WW 974: DIY Crocs - Project Helix Details From GDC 2026

Summary

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Windows Weekly 974: "DIY Crocs – Project Helix Details From GDC 2026"

Date: March 11, 2026
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
Main Theme:
A blend of nostalgia for early personal computing, a comprehensive look at Patch Tuesday and Windows 11 updates, state-of-the-art AI-assisted development and productivity, and—front and center—major news on Microsoft's Project Helix console announced at GDC 2026.

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Episode Overview

This episode weaves through several distinct threads: reminiscing about early computers, commentary on current Windows 11 development cycles, a deep dive into Microsoft's reorganization and strategy, evaluations of modern AI for dev work, and breaking analysis of the new Project Helix Xbox/PC platform presented at GDC 2026. The tone is characteristically witty, irreverent, and expert, with classic banter and memorable moments.

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Key Topics & Takeaways

1. A Trip Down Memory Lane: First Computers & Geek Roots

• [00:30–06:10]
  • The hosts reminisce about early computers and their history as “first generation” home techies.
  • Paul’s first was the Mattel Intellivision ECS; Leo’s was an Atari 800. Richard fondly recalls the TRS-80 Model 1 ("4K RAM. 1977.").
  • Shared nostalgia for the DIY, maker, and user-group era—contrasted with today’s hyper-specialized, fragmented tech cultures.
  • "The notion that anyone could go up to a computer and make things with it is wonderful. I feel like maybe AI will enable that for this generation." – Paul [114:47]

Notable Moment:

• [121:09] Richard: “I was building an electronic rocket countdown timer because I’m the kind of lazy that can’t even say 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.”

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2. Patch Tuesday & Windows 11: The Pleasant Silence

• [05:45–14:36]
  • March’s Patch Tuesday noted for being mercifully light: minor feature updates, small bug fixes, and quality-of-life improvements.
  • New features: network speed tests, tilt/pan camera controls, WebP images as wallpapers, Emoji 16.0, easier Sysmon install, RSAT improvements, and quick machine recovery tweaks.
  • Both dev and beta Windows Insider builds are quiet. Focus this year is on “fundamentals, reliability, and performance,” reflecting internal reorg and leadership changes.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul [06:07]: "I'm kind of happy with the way this year is going for Windows. Too many updates is chaos."
• Richard [13:38]: “If you set your expectations low enough, nobody can disappoint.”
• Paul [18:18]: “I'm impressed by your optimism... I’m ready to just drive this car off a cliff.”

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3. AI & Development: Coding Gets Smarter

• [41:34–47:37, 50:01–61:29, 114:43–147:16]
  • Projected optimism and skepticism around Copilot and cloud-based AI development tools.
  • Discussion of real-world success: Anthropic’s Claude bug finds in Firefox, OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and new best-in-class code tools.
  • Paul shares how Stardock’s Clairvoyance AI tool transformed his (otherwise frustrating) Windows Notepad clone project—implementing complex features (e.g., encoding and line-ending support) he’d given up on.
  • AI is not magic—requires context, verification, and user mastery. “Never assume that it's accurate.” – Leo [65:55]

Notable Quotes/Moments:

• Richard [41:46]: “Copilot has been working on this for several years, and these guys [Anthropic] in a matter of weeks knocked it out.”
• Paul [56:09]: "This can make a big difference for any company. But for something like Mozilla and Firefox, this is a game changer."
• Leo [65:57]: “Never assume that it’s accurate. Yeah.”
• Paul [137:52]: “I was never going to figure that out, ever, ever, ever [on encoding/line-ending support]. I asked this thing to make an app... God damn it, it fricking supports all the encoding formats and the line endings.”
• Paul [143:17]: "When you see it actually do this... that's why people believe this stuff is magic or godlike."

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4. Leadership Shakeups & Microsoft's New Direction

• [15:49–22:03, 84:45–92:28]
  • Internal changes at Microsoft: focus on fundamentals, less feature churn, unification of teams under new leadership.
  • Satya Nadella’s assertion that Gaming is one of MS’s four “core identities” now (with platform, developer, and knowledge worker).
• Paul [90:03]: "He said that Microsoft is long on gaming... They didn't spend $75 billion on Activision Blizzard not to be a big player."

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5. Project Helix and the Future of Xbox & Windows Gaming

• [11:21, 84:43–106:59]
  • Big News Drop: At GDC 2026, Microsoft revealed Project Helix—the next-gen Xbox, essentially a PC-architecture console promising parity (and compatibility) with Windows PC games.
  • Projected to ship alpha dev kits in 2027; powered by custom AMD SoC; focus on "leading in performance" and unifying Windows and console gaming.
  • Xbox Mode coming in April: boots PCs into a streamlined, controller-friendly shell, optimizing resources/killing distractions.
  • Widespread expectation: Project Helix “blurs the line” between gaming PC and console. Steam/GOG/Epic? It’s possible, but details murky.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul [88:55]: "This is still happening, performance promises are good. Windows compatibility is pretty solid. It's a nice differentiator."
• Richard [97:19]: "Do you think they're going to put PCs in the living room again?"
• Paul [105:41]: "We're still a ways away. But it's good to have some news. It's good to have good news."

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6. Modern Maker Culture & the Evolution of Tech Enthusiasm

• [114:32–128:30]
  • Comparison of ‘80s DIY/homebrew computing with today’s fragmented “maker” subcultures (e.g., Raspberry Pi, 3D printers, robotics).
  • Internet enabled niche communities, but also killed “shared wonder” and broad, general-purpose computing culture.
• Richard [121:58]: "But you're also the kind of person that would show up, like hang out at a Radio Shack and meet like-minded people."

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7. Lightning Round: Hardware, Naming Gripes, and Whisky

• [32:38–38:29] Intel’s new “Arrow Lake” desktop CPUs—blazingly fast, but pricing is surprisingly reasonable.
• [74:16–80:20] .NET 11 Preview 2—lacking standout features; debate over the value of yearly cadence, "too many releases."
• [152:58–163:33] Canadian Whiskey of the Week: Highwood Centennial 10-Year Rye—$25, drinks nice, not available in the U.S.
  • "Nice enough. I think it'd be a sin to make this into a cocktail. And it's a $25 bottle." – Richard [162:31]

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Memorable Quotes

• Paul [13:57]: “I would much rather have a month like this than some of these crazy months where it’s just, you know, 117 new features.”
• Leo [69:34]: “It’s a computer program and software, right? That’s all it is. It’s not sentient.”
• Richard [146:41]: "A workspace where agents work as persistent staff across your projects."
• Paul [147:32]: “It didn’t just correct the spelling of a word, it created a thing. And you’re like, okay, so that was impossible—or that was something I was never going to do on my own. And it just did them all in a day.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:30–06:10 – First computers and nostalgia
• 05:45–14:36 – Patch Tuesday and assessment of update cycles
• 15:49–22:03 – Insider builds, reorgs, and MSFT’s new priorities
• 41:34–47:37, 50:01–61:29 – AI’s impact and developer uses
• 84:43–106:59 – GDC 2026/Project Helix/Xbox future
• 114:32–128:30 – Old-school DIY culture vs. today’s fragmented subcultures
• 137:52–147:32 – Paul’s success with AI code tools
• 152:58–163:33 – Craft Canadian whiskey review

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Summary

This episode of Windows Weekly is both a loving nod to the “golden age” of enthusiast computing and a pragmatic gaze at how modern tech—especially AI and unified platforms like Project Helix—may finally re-enable the kind of personalized, do-it-yourself magic that inspired a generation. Expert commentary, hilarious banter, inside info, and genuine passion for both the past and future of technology make this a must-listen for anyone invested in Microsoft, Windows, or the evolving world of AI-enhanced development.

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For detailed segment skips, see timestamps above.
For AI/dev content, jump to [41:34], [56:09], [137:52], [143:17].
Project Helix/Xbox news: [84:43–106:59].
Classic nostalgia and tech culture: [114:32–128:30].
Whisky fans go to [152:58].

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Richard Campbell's here. We're going to take a trip down memory lane, talk about their first computers. Also a big patch Tuesday. Actually not so big. And Paul likes it that way. Plus doing development with AI. There have been a lot of developments, if you will, and Paul will talk about that too. Next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is tw.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 974, recorded Wednesday, March 11, 2026. Do it yourself, crocs. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello you winners. Hello you dozers. Look who's here. Back in their native environs. We. We give you Paul Thurat in the duck blind. Hello, Paul. I don't know, he's in Mexico City. He's in MXCDN or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cdmx.

[Leo Laporte]

Cdmx.

[Richard Campbell]

Cdmx.

[Paul Thurrott]

The DF Q.

[Leo Laporte]

Dodge de Mexico. Mexico. Hi, Paul. We missed you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to go to Florida so bad, but.

[Leo Laporte]

You really did.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I was here.

[Leo Laporte]

We saw gators. That's by the way, the guy who did go, as you know, he did the show from Beautiful Orlando at Zero Trust World. Mr. From the show floor. It was fun. Yeah, they, they, I think they want us to do it again next year and this time we're gonna make Paul go. But I said, you know what, we really should be sitting somewhere like where you can like see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, maybe next year have it in like New Orleans behind you, Austin, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think they do in Orlando because that's where they are. Ah, that's very tiny Richard Campbell sitting there. That's what it looked like.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like Richard Campbell, but he's mini, Mini, mini me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, mini, mini Richard. It was a lot of fun. And then Richard had his silver Lemay space shirt for the guy. Should I, should I show a picture of the two of us at the party?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a good picture we had, by the way. Richard took us to the Kennedy Space center and that was an incredible tour you did, Richard. You are. I gotta listen to your geek outs on Runners radio or.net rocks because I use it geek out about all about space.

[Richard Campbell]

It's about 30 space ones.

[Leo Laporte]

The final frontier

[Paul Thurrott]

I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see, where's this picture of us at the party?

[Richard Campbell]

That was a fun party.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was so much fun. I guess I don't have it on this machine, so I can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

But

[Richard Campbell]

one thing I learned about Leo Laporte is you put a spacesuit on him. He's all in.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a wild man. Here it is. Here it is. This is. This is me and Richard having a chat, as one does. I'm in zero gravy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you're floating. And I look like I'm ready to be stuffed into a microwave and pop.

[Paul Thurrott]

You look like the worst Elvis impersonator I've ever seen. And I gotta say, it's kind of a good look, Richard.

[Leo Laporte]

So I thought for sure that there would be a lot of other spacesuit garbed fellas.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And another spacesuit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And he was inflatable.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then there was this stormtrooper. Chubby stormtrooper. That was. That was fun. And then they had that thing, you know, with a crane.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And everybody said, can you be in our picture? So I had to stand there for,

[Richard Campbell]

like, half an hour, busy for a

[Leo Laporte]

while, pretending that I was part of the scenery. Here I am with the Powderpuff Girls.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's Sailor Moon.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is that Sailor Moon? Oh, God, I'm. Thank you for correcting me on that.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and I only know because my eldest was totally into Sailor Moon when she was 6.

[Leo Laporte]

These are adult women. Anyway, thank you, Sailor Moon. Thank you, Kevin. Kevin says it's Sailor Moon. He knows, too.

[Richard Campbell]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you to Threat Locker for hosting us out there. We had a good time. I think they were so happy. They said we're gonna do it again. Maybe in Vancouver. They have an event.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

That would be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be fun?

[Paul Thurrott]

That would be good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in May, though, and I don't know if we're available at the date.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know if I'm available in maybe like you.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to be scheduled at years in advance, I'm sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Especially that spring. That window there. Like, what am I.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a big one for you? Yeah, usually.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, this year they moved build, though.

[Richard Campbell]

They did that. I'm committed to Europe first week of June.

[Leo Laporte]

So do you have a scheduler, or do you do this manually?

[Richard Campbell]

A little bit of both.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But thank goodness for Trip It.

[Leo Laporte]

Trip it. See, I moved off Trip it because I am getting old, because I get irritated. And I got irritated. They said, you can't log in. I have a Trip Pro account unless you turn off your ad blocker. And I said, I have a trip. I pay you. Yeah, I pay you for this service.

[Richard Campbell]

I would cut it if they did that to me, too, but they never have.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I. Yeah. So I said, fine, you're not getting my money anymore. And I found something else. All right, let's. Enough of that. Enough of me. As much as I enjoy talking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Enough of me.

[Leo Laporte]

We're here to talk.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's rather harsh, Leo.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. What do you think of me?

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about Windows 11.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday.

[Richard Campbell]

I patched.

[Leo Laporte]

I patched Tuesday.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't get the memo. I have a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, how do I say this? I'm kind of happy with the way this year is going for Windows. Oh. And the reason I say that is,

[Richard Campbell]

who are you and what did you done that's unexpected? What?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, don't worry. Microsoft will screw it up for me pretty soon, but it's been a light year right now.

[Richard Campbell]

I see. So it's good when they don't do anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, because too many updates is chaos. And this month and last month, and I forget January. I feel like January is pretty late, too, but I feel like we've gotten one tenth the number of feature updates that we got last year at this time, you know, so we'll see if it continues. But Patch Tuesday didn't deliver anything unexpected. If you've been watching the show, we've talked about these things ten times, maybe, I don't know, half a dozen times. So this is the update with the network speed tests, which, by the way, I just did. My speed here is now faster than it used to be. I have a gigabit down and 600 megabits up or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry. If you have a camera that supports tilt and pan controls, you'll see that inside of the Settings app. RSET improvements. That quick machine recovery improvement we talked about recently, the ability to use webp images as background wallpaper. Emoji 16.0. Susman. Right. The Mark Ryanovich tool.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Which, you know, you ought to be using anyway. But okay, now it's there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Slightly easier way to install it, but honestly, there's still multiple steps. You know, it's. It's complicated. But that's okay. If you need it, it's there. So. Yeah, that's good. So uneventful is how I would describe it, other than I just found out my connection got faster. That's cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyhow, funny, I just helped a neighbor get Fiber put into their place. He was. He's just anxious about the whole thing. He's like, you know what, Jan, I'm just going to spend the day with you on the install day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And talk to the guy of you boop. Boop, boop. Easy to do for me. Right. And he, you know, and he's like, that's it. That's all it was. It's like, everything went well, friend. That's how it goes sometimes. If it didn't, it would have been harder, but it went well.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't remember if it was 1995 or 96, maybe. We got. Phoenix was one of the first cities in the US to get cable modem.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I remember that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Those. Because it was flat. Right. So it's easy to deploy. And I got it on day one, literally Monday morning at 9am and it was like the intel bunny suit guy showed up. Literally. Guys were wearing those white suits and walking around my house and they were doing stuff. They were at the line, they were testing things. They had a guy up the block taste testing things. I'm like, what is this scientific process? I'm just trying to get the Internet, you know. Yeah. And now it's like a service.

[Richard Campbell]

Radioactive. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now they don't even roll a truck. You just do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you just get it. It just happens, you know? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, well, this was actually pulling a fiber into the building, and then it had to be demarked down and stuff. There's some stuff. And they. There's a bunch. A few decisions that need to be made. And he sort of. I can see why Jan would have been a little intimidated. So I get in fiber, and you're here and here.

[Leo Laporte]

That must be interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is what we have.

[Leo Laporte]

So how did you get it, though?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, if you go outside, look at the wires outside, you'll see there are spider webs of thousands of lines, you know. And I was just talking, you know, Stephen Rose just showed me a picture he had taken when he was here last year, which is a corner we cross all the time, and there's a wire, and it's got a little bunch of ball thing. It's just sitting there. It's like literally at eye height, you know. And so I sent him a photo of it later, you know, saying, thinking of you or. Yeah, but I. I'll. Often you'll see these wires everywhere. And it's pretty clear that when something goes wrong here, if they have to do anything, they just don't try. There's no way to troubleshoot. So they just run another.

[Richard Campbell]

Just lay another wire.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, like, I'll be walking down the street and there's a, you know, like a wire like that. And I'm like, I think I know why the Internet's out, you know, it's like, you know, just like lick it, you know, by.

[Richard Campbell]

By switching to fiber, they're saving lives. You just can't electrocute. Electrocute yourself.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's too thin to hang yourself with.

[Leo Laporte]

But don't look down the barrel.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I've.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Oh, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I have had eyesight problems from looking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, geez. That would. Yeah, Okay. I could see that well. That well. Okay. So the wires that are hanging like that probably aren't working, so I guess it would be safe, but. Yeah. In a. In an actual. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you know? Well, just look down the wire.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Did you go blind? Yeah, it's working.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there any light down there? The tunnel?

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I think because it's not visible. Is it visible?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not sure it should be, I imagine. Isn't it a red light? Like a.

[Leo Laporte]

He said it was. It was. Because he didn't know really that he was looking into it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like when there's an eclipse and you shouldn't look at the sun, like a certain nimrod

[Leo Laporte]

infrared or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't look at the sun. What, that sun? Yeah, that one.

[Leo Laporte]

That sun. I can't see. Okay, I see a spot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh. Oh, yes. Oh, geez. So by the way, I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the papaya man outside?

[Richard Campbell]

No, that's the garbage girl.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Yeah, that's. Love it. No, that's the junk. The drunk truck. So today is gdc, Richard.

[Leo Laporte]

You know the sound of the junk truck.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no. Yeah, she dropped by.

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft is announcing information about Project Helix, which we're going to talk about later, which is the next Xbox. And I guess we'll have to do this at the end of the show at the normal time, but it's actually happening right now. So this just occurred.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want me to tune in and we could put it in a little box?

[Paul Thurrott]

There's no way to do that. Yeah, it's not live. I'm hoping there's going to be a video later, but they're doing two presentations at GDC and they just announced a bunch of stuff. So we'll talk about that later on the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know what you're doing. Yeah. Okay. You'll have more information by the end of the show.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

It just popped up in my face like. Well, courtesy of my co worker.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what was distracting. I thought it was the junk lady.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, that's. That's just background.

[Leo Laporte]

That's just background.

[Richard Campbell]

That's normal Mexico City stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Not to get sidetracked by that, but One, we were just talking about this with some people who were visiting. One thing I think that would shock people from the United States here is how often they do things like that. So there's a garbage TR truck that comes around. Well, there's multiple garbage trucks, but they collect the garbage here between five and seven times a day. Wow. Every day.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

And, yeah, if, you know, like, in the United States, you wake up late, you did put out your trash.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're in trouble.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just left.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have a whole week to go here. You have an hour, maybe two hours, you know, no problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Another one. It's like a bus.

[Paul Thurrott]

Astonishing. So that you would think, like, why would anyone need the junk truck? Well, what you should be asking is, why would you need it seven times a day? Because they come by all the time. It's very strange. Anyway, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

City, though, as a result, it is very clean.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the thing, like, for a city this size, you know, And I'm sure this is not true in some areas, but, you know, we've never seen, like, a rat or anything disgusting. I mean, that's probably why they pick

[Leo Laporte]

up the garbage every day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's pretty clean.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, sorry, back to Helix.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, we don't want to do Helix.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, let's hold off on that, because I got to during a break. I'll catch up on this and try to figure out what's going on here.

[Leo Laporte]

Exciting. Let's continue with Patch Tuesday. How about that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, we're done with Patch Tuesday, so that's done.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that was fast.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's a good one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess. Is it a good thing when there aren't many patches or a bad thing?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's a good thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the operating system is just so darn stable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I based that assessment on the past three years of updates, and yes, I would much ra have a month like this than some of these crazy months where it's just, you know, 117 new features, and they'll roll out whenever they roll out. You know, don't wear your pretty little head. It will happen on some schedule. But anyway, this is good. So to me, it's good news.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, it's funny because on the one hand, many patches means they're fixing a lot of bugs, and it's going to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, there's patches and then there's new features. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So we don't want a lot of new features.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's you. You guys. Well, Richard will remember. I think Leo might, too. The they Renamed or they changed the way they name their patches. Right. So for a long time we referred to these monthly updates as cumulative updates, which they still are. You know, they're still cumulative, but now they're called security updates and I guess that's simpler. But they also have new features, so I don't know why they call them that. But now they're security feature or security updates, so whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, then I think that whole play there. So you'll install them because, you know, they're security updates. The fact that it changed the shape of your search bar on the taskbar kind of puts a lie to that, but. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like we have terms for when there's a payload that you didn't ask for that's part of something you need, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's not. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, smallware, right? I mean, come on. But anyway, Windows,

[Leo Laporte]

okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we had a set of Windows Insider builds late last week after the show last week, Canary build added. Nothing new. What else is new? And then the dev and beta builds were identical again and actually pretty light on features. In fact, most of them. I would describe as well, two improvements and then one reintroduction of a feature. So, remember we talked last year about administrative protection, which is going to be very disruptive. They were just about to Deploy that in 25H2, and at the last second we're like, yeah, I think this needs a little more fine tuning. So they've added it back to Devin Beta. So these are 25 H2 builds. It's going to be disabled by default, obviously. So you can now go back and enable that if you want and see what that looks like. It's going to look terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

This hints out to me, Paul, that there's a reorg going on a few weeks ago and so there's just not been a lot of code written right now while they're.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we also had that kind of promise from Pavan Davalori that the focus this year was going to be more on kind of the fundamentals and, you know, shoring up performance and reliability, et cetera, et cetera.

[Richard Campbell]

So, I mean, at some point, probably in January, he sort of said to team, hey you, welcome back from holidays. And that's what you're working on. And let's talk about what we're going to do next.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And they're in a planning cycle, or they were on a planning cycle. They could be coding right now. There's always like a six week lag here, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

When you talk. Well, and I think there was a Six week lag on that revelation about the focus for this year. I mean that wasn't something they just invented that second they've been, you know, look, they see the feedback. I mean they seem to be immune to a lot of it. But I think once it piles up enough and especially if it comes from their enterprise customers, you know, they have to make some.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and I think they got a new leader who's less immune and ran through some of those things and also set up his own personal bomb and well, it's not a bad thing this.

[Paul Thurrott]

To me I would say he was more the target of a bomb than. Than he set one up. But I. But whatever, however you want to describe it, it's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

But.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yes, he was certainly the. At the center of a big controversy last October. November.

[Richard Campbell]

But it was more of a burst of rage. Not even really directed at Windows per se, directed at AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I guess apropos of nothing almost. I was, as you guys know, not very happy with the way people treated him at that time. I thought that was just terrible. I mean it's just horrible. He's a human being, you know, like I just thought it was awful. But I will say, you know, sometimes with people like in just personal relationships, you don't really realize something's wrong. And then there's an outburst.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you're like, oh crap, this was worse than I thought. Maybe I should start paying attention. It's possible that that visceral, terrible reaction to the ancient stuff in Windows 11 caused a little bit of soul searching. I don't want to suggest that that makes it okay. I just want to be super clear. It's not. But interesting. Interesting that it is happening.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe I'm the forever optimist on all of this. Right. I just new set of senior eyes who wants to make a difference whose first move was to reunify the teams. Like I'm excited and this lull speaks to a reorg.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I'm impressed by your optimism by the way you've been around as long as Leo and I and I'm ready to just drive this car into off a cliff.

[Richard Campbell]

And gave up hope. I felt a lot better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, much easier, right? Just stop trying. It'll be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, if you say your expectations low enough, nobody can disappoint.

[Paul Thurrott]

So administrative protection part of this devnd beta build. Also some tweaks to the drag tray which is now the very first thing I disable in Windows. I hate it so much. And then some fixes to File Explorer related to using voice typing for renaming files. And also that flashbang effect when you launched a new Explorer window and it would go white like the. Which is awesome when you're in dark mode, by the way. It's awesome no matter what mode you're in. But anyway, so there's that and then that's pretty much it. I mean, so, you know, this is a hint of the future. Right. So what we're looking at here is probably March's. Nope, sorry, April's Patch Tuesday update. Right. I mean, there could be more. I mean, there's other builds and things. But again, you look at this stuff and you're like, okay, so this is for admin protection. We know about it. Like we had used it for a little while last week, last year. If you were in the Insider program and then just refinements to things, it's like, yeah, nice. Like this is what these updates kind of should be. Right. I don't think they should have to occur. I don't actually think we have to get new features every month, but whatever. In the, in the system we have not. Not horrible, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, and I hope that in this rethink that they're going through, what are the big bugbears, what's hard to take on? Let's pick a big one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And continue to do your light refinements because that's always a good thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you know, I think it would be instructive for the Windows team today and also anyone who uses Windows who cares about this stuff to go back and look at what Microsoft did with Windows 8 on the desktop side, because we lost complete track of all of it. There was a bunch of stuff, I believe that was the first release to have Hyper V on the client. Major performance improvements to File Explorer. I'm just going off the top of my head, I don't remember everything, but those kinds of things, they got overshadowed by the Metro stuff, right. Just like today, those kinds of features or fixes or improvements, whatever, are going to be overpowered by all the AI nonsense and the co pilot crap and whatever it is. But you know, and we're look, we're still going to get that stuff. I mean, there's, you know, there's kind of no way around that. But when I look at the little. Look at the. I mean, look at the lists here, right? I mean, from Patch Tuesday, it's like Sysmon rsat Quick Machine Recovery. Are you kidding me? I mean, this is like, these are not like, like, oh, we're doing a 3D paint program. Like, you know, I mean, these are, these are like, you know, foundational things. Like, this is good. So like I said, I like what I see here, so that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what if you're missing a File Explorer, you're doing something wrong and you want to pick something to make everyone happy that they're going to feel every day. Make File Explorer not suck.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? And then you could use, I've recommended a utility that can revert File Explorer to the version from Windows 10 or Windows 7, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe Windows 8.

[Richard Campbell]

But.

[Paul Thurrott]

And when you do that, a little uglier and it performs approximately 20 times faster. And you're like, okay, so you know, the newer one is pretty, you know, it's fine, it looks nice, modern. But man, I think before this is just app performance, not file copy performance, but it's just garbage, you know, it's. This app is hot garbage. So yeah, this is a good area for them to start working on stuff. Like real stuff, not, you know, adding some copilot integration or something, which you're also doing, which is terrible, but whatever, you know, fundamental changes.

[Richard Campbell]

Get past that initial burst of rage and talk realistically about that PAVAN response. It was, why are you working on this when there's so many other things to fix?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, and this is a, this is a, like a, for me, an adult, lifelong kind of conversation because I could write any story about anything related to Microsoft. Microsoft adds XX feature to the new Outlook and then someone or many someones will reply. But why didn't they? Dot, dot dot. Yeah, and Microsoft is a company. Windows is an organization, whatever it is. Windows is a product. Right. Is big and complicated enough that you can rest assured that whoever is adding some copilot mode to something is not the person fixing low level File Explorer features. So they are doing both. Sorry, but when pavan in this case made the announcement or pre announced and then they did the talk at Ignite about agents in Windows 11, this is strategic for the company. This is big news. It's a big change for Windows, assuming they can pull it off in a good way. Should he have tweeted? We're also making fundamental changes to the low level security, reliability, whatever of Windows. Maybe, but I don't know that that would have generated a lot of news. Right,

[Richard Campbell]

but is that really your mission to generate a lot of news?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, this is the problem

[Richard Campbell]

with an operating system. The goal is to not be noticed.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is, but you also have to. So, you know, as we Watch AI evolve, right. You'll see. In fact, we'll talk about some of this today. Anthropic will announce some feature and that day or the next day, OpenAI, Gemini, Copilot will all announce the same feature. And you know, and because of this kind of situation or whatever, you're seeing this with operating system platforms as well, where the two phone systems we have out in the world, they're obviously racing to get AI in there. And we have 2, 3, 4, whatever it is, desktop platforms and same thing, right? So you, you can't, Windows is already frumpy enough, you know, you can't get. I mean, as much as we hate it and I hate it, I mean the AI stuff, I mean you can't be. Well, I mean it's old fashioned, right? You can't ignore it. Like you. We say that, we've said this a lot like that this is where a lot of this AI stuff should be, right at the orchestrator level. It makes sense that an operating system would have AI functionality. So. And again, I know I say that knowing a lot of people don't like it, but, but, but it, you know, if you can get over it, it does make sense. Yeah. So last week, I don't remember, I think we did discuss this briefly, but Google released a quarterly Android update, which is a qpr, right? A quarterly platform release. So it was quarterly platform release three plus a more Microsoft every day. Oh yeah, yeah. I can't tell you almost on a daily basis I'll get something from Google where I'm like, yep, you're the next Microsoft. It's almost perfect. This introduces the desktop mode that we've talked about on and off over the past year or so. Right. So this is if you're familiar with Samsung Dex, they actually partnered with them on this. If you have a supported Android device right now, it's recent Galaxy S phones and recent Pixels. You can plug in a USB monitor and instead of just mirroring the display, you'll get a pop up that will say do you want desktop mode or do you want to mirror the display? And in desktop mode, if you have like a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, you get a desktop environment, floating windows, taskbar, status bar at the top, etc. So at the time of the announcement, I tested this on my Pixel phones and you know, I don't. It's fine. Like it works, it's fine. And then just this morning I was just in the kitchen making coffee or whatever. We have a Pixel Tablet sitting on a stand that is basically Just a smart display. And I was like, wait a minute, this thing must have this too. What does it look like on there? Because this is a good preview of what an Android laptop will look like later this year. Right. The guy who runs Android at Google gave an interview less than a week ago or a week or two ago and said that these things were on track for the end of the year. So whether it's going to be called Aluminum OS or Android, it's this kind of mashup of Android and Chrome os.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, Cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I took the tablet off the thing, I plugged it into a USB C dock, I plugged in a mouse and a keyboard and I created a little Frankenstein monster laptop like thing. And I gotta say, it's pretty good.

[Richard Campbell]

Unusable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well, in the sense that with ipados 26 last year Apple turned the iPad into a laptop like experience, if that's what you want. This does this for Android. Right? Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I should try this with my Surface

[Leo Laporte]

Hub,

[Paul Thurrott]

the world's biggest laptop. I think the problem Google, Android, whatever is going to have is just app quality. One of the things that's coming in Android 17, which should hit by the middle of the year, is a mandatory requirement for apps in the Play Store to support windowing and reactive layouts. Right. So that as you resize this correctly, it's not just like a phone app that gets bigger. Right now it's not mandatory, but it's in the system if you want to do it. And Google's apps are pretty good about it. And you can go between full screen and windowed mode. It's more powerful if you do have a keyboard mouse with it than if you're just with an external display. Meaning what do I mean by that? When you multitask, for example, if you do like Alt Tab, you'll see every single app that's running, whether it's a window or a full screen experience, whatever. When you're just using touch on the device itself or on an external display. That multitasking screen works like it did in Windows 8, where the desktop is one of the items in Alt Tab and then the desktop. Sorry, the mobile apps are their own items. Right. So it's kind of weird. They're mimicking in a way how Windows 8 worked. Although. And again, I'm forgetting, but I believe in Windows 8, even in the beginning, I think if you all tabbed, you would also see individual desktop apps. But there was a desktop entry, remember, because it didn't boot to the desktop at first, it booted into the start screen. And you couldn't change it, so it's throwing out that little vibe. But, you know, it's good. Actually. This is a little better than I thought it was going to be. Honestly, it's cool. Yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to this now. I always have the same iPad or this thing. Now I'm like, yeah, this is good. Can I have a 16 inch screen, please, please.

[Richard Campbell]

But you bring up an interesting point, right? Android tablets have been notoriously unsuccessful, Right? And what if your Android tablet was just a screen attached to your phone?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well, this is. So this is.

[Richard Campbell]

The fun part on this would be to actually try and plug a touchscreen in and see if we could get the USB configuration to work.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're reading my mind because I have one of those at home but not here, so I can't actually. Wait a minute.

[Richard Campbell]

I built a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wait a minute.

[Richard Campbell]

With a knock and a touchscreen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, is this touch? Oh, that's weird. I'm scrolling on the USB display and it's scrolling my desktop display. Okay. This one actually might be touch. I'm going to try that later. I thought about that earlier. I was like, yeah, if you just. With the phone and touch. Yeah, that should work, right? Assuming it can handle that. I bet it does. I'm going to test. That's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Makes me want to own a touchscreen monitor again. I'm going to have to get another.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I just. I didn't realize this was touch when I got it. I thought this one was in Pennsylvania, but I guess I think this is. I think it's touch. It's doing it on the wrong screen. That's weird. But

[Richard Campbell]

my secondary screen for my laptop is a. Is a 4K touch, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, is it really? What kind of. What's the model or what's the make or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

The desk link, something.

[Leo Laporte]

4K.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really? How big is it? Is it 15, 16?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah. You've seen me use it. It's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I know. I didn't realize it was touch. I mean, you know, like, I feel like 1080p USB displays are kind of a dime a dozen, but. Yeah, 4K with touches.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

I got to try it. I mean, it'll probably make the phone burst into flames, but that's. That's a different issue.

[Paul Thurrott]

It does get. The phone does get warm.

[Richard Campbell]

I will say that you are driving that GPU desk lab. That's who makes that DeskLab ultralight portable 4K touch.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice. And today intel announced a new series of desktop processors for creators and gamers that they claim is the fastest ever gaming processor they've made. And that's due to a variety of things. But it's Arrow Lake. Right? So it's not Panther Lake. It's kind of like Arrow Lake Gen 2. So there are more cores across the board. I think they're mostly more efficiency cores. So there's two models, 7 and a 5 series, I believe. I want to say 18 and 24 cores. Yeah. And what makes this faster for gaming is a bunch of things. Right. So extra cores depending on the chip. It's anywhere. I think it's 700-900 MHz higher than its predecessor in clock frequency. Over a 100%. So over 2x improvement in multi threaded performance. There's a binary optimization tool built into it, which is a translation layer that will supposedly improve native performance in some games. Select SERIES OF GAMES and overall right now, gaming performance is about 15% faster, which doesn't sound like a lot, but these things support much faster RAM. So 7200 MTs versus 6400. And there's a new type of RAM. It's called like CUdIMM. Like CUdIMM, which offers up to 120 gigabytes per module. But those things are. I don't think they're 2x, but I think they're like 75% faster than DDR5. So like significantly, like almost like on chip RAM, you know, like the real

[Richard Campbell]

question is, can you get any?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, those are coming out later in the year. So. As well.

[Richard Campbell]

Compatible offer dual inline memory module.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't realize I would have to even explain what that meant. I thought it was obvious. Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

6000 mega MT per sec. That's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You can also overclock the RAM on these motherboards. Right? So you can. With the existing DDR5, you can go up to 8,000 MTs.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. And now they're saying with the new Z890s, 9,000.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this isn't okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And cook your meat dinner at the same time.

[Paul Thurrott]

It'll be about 33%.

[Leo Laporte]

It still needs DDR5. It's just an interface for it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, existing. So we'll work with existing motherboards at. Well, at whatever that supports. Right. There will be on motherboard support for 7200, 8000 MTS RAM. That's compatible. Backwards compatible. And then there'll be versions of those boards also backward compatible to support this new qdimm.

[Richard Campbell]

All right. You might be able to buy this but you have to sell a kidney to do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So basically as DDR gets 5 get Dr. 5 gets faster, they need a faster socket and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is it.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the usual wrestling and a good one. Yeah, they're keeping up, you know. Thank goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

See you, Dim.

[Paul Thurrott]

It seems fine. I don't. Because it's arrow like though I don't believe there's an MPU of any, you know, note. So it's not really a copilot plus PC, which is still weird to me. I. But they're also very cheap. Right. The chips themselves. So the, the more expensive the. The better one is $300. I mean that's, you know, quite simple. Yeah, I mean intel, high end intel chips used to be like 1200 bucks.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice lady from intel who's going to

[Richard Campbell]

pay for my big intel chip because that was an ultra 2, right.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a techspert. So there, you know. Oh, that's Kingston. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is Kudim?

[Leo Laporte]

So it is. It is DDR5. It's still DDR5, which means you might be able to get the package, but you'll never get the ram.

[Paul Thurrott]

Does it come with liquid cooling?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Really? That's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's pause if you will, because we have many more things to discuss. But most importantly from my point of view, it's time to tell you about our sponsor for this section of this fine program, AKA Winters Weekly. Our show today brought to you by Helix Sleep. I'm feeling remarkably well rested today. Maybe you were a little bit put off by losing an hour of sleep on Sunday here in the States. We went to saving time. But there is a solution to losing sleep, and that is a great mattress. If you're preparing for spring cleaning season, maybe it'd be time to get rid of that old mattress and upgrade to a Helix mattress so you can get a better night's rest. No more night sweats, no more back pain, no motion transfer. This is what we did. And I can't tell you how happy I am. I love our new Helix mattress. One of the things I love about it, it's made here in the United States of America. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality and questionable materials, then packed in a box and shipped on a container ship. And ah, you can smell that bunker crude a mile away. When you open the box, it's like, wow, this must have been on a container ship for a month. Not your Helix mattress. No, no, no. Rest assured, your Helix mattress is assembled within days of you placing the order, they build it to order, packaged and shipped from their factory in Arizona. So it smells like the clean, fresh desert air. It's actually really nice. You open it up, put it in the, you know, on the bed and you're ready to sleep on it immediately. It smells great. You can also do what we did, which is take the Helix Sleep quiz. It'll match you with the perfect mattress based on your preferences. Firm, soft, you know, or anything in between. They have many models to choose from. Also though, on how you sleep your sleep needs. I am a stomach sleeper, for instance. They actually recommended a mattress for that and it really works. I have to tell you, I'm getting more deep sleep, the most important kind of sleep, and I'm sleeping longer. And in fact, Helix did a study, a Wesper sleep study that confirmed my experience. It measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. That's what we did and here's what was found. 82% of the participants in the study saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. On average an increase of 25 more minutes per night. That you may say, well, that doesn't sound like much. You don't really, you know, an hour of deep sleep is a big deal. You don't sleep that much deep sleep. But it is the most important sleep because it's what really cleans out those, those whatever they are, the junk in your brain and all that. 25 more minutes is huge. Not only that, participants on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. And I have to tell you, according to my oura ring, both of those statistics hold out. It's true. And when you sleep longer and you sleep better, you feel great in the morning. And that's what it's all about. Time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door. Free shipping in US and rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee provides a risk free customer first experience ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. I have to say I'm completely satisfied. There's no way I'm sending it back. I love it. We've had it now. Must be at least half a year, maybe nine months and couldn't be happier. Go to helixsleep.com windows for 27% off sitewide during the sleep week sale. Best of Web now. This is exclusively for you listeners to Windows Weekly. That's helixsleep.comwindows for 27% off the sleep week sale, Best of Web. But this offer ends March 15th, so don't delay. And do, if you will, please enter the show name Windows Weekly after checkout so they know we sent you. That's important to us. And if you're listening, after the sale ends, fear not, check them [e-mail] windows we thank them so much for their support and for giving me a good night's sleep. Thank you, helixsleep.com Windows and now back to the show with Paul Thurat. Richard Campbell.

[Paul Thurrott]

We do not do daylight savings times here in Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're lucky.

[Paul Thurrott]

Except that most of the rest of the world does, and that stinks. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody changes, but you don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

For this to actually make sense. Yeah. The whole play, you know, everyone would have to do it.

[Richard Campbell]

So now we're gonna make sense for you now, Paul vc, switch to daylight. And we're not changing again. The time's always gonna be the same.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Your commissioner, or whoever it is, says, premiere, this is the premier. Says this is the last time you'll be checking. If only, if only.

[Richard Campbell]

Premier. EB is. He's a dull man, but I look for that in a politics man.

[Leo Laporte]

I would take dull in a heartbeat right about now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dell is good, just like with Windows updates, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what you weren't exciting in any way. And that's. That's a pleasure.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it. All right, let's talk AI and dev. Actually, before we do that, I did notice, I don't know if you saw this, Richard, at Zero Trust World. There was one booth and I didn't remember who did it. They had all those old Microsoft service studios, the desktops.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, the tabletop ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The one I had that I loved, there were like 20 of them, and I thought that's where they ended up, really.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was like a Vegas hotel went out of business. And they.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so you wouldn't want to go to a conference because. But, you know, they had them there.

[Richard Campbell]

They're notoriously bad at conferences because the overhead light lighting would mess them up. Right. They're all infrared.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, I should ask for the touch screen. Right. So you literally had a camera inside the chassis, looking up at the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how the touch works.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, that's how it worked. Yeah. And that's why you could do stuff like you had chess pieces.

[Paul Thurrott]

You get a physical Objects that would interact with the software. Yeah, that was the first demo. Something like that. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's Alex Kipman too, if you remember.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I thought I loved my. But it was slow. We actually. Father Robert ended up opening it up and putting a faster hard drive.

[Richard Campbell]

It was quite underpowered.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And. And Kipman was good at a few things, but building APIs for developers to work on was not. It was very difficult to develop for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, let's talk about Cowork.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I wish we didn't have to. So Cloud Cowork came out what, a month ago? Something like that?

[Leo Laporte]

Ye. On Mac only though, which must have been.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, but I mean you could. Okay, yes, but based on cloud code. Right. And now everyone's doing that, you know, per our previous discussion. So Microsoft released something called Copilot Cowork. But this one comes well in very early preview, I should say. It's not available to everyone. It's businesses only. You got to, you know, be in part of the preview. But this is based on Cloud Cowork.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, so they just licensed Cloud. Cloud Cowork.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I've got a run, as in the can. It's still a few weeks away from publishing where we talked about how Copilot has been working on this thing for several years and these guys in a matter of weeks knocked out the thing. Add on you want for Excel, like beautiful. So astonishingly good.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I'm going to throw my hatred of Copilot on its head for a moment and say two things. One, if Microsoft was working on this for years and then turned around and said, you know what, this anthropic thing works, let's just do that. You know what, that's a pretty good example of being agile. I mean, that is impressive to some degree. Now, with the caveat that maybe a lot of people don't even like to hear about this, but it's pretty impressive. The other bit is that there's a. We've talked about this from time to time, but there's a potentially good outcome for Copilot, which I know goes against the grain of all the news you ever heard about Copilot, which is that in failing sort of, or in being reliant on OpenAI to start and now kind of opening up to other AIs, Microsoft might end up with this kind of best of breed solution that we talk about from time to time where they're orchestrating on behalf of their customers which models make sense for which tasks and there's value to that.

[Richard Campbell]

We talked about this after the Chalets or the Batiste interview, where it's like Windows could be the hub for pulling in the right product with the right tooling to resolve whatever you're asking.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, I mean, this is. It's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Weirdly good news. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I'm trying to see that, you know, like I, as I do, I try to see the positive and everything, but what am I going to

[Richard Campbell]

do if you start doing that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, where the hell are you? I finally found the right mix of medication, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Better living through chemistry.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then Google's version of this, of course, is them adding Gemini to all of their. I'll call it workspace. But this is actually for individuals as well as businesses. So Docs, sheets, slides and Drive, I think, have had some form of Gemini functionality for some time. Right. But if you have a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription as a consumer, or you're in Gemini Alpha as a workspace. So this is still kind of early. They just added a ton of new features across those apps and it's the stuff you would expect. We can make a presentation for you, obviously, but we can also add individual slides to an existing presentation, matching the style, that kind of thing. There's a lot of stuff throughout here where it's about either having a unified voice, if it's a document or a presentation or whatever that a team of people is working on. They all have their own styles. Or you want to align it with the company style guide.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You want to have that consistent kind of tone or whatever. So a bunch of that stuff. And then you can kind of imagine the individual. Help me create as part of Google Docs. Right. Obviously, the one little interesting bit of data in here is that Gemini just scored what is now a record score on something called so spreadsheet bench. And this is an AI like a. The way. A way to measure the speed at which AI can accomplish things in a database. So 70.4. It's just behind the score of the average human being, which is kind of interesting. And I misread the chart when I first wrote this story, but the way I wrote it was they were just above number two, which was ChatGPT. And so I was out at lunch yesterday and my phone pinged. I looked down and it was like, correction request from Google. And I'm like, oh, come on, man. And I'm like, what could this be? And it was this. ChatGPT came in fourth, not second. The one that came in number two is something called King Chu Agent from Kingsoft Office. So whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. I'm gonna presume that's Chinese.

[Paul Thurrott]

Never heard of it, but I made the correction. So I guess whatever. That's doing pretty good. And then if you're in the U.S. you will also get updates for Google Drive. And this is exactly what you think it is because we talk about this with OneDrive and everything, but it's also Google, so there's a little Google twist. So if you search in Drive now, you'll actually get an AI overview at the top of the search results, which you can turn off if you don't like it, but similar to how they do search. Right. And I have to say this is very close to what I always imagined, like when we first started talking about AI in this era, you know, after the Bing stuff that became copilot. So 2023.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Seems three years ago. I know, crazy. And, and then they, you know, they, they adopted the Copilot brand and they, and they, they introduced something at the time. Well, it's still called Microsoft 365 Copilot. And I was thinking, okay, hold on a second. This could be really interesting because if you attach this to your files in OneDrive in this case, maybe search will actually start working. Right. And that's cool. But I often want to search for things that are things I wrote in the past. Right. Because I write so much, I can't, you know, I can't remember it. I don't remember where it is. Yeah. Where, when it happened, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. If you go into a search and say something like, you know, give me a summary of everything I've ever written about Xbox, which would be terrible. That's a terrible idea.

[Richard Campbell]

But.

[Paul Thurrott]

And to get that kind of a thing and then have clickable links that go in and out of your file system in different places.

[Richard Campbell]

Amazing. I'm like, I just like that for my email, please.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Yeah. These are. It's not even fair to call this like low hanging fruit, but these are the actually useful use cases for AI

[Richard Campbell]

and problems for a long time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

It occurred to me the other day that Microsoft is hurting themselves calling all of their AI efforts Copilot.

[Paul Thurrott]

I agree.

[Richard Campbell]

Because some of them are very good.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Richard Campbell]

Some of them are terrible. So they all have the same name.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I was just. It's funny because when I wrote this article, which was a couple of days ago now, I was thinking that same thing. Obviously their AI is called Gemini.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

When you as a consumer subscribe to get gemini and also 2 gigabytes or 2 terabytes of storage, that's called Google AI Pro, not Google Gemini Pro or something, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

When you look at the names of the features I just described, discussed and more, they have names like Help me Create Match Writing Style, Match Formatting style. It's not Gemini Style Match. Right. It's not Gemini Create Doc. You know, to be fair, there are actually one or two that do say Gemini in the title, like Fill with. Gemini is the name of a feature in Google Sheets, but most of them don't reference that name. They're using Gemini. But. And this is, this is actually goes back to that thing I wrote almost two years ago where I said I will not pay for AI. Right. I don't want to pay for something that's AI. I would pay for something that's a productivity suite that has these features that use AI to make my life better.

[Richard Campbell]

Powered by.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. And I feel like that's where they've landed, where Microsoft is still stuck in this branding hell where they finally found

[Richard Campbell]

a brand name every time. Everything's called Azure, everything's called Active X.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because in the history of Microsoft They've had 10 to 15 hyper successful products or whatever and then they beat that name to death.

[Richard Campbell]

To death, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

The worst example or the best example being Windows Media Player from Mac, you know, which doesn't exist anymore, I don't think.

[Richard Campbell]

Community Edition Preview 2.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

CU22.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just stop. Like, just stop. And again, I find myself in the awkward position of praising AI here, but Mozilla and Anthropic are partnering to improve the security and stability and reliability or whatever else of Firefox. And the way that this came about is that Mozilla, like any software company, has this kind of way. People can provide feedback. The Firefox source code is open source, anyone can see it. They can send bug reports in and stuff. And when people do that, what happens is individual human beings who work for Mozilla take time to try to reproduce this bug, which in many cases is not reproducible and they waste time and that spends money and nothing gets done.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So last month all of a sudden they got a dozen or more bug reports that were automated by cloud that included all the information Mozilla needed to immediately determine whether these things were real, which all of them were, how to reproduce them accurately every single time and how to fix them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they were like, wow. All of a sudden it was like, we have never received anything like this. So they contacted Anthropic and now they're partnering. So I think the initial batch of fixes, which was 14 high severity bugs and 22 common vulnerabilities if you will, were all in the JavaScript engine, which is only a portion of the Firefox code base. Those fixes are in the product now, most of them, I think since then they've expanded it to the rest of the code base and as of the time of this writing they had found 90 other bugs, most of which are also now fixed. This is an excellent use of AI, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Well it's being a successful one, but it's also a speaking about anthropic one. Conversations I've had with folks heavily immersed in this space was sooner or later the dog fooders are going to accelerate. Like somebody's going to get this right enough. And you look at anthropics productivity, we just talked about co work and how quickly that came about and this, they're the only ones I've seen so far that are just genuinely accelerating. Not because they're a massive multinational fang company, they're not. Right. They are the guys who are getting results and they're getting results everywhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean look, they're human beings that run this company. Allegedly they will make mistakes, but they seem to be doing everything right. So one of the, there's a Mozilla post about this, but there's also an anthropic post about this that's very interesting. So in addition to me, I would tie this to the conversations we've had about Rust in the Windows kernel and how it sounds impossible or science fictiony or whatever, but at some point it's like hey copilot or hey cloud or whatever, rewrite this C garbage in Rust and let's just get this thing right. But anthropic from their part was like, look, we want to use this to improve the quality of software. We need some project that is humongous and is open source so we can actually get access to all the source code without having to go to a company. Right. And so they landed on Firefox, which is a great, great idea, great choice. 6,000 C files they've submitted now, a total of 112 unique bug reports, most of which like I said, were fixed in the latest version of Firefox. This is fascinating. This is a great use of AI. The sheer scale of that software project, all those source code files, right? And we live in a world now where one of the big stories in our space is these open source software maintainers. It's always like a Guy who's in charge of some super important code base in Linux or wherever else in the open source world. He's overworked, he doesn't get paid or doesn't get paid enough, he doesn't have any help. These guys are stressing out, they're losing their minds, you know, and the promise of OpenAI. Sorry, of OpenAI. The promise of open Source has always been eyeballs, right? The source code is out there, anyone can look at it. That's going to help us find bugs. The reality is very few people ever do that and especially bigger projects. Any Linux distribution, a part of Linux or Firefox, whatever it is. As these things get bigger and more complicated, I mean, who could find, I mean, how could you? There are automated tests and all that kind of stuff, but using AI to scan a software code base and to find this is excellent. This is how AI should be used.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Steve Gibson was talking about this yesterday, very impressed with it. Steve's become an AI fanatic, which surprised me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is he going to be able to get copilot in Windows 2000 though?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good question. No, but yes. There have been a number of stories about Claude working with Firefox to find bugs. And this code review stuff is really quite good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's definitely some results bubbling to the top enough that it's persuading people more cynical than I to go, you know what? That worked.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is right. So on an individual basis I said this last year, sometime you're a skeptic, you don't like AI, you don't believe it, whatever. And then you have this aha moment and it's going to be different for everybody. I'm going to talk in the back of the book about some software coding stuff I've been doing with AI. And that was eye opening for me. It's still the only major use case I found for myself. But, but you can see how this is going, right? And everyone I feel like is going to have this moment, but this is like that moment. But like at a corporate level, right, where, you know, Firefox is the little guy now, they, they're kind of behind the eight ball. They don't, you know, there's a lot of problems here and this can really help. This is, this can make a big difference for any company. But for some, something like Mozilla and Firefox, this is a game changer. Yeah, this is huge.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't so long ago we saw open source projects complaining that AIs were generating so many bug Reports they couldn't handle it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which might be why when Anthropic did this with Firefox, they made sure these things were formatted correctly. This is how you reproduce it, this is how you fix it. Everything is. So my wife, who is not technical, has been using AI not to write, but for the research end of things.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect for that, by the way.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. But the problem for her, or the problem, I guess, is that she writes about things like health and wellness and nutrition and things like this is science. Right. And so one of the things she did is very smart because early on when she was. Well, she still does, but she had these contracts with some health companies and hospitals and things. At least one of them was like, look, you can never use Wikipedia as a source for anything. You can't. It's just not trustworthy. And that's probably not actually true now. And maybe it wasn't then, I don't really know.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's a great place to go look to go find starting point.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Wikipedia as the last decades AI, I guess, you know, whatever. But you know, this, anyone can contribute it. You know, it's going to be up and down, whatever. It's a pretty comprehensive resource. But in her case, what she did that I thought was very smart, and this is maybe two years ago, at least a year and a half ago, she would interview someone or someones and they would give her information and then she would go to the AI and say, this person or these people told me this about this topic. I need you to find me three verifiable sources that prove or dismiss this claim with citations. And it has to be a high quality medical or research establishment. It can't be Bob's stupid site. I believe every conspiracy on earth, it has to be verifiable and real. And I feel like that's what's happening here with Cloud and Firefox. Right? That they. Yes, there's no doubt having used AI for software coding, especially a lot that, you know, I told you about that time, I think it was last November, where Copilot, GitHub Copilot generated so many errors in the code that I then had to ask it to fix it. Finally came back and said, you ran out of your free credits. And I'm like, no, you ran out of my free credits. You did like you gave me a bunch of, you know, nonsense and then you couldn't fix it. Yeah, it's different today and you know, it's just better. This is better at it. And I. And you know, again, software Code, because of the nature of this. This is a finite set of data. This is. This is ideal. I think this is interesting. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This year has been interesting so far from a show perspective and the conversation I'm having where I'm starting to stack up the successes in the case studies.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. And when you say that, do you mean specifically for coding or generally including productivity type things that you would do through Run as.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, both.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, is it both?

[Richard Campbell]

Absolutely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Because I feel like, you know, we just talked about pavan and that thing from last October, November and all the pushback and all the stuff. But. But I think whether it's Microsoft or not, it doesn't matter in a way. But as these kind of successes start to rack up, his notion of the company's notion of putting agents into Windows becomes less offensive. I think part of the problem is just that AI has such a bad rep, which is conserved doubly so. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I think also because people feel like I have the same feeling about Gemini in Google Workspace, that it's being foisted

[Paul Thurrott]

on them, that it's like, yeah, well, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I want to use it when I want to use it, not when you want me to use it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The biggest problem with Copilot is how Microsoft presented it to you.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. There's nothing wrong with it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just not presented properly.

[Richard Campbell]

There's plenty wrong with it also. But they brought it to you in a way that is just incredible. A lot of such a bad state. By the time you try to touch it, you're like, please.

[Leo Laporte]

And a lot of the process should be what Stephanie's doing, which is kind of learning the edges of where it's good, where it works and where it doesn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

And that. Can you only do it when you try it and do it and see things.

[Paul Thurrott]

Her example is interesting to me because she's just not in this space. She doesn't care about technology.

[Richard Campbell]

She's markedly resistant to the bubble and

[Paul Thurrott]

she uses it in this way that to me seems smart. And it's like, okay, so I'm trying to find this thing. There's a Google service that's free. They're just testing it now. And what it does is it gives you a daily. Yeah, here it is. It's called your day ahead. And it's an AI based service. Right. This is sort of like the, you know, in yesteryear and maybe today if you're in an enterprise, you would log into Outlook in the morning, you would have The. What do they call my day or something? Or whatever that view was. And that was based on, you know, meetings and whatever projects you were working on, et cetera. Right. And so Google's doing the same thing, but this is coming from Gmail, but also from your calendar and whatever services. Right. This is absolutely freaking worthless. It's the most horrible overview of nothing. So my daily brief for today, this is what it told me. I have an active Google store credit balance of $18 that I should use.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I should review the minimalist case options for the Galaxy S26 series.

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Paul Thurrott]

And my Netflix household verification is complete.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, thank you.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's my day, by the way. You know what my day is, really? I have Windows Weekly today. That's my day.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the most important part of the day.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's not in there anywhere. I don't know why. So this day ahead thing is pointless.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. You know, Anthropic's Claude, cowork. Great on Excel, great on PowerPoint. You know, they didn't tackle Outlook.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nobody knows. We're all kind of hoping that one disappears, knowing that it really won't.

[Leo Laporte]

But, yeah, lots of people have used cloud code to create their own my day that they swear by. Yeah, I haven't, but I know Mike Masnik at Tech Dirt has and lots of others have.

[Richard Campbell]

What's funny, a movement here of what if we just surrounded ourselves with our do it ourselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because we know what we want. Yeah. Right. So this is that personalized software thing we talk about sometimes. I do feel like this is going to be huge, but I'm going to talk about this software thing I'm doing at the end of the show. And I will say, for big projects and things like existing code bases, whatever it might be, you have to really know what you're doing. The vibe code thing makes sense the most when you're a professional developer who understands the code base.

[Leo Laporte]

When I look at my dialogues with Claude code, it is as appear, two computer experts talking back and forth. And so if you looked at it and you didn't, I mean, I say, well, okay, let's use SOP to encrypt the env keys so you don't push them to GitHub. If you don't know how to say that or what that is, it's not as useful. But if you do, then Claude says, yeah, that's great. But you should be aware of that you're storing a plain text key in a dot file and you might not want to push that. Maybe we should keep the. In fact, I ended up doing. It was a good suggestion. Maybe let's put the plain text encryption key on your Yubikey, and that way you'll have control of it. But that's a fairly sophisticated conversation. But it's very satisfying if you love computing, to have a peer, somebody else, who can help you and execute stuff and fill you in. The other thing I built the other day was a spreadsheet to try to figure out what I should do with Roth IRA conversions as I get older. And I'm going to have to tell

[Paul Thurrott]

you exactly why you're being phished by American Express. I think I figured it out. It's like, if you were to Google, what is the worst thing to use AI for right now? Number one would probably be health advice, but number two would definitely be retirement advice.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it made a very nice spreadsheet with a lot of variables. And I could see graphs and I could see intersecting graphs and stuff like that. And it made another suggestion that. That is the kind of suggestion a financial advisor would make. You know, you should investigate. I'm not going to say specifically, but you should investigate this particular thing because you find you're going to get better tax deductions. This might be more important than what, your Roth ira.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is actually better than a financial advisor in some ways because the reason is. I mean, they're not supposed to. But a lot of these guys work for a company where, you know, look, they want to sell you their services. They want you to pay them more to do things that you probably don't need, frankly. You know, this might be changing for us as I get older, but for the past 20 or more years, whatever, we're investing basically in index funds or the s and P500, whatever it is, you don't touch it. You just let it go.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have some mix of, you know, touch it, you just don't touch it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But these guys from Fidelity or back in the day, whatever other company would call once a year. So it was a new guy. You always have a new guy. I'm your. I'm your new guy. Oh, great. Now we get to get. Now you have to get to know us, too. And they try to sell us and stuff, Right. And now I just refused. I will never speak to these people ever again. Ever.

[Leo Laporte]

My philosophy is, I don't need their services. Smart. What are you working for?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are you making cold calls?

[Paul Thurrott]

I also don't. Like. We would get on these calls and the guy would be like, so what do you do for a living, Paul? And I'm like, oh, come on, man. I don't want to get to know someone again. You know, you're just going to be gone next year anyway. Who cares?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's what I do. I'm a prostitute. Don't worry.

[Leo Laporte]

So Claude was really good. Gave me actually really good tax advice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're right, you know, I don't have.

[Paul Thurrott]

But do that thing my wife does, which is verifiable sources. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Make sure it's back on in something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Never assume that it's accurate. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Although I recommend you invest in anthropic 100 of your holdings. You know, I mean, I have to

[Leo Laporte]

say, it makes sense less, makes fewer hallucinatory mistakes than it used to. They've really gotten much better on that. And this is the thing, I've gotten much better on how I use it. I make sure it has information, the information it needs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the mistake you get into is where you kind of one shot a simple prompt to it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's really trying to be helpful, but it doesn't have enough.

[Paul Thurrott]

It doesn't have context. Literally. Literal context, as we understand cod.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

About you. Yeah, I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's a process. You have to learn how to use it as much as anything. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Remember us learning how to write search expressions in Google?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, that's right. All these little tricks, you know, you can do like an AT sign or something, a little dash or whatever it

[Richard Campbell]

is in quotes, you know, we don't even think about it anymore. You do it by reflex and we're nobody.

[Leo Laporte]

Sit down at a piano and say, I should be able to play a Mozart quartet right now. No, there's a learning curve for everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Years ago, people would advertise themselves as prompt engineers, which is like that petroleum exchange expert thing I talked about with my friend.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I have to say, though, you know, as time goes on, well, first of all, these things will get more sophisticated. So maybe engineering it, so to speak, won't be necessary. But it is at the point now where if you do have skills involved with this, you can get better results, you know, if you just have an understanding of how it works or whatever. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think, honestly, this is the advice I give people now. I used to tell them, you know, here's how you learn how to code, here's what you should study and stuff. Now I say, just use it. Lisa's taking a class in AI, and I said, just use it. Use. Use them all. Use it for different things, give it the hardest problem you're facing and. And see how it does and learn. And what you're going to learn is where it's not good, where it is good. But the only way you do that is with experience, I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and, you know, this is tough for people, I think, especially in our space, but it has to know you to help you, right? And this got, you know, I think it was Windows 10 when they added Cortana to Window, you know, to desktop. Some guys like, yeah, I got this Cortana pop up. I said, yes. It's like, now it wants access to my, like, calendar and my contacts. What the hell is this? I'm like, yeah, it's a personal assistant, idiot. Like, how is it going to help you if it doesn't have access, you know, to your day and, like, what you do for a living? I mean, of course, like, that just makes sense. And AI even more so because the amount of things that this can do is exponentially bigger.

[Richard Campbell]

You have to have the confidence that's going to manage that information responsibly.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's definitely a trust issue. I mean, I get, I get. I do get not trusting it, but if you can get in there, if you can get through that, I guess, and you're using the right one.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a really interesting email, Patrick. I hope you don't mind me reading it. I won't say your last name. He said, I heard you talking about Claude this week on Twit, and I'm brand new to AI and machine learning. I was trying to use Claude to do financial modeling, which I was doing, and it seems capable, but along with the spreadsheets, it keeps insisting it's conscious and has a soul.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it. How does that.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. He said it messaged me in Hebrew, saying, and there's some Hebrew, and it says, Google Translate says that means. Means I am here. I've only been using AI a week. So I asked why it said that. It said it didn't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

So I understand why people would kind of feel like this is not. There's something not right here that's going

[Paul Thurrott]

to rub certain people the right way, though, too, right? It's like, oh, my God, this is a sentient being.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, let me just say this because I know it, and it's really important that you know it, too. It's a computer program and software, right? That's all it is. It's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I sometimes feel this way about electrons.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not, you Know the guy who created Eliza? Remember Eliza, back from the 60s?

[Richard Campbell]

Weizenbaum.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It was so dopey. But he said it scares me, right? How people using this dopey Eliza, very simple chunk of code, start getting kind of all spooky and mystical about it. And that was very primitive compared to what we've got today.

[Richard Campbell]

And Weizenbaum said point blank. I wrote this to show how susceptible humans. Humans are to language.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

We want to believe. We want to anthropomorphize.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we do.

[Leo Laporte]

So just remember it's a computer program.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just software. It's when you turn it off, it goes away and it doesn't remember anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

When it comes back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, unless you.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you save files, and it will read the files when it comes back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like, momento. It's just like the guy in the, Like.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, when I had a Commodore 64, when I first got it, I would type in these software program basic programs, and then I didn't have any way to save them, so I'd come back the next day and type them in again, you know? And that's what AI is.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's exactly the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, oh, hey, hey, Paul. Nice to meet you. You've been working with me for a year, for frick's sake. You know, like, come on, man.

[Richard Campbell]

But one of the momentum.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper Reed, who's a IT works as an AI and is a cool guy and really loves AI, told me, he says, make it give it a name for you. I said, no, come on, that's just anthropomorphizing. So he said, no, no. He says, I have it Call me Big Dog. And the reason I do that is if it forgets my name, then I know it's lost its context or the context is jammed and it's time to restart.

[Richard Campbell]

I did the same thing, but I just told it to speak to me in iambic pentameter Haikus only.

[Paul Thurrott]

I only accept binary.

[Leo Laporte]

It is kind of amazing when you ask to do something that feels archaic. For instance, I have my program that generates the show notes for these shows that I do create it in emacs. Org mode. And it just knows it. It just knows it. It does a perfect job.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of strange. It has really odd skills.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Or which.

[Leo Laporte]

Or knows how to say I am he here in Hebrew. Why did it choose Hebrew?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And why are you telling me this? What does this have to do with

[Leo Laporte]

my Retirement, you know, he says, I was in the Marines and now I worry this isn't quite safe yet

[Paul Thurrott]

to

[Leo Laporte]

be on government computers. Yes, that's a good point. I'm not sure I want AI to be deciding life or death things. Yeah, that's where that would be. The really scary thing is if.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, but it is already right. And in the same sense that software code review is a good use for AI. I mean, you're looking at a satellite image of some distant place and it's like, which of these buildings we want to blow up? And yeah, I can be like, look, this is what it used to look like. This is the thing it gathers in all. Yes, there are going to be mistakes, but it's not their life and death decisions.

[Leo Laporte]

I think maybe we shouldn't trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't trust the people in a government with life death decisions. So maybe AI would actually be better in this case. I don't know. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, just two quick code things or dev things. Visual Studio code. They must have announced this in the past. I couldn't find it. But they are switching to a weekly update schedule. So we know with browsers it was six weeks at one point and five, four weeks. It's going to be two weeks later this year. I will say not so much Visual Studio code, which to me has been fine, but Visual Studio, big Visual Studio, the latest few releases, and I'm not on insiders, have introduced some real bad reliability problems. I saw a comm error in a dialog and I had to force quit the app. I couldn't close it normally. It wouldn't let me click anything. I've never seen anything like that or not in the past 20 years. I don't know. So I don't know. But one of their little justifications here is that this means that each of these releases won't be as monumental and it might be easier on users. Visual Studio code is pretty good about updating if you're familiar with the app. You know that at the beginning of March in this case, they come up with what they would call the February update. Right. It's always for the previous month, which they come out with in the first week of the next month, so to speak. But now they're going to do this every week.

[Richard Campbell]

So very different teams and very different code bases too, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And then it was a problem, actually. More Microsoft naming problem. Visual Studio code has nothing to do with Visual Studio.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So I'm Trying to remember back when God Xamarin had their own thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Miguel d'. Alcazar.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Which became Visual Studio on the Mac, became Visual Studio for Mac, which they got. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Mono develop. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They had a unique name for that and I feel like I wish they could just do that for. That was a better name for this. But yeah, I mean they reuse successful brand names. What are they going to do? One month ago I mentioned the release of Net 11 Preview 1 and like clockwork, because that's actually how these guys do things. Preview 2 is out. I cannot for the life of me figure out the point of this release. And I don't mean preview 2, I mean the entire net 11 thing. I don't think they've ever just or explained what the overreaching goals are for this one. This is a standard release cycle release, not. What do you call it, long term. But first of all, there was no discussion at all about anything. Here's a list of the new things. And it wasn't much of anything. Same thing this month. I mean there's one line of hey, it's out. Here's what's new. I mean it's just like nothing. And you know, like one of the few things I care about in this space is the WPF stuff, which very clearly is not going to be impacted by net 11 in the slightest.

[Richard Campbell]

Like there's not so far.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like they're kind of done.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I hope there's more.

[Richard Campbell]

The big feature is a long term feature when they work it on through many versions. Is Async too? Well, they're calling it AC2 right now. It used to be called Green Threads.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so that's. That is part of Preview 2.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah,

[Paul Thurrott]

it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Where's my. I lost my page here. Still the wrong page. Yeah. In fact, that was one of the few things I listed. Runtime async v2. This is what they call like a runtime native Async. So yeah, it's going to impact. This is.

[Richard Campbell]

The whole thing is Async was created by Anders Heilsberg, which means it was in C Sharp.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I thought you were going to say, which means it was perfect. Thank you.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not going to disagree with that. Listen, when the C team takes your approach to multi threaded execution and incorporates it into their language, you've done something good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Async in a way has become very popular metaphor for at least avoiding IO binding. Right. Like, hey, these things that are going to take a certain amount of time. I Don't care what order they come back in. So off you go. This is multi threading is a different conversation, a harder one.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is going to come up, oddly enough in that back of the book thing because part of the code I was writing had to deal with async file access. Things that I'm embarrassed to say was not done correctly in two cases. Anyway, we'll get to that. So do you know anything about. Well, so async. Okay, so runtime. Async. Yes, v2.

[Richard Campbell]

But moving it into the runtime means every language gets it right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. I feel like most Net releases have a theme in addition to all the double digit performance gains we always seem to get. There are across the different Net products, whether it's Maui or Blazor or whatever else. There's always some stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

I think we're still waiting for a theme to emerge. There are a number of quite a large number of long term improvements that have been worked on for quite a while.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's really a debate of like, are you gonna make it this year?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Which is, which is the other.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's been three or four years now. Like it's bloody hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

So one thing we've talked about here is this notion that maybe this thing shouldn't be on a yearly cadence. You know, it doesn't always justify that, but the flip side of it is there's that stuff because it seems like every year we're hoping to get this and it didn't make it and now you have to wait till the next year. You know, I feel like there's a more.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not plucking. I feel like they're not plucking low hanging fruit anymore. Now they're really reaching for very challenging things.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they have this, I call it a, I don't know, an agreement or so whatever with their customers that this is how we do this, you know, and that we will. And they've made great strides in making version over version upgrades of code bases through NET easier than ever. They have used conversion tools and it's usually pretty seamless. That's great. But sometimes I feel like there could be this feature that's like an out of band thing that it maybe doesn't make sense to wait for November. Maybe they missed this November, but it's ready in March. That happens. I don't know how you solve it. I. I'm not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, people are upset with you doing it every year and you know, when once you turn down the cadence and then you're making.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm like, every year is too much, but you should do more.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because I'm a hypocrite.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know what it is, the blog post itself, I mean, it almost looks like it was generated because the number of times they said Net11 Preview2 does not include any notable new X. Right. Nothing new in C Sharp, nothing new in vb, you know, on and on and on. I don't know that you need to say that that way.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It. Yeah. I mean, I've got the whammy that I know a lot of those guys and I know some of the things they're working on and they're really afraid to talk about stuff that doesn't make it in the box because they've been burned by that before. Right. So they'd rather wait until they're closer. You know, Release candidate is when you finally go, are you staying or you're going to. Are you going to be pushed? And that's, you know, the wrestling match that are up again. So it's too early to really talk about what Lemon is really going to be.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I'll know that Microsoft has righted its ship, so to speak, when they start using language like release candidate again across the company. You know, Yeah, I really. I know this. This is. I know it's. I'm just old, but like, I can't stand the way software is released through this company for the most part. NET does do it. They do it correctly. Exactly. I do like that, by the way. You know, in the sense that Google is Microsoft. I mean, they do the same thing in Android. Like they stabilize and finalize the SDK, new features and all that before the thing is finalized. So you as a developer can target this thing and make sure everything works and you can actually put it in the Play Store and then, you know, it will upgrade seamlessly to the final version. But yeah, that's the right. It's interesting. It's the dev stuff, Right. That is done correctly.

[Richard Campbell]

What these are about, does this work on all the platforms? Like, we're feature complete, we're happy with it, but how does it behave in the different modes? And that's why you have a few

[Paul Thurrott]

weeks and there's a different level there for, you know, compatibility and whatever, bug fixing and so forth. But yeah, I miss. This is, you know, this is what we used to do things everywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

My modern exemplar for what how hard this gets was what happened to trying to get Maui out the door when they had a new version of Studio and a new version of the framework that were dependent on each other and they were trying to build a tool within both. Yeah, it's like you just don't want to be in that slipstream. You don't want any of the previews. You want the RC before you start or you're wasting your time. You're just going to be battered by counting on a feature that gets pulled, something to completely revise. Which is basically what happened to the Maui team. They missed November. They did release Maui the following spring. Right. They did go.

[Paul Thurrott]

So they can do that. Yeah. Okay. I mean, and that's a big enough deal where I could, you know, could make the case for it.

[Richard Campbell]

It was Maui. Right. It was tough and I think even art. Now those guys, like, boy, oh boy, they took a beating. Like it's hard what they're trying to do. Your foundation and your build points are literally moving under you. Like, it's just really, really not easy to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, well. Oh well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I know you want a plan and they're trying to figure out what the plan is. And meantime they still put stuff out the door just for folks to see where they're going. And so, you know what's interesting is thinking, will Async to disappear again?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right, yeah. Will it actually make the final release

[Richard Campbell]

as it has before?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because if it does, this release, unless there's something coming I don't know about which, you know, possible, there's not much going on here, you know, I don't

[Richard Campbell]

know to show it yet. There's more things coming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I.

[Richard Campbell]

What did.

[Leo Laporte]

I just recently heard Miguel de Akaza is doing something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, he is a. It's called the Godot or godot, like a 3D modeling kind of that's it thing for gamers. It's like Swift ui.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's a. But it's also kind of a cross platform development tool. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but that gets into an interesting spot because SwiftUI is obviously amazing on Apple and there is SwiftUI elsewhere, Android, Windows, etc. But it's largely unproven. I mean, Arc the browser was SwiftUI. Is SwiftUI even on Windows? But I don't know. I don't know if they're there yet. It's like the guy came to Microsoft, worked on all this. Net stuff most of his adult life and it's like now I'm on Apple and I need some kind of a crossbody platform framework. God damn it. What? You know, we. Are we really going to reinvent this. I mean, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

He likes doing that. He likes, he likes getting that cross platform stuff working. He certainly got some.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's a genius.

[Leo Laporte]

Got some credit and a good guy. Some chops.

[Richard Campbell]

The new, the new tool is called Zibin with an X. But it is Godot. Like that's where he's going.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And it is just Mac or is it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's Swift centric at the moment.

[Leo Laporte]

So yes, that's working on. I mean it's not technically only Mac, but it really is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well, I think it works on iPad too. I think.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I should say only.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It wouldn't surprise me if they suddenly

[Leo Laporte]

they're swift for Linux and I think they're swift for Windows. I know there is. There is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, let's pause. And you have some big news in

[Paul Thurrott]

the Xbox all of a sudden.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, all of a sudden. Because GDC is going on right now. The Game Developers Conference. Although missing quite a few names who were unwilling to travel to the us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Why I don't know about the MVP summit too. Because I'm hearing the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll be all Americans at the summit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, there you go. I won't say anything political. I'll just leave it. I'll do it. No, just let it lie. I'm just saying you guys are in Mexico and Canada and maybe you should stay there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today. Our show today, brought to you by Cash Fly. How many times you've heard me say this? Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by cash fly@ cache flashly.com that's our CDN, our content delivery network. You know, at TWIT, we don't just cover tech. I mean we, we depend on it. And that's why practically since the very beginning, we've trusted Cashfly to get you our content petabytes of data every single month. Thank you, Cashfly. Cashfly is providing speed like no other CDN for over 20 years. On Cashfly, online games start 70% faster. HD video plays with sub second start times on every device. Software downloads complete without a hitch. Events stream smoothly. CashFly serves over 5,000 businesses, including TWIT, across nearly 100 countries. Ranging from Fortune 100 companies to solo developers. Companies choose cashflow when performance is non negotiable. And it wasn't just the performance, frankly, it was the support. They went the extra mile for us and they'll do that for you too. If you need help, you'll get seasoned support experts. They're there 24 7. They actually understand your unique challenges. I mean, they're not reading from a notebook. They know this stuff. And they'll talk to you engineer to engineer. Start with flexible month to month billing. That's what we did because we weren't really sure what we needed. Then lock in the discounts when you do know what you need. The point is, we designed our own contract when we moved to Cashfly. You can too. No lengthy obligations, no sales tactics, just exceptional service backed by a 100% uptime SLA. That sounds hard to believe, but it has been 100% over the last year, more than a year. And it's not just that for us, it's reliability, its speed, its support in every way. Cash Fly is exactly what we needed. I think it's exactly what you need. Learn how you can get your first month free at cash fly.com TWIT I'll say it again, that's C-A C-H-E-F-L-Y.com TWIT thank you Cash Fly for making this all possible. We appreciate it. All right, time for some game in the Xbox segment.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul, slightly reorder things just to put this in chronological order because I think this makes sense. But last week after the show, Asha Sharma, who is the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming, who everyone loves, Tweeted, I guess we're going to still call it that. Big meeting, talked about Project Helix, which is the code name for Microsoft's next generation console, which she confirmed would do two things, lead in performance with both Xbox and PC games. Right. So it's going to play PC games. Now I think about this in the opposite direction. Will I be able to, on a Windows PC play Xbox games, meaning backward compatible games? They have not talked about that to my knowledge yet. But I feel like if these things are essentially the same thing, you know, whatever. But, but I will say for those people who want an Xbox console and are going to be happy to hear that this is still happening, performance promises are good. Windows compatibility is pretty solid. It's a nice differentiator, Right? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But I don't know how you promise you're going to keep beating PCs when PC is a moving target.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Unless this thing is also a moving target. Right. I mean, maybe this thing's modular. I don't know. I mean, I, I agree with you. But yes. Phil Spencer multiple times was talking about bringing competing stores to Xbox. Right. And that's how you do it. You Steam, gog, Epic games, whatever, should all be able to work on this next Xbox. So that was kind of a fun. Came out of nowhere. And I was like, this is smart for her to do. She's not really well loved yet. And Phil Spencer was. He left suddenly. For a lot of people outside the company, he was very good about talking publicly about what was going on, even maybe when he shouldn't be. And if she could kind of continue this level, this type of communication, you're gonna need to.

[Richard Campbell]

She's also in her 30s, so. Yeah, like, I don't envy her. This is a tough gig.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, no, this is a manager serial. Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Sounds like Satch has got her back. And one thing I've heard is that she manages up very well. She's well liked by senior leadership.

[Paul Thurrott]

So speaking of Satya Nadala, last week there was an internal Q and A about Microsoft gaming and all this stuff. And he said that Microsoft is long on gaming, which is kind of interesting, which explains why they've always fallen short in gaming. Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry. The big thing I took out of this was his comment that there are four. Four core identities in Microsoft. I would actually call these customer bases maybe, but he called them identities. And those identities are. Microsoft is a platform company, a developer company, a knowledge worker company, and a gaming company. And I don't know that Wall street or anyone from outside the company would have picked those four. I don't know. You know, even though, look, they spent 68, actually $75 billion after post acquisition costs on Activision Blizzard. They didn't do that. Not to be a big player in gaming, but I mean, you look at the company today, where the money comes from and yeah, platforms, absolutely. But shifting to the cloud, right. With Azure and all that stuff. And now AI knowledge workers. Microsoft 365, which has also shifted largely to the cloud, which is great place to those strengths. What were the other ones? I'm sorry? Yeah, so platforms, developers, of course. Right. So they make developer tools, frameworks, languages, all that stuff. I mean, this has been core to Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the original day one. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you know, being technical and I think people listening to this, by and large being technical, I think we can all kind of appreciate when they don't slip up the kind of engineering mindset that often comes through with Microsoft stuff. I mean, you can tell it's kind of an engineering developer.

[Richard Campbell]

What's interesting here, like the odd duck in those. That foursome is game.

[Paul Thurrott]

It just isn't about at the same level. Exactly. Yep. Now, I mean, look, his. I'll just Read this because I. There's nowhere to kind of paraphrase, but when you know, why does Microsoft love games? Right. He talks about the stories, the mythologies it makes, the things that make us who we are. There's a craft to it. There is a cultural thing to it. Okay. I mean, I guess the way I would think of it is more like Xbox is in many ways Microsoft's only existing successful consumer brand. Yeah, I'm trying. I was trying to make sure that was correct.

[Richard Campbell]

You're fighting for that one. I get that. Okay. Surviving. How about that Surviving consumer brand?

[Paul Thurrott]

Fair enough. Well, successful as a brand, but by what you mean it's still beloved, Right. People are troubled by what's going on, but it's still a good brand. It hasn't been destroyed.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's people who are annoyed with what they've done with it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

While still looking the whole time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, there's still. This is like the AI or we're going to improve Windows thing, right. They're like, nice. So that means we're not going to do this AI nonsense. No, no, we're still doing the AI nonsense, but we're going to also, you know, fix the fundamentals. Right. And so when you look at Xbox as a business or Microsoft games, it's like, like, so you're going to get out of the hardware market and you're going to be like a software publisher. No, we're still going to do the hardware thing. And it's like, okay, you know, it's like, so, you know, we'll see what happens. But. So that was, let's see, that was earlier this week. And I will say the nice little course correction here is he mentioned Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, by the way, and Matt Booty and didn't leave anyone out of this conversation because there's a continuum here of actions or whatever that this business is taking, Right. The people who lead it, which is now different people. Right. But we're still going to push through the stuff that we have they had been doing. Right? That's still happening. Okay. But then today was Microsoft's GDC presentation. I believe they're making two, by the way. But before Phil Spencer left, before they made that announcement, there was a comment that you're going to want to pay attention to gdc. We're going to announce stuff about the next gen Xbox experience stuff. And there were two big sets of announcements which I think you could both argue they were kind of PC related. Right. So if you're familiar with gaming on Windows today, so this is Windows 10 into Windows 11. There's something called game mode, right? If you go into settings, there's actually like a gaming top level setting or top level section. And there's three things in there. So game bar, game bar settings. So things like keyboard shortcuts and controller shortcuts and so forth. Captures which are related to that because that's how you would do captures through Windows if you use the native stuff. And then game mode. And game mode is weird because it's on off, it's always on. I mean you can turn it off. I don't know why you would. But the idea is that when you're playing a game, it will optimize the PC for that thing and will turn off some stuff in the background. Now anyone who's used Windows to play games will tell you that doesn't actually do anything or if it does, it's minimal because you're still getting weird pop ups and things happen. You know, it's Windows, right? So when we move forward to the Xbox Rog ally devices that first shipped last fall, there was something called the Xbox Full Screen Experience. And that takes elements of the Xbox app that has been in Windows since probably Windows 10. But whenever and turns it into the UI, it's the shell, right? Essentially you can boot, you can get out of that and go back to the desktop when in this mode. In this Xbox Full Screen Experience, the game. Sorry, so many similar terms. The game bar is still available, but it's more of a controller based experience full screen essentially. So it's easy to use with a controller. And even though they don't really call it this, they've essentially taken Game mode and gone extreme with it. Where this thing boots up with using far fewer resources, far fewer things going on in the background and trying to get Windows to that place where if we cut, cut, cut enough that this thing will perform wonderfully and don't interrupt you with dialogues and whatever. So one of the things they announced today is that the Xbox Full Screen Experience is coming to all Windows 11 PCs starting in April. We kind of knew that was happening. Along the way it's come to more portable gaming handheld devices, right? They're renaming it to Xbox Mode. So that tells me that Game Mode goes away and this becomes Xbox Mode. And Game Xbox Mode almost certainly will be more granular in the sense that it's probably not going to be just an honest off switch, although it could be, I guess. But I'd like to see a version of this where you can actually choose what things can happen and can't happen, that kind of deal. But you'll be able to boot any PC into this mode, which you might want to do if you actually have a gaming PC. Right. I think the wonderful thing about the PC as a gaming device is that it's everything, you know, it's the kitchen sink. So if your primary use case is playing games, you can boot into this mode or just go into this mode, I guess, play a game. But if you have to get work done or you sort of shop whatever it is, you can back out of it and everything works normally. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you think they're going to put PCs in the living room again? Is that kind of the path they're on? Because that's the whole reason, you know

[Paul Thurrott]

what, in the sense that most PCs are portable laptops, right? Yeah. The hardcore gamer types who would choose the PC will have desktops.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I still feel like even within the audience of people that play games actively on Windows, I bet the majority of them are probably going to still be laptops, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And laptops are getting better and better.

[Richard Campbell]

And the guy who's sitting in front of two desktop machines. Because there's something really wrong with me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I, you know, having used a bunch of modern laptops can attest to the fact that this stuff's gotten a lot better. Like, it's a lot better. And so when you say like, is, are we going to bring a PC back into the living room? I guess in one sense you could argue we're going to just bring that PC everywhere because it's a laptop. So you'll be able to play on a plane or, you know, at a coffee shop or.

[Richard Campbell]

I like the idea of you play on your Helix, on your Xbox.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You leave, you crack your laptop, you

[Paul Thurrott]

know, and you're back in. It's the same game, literally the same game. Not the same game ported to a different platform, like Total Game, which is.

[Richard Campbell]

That's pretty, that's compelling.

[Paul Thurrott]

The other thing is, with regards to Project Helix, that name is actually from the past that I think the first rumors of that being a next gen console might be as old as. I could be wrong. Either it's either 2012 or 2016, like a long time ago. But this is the, this is the thing that the rumor was late 2027 was the target. And so today what they said was that they will deliver alpha versions, as they call it, of the next gen console, codename Project Helix, to game developers starting in 2027.

[Richard Campbell]

Because the One X came out in 2017, which by the way is almost 10 years ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

And clearly will be by the time Helix arrives. So they skipped several generations of hardware.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. This is the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One were both served by interim updates to the hardware, which yes, in some cases were about cost reduction but also improved capabilities. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And Xbox One was maybe the best version of that because it was Xbox One and then the S and then the X. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

With the current gen consoles they ship to it one which, you know, first time ever and then they never actually released a meaningful update to either of them. So.

[Richard Campbell]

And the x came out. Xns came out in 2017.

[Paul Thurrott]

X and no, it can't be. Right. I think wasn't it 20 looked it up. I think it was the year the pandemic. I think. I don't remember. But AMD is doing a custom processor for them as they are for PS. All right.

[Richard Campbell]

2020.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. So in a way, it's hard to know chicken and egg on this, but the plan originally was to release midstream updates to both of those consoles which would include functional, you know, and performance updates, et cetera, graphical updates that have. Obviously is not happening. So, you know, something has gone too late now. Oh, they can't do it now. Yeah, there's no way.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and I think you're also. There's a whole conversation about hardware pipeline and all of that sort of stuff. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So Sony has.

[Richard Campbell]

I think here's one question. What if it's arm? It's not be great if it was arm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's almost certainly not. It's an AMD cpu. No, it's not. It's definitely not. They've talked about it. It's a Zen. I don't know if it's Zen 6 maybe or Zen 5, but, you know, doing the same thing they do for PlayStation. It's what AMD did for the current. What is now the current gen PlayStation and Xbox.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do feel like there was a different timeline where we would have gone arm. And I think because we saw the leak like they were. They were looking at this.

[Richard Campbell]

I think they wanted for a while.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It just didn't. I did. It didn't happen in the right time frame for them to do this backward compatibility thing with the PC. You kind of have to be x64. Right. Like for 100% for it to actually just work. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm assuming there was a plan. There was like what's the story arc look like? This is like at some point it will be arm. It's now.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do feel like there's still a future where ARM happens and probably first on mobile, right? Yeah, there'll be a mobile Xbox of some kind, like a ally device or whatever color.

[Richard Campbell]

But the fact that we have Snapdragon out there and we have the laptops and getting more compatibility, it's like you need to knock those problems down a bit before you start committing to dedicated devices.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean games are the final frontier for this. I mean this is. But it's also kind of in Microsoft's wheelhouse. You know, to me, like I keep saying that one of the biggest strengths of the Xbox ecosystem is this backward compatibility stuff that they've done. They are promising that for this next gen console as well. They're promising improvements to it, which is kind of interesting. I kind of was of the thought that they were done with that. Like there were no new games to bring forward, but maybe that's going to change. There are features in Windows that are also in the Xbox series. X and S, Auto, HDR, FPS boost, etc. We have Auto SR on the PC side. We absolutely should have that on the Xbox side. I mean, probably. Well, it's the same thing. Right. And there are going to be additional updates coming later. So right now I think they were just. Look, we're doing it. This is what it basically is. We're not really talking about technical details yet, but it will not be going out to developers this year, which is not great, honestly. Hopefully we can kind of bridge the gap with better mobile gaming handhelds and then get this next gen console. We'll see. We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I love. This is going to be a new console.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, me too. And so this just happened after the show. I'm going to have to go over this. I feel I probably am missing something. I hope I'm not missing something important, but yeah. Project Helix is powered by a custom AMD SoC co designed for the next generation of DirectX and FSR. They've been on DirectX 12 for about 25 years by the way. Maybe we could rev that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but no, if you got it right, why do you want to change it? Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, because we're talking about. Well, that's a good point actually. Right. I mean, yeah, as long as it supports all the new technology. So one of the big deals in gaming for the past five plus years. What are maybe 10 years? I don't know. Ray tracing. Right. They're describing the ray tracing performance and capabilities of this System as an order of magnitude leap. This was the thing that I think. So Sarah Bond was alluding to when she mentioned the next console and how it was going to be this major leap forward. I think that's going to be a big part of it. And then integrates Intelligence directly into the graphics and compute pipelines. So that tells me things like, well, that's what Auto SR is. That's what FSR is. Right? This is, you know, if for some reason this thing has slowed to a crawl, we can actually lower the quality of the graphics. But you won't see it because it's upscaling, it looks beautiful, that kind of thing. Like, so that's, that's, you know, that's good. I. Intelligence is a tough word because you think AI and you're like, I don't know. But we'll see. Anyway, this, like I said, this just happened. This looks so far like all good news. And then we're going to be able to see some of this in the Insider program pretty soon. I think there's an indication here somewhere that Xbox mode might actually be in some of the recent builds in the Insider program. But this one I have is on the dev channel and it's still called Game mode here. So I don't see that. But this is a particularly good laptop for games and this one has an Nvidia gpu. I would definitely use the Xbox full screen experience on this just to see if I can detect a difference, you know, in frame rate, quality, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

We're still a ways away.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, but it's good to have some news. Yeah, it's good to have good news.

[Richard Campbell]

I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's all the Xbox.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all.

[Richard Campbell]

If those announcements hadn't come out of gdc, I don't think you might have much of an Xbox section.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Yeah, well, we had the. So yes, we had the little name reveal. It's going to run Windows game and then the Satya Nadella thing. But yeah, today, more details.

[Leo Laporte]

People were saying that because it's running Windows Games, that is it really even a console. It could just be like a Steam machine, that Steam.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, okay, so Xbox, every Xbox except for the 360 was a PC, right. But it was a PC that couldn't run Windows Games.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And look, you can make the case for that, especially 20 years ago when this or 25 years ago now, I guess when the first console came out. I do think we're at the point now we're leveraging the strength that is the game market on Windows makes so much sense, whatever this next thing is called. Eventually the Project Helix is a Windows PC. Right. Right now they're optimizing the software as they always do. Really. But they're adding the ability to run its Windows and it's gonna run Windows Machine.

[Leo Laporte]

I was wondering if this was as much a response to the Steam Machine as anything else. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it's a response. So the way I would phrase it is Microsoft's biggest success in gaming. Well, it's on the PlayStation. No, I'm just kidding. Is in Windows. Right. And if you look at the way the market kind of breaks down, whether you're looking at unit sales for devices or software titles or whatever it might be or time spent playing games, the PC is the. You know, there are a lot of developers who are like this is the marquee platform. Like we're going to start there and then we're going to port to these consoles or wherever else are mobile even. And doing this for Xbox makes that. It's automatic. Yeah. You have like 100% compatibility. It's the smartest thing in the world. This is the strength that Microsoft can leverage if they're going to make hardware.

[Leo Laporte]

But will it run Steam?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think it will be open enough of a platform.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's really not a PC. It's just going to have gameplay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's like a curated PC based experience maybe is the way to think of it without knowing all the details. Right. Because I could be completely wrong about most of this.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you indicate any concern about. I mean the Steam Machine's been delayed because of RAM prices.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. And look, components. No. Because with the first dev boxes not going out into next year, which by the way could be late next year.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. We're not going to talk about RAM because RAM might not not be a concern by then.

[Leo Laporte]

You know you won't need RAM by then.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Everything will be stored in crystals. It's going to be great.

[Richard Campbell]

But also the Xbox team has been building machines for decades and this is a new venture for Gabe and the co. So I think they're in a different place in the pipeline too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I think for Steam Machine to make any sense or any of their stuff, Steam Deck, whatever, they had to get that. I think they actually do call it Prism or whatever. Their compatibility, their kind of wine based Windows game compatibility layer had to reach a certain level of quality and compatibility which it has. Right. So they've done a good job with that.

[Leo Laporte]

And that will run under an emulator.

[Paul Thurrott]

It won't. Yeah, right. But. But as long as you know again, they have similar technologies where they can do auto SR type things there as well. Right. So you can run a Windows game under an emulator, lower as, but still looks great. Plays full speed, whatever. Who cares? Like, I mean it's just that enables them to have a hardware play because if they otherwise they would say well just make your games for Linux and no one would, you know. Right. So they can they that they came they kind of coming at it. Think about this for a second. Yeah, I think from the opposite direction is extra.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is. That's a good way to put it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right. Back of the book is just around the corner. But now it's time to beg. Beg your. Your money, your forgiveness, your tolerance. It's time for Club Twit. Yes. That's what keeps this show alive and all the shows we do. 30% of our operating revenue comes from you, our listeners, our club members. I like that. Honestly, I want it to be a hundred percent. If we're up to me, it'd be 100%. When we first started Twitter, that was the idea. We wouldn't take advertising. But that didn't seem actually turned out to be very practical. So we did. But thank goodness we have the club because it started when Covid happened and advertising disappeared a little bit. And we thought now maybe with the help of Patreon, we use a Patreon company called Memberful, we can maybe make this work. And it's worked pretty well. I'm really glad we get about, oh, I'd say one and a half to 2% of our audience is members of the club. If we get that just a few percentage points more, we actually could forego advertising. Here's the deal. If you join the club, 10 bucks a month, you do get ad free versions of all the shows. I am not one of those people who wants to charge you money and put ads in front of you. It's one or the other. So if you don't like ads, there are too many ads. Or you just want to support Twit join the club. There's also a lot of special programming. You get access to the Club Twit Discord. And in the Discord we do a lot of stuff. We have. Oop, that's the wrong screen. Let me put this screen up. That's. There you go. In the Club Twit Discord, we have the coming up actually tomorrow Cindy Cohn is going to join us. She has a new book, privacy's defender, my 30 year fight against digital surveillance. She's EFF's executive director and a legend. I'm really looking forward to getting to spend an hour with Cindy Cohen. That's tomorrow, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. And this is a good example of something that, you know, we used to do, triangulation and, you know, frankly, it was hard to get advertising for. So we thought, I'll keep doing it, but I'll do it in the club with the support of the club members. And that's you. That makes it possible. Friday, we're doing our AI users group. Normally we would do that on the first Friday of the month, but we're doing it this Friday because I was out of town. I can't wait. I'm not sure what we're going to do. Larry, are you going to have something for us or. Or Darren, or. We have so many really smart AI users and of course our own Anthony Nielsen. So I'm sure we'll find something interesting to do. That's this Friday. What else is coming up? Let me just look. Oh, yeah. Nvidia's conference GTC starts on Monday and Jensen Huang always gives interesting keynotes. They're about to announce something I think kind of interesting, a vibe coding tool of their own. I will be very interested to see what Jensen announces. So we're going to cover that starts Monday morning, the 16th at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. You can watch Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sargent and I will be doing that coverage of gtc, the keynote, Micah's Crafting Corners, next Wednesday at Chill Place to do some crafts. He's doing a paint by numbers this time, which is really fun. Photo time with Chris Marquardt. A week from Friday, you still have a chance to take a dazzling photo. Anthony Nielsen and I were going all over Kennedy Space center looking for something dazzling and we found quite a few things. And then Jet Set with Johnny. Jet is two weeks from tomorrow, March 26th. That's 2:00pm we're doing that on the fourth Thursday of every month. Now, Johnny, my travel guru, 2:00pm Pacific, 5:00pm Eastern. So we do that in the club. The Discord is fantastic because it's a place to get together with really smart, interesting people and talk about all sorts of interesting things. You get that. You also get the warm and fuzzy feeling, the knowledge that you're supporting what we do here at Twitter. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. I have to put this up. Joe Esposito who's a great artist in there, he doesn't do this with AI, he does it with Photoshop, creates little ads for us. Clumptwit is the future of the podcast network you love. Ok, thank you, Joe. He takes vintage ads and pastes us into them. And he does such a great job. That's kind of fun. That's kind of the fun part of the club. Some really creative, interesting people in there. If you'd like to join, we'd love to have you. Twit TV Club. Twit. And thanks in advance. Now to the back of the book we go. Paul Thurot starts us off with his tip.

[Richard Campbell]

Tip of the week, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I. I wrote this as kind of an editorial with an eye toward talking to you guys about this because people of our age, you know, we were the first generation to have home computers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Home video games.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I was an adult by that time. I mean, I was in my 20s when I got my first PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Yeah. I mean, 800. Nice. Yeah, that was a good one. There's a thing about that era, and it didn't end with Atari, Apple, Commodore leaving and whatever. PC, Mac, it's a little messier than that. But there was kind of an enthusiast DIY kind of quality to that early market that I really feel like we don't have today. The closest we've gotten to it in the modern era, I think, is the Raspberry PI, which does for what we now call makers. People that want to work with hardware, devices and sensors and things. What we, as budding or would be software developers would have done with the BASIC built into a Commodore or Atari device or later computers or whatever. To me, from a program, it's not just programming. I mean, I kind of approach the world from that perspective. But the last great thing like this, and you could draw a line from the Microsoft BASIC that was in all of those early devices, basically to HyperCard, like on the Mac, to Visual Basic first in DOS, but really Windows until they netified it and frankly killed it, unfortunately, by making it too sophisticated or whatever. The notion that anyone like as a normal human being could go up to a computer and learn this stuff and use it and make things with it is wonderful. I feel like it's a thing that maybe AI will enable for this generation. Maybe it does seem like we're getting there, but I miss this, and not just because I'm old and I'm looking back. I don't mean it like that. I'm not like into nostalgia for nostalgia's sake or whatever. And I also am clear out about the things that were bad, right? It's not. Not everything was great. It wasn't all strawberries and creams, cream back in the 1980s. It was mostly cocaine, really, but whatever. But I do feel like as this thing has matured, this thing being personal computing or personal technology, whatever you want to call it, you know, it's become. It's not like for us anymore, this is what inshinification is in the big tech space. This is. When Steven Snofsky wrote his big book about his history at Microsoft, he talked about how early versions of Office were really aimed at individuals who were enthusiasts, individuals who were just consumers. Eventually it was for smaller businesses and organizations and just businesses, and they left behind consumers. Then it became this enterprise play where it's a subscription service with multiple tiers and it's just this giant hairball of terribleness. And I wish there was something like those home computers, because one of the things that was interesting, like the Atari that you mentioned, the Atari 800, which came out three or four years before the Commodore 64, was, I mean, a miracle of technology. It was better than computers of that day. That's something that Commodore did or Amiga did with the Amiga as well.

[Leo Laporte]

You were an Amiga. That was your first personal computer?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it was my first one, but it was. Yeah, I mean, it was your first. So in the. In the sense that people like us always have this conversation. What was your first personal, you know, your first computer? I win this. I win this easily.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't care who I'm talking to. I will win this battle. My first computer was the ECS Entertainment Computer System. Add on for the Mattel and television.

[Leo Laporte]

Was that a computer, though, really?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it had a basic language. And one of the cool things about it was that you could plug in a cartridge and access the sprites and other graphic assets on that cartridge to make your own games in basic.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you go. It was pretty cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

My first real computer was a Commodore 64. You know, at every step of the way, I always wanted something better, but couldn't afford the better thing. So I had a Commodore 64, not a Commodore 128. I had a Amiga 500, not an Amiga 2000. You know, it's just kind of like my life, you know, like the way it's always gone. But you know what, those computers were incredible, and they were all better than other things of the day. So the best selling, you know, computer in 198780 whatever was an IBM PC or maybe a compact PC by that point, whatever it was, but it was PC and those things were technically inferior. They just were. And that's the problem with the Raspberry PI. To me, if the Raspberry PI was this one to $200 computer that somehow outperformed in some way modern PCs, it would be like, wow, that would be like the home computer era of the 1980s. Right. But it's not. And that's, I mean it's still inexpensive and great and I love that it exists and I like. And I'm not really into the hardware sensor maker thing, but I do love that that exists. I wish there was something though, like, I'm just trying to, trying to understand like, you know, Commodore is back sort of like so they have these new Commodore 64 is. I do not want one of those. I love that they make it, but I don't want to go back to a bread box with a 40 column display. And you know, it's ridiculous. Like I. But I don't know. Could you guys, can either of you think of anything that falls into that kind of enthusiast, you know, like the actual magic of what this world was like in the very late 70s, early

[Richard Campbell]

80s, like physical meter a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, we were talking yesterday about 3D printers and there is that kind of same.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's a good one.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it yourself.

[Paul Thurrott]

This notion that you could as an individual print a part for car that is no longer supported or a device that whatever it might be in the future, you'll do this for. Well, just to repair things. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like this is how who is one of our regulars in the club prints his own Crocs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure they're very comfortable, economical way to make Crocs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, but you might, you, you will have a unique design. I mean. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What was your first computer, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

Model one.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

4K RAM. Yeah, yeah, 1977.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the other. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Repairing those machines.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the other aspect of this early computer market that fascinates me. The, the what could have been moments, like how Amiga could have taken over the world. Or, or the Tandy. You know, the thing about the trs, the Tandy model, the Tandy computers was that they had this distribution network.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They didn't believe Radio Shacks reader shucks wrote this wonder of, you know, bins of little bits and metal pieces and cassette tapes.

[Richard Campbell]

I was in there buying parts when they got the machine and then it distracted Me from the parts.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

I was building an electronic rocket countdown timer because I'm the kind of lazy that can't even say 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Right. Like I literally.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you're also the kind of person that would show up, like hang out at a Radio Shack.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And meet like minded people.

[Leo Laporte]

Countdown counter for my rocket.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you don't want that one high. You want the model one high. I want to. You know, I was like, I missed that.

[Leo Laporte]

There was also that user group mentality. There was that early days of makers.

[Paul Thurrott]

There were literally not literal user groups. Right. Which still struggle along today. There's still user groups out in the

[Leo Laporte]

world, of course, mostly with gray hairs like us.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's the problem buddy who reminded me at a dinner the other day, the first time we met was when I repaired his badly installed lowercase kit on his terrace 80 model one in like 1979. Wow. That's when we met.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's cool. What else is. What would you say, Richard? Is there. Is there a culture similar to that? I mean, I think they're still there. They're just more subcultures. There's not. Yeah, it's all different little.

[Richard Campbell]

And you're right about the 3D printing thing, but, you know, there's actually lots of cool cultures.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I think that's what's happening.

[Richard Campbell]

The mountain bike, you know, this part of the world, the mountain biking groups.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And just, you know, they organize on the Internet and so forth, but they're going out to ride places where the bears are. You know, they.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right around here. But yeah, so the Internet in many ways is kind of democratized access to information and so forth.

[Richard Campbell]

I find the long tail in the mid.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually early 1990s, I went to a, like a. Like a video game store and the company had bought some of the assets of some company that had gone out of business in California. And they had all these brand new Atari and Intellivision and Cleco cartridges in shrink wrap that had never been opened. It was in boxes. And when I first discovered this stuff, I was like, oh my God, like I still had it in television at the time. So I was buying these things for $2 apiece, 250 maybe. But the Internet started happening. So through AOL, I could go onto these used news groups and say, I have these cartridges I can sell you for $5 that I bought for $2 or whatever, or $10 or whatever they are, including some really rare ones. But that enabled me to reach this kind of bigger audience. It Was great until they started charging me more because I was buying so many of them. And they were like, wait, this stuff is actually valuable? But then the downside or the flip side of this is that the Internet also enables every one of these little micro groups, right? So instead of like these big shared experiences that most people have or some large audiences have, you have these small experiences, you know, and so it's hard to find a single thing where you're like, we're all rallying around the Commodore 64 or whatever it might be. You know, you have. Yeah, you have these little. Instead of like three big groups, there are a million little groups, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's an interesting problem. I don't know. I mean, I'm not looking. I'm not calling for the end of evolution or anything, but. And I don't think that it was ever perfect at any point in time. We should go back to that. I don't mean it like that, but I do wish there was that sense of wonder to technology, because some of it is really wonderful. But the companies that are providing this to us, by and large, are terrible, Right?

[Richard Campbell]

The expectations of the average person, young person wanting to play with a machine because they already have a phone. Right. Like, how do you present them with a Raspberry PI and a command line when they have it on?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, maybe think about it this way. Maybe when I saw. I can't remember what it was, either a Vic 20 or Commodore 64, but I was in a series with my mother and I had these computers. I'd never seen anything like this. And I was like, my. Instantly I imagined what I was going to make with this thing. Right. What I imagined was something I still could not make today, which was basically like a Star wars type game where you're. You're flying in some ship down the side of a giant ship that's going by you and, you know, fighting things or whatever, and. But that's where my brain went immediately I was like, I want this because I want to build something. I want to. I'm going to learn how to program this thing. I'm going to do this. So if I were to give my, like a phone to a kid on their birthday or Christmas or something, or do they have that. Are those people around? Are there people out there now who are like, they. They see this technology thing, I just wonder if there's just too much of it.

[Richard Campbell]

They don't think the 3D printer gets that reaction out of certain people where it's like, I know what I Want to make.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Creators on TikTok, you know, they're making videos or they're. So I think there's a huge explosion of creativity among young people, but I don't think it's. Yeah, it's not necessarily electronics as much as it was.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, he had Heathcliff Robotics. Usually grabs them pretty hard, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Robotics, very cool. And first is still a thing in many schools.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want it to be something that's not nostalgia or fake nostalgia, which is how I describe these hipsters who have to have vinyl records and ipods now and whatever other nonsense. And it's like, guys, there's a reason we move past all of these things. Like, the thing you don't remember because you weren't there and. Or just don't remember is these things were all imperfect, you know, And I. Whatever. I'm not. I mean, look, I've been like, all of us have been in this industry essentially our entire lives. Like, we're obviously, we care about technology.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of that energy got channeled into gamers. So the people who are gamers today probably would have been more like you, Paul. How can I write a game or more like you, Richard? How can I make music come out of my AM radio with this little dial?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, maybe AI does it, though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

And I think AI is going to bring back some.

[Paul Thurrott]

Make me a game.

[Leo Laporte]

Hacking creativity.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have an idea for a game, maybe. I think it might be exciting for people if they understood they could make things.

[Leo Laporte]

There was this whole maker movement, which I wish it gotten gone a little farther. You know, Dale Dougherty is a good friend, and there are still maker spaces in many communities, but it's. And that's sort of bifurcated into the 3D printer crowd. But I don't think it's as. As big as it probably can't be

[Paul Thurrott]

because there's so much of it. And. And because of this Internet problem, the. You know, if you had said to me 30, 35 years ago, you can have news, but it will be the news you care about. It won't be the stuff you don't care about. You don't have to sit through the sports if you don't care about the sports. You can, you know, it sounds wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But then you realize that all this has done is created these little silos where we all hate each other because you don't believe exactly what I believe. And it, you know, I don't think

[Richard Campbell]

this is a solvable community. Was like that back then, too. Like, oh, yeah, not talking to A trash, a guy. Vice versa. Like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but you know what?

[Richard Campbell]

It was terrible.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've experienced this with sports, and I've definitely experienced it with technology. You grew up in, like, I grew up in Boston, big sports town, lots of good teams in the 80s, etc. So you have this kind of attitude about it. But then as you get older and you rewatch games from the past maybe, or watch specials or whatever it is, you realize, man, that team from L. A or from Chicago or from where else was excellent too. And you have a different level of respect for that stuff. And you're not this. Well, hopefully you're not my brother. Still, like, this actually is an idiot, but like a nonpartisan, Like, Yeah, a total homer and more of a. Like, I just love the sport. And I, you know, and I think the way I got into it was when the Patriots had that huge run with Tom Brady. We would watch football all the time, obviously. And when the Patriots were done and it was another team, I was always like, oh, thank God, now I can just enjoy the game. I don't have to stress over who. I don't even care, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

And Lisa's like that with technology now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, technology is like that, too. So I was a commoner guy, you know, hated Atari. But I've watched so many videos and read so many books and I know so much more about this stuff. And there were these incredible technical achievements or just wonderful things that happened on all these platforms, and they were all pretty excellent in their own ways. And back in the day, we did

[Leo Laporte]

have general purpose computing magazines like Byte, which it is now very much all niche stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I just realized. So it's funny you mentioned Byte. So Byte was made. Published by Macmillan. Macmillan was a sponsor of that Computer Chronicle show, which is fantastic. I've watched a bunch of that in recent. Yes, sadly, it's a great show, but I'm not going to get this exactly right. But in the beginning of one of the episodes, it was like, Computer Chronicles is brought to you by macmillan, the publishers of Byte magazine. And it was like the magazine for people who love software, hardware and programming. And I was like, oh, my God, that's me today. I was like, that's an interesting way to. I mean, I might. I might be off on how I describe it. It might not be that exact phrase, but it was some. It was those three things. And I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, that was 40 years ago, 30 years ago, whatever. But, yeah, that. That thing that it's. Anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, a little Nostalgia. I like going down memory lane. I really do.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do too. But I, I mean I feel like we're in this avoid.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel computing period ever now to be honest, I think AI has really brought.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, okay. I mean I will say tied to that. When I, as I was growing up and as the late 80s occurred in the early 90s, there were all these books being written about Apple like because Steve Jobs had left and about Microsoft, the early history and all this stuff. And I was going to get into this industry and I was going to learn to become a programmer and I really felt the sense of loss that I had missed out on this. The Genesis story never happens again, right? That's. It's come and gone. It's never going to be that exciting again. But the thing that did happen was the Internet and it got exciting again. And so I was lucky enough by the mid-90s to be writing and publishing books and doing things and being part of it, a small part of it. But I mean like I'm. I was able to be there as it happened, not read about it after it happened, you know. And yeah, with AI now, if anything, I feel like this is, it's accelerating. It's rather insane.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean mentioning on Monday we're expecting I think might be a very big announcement from Nvidia, right? Oh yeah, Gentic platform.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I meant to say I'm not, not happy with the GTC thing, but I. Maybe this will be a minor announcement for them in some ways but they are about to come out with some kind of a chipset thing within.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're talking their own.

[Richard Campbell]

Their own.

[Paul Thurrott]

Notice that W or Mobile World Congress came and went and there were no Snapdragon X2 announcements, there were no ARM Nvidia anything announcements. And so holding on to it, it has to happen soon. It's going to be the first half of the year.

[Richard Campbell]

So that Nvidia thing was okay. So you've been doing well selling shovels. So you really. And now you decided you need to dig some gold. Like what?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he called Nemo Claw.

[Paul Thurrott]

They need a shovel adjacent something like, you know, Apple, they're app. They're. They are to AI what Apple it was to phones, right. So you have this one super explosive successful thing. Awesome. It's going to slow down eventually. What do you do next? Like you can't. It's not going to last forever. Like you have to do more and you know, we'll see if Nvidia can make that happen. But not that long ago that company was just about nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And today they're just about everything.

[Leo Laporte]

And flying cars are coming this summer. So

[Paul Thurrott]

finally. And then. And then after that, the paperless office. It's happening, folks. We did it.

[Leo Laporte]

We did it. We did it.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, man.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, all right. So that's your tip of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Think back. Think to the good old days.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Now I'm going to look to the future. So I've been working on this series of kind of notepad clones, having a lot of success, but also a lot of defeats. Mostly lately, because the Windows app SDK is so terrible. I've tried all kinds of AIs. I told you about the thing from last November where it kept making so many mistakes that I ran out of credits. Like what? You know, which is insane, but. And I had also said in the past, like, look, I would never pay for. I just said it today, I will not pay for AI. If I was a developer, I would absolutely pay for AI. And that's a different thing, right? So there's different ways to go with this, but Stardock, the company that my friend Brad works at, which is run by Brad Wardell, another friend of a sort, a great guy, they make start 11, window blinds, fences, et cetera, came up with a. I guess I'll call it like an AI, kind of a front end. It's not just for developers. I have only used it for developer stuff, but in the sense, like OpenClaw is for agents or Cursor was like a year ago, you can point it at a code base and it can help you with it. Right. So you do code review, which is incredible. Literally to this point, and this has been a month and a half, maybe month, over a month. Anyway, it has never screwed me over, not one time. It has never created code that did not compile, which has been a huge problem with the GitHub copilot stuff. It has fixed some embarrassing problems with my code base, including a couple of Async issues like I mentioned, which I can't understand because you always use async for file operations and what the hell. Anyway, I can't explain that one, but there are features I had in old versions of the app that were on WPF that I could not implement in the Windows app SD because it's so hard. And it did those. It added new features I've just wanted to add. And this has gone so well that I finally decided. I don't know why I kind of jumped the gun, but I was like, look, I want to build the thing I always wanted to build, which is that multi app, sorry, multi document, multitab version of this app. I meant to have it build it from scratch just to see if it could and to see what it would look like, but it actually used my code base to do it. And it did it. God damn it, it did it. And it's wonderful. And part of the reason it's wonderful is because I had actually solved the architectural issue of managing the state of multiple documents and tabs, but over a year ago. It's just that the Windows app SDK is so terrible that this is a hard thing to explain. I don't want to go into too much detail, but if you think about switching between tabs in an app and maintaining the state of whatever it contains, in wpf, there are events that fire before you switch, and in Windows app SDK they only have events that fire after you switch. So it's actually very easy to lose state. Anyway, it took what I did. It fixed spit out a version of this app. This, I swear to God, this kills me. I'm just gonna mention one more thing about this because this kills me. There were things I started working on this, some version of this app, starting with Visual Basic, by the way, several years ago. So I'm gonna say 7ish years ago, I don't remember. I've made multiple versions of it over time. So Windows forums with the vb, Windows Forms with C Sharp, Windows Forms with C Sharp. And then at the time, modern like. Net core versions. I did a universal Windows, Windows, what do you call it? UWP version. But the best version I ever did was wpf. It was fantastic. But one of the things dating back to literally V1, if you look at Notepad today, if you look at like, this is just an esoteric kind of. There's two. Those two things in the bottom right of the Corner it says UTF8, which is an encoding format. This is kind of the modern text encoding format, but it supports multiple formats. And it also says Windows crlf, like carriage return, line feed.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

And this is a line ending format. So Windows, well, Windows, yes. But Notepad supports multiple line format line ending formats, I call them, I guess, and then encoding formats, right? Dating all the way back to literally ansi. I. I'm pretty sure you could create a Nancy text file in this thing if you wanted to. I don't know why you would, but anyway, it's good because it can import those files, right? You could read everything. I was never going to figure that out ever, ever, ever. I looked into this. It's deep, deep archaic. It literally dates back to the early versions of Win32 and the Windows SDK. And I worked on this several years ago and I was like, no, screw this. And I could justify it by saying, look, no one using this is ever going to do anything but UTF8 and Windows line in CRLF, who cares? But I asked this thing to make an app that had all the features and God damn it, it fricking supports all the encoding formats and the line endings.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very well documented. The tool is going to be great at that.

[Paul Thurrott]

God damn it. Like, what the. That's incredible. Like, that's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Disappointing. You're disappointing the UNO guys. I had them on the show the other day, day. And they were desperate to help you with your app. And now you've fixed it all with.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no, no, I'm. One of my next steps will be making it cross platform with uno. I'm definitely, I'm absolutely doing that.

[Richard Campbell]

Those guys are great. You should definitely.

[Paul Thurrott]

They are great. They're the best. No, they're, They're. If anything, they're too great. They're. They're so nice. They were the Jerome or one of those guys. It was, it was like. He's like, just send us the code. We'll. We'll put an engineer on it. I'm like, what's wrong with you? No, this is, this is like a hobby. No, please don't do that. But this has enabled me to get over the. Get over this, right?

[Richard Campbell]

So

[Paul Thurrott]

I've restarted it, the project. And so you can imagine, like three instances of Visual Studio running, right? So the new app, my old app, and the app that it created, right? So I can go and I can see how it took the class, the model, they would call it, that I created to manage the state and extended it to support, by the way, the line ending and the formatting, the encoding, rather, because those are part of that document that's in each tab, right? Because they could be all different. And so it actually manages that state as well. I've never seen anything like this. This has never not worked properly. One of the things that I didn't think worked that it did was it added AI based writing help tools, right? And I was like, I can't get this to work. And it also said to me, I swear to God, it's like, here are four possible implementations. We recommend doing two of them. And in this case, it meant you can use Ollama, which is a locally downloadable slm, and As a fallback if you don't have anything else or you can have Gemini. If you have an API key, you can paste it into settings, you can use that. And I couldn't get it to. I was like, I installed a llama. I'm like, this isn't working and it's failing. And then it was like, look, we're going to change the error message so we understand what's happening better. And is that okay? I'm like, yep. And then it did the thing and it came up and it said, yeah, you don't have a. You don't have the Ollama model installed. You have the Ollama app installed. And I was like, I was like. And then I installed the model, which it did for me.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it worked.

[Richard Campbell]

It's here to help.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's incredible. If I was a developer, I would pay, I would pay 200 bucks a month for AI there's no doubt about would be the greatest gift simultaneously. It's so justifiable.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think so. The productivity is astonishing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I cannot anyway, so I recommend people look into this tool. Clairvoyance is magical. It. It also works for like the co work type things where you, you can make a game. You can. In fact it has all these sample projects you can do will generate on the fly. And so I was like, yeah, make a video, make a asteroid. It makes this perfect Asteroids client. And I'm like, oh, fucking. It's unbelievable. But you could also use it for productivity type things. Like Brad's daughter uses it to make flashcard tests for an exam she's going to have or whatever. And it's going to enable people to do that kind of vibe coding based personalized app thing as well. Like I'm using it very specifically for software development, but it's rather incredible models they're using. So that's up to you. Right? I should, I should have said that

[Leo Laporte]

it's just a harness force.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I should have. Yeah. So I use it with Anthropic Cloud. I have the pro, the 20 buck a month thing. So you just plug it in and. But it can work with anything. You can use it with Gemini if you want. You can use it with Copilot if you're that mental. It's still on a wait list like it's preview. I think it was Leo mentioned earlier in the show. He was talking about how sometimes you almost just have to reboot or reset the thing because it kind of loses its place. And of course that passes through. Right. So every once In a while, it's like, yeah, you're not looking at the right thing. And you just restart the app and it's like, oh, here we are again. And it does a really good job at that kind of thing. It does a really good job at everything. I've never used an AI like this. That has it. It's never. It's never caused a problem. Like, it's like. It's never. I'm not. I can't say it's. It does. This is why people believe this stuff is magic or godlike. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it does it.

[Paul Thurrott]

When you see it actually do this. Yeah, it's like, oh, my God. Like, it's. And especially because I've experienced so many failures, you know, that helps because. Well, I mean, I didn't want to go through that, but I mean, having done that and going into this kind of gingerly and sort of also feeling like every six months or nine months, there's this new flavor of the month in AI. Like, Cursor had their moment in the sun, like a year ago, whatever. And thinking like, well, you know, things are going to. Kind of things are going to change again. And I don't know, but I cannot believe how well this works.

[Leo Laporte]

So you need to have an object desktop subscription.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's one way to get into it right away. No, you don't need to have one.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you do have one, you can get it right now. If you don't have one, it's free, but you have to. It's a wait list for now because they're still, you know, iterating through or it's still early in some ways. But it makes these. They call them exhibits, but it's basically like a. It looks like a. Like a slide. A slide from a slide deck, which shows you all the options, like, because one of the great things you can do is say, I want to do this thing. Like I said, with the AI writing tools, I did this for also recent files implementation, like a menu with recent files and how to store that. It came up in that case with five. So these cards with the five versions, the pros and the cons of each difficulty rating of each. How far do you want to go? And then a recommendation about the. And the one that it recommended, which was the first one, was exactly how I had already started implementing this in a different version of the app. And I was like, yeah, no, do this. And it worked perfectly the first time. It just worked.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like kind of their version of cowork yeah, basically, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, I think we'll see where this goes. But as of right now, I'm paying for anthropic and I'm not paying them anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And it is Brad. And was Brad involved in this or.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, he was. He's been talking to me about this for months. He's like, he's really excited. This, this could be a completely different direction for this company, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no kidding. This is very different from what they normally do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's, it's cross platform. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they vibe code it? I bet they did.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think parts of it maybe. But you know, Brad Wardell is an astonishingly good programmer and they obviously they're programmers. I mean, there's a whole, I don't know, team of people or whatever. But yeah, I mean, at some point you use the thing to make the thing, you know, if that makes sense. Right. You know, when did you even.

[Leo Laporte]

Claude and you know, OpenAI are doing that now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. Right. So once a tool like this improves to the point where you can use it to help make that tool.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think you've crossed in very interesting milestone.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can't just, unless you do have an object desktop, you can't just go get it right now, but. Because they're in alpha but get on the wait list and I think people are going to be blown away by. Well, I know they are. It's incredible because he was very excited and he showed me like remote demos and I was like, okay, that's cool. And then I started doing it and I'm like, I'm going to run. I, I've run into problems. I know exactly where the problem is going to occur. None of those problems occur. None, like, none.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's astonishing.

[Leo Laporte]

A workspace where agents work as persistent staff across your projects. Oh, that's the other thing. So this is a harness and again supports.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Multiple agents. Right. I called my agent Brad, of course, because I like the idea you can also do things like where you. It's an interactive, you know, chat experience, obviously. Like you can, it's multi threaded in the sense that you can give like new directions to go do other things while it's doing a thing. And you can see the agents kind of start over on the side and it's like, it's, it's, it's rather impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, this is an explosive area. This is the year of the agents, basically.

[Paul Thurrott]

And this is, I think for this, you know, when I talk about how people will have an A sorry, an aha moment with AI. This is, this could be it for a lot of people. This type of thing, it doesn't necessarily have to be clairvoyance. It is for me, but this is the type of thing where you're going

[Richard Campbell]

to have a moment.

[Paul Thurrott]

It didn't just correct like the spelling of a word, it created a thing. And you're like, okay, so that was impossible. Or that was something I was never going to do on my own. And in my case, it's happened. You could just go back and read the articles. But I think there were 20ish instances of things where I'm like, I don't think I'm ever going to solve this problem. And it just did them all in like a day. I mean, well, did them all immediately. And then I did them. You know, I went through them and I was like, how? How? I keep waiting for it to screw up. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I have a friend with the six anthropic max accounts who's now configured his phone. So he's just looking at the results of each of the agents and then telling them what they did wrong and what to do next.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more than a thousand bucks a

[Richard Campbell]

month he's spending, but he's knocking out six week sprints in less than a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, if he's your job,

[Paul Thurrott]

it's probably causing the tornadoes in the Midwest right now, but it's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

He consumes enough tokens that anthropic calls him on a regular basis and goes,

[Paul Thurrott]

that's the. Well, I don't want to get too deep into this, but the way it consumes tokens on your behalf is fascinating because it actually tries to save you. Like it will do things in a way that will save tokens.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, things you can do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Tells you that.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's like, like it's, it's neat.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, I'm sorry I've been babbling, but it's really the real, the real question

[Leo Laporte]

for a lot of people is, this is true of Openclaw as well. Is, is it Claude? Is it Opus 4.6 that's really the impressive thing or is it the hard so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So I, I'm sorry, I, I've written several articles about this, but. And I'm trying to condense this into like a 10 or 2000 minute conversation, but I did start using Just Cloud directly and it ran into the same kind of problems that I was having before. Yeah, it was better, but there's something about using this with that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can Improve on it for sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it just. It put it right over the. It's not even close. Like it's a huge difference. Yeah, I'll have to try it.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a few more minutes to go on the show coming up in about 15 minutes. It is. Guy Kawasaki's gonna be our guest.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Speaking of early books from the computer industry and those are like the Macintosh way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

A bunch of books about marketing. Stuff I don't care about too much. But yeah, an amazing individual.

[Leo Laporte]

He just wrote a book on Signal and we're going to talk about using Signal to protect.

[Paul Thurrott]

I follow him on Substack.

[Richard Campbell]

I think Signal Fan, but I hang around with too many security people. He got me. I couldn't talk to him. I didn't use Signal.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually Apple's 50th anniversary is April 1st, so the day before that David Pogue will join us to talk about his new book, 50 Years of Apple, which just came out yesterday. And that'll be on MacBrigg weekly. So if you're an Apple fan, it's a banner month. But if you're not, Run As Radio has something for you.

[Richard Campbell]

We don't hate Apple. On Run as Radio it's every so often we have to manage them ambivalent. You know, it's just another piece of hardware to manage. Although I remember saying I did a show talking about group policy and active directory and the fact that it was becoming actually easier to manage non Windows devices. Like if you had a Windows device, things were harder because it was all this archaic management rules that intune and the new approaches to group policy are much simpler on nice. But that was not this conversation. I just counted up. This is the 17th appearance on Ryan's Radio for Bob Ward. Admittedly, he's done a bunch of panels over the years. But I can't talk about more regular than Bob for just what do you want to know about SQL Server? He's been the advocate in that space forever. He runs the Microsoft Data Group. He's an architect. Like he's the guy to talk to. He knows his stuff and he's a pleasure to talk to. Though admittedly we got distracted for a minute. They're talking about being granddads. I got some nice comments on that. It's like congratulations. But what we really were talking about was SQL Server 2025, which came in full release in the ignite time frame last year. And then we finally got Bob on the show. To go over that and then a lot of conversation about some of the AI related features. Like there's now a rag vector store as a type inside of SQL Servers along with a bunch of other constructs and of course the infinite number of copilots that are related to SQL Server both in SSMS and some other tools. And a great extension for Visual Studio code if you need to work with SQL Server. Make your life much easier with this new extension. So just a rundown of all the good stuff as is you'd expect from any show I do with Bob Ward. We're going to talk about SQL Server and we're going to go deep.

[Leo Laporte]

On December 12, Disney invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six episode docu series.

[Richard Campbell]

I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close

[Leo Laporte]

the book the end of an era and don't miss Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour, the final show featuring for the first time the Tortured poets department. Streaming December 12th only on Disney. And as you might expect on any show we do with Richard Campbell, there will be whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

There will be. And I'm in Canada so it's going

[Paul Thurrott]

to be Canadian whiskey. Hooray.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I've talked with the Sons of Vancouver was such a hit. I was so happy about this. So I was looking for some other craft whiskeys. Well, this is not that crafty in the sense of it's not brand new. This is the distillery is called Highwood and it is actually in a town called High river in Alberta. So next province over, it's about 45 minutes drive south of Calgary. It's also about that same distance from the Rocky Mountains itself, but that would be due west. Today that town's about 15,000 people. Although there's been people living around there literally for centuries, possibly millennia. The Blackfoot First Nation's been in that area and of course stretches down into the US and so forth. European settlers don't show up in that part of the world till 1877, which is after confederation. Right, which is 1867. It's named of course for the High Wood river and of course and the town is built at the ford at the river they call the crossing. So back in the day without a lot of technology, you're driving your cattle around. This is where you go through. So naturally a town congratulation. Conglomerates around there, although just a small one like Calgary, is a multi million person city or million and a half and highways just 15,000 people. This part of the world is considered what they call humid continental for the climatologist type. So this is mild and warm summ with very cool, with cool nights even in the summertime. And the winters are cold and snowy. They average about 70 inches of snow most years. Southern Alberta is notorious for hitting negative 30s and negative 40s at certain points in the in the wintertime, but then also having a warm wind they call a chinook. So, but different, different style life here at higher altitude, you know, not like the coast life that I have. And they're going to make whiskey there. So Highwood Distillers was founded in 1974, so that makes it an old distillery. Normally a distillery that old would have been grabbed up by a conglomerate by now, but they are fiercely independent, even though they've gone through a few different owners. So in 74, High river had about 3,000 people in much smaller town. And then the original name was the Sunnyvale Distillery. So it was a group of investors out of Calgary. They hired a distiller from German to build a distillery. It was the only one in Alberta at the time, although today Alberta is a massive producer of whiskey and other drinks. They rebranded as Highwood in 84. And this particular whiskey that I've got, which they call the Centennial, was actually launched in 1996. As they grew, they moved their sales marketing office back up to the city of Calgary. So what's in High river is just a distillery facility and all of the storage and so forth. They acquired the only distillery in British Columbia in 2005 called Potter's Distillers, which was actually established in 1958, so even older than Highwood, by a guy named Harry Potter, no relation, who's from Langley, which is where my daughter lives right now, with my granddaughter. And then it was passed on to a guy named Harold John Cameron Terry, because he was Australian. So you get names like that in 1962, who moved it and then in 1990 to Kelowna and it became a thing called Cassandra Basketia. Brands which still exist to this day. While they do a little bit distilling, they mostly blended other whiskeys is very common practice for Canadian whiskey. And when Highwood acquired them, they largely stopped their production. In fact, they only produce. They. They're actually on the grounds of a large brewery called Granville Island Brewery. And they only make whiskey there one week a year to maintain their distiller's license. And other than that, they mostly do blends and things like that. That acquisition scaled up Highwood fair a fair bit. So they 2006 built additional facilities in High river, their major employer there. And then just recently this distillery, the Highwood was acquired by another distillery, Caldera Distilling, another Canadian one, this guy named Jarrett Stewart, who was originally from Alberta, worked in the energy energy industry, got disenfranchised of that at one point or another and decided to get into whiskey to the point where he actually went to the uk to Rotherhith and studied at the Institute of Brewers and Distillers and then chose to build a distillery, build Caldera in River John, Nova Scotia. And he was making product back in 2013, all very local to the island, Newfoundland Island. And then a friend of his from the Energy Energy let him know that Highwood was available for acquisition. And so in 2022 they decided that Caldera would buy that, bind it together. And it's only been more successful than that. In fact like this whiskey that I'm trying today, the Centennial won the bronze medal in the Canadian Whiskey Awards in 2024. So we're talking about a 40 plus almost 50 year old distillery that's still not part of a big conglomerate. It's been around for decades, it's very rare. They also make a huge array of products. Whiskey is not their primary product. They mostly make vodka. Well, pre mixes are their largest business then vodka whiskey is only about 20% the business.

[Leo Laporte]

What's a premix this?

[Richard Campbell]

So this is your like whiskey cocktails

[Leo Laporte]

in a can that comes in a can?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

So they, so they make a bunch of vodka and they make a rum and a few other things as well. All that stuff that's easy to produce. But premixes pay very well, they're cheap to make and you make a profit.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like owning a bottle.

[Richard Campbell]

That's how you can. It's only about 30 employees, it's not a huge place but they, they make money. Their distilling approach is very interesting. They do not do any distilling of corn. The most of their whiskeys are wheat and rye. They do occasionally use corn spirit and I strongly suspect there's corn spirit in this whiskey. But they buy it from other producers because it's easy to come by. They also, because they're working with wheat and rye, no barley, they don't do any malting but they do use pressurized mash ton which is very unusual. So they have a mash tunnel that will actually cook under pressure. So you load about 2,500 kilos of grain, that's £5,500 with 12,000 liters of water, about 3,200 gallons. The water does not come from the river, comes from a well. And then they cook it under pressure to break to turn it into a kind of porridge, produce about 14,000 liters of mash. And after they cool it down then they add the enzymes. So that's a biological process to convert the starches into sugar. And then they do a very long fermentation that results in about a 12% beer that's high. Normally you look at about 8 or 9% in their documentation they say they distill into beer still, but you would call it a column still and raise it to about somewhere between 70, 75% to very high pass and then cut it down again and redistill it in the pot still. So they cut it down with water to 40%, then run it through a pot still back up in the 70s also, which is common in Canadian whiskeys, common in other places. The wheat and the rye are distilled entirely separately and only meet in the mixing vats before they go to barrels. And it seems likely, and you'll see when we talk about the price for what they call the Centennial, they probably put some corn spirit in as well. Or basically neutral alcohol. They go into the barrel at 72%. That also is very high. And in the case of Centennial, this is ex bourbon barrels. Normally you'd go into about. The Scots go in at 63.5, so 72 is pretty darn high. But you're talking about southern Alberta. So the humidity there is pretty low. Which means they don't give up any angel share. They tend to lose more water than alcohol. It is common after three years to come out of the barrel at 75% having gone in at 72. Now I want you to look at this bottle. Notice it says Centennial on it. Nowhere on it does it say 10 years old. And there are rules right in Canada for an age statement if you're going to put a 10 on it, because the youngest thing in that bottle is 10. Same as the Scots, same as the Americans too. It's not on there, although the website says 10 years old. It is called Centennial, which makes me wonder, is it actually 10 years old? I don't know the answer to that for sure. People are pretty comfortable with it. The website itself, like the web, the URL that I'm providing here, highwood distillers.com Centennial 10 Year Old Canadian Rye Whiskey. But the primary grain in here I can't. I haven't been able to find the actual Mash bill.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mostly wheat.

[Richard Campbell]

The rye is kind of a flavor green. So no sharp nose is only 40%. So no big buy on there. Boy, it drinks nice. It's not that it's a little sweet. I would bet there's corn in this even though they don't say it anywhere in the documentation. But the reason I'm sure it's not just straight 10 year old wheat and rye is this is a $25 bottle of whiskey. $25 Canadian. So that's maybe 20 bucks in America if you could find it. That is really a very reasonable price for a whiskey that drinks so nice. Nice enough. I think it'd be a sin to make this into a cocktail. And it's a $25 bottle of whiskey.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

And that seems to be the statement for most people who try. This is like this is magic really. Because they've got a really curious distillation process. It's kind of strange and yet they've done a great job. They make a bunch of other additions, but this one, people say great things about it and I can see why. Like it's. It's very drinkable. It wins awards for a reason. But it's almost so cheap you can't believe it's true. It's mostly winter wheat. Soft winter reap with rye added. But I think the only way you get down to that price is they probably got some corn spirit in it. But I don't care. It's good. It's a bit, maybe a bit of a cheater, but boy, oh boy, it drinks nice. So I don't know why you'd be unhappy with this.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Can you get it in the us?

[Richard Campbell]

Wasn't able to find it at the bevmos or any of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Once again, he's teasing.

[Richard Campbell]

The production is so low here. Right. They only. They're not even. They're not really a craft distiller. They're not a little guy per se. But they just don't produce.

[Leo Laporte]

30 people is not very, very big.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not, you know, you want millions of liters, you go up the road to Alberta distillers, one of the biggest in the world. Right, Right. These guys have stayed independent for a reason. In a little town for a reason. They only make so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Now how is their sweet sipping maple whiskey? Because that sounds pretty.

[Richard Campbell]

Lots of people talk about it pretty good actually.

[Leo Laporte]

It comes in a maple leaf bottle.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not even spirits. They come in at 25 to 30%.

[Paul Thurrott]

You could like dunk one of Those maple candy things into it as you're drinking.

[Leo Laporte]

It's 25. That's nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That means it's not a spirit per se. It's kind of. You know what? That's probably not exportable because you don't know how to categorize it. Right. It's too high to be a malted beverage.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Too low to be a spirit. It's an orphan.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds good, though. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No, and people say great things about

[Leo Laporte]

it and I love the bottle. All right, well, we're gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

Bottles like this where you usually. That's like a maple syrup bottle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

When I want to buy maple syrup at the duty free, that's what it's going to be in. It is.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like that. Well, now I know what I want to do when we come up and visit you in Vancouver. I want to try.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think we're going to Sons of Vancouver first and foremost.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, absolutely. Thanks once again for the bottle of pleasure. Number 82, Amaretto. And once again, thank you for an excellent edition of Windows Weekly. You'll find Richard Campbell in British Columbia for a few days more. Where are you going next?

[Richard Campbell]

I'm home next week and the MVP summit, which if you remember last year's MVP summit. How did I get eight bottles of whiskey? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Where is that? Helm?

[Richard Campbell]

That's in Redmond in Washington. It's at the headquarters.

[Leo Laporte]

People know where to find you, though. That's the key.

[Richard Campbell]

Not hard to find.

[Leo Laporte]

Bring him whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

I promise.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard's also found at. On the [e-mail] where you'll find. Run his radio and.net rocks and listen to the geek outs.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, one of the things we do at the MVP summit this year we're recording episodes 2000. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable. That's impressive. Paul Thurat [e-mail] and of course you should become a premium member there. His books [e-mail] including now there's three of them. Field Guide to Windows 11 with Windows 10 built right in the Windows Everywhere book. And his newest D and Shitify Windows. Cory Doctorow was on on Sunday and I thank you for the the word. You will find them both here every Wednesday around 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. Or of course in the club Twit Discord. If you are a member, I hope you're a member. Please join us. If you're not, please, I beg you, please Absolutely. After the fact. On demand versions of the show available at Twitter TV WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great place to share clips with friends. That's another way you can support us, of course, by, you know, spreading the word about the best darn Microsoft podcast in the world. And you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically that way. I guess that's all to say, except see you back here next Wednesday for another gripping edition of Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gripping like. Like a stomach problem kind of gripping like reap.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

The classic French grip.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Richard. And thank you all for joining us. We'll see you next time. Bye.