WW 978: Pre-Peated - "Copilot Is for Entertainment Purposes Only"

Summary

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Windows Weekly 978: "Pre-Peated – Copilot Is for Entertainment Purposes Only"

Release Date: April 8, 2026
Hosts: Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, Leo Laporte

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Overview

In episode 978 of Windows Weekly, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte delve deep into the evolving world of Microsoft, focusing on key topics including the upcoming Windows 11 25H2 release, the revival and reorganization of the Windows engineering team, native Windows applications, Secure Boot updates, emergency Windows fixes, AMD’s new desktop processors, and the controversial Copilot “entertainment” disclaimer. The trio brings their characteristic candor and humor to both technical and cultural discussions, all while reflecting on Microsoft’s current identity and the shifting landscape of AI and infrastructure.

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Major Discussion Points

1. Microsoft’s Windows 11 25H2 and Update Cycles

[06:08–08:50, 23:23–26:22]

• Upcoming Windows 11 25H2 discussed as more of a maintenance release than a revolution.
  • "You're being forced to upgrade to something that's pretty much identical under the covers." — Paul [24:06]
• Windows' annual cycle of 'forced' upgrades is misunderstood by the press and tech community; it's part of the normal lifecycle.
• The kernel and foundational bits stay the same, with little user impact unless you check version/build numbers.
• For users stuck on older versions (like 23H2), it's likely due to hardware or compatibility blocks.

Notable Quote:

“Nothing will change other than, if you somehow are so bizarre as to know build numbers... you could look at an about box and be like, wait a minute, Microsoft wants me to do a new version of Windows? It's like, yeah, one that is supported for longer than the one you're on and didn't change anything.”
— Paul Thurrott [24:07]

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2. Windows Team Reorg and the Return of Windows Focus

[08:00–10:06, 41:30–43:36]

• Microsoft has “re-energized” engineering teams working on Windows, with core people like Marcus Ash and Jen Gentleman getting more visible and active in public/community spaces.
• Signals a return to customer/enthusiast engagement not seen since the days of Windows Insider “roadshows.”
• The Insider program is being revamped; Windows meetups announced in cities worldwide (New York, Hyderabad, Taipei, San Francisco, London).

Notable Quote:

“For the first time in ages, it feels like there's a group at Microsoft that wants to be working on Windows again.”
— Paul Thurrott [43:30]

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3. “Native” Windows Apps and App Models Debate

[09:19–16:22]

• The phrase “native app” is questioned as “marketing more than meaning.”
• No “truly native” modern Windows app has been made in 30+ years; all are “a thing on a thing.”
• Richard summarizes: “It's turtles all the way down. And that's intentional.” [10:37]
• Most Windows users don’t care about the underlying tech—they care about responsiveness, reliability, and user experience.
• The real user-facing pain points (slow File Explorer, unresponsive interface) aren’t about abstract app purity, but actual performance and interruption.

Notable Quotes:

“You are here for me, not the other way around.”
— Richard Campbell [14:38]

“I don't think making native apps is going to solve any of these problems.”
— Leo Laporte [16:22]

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4. Secure Boot Certificate Update

[31:26–35:52]

• April 2026 Patch Tuesday brings a security notification for Secure Boot certs (especially for hardware issued pre-2011).
• Users will see status in the Windows Security app (green/yellow/red shield icons).
• Most modern hardware is unaffected, updates flow automatically, but further escalation measures are expected for laggards.

Notable Quote:

“This year has been a lot of things, but in our space, one of the things is emergency fixes to Patch Tuesday updates.”
— Leo Laporte [36:06]

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5. Ongoing Patch Tuesday Emergencies

[36:06–39:16]

• 2026 continues to set records for out-of-band (emergency) patches following faulty Patch Tuesday updates.
• The panel suspects internal process breakdowns at Microsoft and a trade-off between applying security patches quickly vs. risking regressions.

Notable Quote:

“On the admin side... the rate of exploit of a zero day is so very high that you're better off taking the patch and dealing with the possible consequences than you are not taking the patch. Except for the past three months.”
— Richard Campbell [37:40]

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6. AMD Ryzen 99950X3D2 Launch

[56:57–57:48]

• AMD's flagship desktop CPU, the Ryzen 99950X3D2, is launching April 22 at $899—possibly their highest desktop CPU price to date.
• Designed for gamers and creators; features advanced cache stacking for increased performance.

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7. Copilot: "For Entertainment Purposes Only"?

[57:48–62:52]

• Microsoft's Copilot Terms of Service still (as of October 2025 writing) includes the clause:
  "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only."
• The hosts roast this, reflecting that for years Microsoft marketed Copilot as a productivity tool. Microsoft claims it's “legacy language” from its Bing Chat days and will be updated.
• The Ts&Cs contain more caveats:
  • “Copilot tries but it can make mistakes.”
  • “You might see responses that seem convincing but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate.”
  • “We make no guarantee or promise...”
  • In all caps: “WE DO NOT MAKE ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION OF ANY KIND ABOUT COPILOT.”
• This led to a larger discussion on “AI as feature vs. product,” and Microsoft’s over-enthusiastic productization and branding.

Notable Quotes:

“Really? Because I have three years of memories of you pushing it for productivity.”
— Paul Thurrott [57:49]

“A lot of this is lawyeries. Microsoft is absolving itself of all blame. But that's cute. It's like you murder someone, you're like, well, I can't be held responsible. You saw the agreement that you never read that I gave you before I killed you.”
— Leo Laporte [62:52]

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8. Microsoft’s Homegrown AI Model Push (MAI Suite)

[62:52–69:01]

• Microsoft is launching new first-party foundational models (MAI Transcribe 1, MAI Voice 1, MAI Image 2, etc.) aiming to lessen OpenAI reliance.
• Deployment is still slow—mostly integration into Copilot and Microsoft 365, but not yet clear if/when they’re available as general APIs.
• Efficient models may allow Microsoft to one day run AI services profitably at $20/month subscriptions, but cost concerns may be a limiting factor today.

Notable Quote:

“Are these things even businesses? ...Microsoft has a rich experience with the cost of OpenAI models in the cloud and what that means to them.”
— Leo Laporte [67:28]

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9. Orchestration, Branding, and the Future of AI

[69:01–72:48]

• Projecting ahead, the hosts believe the “killer app” is an “AI orchestrator” that routes user intent/tasks to the right combination of small, specialized models.
• Branding everything as “Copilot” may hurt adoption, making users wary or confused (“AI” will be hidden tech again when it finally works).
• Many users don’t even realize their favorite “features” are AI-powered, yet marketing obsessions demand a name/badge.

Notable Quotes:

“If you call it artificial intelligence, it's because it doesn't work. Because the moment it does work, it gets a new name.”
— Richard Campbell [71:53]

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10. Executive Turnover at Microsoft

[76:05–87:51]

• Julia Liuson, longtime head of Microsoft’s developer division (and first woman CVP at MSFT), is retiring.
  • Her tenure is deeply tied to Visual Studio’s success.
• Large-scale reorg: many senior leaders leaving, new outside hires (often with AI backgrounds) getting SVP/EVP jobs.
• Amanda Silver is now effectively the most senior dev tools exec; panel debates whether developer tools should be a standalone org.
• Eric Boyd, former President of Microsoft AI, has left for Anthropic, citing the startup’s “absolute leading models with a culture that is committed to their mission.”

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11. AI Assistants & Agent-Based Development

[88:16–94:39]

• Anthropic brings its “computer use” features to Windows; AI assistants can now control the mouse, type, operate cross-device, etc.
• Developers are already operating in new ways—often interacting via phone, voice, and agents more than IDEs.
• The show demonstrates live dictation, discusses habit changes, and celebrates how far speech-to-text (“Whisper”) has come.

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12. Google AI & Consumer Platform Upgrades

[95:48–100:51]

• Google assures users Gemini won’t use Gmail contents for AI training.
• Storage for Google One users with AI Pro goes up to 5TB at $20/month, surpassing Microsoft 365’s 1TB offering.
• The panel jokes about cloud providers always “needing” a reason to peer at your data.

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13. Xbox & Gaming Updates

[105:03–111:32]

• Xbox achievements system gets a visual overhaul and the ability to hide games.
• Several major new Game Pass additions for April: Modern Warfare reboot (MW2019), Oblivion Remaster, Hades 2, Football Manager 26, Final Fantasy 4, and more.
• Forza Horizon 6 announced for May, coming to all platforms and Game Pass at launch.
• Xbox and Windows Insider programs embracing public “fan fests” and meetups—mirroring each other in an attempt to rebuild lost trust and community ties.

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Back of the Book

[114:06–137:10]

Paul’s Tips:

• Gaming on Linux: Steam’s “collections” and Deck Verified filters make it easy to identify games that run well on Linux—even for less powerful systems.
• Chrome Updates: Google Chrome finally adds vertical tabs and a true immersive reading view. Install extensions to reduce telemetry and tracking if you switch.

Whiskey of the Week (Richard)

• Corowa Peated Single Barrel (Australia):
  • "Peated Stage Single Barrel" aged in tawny port American oak; 60.6%.
  • “A stunner... very warming, kind of coffee-cake rich.”
  • Not widely available, brought to Richard by a listener from Australia.
  • Rich historical and local tie-in as the distillery is located in a restored 1920s flour mill.

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On Windows frustrations:

  “If he's Charlie Brown, then who's the football? — Windows. And Microsoft is Lucy pulling it away.”
  — Leo Laporte [07:52]

• On patch fatigue:

  “When was the last time a Patch Tuesday update didn't have to be fixed this year?”
  — Leo Laporte [38:53]

• On Copilot’s many warnings:

  “Copilot tries but it can make mistakes.”
  — Microsoft Copilot ToS [59:13, summarized/paraphrased]

• On AI product branding:

  “Microsoft made a big mistake going out with a brand from day one and making it a thing and like a point of sale.”
  — Leo Laporte [68:28]

• On organizational upheaval:

  “There has never been Visual Studio without Julia Liuson. Never. Until now.”
  — Richard Campbell [84:42]

• On Windows team resurgence:

  “These guys don’t need that job. They’re valuable.”
  — Richard Campbell [43:36]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [06:08] Focus turns to Windows 11 and update cycles
• [08:00] Windows team reorg and return of old faces
• [09:19] “Native” apps debate & Windows’ layered architecture
• [31:26] Secure Boot certificate updates in 2026
• [36:06] Emergency Patch Tuesday cycle
• [56:57] AMD Ryzen 99950X3D2 price & launch
• [57:48] Copilot “for entertainment purposes only”
• [62:52] Copilot ToS and larger AI productization issues
• [76:05] Julia Liuson retires: the future of dev tools at Microsoft
• [88:16] Anthropic’s “computer use” and the agentic developer
• [95:48] Google One: 5TB storage and AI
• [105:03] Xbox updates, Game Pass, achievement overhaul
• [114:06] Back of the Book: gaming on Linux, whiskey pick

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a microcosm of Microsoft’s current dilemmas and ambitions: wrestling with legacy and modernity in Windows, firefighting on app and security fronts, going all-in on AI—yet undermined by branding confusion and trust issues—while pivoting the whole company from software platform to infrastructure behemoth. All of it is leavened by the hosts’ trademark blend of technical depth, cultural reflection, gripes, running jokes, and a global whiskey tour.

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Listen to the full episode and catch up on previous shows at TWiT.tv/WW

(Timestamps above reference the audio episode; skip all ad reads and intros for streamlined listening.)

Transcript

[Paul Thurrott]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here, Richard's here. And there's lots to talk about, including the Windows 11 version 25H2, coming soon to a computer near you. We'll also talk about new builds in the Insider program, a new processor from AMD and Microsoft Copilot. It's not just for amusement anymore. That's coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 978 recorded Wednesday, April 8, 2026. Pre peated it's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Look who's here. From beautiful Mexico City down under the border, Mr. Paul Thurat.

[Richard Campbell]

I thought that was Glenda and I

[Paul Thurrott]

was so excited.com from up north of the 49th parallel. He barely, just barely is in Madeira park, British Columbia, Mr. Richard Campbell of Runners Radio. Hello, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Hello, Paul. Good to see you, Fred.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good, good. Morgan to you. How has your life been over the last seven days?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad you asked.

[Paul Thurrott]

Jolly. Has it been a jolly holiday with Stephanie?

[Leo Laporte]

It's, you know, a lot of. I don't know. Nothing changes here. I don't know what to tell you. It's just.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why you're there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's for.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's for the. The beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

We did get some rain, you know, but we suffer here too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Suffer. Suffer. Mexico City.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on the cool side in the mornings. I don't know, I.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's really pathetic. Do you ever go to the movies in.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I went to the movies this past weekend for the first time here, I believe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Where'd you go?

[Leo Laporte]

See Project Hail Mary, as I was

[Paul Thurrott]

hoping you would say now do they show it in English with Spanish subtitles,

[Leo Laporte]

so you have to look for that. We. The. The theater closest to us does not do original lang or at least they do. And then the next one, it was like 30 minutes away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yosoi Rocky.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, exactly. So it was English, you know, original language and then subtitles in Spanish.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice, nice. Did you enjoy it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was great.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a great movie.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a great book. Love the book.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I'm re listening to the book having seen the movie. There's a lot of detail in the book, obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a 30 hour audiobook.

[Leo Laporte]

Although they had this. There was an addition. There was a little plot edition in the movie which I thought was kind of Curious. Then it's not surprising they had to leave some things other. I don't. I don't think in the book like you, he finds out his name until chapter three or something like it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it takes a while.

[Leo Laporte]

It's more of a slow boil. But. But that, that. But that makes sense, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Have you seen it yet, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I haven't seen the movie yet. Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's worse.

[Paul Thurrott]

We all loved the book. You know, we love.

[Leo Laporte]

I love anything that is just a. Let's reclaim science for the wonder of our time that it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you know, there is a lot more science in the, in the book. Oh yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know. But this, but it's pretty clear this is not thoughts and prayers type science. This is actual science.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's real stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's two for two for Andy Weir now, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

He's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

When they.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yes.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean he didn't touch Artemis, which is fair that I don't know that one would made a good film. It was not the best book he's written either.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But. But boy, when he gets their story right, they turn into good movies. I feel for a guy like Neil Stevenson, you know, who's written so much phenomenal sci fi and no movies.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just looked this up of one of his shows. It was okay.

[Leo Laporte]

They were supposed to do one of Snow Crash, I think on hbo. Or maybe it was a movie, I don't remember.

[Paul Thurrott]

But too hard to make.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand. But it would. The way TV is today. That would be a great series, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Cryptonomicon, the. The three book series. What's it called? The bro.

[Richard Campbell]

System of the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Was the system world that's bigger than the Game of Thrones. I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that would put. That would put. Yeah. Lord. Put Lord.

[Paul Thurrott]

7eaves is apparently in development and 7es

[Richard Campbell]

was originally written to be a movie, as Stevenson said.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's going to be a series with Skydance Media and Imagine Entertainment.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

So they had the rights for a movie and I think they wisely, especially with a, you know, complex.

[Leo Laporte]

We're like 30 years from snow Crash. Like I don't understand how this is never that I. That doesn't make sense to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's challenging. It's now quite an old story. So it's a challenge to say how would you actually make it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they did, you know. Ready, Player One. Like, I'm not a super big fan of the movie, but I. The visuals were Interesting, right? And I feel like you could do that kind of treatment to it.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a nostalgia spasm is what it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

All that. All those Rush lyrics and, you know, it was a real throwback.

[Paul Thurrott]

They made the Peripheral. I don't know if you remember that. Stevenson. It wasn't one of his bigger novels, but they made that into a miniseries. It was okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we can all agree they only need to make one Neal Stephenson book into a movie. And that's. In the beginning was the command line

[Paul Thurrott]

and absolutely my favorite part, you know, where there's. You're at the crossroads and there's Windows and there's Macintosh and there's. And bos.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is like, in case you were curious when this was written.

[Paul Thurrott]

It does date it, doesn't it? Just a little bit more than a cell phone, does it?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, at that time, which is really early on, he was a Debian.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A Linux user. And I believe. I think he uses a Mac now because they went to Unix, Space, whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it holds up, though. I actually reread it.

[Leo Laporte]

It requires. We need a SQL, I think is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

We're overdue.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we're glad you're here for Operating Systems Weekly, but for the next hour or so, let's focus on just one, which would be Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay? The good one.

[Paul Thurrott]

The good one.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to make Windows great again, folks. That's all I'm saying.

[Paul Thurrott]

You've been working hard at that, and I'm proud of you.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a little. I'm sorry to go off topic here briefly, but I've been. I like horror movies. Like, I don't. I guess I read some. Well, Stephen King. I like Stephen King. So I guess I technically like some horror writing as well, but mostly movies, right? So I found this YouTube channel that's this young guy, he's from Florida. He deep dives on individual horror movies, like in Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm street. Those movies, right? And I was watching him, I'm like, man, this guy is. He's too. He's way too into this. Like, he's like. He goes after these, like, these little picayune, like, things, and it's. And it's always like he's trying to, like, stay within the story told in the movie. And it's like, yeah, they were just lazy when they made this. There's no continuity because no one cared. But he's trying to make sense of it. And then I had this realization, which is why I'm telling you this, that this Guy, this kid who I found to be ridiculous in many ways, but entertaining. I was like, this is what I am to Windows, isn't it? I was like, I'm like, this is what I must seem like on the outside, you know, like just like, you know, like that scene in that Roddy Dangerfield movie was like, the guy really cares about what we'll never know. You know, like, I just, it was just a weird, like, moment of real life, like self realization, like, okay, I'm watching me, but for this other topic.

[Richard Campbell]

And I keep thinking you were Charlie Brown.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I am that too. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

If he's Charlie Brown, then who's the football?

[Leo Laporte]

Windows. And Microsoft is loosely pulling it away. So when I got to kick it, it's just.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go. Yeah, you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a pretty apt analogy, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's not bad. Yeah. I think we talked about this last week, but since then I just wrote it up because I'm trying to make sense of all the people that are involved with Windows now because there's a big reorg. Yeah. And there's people coming back sort of. Which is kind of interesting. Not like any famous engineers that we might have heard of or anything like that necessarily. But, you know, people I do know, which is kind of cool because frankly, it's been a wasteland for a while.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, Marcus Ash is in there. I know Jen gentleman's going to be involved maybe even a little more efficiently than she was before. The, you know, the insider program is going to be changing. Yeah, I know. And these people are starting to. They're tweeting and things, you know, and so one of the. I think I brought this up last week, but one of the things that came out of this, somebody asked about was Rudy Hume is got a team of people now or starting a team of people who are going to make native Windows apps. And this is the type of topic that I think lights up certain people's eyes. And you know, Jeffrey Snover, who we all know and love, the inventor of PowerShell. Right. Had been at Microsoft most of his career, but left three, four years ago, went to Google and has since retired. Had published this insane blog post about the history of Microsoft GUI's essentially.

[Richard Campbell]

Or like us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. App user experience. I'm sorry, OS user experiences and just how rudderless that whole thing is. And it is, you know, and last year there was a story where they had sort of a new team. You know, I say sort of because they're all gone now. Again, but they were going to try to fix the Windows app SDK and that just went nowhere and now they're gone and I don't know what's going on there. But obviously if you've got a team of people working on native apps for Windows, they're not going to be win 32 apps, right. I mean, they're going to be, you know, SDK. Well, I would hope, I would be astonished if they did that. Although, by the way, there, you could almost make a case for it. But they won't. Right? I mean, of course they're not going to.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't make a case for it. You really shouldn't. Right. Like, yeah, using one of the more abstracted layers and that question of which

[Leo Laporte]

one, which is, you know, in my version of being the YouTube guy who talks about horror movies, I'll just say we haven't had a truly native modern app written in probably 30 something years. Right. That everything in the Windows world when it comes to apps is technically a thing on a thing or a thing on a thing on a thing on a thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Look, it's turtles all the way down. And that's intentional.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, no need to do this. And you think about what the Windows landscape actually is when you throw arm into the equation and other potential platforms like, you don't want to box yourself here either. Don't make a future problem.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the thing that I'm concerned about, this promise for native apps, because I think it's. I understand where it comes from, it's probably good marketing in certain circles, but I think it's a mistake to even use that term because none of these things are native. Not really. And yes, you can get further such

[Richard Campbell]

a good term now because you don't know what native is anyway. All you know for sure is you're unhappy with the current apps. And so we're going to deal with.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And if you want to look back in the day, and by that I mean like a week ago, you know, the truly pedantic would have argued, well, there's no such thing as native unless it's machine code or, you know, I mean it technically, even assembly language is an abstraction of sorts over one literally

[Richard Campbell]

going to create a particle accelerator is going to organize electrons on your screen for you. Is that native enough?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right, right, exactly. So I don't know, I just, I get worried about these kind of nebulous problems, promises, sorry, which are problems. And also just the sheer disconnect between just people who have that knee jerk reaction to AI, which you know, obviously you understand to some degree or a knee jerk reaction to things like web apps, which again you sort of understand to some degree because you don't actually

[Richard Campbell]

care what the technologies, you care about how it works.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. And if you could use whatever, you know, framework, language, whatever it is, technology, stack and you make something that looks and looks like a native app, if that makes sense. It looks modern, runs normally in, you know, multitasks, does, has all the system features, etc. Copy paste, whatever you shouldn't, you don't, you know, you only notice when something's off. Right. And so I don't know why we care about this and I know I mentioned this last week probably or maybe the week before even, but when Microsoft talks about doing things like replacing non native components of the start menu, I say, yeah, no, I get that. I get like this is going to probably be an improvement because those things are written in JavaScript. They're probably not very efficient. They don't need to be a cross platform tech. It doesn't make sense.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also not the code running on the PC that matters here, it's that it makes a trip out to the web.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's not.

[Richard Campbell]

And by the way, while it's doing that, you get to do nothing. So please stand by while.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, you get to do something. You get to wait, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Lucky you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh boy. By the way, I. Sorry, I just saw this headline. Julia Lucen, head of Microsoft's Developer Edition is division is going to resign.

[Richard Campbell]

She's retiring. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah. To an advisor at the end of June. I have to look into that during the break, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

I knew about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah. That's kind of a big one. By the way.

[Richard Campbell]

It's been coming for some time.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I feel like a lot of things have been coming for some time when it comes to this kind of stuff anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I guess my point here is only don't get your hopes up too high here. The stuff that's in Windows, if you think about what you as an individual uses every single day, there's probably only a handful of apps. Honestly, I can't think of one that needs to be rewritten in anything native. That is a problem. I don't quite understand the push here. The problems I see in Windows from an app perspective are things like File Explorer where the app itself is very slow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think it's because of that weird hybrid.

[Richard Campbell]

Again, it doesn't matter. The only point that matters is Windows isn't sufficiently responsive for the amount of money I spent on this hardware. Like, why am I waiting?

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

There's a mantra here. Stop interrupting me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No pop up dialogues like, do not interrupt what I'm doing. You are here for me, not the other way around.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think Windows ever got that memo.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the, you know, this was. It just, it just did this to me today. I wish I could think of the I where you're, you're, you're doing. This has been a problem in Windows since there's been a Windows. You're, you're typing or you're doing something, you're mousing.

[Richard Campbell]

Whatever it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm literally mid key and something. Look, it come right in the front and it's like, dude, what are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

And as I hit the enter key

[Leo Laporte]

and then you accepted something, it just went away.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes me insane.

[Richard Campbell]

Furious.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So I'm not saying other operating systems don't do that. I used to always use the example of Mac OS 10, which doesn't do this anymore. But the way it used to work was when there was a notification, the little dock icon would bounce, but it wouldn't bounce. It wouldn't stop bouncing until you addressed it. So just sit there. So you're trying to work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pretty annoying too, I must say.

[Leo Laporte]

And I remember having this conversation with a friend who worked at Microsoft at the time, and I was telling him how stupid this was and he says, he's like, no, that makes sense. And I said, it really does it? And I went in front of his face. I was like, tell me when this gets annoying. Trying to watch tv. What are you doing there, big guy? Annoying. Can you focus? Let me know.

[Richard Campbell]

Feature is not more important than what I'm doing right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, precisely.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, it's a commercial operating system. Microsoft has things to sell you, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't help them too much if their operating system gets out of the way. And so you can focus on this other thing. Right. I do understand the delicate balance here, but I also, I guess to reiterate my point, I don't think making native apps is going to solve any of these problems.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's presume they're smart. Why did they say this? I mean, without a doubt, addressing the slowness in Windows will make people happier. Clearly, pavan got the message from the AI blowback. Go address problems with Windows. That's a big one.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop talking. But you don't do that, well, look, on the one hand, I appreciate the fact that there's some group of people who are re energized to work on Windows again. They're being public about it. They're going out on Twitter X or whatever we're calling it today, and they're talking about it. And people, of course, the people they run into there are people who are on Twitter. So they're terrible. And their questions are always the questions that always happen. Like, if I write a story about the new outlook and I say the new outlook now does, I will have 117 comments from people who will say, yeah, but does it do this thing yet? You know, the thing they want? Right? Because that's. Everyone's got their little pet peeve idea in their heads. And this is kind of the problem with this because the enthusiasts who see this are immediately like, well, you're not going to use web apps, right? And he's like, no, no, it's called 100 native. It's like, oh, you really. You had to make that promise. Yeah, like, I. Like, why would you even say that? I mean, it's just so silly.

[Richard Campbell]

Except that, yeah, you, you're. You're po. You realize that people's anger with it is somewhat irrational, and so you sort of feed an irrational response back to it. It's like, we're gonna go hunt down all that web code and kill it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know, Bill Gates, for all of his faults, I mean, very early on, and this would have been, you know, made fun of at the. The time. We talk about how Microsoft and him in particular, were very fond of writing, like, tight, really efficient code. You know, this is like their big mantra, you know, but we live in a world of excess when it comes to computer resources, even with all the component problems. So, like, no one has to. No one's worrying about writing like a 48k assembly language program anymore. Except for Steve Gibson. You know, we write these giant bloated things because we can.

[Richard Campbell]

You're exactly right. And then, you know, you have this much computer and, you know, the old machine you had running the old version of Windows with far less compute, you didn't wait that long for the File Explorer menus to pop up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and I say this all the time. You know, you can, using a tool like Explorer Patcher, go back to an earlier version of File Explorer if you want to see it for yourself. It's displaying the same thing. It's a little uglier on the sides. Okay. It's a little boxier. It's not smooth and round and fun, you know, but man, that thing comes up, bam, no problem.

[Richard Campbell]

And you prioritize decoration over functionality and that's annoying, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Which is, you know, we have Apple for that. Microsoft, you know, I want it pretty of it.

[Richard Campbell]

You're running a Mac, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Like I didn't, I just wrote a, I'm working on the new edition of the Windows 11 field guide and I wrote a chapter about Notepad which I've never covered before. But now Notepad has all these additional features and everything and one of the things you can sort of do is go back to the original version of Notepad. You can't do it totally. By original I mean the, the, the one from Windows 10. And I think when Windows 11 first shipped it's the boxy looking old fashioned one, you know, the, the win 32 version. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So old fashioned. It's last year's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it doesn't look modern and it doesn't have tabs. It doesn't have all these new, you know, it doesn't have AI writing features. It doesn't have markdown support, doesn't blah, blah, blah, whatever. Notepad, it's a, it's just a text editor. It's basically the same app that's been in there since Windows NT and the first version and you know, obviously made other updates. But, but you can do it if you want. And I, in that case, I would say you're just biting your nose to spite your face. Like there's no real reason for that. You can turn off most of the terribleness in the new Notepad, so to speak, the modern Notepad, but you can't turn off the ui. Like that's one thing you can do with File Explorer still, which now that Microsoft knows we can do that, we'll probably get rid of that. But I could make the case for replacing File Explorer. I can't make the case for replacing Notepad, I guess is what I'm trying to say, if that makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

People want what they want. If it is broke, I think ultimately this is about. People want Windows to suck less, which is right.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and by the way, I do think at the end of the day, by which I mean I guess the end of the year, by the time the next version ships, they will have achieved that to some degree. But it, it's not going to hit on every single little picayune thing that is your pet peeve, you know, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

And, and it's never going to pass any native purity test of any kind.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no we're not. We haven't done those in a while. Although maybe they're coming back, you know, who can say? But yeah, not in Windows. No, in Windows, honestly, this should be touted as an advantage. There are so many different ways to write apps. You know, Microsoft made many efforts over the years to kind of meet developers where they were. So, you know, if you want to make an app that runs on Windows for whatever reason, you have a lot of choices. And yeah, that can be confusing. But if everything works properly and it doesn't always, it shouldn't matter to people using it. Right? Because like you said, you know, you notice when you're waiting and it's like,

[Richard Campbell]

you know, the inherent lies, the real problem. It's the old I can get a C or an F thing, right? If you don't notice it at all, it's working perfectly. You only notice it when it isn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So you can, you can never get an A. You can only get a C. You get an F. Right? And then it's easier to blame JavaScript. Then you just, you did the dumb thing. You.

[Leo Laporte]

I even. This is a very human thing, right? This is not a technology issue. This is the way we are as people. We are prone to complaint. I mean, if anyone has worked in customer service knows 90% of the feedback you get is just people complaining about something that went wrong and it's not always your fault and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the thing is like the. I know this, like, I've known this forever. I write about this, I think about this a lot. I have my own little stupid business, which is also just a fountain of negative feedback. And even I, knowing this, do the same thing where, you know, you could have a complaint about something that occurs every single day. And every day you're like, God damn this thing. It's terrible. This thing's, you know, it doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. And then one day it starts working and then a couple weeks go by and you're like, oh, this has been working fine. I didn't even notice. Yeah. You know, and it's just like, it's a hard trap not to fall into.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, you, you know, I was very anti new outlook for a very long time until you bullied me into trying it. And eventually a few weeks went by and I'm like, hey, I haven't turned this off yet. I'm not saying I'm happy, and I'm just saying I'm not furious.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to be clear that if there's something named Outlook, I don't care where it is or what it is, I will not use it.

[Richard Campbell]

Listen, both of them have been to space and both of them failed. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, they did eventually figure that out.

[Richard Campbell]

They figured it out. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh boy. Anyhow, okay, so I like, I think we talked about this a little bit last week too, but I also, I first learned about this from a headline which was sort of what I allude to in the notes, I think. Yeah, Microsoft is forcing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've seen that everywhere. In fact, I think Steve talked about it yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, guys, this is just the normal life cycle milestone thing that Microsoft does where once any version of Windows falls below a certain threshold for having compatibility issues compared to the previous version, they put people onto that. And by people, I mean people. So this is. You're an individual, you're running home or pro, and you're probably, I mean, almost certainly on 24H2. So you get. Being forced to upgrade to 25H2 means that nothing will change other than if you somehow are so bizarre as to know, build numbers or whatever. You could look at an about box and be like, wait a minute, Microsoft wants me to do a new version of Windows? It's like, yeah, one that is supported for longer than the one you're on and didn't change anything. Literally the underlying code base, the, the kernel, the foundational bits, etc. And all of the features are exactly the same. Like it's, it's not like they forced you from Windows 95 to Windows ME or you know, whatever the versions you want to pick.

[Richard Campbell]

Like this is literally Windows 10 to Windows 11.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there you go. That, like, which actually, you know, if Microsoft forced. Well, at some point you do have to do that. Right? But I mean, early on in the Cycle for Windows 11, if they were just like, you know, like upgrading people without telling them, yes, that would be a problem and was a problem because they did do that. But at some point, you know, I mean, the thing's going out of support. Like we have to, you know, we're just keeping you up to date. Like it's not a, this is not. We're not shoveling a new co pilot down your throat or whatever. Which they have also done.

[Richard Campbell]

Which they have also done. And so that means people are nervous or easily angered because it has gone badly before. This doesn't appear to be one of those cases. No, this actually feel like they're straightening things out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this, this thing they're doing right now, they Actually do every year. Right. This is the, you know, we're April 13th, which is what next week probably. Yeah. Is the six month mark until the end of support for Windows 11 version 24H2.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Richard Campbell]

So they're just getting people across because 23. 4. 23H2 is out already.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

24H2 is next.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Out there.

[Leo Laporte]

If you have 23H2 for whatever reason, it's because something is incompatible.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's stopping you from doing that

[Richard Campbell]

upgrade or you've been blocking or you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, somehow if you're blocking it. Right. I mean, obviously businesses have different rules. This is for people. This is, you know, you can, you

[Richard Campbell]

can sync the update servers with pie holes if you want, do it on. You know, I don't know why you'd bother, but you can.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I, Yeah. So not a big deal.

[Richard Campbell]

But I, I said I do terrible things with pie holes occasionally just to amuse myself. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, it's not that kind of podcast, Richard.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't want to know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I, I will talk to you about that offline.

[Richard Campbell]

What have you done with this pie hole?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Is that a pie hole or. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, I gotta tell you, one of my daughters was over and was surfing on her phone and said, why does this page look so much better here than it does at home? It's like pile. She's like, I need one of those. It's like, I love it when you make me meatloaf. Everything is good about that. I will always come over and fix whatever you want. Just meatloaf.

[Paul Thurrott]

As long as you make. As she makes you meatloaf.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. It's literally. Father, would you like to come over for meatloaf? Why yes. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, and while you're here, what does she do? You know, a lot of people is chew meatloaf. What is it about her meatloaf? How does she. What's her recipe?

[Richard Campbell]

Ah, it's so good, so very good.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love meatloaf. I'm the only one in the family who does the last. But I like meatloaf.

[Leo Laporte]

You can make a good meatloaf sandwich,

[Richard Campbell]

you know, that's why I make meatloaf is the next day leftovers. 100%.

[Paul Thurrott]

I agree. 100%.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I'm. I was going to make a joke about don't let your meatloaf or something about your pie hole, but I think we should probably pause before I do. And we'll have more Windows Weekly in just a moment. But first, a Word from our sponsor. How about that? Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. You know, we talk about AI all the time. The potential rewards of AI in business are too great to ignore, but so are the risks. And the risks are manifold. There is, of course, the risk of a bad guy using AI to attack you, and they're doing that more and more. There's also the risk of the AI you're using at work or your employees are using at work accidentally leaking proprietary important data. Loss of sensitive data is not to be minimized at all. And of course, the bad guys are also attacking enterprise managed AI in a variety of ways, prompt injection and so forth. There's a lot of risk out there. And we always talk about how AI is being used by the bad guys. You know that yesterday Anthropic said we can't release our new model because it's so good, bad guys will use it against us. They're using it to create phishing lures that are impeccable. Right. Used to be able to say, well, if the grammar is not good, it's probably fake. There's grammar's always perfect. Now they use AI to write malicious code. We've seen that over and over again to automate data extraction. So what are you going to do about it? I mean, there were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers accidentally leaked to AI applications last year. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. And that's just inadvertent. You know, release of proprietary information. You know, you put your tax return in an AI and all of a sudden everything is, has been revealed. It's really time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. That's what Chad Pallet did. He's acting CISO at BioIVT. He and he says Zscaler did two great things. One, it helped them reduce their cyber premiums by 50% but at the same time is doubling their coverage. So, you know, cost half as much, got twice as much coverage, but also secondly, improved their controls, actually. Why am I saying this? Take a look. Chad's got a little video for you.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

I just replaced the entire show notes with a link to CNBC which I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, why not?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I mean what are we doing here anyway?

[Paul Thurrott]

Nobody's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

I was gonna adding that Julia and Lucy story to the notes anyway. Okay, so we got the Microsoft forcing this thing down our throats. Everyone's fine with that. So Microsoft, I think it was late last year, early this year, you know, announced that we're going to have to update the Secure Boot certificate. Yeah, that's on PCs if you have

[Richard Campbell]

a newer original Secure boot certs from 2011.

[Leo Laporte]

2011, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

They are way too old.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So if you have a computer that's less than a couple of years old, you're probably all set. No problem. If you have an older one, you'll get. You should get an update through Windows Updates. So for example, I know Microsoft Surface is doing this and they just announced, I think it was earlier this week or late last week, I think it was early this week that yeah, the April 2026 Patch Tuesday update is going to start displaying secure boot information. So this will be in the Windows Security app, which makes sense. I almost wanted to bring it up, but it doesn't really matter. But you know, Windows Security uses that thing that dates all the way back to One Care. And before One Care it was called Anti Malware. The mic. It was. Oh God, I can almost come up with the name. Microsoft bought this company. That was. It became Microsoft. It was. Geez, I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But they use a green shield when everything's fine. Yellow if there's something you should look at and red if it's a serious problem. So in Device Security, in the Windows Security app, you can look at Secure Boot and it will give you the little. It'll give you the status now or going forward it will. So that is actually, I guess that's rolling out now, so it's not waiting. I'm trying to think when was patch Tuesday Is it. Was it yes. It must be next week because of the calendar. Calendar.

[Richard Campbell]

Sabari. Was that the.

[Leo Laporte]

No, giant. It was giant.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a long time anti mo. Yeah, yeah. This is 25 years ago, easily. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, but they've been using it ever since. So, you know, if you look down in the trade, there's a little, you know, it's a little overlay on the icon, but there's the shield icon that they use for Windows Defender and Windows Security and it'll have like a green, yellow or red overlay on it indicating its status Anyhow, so if you do have an older PC, by which I mean a normal PC, you'll be able to figure out where you're at with that. And if you don't ever, you know, get the certificate update for some reason, you're going to start running into problems, I think in October, if I remember correctly.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, it's only when you. I think when you get a BIOS update or something like that, if the certs expired, you will be in trouble and there's an exploit risk, but nobody's actually exploited it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. These offline attacks are probably bigger problems.

[Richard Campbell]

I have a run as coming up on this with Richard Hicks, which. But especially from the system in perspective, because that's especially blocking, where it's like, you really need to deal with this. Your life will get worse this fall.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's not like there's ever been a security incident where somebody screwed up some text in a file somewhere and, you know, messed up the whole planet. So I wouldn't. I think it'll be fine. You'll be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

But it is interesting to see. I've done a few shows on Runouts with Steve Sifus where he's talked about all the ways to get administrators attention long enough to fix these problems, knowing it's never their priority. And you're seeing this start to be emulated by other teams. And so the secure boot guys have been slowly escalating this. And it's to get people aware without.

[Leo Laporte]

You actually have to do this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this will really suck if you don't do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, for individuals you'll probably be fine. You know, PC makers will ship this stuff, it will go through Windows Update, you'll be fine. You'll be able to go get it if you don't get it for some reason, but you'll get it. And there'll be notifications in the future. So we'll be talking about this again. But for right now, if you want to look it's easy enough.

[Richard Campbell]

Let me get into the whole, you know, the other aspect I guess blown. This is like what are we doing with 20 year certs? Like this is kind of nuts. What if that got exploited? Like how would you fix this on mass? Like why aren't these rolling over routinely like we do with the rest asserts but right. You know, one battle at a time.

[Leo Laporte]

Just trying to see if I have this on here. I don't think I do. Yeah, I do not. All right. No, I don't have it yet myself anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

I checked all my machines in the whole house and yeah, we're all already updated and that's probably most people's experience. If you're allowing updates and so forth and your hardware is of this decade, you're already done. It's a non event for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Or as I will soon report, Microsoft is force updating the certificate on you so you know, you can look forward to that. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

You thought it was your machine but you were wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

So this year has been a lot of things but in our space one of the things is emergency fixes to patch Tuesday updates.

[Richard Campbell]

Tell me this is a record like our. What is this six now?

[Leo Laporte]

It's got to be a record. I think there were at least four. Five. Four or five. I don't. So the only good news here is that. No, that's not true. Well there's some good news. The, the emergency patch they just released was for the March week D update. Right. Not the patch Tuesday update yet. I mean if the month is still by. Yeah. So if you did, if you're a seeker so to speak and you so to seek and you updated that you might have problems but there's a fix for that. So you'll get the update if you need it I guess is the way to say it. In fact this one was bad enough that they actually paused the rollout of that March preview update so they could fix this problem and now it's actually not being updated, it's not being released again.

[Richard Campbell]

So do you get the sense that somebody key left a few a couple of months ago?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And he took the book with all the instructions with him or something like

[Richard Campbell]

it's definitely he did some secret sauce that we nobody seems to know about now that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, like if you said to me before January if you were like hey when was the last time Microsoft released an emergency patch what they would call like an out of band update or whatever for a patch Tuesday update. I'm like I did. They do that this year, I don't, you know, this year it's been like,

[Richard Campbell]

it's been non stop. And part of the problem here is that, you know, again, on the admin side of the equation, we're now very much in a place where, especially with AI tools, the rate of exploit of a zero day is so very high that you're better off taking the patch and dealing with the possible consequences than you are not taking the patch. Except for the past three months.

[Leo Laporte]

I was gonna say, like, except eventually that will become its own form of risk. But yeah, you're right. I mean, you are right. I. Well, you know, but you talk to these people all the time. Don't want to do this. You know, this has been the push and no.

[Richard Campbell]

And suddenly they have a pile of evidence. Like it's been years of this being an on event. I don't know what you're worrying about. And now it's like, look, see, see, see. Do you know how many emails I get the next time they put out a new emergency patch?

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, look, it took them what, 25 years, but Microsoft has finally made admins Forget about Windows 2000 Service Pack too. So, I mean, you know, in some ways this is good news. You know, we don't, we have more recent grievances, I guess. I don't know. So we'll see. I feel like there were only we'll see what happens this month. But to kind of put reverse the question from before, it's like when was the last time a patch Tuesday update that didn't have to be fixed

[Richard Campbell]

this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, maybe March, I think might have been an okay one. I don't remember anymore. One of them was okay.

[Richard Campbell]

The last March one was clearly not because we're just doing it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is weekday, but yes, but yeah, anyway. Okay, so that's happening if you, if you downloaded that update, which I did everywhere, because that's what I do. I'm an idiot.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You have an update to install or you've already installed it probably. And then in the insider program front, there's a couple of things, one of which just happened as the show was starting, so I didn't have a chance to look at it too closely, but probably late last week. New builds for Dev beta and Canary. Canary is always. Is just, you know, stuff we already see elsewhere. So no big deal there. But if you're on the dev channel and I think the beta channel as well, I think these are the same. Yeah, you'll be getting Xbox mode. Right. Which is the new version of game mode, which is based on the full screen experience that was previously exclusive to or originally exclusive to Xbox rog ally devices. But they made it available to others through the Insider program. The Xbox Insider program, I should say. And now it's just available. It's going to be. That would just be the thing. And I think. I haven't seen it yet. I've been looking for this. I don't have it. But my understanding is that it's going to become or even at the beginning be more granular than it is today in the game mode. So if you game mode is just on by default, there's nothing to do. You can turn it off. I don't know why you would, but it doesn't hurt anything if you're not playing a game. But it lowers some resource usage and background activity, etc. But the Xbox mode will be more aggressive. It's going to work like that full screen experience and you'll be able to boot into it if you want to. So if you have a gaming machine and that's all you're using it for, you'll be able to do that. And I think we're going to start seeing some options in there because that does not exist in game mode as we've had it since I guess Windows 10. And then some other stuff around, more haptic feedback, whatever that means. Just different small things. Nothing. Nothing major. But the big thing here to me is the Xbox mode, which I keep looking for and still do not have.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because that's what happens. And then. And then I just saw this news story. I don't. Well, so apparently the Windows Insider program back in the day, and I'm thinking this might have been a Donner Sakar thing, but I don't remember. They used to have like these kind of roadshow things. So they would go to a couple of major US cities or go elsewhere in the world and they would have like live in person events essentially. And it looks like they're going to be doing that again.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And where is my link to that? Here it is. So. Yeah. So Marcus Ash is one of those guys I mentioned, like I've known for a long time. And now he's back in Windows and doing stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

He is, you know, Gabe all will be back and we really won't know what to do.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'd be. We need some game halls, let me tell you. So they're going to start a Windows Insider meetup thing where they go. In this case, at least in the beginning it will be April 21st in New York City. And then actually it is not, say, the United States. Sorry, hi. Hyderabad in India, Taipei, San Francisco, and then London in toward the end of June. And so this way, yeah, they're going to get some in person feedback and I would imagine over the course of this series of live shows or whatever these things are, we're going to start seeing some of those features that Pavan was talking about, start appearing and then we'll see what people think of them, I guess. So that's interesting to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Do a little hype cycle. Like, that's interesting. That's not Windows for no, you know, decade. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And, and you know, everyone knows this. I mean, but Richard and I have been in the Windows space for so long. Like, we've seen the kind of ebb and flow of this stuff. Like there's always like this big reaction to what happened before. So like when Sanofsky left, it was like, we're going to be open and we're going to do all this stuff and that's when the insider program, you know, happened. We're going to develop this in the open and you're going to get to see it and give, provide feedback. It's the exact opposite way of the way it was before, you know, and before Sanofsky with Jim Alin, it was more like that, you know, open, you know, whatever, out in the open, etc. So it kind of goes up and down. But I. This stuff, I was thinking, you know, with Windows and with Xbox. Right. Because with the new leader of Xbox and we're starting to see more just like kind of what I would call like transparent communication type things. You know, I mentioned up top that a lot of people, like Marcus Ash is one of them, Rudy Hume and so forth. These people are starting to tweet and just be public. And it's like, look, we're listening and we're here if you want to, you know, yell at us basically for a little while, which I think a lot of people do.

[Richard Campbell]

They came back like, just, it's a statement of confidence. Like these guys don't need that job.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They're. They're valuable.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I, you know, I. Look, there's no doubt within Microsoft that there were people who maybe were on Windows before or stuck in Windows or whatever it is where they've seen what's happening. They agree with the complaints they've seen on the outside. They were powerless to stop anything.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or, you know, or help or whatever. And now there's like, look, okay, we're going to actually fix this thing. And now they're like, good, thank you. And now, like, this is very gratifying, I think, for these people. Yeah. And I think we're seeing this on the Xbox side as well. Xbox is tougher because it's going to be at least a year and a half before they have new hardware for a console. And so you have to think about, like, I don't know how they're going to tread water for the next 18 months or whatever, but they're going to dribble out stuff. And we'll talk about one of those at the end of the show where it's not like fan service. That's not fair. But it's basically like people are actually looking at the complaints that people maybe, you know, customers have been making for years in some cases. And it's like, you know, we can actually fix this now. Why don't we just fix this thing? And I feel like Xbox and Windows are in the same place there, even though, you know, Windows is on a much more aggressive release schedule, I guess. But, but Xbox has monthly updates too. I mean, you know, they have opportunities to fix things across the stack. I mean, because it's not just console, but they're also saying the right things, which I think is super important.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so there's that. And then this isn't related to Windows in the slightest, but because this, and apparently this wasn't the first time this happened. But the component shortage thing is so bad and it will now absolutely extend into 2027.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

That even Raspberry PI has had to cut, like to raise prices. Sorry. Yeah. On these low end, you know, computer boards that they make and little kits and so forth, and, and they're, I mean, these, these price increases, these are for things that cost under $100 in most cases, but the prices are going up 25 to $100 depending on the model we're talking about.

[Richard Campbell]

Ram is Ram, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the reasons you got the price down so low is you used common components.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. And in their case, they're what I would call like kind of previous gen components once you get past the processor, which is kind of just a low end, you know, ARM processor. But yeah. So these are probably like DDR4. They literally are DDR4 RAM. Right. So I think one of the two things that Raspberry PI did, I think are nice, which is they introduced a new 3 giga gigabyte model of the Raspberry PI 4, which is not the latest version by the way, meaning they now have versions of this board with 1, 2, 3, now 4 and 8 gigabytes of RAM. And what they're basically saying is like, look, you're using this for some purpose. It. If you can get a lot of, you know, in our space, like, yeah, I'm going to get the most expensive, I'm going to get the one, the most ram. But the way things are so expensive, get the thing that makes the most sense for you and we can, we can have this 3 gigabyte version that's under, you know, it's under $85 in the US if this thing is right sized for your needs, this is. You should do that. Like, at least we'll have these options. It's not super low end. And then, you know, for Raspberry PI

[Richard Campbell]

higher, the big push in the like DIY space, in the home assistant space and so forth is go repurpose an old nuc.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, yeah, you're starting to see the shelf that's perfectly capable of doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

People will have. Not that laptops are ideal for this purpose, but you have an old laptop sitting around, it's like, well, I mean you could use. They really are ideal server, I mean. Well, yeah, well, yeah, in the sense that you can pop open a screen and look, you know, you don't have to attach stuff and it's just there.

[Richard Campbell]

The big thing, I mean, there's lots of YouTube videos. Doing this now is like, pull this old machine apart, clean out those fans, replace them if you have to. Fan prices haven't gone up and that machine's good to go for another three or four years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Yeah, why not, right? I mean, there's all kinds of ways you can repurpose a laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

Obviously we got lots of dormant gear and like, there's just no downside to that. Like, I know the sad part is, and I'm not even going to look at you, Paul, because you literally do feeling. How much dead computer do I have sitting around here? Stuff that's not dead, just turned off and stuff sitting and sitting. Like, I think there's four knucks in a box back there.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is the second time in this episode you've touched on something that I desperately don't want to talk about because it would. I. We only have three hours and I, I just don't have the, the, the bandwidth or time to talk to this. But I have a brand new to this year laptop that has had some serious reliability problems and I won't recognize the TPM Even though it's there and on. I played with disabling and re enabling that and secure boot which is, that was the first time I thought about it. When you said, you said something that just put it into my brain.

[Richard Campbell]

But

[Leo Laporte]

you know, there's a part of me, I'm not going to take a brand new laptop and put Linux on it. But you know, there's a part of me that's like I've never seen this kind of problem on a brand new computer and it's getting a little aggravating. I'll probably write about it at some point. It's been quite a trial.

[Richard Campbell]

Just got another bundle of Gen 11 laptops from which by the way, friend of mine. Yeah, and they've all been cleaned in there at the startup screen and they're going to kids in schools who need them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

They're all out of warranty. You know, it's the four year mark and, and so there's like no guarantees on anything. But there's nothing wrong with these machines. They're clean.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, 11th gen is good enough to run Windows 11. It's going to have all that stuff and you know, it'll be fine. I honestly, I think before intel started really screwing around with cores and how those things work and essentially re architecting their processors to kind of finally address the efficiency needs and the things, you know, that ARM does well, I mean there were always reliability issues but I feel like they were in a better place than they have been since. And maybe they're getting ahead of that or not, I don't know. But although this new laptop is intel anyhow, the other thing that Raspberry PI did that I thought was very nice and I'm surprised even that they went there, but what's the guy's name? Even Upton, the guy who runs Raspberry PI said look, everything is temporary. I mean we don't know how long this is going to last but eventually prices are going to come down and when they do we're going to lower our prices as well. And they didn't say, look, we're going to go back to the exact price they were before. You can't say that you don't know what things are going to look like but. And of course, you know, they had that pandemic era problem where they couldn't update to, I think at that time was going to be to the Raspberry PI 5. They had to wait on that for some amount of time. There was also a component crisis back

[Richard Campbell]

then, but I know A few folks that sell at commercial levels for hardware who are only guaranteeing quote prices for a week. Yeah, like it used to be 90 days, then it was 30 days, now it's a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, you can put your name in a hat. We'll probably get to it eventually.

[Richard Campbell]

Computer here now because next week is going to be different.

[Paul Thurrott]

At Central. Oops, where am I? At Central Computer here in San Francisco they call it market price.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Like you're buying a lobster or something. Yeah, like a lobster.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't put a price, just market price. Ask if you have to ask. You can't afford it, but ask.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, you'll pay what you'll pay and you'll like it.

[Paul Thurrott]

So for a while I thought, oh, when it goes down, it's going to go down fast because they're probably building plants to take advantage of all the demand. But they keep saying no, no, we're

[Richard Campbell]

not going to do that because they don't believe the demand. It's mostly artificial and it will go away abruptly.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. It's only going to get worse.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not true.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, the reality is building a, building a new RAM plant is a five year proposition.

[Paul Thurrott]

When they look at expensive shirts like a fab. Right. No, but I, I just don't see it. I don't. Why do you think it's delusional?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because they're over ordering. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're trying to build as many data centers they can as fast as they can.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, they can't. Yes they are.

[Leo Laporte]

So these companies are going to be like selling RAM on the black market at some point at like Crazy Eddie prices because it's like. Yeah, we don't know why we.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're already doing that.

[Richard Campbell]

What those companies are looking at is what happened to guys like Global Crossing and things that were laying all the fiber at the end of the dot com boom and they all went broke because they were over committed and they're going, that's not going to be me.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll see what happens. I don't see AI's demand for compute going down in any time soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they get more efficient and there's actually. Yeah, I mean. Right. The problem is the supposed demand or whatever is so much higher. It's like we haven't crossed that, you know, that line on the grass.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's very much compute constrained right now. And with this new mythos they're going to charge so much for it. Anthropics. Really had to.

[Richard Campbell]

We've yet to see a single one of these RAM companies go buy into that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

So, you know, are they all wrong? It seems unlikely. You know, at least one would be taking the flyer, but. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, if I were one of them, if I was SK Hynix or somebody, I'd say, let's just take a chance. Spend the 5 billion, see what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

See what? That's Microsoft strategy. I. Yeah, why not? It's working out good for them. Oh, wait. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you want to do it? You're pausing. I sense a pause.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

Would you like me to. I can intervene. We have several things we can do.

[Richard Campbell]

Be clear.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can give you cpr.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or we can do a commercial.

[Leo Laporte]

It's up to you. Let me be clear about this. This is not my first intervention. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

It won't be the last.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Let's. Let's talk about my mattress for a minute, give you all a chance to rest and relax, and then we will get into AI in just a little bit.

[Richard Campbell]

Bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a little bit.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurot, Richard Campbell. So glad you're all here. I'm here because I had a great night's sleep last night. Can you tell? I'm feeling good. I'm feeling. Feeling a little sassy today. That's due to our sponsor, Helix Sleep. How are you preparing for spring cleaning season? Wouldn't this be a nice time to put that old mattress on the curb? An upgrade to a Helix mattress to get a good night's sleep. You know, you're actually supposed to. This is why we replaced our mattress last year. Replace your mattress every six, ten years because they. They wear out. Who would think a mattress wears out? But it does. You know, they start to sag, you get back pain, the motion transfer. They feel like you're on a ship at sea. You know, the night sweats. All of this stuff is a sign your mattress is overdue. You'll want to replace it. But if you're going to do that, do not settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality and questionable materials. You got to do the right thing. Your Helix mattress is assembled, packaged, and shipped from Arizona in the US Of A. Within days of placing your order, so it's fresh. You can also take the Helix Sleep quiz, which will match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal sleep preferences and sleep needs. We did that. I like a Firm mattress. I'm a side sleeper and they had the perfect mattress for me. They'll have the perfect mattress for you. And does it work? Oh, it works. Don't just take my word for it. Helix did a sleep study, a Wesper sleep study. They measured participants sleep performance after switching, as we did, from that old mattress to a Helix mattress. And here's what they found. 82% of participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. That's the most important of all the sleep cycles. 82% saw an increase. Participants on average achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. By the way, that sounds like only 25 more minutes. You know, you don't. Half an hour to an hour is typical for deep sleep. So 25 more minutes is a big increase. That's. It's exactly what I experienced. Participants on average also achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. You'll just feel better when you get up after sleeping on a Helix mattress Time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts at Forbes, Wired, many other places. They've won all the awards. And as I said, Helix delivers the mattress right to your door. Free shipping in the US and rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. They call it their happy with Helix guarantee, which means you get a risk free customer first experience. They want to make sure you're absolutely satisfied with your new Mattress. Go to helixsleep.comwindows for 20% off site wide during the spring savings event. That's helixsleep.comwindows for twenty percent off site wide. This offer ends April 16th. Oh, and if you're listening, after the sale ends after April 16th, don't worry, there's always great deals. Check them out. Helixsleep.comwindows thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. And now that Paul and Richard have had a little nap, they can get back to work. Oh, something just in.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, just. Yeah, I got an email from AMD about the pricing on where's the Thing? Oh Yeah, the Ryzen 99950X3D2. You all remember. Oh, that one could forget. So this is their most powerful desktop processor. It is going to be available at retail on April 22 starting at 899, which I think I started to write this, but I'm not sure this is true. But I feel like that might be their most expensive ever processor for computers. But maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, if you want that's just the

[Paul Thurrott]

cpu, that's just, that's by itself just all by itself?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an expensive wall hanging. So anyway, there's that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that a server chip or is it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it. No, it's for games and. Games and creators.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Yeah, it's like they're starting to build the. Well, this is not brand new, but you know, chip makers are basically going in 3D with these things. And I think that's what they've done with the cash. They kind of double up the cash, but it's more cash, better performance. So that's the big deal there. And then the price, which I think is expensive, but it's probably pretty awesome. Okay, so I thought about ignoring this topic and then I was like, you know what? This is too good to be true and too fun not to ignore. But if you look at the Microsoft Copilot terms of service, it literally says this is true. Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. Really? Because I have three years of memories of you pushing it for productivity.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, some people consider spreadsheets entertaining.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's fun. Like when you ask it to, you know, sort of spreadsheet make a graph and the graph is about something completely different because it hallucinated. That's entertaining.

[Paul Thurrott]

Laugh a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, so I was thinking like. I mean, at first I was like, this can't be true. So Microsoft reached out with a statement that says the entertainment purposes phrasing is legacy language from when Copilot originally launched as a search companion in Bing, which you might remember, that was February 2023, like over three years ago.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

As the product evolved, the language is no longer reflective of how Copilot is used today. I think it is actually but and will be altered with our next update. The thing is. The thing is. The thing is this language is from October 2025. Microsoft started using the Copilot brand for this stuff in March 2023. And then they announced Microsoft 365 Copilot. I think it was that March. And then my copilot for Windows 11 I probably had build if I remember. So that would have been maybe has no one looked at this? And the thing is. Okay, so we can make fun of them for that. I think we should. But reading through this for the first time, like most people, I am struck by how many warnings there are in this terms of service. I'll just read a couple. I put a couple in the story I wrote about this. I'm only going to. I'll do a subset of that here, but there is more. Copilot tries but it can make mistakes. Is language in this thing. It says that. Wow. It's not a par. I'm not paraphrasing. That's what it says. Copilot may give you wrong information. You might see responses that seem convincing but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate. Okay. We make no guarantee or promise about how Copilot will operate or that it will operate as intended. My favorite one, though, is in all caps. This literally is all caps. For the sake of clarity, comma, we do not make any warranty or representation of any kind about copilot. Yikes. Like, seriously. So look, Microsoft is not unique in this capacity. Everyone's doing it, so to speak, but Microsoft is very chaotically and aggressively pushed COPILOT and Slash AI across its stacks for three years now to the point where it's very clear there was no real strategy ever anywhere, and that the idea was just to get it, get it, get it, get it, get out there, get it out there, get out there. They, they have this effort internally with Microsoft AI to make their own models and lessen their reliance on OpenAI, which is going to be the worst divorce of all time when that happens, and it will. But I also feel like the kind of uniquely toxic and bizarre, what am I looking for here? Way that copilot or that OpenAI does things, the corporate culture, so to speak, the corporate lack of culture infected Microsoft, that they saw the promise in this and they just kind of fell for it hook, line and sinker. And now we have, whatever the number, how many copilots do we have? 117 or whatever the number is, you know, how many, how many times or places does the copilot icon appear arbitrarily throughout Windows 11, you know, just to look at something very specific or whatever. I mean, okay, so get rid of the entertainment bit, but what about this other stuff? Like, you know, in the old days, so to speak, a AI is not a product, it's a feature. And it's a million features that spread out across the stack, so to speak. But they market it as a. As a product. They sell it as a product. They have been doing so before it ever did what they said it would do. I mean, it's kind of bizarre to me that, you know, it'd be like, hey, we added spell checking to Word. It's going to make mistakes. It doesn't know how to spell, it's going to use other languages. Sometimes it's your fault. You chose to use it. You know, it's a bizarre stance to take. And I feel like at Some point we have to get it to where they don't have to have this language in here.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it's actually so the entertainment thing. Entertaining. But the other stuff is like, I get it. A lot of this is lawyeries. Microsoft is absolving itself of all blame. But that's cute. It's like you murder someone, you're like, well, I can't be held responsible. You saw the agreement that you never read that I gave you before he killed you. And it's kind of on. You didn't know what you're on about. Really. Yeah, it's bizarre. Anyway, so that happened. Microsoft. I'm losing track of time here. But last week probably announced more. Microsoft AI created foundational models. So this is the Suleiman part of the business. These are the models that start with Mai Dash. Remember they did one for. I think it was Image. Yeah, Images a couple of weeks ago which are including in this list. But they're wrote because they're rolling it out in different products. But there's an Mai Transcribe one which they describe as a state of the art speech to text transcription model. Mai Voice 1, which is a voice generation model which can now generate up to 60 seconds of audio in one second using custom voices. Right. Of course, you train it with a short audio sample and it will start making your voice because that's the world we live in. And then the Mai image 2 which they announced I don't know, maybe two weeks ago or back in February, whenever or sorry, March, whenever that was, is now rolling out in Copilot and Bing and PowerPoint are going to be next for those as well. So you know, they're getting there. This is them making some progress in this.

[Richard Campbell]

But are they, are they selling them? You know, well, OpenAI ships a model. It's news. Right? Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And. And it's just don't see. And most people are using copilot, using the OpenAI model or they're doing development in Visual Studio through the cloud model. Like where are these models and outside of the foundry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So the one thing I. Well, not the one thing. One of the things I did not add to this article I thought about briefly was, you know, we all kind of make fun of Copilot and you know, for good reason. But there is this future with Copilot where Copilot is a sort of what Apple's trying to do for consumers, like a front end for other AIs, some of which will come from in house, some of which might be third party Some of which will be something because the person using it is paying for it over here. They can just plug it into this thing and use it in Microsoft 365 or whatever. So in each of these cases, not in each of them, but in some of them they, they mention like where it is being used or will be used soon, that kind of thing. So I think for now these are not, you know, you don't subscribe to some copilot tier and get access to Mi Transcribe 1 as a developer or something and then you have like tokens you can use or whatever. Like I' I don't think it's like that yet, but I think the point is they'll get it there and, but maybe the thing you're getting to, I

[Richard Campbell]

read this and say, okay, getting rid of OpenAI dependency is smart.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But also are you going to make these viable? Like yes. And I wonder if they're not promoting it because they don't want the cost. They now know how much this costs to operate. If you put it out in the public for $20 a seat, like how much is that?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. One of the, one of the advantages you get as a fast follower. Right. Not as the first person to market is you can look at the mistakes

[Richard Campbell]

and say all the arrows in the back of the pioneer. How do we not have that happen?

[Leo Laporte]

So Microsoft has a rich experience with the cost of OpenAI models in the cloud and what that means to them. And I think when they're developing these in house models, I'm sure there are, there's all this criteria for each one of them, but one of them is always going to be make them as efficient as possible, make them require less compute, but still perform to whatever level. Like you see this a lot in model announcements, especially smaller models. They'll say, you know, like Google Gemma or whatever, which is an open model, it's smaller, it's not as big as the big Gemini stuff. Like it's like this is as capable for this workload as the previous version of Gemini or something like that. So I think that's where they're kind of heading.

[Richard Campbell]

My expectation would be the moment they can show that at $20 a month it's profitable to run these, these things. They will hype the snot out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the fact that they're not speaks to that. It's not. We're all chasing the question. But I also, you know, are these break even businesses, like, are any of these companies actually capable of making money when they have to Pay for the computer.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. My question is slightly different. It's like, are these things even businesses? Right. So let's just say these Microsoft AI models, whatever the family is that they create over time, is this viable as a standalone business, blah, blah, blah, whatever. You know, probably not. But you can also look at the individual features of each of these models and say, well, where can we apply this stuff to whatever features we have in Microsoft 365 across all those apps? And that's kind of my point with the previous thing, which was that AI is not a thing you pay $20 a month for. You pay $20 or more. Whatever the figure is, you pay it for. Microsoft 365, it has all this AI stuff. You know, I think Microsoft, a company that really cannot brand anything, made a big mistake going out with a brand like from day one and making it a thing and like a point of sale. And it's like, no, you, you have these big software platforms. You should be promoting how you're making them better through a tight, you know, million tiny little AI enhancements everywhere. And I don't. This whole idea of choosing models and knowing what the model is and getting, you know, any chatbot, there's some drop down where there's all these choices. And it's not just models. It's like, well, I'm gonna, I want to make an image and I want it to go fast or slow or I want it to, you know, you can change the language, but it's adapting its model usage based on what you're doing. It should just do that. I mean like it's, you know, that's right, that's orchestration. Yeah. This is a bizarre thing.

[Richard Campbell]

We talked about this about how, you know, what are you going to call AGI at some point? It's like, I suspect it's going to be an orchestrator across a bunch of specific sized models good at particular tasks.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And that's what it is, that you

[Richard Campbell]

don't think about it. Right. You just send out your thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's not an AGI model. It's, it's an orchestrator that works with maybe dozens or even hundreds of models and always does the right thing. And that's, that's makes it truly smart, you know, like to me, that does sound smart. I, you know, I, they've done this before. Richard is maybe better positioned than anyone to know and remember this stuff. But like, you know, Microsoft at one point was going to rename everything.net yep, windows.net office and it started to, yeah, went down that path.

[Richard Campbell]

They did the same thing for ActiveX.

[Leo Laporte]

But that. How is, yeah, how is that any different from AI? Right. It's like this underlying technology. If you're not a developer, why do I care as a Windows user that net's in this thing? That's a weird thing to put in front of a person. If NET is being used to make Windows or whatever else better, fantastic. But to me, that's the story, not the ness of it or the AI.

[Richard Campbell]

It is an old Microsoft branding exercise to leap all over names like this. And I think in the case of Copilot, it is genuinely hurt some very good product.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

By buddying it up with a whole lot of quite bad product.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. And forcing some things that might have been fine otherwise to adapt to this new world where maybe that doesn't make so much sense in some cases. You know, there's all kinds of problems here.

[Richard Campbell]

But I mean, you have to also question thinking there's 120 of these things. What if they all had different names? What would that world look like?

[Leo Laporte]

See, to me, they don't have different names because they're not products, you know, I mean, some of them. That's right. Yeah. And I, you know, we were just talking about the negative feedback loop you get, you know, anyone who does customer service, etc. Etc. But you know, if you woke up tomorrow and your computer was actually faster, if you clicked on Explorer and it just opened, like, you would notice this, you know, especially if you've been suffering from the problems that had been going on for the past, whatever, years. And to me, that's a nice thing to promote. I mean, having to sell it as AI is like a. You're alienating a huge part of the population right now. There's just, for whatever reason, good, bad, indifferent. Some people just don't want to hear it. And it's like the guy from Firefox was saying this. He's like, yep, we have all these users that want to turn off AI. But then they're like, well, wait a minute, what about live translations? Like language translation? Like, well, that's AI. It's. Well, yeah, I want that one. And it's like, okay, well, I mean, we, you know, the, the feature isn't AI. The feature is language translation. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I guess one of those

[Richard Campbell]

great, you know, truths. Right. If you call it artificial intelligence, it's because it doesn't work. Because the moment it does work, it gets a new name.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Becomes.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, that's, that's funny. That you say that. Because he, he almost said exactly that. He kind of said. He said, we need a different name for these things.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like. Yeah, I think we do. I. Absolutely.

[Richard Campbell]

Someone calls you, they tells you about their AI technology, they're basically admitting that it doesn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And there'll be an image recognizer.

[Paul Thurrott]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, this isn't unique maybe to Microsoft, but I think Microsoft uniquely has a problem, a bigger problem maybe than other companies where, you know, Google came up with Bard as a brand. It did not work. And they switched to Gemini and now they're going, they're doing great. It's not because they switched the brand, but there was something about that name. It just didn't make sense to anybody. Microsoft had a good brand in Copilot. It is a good brand. It's very descriptive. It's, it's, it gives, it positions it nicely.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. It's not. If it fails, it's still your fault. You're the pilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But they, you know, they did too much with it. So I feel like they might have ruined the brand. I mean, they might have gotten to the point where it's like, well, you actually can't save this. It's like, no, we're going to get it out of the way. We're not. Maybe we're not going to see the logo as much in Windows 11 or whatever. Okay, good. But they're still selling something called Microsoft 365 Copilot. And I think we're gonna. Yeah, we're gonna talk about this in a second. But when Microsoft announces new features across what used to be called Office A, it's confusing where that feature appears because there are four or five different versions of each of these apps in some cases. And then now there's the extra little bit of stupidity where it's like, well, wait a minute. Do I have to pay to get this thing? Like, is this a. An additional thing on top of my.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And the answer often is yes. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the city is exploding for some reason for you. Well, it had to end eventually. All right, so in that. Seriously closer in that vein, so to speak. Random. You know, I, I talk about this sometimes. It's been a while, but. But you can imagine this giant matrix of features down one side and then the apps, they appear in across the top. And it's complicated. Yep. We really needed to get out of the way. People here don't know how to drive.

[Richard Campbell]

Please. Right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's time for lunch. Get out of my way.

[Leo Laporte]

So this has nothing to do with anything. But because that's happening outside, people here cannot drive. And this is a city that many intersections, including the one we're on, does not have a stoplight or any stop signs or any stop lines or anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you're kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

No, and it's insane and it doesn't make any sense. One of the, one of the things we do for recreation here is we'll be, we could be just on the balcony looking down at the ground there, or we could be in a restaurant, whatever. And you watch people here try to parallel park. And I, I've said this so many times. I have never driven this vehicle. I could get in there right now and park this thing faster than this human being who owns the car. I have seen them park two to three feet from the curb, get out of the car, look at it, try it again. I've seen them give up and just leave. Even though there's enough space for two cars. Like, they don't know how to drive. So what you just heard was like police or an ambulance maybe trying to get by people just in traffic, like just driving around like idiot. Like they don't know how to move over. They just. Anyway, okay, so to the matrix of features with features. Apps, right? So picture something like Word. Word. There's a native version, native version on Windows and Mac. There's versions on mobile, Android, iOS, iPhone and iPad. There's web versions, right. Or a web version, I guess. And they add features and sometimes when they do, they add it to like one of them. So you get to go down the matrix and check that one box, but it's not checked across the whole line. And they just added co create capabilities, which used to be called agent mode to copilot in Word for iPhone. Okay. Which is the way they described it, except if you actually read the post they wrote you need a Microsoft 365 copilot subscription to get that feature.

[Richard Campbell]

Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

So that adds to that matrix. Right. Because it's not enough to have a feature. And then the, you know, the, I

[Richard Campbell]

guess the, well, inherent problem with calling it a feature, you expect it to just get it. You've given me all my other features from my existing subscription. This one's the exception.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So good luck with that kind of stuff. So that's fun. And then I mentioned this as it happened. I kind of looked at this a little bit since during one of the breaks. But Julia Lucent, like we said, is leaving Microsoft the CBNC story, which is the thing. I almost blew the notes Away for noted that she started Microsoft in 1992. Same year Satya Nadella, first product she worked on was Access. First female corporate vice president in history for Microsoft. Helped build the first version of Visual Studio, which was.

[Richard Campbell]

Owned it ever since.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And this was the second time I visited the Microsoft campus was for the reviewers workshop for the first version of Visual Studio. Yeah, I don't remember, but what's weird about that trip to me that the thing I remember the most was Seattle is known for rain, but the truth is Seattle's mostly just wet in the air. It's like. It's not like pouring rain.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That day it rained harder than I've almost ever seen it in my entire life. It was like we were all standing at the big windows in one of the buildings on campus and it looked like we were behind a waterfall.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I was like, are we going

[Richard Campbell]

to be okay today? We call those atmospheric rivers back then, and we call them pineapple expresses.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. Yeah. It was kind of crazy, but she's been president of Microsoft's developer division since 2021. And when Thomas Donkey, who was CEO of GitHub, left the company, the three executives who were reporting to him reported to her.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So now we have.

[Richard Campbell]

He was reporting to her.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. There you go. So now they. I guess they were or are still are reporting directly to her. So we'll see. Do we know, is there someone. Have they announced someone is going to replace her? No.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's. There is a. An exodus of, of, you know, this higher leadership group all around, right? Oh, yeah. And so all this rose up to Jay now.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Who already had too many reports, Jay

[Leo Laporte]

being the guy who came from Meta.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is another part of that story. Right. When you talk about. All of a sudden it feels like there's a big exodus of executives at Microsoft, which there is. But there's also a giant influx of people coming from outside Microsoft getting pretty senior leadership, senior leadership positions right away. And I have to think that these two things actually feed on each other. Right. That they're going to write. There would be people at Microsoft who have been around for a long time. They're like, all right, I'm next in line. Here we go. It's like, oh, we just hired some goon from, you know, I don't know, somewhere else. Yeah, there's somebody, you know, not even an AI company. And it's like, what's happening? And I think that Accelerate, you know, you get into this kind of non virtuous cycle.

[Richard Campbell]

And of course, part of this is developer division doesn't even exist anymore. It's now all core AI. So there was a reorg. And Julia, who used to report to Scott Guthrie for the longest time now was reporting to Jay. It's like, well, that's a pretty big deal. And the hierarchies are interesting here because she's a president, Jay's an evp. But in Microsoft parlance, an EVP is senior to a president.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And I, yeah, look, there's no answer. There's no single answer. You know, different ways that Microsoft can be organized internally. You know, we talked about how when Pavan did his reorgan the Windows group, he brought back parts of kind of the core part of Windows, like out of Azure and back into Windows proper.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one way to do it. You know, Snofsky, one of the things he did was I. He brought the dev stuff under Windows at one point. I feel like there needs to be a dev div. And that it needs to be external to all of these things.

[Richard Campbell]

And that tend to agree with you. It's just a question of, you have to ask the question, what company is Microsoft today? Because they started out as a developer tools company that got sidetracked into operating systems. And I don't think Microsoft is using one of those things anymore. I think Microsoft is now an infrastructure company.

[Leo Laporte]

I. So I, I do agree with you, but I bet if you Satya, Nadella, whatever, forced to describe itself, Microsoft might say, we are a platform company.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And that developing, like providing developers with the tools they need to develop whatever software services, whatever, is that running those platforms is like a core part of the business that isn't just about AI. And maybe, you know, in some cases it's literally software running on a device. In some cases it's up on a server and it might be in a, you know, AI server or whatever. But I don't know, I just, I feel, I don't know, I feel like this, to me is core to its identity as I understand the company. But then again, what you said is correct. They are an infrastructure company.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, well, the margins are different and the primary asset is different.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, when you're a software company, your primary assets is people and your margins are awesomely high.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And when you're an infrastructure company, you know, your assets are your infrastructure and

[Leo Laporte]

those lose value every second that goes by. And they're, that's mostly the, you know,

[Richard Campbell]

the, the plant, the physical structure gains value. The stuff inside it doesn't. But that stuff gets replaced every few years. Like, one would argue that's the consumable. That is the cost of goods is new computers every five years. But that building its location with power, data and water, those only get harder to find.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is why we talk about McDonald's actually being a real estate company that happens to sell burgers to pay mortgages.

[Leo Laporte]

Or leasing company in some ways. Right. Where they're leasing the. The rights to get those products to sell the consumers. But you have to be certain, Microsoft,

[Richard Campbell]

all of the tech giants have stopped being software companies and have become infrastructure companies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Well, we have to pretend in the short term because they still make software, too. But.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, software that a lot of people depends upon. And so you ask the question like. And this is a conversation came out of the MVP summit, too. It's like, so who do we. Who leads development tools for Microsoft now? And the last person standing is Amanda Silver.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, she's a good person, but I feel like her org needs to be independent of AI and I think it needs to be its own thing personally.

[Richard Campbell]

But I don't know what that looks like at this point because Microsoft is all in on AI. And so this is why all these things have been merged. And we'll see what that realignment even looks like. Well, this software development has fundamentally changed. I'm writing a new talk on this where the most productive people I know building software right now aren't touching an editor anymore. Like, they just work a different way. Interacting with agents.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yep. So this is a conversation I've had with Brad because they have that clairvoyance product and, you know, which is a cursor type thing or whatever, you know, but nicer. And he was, you know, he's not a developer. And so for him, when he was right using this thing to write what is essentially an application, that's how he works. And I was just like, I can't, I can't.

[Richard Campbell]

I know, discerning. But it is a real fundamental shift.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And. And I'm surprised. You know, Julia has been through plenty of storms, and I've had a chance to interview her a number of times, both on shows and at conversations. Otherwise, she's extraordinary. I also wondered how long she'd stay just because she's been doing this job for a long, long time.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, how many people can you say that about? Like, Scott Guthrie kind of falls into this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Category. It's like at some point, it's like, you know, like, what's the motivation.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and one argument is you never really made it into senior leadership per se. Like, you were never part of the core group around Ballmer and now the core group around Satya, but you've run this one group phenomenally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. It's one of the highlights. Although I would also say, like, you still buy Visual Studio annually. Like, they've never modernized that flow.

[Leo Laporte]

I will never understand charging for something like that, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that's an interesting question. Right. Yeah. What's the right way to go about that? I would also, you know, I've had this conversation with a person. I don't think she'd mind if I said this, but it's like this is what her customers ask for. Right. The primary customers for products like Visual Studio are these large companies that want to write a check once a year. Don't mess with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's a billion dollar plus business.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, so. Yeah. If. If the. All of. All of that now is under question. There has never been Visual Studio without Julia Lucent. Never. Until now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

She started working on the very first version. She worked on Interdev, but she doesn't want to talk about that. And she has led that product.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not. That's in many ways became Visual Studio.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. That was that core engine. And then it took over everything. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

This. The second product that worked in that shared version of Studio was Java, and it was because of Anders Halsberg.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Anders made that happen. And then it was two. And then eventually was all of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. That first version of Visual Studio was codenamed Boston. And I remember the Visual Basic version was codenamed Vegas, but it was outside of Visual Studio still.

[Richard Campbell]

The first two versions of Studio took a while. C had its own editor, Fox had its own editor. VB had its own editor. And then Java and interdiv shared. And the second version, same thing. And then the third one that was Visual Studio.net meant everything changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyhow, well, it's a moment like I'll raise a grass, raise a glass of Julia losing any time. And I don't know what this looks like after her.

[Leo Laporte]

Mm. It's reasonable.

[Richard Campbell]

Situation with Jay is crazy. He has way too many reports like, where's the new leaders? Where are they?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's probably seemed like a great opportunity. About 18 months ago now he's like, what have I done? Like, what is this? Like, 50% of the AI that this company is working on is under my.

[Richard Campbell]

And Asha was six months with him. And then Moved over to Xbox, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's nuts.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Well, that's what I mean. Like so. Yeah. So in the same vein, another Microsoft 16+year Microsoft veteran who. Did you know this guy Eric Boyd?

[Richard Campbell]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the president of Microsoft AI platform. Left the company to work at Anthropic. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know if you know this. This is also the MIT guy who, who played blackjack till the Vegas kicked him out. Like he.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice. Yeah, they've made movies about people like that.

[Richard Campbell]

They've made movies about Eric Boyd. Yeah. But yeah, he's been in a. He's been one of the principal AI guys again reporting to Guthrie until that stopped happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Just short of 17 years.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, brilliant, brilliant man, without a doubt. And entered, you know, that Anthropic is the most coveted job in tech right now. It seems like I, everybody I know who's a mover and shaker wants a job there and most of them have been told no.

[Leo Laporte]

So look, there's no surprise that he will speak positively about this new opportunity. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

But I do find because of the way things are going with Copilot, I, I do, I, I. It's hard not to read what he said and think about how this wasn't happening for him at Microsoft. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, he's, you know, there's been so many versions of AI at Microsoft, it's even hard to get your head around.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, right.

[Richard Campbell]

And before 2023 survived a bunch of waves of this is how we're doing AI now. And then a bunch of senior folks get let go and he stayed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So this guy, you know, look, Microsoft, for a couple of years there was all in on OpenAI and then, you know, they've been rapidly trying to build up their own thing, obviously. But the way he describes Anthropic is very interesting. The combination of the absolute leading models with a culture that is committed to their mission is inspiring. Like, what were you doing at Microsoft? The impact of cloud code in the last six months, and particularly the last two months, just shows the power of what's possible. Bringing powerful AI to the world. He capitalized P on that, by the way, in a way that brings the benefits to everyone will be so important. And I can't think of a better place to make this happen. By Microsoft. Yeah, like, I mean, it's like, you know, in the same way, look, anytime you're marketing anything, it's like we have a new version of an iPhone. Oh, the last iPhone sucked. This one's this is. This thing is so much better. Like, you have to kind of dump on the old thing.

[Richard Campbell]

I've been involved in AI at Microsoft for a decade plus and we're never getting anywhere here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've seen a lot of dysfunction. It's gonna be nice to work with a team that's actually kind of, you know, going to town on what they're supposed to be doing. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Ouch. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of Anthropic, a couple things there. One other thing there. So Anthropic, early last week launched a feature of Cloud, Cowork and Code, which are essentially the same product called Computer Use on the Mac. And not quite. It was like 10 days, but like, we'll call it a week later, they have now released that on Windows as well. And in the same way that there's a lot of language about warning and being careful and blah, blah, blah, whatever. In that Copilot thing I was talking about, that's what this is like too. Copilot. No, sorry, cowork, whatever it's called, like a cloud. The co. What's the look of it? Computer use. Sorry, there's actually two things here. So there's Computer use, which is you're sitting at the computer, you're prompting the thing, probably in the standalone app, and it can control the mouse, literally move the mouse, it can type, it can do stuff, whatever. You got to be careful, right? You know, obviously you don't want it go to my banking Service and transfer $2,000. You know, you got to be careful with that stuff. But there's a related feature which they had announced separately, but it's part of this called Dispatch, and this is where it's like Anthropic's version of Mac or Apple's handoff feature, where you have Cloud on your phone and you can control your computer from there and you can go back and forth and so you could start something on the computer. You go out for the night, you want to check and see how it's doing, you can see what the agents are doing, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Maybe it needs your feedback. And part of the thing you can do through dispatch, and aside from the normal cloud interactions, whatever is have IT control the computer remotely.

[Richard Campbell]

And again, when I talk to the best developers I know building the best software with these tools now, their primary interface is their phone, because they're not at. They. They're not sitting at the desk anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. It's incredible. I mean, I.

[Richard Campbell]

And then. And it's two way, by the way, the agents are finishing work and pinging the phone and then notifying that on this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So here's what this is, what this reminds me of. 20, no, 30 years ago, there were things, there still are things like this, but like Dragon naturally speaking or whatever, or which I think started as an IBM research project or whatever it was. But I remember reading about this stuff and I've tried, you know, I've tried different voice control things over the years, of course, but I always sort of imagined like the second half of my career would be me sitting in a lounge chair speaking articles, you know, like that's how I would write. And I can tell you from having tried this many times, it's horrible. And so it's amazing to me that developers can wrap their heads around working that way that, yeah, they're essentially having a conversation. Maybe they're typing the prompt in, I don't know. But I bet a lot of them are speaking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, most of us are speaking.

[Leo Laporte]

I would think so.

[Richard Campbell]

And then of course describing the intent of the next prompt they want generated. Right, Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And then the thing comes back, you might have multiple agents out doing whatever tasks. They come back, either they need, they have a follow up question or whatever it is, they have to need your permission to do something, or maybe they finish the task and they want to tell you they've done it and then you're, it's interacting with you and then you continue the conversation and at the end of this little episode you've created something, you know, maybe an app or whatever it is. And these are, this is, I think for a lot of developers this is like a retirement moment. This is like, no, I give a look. I did, I did all the xml, I did the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hey, we're, we're just talking about you right now. You got anything to say to us?

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Yes. You are not necessary. You are the weakest link.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, I didn't hear it for some

[Leo Laporte]

reason, but that's funny, it's like, hey,

[Paul Thurrott]

can you hear me?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, there it is.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

We were just talking about you. Do you have anything to say for yourself?

[Leo Laporte]

Jeez. Huh.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe it's only hearing me half the time. I don't know what's going on there, but yeah, that's. I do it with telegram, actually on my phone and it works quite well. I can talk into my wristwatch, right. And it talks back to me in a nice British accent.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say. Oh, are you just typing now?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. This Is the future. I think a lot of us expected, you know, maybe we weren't thinking software development, I don't think. But, you know, we look like there's, there's all these outcomes here that are so fascinating to me, like how this will impact things that are not like straight up software development. You know, the, the idea that you could, as an individual, like 3D print the apart for a car that's not made or supported anymore. That kind of thing. You know, like, it's like there's going to be a lot of this kind of stuff. Like, will you make something like this is software or services or whatever, but you'll be able to. It's like Freddy Krueger coming out of the dream world and impacting the real world. Like, it's bizarre.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not, it's not passing through. Unfortunately, I'll have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, there's probably some.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it, normally, it talks to me. It's actually kind of nice because that way, it's a very natural interaction. It isn't instant. You know, there's a delay while it thinks.

[Leo Laporte]

But you've adapted to this. Like this when you first started doing this. Right. This must have been a little goofy. And you were probably thinking, yes, this isn't gonna happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what happens? You get tired of typing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you want it to. It is prose. You're not coding. I mean, when you're coding, you're typing. Obviously you're not gonna, you're not gonna speak your code, but this is pros. So you're just, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you know, you know what you want and. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it can be very casual. And by the way, the dictation software I'm using here, whisper from OpenAI, is 100% better than anything I've used on Mac or PC. I mean, they've really nailed it. It's much more accurate. I was in the habit of saying comma, period, new paragraph.

[Leo Laporte]

I stole it.

[Paul Thurrott]

See, I did stuff. And now it types it and it's so annoying. It's like, no, no, you don't need to say that anymore. Leo, knock it off.

[Leo Laporte]

I can type on a full skies keyboard, like a computer keyboard very well. But when I get down to a phone, suddenly I'm like, like, I just, you know, so I, I, I speak a lot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

It is like if I have to write a text message, I, I usually speak, but I will do that. I'll say comma and then, yeah, well,

[Paul Thurrott]

Siri, Siri needs that. But Whisper does not. Yeah, and it's, it's pretty, it's pretty accurate. I had to change the name of my bot though. I was calling it Pax. Pax but it kept spelling it P A, C, K S. Yes, right. I had to change it to something less ambiguous. I call it Jeeves now. And I don't think there's any other way to spell Jeeves.

[Leo Laporte]

And then this is quick just because I thought it was just worth mentioning these two Google things. One, you know, Google will spend the rest of its existence promising people that it's not using their data while it uses their data. But you know, remember the Gmail man thing from Microsoft? You know, we don't read your emails, but Google does that kind of thing. So Google stopped reading people's emails quite some time ago. But now they have Gemini working inside of Gmail and this is the low hanging fruit, frankly for them. I mean this is the obvious place to put it that I'm sure Gmail has more users than any of their services. Well, maybe not search, but Gmail and Search probably the two big ones, right? And so now you can, you know, we've gone from here's some proposed responses to like you could just use this thing as an active partner and compose emails and you know, it can write, write it from scratch and you can edit it and blah blah, blah, whatever. And so they felt the need I think to come out, be like, yeah, we're still not, we're not using it to train our AI. We have to interact with your data obviously to do certain tasks like summarizing the email, whatever it might be. But once we're done with that, we're done. And we never, we don't retain it, it doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't get transmitted, you know, anywhere within Google, blah blah blah, whatever. Unless of course law enforcement needs, in which case, you know, we'll see what happens. But yeah, so they, anyway, I did okay, you know, I guess they're looking to avoid a Gmail Man 2.0. When you think about Google and Workspace and go back in time, I guess, I don't know, 15 to, you know, 10 to 15 years. There was this period of time where Google was just copying everything Microsoft did, right? They came out with their version of Office, their version of whatever, you know, like this is a big thing for them, like they always are Microsoft and their rearview mirror is a problem.

[Richard Campbell]

And I mean Microsoft is also afraid of them, right? Like Google Space and Google Docs, like being online and collaborative the way Google should be.

[Leo Laporte]

And they tripped them up. Yeah. And it took them a while to kind of catch up with these live collaboration features, etc. Etc. But for a long time they were in similar spaces. I mean, you could get like 1, 2, 3. Can you hear me on the MacBook?

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry. It started working

[Leo Laporte]

just like a real British person. Late. But Google, at some point I lose track of this stuff. But if you pay for Microsoft 365 as a person, you get a terabyte of storage. With Google it's been two terabytes of storage. And then more recently they've changed the names of these things. They have Google One, but under that they have something like Google AI Pro, which. Which I don't remember the name. It used to be, but now it gives you all these Gemini rights. Right. Usage rights every month, et cetera, et cetera. But it's been two terabytes of storage. It's been, you know, it's been a good deal. They just raised this to five terabytes of storage.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yikes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I noticed that. I was. Why I pay 20 bucks a month. I didn't even know it was the AI thing. I thought it was just my regular Google one services.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is technically five terabytes. That's incredible.

[Paul Thurrott]

What am I going to do with that?

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to load it up with data that Google's going to train on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

I know how to get more data.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we'll give them space for their data. No, I'm not saying they do.

[Paul Thurrott]

They do look at your data. We know that. No, they do, because if you have pirated movies on your channel, they'll. They'll. Yeah, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was always the excuse in Gmail. It's like, well, you know, we have to look for spam and everything. It's like, okay. But you were doing more than that, so. Yeah, I mean, yes, I. Whatever this security stuff. One of the things I didn't mention in my laundry list of those things that are in the copilot terms of service is that there is a clause. One of the other things in there is there may come a time where a human being manual access to your copilot data will occur, meaning a human being and law enforcement would be one of those scenarios. And the basic advice was like, so if you don't want anything embarrassing to come out, you might want to not discuss it with a co pilot. I think would be the case here as well, I would assume.

[Richard Campbell]

I've been writing email on the basis I've Been prepared to talk about this in court if necessary. I think the same standard applies. You're going to send anything over the Internet, just consider what you'd be willing to tell a judge.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. Because. Yeah. So anyway, I. Throwing it out there. Gemini is in a good place right now. If you were looking at this and were thinking, thinking, you know, this is. Seems like a pretty good deal. It actually just got a lot better. So if like that storage thing matters to you, like 5 terabytes of storage is astonishing. I. Yeah. I don't mean to pull a Bill Gates, but you'll never need more than that, you know, I mean, I feel like I could. That would be fine for me for the rest of my life. I think that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

It seems like a lot, doesn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot of storage.

[Richard Campbell]

A lot. It doesn't seem like something that will

[Paul Thurrott]

stay is that it's 20 bucks a month for five terabytes alone is a better deal than anybody else.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm saying. But you get all the Gemini stuff

[Paul Thurrott]

and you get all the other stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Banana.

[Paul Thurrott]

Banana.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. It's really kind of incredible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow. Just Google. You're so amazing, you.

[Leo Laporte]

I just can't stop recommending Google products is the problem. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, well, you know, this might be a good time to. To pause and. But let's see. Should we let refreshes. Should we let the AI take pause

[Leo Laporte]

the sucking up to Google and see if it'll talk? Hello, Paul. Hello, Richard. Great to be on Windows Weekly with you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now.

[Leo Laporte]

This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by cash [e-mail] TWIT thank you, Jeeves.

[Paul Thurrott]

You may go now.

[Richard Campbell]

Cachafly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cachafly.

[Leo Laporte]

God, they pronounce everything differently in Britain.

[Paul Thurrott]

I spelled it all out for it, but I guess it couldn't quite figure it out. Oh, well, yes. Let's do the Cash Fly ad and then we will continue on with this thrilling and gripping AI powered edition of Windows Weekly. I want to get a. I want to get it to the point where it can talk and have video so it could actually become.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

A contributor.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you, you're, you're like, this is going to persist when I'm just step away from the console.

[Paul Thurrott]

I did train it with my voice.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is like one week we're going to be like, is that Leo?

[Paul Thurrott]

That looks.

[Leo Laporte]

It's gonna be like a. Like a. Like a lollipop face on a stick. You're like, he sounds like Leo Clutch Cargo lips. Yeah, exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hello?

[Leo Laporte]

Ball like. Wait a minute.

[Paul Thurrott]

This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Cashfly. If you're listening to this right now, Cashfly probably had something to do with it. They have powered Twits content delivery practically since day one and we are very darn happy about it. Cash Fly has been the performance obsessed CDN for over 20 years now. They still set the bar for excellence. Game downloads deliver up to 158% faster than competing CDN providers. HD video plays on demand with sub second start times on every device. Software downloads complete without a hitch even during massive launch day surges. Live events stream smoothly to millions of concurrent users worldwide with less than 1 second latency. CashFly serves over 5,000 of today's most demanding businesses from global media and entertainment giants to indie developers, all on a global network with more than 75 points of presence across six continents. That's important to us because we have listeners all over the world and we want to make sure you get the podcasts, the video fast, no matter where you are. Cashfly does it. Companies choose Cash Fly when performance is non negotiable and when you need help. And Patrick our, our engineer, our CISO will tell you this. You're going to get seasoned Support experts available 247 who actually understand your unique challenges. Engineer to engineer. They're really good. Start with flexible month to month billing as we did. Lock in discounts when you're ready. The point for us, really important at the time, when we were just getting started, was you design your own contract. No lengthy obligations, no sales tactics, just exceptional service backed by a 100% uptime SLA. You heard that right? Not nine nines, 100%. They've been 100% more for more than the last year. Unbelievable. Learn how you can get your first month [e-mail] twit. Again, I'll say it for Jeeves because he's busy right now. That's C-A C-H-E-F-L-Y.com Twitch. Thank you cash Fly. Now back to Richard and Paul and the much heralded, much beloved Xbox segment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so I mentioned that Xbox is starting to pump out little features similar to what we see on the Windows side. Right. Which I take to be, you know, fan service in a way. Right. Like we're paying attention to the console again. You know we had, I think it was the March Xbox update was mostly all console stuff. Like I can't remember the last time we saw something like that. And so the Xbox team just announced that they're going to be. They're not really changing the achievement system per se, but they're kind of doing a visual refresh on console for how these things look and how they'll highlight it. Like if you've gotten 100% of all the achievements for a particular game or whatever. The thing I notice is probably just tied to the theme of the player they chose to take the screenshot of. But it's red, not green. It's like, guys, what are you doing? What are you doing? But I guess that could be any color, because you can theme your dashboard or whatever. But they're going to let you hide games from your achievement history. So if you don't want people to know, you've been spending an awful lot of time on Lawnmower, you know, whatever that thing is, like any stupid game, whatever the. What was the one like the. The goat catapult game or whatever. So that's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Great game.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's cool. Like, I. This is just a nice little, you know, visual update. Whatever. That's good. And then this is interesting to me because I was just thinking about this, and actually not just thinking about it, looking into this. So I saw a blog post somewhere in my feed about it was called the last Truly Great Call of Duty. And I was like, all right, I got to see what they said about that. What are they talking about? And what they're talking about is not the original, the remake, but the first Modern Warfare game remake, right? So that might have been 2019, I think, which was the first of three games. It was a trilogy. And then they interspersed the Black Ops games, the new Black Ops games, between them. And this article did a pretty good job of comparing the visual quality of that game to Modern Warfare 2 and 3, and then the Black Ops games that have come since. And it has this really nice, gritty feet on the ground kind of look to it. And I guess I missed it, but it was on sale on steam recently for $6. This is a $50 game still. And I didn't buy it. I'm like, well, that's okay. I have it. I must have this. Like, I have all the Call of Duty games. I do not have it. And I was looking through the Xbox app on Windows where you can see all the game Pass games. So I have Game Pass ultimate still somehow. And you can get two, you can get three, and get all the recent Black Ops games. They're all in the same installer. They're part of the same big package, but one is not Part of it. One is the last one that came before all that stuff. And in the words of the article that I had read, which I apologize, I didn't link to, but the, you know, they were saying this is before all the really stupid stuff started happening where it's like Beavis and Butthead were running around in the game and all that kind of stuff. And I really, really want to play this. And so I started looking around like, I'm like, all right, maybe I don't get it through Game Pass. Maybe I'll pay for it. No, it's 50 bucks. Like, okay, by paying 50 bucks for this thing. But anyway, it's coming back to. Obviously it was in Game Pass, but. But for some reason this is one of the Call of Duty games that's not in Game Pass as we speak. But starting next week, I think it's the 14th. Is that the right. No, April 17th is coming back to Game Pass Ultimate Premium and PC Game Pass.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm going to look at that when that happens. But this is a. This is the first half of April kind of list of new games going through Game Pass. It's pretty lengthy and actually it looks pretty good because some months you're like, what's going on here? But Elder Scrolls 4, Oblivion Remastered's in there. EA Sports, NHL 26, Modern Warfare, like I said, Hades 2, Football Manager, 26, PCN console, lots of other stuff. So a bunch of stuff coming. Oh, Final Fantasy 4.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Across all platforms as well. So bunch of stuff there. So that's good. Did I miss something? Oh, and then it wasn't in the original post, but as we were starting to show, Microsoft has started blogging about Forza Horizon 6 and that is coming next month. So it's not going to be this month. That's why. And that game, when it does arrive, will be available across all the platforms. So Xbox Series X&S PC and Xbox Cloud as a play anywhere title and playable day one on Game Pass. So that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

The junk lady's here. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we did. So last week, I think it was Microsoft announced they're doing the Fanfest event at what used to be E3 or time to the week that used to be E3. Apparently the response to this has been so positive. They're going to bring this to seven different cities around the world in the following weeks.

[Richard Campbell]

Did we just talk about the insiders?

[Leo Laporte]

Mexico City, but they'll be in Clone Germany. London, Mexico City, Seattle, Sydney, Australia, Tokyo and Toronto. And then I guess There'll be future city additions as well. So you'll be able to do, you know, go to a live thing and experience these games yourself before they came out, if you want. So that's kind of fun.

[Richard Campbell]

So didn't we just talk about the Windows insiders doing a fan festival? Like, is this a playbook for them now?

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm saying. The parallels between these two groups, all of a sudden they're like, yeah, they both have some trust to regain and new leadership. Yep. And they're both kind of pursuing similar tax. So. Yeah, I think it's smart. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I find the, the whole, you know, big city tour thing interesting for Windows insiders and for Xbox for that matter, but. Okay. You know, I might even go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, I'm, I, I'm not gonna be. I can't, I can't go to any of the Windows ones, but. And I'm not sure the timing for Mexico City for the other one, but I would consider it right. Just to see what's going on.

[Richard Campbell]

They come to Mexico City, you got no excuse. I'm talking about driving down to Seattle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, if I was home, I'd have to go to New York, but that's a two hour trip, you know, each wet. Yeah, it's, it's still, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, if I, if I, if I made the journey down south and it ends up doing it being a bunch of things. So that would just be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course. No, that. And that makes sense. Yeah. Anyway. Cool. Anyway, I don't know what happened there. Sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's okay. The Back of the book is coming up next on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. We want to send a special thank you to our Club Twit members, the folks who make all of this possible. Without Club Twit, I don't know if there would be a Windows Weekly. I'll be frank with you, because you pay about a 30% of our operating expenses. Without Club Twit, we'd have to, we'd have to make some serious cutbacks, and I don't want to do that. I like the shows, and I think the shows are valuable. If you think they're valuable, that's the best way to show it. Twit TV. Club Twit, it's 10 bucks a month. You do get some benefit. I'm not saying you're just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, although that's certainly a part of it. But you also get AD Free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this moment of begging. You get access to the wonderful club Twit Discord. A great place to hang out, chat with other like minded brilliant people. You also get special programming we do just for the club, including our AI user group which is coming up on Friday. We do special interviews. Recently interviewed Cindy Cohn, the director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There's Stacy's book club, Micah's crafting corner. He's doing paint by numbers. You can bring any craft. It's really just a chill hang of an evening. He does that every month. We've got a photo segment every month. Johnny Jett talking travel every other month. There's just a lot of great content that we make because we can. Thanks to you and your support. TWiT TV Club TWiT. Join the club. We'd love to have you.

[Leo Laporte]

K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boys Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

[Richard Campbell]

It's not a battle.

[Leo Laporte]

So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is an honor to share.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's our honor.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is our larger honor.

[Leo Laporte]

No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side and participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

[Paul Thurrott]

But enough of that. Now it is time for what we call the back of the book. We kick things off in the back of the book with Mr. Paul Thurat, who has once again migrated to the far right of the screen. There we go. And his pick of the week or two of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. So if you have a PC and you're like, I'm going to put Linux on this thing. I've been doing a lot of that this year and then this month I've been kind of writing about it a little bit. But one of the big mysteries to me was, well, how does like gaming work on Linux? You know, and the thing I've learned is that if you can first get it installed on the PC, you want to use this thing on. If you have an Nvidia GPU especially. But whatever GPU you can work install those drivers, right? Actually all you got to do is load Steam. Like Steam puts the proton emulator and all this stuff onto the computer. And that's the kind of key. But before I understood how that worked, I was like, well, okay, but what games could I play? What would make Sense, right? And so recently I tested some Windows games on Windows 11 on ARM. And the only computer I have here like that is the, like the lowest end, you know, Snapdragon X, like not plus, not Elite, just like lowest end one. So I was like, well, I don't want to overwhelm this thing. I know it's not going to play Call of Duty, but I put Alan Wake right on there and it ran fine. Like it runs great. I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. So I started with that on Linux and that also runs great on Linux. I'm like, that's nice. But I'm like, I don't want to just like, you know, guess, right? There must be a way. And I don't really think about Steam or play around with Steam. And I find Steam to be mostly annoying, frankly. But here's a little tip for anyone doing this. Steam supports something called collections, right? And there's static and dynamic collections, and collections are basically just a subset of your game library. So I have like 82 games in my game library. And you can filter it by different things, right? And one of the things is if it's certified or will play on Steam Deck. So when I change, if I create a filter, which is I create a collection where the filter is just. I only want to see those games that are certified to run on Steam Deck, which, you know, Steam Deck is a fairly low end computer, right? So if you have this older computer, you want to put Linux on it, maybe you want to play games on it. So that whittled my list down. I'm doing this off the top of my head, but I believe it was down. I think it was 20 games and I installed, you know, like Doom 2016 control. I've tried a few more since I Resident Evil Village, which I always call Village for some reason, and they actually run great. And like that's actually kind of a cool way to do it. And in my case when I switch it to like games that are just playable, I think it goes up to 60 or maybe 62 games. And I haven't tried those yet, but it's kind of a neat way to test gaming on Linux. So it's good to know about.

[Richard Campbell]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And in the sense that I am, I've turned into like a someone who's just not faithful to any browser because I have to keep switching browsers. Google Chrome this past week added two features that other browsers have had forever, by which I mean telemetry and tracking. No, sorry, vertical tabs.

[Richard Campbell]

They Invented that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, they innovated in that space. And then a read, they, they've had sort of a reading view, but now they have what they call an immersive reading view. That works more like reading view does as everyone else knows it. So if you use like Edge for example, Edge has a really good reading view actually, which can also read to you, which I really like. But they've added, you know, they're, I don't think they're going like back to basics or anything. They're still going to do all the AI stuff, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But if, if you did not use Chrome for those reasons that those features are available, I just would recommend that anyone who uses Chrome install the correct extensions to prevent all of that tracking and other nonsense that does occur as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Pie holes are your friend.

[Leo Laporte]

And just real quick, Richard, and see if I can get this right. Have you ever had. This is just a basic inexpensive whiskey, but we bought it here now twice in Mexico City and for some reason it's in our supermarket. It's just, it's Jim Beam but seven year aged. And I want to say, I want to say here it's 20 bucks a bottle, maybe 25 at most. But it's cheap. It is super good. Like it's like a really good years

[Richard Campbell]

is long for bourbon, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think this is five. I think this is a new one. Like a new type of gem beam or whatever. Like it's. I don't think they offered this before, but it's. You should look.

[Richard Campbell]

Bim's been due. Remember they did a year long shutdown of their, of their distillery. They had a big backlog and B, they needed a refit anyway. So this may be the beginning of a rebranding.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Richard Campbell]

And one of the consequences of stopping for a while because you're overloaded is your barrels keep getting older.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's right. So they're like, hey, we should sell this as something because it is different and it's very, it's. It's just good sipping whiskey by itself. Like it's really good.

[Richard Campbell]

It's typically your problem

[Paul Thurrott]

plaque.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now they put an age statement on it. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're saying it was just a rebranding of the existing. Yeah, if for some reason I just

[Paul Thurrott]

looked it up on the Whiskey Advocate.

[Leo Laporte]

So what does it say how much it costs in the US there?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's 38 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

38 bucks for suggestion here, retail is 25. It's in. Yeah, I was gonna say it's 20. It's 20. I want to say it's 20 or maybe 25.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just looked on, you know, a local website.

[Leo Laporte]

This is surprisingly good. Like, it's nice. Yeah, it's very good.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's Jim Beam black, but now they have an age statement.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, people are more willing to tolerate those ages, I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think most people know that, that bourbons typically.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is a major improvement over the regular gym. Good for them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Does it have a handle on it? Because my mom really likes that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not. It's not in what I would call it chuggable container. I will say it goes quick and my wife's not drinking it, so I don't know where it's going, but it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want to try the one that Richard was talking about last week. That sounded really good, but we've got another whiskey pick coming up. Before we do that, we need to talk about Run As Radio, Richard Campbell's very own podcast. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

After an unusual short show last week, this show is far more traditional, talking about securing AI agents. So Niall Marigan's an old friend of mine, known him for many years. He's worked in Microsoft, he's worked out. He's an Irishman living in Norway with a family and stuff. And so he's been in the oil industry for forever and mostly in the security spaces. He does a lot of stuff with missing children and things as well. He's a very cool guy. So he's full in on the impact of injection attacks and a lot of the AI related problems. So there's a ton of links in this show as we hammered through what's been happening for exploits utilizing LLMs and specifically went into the what happened at ServiceNow, which was a fairly serious escalated privileges attack, utilizing prompting, like literally hijacking the prompt and ending up with additional credentials. So there's now new tooling coming into play to help you manage some of these problems and to help, you know, do this thing they call task adherence. So focusing on this is all you do. You don't do anything else. Don't go outside of this. And I think we ultimately wrapped up talking about the fact that OWASP now has a category of documentation specifically around securing agentic applications. So a great thorough cap from a guy on the front lines battling these tools for his companies right now and willing to share his advice. So we're in. You know, progress is happening on all fronts in these areas and this is one of them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Run his radio 1031.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

As they say, just drops today@runnersradio. Yeah. Com.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, I did the thousandth show with, with Paul last fall and yeah, that's cool. We have episode 2000 of.net Rocks in the Can. Won't publish till the end of April, but we did it at the MVP summit in a giant party. So, yeah, that's. That was an experience.

[Paul Thurrott]

How fun. All right, time for that brown liquor pick of the week.

[Richard Campbell]

Speaking of the MVP summit, as is common for the MVP summit, I received a number of bottles of whiskey. One of them you experienced last week with Jeff the Creed. Here's one of the other ones. This is from Australia. So Chris Goosen, who's an MVP and is a big fan of the show and, and the whole whiskey thing, last year he brought me the bottle of Dark Harmony number three from. Yeah, it's from Australia. And so he. Apparently he sweats a lot about what whiskey to bring. So a few things we can notice on this pretty straightforward labeling. It's a 500 mil bottle. This seems to be a standard practice now in Australia because the whiskey is quite expensive. So they're just making smaller bottles. So you don't have as big a sticker shock. You just get less Lucky you. And we. So we've got. We met up at the Aloft Bar and had a long conversation, talked through this stuff and had a good time together. Now, what is Karawa? Well, Carawa is a small town in New South Wales. It's about 600 kilometers, 380 miles west of Sydney. So inland away from the water. It is on the north side of the Murray River. And you've probably not heard of the Murray river, but it's the largest river system in all of Australia. In a country that's remarkably deserty. This southeast corner is where the water is. And so the Murray river runs about 1500 miles, 2500 km, starting in an area they call the Australian Alps, which is very aspirational, down in the southeast corner. And the river itself then runs northwest across an area they call the Murray Darling Basin, draining through lakes, Lake Alexandrina, and then ultimately into Long Bay, into the ocean not far from Adelaide. So you're starting out, you know, way in the southeast corner south of Sydney, and then going all the way as far as almost to Adelaide. So it's huge system. And most of that river defines the border between New South Wales and Victoria, the two provinces in the southeast corner there. Now, Aboriginal people have been there literally for millennia. This is the traditional lands of the Bangarang and the Widow Jiru peoples. And in fact, the word in Widowjiru for a rocky river crossing is Korawa, which is what's there. So the Europeans show up in the 1840s. The first town built in that area was on the south side of the river called Wangyagana. And then eventually there was a bridge built across and they started building on the north side that becomes Corowa. It's a major grain growing region. So by the 1870s there's all kinds of grain. And then Murray river is quite navigable. So they're using that to move product out is your highway when it's the 1800s. And so around 1920, a large flour mill was built in Coroa by the Roller Flower Milling Company. And so even though it's a relatively small town, it became this hub of business activity coming and going via the river. In 1893 there was the Corwa Conference, which, while not the definitive meeting, was one of the anchor points for the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. So those sort of claim to fames of a relatively small rural town in actually the. The mill was built in the 1870s, but it burned down in 1920. And then they built a bigger one to the. And again it's 1920. So they have their own heating and power system, its own boiler, 14 sets of rollers, a bunch of grain silos. Massive thing. And again, all this business was grain being processed at the mill and then flour shipped down the Murray river to be exported. The mill shuts down in the 1970s and, well, a bunch of different proposals go by. Ultimately, the council buys the derelict mill in 2001, initially for a waterworks project. That doesn't happen. In 2009, it gets sold to a father and son team, Neil and Dean Druce. They buy it for a dollar. This is all over their website. They get it for a dollar. With the rule that they would restore it. It became a heritage site in 1999. So there's a bunch of restrictions on this now. The Druces are locals to the interior area. They actually operate this huge factory called the Juni Licorice and chocolate factory in a town called juni. It's about 200km, about two hours drive north of Carawa. And the Druse had been farming the area. Their first farm was in 1918, so they've been around there a long time. The grandfather, Pappy Drew, was one of the first organic farmers in the area in the 1960s. So Neil Druce had this Is the son or now considered the father. Purchased and restored a 1930s flour mill in Juney to make into a chocolate factory, which is usually a licorice factory because licorice actually uses grain and they're grain growers and then also also got in the business of chocolate.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Australia is the best licorice. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so, you know, the whole point of the restoration is to keep the original character building and so forth. And so they were basically repeating their success down in Corowa by getting the old flower mill and doing a restoration, keeping the character. So the sun Dean moves to Corwa, start staffing up with local people while the renovations ongoing. Most of his staff is under the age of 30 and since they've already done this up in Juney, they know the retail side. They open a cafe, open a store, they're selling chocolate and licorice and so forth. Lots of community engagement, sponsoring events, that kind of thing as they and decide they're going to try whiskey again. Another thing you can do with grain. And they grow a lot of barley in the area so they're all in on for that. But they don't have a background in whiskey so they hire in essentially. Although as all the research I've done, they don't hire experienced people really what they do is hire young people from the area who want to learn. And so they hire a fellow named Tyler Spencer who's ready for a career change and goes into the brewing side working with local barley and how to get maltings done and so forth. And they hire a guy named Bo Schillig to get educated in doing the distilling. They call him the dreaded distiller because he happens to have dreadlocks and I don't think he made whiskey before he got into this job. So. And they build out a local distillery, craft scale, so not too large but stainless steel washback, standard yeast grain strains. It's the environment is of course Australia. So it's still very hot and with very mild winter. So they have an over aging problem without a doubt. They get stills made locally by Burns welding and fabrication. Very fancy name, but out of Griffith, North South Wales, not too far away. And they use existing barrels, so mostly wine barrels because again that's the growing area west of there is an area called Barossa. And so they're using lots of wine and port barrels from that part of the world. But they do acquire a certain number of ex bourbon barrels for doing aging. And the rack warehouse is in the flour Mill, the flour mill is massive. So even with the cafe and the tour areas and all of those sorts of things and the distillery, still plenty of places to store whiskey as well. So the restoration starts in 2009. They don't start actually doing distillation until 2018 and now they're starting to. Starting to age up. So their core, they, they do a lot of small batch releases. All these 500 mil bottles, their core range is repeatedly made. They've got five different types of call barrel house peated. They do a lot of a few different peated whiskeys. But of course that, that barley comes from Scotland because you only get the peat flavor right if you use Scottish peat and Scottish barley. So it's easier to do it that way. But wherever it's non peated, like their boss Verde, that's family farm barley. And then they have various different barrellings, agent pork cask aged Australian Muscat cast, it's that sort of thing. And then there's single barrel editions and that is what Chris brought me. So this is called the peated stage. Single barrel, American oak, tawny. So it's not an Amer, not an Asian American barrel. Actually this is a barrel from a winery called Old Redemption and they make tawny ports. So the barrel is American oak that they imported but they actually aged it out of the from Old Redemption, which is in the Barosa. And it was a huge barrels, a 300 liter barrel that's very big. And I don't know exactly how much time they put into that but it, there's only 530 bottles. It's a single barrel. They literally called the barrel 512. So 530 barrels. No, you cannot buy them. They're all gone. They're in collectors now. When it was available they were 195 Australian dollars. So about 150 US. It's 60.6%. So for an afternoon drink, this is going to be a poke in the eye. And you'll notice I just opened the bottle. I know nothing. Right. I'm just going to taste this cold. You know, Chris Goosen has never steered me wrong. So I don't smell Pete.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Richard Campbell]

I do smell alcohol. Like there's no doubt there's 60% in there. Oh, I taste the Pete for sure. Yeah. Yeah. This definitely got that PD kind of. It's not really powerful. This is no octamore or anything like that. Boy, it went down nice. My goodness gracious. Very warming like that sort of coffee cake rich. Wow, that's amazing. Just a sort of big rich like my mouth is literally watering to drink more of that.

[Paul Thurrott]

It unfortunately doesn't look like you can.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't order it. It's nowhere to be found. Yeah, there are other single a barrel editions out there, so you could do that. 195 Australian dollars and it's a 500 mil bottle, so, you know, getting less. But this is typical of Australian and largely this stuff is not exported. Do you have to get this in Australia? It was brought to me from Australia.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's a stunner.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it typical to have a peated whiskey from Australia?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it's unusual. And again, that is Scottish barley. Whenever it's peated, they are ordering it from Scotland already peated to specification.

[Leo Laporte]

Same Japanese. Okay. Prepeated.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, as we did when we did the Scottish whiskey series, I talked about in the modern barley today you don't do your own maltings.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a very unusual thing, in fact. And Cora doesn't either. They have a brewery in town. The brewery does the maltings and sends them over the grist. So already ground and good to go. For them to go directly, we need a.

[Leo Laporte]

A crystallino for peated whiskeys where it re. Removes the peat, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Depeated. You got pre peated.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

There's plenty of non peated versions from Carawa. It's unusual to have a peat because it is imported grain. So that does cost more and it's. And it kind of goes against their style. You know, when you talk about their most popular whiskies, it's local grain from a. Aged in a local barrel. Like that's what they're about. This is a. This is the craftiest of craft whiskeys for this part of the world. For as much as these guys are clearly pros, like they've done this playbook before. They know how to do development in rural Australia, which I think is super cool. It's a town of 5,000 people.

[Paul Thurrott]

They do it up too, man.

[Leo Laporte]

They. Yeah, they have.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh no.

[Richard Campbell]

And it dinners there in the nation, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And if you take. If you look at the videos and things of the inside of the building, they have very much left. This is a 1920s flour mill vibe. The wood has not been refinished. It's very open air and structural. Like they have kept the sense of the heritage of that place. And this. Look at the walls. The walls don't need to look like that in that barrel room.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They just left it alone.

[Paul Thurrott]

They left them.

[Richard Campbell]

It's Part of the esthetic of the place.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, That's. It's really cool. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And you know, most whiskey makers make whiskey and then become a destination. These guys knew how to do the destination. Mostly they came into whiskey later. But I love that they. They got local people trained up to follow good patterns to do the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Isn't that great?

[Richard Campbell]

They're making good whiskey from it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Isn't that great?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's very cool. It's backwards to the normal approach.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And yet it's got a real honesty to it. Like you can't not take these guys seriously. They're doing a cool thing. A young group of people making really interesting whiskey.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's good.

[Richard Campbell]

That's really fantastic. And I'm not a big peated whiskey guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's your dread. There's your dreadlock.

[Richard Campbell]

There's. That's him. Yeah, that's Bo. That's the dreaded distiller right there in distiller. Yeah. They're all Australian football players, these guys.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no kidding.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it does.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That is.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not pros. They're not damaged enough for that. That's a lot of injury.

[Leo Laporte]

But.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but they were all friends and they're all, like I said, young people. This a young people with a playbook from dad on how to do this. You know, just like what they're doing up north from them and they've really kicked the town. Right. Just done a huge thing and made some really, really interesting whiskey. Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Hey, I was delighted.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a travel every time you do this. I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Chris Goosen scores again. Man. That these guys. Two for two. He got me totally enamored of Tasmanian whiskey. Whiskey. There's no repeat to this. Caraway is a unique thing, but it makes. I've never wanted to spend time in rural Australia more than this now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh boy.

[Richard Campbell]

In there. And sort of check some of this stuff out though. I. Yeah, absolutely delight. How cool the post of this. I gotta tell you. I feel like I've now like smoked a cigar. Like I'm all kind of smoky and raw.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I know.

[Richard Campbell]

This is not gonna. Yeah. This is not Jeff the Creed. Like my Jeff the Creed is almost half gone. Right. From last week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like you can sip, sip and sip. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This is going to be deployed when I'm smoking briskets this summer.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

That's when it's going to come up. When we're. When this air is full of hickory smoke. Cuz I've been running A a batch of brisket. I'm going to be sitting with my friends because it takes hours and hours. This is what you would sip cuz your smoke comes while you got smoked on the outside.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it. Very good. Thank you. Richard Campbell. Richard Zwicky Segments are collated on a YouTube channel. You can find it if you go to somethingweirdfrommycloset.com There are more than a hundred of them there. It is a tour of the world and adult spirits and it is really awesome. And we will eventually add this one. Kevin slowly is adding everything as they go.

[Richard Campbell]

He's had a burst of action there. So it's, it's, we're getting closer.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it. Thank you Kevin. We appreciate it. Kevin King, our editor and producer for the show. Richard's [e-mail] that's where you'll find his podcast.net Rocks and Runners radio and he joins us right here every Wednesday along with Paul Thurat from thurat.com Leanpub.com is where you'll find his books. And actually if you join, become a premium [e-mail], you'll get all the books as part of the membership, which is a great deal. So save your money and join the website therot.com we do windows weekly of a Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live. If you're in the club, of course, Club Twit Discord would be the destination. Everybody though can watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik six different places you can watch and chat with us. I'm watching all six after the fact on demand versions of the show available at our website, Twitter, TV WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly at Windows Weekly and if you go there, it's a great way to share bits of the show. You can clip them out. Of course the best bit is already clipped for you, the whiskey bit. But you maybe you want to share the Xbox bit. We haven't made a Xbox playlist yet for Paul, so you can do it yourself at YouTube after the fact. On demand shows also available from your favorite podcast player. In fact, that's the best way to get it. Just subscribe audio or video and you'll get it automatically as soon as it's done. Thank you gentlemen. Have a wonderful week.

[Leo Laporte]

You too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Are you hitting the road next week?

[Richard Campbell]

One is the Don Julio we did together in in January. So we're pretty close. That Don Julio, 70 was an experience.

[Paul Thurrott]

Aren't we all jealous now? We'll see you next time, Windows Weekly. Bye. Bye. Hi there. Leo laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network you probably already know about. This Week on Tech. Every Sunday, I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the Twit Network. Thank you.