Windows Weekly 981 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. There's some big changes to Windows Update. Paul will have the details, plus gaming on the new Snapdragon X2 and earnings learnings. Microsoft earnings comes out at the end of the show, but we already learned how much money intel lost this quarter and we're trying to figure out why did the stock market go up? Insight coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:29]:
This is Twit.

Leo Laporte [00:00:36]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 981, recorded Wednesday, April 29, 2026. Semi sophisticated. It's time for Windows Weekly. Get ready, everybody. It's time to talk Microsoft with our dynamic duo of Microsoft journalism.

Richard Campbell [00:00:55]:
Mr. Paul Thurat from thurat.com looking very dynamic today.

Leo Laporte [00:01:00]:
Very dynamic.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:01]:
His range more like Diure, but. Hello, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:01:07]:
Hello, Paul and Richard Campbell of Run as Radio. Richard is back home in British Columbia for the minute. Yeah, yeah, for the minute.

Richard Campbell [00:01:16]:
Beautiful sunny day out there.

Leo Laporte [00:01:18]:
Look at that. Tell us again, that is. That is not a lake.

Richard Campbell [00:01:23]:
That's. That's the ocean. That's a salish sea.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:25]:
What do you call it? Like an inlet?

Leo Laporte [00:01:26]:
This guy go by?

Richard Campbell [00:01:27]:
I think I whiz by.

Leo Laporte [00:01:28]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:01:29]:
And that's Texada island in the distance there.

Leo Laporte [00:01:31]:
So what a view. And a pure thing to wake up

Richard Campbell [00:01:34]:
to, let me tell you. And perfect.

Leo Laporte [00:01:36]:
That is a postcard we're looking at. It is. It's very nice. I'm just gonna sit on that for the rest of the show.

Richard Campbell [00:01:41]:
How about nice? Let's do this.

Leo Laporte [00:01:43]:
We don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:43]:
Better looking than us, guys.

Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
Just the beautiful lake or lotion or

Richard Campbell [00:01:49]:
whatever the hell it's ocean.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:51]:
I don't meet anyone. Every once in a while you meet someone who like watches this podcast and I'm always, I always start off the same way. I'm like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

Leo Laporte [00:02:03]:
Gentlemen, Mr. Surat will commence today's sermon on Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:08]:
Yes, I'd like to begin with an apology. No. So, you know, this has been a good year, honestly, and, and there's a lot more to come. But, you know, we all know that Microsoft is working on those pain points. We've been waiting for them to be implemented and now that has started through the insider program, of course. And so excuse me, because I'm caught on a wire here. So there's two bits to what they've done. The first one is to roll out the changes to the insider program that they announced.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:40]:
Right. Which is Basically amounts to them replacing the dev channel with the experimental channel. The beta can channel the beta channel. The beta channel continues forward as the beta channel, but the focus of each of each changes a little bit. But experimental is the channel where you'll get future features that you know, some of which may not actually land.

Richard Campbell [00:03:04]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:05]:
And beta is features. We're pretty sure those are going to be in Windows in the near future, and then they'll move.

Richard Campbell [00:03:09]:
You know where Canary goes?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:13]:
Nobody knows. Canary still has two different build streams. I don't like. I don't know. I don't have one.

Richard Campbell [00:03:21]:
And Canary two.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:22]:
Can we have Canary one and two? Listen, it's like, you know, like nobody knows more about Windows than we do. What's Canary for? I have no idea.

Leo Laporte [00:03:30]:
It's not like anybody else knows best.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:32]:
No, I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't know. So that's in there. At some point, that will be kind of enforced in the sense that you'll have to switch over it. But for right now, you can just kind of opt into it. Eventually that's going to change. But once you do that, what you'll see is a set of feature flags in the Windows Insider program settings interface. And this is, among other things, is where you can make sure that new features are actually there.

Richard Campbell [00:04:04]:
The defaults actually specify one of the AB options?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:07]:
Well, no, you can specify them all or not. In other words, you either get them or you don't, which is better than nothing. I agree.

Richard Campbell [00:04:14]:
Well, maybe you could select hey, whenever there's an optional option or what you want to test, I want it.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:20]:
Exactly.

Richard Campbell [00:04:21]:
I mean, that's super important for you. I don't think it's important for anybody else in the world, but it's important for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:26]:
You have no idea how important.

Richard Campbell [00:04:28]:
We'll call it the Throttle.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:30]:
I am my living or dying on that hill. So I'm super excited about that. So that's cool. There's that. And then when you go into the experimental channel, and this is kind of an example of where it's simpler, but it's not really that much simpler. But you can at this time. This will change over time, too. You can either test Windows 11 version 25H2.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:53]:
24, sorry, 26H1. Right. Or future platforms. This is optional. I think by default, it's probably on future platforms. So future platforms is those features that may or may not, you know, make. Make it all the way. So that's great.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:08]:
And then they also implemented changes to the Windows Update interface by which you would get to the Windows Insider program interface actually in Settings.

Richard Campbell [00:05:21]:
This was Aria Hansen.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:23]:
Yes, yes, right. So this is also, this is, this is, this is rare. I don't get to say this a lot. This is better than expected. And what I mean by that is Microsoft has a long history of over promising. On delivering. In this case, when they, when Pavan Davalori wrote that post where he talked about the pain points and he mentioned, you know, we're changing Windows Update, he was, he was vague, you know, he said that they would allow users to customers to extend the pause on new updates for longer than was the case currently. Currently you can do it for, I think it's five weeks.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:59]:
But he didn't say how long. And I was like, what does that mean? Like six weeks? What are we talking about? You know, seven weeks? What do you mean? And it's actually essentially indefinite or infinite I guess or something with two caveats. You can extend it indefinitely in 35 day increments using a calendar control which is, you know, super easy. There may come a time where there's some kind of a zero day something something and you actually have to get a, you know, a security update. Right. There's probably nothing we can do about that. So that may happen. But you can essentially push this out indefinitely if you want.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:33]:
I don't know why anyone would want that exactly, but certainly you might be working on your computer doing something like, look, I don't want this to happen right now. I'm in the middle of a project, whatever it might be. I had seen this one before, but you can now shut down or restart the PC without installing updates. You have to do it through the start menu and then you get the additional option. So restart with installing updates. If there are any pending or restart without doing that. That's nice. There's also that thing I'd seen previously, which isn't technically Windows Update, but update related, where you're installing Windows from scratch.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:02]:
So you got a new PC probably or you reset a PC, you get to that new to 25H2 screen where you have to install a feature update and it takes 20, 30 minutes, you know, it takes a long time. And now there's a little link on the bottom that says yeah, we're not gonna, I'm not gonna do this right now. Skip this, you know, which is nice if you want to just get right in, right and get going. And then back to Windows Update, sorry, fewer disruptions. And so they're, they're coordinating updates so that they will essentially ship or be implemented Together. And I kind of think about this in the sense that one of the things Apple does in their App Store is if you have all these little micro transactions, they won't put them through one at a time and have some credit card fee on each one of them. They'll kind of bundle them together. And people who, if you're an Apple user, you might sometimes like get a little notification on your phone where it's like, oh, Apple charged you $35 or $14, some random number.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:58]:
And you're like, what is this? And it's because they're kind of bundling those payments together. And you know, it's not. If you do a lot of purchasing, you may not. You're like, what? Like, what is this thing? You can also as a seeker now, and I actually don't see this yet in the build, but I'm sorry, you can go in.

Richard Campbell [00:08:15]:
Seeker?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:16]:
Yeah, as a. See, in other words, let's say you have. You don't think about Windows Update for some reason or you haven't looked at it in a while. So updates have been piling up. There's going to be a new available updates. It's a expander is the name of the control. But you click on it and then it shows you whatever those things are. And then you can choose the ones you want to, if you want to, or just wait again, you know, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:38]:
And so that's nice. And then they're building in a kind of functionality one would assume had been in Windows forever. It's the type of thing they first implemented. And you're not going to believe me when I say this, but Windows Millennium Edition, when they had an automatic driver rollback feature, which solved one of the biggest reliability problems with Windows 9X, which was that you installed a driver and then could not boot into Windows because something was wrong with it. Right. That used to be a problem screen. Yep. So Windows me was the first system to actually just override that and go back.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:10]:
They would save the previous driver every time you install the driver and then it would automatically roll back and then you'd be fine. You could, you know, do whatever you wanted to do. They're doing that with Windows updates now. So if there's something, I bet everyone listening this has probably experienced this at least once, where you actually do try to install an update and then you're working and you're doing whatever and you're like, let me go see how the thing's doing. It's like, update failed or whatever. And you're like, okay. And Then you click retry and you work a little while and come back. It's like, update failed.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:37]:
And you're like, okay. And you don't know why. There's no obvious way to fix that. There are ways to fix it, but they're complicated and you have to look it up. And they're going to do this automatically. Like automatically recover of failed Windows updates. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:09:51]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:52]:
Yeah. So obviously me being who I am and doing what I do, I went in and, you know, played around with this and it's great. Like I don't, I don't know that I have a complaint, which I have to say makes me feel. I almost threw up in my mouth

Richard Campbell [00:10:09]:
when I said it's very distressing.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:10]:
Yeah, it's hard for me.

Richard Campbell [00:10:13]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:13]:
But I. This all looks great. Like I. Nice. I mean, and like I said, this is actually, you know, when, when he announced this, I was like, okay, I mean, let's see what they do before we get too excited here. And he was really vague on the time frame for pausing updates, but actually it's pretty good.

Richard Campbell [00:10:30]:
Aria Chi.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:31]:
But yeah, I mean, when Pavan talked about it. Sorry, when he. In his list of, you know, things we're going to fix.

Richard Campbell [00:10:38]:
Well, I just, you know, we were both pleased when I was. We were both disturbed by the outcry against Bavan. Although I don't think it was really against Pavan. It was like, don't say AI. Everybody's angry or not.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:48]:
It's the don't shoot the messenger thing. I mean.

Richard Campbell [00:10:50]:
Yeah. Although he also responded pretty well to it and what he's working on, I think matter if it's a lot of people not including Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:58]:
The thing is, I didn't write this anywhere but you know, as I was talking about this, you know, I often do write and talk about like intent, like what's the point of what Microsoft in this case might be doing or whatever. And when you think about some of the behaviors in Windows 11 that are bad or against what you want or maybe aren't opt in and they just do it for you or they force you into like, you know, folder update. That thing I complained about a lot. You know, you complain and then you step back and like, well, why, you know, why are they doing this? And there are, you know, there are good reasons to semi force people to sign into Windows with a Microsoft account if you're a consumer. There are business case reasons too. Right. I mean, they're trying to push you in a certain direction. Of course, there's both elements.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:41]:
There when you think about Windows Update and the system that they had in place, I mean, there's no, there's no business imperative like insertification type issue with Windows Update where you can say, well, they're just making me install updates because other than, I guess maybe there are new features every month and they want you to get the new features or something. But really, to me, this goes back to the Terry Myerson thing about we want everyone to be on the same version, which is technically impossible. But by the way, they actually solved that problem too, which is funny. But they keep the notion of keeping everyone up to date in this, especially when you talk about security updates, is a good one. Like it's a good idea. It would be better if we didn't have to reboot so often. You know, there's that kind of a thing. And so I'm curious here.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:27]:
They. They're being extremely liberal in allowing people to pause updates, which is like dramatically, almost the opposite, but different than the previous policy.

Richard Campbell [00:12:41]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:42]:
And I'm not talking businesses and their group policies and all that, which is

Richard Campbell [00:12:46]:
a different thing entirely.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:47]:
Just like human beings, like just people. And I'm fascinated by it because in some ways this is contrary to what is best for Microsoft as the maker of the platform, you know, but they're doing it, and that's fascinating.

Richard Campbell [00:13:03]:
We also don't know what it'll actually manifest as to just one thing for what they say and what actually comes down.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:09]:
Well, yeah, so time, in the same way that time can heal all wounds, a time also opens old wounds. And yes, it's going to be, say

Leo Laporte [00:13:17]:
time wounds all heels. So there's that.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:22]:
I. Wow.

Richard Campbell [00:13:24]:
You can get a cream for that, though. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:13:27]:
Sorry, I didn't mean.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:28]:
You really threw a random rubber in the flow there. That was an AI did that, didn't it? Is there a semicolon in there? I completely lost my job. Like, what the. What I mean by this is when something is new and fresh, you're not seeing the whole experience. Right. And so it goes against every grain of my being to allow Windows updates to accumulate somewhere. But I do use so many computers that this will eventually happen on some computers. So I'll be able to see what this is like.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:00]:
But I'm curious what the experience is like over time when you do in fact have maybe two months of security updates sitting in the queue and whatever those features are, whatever the other things are. Because you're going to get NET updates in here, if you have Visual Studio, you're going to get those in There, it's going to be other things too. There must be at some point where they're like, we get it, you don't like updates, but seriously, you know, you need to reboot or something. So we're not seeing that today because there are no other.

Richard Campbell [00:14:29]:
They don't have that problem. And I wonder if their telemetry showing, hey, most people taking updates anyway, like this isn't going to affect that big

Paul Thurrott [00:14:36]:
of a chunk of the world. See, that's the thing. You could pick any choice that especially enthusiasts, our technical people don't like the forced Microsoft account sign in thing, the Windows update pausing or whatever it might be, even if you had to go 17 menus deep to turn off all telemetry. Right?

Richard Campbell [00:14:55]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:55]:
The truth is most average people, which is most people using Windows wouldn't even bother. They wouldn't even look.

Richard Campbell [00:15:01]:
Never.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:01]:
So why not?

Richard Campbell [00:15:02]:
The defaults matter a lot.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:03]:
Yeah, just give that to the people. If, if you're the smart slash dumb enough to want to turn that stuff off or whatever it is, let them, Let them hurt themselves. You don't need a bike. You know, it's not a motorcycle. They don't need a helmet. You know, some of them actually do know what they're doing. I mean, there might be whatever reasons like, I mean, there are workarounds for everything, of course. But yeah, it does beg the question, why not spill this in the ui? Like, what's the why?

Leo Laporte [00:15:27]:
This is universal. I've argued for this for a long time. Android does it. IPhone does it. Apple does it. Just give us a switch, hide it, make it.

Richard Campbell [00:15:37]:
I gotta tell you, when my pixel wants to update the os, it just makes it unusable until I turn the phone off and on and finishes the update. A whole bunch of stuff doesn't work.

Leo Laporte [00:15:48]:
Android has one, actually, Andrew does. You have to tap to the word developer like eight times.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:53]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:15:54]:
To get into that, to turn on the developer settings. That's fine because in Windows we'll share

Paul Thurrott [00:16:00]:
this on Reddit and everywhere, the setting app added a similar thing. There was always a developer mode switch, but it's like Settings System Advanced, I think they've lumped in all the advanced features, which includes the developer stuff. So things like I want to right click on the icon on an app that's running and choose End Task from there. I don't want to have to go through multiple steps to get into Taskman or whatever. That to me is very much like Android, except that you don't have to tap the screen 10 times or whatever it is. The pixel thing is interesting because I have three pixels here and I'm on the beta, so I see more updates than usual. I guess it's pretty prickly when you don't install. You know, it wants.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:43]:
It really wants. It bugs you.

Leo Laporte [00:16:45]:
But that's right. Because there's security patches.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:47]:
Yeah. I mean, right.

Leo Laporte [00:16:48]:
You know, you need to do that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:49]:
Yeah, normal people do.

Richard Campbell [00:16:50]:
And that's always the problem here is right. When that's the balance.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:55]:
That's.

Richard Campbell [00:16:55]:
And it's hard enough to find anyone who wants to care, enough to block any update, but to find. I'll only block certain updates that you never find.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:03]:
Right. That's exactly the point. I always think my wife, being a normal human being, doesn't think about this at all, doesn't care. Sometimes she walks in, turns on her laptop and it has rebooted. And you know, Windows is semi sophisticated in the sense that some. You can. This is click. I think it's on by default now, but you can.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:18]:
It will do what mobile platforms do and bring up apps that were running before, if they're modern apps.

Leo Laporte [00:17:23]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:24]:
I mean, it's not perfect, but, you

Leo Laporte [00:17:27]:
know, it's not sophisticated is what I'm always looking for in a. I mean,

Paul Thurrott [00:17:30]:
I'm just trying to be accurate here. I don't want to, you know. Well, look, Windows is a legacy desktop platform. It has a modern app platform in there too. But a lot of people are going to be running some mix of these things. So modern apps, such as they are, have whatever deficiencies, but they are easier to resuscitate and do that kind of thing with, whereas legacy apps.

Leo Laporte [00:17:50]:
You know, Burke is saying that because he uses Windows Pro, he doesn't see as much nagging and.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:56]:
No, that's not true.

Leo Laporte [00:17:57]:
I don't think that's true. I mean, is there. If you buy the LTSC version, the.

Richard Campbell [00:18:03]:
And the Enterprise editions are pretty stripped down.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:05]:
But. Yeah, but even, even those. I mean, I've tried this too. Like, is installing Enterprise Edition some solution? You know, honestly, if. Whatever the number of problems you might have with Windows, it only solves like two of the seven. It's not, you know, and it's because you're running it as a person. You know, most people running enterprise are. It's a managed environment and you're.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:26]:
It's your company who's kind of hand. That's handling that. And, and they will determine your experience. Windows Pro, though, versus Home. I mean, not really. I mean, there were things along the way, like when Microsoft started Enforcing Microsoft account sign in. They did it first with Home. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:44]:
So if you had Pro, you didn't see that at first, but then they added it to Pro. So slowly. It kind of depends.

Leo Laporte [00:18:49]:
Yeah, I've always said Windows is best for somebody who has an IT department.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:54]:
Yeah. Or thinks like an IT department.

Leo Laporte [00:18:56]:
Or like you.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:57]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:18:59]:
You're your own it. That's kind of what I used to say in the radio show. If you're using Windows, you're your own it's department. Okay with that?

Paul Thurrott [00:19:06]:
I mean, they're trying. I don't know what else to say. I mean. Yes, look, I just had this conversation with Laurent, my coworker this morning. But you know, Apple, Steve Jobs was still around and Mac OS X was the primary concern there. He would make fun of Windows for having multiple product editions that were like, we have one version of Mac OS 10, you know, at the time. We don't have like a Enterprise, we don't have Pro, we don't have Home Premium and Ultimate and blah blah, blah, whatever. And fair enough.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:35]:
You know, Apple was able to move first to not charging for updates, like for OS updates. Right. They did that before Microsoft, like on, on the desktop. And you know, it's a smaller platform, obviously. It's the, the, I don't know, Vast majority.

Leo Laporte [00:19:53]:
There's no enterprise market.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:54]:
Yeah, the majority of the customer base is enterprise and, and they did have

Leo Laporte [00:19:58]:
a server version, to be fair.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:00]:
Apple did. Yeah, yeah. For a little while. Yep. They did. Yep, yep.

Leo Laporte [00:20:03]:
Desktop.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:04]:
Yeah. But they don't, you know, there's this. Even today they don't, they don't have the like cloud based equivalent. They don't really do that. Like they're not, I mean they have a, an Apple business offering that does. It's basically MDM stuff up in the cloud, whatever. But they don't really do the Microsoft heavy infrastructure thing. But that's been the, that's the shtick.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:22]:
I mean, you know, Microsoft's business is, or the Windows business is for businesses largely. I mean people use it, you know, for all the right reasons. I mean you use Excel at work, you're like, I want to have this at home or whatever. I mean I, you know, it makes sense to some degree, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, we're dealing with the, I guess the side effects of the different focus, I guess of the two platforms. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:20:48]:
Yeah, I think they're very different.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:20:51]:
Markets.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:51]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, you can move between them pretty easily. It's not like they're. They're not that different. I mean, but there does need to be.

Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
I mean, in Microsoft's defense, there does need to be an enterprise operating system.

Richard Campbell [00:21:04]:
Apple's whole. There's one version of Mac. It's like, tell me you haven't broken in other markets without telling me you haven't broken in other markets.

Leo Laporte [00:21:09]:
Right. Microsoft needs those different versions.

Richard Campbell [00:21:13]:
I think customers are pretty clear about what they want.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:16]:
Right. So I felt this for 25 years. There should be a business version and a home version. They could have completely different UIs. I mean, the only thing that really matters is that the basic interactions are the same and the apps all run everywhere. Right. Like, so there's no. Or maybe just the home version has fun themes or something.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:34]:
And the business versions, the home version

Leo Laporte [00:21:35]:
should look like XP. The business version should look like 2000.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:39]:
2000. Yeah, yeah, there you go. So in a way, they sort of did do that a little bit. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know why they don't. I don't know why they don't do that. I guess it's a support nightmare. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:50]:
I don't know. Anyway, it's getting better, so that's good news.

Richard Campbell [00:21:55]:
They're working on things that people appreciate.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:00]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:22:00]:
I got the sense from Aria's blog post that these were ideas she'd had for some time and just, just got priority on. So she was kind of delighted. Like, all this stuff I've always wanted to do for you, I'm now allowed to do.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:14]:
There is a Windows and Xbox. There's these changes occurring right now where I think we're seeing people step in who are like, I've wanted to do this for so long.

Richard Campbell [00:22:24]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:25]:
And now I can't.

Richard Campbell [00:22:26]:
Now I've been sort of open doors.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:28]:
Yeah. A lot of people have left the company. You know, Rich and I both been around a long time, know a lot of people at the company. Both have seen this huge swath of people.

Richard Campbell [00:22:36]:
We're friends with a generation of departure happening right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:39]:
It's insane.

Richard Campbell [00:22:40]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:40]:
And it's accelerating right now because instead of the past two years, ish of like layoffs, you know, they've recently offered these people, like a buyout, essentially.

Richard Campbell [00:22:48]:
First time ever. They've had it. Early retirement package. I can tell you how many people have pinged me saying, do you think I should take this? Because, like, it's this or I get laid off. Like, that seems to be the sense, but it's also a reality. Like, these are friends of mine from 30 years ago that are now, like, me in their 50s.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:05]:
People are always like, you know, Paul, you know, what does Microsoft think about all the stuff you complain about? I'm like, I don't think I know anybody anymore. That matters. Like, I used to know so many people there, and it's very different. It's going to get even more different. I was going to say worse, but just, you know, it's going to get even more so. But the. One of the happy side effects is. And it just won't always be the case.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:24]:
But like I said, Xbox and Windows, we're seeing people come in who are like, you know, I've been sitting on the sidelines for a while. I don't really like the way this is going. And now I have the opportunity to impact this in a way that's positive. And they are. And that's, you know, that's good because no matter how terrible any company is, if you know anyone who works there, you, you know, these people, they're human beings. They want to make good products. They want everything to be great. And then you're like, yeah, but your company's terrible.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:48]:
It's like, I, you know, I don't. I don't make the decisions, you know, whatever. And now we're starting to see that. And, and again, in both cases, so far at least, it's been mostly very positive. So this is good. I feel like the, you know, the Insider program has been not even treading water. They've been circling the drain for years. It's.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:07]:
That's a huge problem. And then, you know, I wrote a book about how terrible Windows 11 is. I mean, you know, it's a. It's a problem. So it's nice to see that getting reversed. And it's mostly new people, you know, or. Yeah, maybe people in some cases, like guys like Marcus Ash and, yeah. Rudy Hinn or whoever, who I've known or sort of known for a long, long time.

Richard Campbell [00:24:28]:
And mostly IC types like, not the managers. These are the architects and so forth, who in some ways kept their head down.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:36]:
Yep. Well, they were just doing. They were somewhere else. I mean, they were doing whatever they were doing. I mean. But, you know, Scott Hanselman is in this category now, too, which is very interesting. He's a great guy, and a big

Richard Campbell [00:24:46]:
chunk of his time is focused on Windows now.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:47]:
It's really neat. I. I want a big chunk of his time to be focused on Windows. It's good. So anyway, good, good stuff is my point. So this is good. Oh, that's it.

Leo Laporte [00:25:02]:
And that's all she wrote.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:04]:
Thank you for joining us Next week, everybody.

Leo Laporte [00:25:06]:
No, no, we got lots more. Can't stop until there's whiskey.

Richard Campbell [00:25:11]:
Whiskey.

Leo Laporte [00:25:12]:
Lisa. Lisa was talking. Actually, I should run this by you guys about maybe ending the show before Whiskey, but not really.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:21]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [00:25:23]:
Like say. Okay, that's it. Thank you for joining us.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:25]:
And then just doing the whiskey thing,

Leo Laporte [00:25:26]:
and then doing the Whiskey thing and then offering it as a second item or something like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:32]:
That's. I mean, to me, that's almost semantic in nature.

Leo Laporte [00:25:35]:
It is.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:36]:
Because I know there's some people. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte [00:25:38]:
You know, we put it at the end, so it's like.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:39]:
It's at the end. You can just. You don't care.

Leo Laporte [00:25:41]:
So here's. Here's why she said that. She said. But people tell me they still listen to it in case Paul says something interesting at the end.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:49]:
Wow, that is. That's bleak.

Richard Campbell [00:25:52]:
In case there's.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:53]:
The chances of that are pretty slim.

Leo Laporte [00:25:57]:
Hope springs eternal.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:59]:
Okay, well, I. That's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:26:04]:
No, I don't think we're gonna do

Paul Thurrott [00:26:05]:
it, but I know. I mean, I. I don't know what to say. I mean, like, you know, when Mary Jo was on, she did a bear segment or whatever, and I'm. Same feedback. A lot of people loved it. And so a couple of people were like, I don't understand.

Leo Laporte [00:26:15]:
And I think people.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:16]:
We can joke.

Leo Laporte [00:26:16]:
Here's the deal we're gonna make with you all. Paul will never say anything interesting after the Whiskey segment.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:24]:
I can't guarantee I'm going to say anything interesting before the Whiskey segment. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:26:28]:
So just in case you're sticking around.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:26:31]:
If you don't want to hear the Whiskey segment, just, you know, pause the tape.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:35]:
You know what? Actually, when the Whiskey segment's done, I'm going to put a. Put a band aid on my mouth.

Leo Laporte [00:26:42]:
Paul will never say anything. Extra. Extra. After the Whiskey segment. Peter Norton is not dead. No, somebody's looked it up. He's still alive. In fact, what he did is he took all the money he made when he sold to Symantec and he had.

Leo Laporte [00:27:01]:
The Norton Museum in LA is amazing. He got really into art collecting. He's got very good taste. Paul, you're muted. If you're saying something about Peter Norton, no one's hearing it.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:12]:
Sorry. Would you say that he and McAfee went in different directions?

Leo Laporte [00:27:18]:
Let's not forget McAfee, who has passed on due to maybe a little too Many bath salts.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:26]:
We're being kind.

Richard Campbell [00:27:28]:
Something.

Leo Laporte [00:27:28]:
Yeah. What a story that is. You're right. They did. They went completely different directions. Yeah. So I think intel owns McAfee now. It's very confusing.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:39]:
Is it Intel? I can't remember.

Leo Laporte [00:27:41]:
They may have spun it off. Symantec's gone.

Richard Campbell [00:27:44]:
Maybe they don't know. Semantic got Norton. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:46]:
Yeah, yeah, but Norton.

Leo Laporte [00:27:49]:
Hey, Norton.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:51]:
There's a Norton web browser now. I mean, really, like an AI. Yeah, I think it's called Neo or something like that.

Leo Laporte [00:27:58]:
I want to give credit to Peter Norton because he wrote. Really, one of the best.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:01]:
Oh, my God. Programming Windows, the assembly language for DOS thing, was amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:28:05]:
Classic. Yeah. Not Windows dos. That's right.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:07]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [00:28:07]:
It's the book.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:08]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:28:09]:
And he got in the whole thing because he wrote a simple. I don't think it was a scanner. I think it was like a disc.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:15]:
He's almost like the. This. The Steve of assembly language, if you will.

Leo Laporte [00:28:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, but yeah, no, so, no, no diss to Peter Norton. But he sold it.

Richard Campbell [00:28:28]:
And the.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:29]:
No, but, yeah. You were talking about the yellow box with the guy with the arms cross. I'm like, who was he referring? Big.

Leo Laporte [00:28:35]:
Just remember fat tie. That's the era.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:38]:
Well, it was the. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:28:39]:
Everybody remembers that box.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:41]:
He wasn't shopping at Chess King comes from a different era.

Leo Laporte [00:28:46]:
Norton is now owned by something called Gen Digital Incorporated. Intel bought him for 7.7 billion in 2010.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:52]:
So who owns McAfee then?

Leo Laporte [00:28:54]:
Sold him in 2017.

Richard Campbell [00:28:55]:
McAfee is owned by an investment collector.

Leo Laporte [00:28:57]:
Ah, private equity.

Richard Campbell [00:28:59]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:29:00]:
The Advent International Corporation.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:02]:
Okay. It's the business of the future.

Leo Laporte [00:29:04]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:05]:
Today.

Leo Laporte [00:29:06]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:29:07]:
Anyways, all value out of assets until there.

Leo Laporte [00:29:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:11]:
That's what Corel does, isn't it? Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:29:17]:
And again, another great Canadian company. Corel was a great company.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:22]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
But that's what happens.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:24]:
Was Novell Canadian or were they American?

Leo Laporte [00:29:26]:
No, they were from Utah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:27]:
Yes. Right, right, right. So basically, Canadian.

Leo Laporte [00:29:30]:
They're the Canadians of America. Absolutely. But okay, well, Minnesotans, too. Yeah, that whole area.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:39]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:29:41]:
All right, let's talk about Snapdragon.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:29:44]:
Did you still. That. That Acer is still. It's a.

Richard Campbell [00:29:48]:
Still leaning on his door.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:49]:
The Asus is sitting at home.

Richard Campbell [00:29:51]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:52]:
Waiting for me. That's the one with the awesome processor. So I can't wait.

Leo Laporte [00:29:55]:
But it's good because you have the first two levels on there.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:57]:
Yeah. So I have A plus and in Elite. And, you know, they're both set up for disappointment. Man.

Richard Campbell [00:30:02]:
I think you're Going to get in you not be able to tell any difference at all.

Leo Laporte [00:30:05]:
Well, that would be sad.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:06]:
Yeah, I mean day to day that's probably going to be true. So going between plus and Elite, you know, just like is the case the first gen, you don't really day to day normal productivity stuff. No issues. One of the big things that's changed over the last year for Snapdragon is games are starting to be a better experience. And that's true in the first gen too. Even the. The only one I had here previously was a first gen Snapdragon X. Not even a plus, like the lowest end, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:31]:
And depending on the game, you know, you could do something like Half Life 2, an older game. Like that stuff works fine. Like it's actually pretty good. But for the X2s, I wanted to test a broader range of games because I had done this again toward the end of last year when they started improving the game stuff, you know, Fortnite I played Control. The Callisto Protocol, which is actually a pretty heavy game, was pretty good, you know, not too bad. So the first round I went through it, you know, Half Life 2 again, which obviously works great. The 2016 version of Doom and Doom Eternal. Awesome.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:03]:
And by awesome I mean actually Doom Eternal is even better for some reason than the first one. This thing runs it like on this computer. This is an X2 Elite. It's like 60 frames a second at 1600 by 900. Like I mean it's doing autosr so it's probably technically running at a lower

Richard Campbell [00:31:19]:
res but on a long life battery. Nice thin laptop.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:23]:
No, it's, it's good.

Richard Campbell [00:31:24]:
Monster Man.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:25]:
Yeah, control is fantastic. 1920 by 120060 to 70 frames a second, which is unbelievable. Yeah, that's the one I had to install, I think. I guess I mentioned this. The.net framework 3.5 what I played Star Wars, Jedi, Fallen Order. Fantastic. So this was good enough that I was like I'm just going to get stupid and see if anything AAA from 2 seconds ago actually works right? Or at all. And they do not.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:56]:
So Call of Duty, Black Ops 7, nothing. Which was the case before on previous gen. And then I tried Battlefield 6, same thing. Both these things like take half a day to install and then you get them installed and it crashes like immediately. And you're like, I've wasted my life. But well, you have to do this, right?

Richard Campbell [00:32:13]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:14]:
We'll see what it looks like when we get to the X2 elite extreme based system. But I think, I think this is more the games than this platform. I actually do think these games could run fine and that there's some work could be done. The fact that, you know, Activision Zone by Microsoft now tells me maybe some work there will occur. You know, we'll see. I. I realize it's not, probably not a huge priority, but this is definitely a step up in that capacity, I guess is the way to say it. So I think the next thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:45]:
This is going to be super hard to figure out, but I want to see if there's anything that makes sense like from a local AI perspective with the MPUs, because it's depending on the system. The ones I have here are both 80 tops mpus. I think the lead extreme might be 85 or I can't remember what the mix is, but roughly twice, not quite twice, but almost twice as good as before or twice as fast, I guess. But what does that, you know, like what does that look like? So I'm going to try to figure that out. I have been playing around with locally I did an episode of Hands on Windows that will. We're so far ahead now, it'll probably come out in September, but whenever it comes out on local AI, which has gotten dramatically better. Right. I mean, so you know, we'll see, we'll see what that looks like.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:28]:
But I, but so far I have to say it's. I guess it's not surprising, but it is definitely better. Like it's definitely a step up. If you care at all about games. I mean obviously if you care primarily about games, this is not the direction to go. But if it's, you're an occasional game player or whatever, maybe just, you know, want to play older games especially, no problem. Like that stuff actually works pretty good. So that's nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:51]:
We mentioned Scott Hanselman in passing earlier. He is one of among his many roles. Somehow he's working with a part of the company that is doing what I would call technology preservation. And they have over time announced the Oprah open sourcing or I guess in one case the reopen sourcing of various versions of Ms. DOS 1.25, I think in version 2, version 4. And then today they announced, or it was last night, but sometime in the past 24 hours they've released the source code for what might literally be the earliest version of Ms. DOS, which is CPM, I'm just kidding, is 86 DOS. The, you know, the.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:32]:
Tim Patterson, the guy who created the thing that became dos. Right. They announced or released the source code for the kernel for 86 DOS 1.0, which is the thing he essentially showed Microsoft and sold to Microsoft. Right, right. That IBM called PC dos, Microsoft called Ms. Dos. But it's not just the kernel. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:52]:
They have multiple snapshots of that kernel, which is cool. They have the source code for CHKDSK and other early Ms. DOS utilities. And they have what Scott Hanselman kind of referred to as like the late 1970s version of, like, the GitHub commits, where it's like his handwritten notes and comments in the listings of the assembler talking about things that weren't working right and that they should be fixed and were, in fact later fixed and things like that. So there's a whole, like, body of work that goes along with this that, you know, Tim Patterson has given Microsoft permission to use and then to, you know, into open source and just make available to the world. So, people, this is like an insight into a. Obviously a milestone in personal computing history that's really important and it's amazing to me that anybody cares about this. Like, it's so great that they're doing this.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:48]:
I think it's wonderful. So that's really cool.

Richard Campbell [00:35:51]:
Yeah. I don't know that it matters, but it doesn't. It doesn't hurt anything.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:55]:
Right, and that's. Right, exactly. Yeah, it doesn't hurt anything. And there's a whole retro computing thing going on now, which is probably stronger than it's ever been. And I don't know that anyone's gonna. I'm gonna make my own custom version of the Ms. DOS kernel from 1980 or whatever. It's like.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:12]:
Yeah, okay, but pretty sure not. Yeah, probably not. Or maybe I'm gonna write x86 assembly code that would actually run on one of those processors from back then. Yeah, probably not, but. But if you. I think. I think you could learn from this. I think there's anytime there's a source code open, sourcing whatever of something, especially if it's something you use like the Zork games or Word Stars.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:35]:
Like this. It's amazing. Yeah, it's just amazing. I love this.

Leo Laporte [00:36:38]:
So. So this is the. This is the original Seattle dos. Right? The Tim Patterson that Microsoft bought.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:45]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:36:45]:
It's not Ms. Dos, it's Seattle.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:47]:
Well, it becomes Ms. Dos. Right. So it's at the time that his name for it was 86 dos. Right, right. There was, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:36:54]:
Oh, I see. There's both 86 DOS, Ms. DOS and PC dust, which is the IBM.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:59]:
IBM version. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:37:00]:
Version. Oh, interesting. So you can really look at the whole.

Richard Campbell [00:37:03]:
Yeah, you can just look at the Lineage.

Leo Laporte [00:37:05]:
This is so cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:06]:
I know, it's amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:37:08]:
Oh my gosh. I wonder if Steve knows about this because he could actually read this exactly

Paul Thurrott [00:37:13]:
like, oh, I see what they got there. Look at that.

Richard Campbell [00:37:16]:
What were they thinking there?

Paul Thurrott [00:37:18]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [00:37:19]:
Wow, is this cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:22]:
We talked about this some weeks ago. But one of the things I think we've lost from a software development perspective is something that everyone really wanted, which was we have essentially infinite computing resources. Even with all the crises we have now that we're not forced to constrain in any way. This thing had to run on a system. I'm sure that the low end was probably 64, 128k, you know, five and a quarter inch floppies, maybe even eight inch. I don't know what they had at the time. You know, the fact that it did any of this stuff is. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:57]:
It's astonishing, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:37:58]:
You know, we had a guest on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines, Ian Bogost, who is a interesting fella. He's a philosopher, but he's also teaches. He has a game company. Teaches games.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:11]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:38:12]:
And he's at the Washington University at St. Louis University. And he had. He just finished up a Atari 2600 programming course.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:22]:
I got it. I'm so

Leo Laporte [00:38:26]:
6502 program 6502.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:28]:
Assembly language. Might like. It's like if you want to learn assembly language even today, I don't know why you'd want to, but if you wanted to, it might be smart to start with 6,500 because it's such a small instruction set. No, I'm serious.

Leo Laporte [00:38:39]:
It's pretty awful.

Richard Campbell [00:38:40]:
No, but that's indirect addressing.

Leo Laporte [00:38:43]:
This is why I would start with

Richard Campbell [00:38:44]:
the 62 bytes for where I want you to write.

Leo Laporte [00:38:47]:
You start with a flat, memorable model. It's a very clean instruction.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:51]:
I don't want to use x86, but there are. There are today more places you could write code that would run 6502.

Leo Laporte [00:38:59]:
Well, that's true.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:00]:
Would run 68,600.

Leo Laporte [00:39:02]:
Absolutely, absolutely true.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:03]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:39:04]:
The other thing that, that was talking about memory constraints, the cartridges, I can't remember. They're 4k or 8k.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:10]:
Well, they could be. By the way, originally they were 2K.

Richard Campbell [00:39:13]:
Probably 2. Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:39:14]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:14]:
And then they, they. One of the ways they expanded capabilities was by adding RAM to the cartridges. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:39:20]:
But they also built into ROM a bunch of routines, like sprite routines.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:24]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:39:25]:
That you could call. So a lot of the code you was in the rom, you didn't have to.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:28]:
So look, there are newish Atari devices now that run that. Those cartridges. Commodore is back. They're doing Commodore 64s. They just announced the 64C. If there is a. It may be small, but there's a market of sorts for people that want to learn how to code these things and write apps and games.

Leo Laporte [00:39:47]:
I mean, well, clearly these students took a class on 80 programming. Atari 2600. He said it was a great class. It was really enjoyable.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:56]:
That's the ultimate constrained environment, by the way. Like the Atari was. I mean, even at the time was like crazy limited. It's amazing, like how many things you could do between each scan line and all this. It was super, super constrained.

Leo Laporte [00:40:08]:
But there's a. I'm so glad there's young people who want to learn this because there's this huge value to learning how to work within those constraints.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:15]:
By the way, this would be a good use of AI as well to have it teach you how to do this and kind of work along. I mean.

Leo Laporte [00:40:21]:
Well, that's why I'm glad these listings are on GitHub because you can absolutely say to Claude, code, get these listings. Let's. Let's learn.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:28]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [00:40:28]:
And I think that's fantastic.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:30]:
Just incredible. And I think this is incredible. I mean, again, you know, practical day to day for most people, nothing, obviously, but I. I appreciate any form of like technology preservation, you know, the good old game stuff where they're, you know, not just preserving old games, but allowing, you know, changing them in some way so that we can run them today just on modern hardware.

Leo Laporte [00:40:50]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:50]:
Is awesome. I think that sounds great.

Leo Laporte [00:40:52]:
Out of Sync is mentioning in our Discord chat a very cool project that actually I found earlier. I think it was on Hacker News where the guy created something called the Visible Zorker. And when you play the game Zork, which is those great text adventures, like show you the. It shows you the code on the right as you're playing. I love this. So you can actually see. And of course, this is not assembly code.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:18]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:41:20]:
This is their.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:21]:
Oh, because they had a pseudo code thing, that parser. Yeah, yeah. So it could run on multiple platforms.

Leo Laporte [00:41:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:25]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:41:26]:
So but you're seeing the parser actually work.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:28]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:41:29]:
It's pretty amazing. You can see.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:30]:
I mean, this was their key intellectual property.

Richard Campbell [00:41:33]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:41:33]:
They open sourced this. Again, this is why open source, open sourcing. This old stuff is fantastic.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:39]:
So when you. When you started talking about the guy who taught the Atari class, I do have a vague goal this year to figure out game programming. And what I mean by that is A game like a Windows app or like Windows really is, just. Just sits there in it, and then every time it comes in a circle, it does something and it looks and says it's an event.

Leo Laporte [00:42:02]:
They call it an event.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:03]:
An event loop. Exactly. And I, I, I, I. This is something I've just never fully understood my entire life. And I feel like between this Commodore stuff and the 6502, like I mentioned and whatever, like, I, I just, I want to see examples of this especially. The simpler the better. Right. Like stripped down.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:21]:
There are these incredible videos, by the way, on speaking of code and game preservation on YouTube, where a guy analyzes the open sourcing of the code from Doom and then Quake and then whatever else. And in each case, this guy's like, this is a master class in how to write incredibly interesting code. The best code imaginable for that era. Because, you know, John Carmack is basically an alien who came down from outer space and taught us all totally different. Jesus. Like, amazing.

Richard Campbell [00:42:48]:
And, And I'll never knew how to reticulate the splines.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:51]:
Yes, yes, he did.

Leo Laporte [00:42:54]:
I wrote as part of a class. I took a class in programming from. Online from University of British Columbia, actually. Interesting. Really good class. And one of the final assignments was to write a kind of battle. What is it? Where you're shooting aliens. Alien space asteroids.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:15]:
Yep. Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:43:16]:
And so. And you write it in a scheme. It's called a racket. So this is the code. And that's exact. You nailed it. This is exactly what it is. It's an event loop.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:25]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [00:43:25]:
Yeah, it's like runs over and over again, and then you have to write all the things that happen in the event loop.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:43:32]:
Which is really cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:33]:
In a Windows app, you know, and when I say Windows app, I mean dating back to like 1985, literally. You kind of set up the app for your window for the app, and then you set up that event loop. And the event loop is what events are we going to choose to respond to?

Leo Laporte [00:43:49]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:49]:
You know.

Richard Campbell [00:43:49]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:43:50]:
And so when the mouse goes down, when the arrow, when the arrow key,

Paul Thurrott [00:43:54]:
you could do nothing. And then your app won't respond to any mouse clicks or any. Yeah, you just ignore it. Yeah. But you, you specify the things you want to reply to. And I feel like a game is basically the same thing. It's, you know. But I say that I think there's

Leo Laporte [00:44:07]:
an event loop in Windows. You bet.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:09]:
No, they're definitely. No, there is all graphical UI literally is. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:44:12]:
So that's the difference between command line, Program and a graphical ui. Graphical UI has to have an event loop because you have to respond to

Paul Thurrott [00:44:20]:
all the different things it's doing. The equivalent of. There's a phone and you pick it up, you're like, is anyone there? Is anybody there?

Leo Laporte [00:44:27]:
Is anybody?

Paul Thurrott [00:44:28]:
Is anybody there? You know, you pull. It's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:44:32]:
It's really. Yeah. Actually that's the difference between polling and interrupt driven.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:38]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:44:38]:
This is a good way. You know, kids should do this. I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:41]:
That's what it means.

Leo Laporte [00:44:43]:
Imperative to do it because of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:44]:
I know, but I still. My God, you can't listen, you. The only, the only way to be truly effective with AI encoding is to know coding.

Leo Laporte [00:44:51]:
You need. You need to know what's going on.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:53]:
Maybe there's a Raspberry PI version of this or something. I mean, I feel like there's got to be a semi modern but also semi inexpensive and low end way to, you know, learn this stuff or whatever. I'm going to try to figure that out this year.

Richard Campbell [00:45:08]:
Yeah, definitely look down the pie path. There's a lot of good stuff in there that's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:13]:
Anyway, I like this stuff. I'm.

Leo Laporte [00:45:14]:
Oh, I love this stuff. I just. And you know, in some ways I'm sad that I've gotten so much into AI coding because I miss Leo.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:22]:
Let me. On behalf of all Twitter listeners. We're all sad. Little sad. I know.

Leo Laporte [00:45:28]:
I'm sorry I lost my marble.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:30]:
No, honestly, no, I actually, in some way. Not in some ways, you are literally inspirational in that way because of who you are and your level of experience. No, no. But it's not just that. Your job is to know what's going on and blah, blah, you do that stuff. But you, the way you've doved, dived into this. What's the plural past tense?

Leo Laporte [00:45:53]:
Dived.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:54]:
Dovan. I'll say. Like a dove bar into this is how. One of the ways I know it's important because you could just know what's going on in the world and not have to not do anything with it and you'd still know what's going on. But like you, the amount of attention you've given. This is important because it shows that stuff is real.

Leo Laporte [00:46:14]:
Dove into VR headsets.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:17]:
But that's what I'm saying. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:46:18]:
I didn't dove into bitcoin, but when I saw this and started playing with it.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:23]:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte [00:46:23]:
This is something.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:25]:
What you just said is in many ways existential because, you know, every once in a while someone in the discord, then you'll repeat it. You'll say, hey, they're asking, how can you know what's this topic that's going on with Windows? I'm like, I didn't even cover that because it's nothing.

Leo Laporte [00:46:36]:
It's not important.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:37]:
And ignoring something, you kind of hope everyone's picking up on it. But what's going to happen is people are going to be like, hey, this thing happened. How come you didn't write about it? Like, oh, you didn't write about it. I thought, you must not know about it. Let me tell you about it. And it's like, no, I didn't write about it because it's not important.

Leo Laporte [00:46:50]:
So that's called editorial judgment.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:52]:
It's kind of a hard. It's a hard line. But when you dive into something and

Richard Campbell [00:46:57]:
it's like, sorry, did you say censorship?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:00]:
Curation.

Leo Laporte [00:47:00]:
Curation, not censorship. Well, you're self censoring.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:05]:
Yeah, I guess. Bias.

Leo Laporte [00:47:06]:
It's because we, as humans, we have limited attention.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:09]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:47:09]:
We can't go do everything and.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:11]:
But the amount of time and attention you are giving to this tells me, and I'm sure it tells millions of people that this is important. No, I mean it like this, or I'm a goofball. No, it's.

Leo Laporte [00:47:22]:
No, I'm getting some pretty good stuff out of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:25]:
Right? That's what I'm saying. You can. Even in the limited exposure I have to what you tell us about it on this one show, I'm like, there's something going on here. Like, this is. I think this is important.

Leo Laporte [00:47:36]:
You know, one of the things I've been preparing for is this trip to Hawaii because I wanted to. It's all running on this local framework, by the way. Coming up at 2 o', clock, we're going to interview the founder of Framework,

Paul Thurrott [00:47:49]:
Nirav Patel, the laptop company who just made the laptop company the awesome Lap, the MacBook for Linux or whatever. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:47:56]:
And, you know, his background's interesting. He started at Oculus back in the Kickstarter days. He did that.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:01]:
He designed the Rift, like before Meta,

Leo Laporte [00:48:03]:
but he went to Meta for six years. He was at Meta, did all the Oculus, the one and the two.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:08]:
Well, so did John Carmack, by the way.

Leo Laporte [00:48:10]:
Yeah. And he said. But he said, unlike John Carmack, you know what? This stuff's not repairable. It's going to end up in the. In this land.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:17]:
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:48:18]:
What if we made this stuff that you could repair and upgrade? And that's how Framework started. So he's very inspiring. But they have. He made Also this AI machine and he's very worried. This is why we're going to interview him. He's very worried that AI is, is going to be. Become the property of these big companies and you won't be able to run it.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:38]:
Oh, I. Listen, I. We talk about this a lot. Local AI has gotten so much better. It's not going away if, if literally the world goes where most they won't. But even if it did, most proprietary AI is the big cloud stuff and most open source AI is the local SML small language model. Whatever. It won't.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:55]:
But even if it did, that stuff's still going to be awesome.

Leo Laporte [00:48:58]:
Well, one of the things. So as I said, I'm going to Hawaii. The first thing I had to make sure is that I could access this framework which is a local run.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:05]:
Do you. Are you going to bring that with you when you go to Hawaii?

Leo Laporte [00:49:07]:
No, I have set up so I. And we had to. I had to work with Claude.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:12]:
We did.

Leo Laporte [00:49:13]:
I did a test where I just ripped the plug out of the machine.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:16]:
Are you gonna like call in from your phone and stuff? Is that what you're doing?

Leo Laporte [00:49:19]:
Like from my. I could talk to it from my watch in Hawaii.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:22]:
Nice. Hey, Dick Tracy, we're waiting in line for breakfast. Let's get moving.

Leo Laporte [00:49:28]:
When you want. You want to see. Hey, say hi, say hi to Paul and Richard. We're doing Windows Weekly right now and they really don't believe it that I can. Can talk to you from my watch, even in Hawaii. I want to see if should respond soon. Can't really hear it.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:48]:
I'm answering when I talk window.

Leo Laporte [00:49:53]:
Yeah, you can't hear because I could barely.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:55]:
I could hear a couple.

Leo Laporte [00:49:57]:
Yeah, it's coming. So that's the other.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:58]:
Or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:49:59]:
Yeah, I had it. So now I can route through the Sonos speakers because I have Sonos speakers in every room.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:04]:
See. And everyone thought that what the hell was that? But that's what that was.

Leo Laporte [00:50:08]:
I said I'm never buying another Sonos device until I realized I can actually control it through HTTP posts.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:15]:
Now he has a fort made of Sonos speakers in his living room.

Leo Laporte [00:50:19]:
I now have Sonos everywhere. And. And I told it. Follow me. So talk to me on whatever Sonos speakers are nearest me, which is awesome, by the way. I want, I want. The goal is to have the house. I can talk to the house and the house talks back to me.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:34]:
No one list even people who don't like this stuff at some point with Google or the Siri stuff or I Guess maybe back in the day, the Microsoft Cortana thing at some point stood in some room in their house and said something to that agent at that assistant and then heard a speaker in some other room go, okay, Paul, seriously, like and like. But. Right. I mean we've all experienced that.

Leo Laporte [00:50:55]:
This, it's using the WI FI access point to locate me so it can, it can figure out where I am.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:00]:
They have smart bulbs that do this kind of thing too. Now where it will, it does present sensing and so forth. I mean this is stu.

Leo Laporte [00:51:07]:
But the difference is instead of talking to Google or Amazon or Apple, I'm talking to this little framework here. I'm talking to my local AI that knows me. Has history, has been, you know, carefully.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:19]:
What's the. What's the model?

Leo Laporte [00:51:21]:
Well, this right now is using Claude. But the next step, and this is something I'm going to work on in Hawaii, is to make it Quinn, which is probably the best.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:29]:
And that's their small language local version.

Leo Laporte [00:51:31]:
Yeah, they have. Well, this is 128k gigs rather. So it's. It can run, I think quinn, what's the 27 for sure. And it might be able to run the one step bigger. But the thing is for an agentic thing where you're just saying, hey, make it a calendar appointment or can you find the email from Paul Thurat or whatever you don't need.

Richard Campbell [00:51:48]:
Claw doesn't need to be local.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:49]:
Yeah, I could just go as far as to say that could run on a 6502.

Leo Laporte [00:51:54]:
Probably run on. Well, yeah, that's a good question. You know, you need a lot of unified RAM anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:00]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:52:00]:
This is the experiment.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:01]:
Right. I've been experimenting with Gemma, which, you know, the latest version came out in.

Leo Laporte [00:52:06]:
Very good, the Gemma.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:07]:
It's. Yeah, it's really good. I've not looked at. What's the cloud one again? I'm sorry, The. The anthropic version.

Leo Laporte [00:52:14]:
Claude code.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:15]:
No, the.

Leo Laporte [00:52:16]:
Oh, Opus 47.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:17]:
No, sorry, the. The local one. The. The small language version.

Leo Laporte [00:52:21]:
I don't think Anthropic has this.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:22]:
Oh, they don't have one. Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:52:23]:
Oh no. Oh, in fact, mostly it's the Chinese ones. Deep Seat 4 just came out this week and that's very good, supposedly so. But I'm not looking to code. I will code with Claude code. That's really.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:33]:
Or.

Leo Laporte [00:52:33]:
Or Codex. Maybe GPT55. Those really are. Those frontier models really are better coding. But there's a lot of stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:40]:
And by the way, they always will be, but. Right, exactly. But the small stuff's going to get. Is just keeps getting better.

Leo Laporte [00:52:46]:
It's crazy enough now to parse documents to do research. For me, the only thing I've ever.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:52]:
I think I said this because I must have talked about this or maybe it's just because I did. I did an episode of Hands on Windows about this but I had to do like a thing about Tolkien writing and it just ran out of. It runs out of context eventually produces like 18 page report essentially. But then it lost its memory of.

Leo Laporte [00:53:09]:
Then it ran out of Tolkien because.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:10]:
Right, exactly.

Richard Campbell [00:53:13]:
We did that pun a while ago

Leo Laporte [00:53:15]:
last week as a matter of fact.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:17]:
Right. That's the only thing. But, but.

Leo Laporte [00:53:19]:
Well that's token management, context management. That's a big part of the job. There's all these new. That's why you do kind of need to be technical right now to do right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:29]:
But that. But again, it just keeps getting better.

Leo Laporte [00:53:31]:
I mean it does because they're solving these problems for you more and more and more.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:36]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:53:37]:
So it's a really interesting time.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:42]:
Yeah, yeah. Yes, it is. It really is.

Leo Laporte [00:53:45]:
It really is. And what's, you know, what's a challenge for Microsoft to bring it back to Windows is that these, all these companies certainly Chat GPD want to be platforms.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:54]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:53:54]:
Chat GPT, we just got the story from Ming Chi Kuo this week that they're going to do a phone and there won't be apps on it.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:00]:
It. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:54:01]:
It will all. It'll be the platform.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:02]:
Well, so I've joked about this. When Apple integrated with Chat GPT and only Chat GPT, you know, originally still to this day. Right. And you know, from chat GPT's perspective, like you can, you can have all these apps in your phone and we'll use those. That's great. But you'll never need to run those apps again like Chat GPT. It's like is there a way absorbs them? Yeah, like in the. It's right.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:21]:
In the same way that like in Windows you could like change the. The shell to be any executable. You could have it in the old days put into notepad if you wanted to. It's like I just want my iPhone to put into Chat GPT, you know. Yeah. Like Apple will not allow that.

Leo Laporte [00:54:35]:
No, that'll never happen with Apple. In a way that may be the right solution. Just like we were talking about earlier where the sophisticated people will have a path. So right now with the talk with the action button on the iPhone, when I press it, I'm talking right now

Paul Thurrott [00:54:50]:
to my AI, just like Apple intended. Leo, it's so Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:54:54]:
Probably so much. But I'm talking to my AI, and when I stop, it will then send it to the framework and then it will respond and it's going to talk through the speakers and it's going to say, what are you talking about? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:07]:
Did you.

Leo Laporte [00:55:07]:
Did you ask for something?

Paul Thurrott [00:55:08]:
But it appears that you're on a podcast.

Leo Laporte [00:55:11]:
So I still have all the apps on here and all that stuff, and I. What I suspect is. Now you can hear it talking to me. What I suspect is that Apple will do this bifurcated thing where you'll have all the apps, but they'll like Bixby. Remember the whole idea of Bixby, this

Paul Thurrott [00:55:25]:
is the MCP semantics app thing where they'll expose their functionality exactly. So you can conversationally interact with those features or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:55:33]:
I also bought the Rabbit R one little thing and talked to it through that too, which is a much better.

Richard Campbell [00:55:38]:
10 minutes of that thing. Worked.

Leo Laporte [00:55:40]:
No, you know what? The new version talks to openclaw.

Richard Campbell [00:55:43]:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte [00:55:44]:
So I could talk directly to it. And the only problem is it doesn't support tailscale, so I have to do a tailscale funnel, which I haven't bothered setting up. So the watch goes to my phone, which does support tailscale, so I can get that back to the framework from anywhere in the world.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:59]:
I'm just trying to figure out the Windows app SDK. And you're living in the future? I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:56:03]:
No, but that's the weird thing is I. It's not. You don't have to be that technical. You just have to know what questions.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:08]:
Well, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:56:08]:
No questions asked.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:09]:
That's right. Which, by the way, is the thing I would have said 30 years ago.

Richard Campbell [00:56:13]:
Like, well, you know, understand the answers you get back.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:16]:
Right. Okay, fair enough. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:17]:
Some of this I don't like.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:19]:
Knowing where to look for the answer is key. You're not going to memorize everything you know?

Leo Laporte [00:56:22]:
No, it's a. It's a good partner. And really, I think the way to think of it is a kind of a dumb intern. It may be better at idiot savant. Like, it's really smart about some things, but it's also really stupid about some things.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:35]:
Yeah, it's like a random situation. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:37]:
You got to know where those boundaries are and where you can expect it to do the right thing and where, you know, it won't. Anyway. I'm sorry. No, here I am interrupting.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:47]:
No, I'm My head's. You're sidetracking me easily because I'm just. This is all.

Leo Laporte [00:56:53]:
These days, Kenobi's response was, ha. Apple's whole thing is to talk to Siri, not route around us entirely. But here we are, Obi Wan on the wrist. So it's got some personality, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:57:08]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:09]:
Bypassing the Empire. Tell Paul and Richard here. The rebellion is going well.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:14]:
The rebellion is going well. Oh, boy.

Leo Laporte [00:57:17]:
So how did it know all that? Right. Well, I built in some memory.

Richard Campbell [00:57:20]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:57:21]:
It doesn't really know that.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:23]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:57:23]:
But it's fooling me.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:25]:
I'm pretty sure Arthur had a phrase about this.

Leo Laporte [00:57:28]:
Certainly entertaining me.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:30]:
Well, entertaining is good, but being useful,

Leo Laporte [00:57:32]:
there's some use because I.1. So, for instance, I used to have a calorie logger.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:36]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:57:36]:
But such a pain. You got to enter. All right, so now I just tell it. Yeah, I had that for lunch. I had a tuna sandwich and a bag of chips. And it figures out what the calories are.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:45]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:57:45]:
It will then say, because it knows I'm trying to cut carbs. Well, Leo, you're up to 100 carbs today. You might want to try a salad tonight.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:52]:
I feel like there already are kind of car or calorie carb, whatever, counting apps that you take a photo or something and tries to.

Leo Laporte [00:57:59]:
There is rough.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:00]:
You know, there's one.

Leo Laporte [00:58:01]:
I actually tried it.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:02]:
It's kind of interesting, but.

Leo Laporte [00:58:03]:
But. So that's their AI doing basically the same thing. But I don't even have to take a photo. I just tell it. It has a pretty good grasp of.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:09]:
I can tell by the munching sound you're making that you're eating a vegetable.

Leo Laporte [00:58:15]:
So there are a little use. I log my exercise that way, and it knows where my goals are and what I'm doing. And so there's little useful stuff. Memory is helpful.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:25]:
Yeah. No, I. I didn't mean to suggest it wasn't useful. I mean.

Leo Laporte [00:58:27]:
No, I'm suggesting it's not. It's.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:29]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [00:58:29]:
Rich. Is right. It's entertainment.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:31]:
It is entertainment. But I feel like it's even says

Richard Campbell [00:58:33]:
it on the license.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:34]:
License. Yeah, I believe it says the word clown on the license. But if I. If I read it correctly. But. But it is edging into useful. And that's the goal. Right? It will be useful.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:46]:
It won't just be entertaining. Like, it will be useful.

Leo Laporte [00:58:48]:
And that's really my goal, is to be prepared as we enter this world. It's not. We're not quite there yet, but we're moving in that direction.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:57]:
But you are, you're kind of performing the same role or whatever as ever, which is to be on the leading edge of that, see where things are going and be able to get people ready for this. And, and I think that's important work. It's good.

Leo Laporte [00:59:07]:
Thank you. You've always been.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:08]:
No, I mean it. I know it's. Listen, if you were being an idiot, I probably would say nothing.

Leo Laporte [00:59:13]:
Well, you've sold that sometimes too.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:15]:
Yes. Paul's being awfully quiet over there.

Leo Laporte [00:59:18]:
No, no, no, that's what I love about you, Paul. You, you, you. You will say what you think and I appreciate that.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:24]:
That's. No, I think it's. I think it's great.

Leo Laporte [00:59:27]:
Yeah, we've had our little dust ups.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:30]:
We don't agree about everything, but I feel like we agree on like 97% or something. I mean, something.

Leo Laporte [00:59:35]:
Well, this is what I love about the job that you and I and Richard have, which is we are not talking to the general populace. We're not trying to explain computers to people who don't care. We are talking to enthusiasts. And so we really are more wife that.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:51]:
Because she'll be like, really? Because let me tell you what my lunch was just like.

Leo Laporte [00:59:55]:
But Richard, wasn't that the case at Zero Trust World where you're surrounded by people who are so much like you that you can immediately have a conversation?

Richard Campbell [01:00:04]:
Yeah, I know very you're right about it.

Leo Laporte [01:00:07]:
Yeah, it's great. It's like we have friends because we're in this niche in this subculture.

Richard Campbell [01:00:12]:
Yeah, that's the whole thing about conferences is once in a while you're not the only one in the room.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:17]:
Yes, I do. You know, I. This would have come up when these things happen in real life. But you know, I, I have a lot of friends like you guys do who are just like mainstream. They're not technical, they don't care about this stuff, whatever. They're confused by my life. And it was the same person, oddly in both cases I can think of. But I remember when my friend asked me about an ipod and like, should I get an ipod? And this was like really early on.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:37]:
And I was like, yep, this is, this is the way to go. And the other one was when he bought a new computer and I guess Windows 8 had just come out last year. And he goes, so I can, I can put this on Windows 7, right? Like there's something in here that makes it go back. And I'm like, you know. And they eventually fix that. But both cases like, this is someone. Not technical, smart guy, but like not, you know, not in this world. And I think that's interesting too, because one of the things that's already interesting about AI, even now in this early days, how many people, normal people, pay for like chat, GPT or cloud now or whatever, you know, like it's close to a billion people.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:14]:
Yeah. This has moved into the mainstream, like, you know, whether it's ready or not. That's a debate to be had. But it's interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:01:22]:
It's very. We thank God because I was getting so bored of these glass slab phones.

Richard Campbell [01:01:27]:
I know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:29]:
In the Microsoft language, we would, you know, we were stressing over what the next wave was and it was never anything interesting. And it was like, oh, God, come on, is that all it is? I remember some guy even, like, I was really into tablet PC stuff, even though I can't handwrite to save my life. And I remember some guy in a. This is. That doesn't matter where it was, but we were. It's like a whiteboard. Someone had drawn this complex diagram using like a dry erase whatever. And this guy's like, that's why I have a tablet PC.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:56]:
I can draw that. Blah, blah, blah. And I was like, that's cute. And I took a picture of it. I'm like, you know, like, I. Whatever, whatever, Leonardo, you know, draw your picture. I like what you're like, Jesus. Like, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:07]:
Like, you know, just like I'm using the technology because I have it, you know, not because that's what makes sense. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:02:13]:
Yeah, I've been a sucker for that. I've bought a lot of note taking. And then I. Yeah, we all have.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:18]:
I mean, that's the thing.

Leo Laporte [01:02:19]:
I don't actually. I don't want to write to do handwriting.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:22]:
No, no.

Leo Laporte [01:02:23]:
I have all the Apple pencils.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:24]:
My hand cramps up when I write a check. Why would I want to take notes?

Leo Laporte [01:02:27]:
I cannot write a check.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:30]:
Stupid.

Leo Laporte [01:02:31]:
All right, where were we? You know what, let's do. Let's do a break.

Richard Campbell [01:02:35]:
If. Do the intel news and then we.

Leo Laporte [01:02:37]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. After the intel news and your. And your theory. I would like to hear your theory.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:42]:
So I. Look, you guys know because every quarter we talk about Microsoft earnings. In fact, by the way, Microsoft will announce earnings, I think today.

Richard Campbell [01:02:49]:
So that's. I gotta, I gotta go next week's show.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:51]:
I gotta keep an eye on that. I have, over decades had this creeping sense of Microsoft. Not sense. The creeping reality of Microsoft being less and less transparent about their tech companies. Yes. 100%.

Richard Campbell [01:03:05]:
What was the Alphabet reorg? But hey, we want to hide where we're spending our money and where we're making it.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:10]:
You know, like Apple, for example, one of the things they used to be really transparent about was how many ipods, iPhones, iPads, whatever they sold every quarter. They stopped doing that years ago.

Richard Campbell [01:03:19]:
And as soon as they're not the dominant number, they're never going to say it again.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:22]:
Well, or you do something like we have Azure or something, or Azure being Microsoft's iPhone or whatever, where the growth is phenomenal for like long, long time. And then eventually everyone on the planet has an iPhone and we're not upgrading as much. And it's not their fault. They're still doing great. This phone's great.

Richard Campbell [01:03:38]:
Eventually you win, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:03:40]:
And all of a sudden that story is not compelling to Wall Street. And the reason they change these things, the reason they stop talking about these things is so they, they have a happy story, they can sell Wall Street. The thing is, in our case, because we live in the United States, like SEC regulations have not changed in this time period.

Richard Campbell [01:03:55]:
They are actually, their enforcement certainly has.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:57]:
Yes. They're legally required to provide information that will help investors know whether they should invest in this company and what this pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, whatever are. They're not doing that. And so I, you've heard me complain about that over many years. And then there are these other things that happen where Spotify, for example, announced their earnings. Like I've held up Spotify as an interesting example of a transparent company because they have paid and non paid users. The non paid users for a long time vastly outnumbered the paid subscribers. Although, by the way, that's almost, that's gotten closer.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:29]:
But the revenues from paid subscribers, which is something, you know, we talk about with Club Twit versus, you know, ad supported people or in my site, you know, throughout premium versus ad supported people, even though there's a lot fewer of them compared to the overall user base, they, they contribute far more in revenues. Right. And I always love that because it was super transparent. But the one thing I've seen with Spotify over the past couple of years is they've started lying everywhere. And by what, what is lying mean in the context of reporting your earnings? Well, you say that you were profitable in a quarter in which you were not profitable, meaning actual net income, which is profit or loss, after you add up all the money you took in and take out all the money you spent at the cost of doing business. But they were not doing that. They were ignoring that part of it. It's like saying, hey, listen, I'm going to stop paying the rent.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:17]:
So all of a sudden we're net profitable, you know, like extra money we have. Yeah. This past week they did their earnings. I, I almost had like a, like a brain aneurysm. Like they. There's this notion of GAAP which is generally accepted accounting principle. This is a. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:33]:
Equivalent in Europe. Right. And there's non gap. Legally you are required to report gap earnings. You can talk non GAAP if you want. Non GAAP earnings don't take into account account currency exchange rate fluctuation. Right. If you're a U.S.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:46]:
company, you make dollars. The amount of money you earn is partially. Actually it's sometimes dramatically impacted by the, the value of the US Dollar. Right. Versus other currencies in Europe. Spotify is in Europe. They have a different. It's the same rule, basically, but a different regulatory body.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:05]:
Whatever, who cares? They said, like, I see these headlines, Spotify growth was. I'm gonna make this up. I don't remember the number. 14% to whatever number 4 point something, 5.7 billion. I'm like, oh, great. So I start writing the story, but I look at their balance sheet and their earnings or their revenues were up 8%. Like where did the 14% came from? They used a non GAAP growth figure with a GAAP actual hard number for revenue. I'm sorry, that, that's, that's fraudulent.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:34]:
Like, that's, that, that's insane. And there's a lot more of that. I don't want to go off on Spotify too much intel though. I would like to go off on intel for a moment. Intel announced their quarterly earnings. Now this company is, you know, it's been circling the drain for a long time. They were owed several billion dollars by the US government. Never got a cent of it.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:53]:
And then the US government announced an investment in which case they would get this money finally, which they were owed legally. Should have sued the government. Just got it, but whatever. And they've not, still not been doing great. They don't have any customers that are not named intel for their foundry business, etc. You know, like they're still just not the kind of treadmount. Right. But I saw these headlines, Intel's back, baby.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:14]:
I literally saw an all caps headline, intel is back. And I was like, oh, okay, it's only one quarter. I don't want to get too excited, but maybe they turn things around. So I'm like, oh, cool. Every Headline was extreme, not. Not positive. I mean, like overly positive, like crazy positive. I'm like, what's going on with this company? Intel lost $3.7 billion in the quarter on revenues of 13.6 billion.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:39]:
Revenues were up 7%. So single digit, not great. Intel stock price jumped 20% because everyone was so excited by these results.

Leo Laporte [01:07:46]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [01:07:47]:
What?

Richard Campbell [01:07:47]:
Well, now, come on, Paul. Like, 3.7 is mostly the mobile. I write down like it's a paper.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:54]:
It's also money lost on payments associated with the US government's 10% stake in. What? What? Okay, here's the thing that's like, you know, look, you're right, whatever. But here's. I'll just say Intel's PC chip business, the revenues net were up 1%. Negligible, nothing. What did go up 22% was their data center and AI business unit. And that's the. This is.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:19]:
This is Wall street ignoring the old school thing no one wants to talk about. That's not doing great. But also ignoring the Foundry, which they don't report as part of the running. I mean, they do, but it's treated as a separate business. And they're like, oh, data center, great. Plus, intel gave a. What do you call it, an estimate of the current quarter for the revenues. And those were a little bit higher than the consensus from analysts.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:42]:
Somehow this triggered this euphoria from Wall street, sent their stock through the roof. Insanity, right?

Richard Campbell [01:08:49]:
Turning around would have been fair Back is a stretch. Turning around and one with their issues.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:54]:
I mean, look, turnaround to me means a year of credibility, you know, whatever it might be. Their Intel Foundry business, by the way, 5.4 billion in revenues, up 16%. This is almost insider trading, given that all that money comes from intel and to make Intel's own chips. And so intel, if they wanted to goose this business, could be like, let's pay a little bit more and make it look like the business is doing great. It's. This is weird to me. So I kind of put these things all together in my brain and I was like, what the hell? You know, what's going on? Like, what is this? And I, look, this is insanity. I want to be super clear, but I feel like this is a.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:37]:
It's almost a conspiracy theory. The only chink in this argument being that these companies and entities, entities being governments, regulatory bodies, et cetera, are not in fact working together. They're just all doing the same thing.

Richard Campbell [01:09:50]:
It's like it's all mutually beneficial.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:52]:
The circle jerk of money that does not exist. That is our AI industry that is hundreds of billions of dollars not exchanging hands between businesses. You know, we'll talk a little bit more about some of that in the AI segment. But like these things are all symptoms of the same problem, which is that in with the goal of making the economy seem as good as it can be, whether you're looking at it from a national level like the United States or just globally, whatever. Again, not like the EU and the US and whatever other countries are colluding necessarily. But it's better for their countries, it's better for the market, it's better for the economy if this stuff looks great, you know, and I just, I'm sorry, Spotify is lying. Intel's crap. They're not doing anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:38]:
AI spending is out of control and is incommensurate with the payoff. And I think a lot of these companies are just going to go out of business are, you know, retirement funds are all wrapped up in this. If you live in the United States and have a 401k or whatever. And I just, I'm like, what is this? Like what? Like what is this? So I don't know, I, I, I often no, I, I, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like the intel headlines where when I looked at it, I started to write the, you know, the story that I started to write was like intel had a great quarter.

Richard Campbell [01:11:08]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:08]:
And then I read the quarter and I was like, no they didn't. Like, what is this?

Richard Campbell [01:11:14]:
They had a better quarter. If you take the write down out, they had a better quarter than they've had recently, but not by much.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:22]:
That's what I mean. Like, but you can't take it out. It's part of the finance. That's like saying, well, it just is

Richard Campbell [01:11:28]:
an admission of a mistake.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:29]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:11:30]:
It's like, hey, we made this investment. It has not worked out. We're admitting we've lost money on this the whole time and now we're finally doing the accounting of the mistake.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:41]:
You make that sound responsible. I say it, but it is. It would be if there were no people that understood money working at intel for the past five years. I mean, you know, like they knew what was going on. Like I, look, these companies are all

Richard Campbell [01:11:56]:
just quietly ignoring the fact that it was a blown investment for a long time.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:01]:
Okay. But I feel like the SEC in this case should step in and for all of these companies and whatever the EU regulatory body is in Europe, I don't know what it's called, should do the same and, and Be like, look, we have regulations for a reason. Yeah, I get that you're trying to. Like, it's. Earnings are not pr. Except that they are, because good PR is what sends the stock price up, which is what sends their market cap up, is why we're stuck with the three biggest companies in the world that haven't changed in 20 years. And the goal of these companies is to make sure we weather this AI storm and we emerge on the other side with them in exactly the same place as they are today. And I know how, like I said, I know this sounds vaguely insane.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:41]:
Like, I get it. Well, I'm anti conspiracy theory.

Richard Campbell [01:12:44]:
I'd argue that the. The shareholders should be up in arms about all of this. Except more investment organizations are lying to you.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:53]:
Come on. But you. But.

Richard Campbell [01:12:56]:
Okay, but your portfolio is bigger. So I do feel like we're coming into a moment like this. So far this year, with the, with all the prices down, you're starting to see investors, you know, the investment guys looking around going, hey, we're not. We're not actually making that much money anymore. Like, what's going on?

Paul Thurrott [01:13:13]:
Or just growth. The. The gross byproduct of consumerism and capitalism, I guess, where you have to grow and grow and grow. It's how you get something. Like we have a company that makes Oreo cookies, and we've saturated that market literally with both fat and people eating cookies. And now we make a Oreo cookie cereal.

Richard Campbell [01:13:33]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:34]:
Because we have to expand. And you're like, okay, well, it's sort of food. It's. I guess that's sort of similar, but we have like a sneaker company making AI. We have. You know, like, everyone gets into everything Spotify announced this past month. Paper, books. What? What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte [01:13:49]:
I know, that is weird, isn't it?

Paul Thurrott [01:13:50]:
Like, what is this stuff? There, there is a. I don't think this is in the story I read about Spotify because again, I could have gone on and on and on about this, but Spotify has co CEOs now. There's a. A little.

Richard Campbell [01:14:01]:
It's what all the cool companies are doing. Just got satcha.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:03]:
Well, the guy who started the company, Daniel. Yeah. He literally left.

Richard Campbell [01:14:08]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:14:08]:
Wants to spend more time with his money.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:10]:
Since January, the CFO of this company, or the part of the company that is responsible for their earnings, has been providing the CO CEOs with what I would call fake numbers so he can make policy for the company's strategy. And they're reporting those fake numbers in their earnings every quarter. So I guess it's consistent, but they. It. Now, again, they don't say fake, and they don't. You know, that's. You know, that's not a. That's not a good word for them, but that's what it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:40]:
And they had. They reported it. It's in the. It's in the report. Like, what? But. Okay, whatever. I don't understand. I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:49]:
Like, I. I've said this a million times. I have a business that doesn't make.

Richard Campbell [01:14:52]:
Why you're not a tech giant CEO 100. Honestly.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:56]:
Yep. Part of it is just an inability to be successful. I don't know. A part of it is integrity. I don't know what you want to call it, but you're.

Richard Campbell [01:15:03]:
You. You're limiting your ability to lie at scale. I get it.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:07]:
To lie at any scale. Like, this stuff makes me sick.

Leo Laporte [01:15:10]:
Let's not say lie. Let's say creatively.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:15]:
Well, okay, but this is. Sorry. I come from Boston. I'm a Mass hole. I think there's an east coast thing. We're not passive aggressive. We're just aggressive. We speak plainly.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:23]:
They're lying.

Richard Campbell [01:15:24]:
They're lying.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:26]:
And I know, you know, like, I. Friends, you know, Denver, Seattle, you know, they'd be like, whoa, whoa. You know, like, settle down.

Leo Laporte [01:15:33]:
That's a little hard.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:34]:
Tell us what you really think, Paul. Yeah, I just did. They're lying, you know, and they have

Richard Campbell [01:15:40]:
been for a while. Yeah, it has been some.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:44]:
I think in Microsoft's case, just because I follow this company much more closely than any other company, I've seen it more clearly. And I. I really feel like every quarter is a little bit of a feeler to see how much they can get away with. You know, there are weird exceptions. A quarter or two ago, they actually gave a hard number for Azure.

Richard Campbell [01:16:00]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:01]:
No, the first time in history.

Richard Campbell [01:16:02]:
And we used it to ripple across a whole bunch of numbers in the process.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:05]:
Because then you can backtrack it and say, like, oh, here's the point where they were just losing money on this thing.

Richard Campbell [01:16:09]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:10]:
Well, actually, we can. We can't really say if they're making money now because we don't have profits, but just revenues, whatever. But with that one major exception, they've gotten less and less transparent every quarter for possibly 10 to 12 years. I don't remember. I don't remember anymore. They used to say, like, you know, like, Apple would say we sold these many iPhones. Microsoft would say we sold these many Windows licenses. They don't do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:33]:
They've not done that for a long time. Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:16:35]:
Well and, and like I said, it is a kind of conclusion collusion when everybody's doing it.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:41]:
Yep. Right, right. And the collusion extends to again to Wall street, to the analysts, investors and very much shared collusion because those guys don't want to hear about Windows. They want to hear about these high growth new markets right here.

Richard Campbell [01:16:54]:
But yeah, they don't hear about bad news of any kind.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:56]:
So no one's asking questions. It's like, well you know, no one is like hey, great news, Azure, everything's going gangbusters. Hey, how's Windows doing? You know, can you give us a number there? I. No one's going to ask that question.

Leo Laporte [01:17:08]:
Who cares?

Paul Thurrott [01:17:09]:
Well, who cares? It's billions of dollars. It's several billion.

Richard Campbell [01:17:13]:
We have figured out how to turn investment portfolios into a kind of financial junk food and just keep laying all the trans fats, baby. Like I'm feeling good.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:22]:
It's sickening. And look, I'm not an accountant, you know, it's got, I liken this to antitrust. Right. I'm not a, I'm not a, a law expert. I'm not a, you know, whatever. I'm not into this. But Microsoft got in this trouble in the early 90s, they went to court in the late 90s they went to court again in the EU. That thing dragged up for 10 years.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:39]:
I had to learn a lot about antitrust. And so now like in certification, you know, when you see it, you know it's. I didn't mean to, I wasn't trying to become an expert in this. I but now I'm like, I'm really clear eyed on this and same thing with this financial stuff. Not good at math, not good at numbers. My wife handles our finances. She should. I'm terrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:58]:
But I do write about earnings every quarter, every single quarter for several dozen more whatever companies, Microsoft. I write really long articles about where the money's coming and going, where it's possible to write about that.

Richard Campbell [01:18:10]:
What you're really looking for is the Ozempic for financial reporting.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:14]:
Yes. What I'm really looking for is the truth.

Richard Campbell [01:18:16]:
And now you're just talking crazy talk. Mr. Thunder, honestly, I told you it's a conspiracy theory.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:21]:
It's a picture of a ufo. It says the truth is out there.

Richard Campbell [01:18:24]:
Yeah, I'm not going to try and get you to go back to where it was. I'm going to find a medicine I can sell you for an excessive amount of money that will treat the issue.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:30]:
Hey, we all look, whatever anyone's opinion about this, we all know how fascinating it is when some report comes out where we received internal documentation. Sometimes it comes from a court case. Those are. Those are good too. Where you're like, holy crap. Like, this thing. This is what they were doing. Like, everybody knew it and we were

Richard Campbell [01:18:46]:
all in on it. And it was. And it was like, if we don't do our competitors doing it, we have to do it too.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:51]:
Yep. That's not a good way to live your life. And it's not a good way to do. Well, actually, it is a good way to do business. That's the problem. Yeah. Anyway, all right, I'm sorry, I'll back off from this, but. Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:19:02]:
Tell us how you really feel.

Leo Laporte [01:19:05]:
I just don't want to get sued, that's all.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:10]:
So the guy worked with Umbrella. He goes, what if. What if Spotify comes back and makes a statement about what you wrote? I'm like, what are they going to say? They're going to say what we do is legal and if it wasn't, the regulators in the EU would come after us. And.

Richard Campbell [01:19:23]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:24]:
Yep. 100. We've been.

Richard Campbell [01:19:25]:
We've been running in traffic for years. I don't know why you're concerned about us being hit by a car.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:29]:
Yep. Yep. So anyway,

Leo Laporte [01:19:35]:
let's talk about our sponsor. And we will continue on with an AI segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:40]:
It's not a financial investment firm, is it?

Leo Laporte [01:19:43]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:44]:
Okay, okay.

Richard Campbell [01:19:45]:
No, it's something way better.

Leo Laporte [01:19:47]:
Oh, sorry. Talking to me. Gotta get him to Shut up. Lisa. This 3am Lisa nudges me. She says, there's somebody in the house.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:00]:
Yeah. You're like, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:20:01]:
And I said, does it have an English accent? She said, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:06]:
Which would suggest to me that you knew who it was.

Leo Laporte [01:20:09]:
I think I might know what's happening. I will take care of it. Maybe this whole idea of having it talk to me all over the house was a bad idea.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:19]:
Well, look, you may scale it back, but you have to get it to work first. Right? So I still think it's important.

Leo Laporte [01:20:24]:
That's what I told her. I have to get it to work first.

Richard Campbell [01:20:27]:
Putting sleep time barriers on is a good idea.

Leo Laporte [01:20:30]:
Yeah. I think I might say after midnight, please. Let's just wait till.

Richard Campbell [01:20:34]:
You know. The feature she really liked is all of the LEDs in the whole house being turned off around 11 o'.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:39]:
Clock.

Richard Campbell [01:20:39]:
O'.

Leo Laporte [01:20:39]:
Clock. She does like that.

Richard Campbell [01:20:41]:
She like. She noticed that right away.

Leo Laporte [01:20:42]:
She does. My wife would like that too.

Richard Campbell [01:20:45]:
And it took a minute early on

Paul Thurrott [01:20:47]:
in the whole smart home Thing. My wife walked in and she turned the lamp on. I'm like, what are you doing? She's like, I'm turning on a light. I'm like, don't touch that. She's like, you know what? I just want the light to work. Like, it has to work the way I want to use it. I'm sorry. And I was like, that's a fair point.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:02]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:21:07]:
It's hard living with us. I'm just saying.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:09]:
Oh, I'm the worst.

Leo Laporte [01:21:10]:
Yeah. And I apologize to Lisa pretty much daily.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:14]:
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:21:15]:
I really am. You married a geek. Sorry about that.

Richard Campbell [01:21:19]:
That's what you get.

Leo Laporte [01:21:19]:
That's what you get. She, you know, she knew. Doesn't make any better, but she knew.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:25]:
So Microsoft and OpenAI changed the partnership for what, 17th time now? I don't even. I've lost track of this, but obviously each time this happens, this is, I think, the third time in a row where a lot of it is about Microsoft not wanting to pay for or provide the infrastructure that OpenAI is demanding so they can expand in their own way. And, you know, this is allowing OpenAI to go off and work with other cloud infrastructure. Right. You know, they have a great. Well, they have partnerships with every company you can think of. But, you know, Oracle was one of the early beneficiaries of this. And when they announced this, this would have been probably Monday.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:10]:
I was talking to Brad about this and I was like, well, you can queue up the AWS Amazon announcement, sure enough, less than 24 hours that happened. But one of the many things that's changed is that Microsoft, or OpenAI rather, has the right to deliver their Frontier models, you know, the. The best GPT models they have on other cloud platforms. Right. So the exclusivity thing is not as exclusive, I guess, as it used to be, maybe is the way to say it. Microsoft still has the right to use all of those models. There's still a timeframe on it. The timeframes have shifted a little bit.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:51]:
We're still Talking up the 2030s, I guess. 2032, I think was. Or I think it was 2030 originally for everything, and now it's 2032 for some things. There's some. Been some changes around what happens if and when AGI happens, etc. Microsoft now has the right to pursue AGI themselves. You might note that Microsoft has actually been talking about doing that for a while, but they call it Super Intelligence, I suppose. I don't know if they stop using that term now and just call it AGI.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:18]:
We'll see. But you know, whatever. The revenue share thing continues. But the big thing to me was, you know, they're going right to Amazon and sure enough, next day Amazon announced and OpenAI announced the expansion of their partnership and they're, they're getting the whole meal deal. So the OpenAI models are all going to be available on Amazon Bedrock, which is this is through AWS Amazon or sorry, ChatGPT Codex, available through Amazon Bedrock. Bedrock will use OpenAI to manage AI agents. And of course now Amazon's promoting this as this is where everyone always wanted this stuff to be. This is great for everybody.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:02]:
And you know, it's fair to say like AWS has incredible share and I mean not just market share, but like mind share for developers that are producing whatever they're put, whether they're like mobile apps or cloud services, whatever. And so Amazon is the major player, I would say, in cloud infrastructure. This is huge for them and it's huge for OpenAI because the funnel has opened up nicely for them. Amazon is one of two other companies essentially on earth other than Microsoft, who could provide infrastructure at this scale or better even depending on how you want to look at that. So not surprising, but still it's on

Richard Campbell [01:24:40]:
and said it took this long, but also it's like just when OpenAI seemed to have lost the lead to Anthropic, now you're over there like Amazon must be also annoyed, but yeah, you got to add it to the offer.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:54]:
Yes, I mean Amazon has also a major investment in Anthropic and major partnership with Anthropic and they're doing what they should be doing as an infrastructure provider, which is we'll give you your choice of models and you as the developer can pick whatever you want and. Great.

Richard Campbell [01:25:08]:
Yeah, because I don't see this harming Microsoft in any way.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:12]:
Well, the only. So the one possible way is actually Amazon or Azure, the other a word, Azure growth in the future. So obviously Azure growth has slowed compared to the 70% year over year days, but it's still high 30s, maybe up to near 40%. I mean it's possible that this will drive some. Not so much, not because of AI in particular, but if you're going to use OpenAI on AWS, you might also be using AWS across the board for whatever other infrastructure. And I think some of those folks

Richard Campbell [01:25:50]:
that you would actually send people to Azure because they wanted to use OpenAI,

Paul Thurrott [01:25:53]:
people were using Azure to some degree perhaps because they wanted to use the OpenAI models, you know, or Microsoft's versions of them, whatever it might be. So we'll see. This is an interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:26:04]:
Yeah. I don't think anybody. I think Everybody went to OpenAI and so they were using Azure under the hood.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:09]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:26:09]:
And maybe didn't they need an account for that?

Paul Thurrott [01:26:12]:
Yeah, but that, but that could show in Microsoft's earnings in the future. I guess. We'll, you know, we'll see. We'll see. It's going to be hard to know the truth of this, but.

Richard Campbell [01:26:20]:
Well, considering how they do financial reporting.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:23]:
Exactly. That's what. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:26:24]:
Don't get them started.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:26]:
Richard, did I ever mention. Have you ever looked at it. Not even once have you ever looked at an Amazon financial report? If it was a hundred thousand words, 99,000 of them are things we did this quarter that have nothing to do with anything. You have to really. But they do provide hard numbers on aws, some.

Richard Campbell [01:26:44]:
Whatever number they're leading on. That's the hard number that appears at that point.

Leo Laporte [01:26:47]:
One of the things. And I'm sure we'll talk about this later on intelligent machines, but wasn't there language in the OpenAI Microsoft contract that said as soon as OpenAI hit AGI.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:59]:
Right. Everything changes. Yeah, that's changed. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:27:03]:
So does that mean they can now announce they have AGI within.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:07]:
No. So that announcement has to be verified by a third party. Both sides agree to. And even if they do it, Microsoft can. I'm doing this off the top of my head. I should probably just read this to be sure. But I believe I'm looking at the wrong announcement. I'm like, why don't I see anything about Microsoft in here? Oh, it's the Amazon announcement, I believe.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:26]:
Let me just make sure before I say this out loud, because I want to make sure I get this right.

Leo Laporte [01:27:28]:
I think, by the way, for users, this is huge because now with aws, you have access to some really good new models.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:36]:
Well, AWS arguably is where a lot of developers wanted to be already. Like the Madrid. And now they're there too. And it's like, well, this is. That's what I mean. Like that's how maybe it could impact. Let me just look for a second. I just want to.

Leo Laporte [01:27:47]:
This is also because OpenAI is about to IPO as is anthropic. And OpenAI is starting to. You starting to see stories like in the Wall Street Journal saying Open AI is struggling, they're not doing as well,

Paul Thurrott [01:27:57]:
they're not meeting well. There are these reports like that come out of internal documentation where it's like, we're not even close to meeting our revenue.

Leo Laporte [01:28:03]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:04]:
Expectations. We already are on the hook for close to a trillion dollars by the way. We have, there's no chance, by the way, there was never any chance they were going to pay that. But this will maybe help a little bit.

Leo Laporte [01:28:13]:
But also they, they said, I can't remember what they had a goal for the number of users that they didn't meet and this was one way to improve that is by going on aws, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:28:22]:
Yeah, it could be. Yeah, could be. I think Microsoft was struggling to meet their infrastructure demand. Well, we know that. I mean that's a fact.

Leo Laporte [01:28:28]:
Is that what was. Is that why. Because why would Microsoft give this up?

Paul Thurrott [01:28:31]:
Right. Well, so actually that's a way to look.

Richard Campbell [01:28:34]:
That part happened a while ago.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:35]:
Right. Like, well, what does Microsoft get? So Microsoft continues to get access to their models which, you know, depending on how you look at, are among the best in the world. Obviously that will continue past the point that AGI is declared. Now I think that's different. I think it stopped at AGI before Microsoft continues to get intellectual property rights to OpenAI research. Research meaning experimental models they've created that may or may not ever become public but are testing things and we'll see where the things go. And so they get access to that. That's actually kind of important.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:06]:
Like I said, Microsoft can pursue AGI independently of them. The revenue share agreement they have right now, which I have to feel is somewhat lopsided, but whatever remains in place until one of either company achieves AGI. That's interesting but here's the, here's the little financial bit. Both companies have agreed to spread out the payments for revenue share over a longer period of time which they've not specified. Which is the indication to me that neither company is even close to meeting their expectations on revenues from, you know, AI based products essentially. So in other words, OpenAI is not going to have this money maybe ever, but not anytime soon. So this is an acknowledgment of that implicit and we've talked about Microsoft struggles with copilot is that first party or whatever. I don't think either company is.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:01]:
I mean they're spending so much on infrastructure. There's some little bit of money going back and forth sort of on paper, but not really. Right. I'm sure a lot of it's in the form of what I would call Azure credits or something or whatever you want to say it.

Richard Campbell [01:30:13]:
It's not like they have 250 billion to spend on Azure, which was part of the requirements.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:19]:
Yeah, I mean, Microsoft owns a smaller percentage of the public company of the public company than they did of the private company, if that makes sense. So 27 versus 32.5.

Richard Campbell [01:30:29]:
But at the current, you can't sell versus 27 of something you can and don't know why.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:34]:
Look, whatever. I feel like this company could crater, frankly. I mean, Microsoft no meaning open AI,

Richard Campbell [01:30:40]:
but more like Netscape every day.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:43]:
Oh, God. Well, Netscape had a real product. No, yeah, okay, fair enough. No, this, I think this, I think that's a good comparison, actually.

Richard Campbell [01:30:50]:
But the real question you have to ask is who is aol? That's the question.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:55]:
They think it's Amazon aws.

Richard Campbell [01:30:57]:
Actually, I think it's Oracle, but yeah, okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:59]:
Or some. Yeah, there you go. Maybe a combination of those two. But Microsoft's stake in OpenAI, remember this company directly, it's really hard to know how much they've spent on this company, but we know it's 11 to 13 billion.

Richard Campbell [01:31:11]:
It's what they directly invested is 13.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:14]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:31:14]:
That's not what they spent.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:16]:
No, it's a lot more. But they're the value. 27% of the value of OpenAI at the time of this announcement was $135 billion.

Richard Campbell [01:31:25]:
That was the valuation of the company.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:27]:
I don't know who you sell that to. You know, like, I don't know. I mean, not that they would right

Richard Campbell [01:31:32]:
now, but I wonder, you know, what's not in this agreement? What's the rules around the IPO? Could they unload their 27? I bet. No, I bet. Because normally that's the rules anyway for is.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:43]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:31:44]:
The. The precursor investors are locked out of the sale.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:47]:
Yeah. There was also that weird period where Microsoft and then Apple, briefly. We're going to have a person on the OpenAI board that did or did not have voting rights or whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:31:57]:
It was an observer. And as soon as Apple wanted their observer too, they're like, how about no observers?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:02]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, the OpenAI Microsoft partnership deal, whatever you want to call it, was good until it wasn't obviously at

Richard Campbell [01:32:11]:
some point until they made demands that even Microsoft's going, right, we can't do that. And you don't need that.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:17]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:32:18]:
Right. You're asking us to validate your, your growth model by building infrastructure that you.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:24]:
Is. You're never going to be able to pay for it.

Richard Campbell [01:32:26]:
You're never going to be able.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:27]:
Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, Microsoft, every time you have

Richard Campbell [01:32:31]:
to go back for more money, you have to make bigger promises until you finally, you're starting to promise more than the number of atoms in the universe and you're like, I don't think you're going to pull that off.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:38]:
I mentioned this a week or two ago, but there's an Amy Hood interview in Bloomberg. Everyone should look up if they care about this stuff where, you know, she talked about some of the struggles or whatever with this kind of stuff because there's a, I think of it as a, I think of it as. I'm not sure what I think of it. Anyway, she framed the infrastructure problem a little differently than I would have, but probably knows a little bit more about it than I do. So it's just there's a capacity constraint and as big as these companies are, there's a capacity constraint everywhere really.

Richard Campbell [01:33:12]:
At some point Microsoft was out in the lead on a lot of this stuff and even let go of some property and power rights that the other companies grabbed immediately and were criticized.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:21]:
That's what's interesting. I mean, look, at some point it's going to be a what man would want them now situation with OpenAI. But they'll bounce around. They'll, they'll go to, they've gotten their Oracle. They'll be at wws. Google may jump in there too. We'll see. And every time there's a new announcement, Google will be the best place, their TPOs are the best.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:38]:
You know, we'll, we'll have all that marketing stuff and we'll see if they'll fake it till they make it or if they just fake it and then disappear.

Richard Campbell [01:33:45]:
Google's gonna have to focus on Gemini. They can't be interested in other people's models. Amazon's models just never amounted to anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:53]:
So unless it's just, I mean, a pure Google cloud play where it's like, look, we have infrastructure, we can host these. You know, in other words like Amazon,

Richard Campbell [01:34:01]:
Google Things and pure is not one of them. Right? Like thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:05]:
No, but I, but they all, Sorry. You know, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and I guess Oracle. But those three companies all have first and third part. Yeah, first and third party services. Among the third party services are what I would call infrastructure Google Cloud. Is that for Google? If Google or OpenAI models running on Google somehow made sense to either company? Well, of course it makes sense to Google. Who cares? They're a customer. But I mean there's a whole big

Richard Campbell [01:34:32]:
chunk of Google that cares very much about we. If you want AI, you're running Gemini. And I think they got more political clout than GCP has But it, I

Paul Thurrott [01:34:41]:
mean the Amazon model suggests to me that just being the electricity, so to speak, the infrastructure is a good business.

Richard Campbell [01:34:49]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:49]:
And in the same sense that like serving ads is a good business and all those other companies want to be part of that too. Like I could picture Google being like, look, we. Google Cloud is a distant third place in this market. It's always going to be. This might be a way to goose that a little bit.

Richard Campbell [01:35:05]:
The same way that Ballmer would attack anyone that would try and build something out of Microsoft that wasn't directly beneficial to Windows.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:11]:
Yeah. You think they're still. That's where they are now with Gemini?

Richard Campbell [01:35:14]:
Well, I think when you think of Google and you think of Gemini. Gemini, what is Google's primary product? It's telemetry. And Gemini is an excellent telemetry generator. So why would you ever impair that?

Paul Thurrott [01:35:26]:
So to use Microsoft's overly colorful language, this would be like Google knifing the baby, so to speak, and they're not willing to do that.

Richard Campbell [01:35:33]:
But more importantly, the, the senior VP in charge of Gemini has more clout than anybody at gcp. And if GCP makes any move that might jeopardize anything related to Gemini, they will be stabbed in the dark.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:44]:
But Richard, that would be like Google purposefully ruining search so that they could serve more ads because people had to click twice on links. Oh, they did do that. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. You're absolutely right.

Richard Campbell [01:35:56]:
I mean, just being cynical enough.

Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:01]:
I thought I was cynical enough, but I guess I. Look, we all have something to learn. It's okay.

Richard Campbell [01:36:06]:
But you know, we've seen this political battles between these different elements within the company. And so, you know, my immediate response is nah. The guys running Gemini have lots of clout and I think you're. Anything that doesn't give Gemini love is not going to have a chance.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:20]:
Yeah. I mean Google Cloud in many ways to, to Gemini is Intel Foundry. To Intel's chip business, it's like, look, if, if all you do is surf us, it's gonna be all good. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:36:31]:
And if you do anything else, we will crush you like a box.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:33]:
Well, especially if it hurts us. Yeah, exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:36:36]:
Doesn't benefit us or.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:38]:
Right. There you go. Okay, that could be. I don't, you know, I don't have that. This is not my part of the world. But I think you're. That makes sense to me. So.

Richard Campbell [01:36:44]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:45]:
Okay. Well, that was depressing. So if you are a Microsoft 365 copilot, customer. I'm sorry, A and B, you now have agentic features available to you through word, Excel and PowerPoint. So this is similar to. I'm forgetting the term for this, but Anthropic has released these.

Richard Campbell [01:37:06]:
This type of cowork, which is this week's run ads, for that matter. The timing is impeccable.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:11]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:37:12]:
And it was the M365 conference last week. That's where all this stuff was announced.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:16]:
Yep. And we're still, you know, I think Microsoft here is kind of straddling the line. I brought up the Stevie Batiste stuff last week, but you have the AI on the outside, AI on the inside. I think this is kind of a little mix of those in a copilot sense. It's literally a sidebar. You know, we're kind of used to those in Microsoft Office, but, you know, but more deeply integrated into these products maybe than would be possible otherwise. I suppose. So I.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:41]:
This is this. Well, other than the fact that you actually do have to pay for a separate subscription to get this right, which is kind of squishy thing here, this is a somewhat. Well, it isn't though. I was going to say a captive audience because they're already paying for Microsoft 365. I suppose there are. And Richard brings this point up sometimes, you know, that writing the one check is more beneficial, you know, in some ways that as long as the functionality is, you know, close enough, comparable, rather than writing a second checked in.

Richard Campbell [01:38:10]:
Well, that's what this week's run ads is about is like. It was not comparable.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:15]:
No, it wasn't. But I mean, maybe, you know, assuming that it is at some point or is today, maybe then it be then maybe that becomes a good business for Microsoft. If I live long enough, I'd like to see Outlook eradicated from the planet Earth.

Richard Campbell [01:38:31]:
Good luck with that one.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:32]:
I know it's. It is the. We used to call these, what, PIMs, right. Personal information managers. It's like the, the PIM version of Cancer or I. I don't know what to call it. It's like the cockroach, I guess, of, of productivity. They're doing this to Outlook too.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:52]:
So obviously there's going to be Copilot integration. Microsoft 365 Copilot integration. Just Copilot, whatever you want to call it, that will allow you to manage your email, your calendar, your contacts, et cetera.

Richard Campbell [01:39:03]:
And I mean, pretty much the only thing anybody ever wanted from LLPs is like, can you help me tame my mail? Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:12]:
Right. Listen, if we could all Spend less time in email and less time in teams meetings. Our lives would all be less stressful and healthier. And who knows, maybe is Copilot the cure or just the symptom of the problem? I don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:39:26]:
Copilot can actually search my email in my Outlook email in a meaningful way. That would be awesome. But you. I don't imagine it can't.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:33]:
I was gonna say. What are you talking about? That's. Yeah, search is still that thing that should have been the low hanging fruit and the. The big win for customers with AI. And it is somewhere. But to my knowledge not so far with Copilot. But we'll get there, I think. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:58]:
Speaking of Outlook and how much I

Richard Campbell [01:39:59]:
hate

Paul Thurrott [01:40:02]:
was down for quite a bit of time this past Week and specifically

Richard Campbell [01:40:07]:
Outlook.com not exchange online services.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:10]:
Yeah, right. I'd like to see it just go down and not come back. But I guess like I said, I don't think that's gonna happen.

Richard Campbell [01:40:18]:
But Hotmail,

Paul Thurrott [01:40:21]:
Hotmail used to be a free ESD based HTML email system which you know, in the day was probably pretty good and now it's something out of Hell's Seventh Circle. I don't know. Anyway, I'll just move on from this because I hate it so much. Week ago, two weeks ago maybe we talked about GitHub Copilot was rumored and then Microsoft confirmed would be moving to what they're now calling. I called it a token based. Token based billing model. They're calling it a usage based billing model. Same thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:53]:
It's the same thing.

Richard Campbell [01:40:54]:
You are 100% correct. Like it is absolutely a token based model.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:57]:
Yeah. And tokens are fun because you get to be charged in both directions. But this is an interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:41:03]:
Sorry, the request based model had problems.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:05]:
Oh yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:41:06]:
I knew folks who wrote the most extraordinary requests through those tools.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:12]:
Yeah. So you could make the argument that a single prompt, I guess we'll call it is a request. It's one unit of billing if you will.

Richard Campbell [01:41:22]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:22]:
It could generate multiple instances of things running on the server and then multiple instances of it coming back to you either to give you some bit of data or some request on its part because it needs more information, whatever it is and those things all cost money. And. And I'm oversimplified.

Richard Campbell [01:41:40]:
I have a chat, I have a channel, it's signal where a group of us were trying to figure out what was the prompt that was would take the longest to run and slow down as a single request. We got over three hours this Is

Paul Thurrott [01:41:49]:
like, that's every year there's a C language obfuscation thing where you can write like a single line of code that does the most or whatever. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:41:55]:
Does the most that nobody can read.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:56]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:41:58]:
And all the lisp guys are like, yeah, that.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:02]:
Hold my beer. I got this.

Richard Campbell [01:42:04]:
We were writing the prompts from Doom.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:06]:
So this is like anything else. Like, you know, telecoms announced like, all you can eat Internet access. And then there's like the three people that abused the hell out of it. They're like, all right, we're not doing this anymore.

Richard Campbell [01:42:15]:
Yeah, now we got a terabyte cap or.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:18]:
Yeah, it's. It's possible for some big percentage of the user base, this won't change things. And then it's possible for those who used it the most, this will change things pretty dramatically. And I think that's the point. They're. They're trying to kind of right. Price it, if that makes sense. You know, let's actually charge what this thing costs for.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:32]:
You know, what an idea.

Richard Campbell [01:42:34]:
But you're seeing this movement across everything to do with these tools is, hey, we're going to have to actually start getting costs right now. Like the. This is how the bubble ends. When you start caring about efficiency.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:47]:
The problem is from the perspective of a user. This is insertification. Right. You were, you gave me this thing. I got used to it.

Richard Campbell [01:42:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:56]:
The fact that I was. It was costing you money. Feels like it's your problem. I don't understand how you didn't solve that. But. Okay, but now you give me the cost and I don't like it.

Richard Campbell [01:43:03]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:03]:
And so we'll see. We'll see what this looks like their problem.

Richard Campbell [01:43:06]:
And they've passed it back to you.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:07]:
That's right. We're passing the problem on to the consumer. Wait, that's not the phrase they're doing. I think I just referenced this a week or two ago too. This is kind of funny, but people have been around in the Microsoft space for a long, long time will know that back in 2008, they launched something called Windows Azure. And at the time it was only. This is one where I'll need bridge itself. At the time, was it only infrastructure as a service or no.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:30]:
Software as a service?

Richard Campbell [01:43:32]:
Yeah. It was the only platform Web roll and Apple. One thing no nobody wanted.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:37]:
Right. Okay. Right. Well, you know, and the baby steps.

Richard Campbell [01:43:40]:
The joke is they were describing serverless compute.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:45]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:43:46]:
Like five years before anybody wanted it.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:50]:
Yes. And we can thank Ray Ozzy for this because he had already created products that had this kind of back end infrastructure where this was a thing and it was like, this is.

Richard Campbell [01:43:59]:
It was his architect, Avatab, who was one of those. Also one of those guys who would say, if you don't understand this, it's because you're stupid.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:06]:
Yeah, well, compared to him, everyone is.

Richard Campbell [01:44:08]:
But no, he.

Leo Laporte [01:44:09]:
He had.

Richard Campbell [01:44:10]:
As is typical of smart people, he had gotten all the way to the end game. Right, Right. And you don't show your work like people wanted VMs. I bought VMs from Amazon. Sell me a VM. No, if you want a VM, you're stupid.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:24]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:44:25]:
You want this.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:26]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:44:27]:
And the first thing Guthrie did when he took it over in 2011, it made VMs.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:31]:
Yeah, right, right. Made what people wanted. Yeah. I would say maybe that's the wrong term. Gave people something they understood.

Richard Campbell [01:44:40]:
Understood. And then you build them a path to tell us, like we should have serverless. Yeah, that's a great idea.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:48]:
I've had two instances in my life, professionally, where I went into some Microsoft event and meeting and then I didn't understand anything they said. And one of them was, what do you call it? Quantum. Quantum computing. Which I. Yeah, I couldn't explain that right now. My life depended on it.

Richard Campbell [01:45:07]:
Feynman had this right, if you understand quantum computing, it's because you don't understand it.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:11]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:45:11]:
You're wrong.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:11]:
Right, Right. But the other one was Windows Azure. And. And the day they announced that, I sat in, the audience said, probably not ignite. What do you call it? Microsoft. Oh, pdg. Not tech. Okay, pvc.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:23]:
Fair enough. And I was like, wow, it was. And I walked out of the room and they had some PR people there and they're like, hey, we're going to have like a press only thing, you know, 20, 50 people an hour more. You could. If you have any questions. I'm like, I have nothing but questions. And I sat through that thing and I came out and saw the same woman. She said, how'd it go? I'm like, yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:41]:
I.

Richard Campbell [01:45:42]:
So you were still nice enough not to say. And I'm pretty sure you don't either.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:46]:
Yeah, I don't think anyone here knows. But the one thing they said, this wasn't at the announcement, but as Windows Azure wound its way through development, they got to the point where they were going to release it, but they didn't know what to charge for it. So what they said, they basically were going to the same model they're doing here with GitHub. Copilot, which was we're going to go to a usage based billing model. We don't actually know if this is fair, if anyone will even like it. So what we're going to do is for, I think it was for three months or some number of months, we're going to send you a pretend bill so you use it while it's free, it's still in pre production, whatever, and we're going to send you a bill as if you were paying for it and then you can see what that bill is and you can tell us if it's okay. And they're literally going to do this for GitHub Copilot. So in, I think it's in May, customers on, you know, these are paid plans obviously will get a pretend bill which they can go look at and then they can understand based on their usage that you know, maybe they were paying, what is it, 20 bucks a month probably for the pro version as an individual you can look at that bill and look, if you don't use it a lot, maybe it'll be less.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:44]:
I think for a lot of people it's gonna be a little bit more. But you know, this is, we're gonna find out.

Richard Campbell [01:46:48]:
So then you start assessing value. Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:46:50]:
Right, that's right.

Richard Campbell [01:46:52]:
I've got friends with multiple anthropic $200 max account.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:57]:
I was just gonna reference this. Exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:46:59]:
We're literally saying if it was $1,000.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:02]:
Yeah. So when as a, as a person, not as a professional developer or an infrastructure guy, when I hear about a $200 anything, whether it's chat, GPT, anthropic, cloud, GitHub, copilot I think has something like this. Probably whatever it is, I'm like 200 bucks a month, Are you kidding me? That's a car payment.

Leo Laporte [01:47:18]:
That's crazy.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:18]:
But you know what, if you're a professional developer or whatever it is, this is like, come on, this is the cost to do a business.

Richard Campbell [01:47:23]:
That's no problem. Well, and it's, you've now had enough time that this is your, your workflow and you're wildly productive and you've seen

Paul Thurrott [01:47:30]:
it work and you're like, no, 200 bucks a month is no problem. So you know, we'll see. I mean again, for me as an individual it's a problem. But, but I get it. Like I, I, you know, I think this is a. We'll see. I'm really curious to see where this, where this goes and what bills look like. You know, I don't know how Transparent.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:46]:
Microsoft will be. But you'll hear from customers and things and we'll find out. It's going to be kind of interesting. So that starts June 1st, but then in May you'll get a pretend bill and you can see, you know, see what it looks like. We'll see. Yeah, I'm just mentioning this for the humor factor, but OpenAI is apparently working on a phone, so to our earlier conversation. Great. I'm pretty sure, you know, they, they bought Johnny I've and his company, whatever it's going to be called because they can't keep the name, I guess, but whatever it is, and, and I believe there's some period of time where they can't in fact release a product.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:21]:
But that's okay because this isn't going to enter mass production until 2, at least two years from now. It's not, you know, instead of apps, it's going to be AI agents. It's the whole nightmare that everyone who hates AI feared this happening. Yep, it's happening. It's obviously happening. And okay, I mean, whatever, I have fun with that. Obviously it's gonna be, it's gonna have to be Android based, right? I mean like I,

Richard Campbell [01:48:49]:
yeah, but with no App Store. Because why would you need an App store when you have agents?

Paul Thurrott [01:48:52]:
Let's ask Amazon. Amazon, why would you need. Oh, that's why. Yeah, I mean, we'll see. I, I, I think the big bet

Richard Campbell [01:49:00]:
here is that we see this product, see the light of day.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:02]:
I know, well, so we talked about this a little bit earlier for whatever reason, but the notion of you have AI, it could be running in the cloud, it could be running locally, it doesn't matter. It's on a computer, it's on a phone, it doesn't matter. You have apps and you have online services and they're connectors of whatever types and we have these kind of what I would call a modern version of screen scraping for those apps that are not compliant with whatever standards we have now. I mean, there's ways to get data in and out of apps, etc. Yeah. The bet here is that this will be a lot more seamless and cloud based than it is today and that it's going to require a mindset change on the part of users. And this is something, this is oddly something Microsoft has been trying to do for at least three decades, which is get people to stop thinking about apps and thinking about what it is they're trying to accomplish. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:50]:
This was the document based UI in Windows 95. It was the people Centric UI in Windows Phone. The. And you know, the brands that make the apps and the services do not want this. Right. They want, you know, in other words, you're not editing a photo, you're running Photoshop. You know, they want you to think app first.

Richard Campbell [01:50:07]:
I can sell photoshop.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:09]:
Yeah, but OpenAI is. And I think other companies too are kind of counting on a mind shift change, which by the way, speaks to the natural language thing. And we'll talk about how this works in the creative market in a second. But this notion of some of these tools are complex. I may not want to learn them, I may not be able to learn them, I may not be paying for them, whatever it might be, whatever it is. But I know what I want to do. I want to remove the red eye from a photo. I want to take that person out of the corner of the photo, if we're talking about photos, or I want to, you know, edit a document or whatever it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:38]:
And I want it to be whatever font. I want it to match our brand, our branding and our whatever style guide we have, et cetera, et cetera. You know, today those things all require someone to know the tool and where the options are and how to use them and all that kind of stuff. And the idea here is actually very appealing, even though it's very different, which is just tell it what you want and it does it and you don't care what it uses on the back end. If it's using Adobe Photoshop, fantastic. If it's not fantastic, who cares? As long as it doesn't. You're asking for. So I'm not saying this isn't going to work.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:07]:
I'm just saying this mind shift change has never worked, you know, in the real world yet. It doesn't mean it can't. And maybe AI is the thing that does put that over the top.

Richard Campbell [01:51:17]:
Maybe you got to make the product first. And, and let's face it, if that product was going to work, wouldn't it have already? Because I've got put chat GPT, I can put Perplexity, I can put any of these tools on my phone and then when notice I'm not using any apps.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:33]:
So I mentioned this. I wanted this year I'd like to figure out the video game thing. One of the other things I want to figure out, I think it's like a focus month. Like sometime this year it won't be May, but sometime this year I do want to kind of figure out some set of tasks where I can automate something and Reduce the time and the drudgery and the. Whatever you know is there. Like right now, I use whatever apps I use to. I have a photo or an image, whatever it is, I crop it, resize it, post it onto my site. Is there some AI workflow that does exactly that and works as good or better than the manual process I'm doing now? The answer is almost certainly yes, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:10]:
And that's what, you know, that's what they're betting on, right, that this will be true across the board. This is Star Trek. It's what Leo's doing, actually. It's. You're talking to the AI and it's doing the thing you ask it to do. We need those.

Leo Laporte [01:52:21]:
I've got the holodeck working downstairs. I just.

Richard Campbell [01:52:24]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:24]:
You know, you are as. You're like the guy you're in. You're in a wagon going across the country. You have no idea what's out there, but you have a dream. And eventually we're going to have California. And, you know, like, right now, maybe you're the dawn of.

Richard Campbell [01:52:37]:
People are going to die of death.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:38]:
Exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:52:39]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:52:39]:
But, you know, we'll be feasting on leg of.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:42]:
Leg of Paul, basically.

Leo Laporte [01:52:44]:
Paul.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:45]:
Nicely marbled. No, but I mean, we need the pioneers, right? So.

Richard Campbell [01:52:50]:
Yeah, you can't have a revolution without a Donner Party.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:53]:
That's right. Yes. Blood will be spilled. So we'll see. That's. Anyway, that's the vision. And without even knowing the pride, who cares? And it's at least two years away, but I think there's something to it, I have to say. The notion that people today, and Leo does, and some others do, and it will get better, that can just talk.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:15]:
And it does the thing and it works. And you have to have enough experience with it where you stop thinking about it. It just does it. And you're like, my God, this just works. And then we're going to look back at what we're doing right now or 10 years ago or 50 years ago, whatever it is, and be like, wow, it's going to be like, I cannot believe we used to. And. And. And right now we're saying, I can't believe in the future we're going to.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:36]:
Dot, dot, dot. But, you know, that's. That's how life works.

Leo Laporte [01:53:39]:
Some of this is my own timing. As I age, I want to kind of have this in place when my memory starts to fail so I can have a little help.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:48]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:53:49]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:49]:
We. I think I made this comparison on a previous show, but it's like the. In the show Veep, the guy whispering into her ear.

Leo Laporte [01:53:56]:
Yes, that's the guy. I want my bag man.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:58]:
You want. Yes, you. That's one of the roles AI will provide because we go out in the world here, we meet, we know people, we don't remember people's names. I have to remember dogs names. There's like, I don't. You know, I'm mad at this. I have a notion note for all this. I don't remember things.

Leo Laporte [01:54:12]:
Is it a crazy idea, though, to think that. I think it's just. It's an augmenter of some kind.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:19]:
Of course it is. In other words, like, when I see a person I recognize and I know them, and I. And I immediately have, like, warm feelings from. Because I know them and we, you know, exchange whatever pleasantries and this thing can be like, by the way, his birthday is tomorrow.

Leo Laporte [01:54:32]:
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:32]:
You know, that's. I'm sorry, but that's undeniably useful now.

Leo Laporte [01:54:36]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:37]:
In the beginning, it's going to require stupid glasses. Eventually it'll be some kind of an implant. It will, you know, whatever, but.

Leo Laporte [01:54:42]:
Or maybe they're ready, though, when you

Paul Thurrott [01:54:44]:
have like, the flower that squirts water out of it, but also is recording everything, like, whatever it is, you know, whatever the form is. Right. It's going to evolve. Yeah. Undeniably useful.

Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:54]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:55]:
That's all.

Leo Laporte [01:54:55]:
I think glasses are a good form, actually, but.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:58]:
Yeah, but they're also an interim form, right? I mean.

Leo Laporte [01:55:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what it'll finally be.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:02]:
Maybe I say that having spent, like you put a contact in. It's backwards, take it out. Reverse, put it in backwards. Reverse, put it like, what's happening? You know, like. So maybe glasses are actually the best form. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:55:12]:
But yeah, you're right. Smart contact lenses might be.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:16]:
That will be a step. There's no doubt about it. You know, it'll be hearing aid type things.

Richard Campbell [01:55:19]:
He was all over this.

Leo Laporte [01:55:20]:
Yes, he sure is.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:21]:
I've been trying to get to AirPods. AirPods will do this right? Now that we've made it acceptable to wear Earth Buds in public. And actually, by the way, not only acceptable, but preferable to idiot on his phone watching a video or having a call where everyone in the restaurant gets to enjoy this. Right. It's actually better that you wear earbuds. We've made it socially acceptable, so that will be part of it too. Right. There's no doubt Apple will come up with something whenever.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:48]:
If they ever figure out AI Anyway,

Leo Laporte [01:55:51]:
well, they're certainly going to announce something at the WWDC in about a month. So we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:55]:
Yeah, we'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:55:56]:
I mean, they're the, they're the most likely, I think, company to try something like this.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:01]:
Of course. Oh, my God. In the home and then just generally for consumers who are out in the world. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:56:07]:
But we don't know if they'll do what we need. We just know that they'll be trying for sure, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:13]:
Yep. Yeah, I think, I think you're right.

Leo Laporte [01:56:15]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:15]:
All right, Little, Little, just let's wrap this. I'm sorry, Just, just too quickly. Sorry. This is too much. They're related. Adobe released their Firefly AI Assistant in some kind of a public beta. So if you were waiting on that, that's there and this is that. Describe what you want and it works across the apps and creative suite.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:31]:
So, you know, if you're a creator type, you use these apps, you pay for this thing. There it is. And we'll see. And you know, I think a lot of that workflow is going to be heavy app based in the beginning, but will become more and more of the conversational thing. And we'll see, you know, we'll see where that goes. And then anthropic, about 10 days ago announced, I don't think. Did they call it cloud creator design? Yeah, which is a capability for cloud where it can create design assets for creators. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:58]:
Which is really cool. Today they. Yes, right. So today announced just a long list of partners. It's like Affinity, Adobe, Autodesk, Blender, like across the board connectors so that those things can work with cloud. Right. So you can go in either directions. In some cases, like in Blender, there's going to be a cloud plugin in the app where it's there, you're going to be able to do.

Richard Campbell [01:57:22]:
Claude.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:22]:
Right, Claude. I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce these.

Richard Campbell [01:57:24]:
Not cloud.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:25]:
Look, I still say Pinterest. Dude, you got to understand, I'm never going to be able to get this name right.

Leo Laporte [01:57:30]:
But Claude.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:33]:
Is it Cloud or Claude?

Richard Campbell [01:57:34]:
It's called Claude.

Leo Laporte [01:57:36]:
C, L, O, D. Claude.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:38]:
That's a terrible word for an AI.

Leo Laporte [01:57:39]:
Anyway, well, you know, the new model from Open AI is called Spud, so there's that.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:47]:
We're gonna use it to grow plants on Mars.

Richard Campbell [01:57:50]:
Okay, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:53]:
Whatever. Spud, like Spud Web. The little guy that played basketball that could dunk.

Leo Laporte [01:57:58]:
Right, The. The dog.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:00]:
Yeah. Oh, Spud, right.

Leo Laporte [01:58:02]:
Wasn't it the Budweiser Mascot Spud.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:04]:
What was that dog's name?

Leo Laporte [01:58:08]:
Let's not tax Paul's brain.

Richard Campbell [01:58:09]:
I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:10]:
Geez. I already can't. I can't hold on. The things. I know.

Leo Laporte [01:58:12]:
Spuds McKenzie, Spuds MacKenzie.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:15]:
There you go. Hilarious. Yeah. Eventually, we'll have a Budweiser AI and there'll probably be Spuds. It'll be a frontier model, and God knows it will hallucinate a lot because it's drunk all the time.

Leo Laporte [01:58:26]:
Anyway, I did get an email from. He said, could you tell Paul not to call it Cloud?

Paul Thurrott [01:58:33]:
This is like. I. Like, this is like calling someone's parent, you know, I know.

Leo Laporte [01:58:37]:
I get the emails. You know, you really ought to tell

Paul Thurrott [01:58:40]:
Steve to knock him out. It's like, you know, he's available on the Internet, too. You can just. Well, interestingly. And my. One of my. My tip today is based on an email just like that. So we'll.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:49]:
Okay, we'll go in the opposite direction. Okay. Anyway, so like, 50 plus tools across all these major apps. So look, this is the thing we were just talking about. This is it happening in the creator space, creative space.

Richard Campbell [01:59:02]:
So it's exciting.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:03]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:59:06]:
Now, yes, it's time to prepare yourself because the Back of the book is coming up. But before we do that, ladies and gentlemen, Paul Thurrott. Richard Campbell, you listen to Windows Weekly, and it's time for the Xbox segment.

Richard Campbell [01:59:20]:
Paul.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:21]:
Yeah. How are we doing on time? Oh, I'm gonna try to rant. I'll try to raise. Well, I want to do a long one. I always feel like I'm. You got short sticks. No pressure. I'm going to spend 6 of it doing this.

Leo Laporte [01:59:36]:
You should never do Radio Man.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:37]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:59:38]:
It was. Man, that network clicked.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:41]:
We've all done the thing where you're sitting on stage and there's a little timer down there, and you're like, it's hard. You know, this stuff's hard. By the way, Alphabet and Amazon just announced earnings. Fantastic.

Leo Laporte [01:59:51]:
Oh, yes. Today, Microsoft. Yeah, Meta.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:54]:
Yep. The rest of my day screen is what I just saw. Okay. Fantastic. So big news. Out of Microsoft last week, or out of Xbox, I guess Microsoft Gaming, part of the return of Xbox, was not just a phrase. Asher Scheimer announced that the Xbox as Xbox as a business, or, sorry, Microsoft Gaming, which is the overreaching business for all this stuff, will be renamed, rebranded to Xbox, which I think a lot of us like. Yeah, nice.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:19]:
That's what it should be. Right? And you know, they're saying all the right happy words are on Xbox. The one thing I really like is how vocal they're being and how public they are. The Asher Sharma and then Matt Booty, who I think is like the chief content officer of Xbox. Right. He's the guy who's been around for a long time. He's been around almost 20 years, I think are just talking to everybody and just saying all the right things. I mean, obviously there's certain things they can't say.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:44]:
A lot of people are asking about exclusives, are you gonna. And it's like, well, we're talking about it. I don't think the end game is that too much changes. But they're doing what Windows is doing with this pain point thing in Windows 11, which is like, look, we hear you. We're going to address this stuff. You know, they lowered the price of Game Pass, etc. They're making a lot of good noises. I like it, like how vocal these guys are being and how positive the news is.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:08]:
It's been nice like this. You know, we've had a couple of really rough years with Xbox and I'm not blaming Phil Spencer, anybody who ran that part of the business at the time. But it's, it's really neat that the like, you know, Asha Sharma is kind of an unknown. She came in, everyone was like, what's going on? Are they winding it down? Is that what this is like? They want her to fail? No, it's very clear. They want. This is a big thing for Microsoft. They want this to succeed. It's awesome what's happening.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:34]:
So I'll just leave it at that for now. Among the things that people have asked her about is Microsoft. Two years ago, I think back when the antitrust stuff with the App Store started happening with Apple and, and of course Google as well, Microsoft started saying, yeah, we're going to put an Xbox mobile game store on iOS and Android. And then they never did. So the deal there is like. She's like, look, I just walked into the job two minutes ago. Give me a second. But this is still on the table.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:59]:
We still want to do this. A lot of it's going to be based on whether enough regulators around the world reign in these app stores. I think they will. So the plan still is to have some form of Xbox mobile game store on mobile. So there's that. I think it was November, but maybe December, whenever it was, Valve announced this new Steam computer. What's the. It's a Steam.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:22]:
Not Steam Deck, but the computer. Like the Steam machine.

Richard Campbell [02:02:25]:
Yeah. Called the Gabe Cube.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:27]:
Yeah. The first Thing I thought, you know, because was I noticed, I'm like, you guys never mentioned how much this is going to cost or when it's coming out. And then they never released it, but they just announced the big peripheral for this thing, which will still work with other things as well. It's a kind of a first class peripheral for any platform really is the Steam controller. And if you were worried that these things were going to be expensive, you were right because this thing's going to be 99 bucks.

Richard Campbell [02:02:52]:
Wow. Controller.

Leo Laporte [02:02:55]:
Oh, yep.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:56]:
So a list price on a standard Xbox wireless controller these days is probably 69.99. You can often get them for 59.99 or less, you know, depending on sales and stuff. So, yeah, that's expensive. It has the two sticks and all the buttons and all the, you know, the D pad and blah, blah, blah. But it also has an Xbox controller. Yeah, but, but below those sticks are two trackpads. There's one on each side, right?

Richard Campbell [02:03:21]:
Yeah, touchpads.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:22]:
And that's interesting.

Richard Campbell [02:03:23]:
So very well placed to be bumped accidentally by your thumbs while you're on the sticks.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:27]:
Yeah, I mean, based on my inherent clumsiness and my problems typing, you know, this would probably be me shooting myself on the head in Call of Duty a lot or whatever the equivalent is. But it's interesting. So 99 bucks. I mean, I would be shocked if the Steam machine came in at anything under a thousand, frankly.

Richard Campbell [02:03:47]:
Thousand dollars. But honest to goodness, I was thinking, you know, the next Xbox is going to be in that price range too.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:52]:
Like now they're making happy noises that it won't be because one of the core tenants of this new Xbox, so to speak, is that things will be affordable. Now, I. This is a razor. Razor blade kind of situation.

Richard Campbell [02:04:03]:
2028 and the RAM crisis will be over.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:06]:
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's gonna be. Yeah, we'll see. So we'll see. Yeah, we'll see.

Richard Campbell [02:04:12]:
All right.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:14]:
See you got.

Leo Laporte [02:04:15]:
You got it done in five minutes.

Richard Campbell [02:04:16]:
You mowed that down, friend.

Leo Laporte [02:04:18]:
You mowed it down.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:19]:
I had incentive. I had incentive. You just, you just want to hear a.

Richard Campbell [02:04:23]:
About prohibition, that's what.

Leo Laporte [02:04:25]:
Yes, Whiskey is around.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:27]:
Unfortunately, I'm probably going to be writing an article about someone's earnings, but.

Leo Laporte [02:04:30]:
Yeah, well, Microsoft earnings just around the corner probably right about now.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:34]:
Right. I know. That's what I'm.

Leo Laporte [02:04:38]:
All right. You look at that while I tell everybody why it's so important to support this kind of independent content.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:49]:
Yeah. So I had a twit listener. He Was listening. I think it was MacBook Mac Break weekly. He was talking, he described it as a Mac OS feature. But there's a Mac app or solution called UTM which is one of several ways to run virtualized machine virtual machines on a Mac. This is a little problematic under Apple Silicon for whatever reasons, but most people have heard probably a Parallels desktop, which is the big way, but it's paid and you pay every year. So that's kind of a problem.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:17]:
And then I think VMware still makes Fusion on the Mac. But I haven't looked at that in a while. But the question had come up like that. One of the problems is you can't like buy like Windows 10 on ARM, you know, like Windows 11 ARM, sorry. And you know in, in Parallels they offer like a push through thing where it goes to whatever online store and. But the thing is the two things you need to know are if you buy this officially what you're buying is a Windows product key. And a Windows 11 product key works on x64 or ARM. So you could just buy it.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:48]:
You could buy it from Microsoft directly. You could find a store that sells it, you could buy it there. It doesn't matter how you get it. But what you're getting is a product key and you can enter that in Windows running virtually on a Mac or wherever and it will work, it will activate and you'll be fine. So you can do that. That's one thing. The other one is yeah, don't do that. So I have my MacBook Air here.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:09]:
I don't remember if I did this right after I got here, right before I came here, but I did reinstall everything. I was trying to just use the Mac by itself without Parallels. There's a couple of Windows things I really need. So I did eventually reinstall Parallels. And the one thing I've been doing on this trip was just didn't pay for it. I mean I actually have product keys I could use. I have paid for Windows if I wanted to. I kind of wanted to see how long it would go.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:34]:
And every once in a while it's like, hey, you should activate this. I'm like, all right, close. And I don't do it. And it works fine. It's fine. Now if you're running apps full screen or if you're running in a virtual environment, you will actually have a note activated watermark, which is not great. I just run the apps in whatever it's called Coherence. And so I don't see this.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:51]:
I don't really care. Do not buy this thing from Microsoft and pay 200 bucks or whatever the price is. There are product keys everywhere. And this is like the argument I made about Spotify. If it was illegal, Paul, the EU would step in and prevent it. But you can go, I have bought product keys myself from productkeys.com game card shop show. When an office is one, you can get a valid Windows 11 Pro license key for as little as 9.99. Do that.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:22]:
Because, by the way, let's say it does. Let's say a year from now, it falls apart. Somehow it stops working. You only pay 10 bucks. You know, don't worry about. Who cares. Like, that's all.

Richard Campbell [02:07:31]:
You're gonna be fine.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:32]:
You're gonna be fine. You can tell them Paul sent you. No, don't do that. The other thing. Well, so that was a. That was a listener, I guess, wrote in. But just Yesterday, Microsoft released PowerToys 0.99. Someday 1.0, baby.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:51]:
It actually has two new utilities. And both of these are awesome. One is called Power Display. If you enable it, it puts a little, you know, monitor looking icon down in the tray. And it allows you to control the features of multiple displays without having to go into the Settings app, which is actually kind of a pain in the butt, by the way. So this is especially. This is useful for anybody. But if you have multiple monitors, like on this system three, you can adjust the volume, the brightness, contrast, color profile, and other features just from a little fly out, you select the monitor.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:19]:
It has the features right there. Awesome. So that's cool. The other one, this is interesting how people have described this. The other one is called Grab and Move. And what you basically do is a keyboard shortcut. And then you can grab any window running in Windows, like an app or whatever window, and you can move it around. And so people see this like, oh, Linux has had that for 20 years, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:38]:
And it's like, yeah, but that's not actually why this thing exists. If you are familiar with Windows, you can do this yourself right now, unless you have installed something that overrides this for literally dating back, I think, 30 years. There's a keyboard shortcut called Alt space that brings down the window menu of any application, including modern applications. And there's some options in there. You can close it, minimize it, whatever. But one of the options is Move. And if you select Move, there's a sub menu or no, I'm sorry, no, it just puts it in move mode. And then you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move that window around the screen.

Leo Laporte [02:09:14]:
Nice. Because dragging is so, well, the pro.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:18]:
The reason this is good to know is because you can have an app window that's slightly off screen, especially in a multi screen environment, by the way, where you're like, I can't grab the thing and move it. It's off screen. Like the title bar is off screen. So I can't even access that thing. So if you know this keyboard shortcut, you just do alt space and then move the arrow keys and then you can move it around. Except in modern days, there are multiple apps, including some built into Windows, that actually override this by default. So one example is Copilot. Copilot seizes the alt space keyboard shortcut if you install PowerToys.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:48]:
Ironically, there is a utility that is sort of a start menu replacements that I've just zoned on the name of. It doesn't matter. But anyway, it by default overrides that keyboard shortcut as well. So for people that are using something that overrides this, this is another way to do it. Right? So it's the same thing. It's a way to grab the menu and then move it around by holding down a key. It's. I think it's like alt plus right click by default or whatever, but you can map it to something else, which is good.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:21]:
And this is kind of a way for these things to work in harmony. So the point of this is you always have a way to move a window, even if you can't select the title bar or the window control. Super good. And then a bunch of improvements across several of the utility. Oh, Windows Command palette is the name of the thing. I couldn't think of that thing. Picked up a clock and a desk. Calculator History and a lot of other features.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:43]:
Keyboard manager, which is awesome, especially if you want to kill the co pilot key, which I always do. Zoom it, which is the Mark Rudzinovich utility. Imagery size, etc. This is like a giant release. Strongly, strongly recommend anyone using windows uses PowerToys. And it just got better. Nice.

Leo Laporte [02:11:01]:
Love PowerToys. Awesome.

Richard Campbell [02:11:03]:
It's good stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:11:04]:
Now it's time for Mr. Richard Campbell and our run as a radio.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:10]:
I'm going to mute myself. I apologize. I got to. I'm going to try to work.

Leo Laporte [02:11:13]:
Yeah, yeah. You know, before we do whiskey, because I already promised the beginning of the show that Paul would not say anything of importance.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:20]:
Oh, I'm going to mute myself right now and I won't say anything important till Friday, so.

Leo Laporte [02:11:23]:
No, no, no, we have earnings palooza. Paul will give us just a little summary after the. After the run is radio before we go into whiskey. So if you can just a little. You know, I know Microsoft stock is going down.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:37]:
I thought seven minutes was a problem. You're talking like two minutes now.

Leo Laporte [02:11:40]:
You're gonna have two minutes after Richard. And then. And then we. He will hold his peace until next Wednesday. Okay, fair enough. Don't hold it too tight. All right. Now, Richard, I may have made a

Richard Campbell [02:11:52]:
mistake with this show because I actually recorded this show at the end of February. This is my friend Sharon Weaver, who has been in the consulting business for years and years, SharePoint and M365 and so forth, and was a big. Has always been advocated M365 copilot. But then she took Claude Cowork out for a spin back in January and just said, like, this is what you were wanting from M365 Copilot when it came to stuff like Excel and PowerPoint. And so it's like, well, let's talk about it. And, you know, we actually got dug into this idea of, I think Microsoft's trying to do too much. You have all these different groups inside of the Excel team all trying to make their contribution. And so in some ways, doing everything meant nothing worked where with Claude Copilot.

Richard Campbell [02:12:38]:
Their approach to their Excel cowork tool was, you know, here's the six things lots of people need to do, and it does those things really well, like just the layout, ability to tweak the look of your sheet, you know, move things around and so forth. Incredibly impressive. So we were very wowed. And I probably should have put this out a few weeks ago because of course Microsoft has had the response of working with Anthropic immediately. And we just had last week the announcement about agentic AI for Excel and PowerPoint.

Leo Laporte [02:13:06]:
Things move so fast in AI, you know, they.

Richard Campbell [02:13:09]:
Well, and they do. And, and I, I remember debating at the time, it's like, I don't know how quick to drop this show. You know, I had a certain number of things already ready. I clearly held onto it longer than I needed to. But it's a great conversation with someone who. Very knowledgeable.

Leo Laporte [02:13:20]:
Yeah, there's good information in here. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:13:22]:
Yeah. And, and just, you know, if you haven't taken co workout for a spin, you probably should. It's impressive. And it also speaks to the advantage of being arm's length from a product. Like, they didn't have the ability to talk to the product team about how to do stuff. What they did was talk to the users, talk to people who use Excel and say, you know, what do I, what can I do? They'll make the most difference for you. And that's clearly the direction they went in. And I understand, you know, the success of Cowork hit the Microsoft people very hard and they are very much taking the same viewpoint now of we just got to focus on the brass tacks, the things that matter the most.

Richard Campbell [02:14:00]:
So in one sense, I'm really excited there's competition in this space because it'll definitely make better products all around. But yeah, on the other point, we've been talking about this for a while. Anthropic seems to be running away with this. Like they're clearly using their tools to build more software and more tooling that is beneficial than just about anybody else. Cool. Impressive.

Leo Laporte [02:14:23]:
All right, we have whiskey. We are going to do whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:14:25]:
But before we do. And it's a fun one.

Leo Laporte [02:14:27]:
Yeah, before we do that. Paul's typing furiously.

Richard Campbell [02:14:31]:
What do you think, Paul?

Leo Laporte [02:14:32]:
Before, before we do that, we're going to just get a quick top line because this is earnings palooza today. Microsoft, Meta and Google all announced earnings today. Tomorrow, Apple. So it's been crazy. And we will talk about this in more detail next week once the earnings learnings become apparent. But just top line.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:51]:
Top line. 31.8 billion in net income on 83 billion. I'll call it in revenue. Those are both double digits of gains, 23 and 18% respectively. You know, then they get the fake. You know, like our AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate. Who cares? That's doesn't mean anything.

Richard Campbell [02:15:10]:
As soon as you hear annual revenue

Paul Thurrott [02:15:12]:
run rate, you know, fake, fake revenue.

Leo Laporte [02:15:14]:
Lie.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:14]:
Yep. Why lie? Lie. Anyway, capex spending did go down sequentially. Quarter of a quarter. That was 31 billion. It was 37.5 billion in the previous quarter. They did indicate that that was going to be the case. The thing you actually compare that to is a year ago and it's double the number a year ago.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:31]:
So it's still up. I, I haven't had time to look at the individual businesses, but since we're. This is Windows Weekly. I just look at more personal computing real quick. Windows OEM revenue declined 2%. Yeah, let's not look at that. So they made a lot of money and I need more time.

Leo Laporte [02:15:50]:
Yeah, take your time. We don't want to rush you.

Richard Campbell [02:15:53]:
There's lots to know.

Leo Laporte [02:15:54]:
Yeah, there's lots.

Richard Campbell [02:15:55]:
And again. And these are obfuscating documents. Truly.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:00]:
Yeah, it's a tough thing to read.

Richard Campbell [02:16:01]:
Wild appeal.

Leo Laporte [02:16:03]:
Do you ever feed this to an AI? Just, just to say, hey, analyze this.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:07]:
Le. I'm going to ask you the question I ask everyone who asks me a question like that, which is why would I want to save time and money? That's. I mean, I'm not saying it's stupid, but like, you serious? I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:16:18]:
It's probably pretty good at analyzing.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:20]:
No, of course. Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [02:16:22]:
It does corporate speak very well,

Paul Thurrott [02:16:25]:
especially when you want to do comparisons over a long period of time and you can look up that data. That would, that would, that would be smart. So the answer next week. No next.

Leo Laporte [02:16:33]:
You don't have time. It just came out right.

Richard Campbell [02:16:36]:
Just, just dropped. It's. It's unfair they should drop this stuff on a Thursday, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:16:40]:
And in about 18 minutes we are going to have the founder of Framework, Nirav Patel on intelligent machines. But that gives us 18 minutes to talk about brown liquor.

Richard Campbell [02:16:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:16:50]:
For whiskey pick.

Richard Campbell [02:16:52]:
Well and I'm back in Canada, so of course I pick a Canadian whiskey. And I've been meaning to talk about this one particular one for a while. This is the Rifle Rye. Great name. They've got their own web page, riflery.com which is sweet because it's actually Alberta Distillers. And we've talked about Alberta Distillers before. So I'm kind of cheating here in the sense that, you know, there's so many other distillers talking about. Why would I go back to this one? It was 939, so about a year ago that we talked about rare batch rare old batch number one from Alberta Distillers.

Richard Campbell [02:17:22]:
Although Alberta Stills makes all kinds of. Of things, including a bunch of American stuff. They're obviously based in Alberta. They're just outside of Calgary currently. They went, they started in 1946, went through a bunch of different acquisitions. Today they're part of the Suntory Global spirits brand. This is a large scale bespoke operation. If you want to make booze, you can call these guys.

Richard Campbell [02:17:48]:
They have a bunch of their own brands. They make a bunch of different vodkas. They make a ton of different whiskeys of which Rifle is one of them. And also manufacture for other brands including guys like Whistlepig. What they're famous for is making 100% rise. And we've talked about this before, that making straight rise are very, very difficult. It's a difficult grain to work with. It's expensive, it's sticky, it has a lot more polysaccharides in it.

Richard Campbell [02:18:12]:
And so the way you solve this problem is what Alberta Distillers has done is you employ some microbiologists who literally optimize a kind of. Kind of enzyme. They call it a purified enzyme. This is Shannon Thomas. So that they can properly digest the rye to be able to process it better. And that's their business all around. Now, I want to talk specifically about the Rifle Rye because George Rifle was one of the founders of Alberta distillers back in 46. And that's where the name obviously comes from.

Richard Campbell [02:18:48]:
Although he had nothing to do with it because he. He passed away before this actually happened. But the story of the Rifle family is kind of epic. So we got to go back to George's grandfather, Henry Rifle, who arrives in Vancouver in 1888 at the age of 19 with his brothers Jack and Conrad. They're German immigrants from the area around Bavaria. Beer making families. And they had been. They actually landed in San Francisco first, missing the end of the gold rush.

Richard Campbell [02:19:17]:
And they worked in breweries there and then moved up to Portland and were working breweries there. By the time they get to Vancouver, they think they can open their own brewery. So they open a Brewery at 11th and Main. And this is in the late 1800s. They call the San Francisco brewery Clever. It doesn't go well for them. I mean, they were in the right location. There used to be a Creek running down 11th that's all been covered over now.

Richard Campbell [02:19:41]:
The city has grown a lot since then. But that was. There was a bunch of. There was brewery row then. And so they. They go broke. The other brothers got out of the biz entirely. But Henry goes.

Richard Campbell [02:19:50]:
He thinks he knows what he's doing. He gets back into it again. He creates a company called the Canadian Brewing and Malting Company and does very well for himself. Until World War I. For two. There's a couple of problems with World War I. The first was he was a German immigrant. And World War I was.

Richard Campbell [02:20:08]:
He was on the wrong side at that point. So he had problems there. But also in 1917, British Columbia brought in alcohol prohibition. And so being a beer maker was a problem. And Henry recognizing he's struggling to be in Canada anyways, an immigrant and his business was jeopardized. Grabbed his son George. Not this George. This would be the.

Richard Campbell [02:20:31]:
The. The father of the George we're talking about. We'll call this one George C. His middle name starts with C. And they went to Japan and founded a company called the Anglo Japanese Brewing Co. And started making beer in Japan. In fact, they even learned how to malt against rice. They learned a bunch of other things.

Richard Campbell [02:20:47]:
But in 1921, prohibition is repealed in B.C. and he still has a bunch of family there. So he sells off that business and comes back to Vancouver. And Prohibition is still in full swing in the U.S. so, you know, loaded with cash and experience, they set up a new set of breweries, but they also buy a distillery in New Westminster. And their operations are in an area called Delta. This is along the Fraser river. And it's called Delta because it's literally the Delta of the Fraser, which breaks into a number of arms.

Richard Campbell [02:21:20]:
And so they have this big piece of land along Waltham island that's all marshlands, which is ideally set up for rum running. Now, today, that area is known as the George C. Rifle Migratory Bird Sanctuary. When they got out of the biz, they then donated the land to the government to protect birds. But it's a good bird sanctuary because it was full of plants and things and good at hiding the illegal shipping that they were doing. So they've got this big distillery, they're producing a lot of whiskey. Their largest ship was called the Malahat, and it could carry 100,000 cases of liquor. And so they'd go out this big ship down to near the.

Richard Campbell [02:22:01]:
Near California, Mexico area, about 12 miles offshore. So they're outside of the legal limits. And then smaller boats would come out, load up with them, and then smuggle in. They made a huge fortune, just a pile of money running on this until, of course, 1933, when prohibition is ended. And then, wisely, they get out of the business. They were being investigated by all sorts of governments. And so the moment the business model didn't make sense, they got rid of everything and just settled down. Now, in the meantime, they'd made so much money, they'd built this phenomenal mansion in the wealthy area of town.

Richard Campbell [02:22:37]:
There's the. For folks who are from Vancouver, the Rifle family built the Commodore Ballroom and the Vogue Theater along Granville street, which are two, like, landmarks in the city. And it sounds. It seems like the research I was able to do that the Canadian government largely backed away when it's just like, we're not in this business anymore, like it's not us at all. But in 1934, when the. The rifles were in the US for a visit, they were arrested by the government and charged with smuggling. And the indictment included a charge for $17.25 million. In 1934, they were required.

Richard Campbell [02:23:17]:
It was offered a bond at $250,000. They negotiated that down to 100,000 each, and then immediately went back to Canada with no intent to go back to the US at all, but then negotiated a deal with the US government to settle, giving up their $200,000 worth of bond, plus an additional half a million dollars to settle out of the court. So pretty good deal for them all around. And George C. Then has had his son back in 1922, which is George H. And that's the George of Rifle Rye. And he's also the guy who founded Alberta Distillers in 1946 and passed away in 1992. So, you know, live to the rifle age of 70.

Richard Campbell [02:23:55]:
This was launched in 19, in 2022, so 30 years after George passed away. And let's talk about how this works. If you look at the website, you will notice that they talk about a classic cocktail with rifle ride known as Rifle on the Rockies, which is to say on ice. Very clever. So I got a big ice cube here and a big glass and a poor little rifle into is really not a mixed drink.

Leo Laporte [02:24:20]:
It's just rye whiskey on ice.

Richard Campbell [02:24:23]:
It's rye on ice. It's properly made.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:26]:
Hmm.

Richard Campbell [02:24:28]:
So no mash Bill, right? That's an American thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:34]:
The.

Richard Campbell [02:24:34]:
The way they make this is they make pure 100 rye distillate. That's what Alberta Distills is known for. They age it in new I coat and ex bourbon casks, but then they blend it. So what's actually in the bottle is 91% of that rye distillate, but also 6% Old Granddad bourbon and 3% Oloroso sherry not aged in those barrels. Actually, the liquids.

Leo Laporte [02:25:00]:
That's a weird mix.

Richard Campbell [02:25:01]:
Well, remember when we did the Canadian whiskey story back in the day and I Talked about the 1 11th rule?

Paul Thurrott [02:25:09]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:25:09]:
Well, the 1 11th rule means that up to 9.09% of a Canadian whiskey can be anything else. And so if you do the math, 6% old granddad, 3% Sherry, it's still under 9.09. So this is a Canadian whiskey by the rules. Now, this is not the first time that Alberta Distillers has done this. They have, back in 2015, they released something called Alberta Rye Dark batch, which is exactly that same ratio with 6% old grandad, 3% all over the Sherry, and interestingly enough, old Granddad Bourbon owned by Suntory now. And they don't know Suntory doesn't own any Sherry bodegas, but they do have operations in Spain for wine and distribution. So they have a good deal to be able to put this all together. And yeah, so it's.

Richard Campbell [02:25:59]:
You only make this in Canada. Nobody else would do this. Right. It's only because of that rule that you have this option to simply add things to it. And I tell you, you can taste it. There's definitely like a sense of the sweetness of bourbon. It's not that spicy like normal. We the relationship that most people have with rye is in bourbon, which is mostly corn, a little bit of barley for the amylase and then in between will be a flavor grain.

Richard Campbell [02:26:25]:
And that flavor grain most of the time is rye. And we talk about the rye bringing the spiciness. Well, that doesn't happen here. It's a very light drinking, easy, easy Canadian whiskey to drink. Right. And by the way, it is a Canadian rye whiskey, but according to the rules of Canada, there doesn't have to be any rye in a rye whiskey. There happens to be rye in this one, but it's not a requirement. And it begs the question like, how did we get to this situation? And the reality is that during the U.S.

Richard Campbell [02:26:56]:
prohibition destroyed their rye market entirely. And, and the Canadians continue to produce rye the whole time because the different provinces had prohibition at different times. And so by the time prohibition ends in the US there's nobody left that makes rye down there. It's made a comeback now we've talked about that. And so generally speaking, people were associated rise with Canada. Anyway, so Canada just started putting rye on everything and never made a requirement. There actually has to be rye in it. The idea of 100% rye is very weird.

Richard Campbell [02:27:26]:
Again, we've talked about the. There's a number of times and they do have that problem solved. It's not a requirement, nor is it a requirement to only have Canadian whiskey in your Whiskey up to 9.09%. This is $50 Canadian. That's about 35 U.S. and yes, it is available in the U.S. but only spotty. The big dealers don't handle this.

Richard Campbell [02:27:44]:
You'll have to look around for it. But at that price you can and can't go wrong. It's 40% 2% ABV. It's eminently drinkable.

Leo Laporte [02:27:51]:
And do you taste the sherry? I mean, is it. It's weird to have.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:54]:
No.

Richard Campbell [02:27:54]:
3% is barely there. Right.

Leo Laporte [02:27:56]:
Probably the same kind of roughly that you'd get from a sherry barrel. You think?

Richard Campbell [02:28:00]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:28:01]:
And.

Richard Campbell [02:28:01]:
And that's was the original excuse for the 111 thrill was that the Canadian distillers were having a tough time buying the sherry barrels because they were largely locked up.

Leo Laporte [02:28:09]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:28:10]:
You Know, Scott's kind of had that tied up. So it's like, hey, can we just add a little sherry? Because in the end, isn't that what you're doing when you put it in the sherry barrel anyway?

Leo Laporte [02:28:17]:
Right?

Richard Campbell [02:28:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:17]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:28:18]:
But only up to 1 11th. How about that? Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:28:20]:
And what does the old granddad bring to its smoothness?

Richard Campbell [02:28:23]:
Yeah. And a little more sweetness, too.

Leo Laporte [02:28:25]:
Sweetness.

Richard Campbell [02:28:25]:
You know, that's got corn. Yeah. And it's a bit more mature. Like, this is probably only. The rye is probably 3 years old. Like, oh, with the exception of that one that I talked about, a 939, which was a 20 year old rye, which is very weird. Right? Like, most of the time these things would be no more than five years old. They're only required to be three.

Richard Campbell [02:28:44]:
The fact that there's no age declaration on it lets you know there's no way it's much more than. Than three.

Leo Laporte [02:28:49]:
Well, they're winning enough awards that they're doing something right.

Richard Campbell [02:28:52]:
I mean, yeah, you know what, it's a cool drink. No toys about it, but I understand if you've spent time in award ceremonies and so forth. It's more about how much you spend on the awards programs than necessarily how your drink is per se. So you can, you know, there's some I respect more here than others like that International Spirits Awards are pretty good. Most of the other ones, like, listen, I've done this in some of my startups too, where it's like, we need to win some awards that's hard to pull off. Like you can figure that out.

Leo Laporte [02:29:18]:
So, you know, maybe that's where I've gone wrong. I need some awards.

Richard Campbell [02:29:22]:
You could just go, you know, what if you went and played ball with some of those podcast comments where they run those awards.

Leo Laporte [02:29:28]:
We won awards, Paul and I spent

Richard Campbell [02:29:30]:
some time back in the day doing conferences where they had, you know, best of and so forth. And it costs a lot of money to be in those things.

Leo Laporte [02:29:38]:
A shelf of awards. And I threw them all out. And then unfortunately, the only award I really cared about, about my Emmy award, fell off the shelf in the windy day and it broke and died. I've trapped it inside my Webby award.

Richard Campbell [02:29:53]:
Oh, nice. You protect your Emmy and your Webby. I like that.

Leo Laporte [02:29:56]:
It's kind of. It's a. It's a. It's a. It's kind of a metaphor about the future of. Of media or something.

Richard Campbell [02:30:03]:
Cram them all together.

Leo Laporte [02:30:04]:
An Emmy trapped in a Webby.

Richard Campbell [02:30:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:30:07]:
Richard, Excellent job, Paul. Yeah, don't say a Word. Because we've promised.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:12]:
I got one thing to say.

Richard Campbell [02:30:13]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:14]:
I won a writing award. Some big plaque, you know, so 15 years later, my wife won a writing award, and my daughter was like, that's impressive. Right? I'm like, yeah. I mean, I won one 15 years ago, and mine's bigger, but. But. I mean. But, you know, but good for her.

Richard Campbell [02:30:35]:
And to be clear, when you win an award like that, especially like an Emmy and stuff, you have to buy the award.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:40]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:30:40]:
It's not free. They don't.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:42]:
I had an employer at the time. You know, I don't know how it

Leo Laporte [02:30:44]:
happened, but you have to buy to enter those.

Richard Campbell [02:30:47]:
Yeah, you have to buy to enter them. The awards themselves, they're also pricey.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:51]:
Somebody entered it, I guess.

Leo Laporte [02:30:52]:
But, you know, I think the Mei won fair and square.

Richard Campbell [02:30:55]:
Yeah, without doubt.

Leo Laporte [02:30:56]:
I don't know about the Webby.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:58]:
Just saying mine's bigger. That's.

Leo Laporte [02:31:02]:
Mine's dustier.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:03]:
I'll.

Leo Laporte [02:31:04]:
I'll say that.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:05]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:31:05]:
I bet you you could contact the Emmy organization to have that thing remade for you.

Leo Laporte [02:31:08]:
Can. And you pay for it, just as you said. It's very expensive.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:11]:
They're excited to make a new one.

Richard Campbell [02:31:12]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:31:13]:
They're happy.

Richard Campbell [02:31:13]:
Very profitable.

Leo Laporte [02:31:14]:
But I kind of. I think this is kind of.

Richard Campbell [02:31:16]:
I think that's super cool. I love it.

Leo Laporte [02:31:17]:
She's trapped in a. In a prison of making.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:21]:
This is like the beginning of Superman where they're in the. Yeah. Phantom zone or whatever. Yeah, absolutely.

Richard Campbell [02:31:26]:
A metaphor for.

Leo Laporte [02:31:27]:
It's carbon.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:29]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:31:30]:
New media. Carbonite. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this thrilling and gripping edition of Windows Weekly. You will find Richard Campbell at his website. Run his radio dot com. There's also another great podcast there that he does with Carl Franklin called.netrocks.

Richard Campbell [02:31:45]:
by the way, episode 2000 publishes tomorrow.

Leo Laporte [02:31:49]:
Wow, that's impressive. Holy cow. He's been doing it longer than anybody.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:53]:
That's.

Leo Laporte [02:31:54]:
That's really impressive.

Richard Campbell [02:31:55]:
Well, it's arguably the longest running podcast

Leo Laporte [02:31:56]:
on the planet now, you know, Certainly a strong candidate.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:00]:
Yeah, it's amazing also.

Leo Laporte [02:32:03]:
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paul Thurat. You see him to my left, to my right on your screen? He's on my left, on. Never mind. Paul's there in the middle of this window. Look like those superheroes from the beginning of our little I'm the O Fish one. Paul is@therot.com. become a Premium Member.

Leo Laporte [02:32:25]:
You'll get all the goodness. But there's lots of great free content there as well, including, I'm sure any minute now his wrap up of Microsoft's earnings. I'll get an early look. Also, his books are at leanpub.com, although if you become a premium member, you get the books for free. That includes Windows Everywhere, the Field guide to Windows 11, and his newest, Deinshidify Windows. There's a certain kind of arc to that.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:52]:
Yeah, going in the direction. Speaking plainly, as we said, we do

Leo Laporte [02:32:58]:
Windows Weekly every Wednesday right around 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. Club members can watch us in the Club Twit Discord, of course, but everybody's invited to watch live YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and kick after the Fact on demand versions of the show available at the website twit tv.ww video is also available at YouTube.com There's a dedicated Windows Weekly channel. Good place to share clips because Everybody can watch YouTube, right? So you just hey, this was good. And we share it. Actually, that's what we do with all of those whiskey segments. We put them. Kevin King, our editor, has done a great job of compiling them. You know, he's not quite up to the present, but he will be.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:39]:
I think we've established Kevin's kind of a slacker. I mean, I.

Leo Laporte [02:33:43]:
There's more than a hundred there, and the easiest way to get there is something weird from my closet.com, which is a dedicated redirect that brings you to

Richard Campbell [02:33:53]:
the YouTube playlist when it works.

Leo Laporte [02:33:54]:
But yeah, yeah, or just go look for it on YouTube. You'll find it. Thank you everybody for joining us. We really appreciate it. We'll be back here next Wednesday with the full Microsoft earnings learnings.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:07]:
Definitely.

Leo Laporte [02:34:08]:
On behalf of Paul and Richard, I'm Leo laporte. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye.