Windows Weekly 872 Transcript

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

0:00:01 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Windows Weekly. I'm Michael Sargent, I'm subbing in for Leo Laporte and you know what that means. Thought exercises for Paul Therrat and Richard Campbell. We have a conversation with Paul where he says he wants the enterprise experience of Windows as a consumer user not that consumer user that's filled with all the extra craft. Then we talk about what Windows 11 got in the latest patch Tuesday, a little bit about Windows Insider as well, microsoft's upcoming Surface slash AI event and Paul giving the custom GPT builder a go. As always, we cover Xbox and Xbox Corner and loads of tips and tricks with the back of the book. All of that coming up on Windows Weekly.

0:00:50 - Richard Campbell
Podcasts you love.

0:00:51 - Mikah Sargent
From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly, with Paul Therrat, richard Campbell and Michael Sargent, episode 872. Recorded Wednesday, march 13th 2024. Go Skype yourself. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by CacheFly. 

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It's time for Windows Weekly, and if you're listening to this and not watching, you're probably going. What voice is that? Well, maybe no, it's Micah Sargent, subbing in for Leo Laporte, who is on vacation in Mexico. I am here to join two of the wonderful Windows Watchers of the world. It is Paul Therrat. Hello, paul.

0:03:11 - Paul Thurrott
And Richard Campbell.

0:03:12 - Mikah Sargent
Hello Richard. Hey, Micah, great to see you, Good to see you both. I think our listeners are always curious to hear. Paul, from whence do you hail this week?

0:03:26 - Paul Thurrott
Back home in Macintosh, pennsylvania, after five weeks in Mexico, and if I fall asleep in the middle of podcast, it's not you guys, it's me.

0:03:38 - Mikah Sargent
It's not you. It's me Understood. Is it rainy there or snowy there? What is the weather like there?

0:03:43 - Paul Thurrott
No, it's actually. It's nice for here right now. It's sunny and it's actually warm for here, although, as I observed to my wife when we were flying home yesterday, standing in the pitch dark in front of our apartment in Mexico, said look at the temperature right now, because it's warmer here right now than it's going to be all next week in Pennsylvania. Make sure you know it's like the middle of the night, but it's for here this time of year it's good.

0:04:06 - Mikah Sargent
And how about you, Richard Campbell? Where are you calling from this week?

0:04:10 - Richard Campbell
I'm in Studio C of the DevRel Studio is a building 25 on the Microsoft campus. This is MVP week, so there's a whole, there's a 1500 or so MVPs. That's in it on the place and I'm down here for that and I was able to ask nicely of the right folks to see if I could borrow a studio for a few hours.

0:04:28 - Paul Thurrott
Nice, it looks like a serial killer hotel room or something. Yeah.

0:04:35 - Richard Campbell
This used to be the room with all of, like the old versions of windows and things behind it. I was surprised when I walked in here and it's nothing but sound reflection cushions.

0:04:46 - Mikah Sargent
And plastic sheeting on the floor and selection of steak knives.

0:04:51 - Richard Campbell
Couple of scalpel, some bleach.

0:04:54 - Mikah Sargent
That's good, that's good.

0:04:55 - Paul Thurrott
This week on Dexter.

0:04:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly. Well, let us get rolling with the show this week, kicking off with what's new in Windows 11?.

0:05:06 - Paul Thurrott
Oof. What is it new?

0:05:10 - Mikah Sargent
It is always new.

0:05:11 - Paul Thurrott
This is not in the notes but I've heard from multiple people and I've seen screenshots of this. The indignities never end for Windows users. Unfortunately, they're getting popups advertising Bing and you can switch your search engine back to Bing. It's easy to switch back. Blah, blah, blah, whatever.

I think I'm gonna make it in my life's work now to put an end to this nonsense, the constant badgering of use other Microsoft stuff. It's getting to be too much. I've stopped using OneDrive largely. I've stopped using Microsoft Word largely. I mean, how far are we gonna push the user base? And I guess there's no end to it. I don't know. This is a new era. This is so weird and out of sort of our character for me. But I'm reading Stephen Snofsky's book Hardcore Software. I've referenced this a few times. I have my issues with the man, but I wanna talk to him now because I'm curious. He probably can't talk about this. I'm sure that was part of his separation agreement, but I'd love to talk to him about what has happened to Windows and his wake and what he thinks of it. I'd love to hear this because, for all that, whatever issues one might have, he comes from the old school era at Microsoft, right? I mean he ran his office for several years and obviously then Windows.

But I mean I don't know. I'm kind of in broken record mode here now. I just don't know. I don't even know what to say anymore. Like every day you wake up but there's a new little smack to the face and I don't quite understand why that is.

0:06:48 - Richard Campbell
but and this is I would also think he's from the era where Windows was the center of the company.

0:06:53 - Paul Thurrott
And that is and where Microsoft actually said what does the customers want? We should do that. That kind of thing, that kind of thinking, which I don't understand how that ever goes out of vogue.

0:07:03 - Mikah Sargent
but and this is all kind of surrounding the use of the platform as a means of pitching other-. Well, that's where your complaint is.

0:07:15 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, of leaning in and kind of guiding what do you call it like a nudge, nudging users in a certain direction. Except it's not a nudge just so much, as there's a push off the edge of the cliff. You know the forced edge usage right In Windows 11, that type of thing. People kind of forget this, I bet. But when Windows 11 first shipped they actually got rid of the default browser interface. There was no way to set a default browser. You could go in and individually set individual protocols and things like that, but there was no button to set it like I want this to be the default, and so of course they step back from that particular cliff. But then they just ignored it because they forced you to use edge in certain circumstances, unless you're in the EU now with the DMA and all that.

We'll talk about that a little bit later, but there's still just a lot of badgering going on. This is the certification stuff, as we'll call it here in the family-friendly Windows Weekly when the needs of the company outweigh the needs of its own customers and user experience is, start turning on you because you're not what's important anymore. I mean, it's a strange thing and I know Windows is not the focus. I understand that at Microsoft, but it's still responsible for several billion dollars of revenues every quarter.

0:08:33 - Richard Campbell
You think they take it more seriously than that, because in general there is this pretty strong culture at Microsoft of customer data-driven features.

0:08:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yes.

0:08:43 - Richard Campbell
But it's almost like they're the lepers and so nobody's talking to them or telling them what to do and they're just sort of running the asylum.

0:08:51 - Paul Thurrott
Well, unless they're listening on the microphone which they could be, right what telemetry data doesn't tell you is how loud the man screams when stuff turns on them, right, when the pop-up comes up again. Or it's not even just confronting you with things, although that's a big part of the experience, right? Anyone who has the will to turn off Edge as the defaults browser will be badger to use that product for the rest of their lives, right? I mean, that's the thing you have to kind of live with. But then there's the behaviors like OneDrive, where I witnessed this multiple times in the past two weeks, where, no, I do not want to use this for fold-to-backup. Thank you very much.

And then you notice a certain kind of error message that occurs because you're deleting a file and you can say wait a minute. And you go and look and, sure enough, they turn it on. Just turn it on, didn't say anything, just did it for you. Wow, and it's just, it's a little tough. So anyway, this morning, like I said, I woke up. I think three people had forwarded me a screenshot of their own screenshot of a new front in Windows which is selling Bing and the Bing search. As you're changing and I don't know it's getting tiring, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. So, anyway, today's show is gonna be about how to switch to Linux.

0:10:07 - Richard Campbell
Here we go, so yeah, Well, I don't think that's true.

0:10:13 - Paul Thurrott
No really Coincidentally, I ordered a Mac today, completely coincidental, has nothing to do with anything I just said, but, dear God, please make it stop.

0:10:22 - Mikah Sargent
You said that it makes you use Microsoft's Word less. I don't use it at all. Don't use it at all anymore. How long have you been off of the Microsoft Word?

0:10:36 - Paul Thurrott
Of Word Since about November, I think yeah. So I've gone through a couple of different things. If I'm going to move off of something as long lived as Word right, which is a difficult decision to make, or even one drive same thing, I mean it's built into Windows, it's easy, it works well, you know for the most part. But the badgering, badgering and then the bad behavior, et cetera, you know, at that point you start to think a little differently. So in the case of a Word replacement, what I wanted to use was something that was I like Markdown. I wanted to use a Markdown editor. I've been using Type-Hora the most part, which is good. I have unique issues and of course you're saying we can tell that, paul. But I mean, you know, compared to normal Windows users, in that I use a lot of different computers. So as I switch between computers, one of the things I try to do is, you know, automate the process of getting up and going and etc. Etc. So the problem with Type-Aura is it has a limited license for a number of PCs. You can install it on and deactivate and you can reactivate and you can, but it's a pain. And I wrote those guys and I was like, hey look, I've been kind of using your product. I love it, I paid for it, I'm happy to pay more, but what I'd like is some kind of a license where I don't have to keep reactivating it. And they just told me well, first of all, they took them almost 10 days to get back to me, but they finally got back to me and said you know, you could just use it on activated as a matter, like it works fine, you have to. Just, you know, you have to get rid of a dialogue which is a pain, and I'm like guys, that's, that's not an answer, like I need you know.

So I started looking around and I've actually been using Libra, Libra Office writer, which is like their word replacement. This is the. This came up out of Star Office, which, you know, sun purchased in the 90s I think we talked about this last week and it actually works really well and it's got this. It's got its own little kind of old school quality to it, meaning pre-ribbon Microsoft office. You know, you can kind of really, I mean, you can still listen to an office, but you can customize the toolbars and what's there and kind of make it more of a minimalist UI, which I really like, and I use it with rich text, not with like a word or open document format, but it works great. That's a product we're surprisingly well actually, so I haven't used that.

0:12:55 - Mikah Sargent
And what about you, richard, are you?

0:12:59 - Richard Campbell
I'm not as frustrated as Paul, but you know few people are. Yeah, I mean, my current nag is for the MVP summit. You have to. You should fill out a schedule right. They sort of select what sessions you're going to go to and they generate a schedule for you that shows up as a separate live ICS in your outlook, which is fine. That's not a big deal. It's kind of cool because you can tinker with the scheduler and then that'll be reflected immediately in your schedule. But I don't think they allocated quite enough resources to it. So every so often outlook wasn't able to contact that schedule to make sure it was up to date, and whenever that would happen it would pop a modal dialogue that says cannot connect a schedule. Okay, there's not a not okay button. Like you don't have that.

0:13:44 - Paul Thurrott
This is not okay.

0:13:48 - Richard Campbell
But it stops everything and it's like this thing. It's like it's not a sin, it's not the MVP folks fault that they didn't perfectly serve the schedule, it's that somebody at Outlook thought, yeah, most of that looks good enough. You know, I'm going to interrupt everything. I'm going to lock Outlook so that you will click the okay button. Geez.

0:14:07 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's frustrating. Yeah, it's what is it? Death by a thousand cuts, kind of situation.

0:14:14 - Richard Campbell
And it's this, this thoughtlessness, that you run into here, there, everywhere. There's just a lot of moving parts and I'm I'm empathetic, but it's like you would think they would be getting better after this much time.

0:14:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah Well, speaking of getting better, do you want to talk?

0:14:33 - Paul Thurrott
about it.

Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to go off on a rant there. So yesterday was patch Tuesday. We got the expected cumulative updates across the two versions of Windows 11, windows 10, etc. So new features get squeaked in, because they do right. One of the big stories for the past year and a half now, I guess, is that you know, microsoft said, hey, we're going to do this one feature update a year. But then they started updating Windows every month with the new features, with rare exception, I think maybe December last year. You know it's it, it does. We get something every month, right, and of course we've got this moment five thing coming soon or coming now, depending on how you're updating your system. So patch Tuesday brought a couple of features that we've seen tested in the insider program, like a USB 80 gigabyte per second, 80 gigabit per second support. If you use the phone link app in Windows, you probably may know that if you go into settings there was a phone area that had a phone link item in it and there wasn't really anything you could do in there. But it had some links to some stuff and that's been changed to mobile devices and I think that they're going to start bulking that part of the settings app up with more things, so that they've kind of set the stage for that as well. I'll just very randomly throw out the fact that Windows 10 actually got some functional updates, because I know everybody took Microsoft at their word when they said no new features for Windows 10. And yeah, it's been a roller coaster ever since. This is not big stuff, but if you're familiar with the way that Windows 11 has been being updated lately, including in moment five, the share interface is getting some explicit app support, which Microsoft is doing, which is kind of strange. In other words, if you were the maker of WhatsApp, for example, you could opt to integrate into the system whenever someone's trying to share something that could be shared through your app. Apparently, they never did that, so Microsoft's adding that stuff manually, right? So WhatsApp, I think Facebook Messenger, a couple of others are popping up in that interface now, and that's happening in Windows 10 too, not just Windows 11. Not a big deal and not something that a lot of people would notice, but you know it's happening.

This was part of. Where did they disclose this? Maybe it was actually part of the next story when we talk about Windows and the EU and the DMA, but Microsoft recently disclosed that how they were going to roll out what we call Moment 5, although the company has never used that name publicly but Moment 5 being the latest quarterly feature update to Windows 11 and, yeah, no to Windows 11, both versions. So there was a preview release recently I think it was last week. We talked about how they were going to release it and it was a little bit late. That was tied to the what we call the week D update set of updates right From the previous week. This week was week B, which is patch Tuesday. We didn't get the stable version of that, if you will, but it's still available in preview. There will be another release of that in preview in two weeks or a little bit under two weeks, and then the stable version will go out in April and Microsoft said that they expected to be fully deployed, or reasonably deployed, by late April worldwide.

So what is it? Yeah, we get about six weeks on the schedule where things are going to get a little weird, because features will stop, pop, start popping up for people in different areas at different times, because we're all living in a roulette wheel now and that's how we do things. I mean, there's no other way to say. It's just, I'm just, I'm trying to get comfortable with it. It's just what? Does Microsoft call it? Continuous innovation? I guess I would call it sporadic updating. I don't know.

0:18:25 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, here's something that I'm curious about, because part of what you do, both on the show and on your site, is to beat my head against the wall. No, is to talk about what's new on these platforms, and the struggle that I have as a consumer tech journalist who primarily covers Apple is that Apple does far fewer updates throughout the year, and so you got to find stuff to talk about the rest of the time.

0:19:02 - Paul Thurrott
And so, before you continue, I'm sorry to not start to interrupt, but from my point of view, on the outside of your world, I look at the Apple world as a never ending series of you know. Forget about the iPhone 16, wait until the iPhone 17 comes out, a year after that, like it's, there's a lot of rumors. Yes, that's true, In the Apple space, that's. But then again, I'm also kind of jealous. I was I. It's funny, you started down this path, I was I. I have a rough idea of how this works, but I was good.

I was going to ask you, you know, what your view is of how Apple updates its platforms, but also just express a bit of jealousy. As to the Mac, to me it seems like it's on a more stable, predictable update path than Windows. Well, no, not just to me. It is right, this is an objective fact, right, but you're saying from the perspective of a, like a tech enthusiast, that in some ways this can be boring. So between September and maybe WWDC, right, there's not a lot to talk about. Is that the?

0:20:06 - Mikah Sargent
so that's what. Yeah, I wanted to approach it from the terminology that you folks use on the show. As a seeker, I do get kind of bored with the operating system, but that's also a privileged position from which to speak, right, because how nice it is that I can get bored with it because it just works most of the time and so it's interesting grass is always greener kind of situation. Because, yeah, I mean and this again as someone whose livelihood is talking about this stuff in both of our cases, then it you know, there is at least new stuff to talk about regularly. But again, on the other side of that is if it's constantly being updated and there's constantly holes that need to be patched, that is, that is an issue.

It's just two different approaches and I was kind of curious, do you? What do you think is the reason? Which is better? Not even which is better, but what is it about the structure of Microsoft versus the structure of Apple that they are run that way? Was it? Was it just a decision made by somebody a long time ago and they've stuck with it, or is it?

0:21:19 - Richard Campbell
just their nature. There is no equivalent of the Windows Insider program at Apple. Right, it's just the.

0:21:25 - Mikah Sargent
You know, you have no, you only see what the developer beta would be the closest, but we don't have all of the different channels and all that kind of stuff.

0:21:32 - Richard Campbell
It's. So I would argue that part of that is that Microsoft, after the Department of Justice consent decree back in 2001, basically agreed to be a more open company, to show how they were making things, to show that they weren't working against the public interest, and so that's just become reflex to tend to show off the sausage being made.

0:21:56 - Mikah Sargent
That's interesting yeah.

0:22:00 - Paul Thurrott
There's so much I really we could. We could devote two hours this topic. It was fascinating to me back in the day when, when Apple was kind of coming up in the world under Steve Jobs, that one of the big defenses that Microsoft would give to why they couldn't do things the way Apple was doing it at the time was because we have such a huge and diverse user base and you could you could pull 100 office users and every one of them would have 10 features that they needed that were unique and unlike the other 10 people or 100 people, whatever the number was. And but you know, apple has a very large and diverse user base today and I would say they're kind of on equal footing from that perspective.

In an age in which Windows is not at the center of the universe. It's weird to me that they would afford any time to updating with superfluous new features that nobody needs or wants Like. This is a platform we use to get work done on. It should be stable, it should be unchanged, it should be. You know, the enterprise model is, I think, the thing most Windows users do want. I, people who are tech enthusiasts today, by and large are not following Windows. They're, you know they're. They're following these mobile platforms, the web or whatever.

0:23:07 - Mikah Sargent
And so I just don't. I do it. What's the appeal of releasing all these silly features?

0:23:15 - Paul Thurrott
It might be a bid to make it seem. Well, first of all, there's a bit of jealousy of the mobile platforms. There's part of it. So when Windows 10 was coming around, I think one of the deals there was like look, let's show that this thing is dynamic and improving and it's just as exciting. We have a big user base. We do. But I think the nature of these platforms is a little different and honestly, I don't think you can really or should compare it to mobile. You should compare it to the Mac or Linux or whatever you want to pick. And how are those things updated, Right? And to what extent are they updated every so often, Right?

0:23:48 - Mikah Sargent
This too. Is there any level, do you think, of the folks who are working on this stuff sort of auditioning for the maintaining of their of their roles? What I mean is, are the folks, is there any level of the folks working on Windows going? We know you're starting to pay attention to all this other stuff and Windows is kind of falling. We need to show you this is still just as interesting to people, and look at all the numbers that prove that what we're doing matters and I'm worried about Does that have any role in it at all?

0:24:22 - Paul Thurrott
I would love to think there were even adults working on this. Now I don't. I mean, look, I accept and understand that this is not the focus. Right In the 10 years that Sacha Nadella has been around, the cloud was a big push and you kind of look at that and you think, okay, well, windows is that part of the company that can't really do play a big role in that. Right, they tried the way. It's kind of bizarre when you think about it and related to what we're talking about, that the way they tried to get it to conform to the way the cloud works is with the way that it updates. You know, we're going to try to. Even though this thing is a monolithic, desktop installed operating system, we're going to try to update it like it's an online service. It's fair to say that, honestly, it took them a while, but they kind of got there, which is rather amazing. It's like they do have the ability to update Windows pretty seamlessly and that's actually a pretty good technical achievement.

But the thing I'm talking about is the features. Right, I don't understand what we're doing anymore. We're moving the cheese, right, we had a they tested for two seconds this co-pilot thing in Windows 11 where the button was on the taskbar and they moved it and I don't know why. I don't know what was the point of that, like what? They're just moving stuff around now, you know, and I so I don't see it as a lot of adult supervision. It's not the. It's almost like the parents are looking elsewhere. So let's just scroll around, because who cares? You know, I can't think of a reasonable, responsible strategy, reason to do the things the way they do at all. I don't get it. I just don't understand it. I don't know.

0:26:02 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know, I don't know how I get off in a stand-in for sorry, it's kind of my fault.

0:26:05 - Paul Thurrott
But I, but I, no, no, it's okay, it's, but it is a coincidentally I was, I was thinking about this and when you were talking, I was thinking about asking this question because I look at the Mac from the outside and I think you know I like the way. That's the way it should be. That's the way you handle a mature, stable platform. It doesn't need these big dynamic changes every quarter, every year, every whatever. It just doesn't.

And I wish that Microsoft treated Windows with the same respect that I think that Apple treats the Mac right. We've had the excitement with the silicon stuff, right. Yeah, the switch to ARM has been very exciting on the Apple side and we're going to get a little bit of that this year. By the way, we're finally kind of moving down that path on the Windows side. But I mean think you know it's just not that kind of platform we don't use it to for social media, for game well, games we do, of course I mean, but for, like, a lot of these little mobile, a lot of little personal technology workloads. It's not where they're at, workloads, they're like play loads. We do that on mobile. Now, you know, and I just don't, I just wish this was, I wish this was treated like I said with respect, I think the Mac is on the Apple side. I wish it was just left alone.

0:27:22 - Richard Campbell
And you're hinting around at one of the big issues here, which is that, when it comes to the important part of Windows, it's the enterprise side of things and the consumer versions aren't getting anywhere near the same level of attention. What the enterprise wants is very different from what a typical consumer.

0:27:38 - Paul Thurrott
So how is it that they're not getting their way right? No one is rushing out to stores and no one will ever rush out to stores to buy a new PC because of some new featured Windows 11.

0:27:48 - Richard Campbell
You miss the Windows 95 lineups. Is that what you're saying?

0:27:51 - Paul Thurrott
It's a long time ago. As far as I can tell, that might even be science fiction, I don't even. I'm not sure that even happened and I lived through it. You know it's a different world. I mean that's in the Sinovsky book. I mean the Microsoft shift in focus from individuals who by and large were enthusiasts in the 1990s to what became what they call large organization lorges, like enterprises, changed the way that they approach software development. And I don't think you no, I know they haven't, but I don't think you can get back from that. I think that's the way that world went. I don't know, I don't understand it. I get all I can say. I just have to keep saying the same thing. I don't know why. I can, I know, when I don't think anyone could explain it to me. You know, I don't think there is an answer where I'd say oh okay, I get it, I've been, I yeah, I've been thinking this wrong the whole, the whole time. My mistake.

0:28:47 - Richard Campbell
We have talked about a bunch of pieces of this where it's like you know, said things like you know. Don't think it's only one team here. There's a bunch of different people trying different things. Every so often we see them trying to organize them. But you know, the the Conway's law applies here. The product reflects the organizational structure that made it, and so in some ways, you're seeing a manifestation of them exploring their business model or the development model in the product as it's being made. Right.

0:29:21 - Paul Thurrott
You know, microsoft right now, obviously, is rallying around AI and there's there's some compelling stuff that can happen on the client with AI, whether it's in Windows or across the Microsoft Office apps or whatever it might be, and there are interesting little things you know. But let's face it. I mean we're not going to get any differentiating feature in Windows. It's going to keep people there versus some other platform or versus mobile, et cetera, et cetera.

0:29:47 - Richard Campbell
But you could see that we could right. I mean, we we noticed this right away in the last build when and Stevie Batesh did his thing, he went one of the great hubs for these large language model interfaces could be Windows, that they could provide a standardized interface to all kinds of software, that you'd have this interesting dynamic of what software will be presented to the user through that interface. Yeah, but I think we both had the same reaction at the same time, which is like I don't think the Windows team is up for this.

0:30:17 - Paul Thurrott
I think. I think M365 is going to win it, yep, and, and I this is going to come up. I'm going to really try hard now. I I don't mean this to be insulting, I don't, and I want to be really careful here. But you know, the best and the brightest in Microsoft and Windows, it's just not the focus of the company. You know the, the, the notion that someone is going to come out of the Windows business with this idea, this advance and and have an impact. It. It's just not the way things work anymore.

Even when Windows was on top of the world, within Microsoft, a lot of what it did as a team was ignored. Outside of the right. You know, office did its own user interfaces, didn't want to integrate with whatever you know storage system that Windows was going to have and then never had, because that never worked right, because you know it's just that type of product. But I don't know, I'm struggling, I'm trying, you know I you have to work pretty hard to chase me away from anything Microsoft or Windows. And it's happening because they're they are trying really hard. It's the one thing they've been successful at.

So I don't know, you know what's going on here. But I look, I use Windows every day, obviously on a multiple machines. I love it, and there are these things I don't like and I wish were different. But I, I, I think what I, I think what I'm asking for or what I would wish for, or whatever is just, you know, stability, consistency, liability, transparency, predictability. You know, all those things I think at Enterprise would want, and it's it's. It's curious to me that they're not doing it, because that is the customer base.

0:31:59 - Richard Campbell
Largely, the enterprise is staying off Windows 11, right, they're all still in the wind.

0:32:03 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, so this is the play, yeah, so they can kind of screw around here and see if anything works, I guess, Well and at the same time they're getting a lot of heat from the enterprise side.

0:32:10 - Richard Campbell
To stay, group policy has to work. Authentication engines have to be the same. Like a lot of the stuff you've seen put back into 11 is because enterprises said not go in there, that that represents hundreds of thousands of dollars in support tickets to me if you don't fix that, yeah.

0:32:27 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, I, I suppose, as businesses eventually are going to have to adopt Windows 11 or whatever comes down the road, they're being being forced to yes, yeah, yeah.

0:32:38 - Richard Campbell
They should look. We just hit on this.

0:32:39 - Paul Thurrott
It's the same topic over and over again. I, I would pay for this product. I want I would if I could get the enterprise version of Windows 11, you know, somehow as a consumer, easily, if I could get it as part of a subscription that I already pay for or will pay for, if I could pay a little bit extra and not be nagged every time I'm using one of their products, that'd be kind of nice. You know this is going to be a system that is a win-win, you know, for users and for the company itself.

I would think it makes it sound like I'm down on Windows, because the thing is, I just, you know, as I, this is still the center of my universe when it comes to this stuff and I still prefer it to, you know, the Mac or Linux or Chrome OS or whatever, and you know it's like a kid is doing bad in school. You know I just want it to be as good as it can be. You know it doesn't mean I don't love it, I just. But I, you know, I can see the problems and I'd like to, I wish they were fixed.

0:33:37 - Mikah Sargent
He's not angry, he's just disappointed.

0:33:40 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not angry. I am angry, anyway, and making me further angry, and I think this is something that applies to a lot of people, like, for example, in the Apple world. Right, when you look at what Apple is doing in Europe, in the United States, we're like can we have that? Yeah, and wouldn't it be easier for you, right, apple or Microsoft, just to do it the same way everywhere? You know, I referenced this probably months ago, but when the GDPR came about, microsoft at least I think all the major cloud providers basically said look, it's really hard to adhere to these regulations. We're going to do this work and we're going to apply them worldwide. Everyone's going to benefit from this right. And so when this DMA and then what's the other one, the digital, the sister act, digital, we've lost sight of it because the DMA is so big. But whatever the other one is, when these two sets of regulations came about, you know, naively, I think, a lot of us were like you know, maybe we'll do that again, you know, and they're not right, they're not doing that. You can see it very aggressively with Apple.

It's very interesting for Apple to be on the receiving end of a lot of bad PR because of the belligerent way that they're handling things. For Microsoft guys like me, this is like riding a bike. I've seen this story before, like I. You know we saw Bill Gates slouching down in his chair during the depositions from the USA and I trust case, you know, debating the, the, the definition of the term, the, you know. I mean this is what Apple looks like now. They look like jerks, you know. So Microsoft is coming off a little better, although they're basically doing the same thing, right, and that's the. The other big kind of Windows 11 story this week is last Friday of Thursday they published, I think, in tandem with that day where the switchover was supposed to happen.

You know how they're changing Windows in the well, the European economic area, right to meet the needs of the DMA, and they're going to let you do all kinds of fun stuff. You know you can get rid of Microsoft Edge. You can get rid of Bing, right, you can. You don't have to. Well, I actually think of this as a nicety, but one of the key benefits of a Microsoft account is you get what I think of as pass through authentication right. You've signed into Windows with a Microsoft account. When you go into Edge, you're there, right. All of your stuff passes through. Maybe you're using your Microsoft account to store your passwords. These things go. You know they work with apps, they work with websites through Microsoft Edge, et cetera. This stuff is all you know.

Because of the impact of the DMA, you know people in Europe are going to start having choices, right? Interestingly, there are examples of things that they've done for the DMA that they've said you know what? We're just going to do this everywhere, right? So one of them is the widgets thing. I think it was two, three weeks ago. I had this tip that this came up before the DMA deadline. But they now allow you to go into widgets and turn off that.

Microsoft start newsfeeding, which is terrible, which is wonderful. So you could choose to use widgets. I know it's going to be crazy just for the widgets. You know, I know, I know it's nuts. You could also, if it existed, could install an extension or add in whatever you're going to call it that would allow a third party to provide their newsfeed inside of widgets. So, my knowledge, that hasn't yet occurred, but it could, right.

And so they've turned this thing into kind of an open platform, which is, you know, the essence of Windows to me that you could say look, I want to use Windows, but I want to use Chrome, and I should be allowed to use Chrome everywhere, like not just somewhere. In some places. I want to use widgets, but I don't want to use the Microsoft feed. I want to use, you know, whatever the Google feed. That will never occur or whatever it might be.

So Microsoft not quite as belligerent, right as Apple in this case, but there are example, many examples, of things that are only in Europe and then some that are everywhere. I think a lot of this ability to uninstall inbox apps meaning in in dashbox, not email apps, but apps that are included with Windows, which actually started a couple of years ago, might have been related to regulations are coming. We should just do this, and they're letting you kind of do it everywhere you know. So that's good, it's not all bad, right, it's not all bad, but still you see these news stories and it's like I don't, I can't afford to move to France. Could I stop this too?

0:38:18 - Mikah Sargent
Or you know I'm with you. I think you know there in fact I just talked about that this morning on one of the shows that I do clockwise about the things from the EU through the DMA that Apple is changing and what things we wish, and it's kind of piecemeal. There are a few things that I'm okay with not having, but then there are others where I think, oh, that would be a better experience.

0:38:40 - Paul Thurrott
But ultimately, I think most people you must have I mean you're, I have these guys. I think everyone does like there are some people who just believe these companies should be able to do it.

0:38:48 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, absolutely, yeah, definitely, okay, fine.

0:38:50 - Paul Thurrott
God. God love you and I trust exists for a reason. Please wake up. But whatever I, I, we don't begrudge others to have the choices we might not take. We just want them to have the choice right. In other words, yeah, there might be. I might not want to ever uninstall Safari or Microsoft Edge. In my case, I don't mind that.

0:39:10 - Mikah Sargent
That's a thing, right, exactly.

0:39:12 - Paul Thurrott
Why would we? Why would I care? That other people want to do that, it's fine, let them do it. You know I, I look, I, I have to use Microsoft Edge. Sometimes I read a book about Windows, right Like I. You know I have to know something about it. But I have chosen in my daily life not to use it for so many reasons because it's terrible. But to each their own. You know you can use it if you want. You're just making bad decisions.

0:39:39 - Richard Campbell
You're okay with them being wrong yeah.

0:39:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I'm okay, you're okay. You're a little mental, but you're okay. Uh, no, it's. I teach the wrong.

0:39:47 - Richard Campbell
It's fine, that's how you're, but you're making me think of Windows. End, right that they did make special versions of Windows just for the EU.

0:39:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, uh to be yeah and actually I'm tied to that, so I didn't write about this today. But Brave came. I think they just tweeted it. This might be why they didn't have an announcement. Um, brave, the alternate browser maker, said this is a chart of our adoption on iOS and this is giant spike. At the end, that was when the DMA went into effect, because in the European economic area, when you have a new install of iOS or you bring up an iPhone or whatever for the first time, you get a screen just like that browser ballot that we had in Windows and Windows end. This says hey, there's a bunch of browsers, which one did you want to use? And they, you know they randomized the order. A lot of people are prick and brave. All of a sudden, you know, and the and their whole thing is like that's what happens when you give people a choice. People take a choice. You know they make a choice. Right, there's your little graphic if you're watching.

0:40:46 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I was. I saw that too and I thought this is good, this is how it should be, this is, this is an open market at work.

0:40:54 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, and it makes the case for what the EU did.

0:40:58 - Richard Campbell
Exactly. We talk a lot about overreaching government regulation and so forth, but it's like when they, when they did what the EU specified, people made other choices and that's a pretty clear hint that they did the right thing. Yeah.

0:41:11 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, agreed, I don't know. It is about respect, though. Right, you know I want, you know you want windows or whatever you use, you want the product using to respect your choices. You know we don't click a, we don't make a choice, so you could ignore it.

0:41:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's really frustrating. It's a bizarre it's a bizarre behavior. Yeah, that actually just happened to me today. I will I name the company. I don't know, maybe I will. At the end We'll see. I'm going to name this. This updating app for the different apps that I have from this company popped up and immediately it alerted me of a change that I had made on purpose, which was I turned off the feature for it to auto launch.

0:41:55 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, this sounds like you're talking about Microsoft, aren't you? I said don't Microsoft Login. It's not. It does sound like that, probably.

0:42:02 - Mikah Sargent
I said don't auto launch it login. I don't want you to do that. I'll start you when I'm ready. And so I went in to do the software updates for the two apps that were ready and then it presented me with a little banner at the bottom that said there's an update for this updater app. And there was not an update. But if I clicked that button to do the update it's going to re go through the system and it's going to turn on those auto launch prompts at the beginning.

0:42:31 - Paul Thurrott
You sure you're not talking about Microsoft?

0:42:34 - Mikah Sargent
It sounds a lot like Microsoft it's Adobe.

0:42:37 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, there you go. Well, that's why it sounds a lot like.

0:42:41 - Mikah Sargent
Microsoft. I thought, oh, that's very tricky and that's wrong.

0:42:47 - Richard Campbell
And again by respect don't change my defaults yeah.

0:42:51 - Paul Thurrott
It's not even a dark pattern, it's just a bad behavior. Oh boy, yeah, I can see Adobe doing that.

0:43:00 - Mikah Sargent
They're very serious about having their stuff start as soon as the system starts. And look, there's an argument to be made that part of that is a security mindset that you do want to have the latest version, especially of something like Adobe Acrobat, because PDFs are a great way to get in. But ultimately the telemetry and all that jazz that they get is also part of it.

0:43:23 - Paul Thurrott
January 2015,. You know, terry Morris announced a bunch of things. I think this might have been the initial haul lens reveal, right? One of the things they announced was that Windows 10 was going to be a free upgrade for everybody Windows 7 uses, windows 8 uses, windows Phone uses, remember but there was a little asterisk, right, we are going to keep your, your device, up to date. Now, this is going to be on us. We're going to do this. But I think one of the things this was Windows as a service, as they called it.

Right Now, it's called continuous innovation, but the notion that we want everyone to be or as many customers as possible to be on the same version is a good one. From a security standpoint, it's easier to update systems that are on the same version, right? You don't have to make multiple versions of patches, and we've talked a lot about how they completely screwed it up, because every single version of Windows 10 was a different version of Windows and required a different patch and whatever. But they got there, like I said, they actually got to the point where they were good at doing this, and that's great. But we're talking about features. You're adding features. You're not fixing security problems. You're just arbitrarily adding features.

When Richard's first joined the show a year and a half ago-ish, almost we were in the midst of this it was 22H2 at the time, unannounced. In early December, late November, all of a sudden OneDrive changed right, but not for everybody, and it wasn't until and I mean this, this sounds impossible, but it wasn't until about a month or two ago. There were three different versions of OneDrive out in the world and if you did a clean install of Windows 11, 23h2, as recently as a month or two ago at the most you got the first version of OneDrive, not the second or third Like it's and to this day I you could all go and look yourself, I guess. But if you look at OneDrive settings and folder back up, some people still see three folders, some people see five. You know it depends and and this is the it's the uncertainty bit of this that I find strange, not just the timing of how the update goes out or who gets the update, or you know it's it's there are literally features out in the world that just are not on some computers and no one can explain why.

You could have 22H2 now and have every single feature in 23H2, but you're just on 22H2 and I don't know why. You know I get I can't explain it. I don't think Microsoft could explain it. That's. It's weird, like it's a, it's a new world we live in. It's. I obviously am struggling. I've been babbling for an hour probably about this now because I can't. I try to be okay with it and I just I it just doesn't make sense to me, so I'll, I'll move on. I'm sorry, yeah.

0:46:02 - Mikah Sargent
Round this out.

0:46:02 - Richard Campbell
I'm trying Windows.

0:46:04 - Mikah Sargent
Insider here.

0:46:07 - Paul Thurrott
On the therapist couch.

0:46:10 - Mikah Sargent
How does that make you feel All?

0:46:12 - Paul Thurrott
right. So there's been some action in the Windows Insider program since the last show. If you've been paying attention over the past couple of months, you may recall that for a while now it seems like all of the big updates are coming out at the end of the week after our show every week. This week they actually released a bunch of stuff today, so they're kind of getting back on what I think of as a normal schedule. But there was a beta build last week where they added some new co-pilot actions. I'm going to try not to be cynical and say something like meaning you'll see it in stable in three weeks, but you never know.

This was how they deployed the change, with the co-pilot button moving it over to the far side of the taskbar, and the way that this works now is as you most well, and it's an experiment, they're calling it, but it will. It will definitely appear in Windows at some point. Is you kind of mouse over this thing? And if there are things that co-pilot can do with something, maybe you copy to the clipboard or whatever. You will see actions right and enlist in like a context menu as you mouse over the co-pilot button, right? In other words, you've copied some text into the clipboard. You mouse over this thing and it says, hey, do you want to summarize this thing? Do you want me to explain it? Do you want to just put it into chat and you can do more with it, that kind of thing. So that's good, that's fine, but again, we're probably just going to get that together.

But the bigger news happened today. So today, after I think it was just one set of builds, maybe two on different build numbers, they put the Canary and Dev channels back on the same build again. Remember, we were doing that for a while. This is the system we expect to become Windows 11, 24 H2 or what we used to call Windows 12, right, and there's some big stuff going on here. So the biggest one is the Teams client right, there have been two different versions of the. I'll call it the consumer Teams client in Windows 11 in just a few years.

0:48:07 - Richard Campbell
The one that nobody should use right.

0:48:09 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, neither which, well, neither which anyone used right, separate from the Microsoft Teams app for commercial customers, of which there have also been two major releases, right, you know the classic version. Now, in the new version, which I think most customers would agree, the new one is better, but of course, what people want assuming they want it for consumer use at all or for personal use is like one client. Right, right now you could have three different versions of Microsoft Teams and you start many If you search your computer for Teams. I don't know, we can all do this together. I have two, I guess, but Microsoft Teams, which, curiously, is not what I think of as Teams, right, the consumer app, and then also Microsoft Teams worker school, which is the real Teams.

So they're going to start integrating what they're calling now the unified Teams client, which is going to include both consumer and commercial support in one client, just like we see on mobile. That will be part of Windows 11 24H2, if not sooner we'll see. That's something that Microsoft's been talking about separately, kind of unifying these clients. So it will be included in Windows and this will be a fun product bundling complaint for antitrust we can talk about in about six months. It'll be good because I missed the 90s.

0:49:26 - Richard Campbell
And I'm sure the Slack people are not excited at this.

0:49:29 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly, you're right. Yes, that's exactly right. Well, you know what's going to happen is Windows 11. Users in Europe probably won't see this, so they'll be able to remove it or whatever. Well, everyone should be able to remove it. But there were a bunch of co-pilot updates coming as part of moment five. These are kind of related co-pilot windows. I should say this is related to the make Windows do things or set settings and so forth. There's a bunch more being tested now in Dev and Canary, although some users are seeing, some are not, etc. Etc.

But this build also has a bunch of smaller improvements the way that progress bars work and taskbar icons. I'm sure most of you are thinking what are you talking about? There are progress bars, but there are. If you do like a big file copy, for example, you'll see a little progress bar under the file. Downloads in Edge 2 show that progress bar. Yeah, so there's a visual change there. Let's make it a little more obvious what that is. Live captions, which is honestly an awesome accessibility feature, is getting a quick settings tile. I don't think they're using the term tile, but it's a button. If you open quick settings, you'll see there's a grid of these things. You can add and remove those, and live caption will be one of them. It's not there today and then some other stuff, but that's the you know this is.

We're starting to see some movement here and we have, you know, moment 5, which is sort of happening right now as you speak, a little bit depending on where you're at. And then we have 24H2 formerly, you know, the operating system, formerly known as Windows 12. We're going to know it by us, like a squirrely symbol at some point, is coming in the second half of the year. So there's, there is a lot happening. Micah could be jealous of that. I guess that's right.

And there was also a new beta build today. Not a big deal, but if you're familiar with the new start menu in Windows 11, you know that there's a pin section and a recommended section, by default. A recommended section I don't know why they call it recommended, but it's recently installed apps and recently install sorry, recently access documents. They kind of intermingle. You can configure that obviously to, or maybe not obviously. You can configure that to show only one or the other.

But coming in beta meaning we're probably going to get it before this summer in stable is your most frequently used apps will now appear there, and I guess the theory is, like you know, to my mind, like, why don't they just appear in pinned? You know, one of the configuration options Microsoft might make would be, say, here's an idea like order them by use. You know, like, but I guess that's the area where you get to choose what's there and what order they're in. You can make folders and stuff and I maybe they don't want to touch that, so they're going to add a third type of thing to recommended, which I still think is a terrible name for that area, but whatever. So there you go, nothing.

0:52:23 - Richard Campbell
Well, I don't know. I have news. That's what you're telling me.

0:52:26 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, to summarize the past 57 minutes, I have nothing but goodness, in fact. Maybe just cut the front of that show right off and just, it's just all good, just started there, yeah, all right, microsoft up.

0:52:43 - Mikah Sargent
next One more general look at Microsoft after we just covered Windows 11 plus. As is always my way, I asked both Paul and Richard some thought exercise style questions that resulted in some rants.

0:52:59 - Paul Thurrott
I am. You have a unique ability to trigger me. No, oh, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, that's Microsoft.

0:53:06 - Mikah Sargent
It's not you, I just bring it to the forefront. Right, we dig into it. All right, no, you know what it is.

0:53:11 - Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry to interrupt, but because you approach this from the outside and you just have this kind of normal worldview, right, Like when you ask a question like that, it's like right, Like it's like right. This is so stupid.

0:53:24 - Mikah Sargent
This is what I've been saying the whole time, right.

0:53:26 - Paul Thurrott
This whole, like the whole world I'm in, is so bent and wrong. And then you're just like I don't understand why it's like this. You're like yes, thank you.

0:53:35 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly. Oh good, Well, that helps that I'm confirming that you were. Yeah, what you're, what you're believing and feeling, is valid. Paul, that's what I'm going to do.

0:53:45 - Paul Thurrott
I'm okay, you're okay, we're all okay. Somebody loves me.

0:53:49 - Mikah Sargent
So how is Microsoft dealing with all of these hacks that are going on?

0:53:56 - Paul Thurrott
Paulie, in the sense that there's been some. So Microsoft divulged a couple of months ago that they had had an incursion right In their corporate systems by a Russia sponsored hacker group, and we've now gotten three sets of revelations about this. It's not getting better, it's getting worse. Right, and I wouldn't I wasn't necessarily in this group, but right away people were saying, oh, the way they're talking about this is a little squirrely, you know, it's almost like they're purposefully not telling us everything you know, and Microsoft has tried to position their disclosures as being transparent, that we'll let you know more when we know more.

In the beginning, the big story was like look, this the two things I would say. One was that it wasn't a software bug in a modern Microsoft system that caused this and it didn't infect any customer data, right. And then over time it's like well, okay, actually I guess they kind of hacked into our systems. They got in front of more data than we thought. Now they're saying they actually accessed our source code, you know which? I think for a company like Microsoft, you could consider the crown jewels, right, depending on which source code we're talking about, I suppose.

0:55:10 - Richard Campbell
Recognizing. Most of the source code is on GitHub, where it's publicly accessible.

0:55:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah Well, and you know, the notion that this group used what I think a lot of people might term a fairly unsophisticated attack and was able to get through speaks to a little bit of a management issue, because Microsoft has so many systems and VMs and in physical systems as well, it's probably hard to kind of keep track. But they, this group, seems like they were pretty successful. So it's kind of a weird thing in 2024 now, for something like this, of this scale, to kind of happen, and I feel like we're not done with this right, I think. I think here's the question.

0:55:53 - Richard Campbell
Why are they talking about it? It's not. There's no requirement for public disclosure, no customer data has been jeopardized. Why are they talking about it at all? Like nobody builds PRs by accident. This is hard work. Why would you choose to do this? Who are you talking to, actually?

0:56:11 - Paul Thurrott
So if you, if you would ask me this after the initial disclosure, I would have said two reasons. One is that some of Microsoft's customers were seeing some of the same type of attacks and I think Microsoft saw something that indicated that these guys were also going after. I think it was HPE and I don't remember the other companies, a couple of the companies and so I think part of it was look, this is going to get out. We, you know, we need to discuss it to some level, but one of the reasons you talk about this as a when you're a company like Microsoft is because it might make you look good. Right, we discovered this thing, we stopped it. Nothing serious happened. I think the problem is it was more serious than it led on, and I don't know if they knew this back in January and maybe now they're kind of backed into a corner a little bit.

0:56:56 - Mikah Sargent
But yesterday on security. Now Steve Gibson took issue with the fact that Microsoft released and I guess is maybe now shown a pattern of releasing this news on Friday evenings which is a classic.

0:57:13 - Paul Thurrott
It's a classic in the corporate world Taking out the garbage after the market's closed.

0:57:16 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and I mean yeah, you, you point out that this is kind of in the fact that they caught it and all that jazz. I wonder, though, if there isn't some level of requirement, right it?

0:57:31 - Richard Campbell
was normally is, but only government.

Yeah, but normally governments would. Especially they're making hints that this does involve FBI, dia. That's true Folks who would say release nothing, yeah, that's a good one. Well, so the couple of the things we've been banging around folks I've been talking to on this is the government can't release it themselves, so they're asking Microsoft to do it because it's useful for political positioning. There's also the internal angle, because one of the things they announced, especially the initial release, is that they're doing a major security wash throughout the company and it is fairly common practice at Microsoft to do public releases about changes in behavior that they want within the company, so they kind of can't take them back. Everybody knows we're doing this now, so we have to do it.

0:58:19 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so this came out in the second disclosure.

Was this notion of we 'd already announced this new version of what I think of as the trustworthy competing 2.0 initiative right? This event has shown us that what we're going to do, among other things, using AI to sort of algorithmically discover attacks, et cetera, et cetera is the right approach, and, as it turns out, we're going to have to move more quickly to make this happen. So had Microsoft, I'm sure they looked at these changes, just like the changes they made in server for 2003, that, without initiative back then, where the functionality became very difficult to use because they had to lock everything down, things broke, and things are going to break with this too, and I think this is their way of making the medicine easier to swallow. It's like look, we didn't want to do this to you guys, we were going to ease this in, but this is really serious, see. So we have to do. We have to make these breaking changes now, and maybe it's just a way to kind of get those things over the hump. Ultimately, I mean, that might be the right thing to do.

0:59:23 - Richard Campbell
It's kind of a weird stance to take, but we've seen him do it before, so it does look like a familiar pattern.

0:59:29 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you get customers who are like, yeah, I don't care, we're not doing it, and it's like, no, we really need to. Yeah, yeah, and it was. It's not us, it's the Russian guys. No, I again. This is borderline conspiracy theory in a way, but I do think there's something to it. Right that you know what the right thing is to do? You know you're going to get pushed back from your most important customers. Oh, you got hacked too. Oh, like, I guess we're going to have to get going.

0:59:57 - Richard Campbell
Huh, yeah we did kind of. We did kind of telegraph that this was a possibility. So right, you know you had an opportunity to act before it got this serious, yeah.

1:00:07 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, if this was a true crime show, eventually there would be the episode where we find out that Microsoft, in fact, was the one that hacked itself, you know it's a thank goodness it's not a true one.

1:00:20 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, what's your state sponsor now?

1:00:23 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly A Russian sponsored group called Microsoftcom Broken to yeah, I don't know no one.

1:00:31 - Mikah Sargent
Clip that and take it out of context.

1:00:32 - Richard Campbell
Okay, yeah, it is interesting. They obviously there's more going on. There's a lot of sub posting going on here. They are not actually speaking to the public.

1:00:47 - Paul Thurrott
I actually think that you know, in a bid to be transparent, they're coming off as not at all transparent.

1:00:53 - Richard Campbell
Yes, and that's when I'll feel the creepy.

1:00:55 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, and that's when you start talking right, and that's the the why we're speculating, because I, you know, I would say the first denouncement I was like I don't know. You know, I think Richard, you were pretty much you were like I don't know. This seems kind of scurrily to me, like this is not you know, this is, this is a fake disclosure right or fake transparency Right?

1:01:12 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, because it doesn't fit the normal disclosure profile. Yeah, the normal disclosure profile is customer day has been impacted. Here's how we're mitigating it and that's not what happened here. Why are you talking about this? Because they do routinely deal with these state sponsored actions in a variety of ways. Go back and watch the half-nume exploit, because that was affecting customers and it was state actors that were doing. They had a heavy FBI involvement, like all of those pieces were there. This is not the same.

1:01:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that, no, there's right. And and the more they talk, you know it's like me. At the top of the show I went on and on about Microsoft. At some point you're like, okay, we get it, it's, it's. It feels like that, a little bit Like what. You're still talking about this, what's going on, what, why you I'm sorry you're, you're still finding things out what, what are you doing Like what? You know it feels a little off you know, and why are you disclosing them?

1:02:09 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, interesting.

1:02:10 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yeah, maybe someday we'll have a full story here, but I feel like you know I would have said this last time we talked about this I don't think we're done. No, I don't think we're done either. Yeah, I think there's more to come. Yeah.

1:02:22 - Mikah Sargent
Especially given just the once you have access to those emails and the emails of their cybersecurity team.

1:02:32 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, there's just so much that's involved here that who knows I know who knows, I have a hard enough time changing the passwords of my password manager. I can only imagine when it's like at Microsoft right now, they're trying to figure out my God, like the, just the, the chain of emails. You know just that they might have gotten access to all the information there. You know the source code. Geez, I mean like I don't, it's yeah.

1:02:53 - Richard Campbell
But source code is a super vague term. You know, senior emails like it could have been nothing too. Like there's no concept of what the content was. There's a lot of source code flying around Microsoft, most of which is publicly accessible anyway. Like I'm not sure, the fact that they're that vague about those statements. Again, why? Why? Because it makes it appear are you trying to make it appear more threatening? It actually was, or you know?

1:03:18 - Paul Thurrott
are you just getting ahead of it, right? In other words, the hacker group, maybe it's going to disclose information that would might be embarrassing? Yeah, so you've already disclosed it? You already disclosed it, right, which is?

1:03:29 - Richard Campbell
also a common fact, but that's the whole thing is there's been no signal of midnight blizzard trying to extort Microsoft.

1:03:36 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's odd, isn't it?

1:03:37 - Richard Campbell
They've never bragged about this, they've never talked about it, yeah, which again might be another reason for the disclosure, right is? We see you, we know who you are.

1:03:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, there you go. Okay, well, I'd like. I mean, maybe someday we'll have a full story here- there could be a book that comes out of this. This could be a. You know this could be a big, big deal. I guess we'll see, but it's gotten bigger. We know that much. Midnight blizzard, the trilogy yeah, like to riff on Kev Burris thing. It's like we know what you did last summer.

1:04:09 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah.

1:04:14 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, so there were rumors and now it's a fact. Microsoft is holding an event on March 21,. Which isn't about what.

a week Next week, I guess next sort of, except with the short notice on these things. I know. Well, I think we live in an era now where everything kind of leaks, you know, like the remember the Xbox event this past month. They were going to hold off until the end of this month and then it leaked, okay, so I think they're just trying to get out into the world, or whatever.

We had heard rumors that Microsoft is going to be releasing a Surface Pro 10 and Surface laptop 10 in both Intel and ARM variants. Right, kind of interesting Also that the ARM versions would be delayed because that stuff's happening a little bit later in the spring. But they've come out and said that Microsoft, they has come out and said, yeah, we're going to have this event. It's going to focus on what they call a new era of work, right? So co-pilot Windows and Surface, which to me sounds a little bit like the September event. Right, except that Surface, if it is Surface laptop and Surface Pro, those are the two core Surface devices, right? If they're? So we will see what this looks like. I'm curious. I have my eye on Surface laptop. I wouldn't mind getting a big Surface laptop.

1:05:33 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, presumably all with AI chips in them, like inevitably. Oh yeah, it is.

1:05:39 - Paul Thurrott
Microsoft. So it's possible? No, but yes, even Microsoft should, Because it's too soon for.

1:05:45 - Richard Campbell
Intel Ultras, because so it's got to be something else. Oh geez.

1:05:50 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, well, well, I mean, qualcomm's had that stuff for a while, so it could be at least a no. So we'll see. Okay, we'll see. We can't make any promises, right, rich? What do you know about this one? I learned about this kind of last minute. There was actually an event recently in New York for kind of a small group of people about something called Microsoft Co-Pilot for Security, which they could have used on their internal systems before that Russian hack thing. What exactly does a Co-Pilot for Security even look like?

1:06:26 - Richard Campbell
Well, I don't understand this. To start with, it was one of the first Co-Pilots announced, after GitHub Co-Pilot Like, even before N365 and anything. They talked about a security Co-Pilot very early on, which is to say, obviously they had been working on it for some time and coincidentally, I have a run as episode that's going to publish the first week of April about Co-Pilot for Security, which is the redamming used to be security Co-Pilot, right, yeah, because they changed all the names all of the time. It is a terrible name, it's a dreadful name. So is Azure Co-Pilot Like. What's great about GitHub Co-Pilot? You know what it does? Right, it accesses source code from GitHub to help provide you with code. Right.

As soon as you get into these macro things like security like you're going to try and give that a definition in any way it gets kind of impossible. The conversation I had with George we very much dug into this, helping you navigate the strata of event logs and streams and so forth to see where things are going on. One thing that LLMs are very good at is summarization of data, so that's certainly an element. So then right away you're pressing, Then a seem like Microsoft Sentinel. No, no, no, not that. It's like. You know we get back to this idea that that there shouldn't be any Products that are specifically LLM said. Llm should be included in products we're already using. But I do think and it's certainly the direction we went in in this conversation I've got to give away the show that most folks that are working on security in organizations are part-time. Right, you're a normal system in and you get to put the temp file hat on once a month, and so the idea that you have a tool that really maintains state, that knows where you are in your security efforts, to help you go to the next thing and address the next most significant problem, to continue to strengthen your security profile for your organization, it's a pretty useful tool.

Yeah, so it's cross product. That that's the hope, certainly it's. You know, looking across all of your Data streams, all of the log-in spaces of what, which is part of the challenge, right, when you go to set up a seem like said no, you're mostly trying to direct all of these conduits of potential security information into a place where you can see, before the disaster strikes, that you know a breach is underway. A typical ransomware attack is three to six months long, so they've been in the system for a long time and post facto, you know, after the bomb goes off you can go and see that they've been poking around for months. But a whole point of us, a system like Sentinel, is to pick that up before it goes off so that you can start fighting back, and that shouldn't be what security copilot's about. There is a product for that, but it can be something to help lead you down those paths. So I Think they're taking a terrible risk with this product.

1:09:26 - Paul Thurrott
I did too. I do too. I feel like the the function that well, I guess it's the cross-partic part of it that makes it make a little bit of sense.

1:09:36 - Richard Campbell
But you know it's the implied promise. I have a copilot for my security. It's like narrow the scope man, it's too much.

1:09:46 - Paul Thurrott
It's like, hey, copilot, secure my environment.

All right, have a good weekend. Everybody done, thanks, I, it seems a little, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean if you've ever done any kind of a Corporate rollout of Microsoft technologies, you know that this, this notion of best practices right, that Microsoft has established, brought their products and they, you know they, they, they built that into products in a way. But I would say to date, not that I do a lot of this, but I mean what I see when I look at like Microsoft 365 is or you set up, I'll enter ID now I guess what used to be Azure Active Directory. I mean, you, you kind of go through what's basically it looks at your system and it says, okay, you got a few problems here. And you go through it, kind of a checklist, and it's hopefully one that's sorted by priority right, where you are Figuring the system in a way that meets the best practices right, and I guess the promise of this although again, I don't see how this works exactly would be that it does that for you, I guess it.

1:10:50 - Richard Campbell
One would hope we don't have a clear picture of exactly how that's right.

1:10:55 - Paul Thurrott
That it's launching on April 1st is probably coincidental, but I think I'll just point it out just in case you know it's. I don't know, I'm a little this one's, this one's interesting.

1:11:07 - Richard Campbell
They are launching on a Monday, you know. They the and this falls into the same umbrella of things like making sure your data as state is in order. Right, they talk about if you're gonna name hold on M365 co-pilot, it's important they have your data as dated order. What does that even mean? Right, it's. And really what it is is you're setting security rights for all of the data that this tool is about to index and surface to everyone. Yep, the question is how would you know when your data to state was in order? Like, does a little red light turn on when you got it nailed? It's different. They're gonna interest this.

1:11:42 - Paul Thurrott
It will be a brand-new feature, richard, it's called. It's a green badge. Mm-hmm, they'll let you know when everything's good. I Mean, you know, copilot, as I think of it, at least the copilot's I've used are sort of one-way streets. You go to it, you do something and you walk away. Mm-hmm, I think security requires more of an automated Entrity. Yeah, like you want to hear from it, you know? No, I guess I don't know. This is gonna be a two-way conversation here. I don't know.

1:12:13 - Richard Campbell
This is we'd be a heck of a progress, was it? What I find interesting is it was Announce we're announced very early on. And again, I think there was a lot of pressure from Sacha for all these teams to do something, and many of them that it are. You know that, as is was true for the Bing team. Many of them are already working on a product in that space, just latched on to the open AI libraries to upgrade their own stuff. And here you go, we're there. But it's one thing to make announcements, nothing to ship a product. So we we're mostly hoping. You know, one of the concerns for me now, if they're gonna roll this thing out on April 1st, is on April 3rd my show is gonna come out. It may be wildly wrong. Yeah, I recorded it a couple of weeks ago. Maybe he needs a little disclaimer in the beginning.

To write a record, a bumper and go, yeah, yeah, recorded before the announcement. So yeah, yeah, right, or I will be rushing to redo it based on our learnings from the Hack.

1:13:08 - Paul Thurrott
We have Rush this product to market. Yeah.

1:13:13 - Richard Campbell
Well, it's part of my life. Recording in advance has consequences.

1:13:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it also is advantages, by the way, which I'm very jealous of, because, you know, everything I do is kind of spur the moment, news related, blah, blah, blah. Whatever you get to put a bunch of stuff in the cans, call Kind of lined up, it's nice, yeah, and I work with my sponsors on you know stories that they're excited about the fits.

1:13:35 - Richard Campbell
Well, when the products, like, all of that goes together, right, right, well, we'll see. We've what.

1:13:38 - Paul Thurrott
Two weeks about, two weeks from the two weeks from Monday, I guess and then this is something I never.

I don't really pay too much attention to this, although I'm very interested in the dev space, but people probably know this notion that Microsoft Teams is a powerful enough platform that it supports apps, of course, and third parties can create these apps, and I'm sure this is not the only way.

But Microsoft has a free toolkit that you add into visual arts that allows you, that provides you with things like you would see in visual studio, like templates for different types of apps that you might want to run In teams, and they have added AI capabilities to this. So you can add AI To an app that you would write for Microsoft Teams, including an AI chat bot that would run within teams and be one of those things you kind of interact with. So possibly it works off your corporate data or whatever, and you can have that kind of in in-house Kind of what we used to think of as a used to call this a used to call in-house corporate apps, a, whatever it's like, not a public app, like just one, you know, internal application, oh gotcha, yeah, that type of thing. So this thing is called the tools.

Sorry, the teams toolkit for visuals to use in-house. Sorry, the teams toolkit for visual studio. It's been around for a little while. Cry is the latest version of visual studio, but if you get the latest version of this toolkit, it is a bunch of stuff in there for Working it not just for AI but about there's some other new features as well, but there's some AI features in there that might be of interest To developers. Okay, what else? And then, moving off of Microsoft, most people probably don't know this, but opera had Opera has a browser called opera one.

They've kind of made this their flagship browser, the. Their Innovation, such as is, or their idea, is that, rather than tack AI onto the browser will architect this thing To be kind of AI focused from the beginning. And now that they've kind of made this architectural shift and they've added their own AI capability called aria, they want to start adding AI features, probably at a fairly furious clip. So they've created a feature drops program right, a lot pixel, I guess where you could join this. Use opera one and you get Early access to these new AI features and you can Test them and provide feedback etc. It may be impact the product. So if you're running opera one on Windows, macro Linux. This is available right now in the. I think it's the dev channel or beta channel. I think it's the dev channel. I don't see it in my own history. It's in there somewhere, but but in one of the non stable channels, right, so you can opt into that if you would like and you'll get new features on a Bi-weekly basis, going forward and then hot off their success with the DMA, the European Parliament, right, is moving toward what they're calling the Artificial Intelligence Act, and this is the Not surprisingly that they would lead the way on this, given how they're doing things with other forms of regulation, especially big tech.

But the idea here is to put safeguards on AI and just kind of Legislate that right. It still needs to be fully adopted. You know it's not, but they're, they're pushing toward it. So you know, if you, if you like the GDPR and you thought the DMA was great, this is their. This will be their iPad moment or something. I don't know what I'm talking about, but anyway, they're, they're moving toward that kind of a soul of the map today. They're moving toward that. So I'm sure we will never have anything like it the United States, because we can't get anything done, but it looks like they're gonna get there.

1:17:15 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's a sheet you think about legislative bodies that legislate?

1:17:21 - Paul Thurrott
Legislative bodies that legislate. What an idea.

1:17:23 - Richard Campbell
The concept.

1:17:25 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's almost like I have a devolved browsing. You're actually on music. It's a. It's quite a concept. What is this Shangri-La we're talking about Now?

1:17:34 - Mikah Sargent
Did, did, I, did, I did, was it? Was it on purpose that you skipped the first topic in AI, or no, I'm sorry, completely skip that by mistake.

1:17:44 - Paul Thurrott
No, it's because I'm a spaz. So, yes, so this past week, microsoft Michael ball, let's just say back in January, I think it was Microsoft talk about this notion of bringing a custom GPT builder to Co-pilot for Microsoft 365 and I think at the I think they said at the time also the co-pilot pro. It is available now and with for co-pilot pro subscribers Like myself. And so yesterday I flew home from Mexico City and had sporadic Wi-Fi, so naturally I built a co-pilot, but as you do, in the air, as one would, and I was working on it again today, because it's not quite what I want. But ideally what I would be able to do is say, hey, I have this website that has a bunch of content on it and I'm gonna ask you questions, but I only want you look at my site. Yes, right, don't look anywhere else. And I can't get it to do that. But what's interesting is I can throw it questions like I wanted to co-pilot, and I said I've actually even tried this. I suspect this will work fine. Let it answer the question and say, yeah, but I only want the answer to come from my site, and then it will say okay, and then it gives you the answer just from my site. Right, that works today, you can do that right now, or I can do it anyway with this stuff. But to make it work that way all the time? I can't figure that out and I don't know why.

There are these two very broad option checkboxes in there. One is use search results and the other one is image generation. If I turn off web results, it doesn't do anything, like you can't even look at my website. So it's not like that would make it. You know, I very specifically Designed it, for lack of a better term. That's a stupid way to put it, because I didn't do much work. But to only take information from thoratcom, but it I, it does not do that. It says it's going to do that. I just did another version today and it very explicitly says this will only provide information from thoratcom. Then you ask you the question it's like Wikipedia, the verge. You know, whatever root it right is, it just doesn't work that way. So yeah, but obviously that's not really what this kind of thing is for it.

A couple of years ago, microsoft added these custom GPT's, which we've seen in open AI as well, for things like, well, image creation, which we already had, but vacation planning, recipes and, I think, fitness training right, or yeah, fitness training and these, those are good ideas, those are good subsets, right. You kind of cut down on the volume of information and maybe it becomes more reliable and accurate. Although careful with the recipes and fitness training if they screw those up, because you could kill yourself. But so I yeah, I mean, I think what I've really created here and again, created as a tough term because I didn't really create much, but I basically just sort of said to this thing look, I want to focus on personal technology topics and it's, I don't know, I don't know that I've, I don't even know that this is a skin off the onion. It may be no different than just asking Copilot the question I haven't had time to test it, but an interesting capability. This would be the thing it could do right is index a site.

1:20:53 - Richard Campbell
That seems to be the logical thing to do, so Microsoft does have a.

1:20:58 - Paul Thurrott
Graphical interface. I can forgetting the name of it. There is a site, there's another tool Microsoft has for developers where they can create a Tool using Copilot that does exactly what I've just described. Right, so that capability exists. If you go into the interface for this custom GPT thing and Copilot, it says that you can upload your website to it, and it's like I'm not uploading my website. Here's a PDF version of the 18,000 articles I published since 2015 no and but I.

But there's something interesting here, right, I think, between the capabilities that sort of exist today, not necessarily here, but also in the Microsoft stack, the stuff that we know is coming in Copilot for Microsoft 365, especially the one drive bit, right, there will come a time and and given the speed at which this is happening, probably before the end of the show where I could create some kind of a custom GPT.

That's not just the content for my website, but I could point it at my one drive archive and say here's the 30 years of stuff I've written, back when I worked at Windows IT Pro, back when I wrote paper based books across a variety Microsoft topics, whatever it is. Here's the note, the notes I took during a meeting with someone from Microsoft, and then you could point it at all that stuff collectively and say it's sort of like, it's almost like a Paul throughout mind meld, in a way like here's a time I want to know more about this topic, whatever it is, and have it actually go through that body of work. I think might be kind of interesting. You know, and I'm gonna, I'll play with that because you know, at that point I guess I don't even show up every day. But you know what might I think of the right based on what you've written for 30 years.

1:22:45 - Mikah Sargent
The challenge? The challenge here especially, is that its ability to properly determine what it's going to say next Required this whole set of training data that gave it, yes, that ability, and then trying to take that and sort of separate it then from its index of content that you want to have it Pay attention to. If Leo was here, he would be talking about the Probably effusively talking about the GPT that he created for one of the programming languages that he uses.

1:23:27 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, yes, we've heard of it.

1:23:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, yeah, I'm sure I am a big nerd and I run some Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and I've actually created a couple of GPT's that are accustomed to those campaigns, and so if there's something that I need help with in the moment where the players do something completely unexpected, I'll pop that in, and then it has the context of what's happened thus far, and I think that's really cool.

1:23:54 - Paul Thurrott
I really think this kind of thing is very interesting. I mean, that is literally the nerdiest example ever. But no, but you, you create this world that has maybe a history and famous people in it and characters and events and everything. And you know, if you were Tolkien writing this book, I don't know how he did things, but you know I would have a hard time keeping this stuff in my brain and having a reference that you could go to to find things out. I think it's fascinating, right, I think that's a really neat thing, and but but whether it's a Dungeons and Dragons campaign or a specific programming language or whatever it is, you're talking about something that has kind of a finite body of data, and I think that's the type of thing that AI would be good at dealing with summarizing, providing answers against that data, right, and and I'm kind of talking about the same thing, again, not as geeky as your thing, but but you know, a finite body of data that, you know, for me, in my case, has spanned, like I said, 30 years, but Whatever, a number of articles, whatever, never books, whatever it is like.

I mean, there's a. You know kind of a. There's a body of work. I mean, it's something to I'm really curious to. It's like when you're a little kid and you hear your voice on a tape recorder for the first time and you say I sound like that, like you, I, I, I should know this information fairly intimately, but I think I'm going to be surprised by some of the stuff that comes out of it. Like I'm just curious, you know, yeah, see what that?

1:25:22 - Mikah Sargent
looks like Absolutely, I think. Yeah, that's that that. So Google had I can't remember what it was called, but something with the word notebook in it, and I was yeah, I think it's, I think it is just Gemma, I think it's just a notebook.

1:25:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and I know, and.

1:25:37 - Mikah Sargent
I wanted what you're talking about from that. I didn't end up getting that. It just became kind of a search engine for stuff that I'd written before. But yeah, I wanted I mean, I had even going back to high school documents in there, from when I was in a poetry class, for example, and Wrote a bunch of poetry and I thought it'd be super cool to see if it could pretend to be me writing a poem without it end up looking.

1:26:01 - Paul Thurrott
It didn't end up working well, that would be the next step. Now it's like I'd love to see you. I was really busy this week. I didn't have time to work in the game. What do you think I might write? You know that, like given the body that's of work that's come before. What is the next installment? Look like.

1:26:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah or oh. Russia's back at it again, trying to get into the servers. How would I handle this problem?

1:26:25 - Paul Thurrott
I responded that if I were Microsoft not saying I am, but if I was, yeah, well, yeah. So you said you kind of called it a search, and I think you could literally call it a search engine. Right, search engine is kind of an interesting term because I feel like we're going to start shifting on what that means. But sometimes you go to the web and you're looking for an answer to a question and it's a fact. The date of something, what day of the week was April 21st, 1985 or whatever, right. So those things are just whatever. It's like a little. You spit out a fact and that's kind of fun.

But I think the summarizing bit is what's really interesting. Right, look at everything I've ever written about one drive or something, and when did one like what was, like what happened with? Remember, one drive used to have before files on demand I can't remember the name. But there's this other thing what was that called, you know? And and to have it kind of go back and look through stuff and then say in April 2020 you wrote this and then in 2021 it was this and then it changed this 2022, just like that kind of a bullet list or not, whatever, just like a summer. I think I still, I still think there's great value in that I this is going to be very interesting. I think it's going to surface things that we were just fragile enough as humans. We kind of forget, or it's going to draw these kind of comparisons that we never connected ourselves yeah, the comparisons especially, but also what you're saying there.

1:27:52 - Mikah Sargent
I remember reading a couple of books about memory and human beings and the argument made is that our brains were never designed to be these deep storage devices that our brains are very good at processing and very good at in the moment, and so getting all of that stuff out of our brain and down somewhere, even freeze them up more to do the processing that they're good at, so that would be cool to have how many times you walk down the street you kind of catch something peripheral vision.

1:28:22 - Paul Thurrott
You look and it's just, it's like it triggers. This year I remember something.

1:28:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, or you smell something or you know whatever it is actually smell and you're like, oh my god, like I just had this.

1:28:31 - Paul Thurrott
You know or you see someone who's not the person, but it reminds you of somebody and then you suddenly, you know, I think, AI is going to provide this moment for us, if you will, as we search our little collective histories here yeah very cool maybe maybe I could even make the stupid GPT, but let's take a pause here before we come back with a conversation about Microsoft 365 up next on Windows Weekly.

1:29:07 - Mikah Sargent
All righty Paul and Richard Campbell. Yeah, what do you got for us in Microsoft 365 land?

1:29:14 - Paul Thurrott
so at the beginning of the show I expressed for the 117th time my angst with Windows and what's going on there. But if you were to look at the collective body of people using Microsoft, I don't think there's an angsty angst bigger than the angst around outlook right now. There was a little bit of angster on teams there for a while. I think that's kind of settled down. But Microsoft in 1997, right, introduced outlook, the first version. It came up out of schedule plus, which I think a lot of people either don't know or have never heard of. It don't remember. But basically they added email, I guess, to take a schedule plus, and out came outlook right and contacts like those are the big yeah and it was specifically designed for.

Well, what became exchange or what was, I guess, by then exchange, right, yeah, right at the time the internet email was happening, you know, and, yeah, a lot of the initial criticism of the product was that it wasn't very good at that stuff. So they spat out outlook 98 a year later to kind of correct some of those mistakes, and I don't know remember when it happened, but outlook 2000, outlook 2003, whatever outlook that became the center, yeah, the sovereign app the thing.

1:30:29 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it is the right, it's where you start your day at work.

1:30:32 - Paul Thurrott
It's where you end your day at work. It's, it was everything. How many people do we know that protected their PST file like it was the one ring in Tolkien.

They had a back up in their pocket, in a floppy or something, back in the day, whatever all of your email data was in this one place. Of course now it's all different now, but but outlook is, it has persisted. You know, and I'm sure in most businesses today there's a big divide between the people who kind of live and die in teams and the people who kind of live and die in outlook and, yeah, microsoft's, you know, doing that work to integrate it. Well, they're screwing it all up because Microsoft has released and is now improving a new outlook, the cunningly named Microsoft outlook, which is one of I don't know 20 something apps or whatever services but the name outlook in it. Yeah, that it will eventually, you know, replace the classic of the legacy or whatever they refer to at the old, you know, the one that debuted in Office 97, right, mm-hmm, and it has. It is in the process now of replacing the mail-in calendar apps and Windows, yeah, which is causing a little bit of angst for some reason.

1:31:46 - Richard Campbell
It was always a frustration there was. There was always another app right. If you were in Outlook and then you clicked on a calendar item, it opened calendar Right. That was annoying, Yep.

1:31:58 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and I don't know I those apps came up out of the Windows 8 stuff. This was the going back. You go back to probably 2010. 2011. Chris Jones, out of Windows, was relieving Windows live at the time and they were part of that initial wave of apps that were written in HTML. Yeah, and we're supposed to show off the what was capable or what you could do with what was then called the Metro app platform at this platform from Windows 8. So those apps, to me, are horribly out of date. There's a lot kinds of, well, the mail app, especially calendars fine, honestly, but but they're being replaced, right. So that's happening like that's happening pretty aggressively, but over on the commercial side, you get those guys running. You know the classic regional office yeah they are not happy.

They are not happy because they look at this thing and they see a couple things. They see a web app which they don't like, right, and they see a lot of missing features, which is, you know, absolutely, absolutely understandable. And, just as is true of office broadly or any office app, there's a million features, a million commands in Microsoft Outlook today. Every one of those people requires whatever subset of them. All of those subsets are completely different. So, yeah, pleasing every one of these users is Not just difficult, it's impossible, right? No matter when this thing completes, it will not meet everyone's need, there is no doubt about it, but they're trying. You know, the question to date has been okay, but when is this happening? And most people are asked that question up because they care, but because they're looking at the clock saying, well, I'm gonna retire in 2025.

1:33:34 - Richard Campbell
Do I really have to learn this? Yeah?

1:33:35 - Paul Thurrott
could I just get off, you know? Could I just never have to deal with this Mm-hmm. So this past week they finally provided they Microsoft a bit of clarity in the what this schedule will look like. It's not specific other than at the very earliest they will replace classic Outlook for Windows with this new version in 2029. So that's over five years away. The end of 2029, that's. That's the soonest this could happen. They have milestones to hit where they have to have some specific range of features before they leave an attempt to do this. Yeah, but there will be a point where you know the new outlook will become the default and often will be the outlook. Yeah, right, you'll still be able to go back, right, there'll be a time where it will be the default and you can't go back, and that's many years down the road, but it will happen. The Promise for Microsoft is that none of these milestones will be hit without at least a year of warning, right, in other words, they're not gonna. You're not gonna wake up tomorrow and sit in here. Oh, sorry, the opt-out's over, you can't do it. You know, like, you'll know a year, mm-hmm. So commercial customers will have the ability to Roll this out and they if they want to go early, like if, for some reason, the new outlook works well in an organization I've never heard of anyone say that. But if it does, you'll be able to roll this thing out and then make it the default and make it, you know, just there, like. You can not, you know, even prevent people from going back if you want, which I'm sure Microsoft would like to see. But this is fascinating because in some ways this is the Team certification of outlook in a way, and what I mean by that is teams.

Is a web app? Right, it's written, written with well, it's written with web technologies right, outlook is Very much a classic, you know, 132 app, that the big architecture Well, it's not architectural. But the big kind of technical change that's occurred in classic outlook, as we call it now, is that they move the extensions, like the, the way that you extend the ability of the app with by third parties or whatever, to a web model right, and the idea there was that you could write one outlook extension that would work in outlook on the web, it would work in the classic client on the desktop, it would work in the new Mac client, and you know, not a bad approach, but I think you know they've seen the writing on the wall here and they want to, you know, move to a pure web client, which I, you know. There's been a lot of pushback to this, so You're in this group. That's your time frame 2029 at the earliest. Before you. That's me.

1:36:09 - Richard Campbell
I'm in that group. Yeah, I've tried to flip to the new one a couple of times, and then what I actually? I think I have to switch back to the old one to get any work done.

1:36:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's okay, I heard from what look every, like I said everyone has different needs, right, and you could point. You could probably point to specific features. Fair enough. Ptpst file support we talked about pop three. I can't support to support for like file types like eml and msg, right, mm-hmm, older reordering, drag and drop, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But One guy on Twitter, I don't know, I'm not making fun of him exactly, but he said I, I have nine email accounts I have to manage. I had this thing like support six accounts and it's like maybe you're the problem, you know, I don't know.

1:36:52 - Mikah Sargent
It counts. What are you?

1:36:53 - Paul Thurrott
doing? I Don't know. Anyway, I, they're trying to be reasonable here, they're trying to be as Transparent as they can be I, the truth is they really don't know, right.

1:37:07 - Richard Campbell
No, no, they'll extend it as necessary, but they are just trying to get a motion towards the Sun setting. I Maintaining I don't envy them many taking apps right.

1:37:17 - Paul Thurrott
They will never please anybody with this.

1:37:19 - Richard Campbell
No, that's the problem, but they're trying to make the fewest people angry, so they create an arc to reduce those numbers.

1:37:27 - Mikah Sargent
That sounds like. That sounds like a perfect way to make bad choices To try and make the fewest people angry. That's like designed by what is it called? Designed by committee, basically, yeah.

1:37:40 - Paul Thurrott
I, yeah, like let's not innovate, let's just try not to hurt. You know I, this is the. The outlook group is the one that you know. The people who live in outlook and love outlook rely on outlook. You know, they're the ones who would resist or were resisting teams in the beginning and probably still today into a large degree. They're not gonna move to new outlook. You know, like the way you reduce the number of people, literally as you let them retire.

1:38:07 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, they're just not gonna move and hence the dates right, they're making it long enough to try and do that. And they have been peeling people off into Into teams loop. Some of loops capabilities are about allowing email people to participate Into the collaborative tools as well, yep, but they really have built a lot of bridges. I would say there's a more. You know, one of the issues here is that as soon as you're running in the browser context, your relationship with the network is different. Outlook has always had a problem with Windows networking, because it's just the way that Windows networking works. Well, if the network is grumpy about something, outlook has no choice. It ends up hanging. It was very. They've never been able to crack that.

1:38:46 - Paul Thurrott
Now you are describing a problem that is 20 years old Exactly. I heard it's incredible.

1:38:51 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and they and their solution was not to crack it, it was to change the stack To simply have go. Okay, let's just do this as a progressive web app instead. He's in the browser. Owns that relationship instead of that and I you couldn't well this.

1:39:06 - Paul Thurrott
Obviously there'll be some kind of client sync or whatever, but I maybe it being in the cloud, kind of some weird way, reduces the hops to the client.

1:39:17 - Richard Campbell
You know it there once was a time when outlook behaved dramatically better if you had your own exchange server. Yeah, that wasn't. She hasn't been true for years either. That's right.

1:39:27 - Paul Thurrott
Yep yeah, so they're trying.

1:39:30 - Richard Campbell
I would say this the only thing worse than outlook is all of the other email choices.

1:39:38 - Paul Thurrott
Can I get a shout out for you, Dora?

1:39:40 - Richard Campbell
anybody you know, I remember that one but it's also, you know, part of it is your own behavior. Like lots of folks fix to Gmail because they just don't organize their mail. It's not a thing. They're not hierarchical about mail. That's an obsolete concept. You live in search. That's right. That's exactly right. Which means and I've got to deal with folks like this all the time which means what they really is is I can't find your email. Send it to me again. I.

1:40:06 - Paul Thurrott
Think Gmail search works pretty well, but I hear you.

1:40:09 - Richard Campbell
I just said in my experience, those that rely on that often just a mere email again because I can't find right, right, right.

1:40:17 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, if you want to round Robin a word, doc, I think outlook is still a great solution.

1:40:22 - Richard Campbell
Don't recommend doing that, no and these days, if you're running an M 365 properly, m 365 intercepts that throws it into SharePoint, just passes a link around.

1:40:31 - Paul Thurrott
That's right, and it looks like you're doing that thing you thought you were doing.

1:40:33 - Richard Campbell
But yeah, but it did, but it actually is maintaining versioning and so forth for you Not to mention is permissions and stuff. Right, you're, you're, you're making sure it doesn't go outside the environment, if that's what you want, or your organization or whatever and when that works, it is magic, and when it doesn't work, the error messages are hopeless and you will never figure out why it isn't working.

1:40:54 - Paul Thurrott
I think you just describe what at the top of the show, the modal dialogue box.

1:40:58 - Richard Campbell
That is just like seriously like what, what, why, you know and you know. The funny thing is that wouldn't happen in the new outlook. Because it can't happen in the new outlook? Because PWA. Oh, because the you can't do a lot of dialogue. A lot to do a dialogue, that's not a thing.

1:41:15 - Paul Thurrott
Right, right, modern, yeah, nice, yeah, okay, I don't I Not use outlook, the classic outlook, in a long time, other than those Mistaken clicks where it starts opening. You're like, oh, what have I done, you know?

1:41:33 - Richard Campbell
What is this? You know, yeah, you get a little chill as that thing pops up again. You know, oh no, I gotta make this go away. And you click on it too quickly and now it's got the white screen of death literally never go away until you're like, oh, here we go. Yeah, here.

1:41:46 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you know.

1:41:47 - Richard Campbell
I think the line I used on dotnet rocks it actually got me a call from the outlook team was 65 threads. None of them are for you.

1:41:58 - Paul Thurrott
Oh.

1:41:59 - Richard Campbell
Yep.

1:42:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, listen I this was like dealing with a slightly feral animal. You just kind of you set the thing up to download your mail. You walk away, come back tomorrow and say I was done, you know.

1:42:10 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, let me know when you're done doing whatever you want to do, because clearly what I want to do is get on it Eventually. Yeah, yeah, I mean, every time you're angry with windows is because it's prior to something over what you need. That's a good point. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, in that hole. I start your app and it immediately wants to update. It's like you know, I was starting this up because I had something to do, right, right, what you want to do.

1:42:34 - Paul Thurrott
I um, this is my relationship with the discord. I use discord specifically for the show. I don't use it outside of the show. Um, and every time I run it before the show, it has to install something else.

1:42:45 - Richard Campbell
And I've just learned that, an hour before the show, start discord and let it twitch for a while, and then we'll be able to use it. Pardon the pun, um but yeah.

1:42:56 - Mikah Sargent
I get it All right.

1:42:57 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you know, a little slow here today.

1:43:00 - Richard Campbell
Okay, uh, slightly related to I can't believe you're talking about this. I'm delighted. Skype yeah.

1:43:08 - Paul Thurrott
Really All right. So who I? I got a lot of. He knows, even knows what it is anymore.

Thank you, I was gonna, so listen. We live in a sea. Think I'm cynical. You should see my twitter feed, right? So a story about Skype goes out on the on the wire there and it's like, oh, skype still exists. I didn't know. You know, come on, um, I, I, I use Skype every single day. I mean, really, that's a me. I'm not proud of that fact. I'm just saying, you know, it's, it's still a thing, and and it's kind of strange, because Skype is a place where Things show up new features. Right, they added that, uh, after co-pilot went to Bing, initially it showed up in Skype. You know, maybe they feel like it's a safe space. It's s things, or something.

1:43:50 - Richard Campbell
I don't know Um Skype today, so sorry. The underlying DLL for Skype is the same one for teams, the, the, the, the, the, uh, the voice modules, all of the communication stuff. It's literally the same piece of code.

1:44:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean it. I honestly is this kind of client goes. It's not a bad one. No, here's an interesting, here's a little tip. This could have been my tip this week. It should have been. But Uh, you can, you can Skype yourself, right, yep.

1:44:15 - Richard Campbell
And the end. I know Skype yourself.

1:44:16 - Paul Thurrott
Sounds like a horrible thing to say to somebody, but the idea there is we do this with email, right, we send ourselves an email and then we go to the other device and get a email. Right. You can do that with Skype. You Skype, you could send files and whatever goes. You know Skype yourself.

1:44:31 - Richard Campbell
If I, if I had set up a little earlier today, I would have fired up Skype to make a call to myself with a recording, to hear this microphone, to figure out what I had done, maybe, maybe I would have figured it out. Maybe, yeah.

1:44:44 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know, Like talking into the back of the microphone is not one I don't think I would have. That would have been on my troubleshooting checklist.

1:44:51 - Richard Campbell
But it took me a. It took me a minute, but we got there.

1:44:53 - Paul Thurrott
I thought you were taught. When you talked into the side of it I was like, oh my God, that sounds way better. Maybe you should do it.

1:44:59 - Richard Campbell
Maybe you should do the whole show side like this you know it's a 20 plus year podcaster, Like once upon a time we did this show through Skype. In fact, I would have multiple laptops set up each on separate Skype accounts all going into a mixed minus board to be able to do track isolation.

1:45:17 - Paul Thurrott
We used to a tweet, we did.

1:45:18 - Richard Campbell
We used Skype for possibly a decade I mean I, it was a long, long time and everybody had Skype, and then over time, bit by bit, it was like, hey, we're going to use Skype for this. And they're like, oh yeah, I haven't started that for a while. I was like, well, it's going to have to be updated, I guarantee you. So go get started.

1:45:35 - Mikah Sargent
Go get it now, exactly.

1:45:37 - Paul Thurrott
This is a goofy reference, but there's a show on Netflix called somebody feed, feed, fill right. This is the guy who started the everyone loves Raymond show. He does a travel Chanel, but one of the little sticks they have in the show is that the last five minutes he he Skypes his parents and they talk about wherever he is and it's really the worst part of the show. But it's like this little in show ad for Skype. You know, and that's how you can tell he's a middle age white guy, he's using Skype, but so Skype? So yes, to answer your question, skype still exists. Yes, they're still updating it.

And it's weird because I noticed this before I saw the announcement. But if you go into Skype and yeah, you probably have it there's like there's some tabs now and you can tab between chats, channels and all which is both chats and channels together, and you can channels. It's like a, it's a feed, you can add news to it, you can add new sources. You know CNN is in there, washington Post, et cetera, et cetera. And why anyone would use this, apps like the, this app like this, I don't know, but it's the social mediation of Skype.

1:46:40 - Richard Campbell
Is that where we are, and right and right on schedule.

1:46:44 - Paul Thurrott
now that Facebook is finally becoming a big thing, they decided to jump on that bandwagon. So I don't know, I don't, I really I can't explain why they're doing this. Maybe Skype is another example of a product that, uh, you know, just leave it alone.

1:46:56 - Richard Campbell
It's been, it's just been unsupervised for a while and some interns got bored.

1:47:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, let's see what if we we could just release an update, right, like no one would notice? What would happen if? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's how these things are right. We've had one too many to kill, is what? Let's go back to the office. Um, yeah.

So, I, I don't, I can't that, I cannot explain, I'm amazed. Yeah, it's crazy. Um parallels desktop. If you're a Mac user, you know that is kind of the especially the Apple Silicon apps a max the right way to run windows. If you are a windows on arm fan, you know it's right now still the best way to run windows and arm, which is silly and sad and embarrassing, but a fact. Um so this product is pretty great.

Um version 19 came out, I think every year that August or September, I think it's the timeframe and they've released the third major update now for that. And there's a couple of windows related things that I think are interesting. Um, one is that it fixes some graphic rendering issues with uh it. It doesn't support DirectX 12, which is too bad to redirect X 12, which is too bad to redirect X 12 games. Um, including some big ones like Jen Shin uh get Genshin Genshin impact, genshin impact, rise of kingdom, stark souls too, et cetera. Um, the other one for uh corporate customers especially, but they've always supported cross platform clipboard uh synchronization right, copy to the clipboard and windows paste into a Mac app right, kind of seamless back and forth. I guess corporate customers asked for them to add some directionality to that so you can configure it at a corporate level for uh, keeping it Mac to windows only, windows to Mac only, or bi-directional or off right, obviously. Um, and then some other features related to Linux which we'll ignore, uh, because you know Linux no.

I did a big thing about Linux last week. I liked Linux.

1:48:44 - Mikah Sargent
Relax, chill everybody, calm down.

1:48:48 - Paul Thurrott
I like Linux. Hmm, Um, I bought a penguin hat at build right. Uh, you know, Mary Jo and I and, I think, uh, some others, we all had a graph y'all. Probably we had our Linux hat or penguin hats on Remember.

1:49:02 - Mikah Sargent
Linus, the wait. What no wait. What's the actual name of the penguin? Tux, tux, tux. That's right, um, I think it's time for Xbox corner yeah.

1:49:14 - Paul Thurrott
I think so too. What? Uh? Just a couple of small things.

This week, um, there is a group of Activision uh quality assurance workers. Uh, mostly, I think, in I already forgot Wisconsin or Minnesota or somewhere up there, uh, but spread it out through a few different locations. It is Minnesota, excuse me. Small groups in Texas and California uh voted to unionize. They went through a place called the communications workers of America who announced this and said this is now the biggest video game union in the United States. Uh, approximately 400 people uh across the various groups. Um, there are some other groups in Microsoft studios from, like Blizzard, raven, I think, xenomax who have also unionized, smaller groups than this. Um, microsoft, not so much as a condition of its uh acquisition of Activision Blizzard, although, but they did make this pledge that they would remain neutral on uh unions and uh, they've come through on that promise and said you know we, we said we would be and we are, and uh, we recognize this union as the bargaining representative for these workers and uh we will maintain a positive uh labor slash management relationship. I mean so um there you go.

1:50:27 - Richard Campbell
I mean the. The video game industry needs to rehabilitate its image of how it treats its workers, Full stop, yeah, and you know what I would also the corollary to that is that what tick talk needs is Bobby Kotick.

1:50:42 - Paul Thurrott
So, uh, you know we can get, we get rid of him from Activision, he could go to tick talk. Perfect, you know, the world is, uh, is in balance again.

1:50:50 - Richard Campbell
Yes, Well, well there's. I was hoping to hear from that guy again. Yeah various legislative bodies are banning tick.

1:50:56 - Paul Thurrott
The money and go to paradise. Can you just leave it? What are you doing?

1:51:00 - Richard Campbell
Don't you have enough Right?

1:51:01 - Paul Thurrott
You've done, go, go. Why do you have to be doing stuff? Um, evil is as evil does, I guess, I don't know. Uh, evil is a box of chocolates, I don't know, that's all right so um, it's a way to keep going, keep going, uh.

And then also, speaking of the Activision Blizzard uh acquisition and some of the conditions that Microsoft uh kind of establish agreements, um, they, one of the many uh services that they talked about bringing their games to was boost droid, which I've described as a company we never would have heard of Otherwise. Boost droid, what is?

1:51:34 - Mikah Sargent
stupid name Sorry.

1:51:35 - Paul Thurrott
That's yeah. No, it's a. It's a. It's a cloud streaming game service. Right, they signed a 10 year deal to bring uh various games to this platform. Um, sometime, kind of was last year, they brought I know it was Gears of War, deathloop and some other games uh to the platform. Now they're they're bringing more games, I guess. So, uh, what is this? Yeah, deathloop, dishonored, dishonored 2. Um, the Dishonored games are fun. It is, uh, gears 5, gears Tactics, ghostfire, tokyo and Pentamount. Um, they work with Crossplay and Crosssave, right, which is a big, uh, one of the or some of the big features of the Xbox platform.

Uh, it's, this is sort of Europe, or maybe even the UK's version of, like Nvidia GeForce Now, like that kind of service. Um, I think it's, I think it might be French. Actually it's somewhere, it's somewhere in Europe. Anyway, um, yep, thank you EU, uh for making them do that. So, uh, yeah, there's, and there's a bunch of others. Remember they they had re-insult with Nvidia for GeForce Now, but also, uh, n-ware was one and some others. So there'll be more of this, but uh, just, the confusing array of ways in which you can play Microsoft Studio games is expanding.

1:52:51 - Mikah Sargent
I just boost. It sounds like a terrible uh sports beverage.

1:52:57 - Paul Thurrott
I can't sit down and I have booster. There's all kinds of things that go through my mind. Um, why are you so jumpy? I asked you a doctor about boosted right yeah exactly All right. Booster rides the X when the first ride is not enough.

1:53:16 - Mikah Sargent
All right Up. Next, it's time for the back of the book here on Windows Weekly, uh, hosted this week by me. Mike a Sergeant, as, uh, our normal host, Leo Laporte, is on a beach somewhere getting a tan in there. I was on Lucas, I think. Uh, all right, let's hear about the tip of the week.

1:53:42 - Paul Thurrott
I do want to stress it is a coincidence that Richard and I left Mexico exactly yeah, as Leo. It's just a weird coincidence.

1:53:52 - Mikah Sargent
Have you ever seen have you ever seen all three of them in the same room at the same time? Exactly, exactly, interesting.

1:53:58 - Paul Thurrott
I don't think so I don't think so either? I don't think I have.

1:54:01 - Richard Campbell
Well, I mean, there was the one, the one build, where I fed you all, cast strength whiskey and annoyed the crew. Oh, that's, yes, that's my first.

1:54:10 - Paul Thurrott
That is literally a decade ago. Oh see, but it's interesting. I don't remember that.

1:54:16 - Mikah Sargent
You fed them. Booster ride.

1:54:20 - Paul Thurrott
That's uh, I don't know what the kids are telling you. Booster rides where it's at.

1:54:25 - Mikah Sargent
I got the money if you got the booster ride.

1:54:28 - Paul Thurrott
I had a Abla Rabunda for the first time and I described it as like being shot in the tongue. I do remember that Sounds delightful I remember Leo trying to take it like Gollum, like taking one ring.

1:54:38 - Richard Campbell
Yes, my fresh as and running off with it. How do you do his office? That was a good day.

1:54:44 - Mikah Sargent
Like being shot in the tongue, I'm told.

1:54:47 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, so let's talk for a few minutes about Kev Brewer. Kev is in the discord. He's a frequent contributor. They see him online elsewhere as well, and today he showed up on my website with a really good tip and I'm embarrassed to say I did not know about this. But this is the neat one.

If you bring up the uh clock app in windows, there is a world clock function and you can add cities to it. And if you add cities to it, there's a little toolbar in the bottom there floating in the bottom, and one of the buttons is compare, and what it will do, among other things, is is come. Well, what it will literally do is compare the times of those two places. So, for example, I was just in Mexico city in Mexico last year, stopped observing daylight savings time. So part of the year there's a one year time difference, but part of the year there's a two, two hour time difference, and normally these things are not that hard to figure out when I'm not talking about you know algebra here, but you know some places do different daylight savings at different times. Some places in the United States still don't do daylight savings right.

It's kind of a neat thing, and so I can see, for example, right now the local time is whatever it is in the local time in Mexico cities, whatever it is, and it tells me those differences and I. This is like a neat little feature They've I have no idea when this came. A lot of the stuff that happens in the clock app lately has been related to focus sessions, right, which is a part of that focus uh feature and do not stir. But we have in the windows 11, but I don't world clock. I don't know when this happened at school and plus it's a cool map of the earth.

1:56:22 - Richard Campbell
I had to take this out for a spin.

1:56:23 - Paul Thurrott
So I hit the windows key and typed in clock and then a box popped up to say yeah, updating clock, and I'm like, really, yeah, so really what you're saying right so if you've never run the clock app, you will see that every single time you run the and most people haven't, but I run it because I use focus sessions. I've seen, I, but I, yeah, every new windows install or a windows install in which you have never used the app. Every single time. Yep, yeah, anyway, that's a cool one. Thank you, kev, for that. Um, I, like I said, did not know this. Um, sometime last month or so, uh, we learned that, uh, lamasoft, the Jeff Mittener story, was arriving on March 13th. If you look at your calendar today's March 13th this game is now available.

This is one of those interactive doctor uh documentaries. Sorry, um, this is a guy who wrote uh and created many, many different games across many platforms. This one has 42 different games as Spanish career, from the Sinclair X 81 to the Commodore Vix 20 and 64, the Atari eight-bit systems, ST Jaguar, et cetera. There's a lot of stuff in there. Um, there's some kind of mainstream games, like the ZX 81 version of Centipede, which is pretty cool, but the classics to me for this guy are attack of the mutant camels, uh, revenge of the mutant camels, and then grid runner, which is a 64 game, and there's a they're calling it a reimagined version of grid runner. That's, it is accurate to the Commodore 64 game, but with modern graphics and sound and it's base I think it's basically using an emulator, but they've just changed the like, the, the presentation, if you will right. It's available across platforms. Um, this is the second one we remember. The first one was about, uh, karateka and uh, that guy, the guy who wrote that game, and um, there's going to be a bunch more of these apparently. So this is from a digital eclipse which is now owned by Atari, but you can get this across PC multiple areas, xbox, playstation and Nintendo switch. Very, very cool, fantastic.

And then just a kind of a side app pick, because I think it was last week. I mentioned, uh, any texts, I'm right, any text. I think it was very, very complicated app. Um, what I'm looking for here is an offline, capable version of Notion. Essentially Although, by the way, I used Notion on the plane ride home and it was okay, like the couple of notebooks or whatever I hit came up. I I've not always had that experience, but that was okay.

Um, a bunch of people pointed me to something called Joplin and uh, joplin, you know, like a lot of things looks just like Notion. There's a lot of this stuff. You know, microsoft loop is a good example, um, but yeah, among the things you can do with this is you can have it sync through a cloud service it's, or I think it does one drive and probably drop box, or just put it into the file system and if that file system is synced through a system like OneDrive or Google Drive, which is what I'm using, it just syncs right. So I put this on multiple PCs. It syncs up. It seems to work great.

It is Markdown base, which I love, like, I really like Markdown and uh, so that's kind of a neat thing. It might that might be slightly off putting to some people, but you can do like that, uh, uh, markdown side by side view or, uh, just have the rich editor, uh, which seems to work pretty pretty good. So it's, uh, something to look at. Again, like sort of like the uh. I've been talking through this for a couple of weeks, but this is a much simpler app and is probably a better solution for more people, Um, than that complicated thing I was talking about last time, which I, I have to say I never figured out it was. It's very difficult to use.

1:59:53 - Richard Campbell
Interesting so many softwares.

1:59:55 - Paul Thurrott
I know this is the biggest thing. There are so many things that look like notion it is. It's a whole sub market. I don't understand why, but it is.

2:00:03 - Mikah Sargent
It's an alternative to notion.

2:00:05 - Paul Thurrott
And there yeah, no, it's crazy, let's crazy how many there are.

2:00:08 - Richard Campbell
Yeah Well, I always question what notions copying right?

2:00:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, leo's probably used them all. I remember him talking about Joplin before.

2:00:15 - Paul Thurrott
I feel like I've used them all too.

2:00:16 - Mikah Sargent
It's yeah, uh, but uh, yeah, there there are a few that are just so bare bones that I like. No, I don't. But uh, I remember Joplin being pretty good.

2:00:25 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, joplin, this one seemed. This one is pretty good, pretty good, pretty good.

2:00:29 - Mikah Sargent
That's it. Yeah, all right, tell us about run as radio this week.

2:00:34 - Richard Campbell
Oh, this week's show, episode 923. If you're keeping track, I'm starting to think about what to do for episode 1000. Um, talking to Dr Jodi Birchel, so I've, uh, chatted with her before, not on this show but on Donna rocks. Um, she was doing AI before. It was cool. She's actually a professional, you know like, has the real degree, it does the real work, so, and it's a very sensible approach to explaining these things. So I thought it was a good chance to sit down with somebody who's known it backwards and forwards from the early days of GPT and say, all right, what are we doing here, what is this software and what does it really mean? And she just took us on a ride, she just explained each piece and how it works together. And and then you know, that makes it very clear of what it's going to be good at, what it's not going to be good, useful for. Uh, and you know not, she's not against it by any stretch of imagination, it's just a tool. But if you use the tool appropriately you should get good results.

2:01:29 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Yeah, definitely check that out and, as you mentioned, do you have been podcasting for ages. At this point, 923 is the episode number for run as well Every Wednesday since April 11th 2007.

2:01:45 - Richard Campbell
Wow, it's awesome.

2:01:47 - Mikah Sargent
All right, then that means it's time for the brown liquor pick.

2:01:51 - Richard Campbell
Hmm, Well, uh, as I happened to be in Redmond at an event, I received booze as part of my life Kind of an unavoidable thing. A friend of mine gave me a bottle of Bush Mills 21, which I should have brought with me, but I forgot it. It's sitting in the hotel room, Sorry, and I've never talked about Bush Mills before except, uh, adjacently, in our conversations about Irish whiskey, that original Irish whiskey conversation we talked about, I ended with the red breast 12, which is one of my very, very favorites. Arguably, Bush Mills is the law the oldest distillery on the planet. There are evidences of distilling going on there starting in 1608. Now it's in the area today. We was known as Northern Ireland, but in 1608, that was not a thing. They predate all of that. And so, not far from Belfast, um, they got the Bush mill named in 1784. And that is a derivative of the barley mills that they had and the Bush river, which is where they get the water to make their whiskey. How famous is Bush Mills? It is referenced by James Joyce in his epic Ulysses, and apparently he was a fan. So this is old school whiskey like in the ultimate degree. And in 2008, on the 400th anniversary the Bank of Ireland printed bank notes with the Bush Mills Distillery on it. God bless Irish. That is amazing, it is badass. 400 years right, and then much longer. It's longer now it's been in a 400 something.

They make a lot of different whiskey. Uh, they for whatever you prefer. They make up a lot of different whiskey, they make a blend. You know this is still the Irish process and if they the rules for Irish are a little bit different than the rules for Scottish whiskey, obviously it needs to be made in Ireland, although they recognize both Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland as being Ireland. They don't require only barley. In fact many Irish whiskeys are made with a blend of grains, different multi-serials See, sometimes you see rice, sometimes you see wheat, sometimes you see corn. They kind of go any way, which way they want.

They are not concerned about using strictly malting. For the enzymes you can do Sacrification, which is the introductions of diastase and other enzymes to allow the malts, the grains, to turn to sugar. They use yeast fermentation. They do not require a specific number of distillations. Column stills are allowed as well as pot stills. Often Irish whiskey is tripled distilled. They allow a maximum distillation level of 94.8%, which is very, very high for most product that you'd make. You'd be calling whiskey. That's in vodka territory and most people don't distill quite that high. They do allow for caramel color. They require a minimum of three years of barreling and you have to be 40% above ABV to be clear to whiskey.

They do define different categories of whiskey in the Irish world. In Scottish it's really just the single malt and the blends, but in Irish they have single pot, still single malt and single grain as well as blending as particular kinds and of course, if there's an age statement on the bottle, that's the youngest thing that's in the bottle. This particular version of bushmills and we call it its premier product, the 21, is about as high as you're going to go from bushmills and it's 100% malted Irish barley, as opposed to some other bushmills that do do blends of grains. They do a triple distillation, pothill only, and then, of course, because it's all barley, they need to manage the sulfurs, which is why they use copper pothills, because the copper chelates the sulfur out of the distillate, makes it a little milder. They do come off at the third distillation at a fairly high alcohol level. That exact number is not known, but they cut with water before going into the barrels.

They do a split barreling for 19 years in both sherry alaroso casks and American bourbon casks. Those are then what they call married together. You'd call them pouring into a pot and then they do a finishing casking two years in Portuguese Madeira casks. So Madeira is an island, actually off the coast of Africa, but controlled by Portugal, and it's where Madeira wine comes from, and they have a handful of these barrels. It's just not that much Madeira, and so to get a Madeira finish is a pretty rare product and it is extraordinarily good and priced appropriately at $250. So I have a good friend, obviously Although he went to the distillery because he doesn't live far from there on his way to come here and pick up a bottle directly from the distillery, which is pretty cool. I know this friend.

2:06:54 - Paul Thurrott
This friend sounds familiar.

2:06:55 - Richard Campbell
You could probably I'm not going to name him, but you probably could figure out who he is. Okay, can I name him? Okay?

2:07:02 - Paul Thurrott
God, I'm sorry, it's Bushmill obviously it's Bushmill.

2:07:06 - Mikah Sargent
It's Bob Bushmill. Yeah, I have in the past toured this distillery.

2:07:11 - Richard Campbell
It's beautiful and ancient. They do have a new distillery and the old distillery labeled accordingly, so you can see that they do have a new distillery and the old distillery labeled accordingly, so you can kind of take a look at what they're doing there. But yeah, there's something about walking around on ground where they've been making spirits for 400 years that would be cool to say for sure. Absolutely.

2:07:38 - Mikah Sargent
Well, folks, I do believe that brings us, if you can believe it, to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. You can head to twittv slash ww if you would like to get the show notes for this week's episode and every week before. The show records live every Wednesday round about 2 pm Eastern, 11 am Pacific, 1800 UTC. You can find the audio and video versions of the show on that page, twittv slash ww. You just simply click or tap to subscribe to audio or subscribe to video in your podcast player of choice. I will also mention that you can get ad-free versions of all of our shows by joining club twit at twittv slash club twit. When you join the club for $7 a month, $84 a year you get access to some great stuff, as I mentioned, access to ad-free versions of all of our shows because you, in effect, are supporting us. We provide just the content to you. You also get access to the twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else, behind the scenes, before the show, after the show special club twit events Get published there. And access to the members only Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club twit members and also those of us here at twit. If that wasn't enough, we also give you premium access to some club twit exclusive shows. The audio versions of those shows are available to the public, but if you want to see the video versions of the shows then you will need to subscribe to club twit. Those shows include Hands On Mac, which is a show from yours truly that covers Apple tips and tricks. Hands On Windows, from Paul Therat that covers Windows tips and tricks. That untitled Linux show that Kevin was showing there all about Linux. And, of course, home Theater Geeks, the show from Scott Wilkinson that covers the Home Theater. Oh, and I should mention iOS today as well, is there All of those shows available in video versions?

When you join the club $7 a month, $84 a year and you help us keep doing what we do, you can also, as a member of club twit, come watch a recording of this week in tech in person, coming up in April. So you just head to ticketstwittv. You'll pop in your club twit email so we can check that you are indeed a member of club twit. Those signups are filling up fast, so if you have wanted to make your way to the studio and watch a show in person. You want to hop on that? All right, it is time to say goodbye to our excellent hosts of the show. Richard Campbell, where can folks head to keep up with what you're doing, and do you have anything else you want to pitch?

2:10:30 - Richard Campbell
The usual spot is Runaz Radio, but in the next couple of weeks we're going to be doing another conference down in Vegas called the Fabric Show. So that's Microsoft's new data analytics show. This is our first version of this community show. It looks like it's going to sell out. We're in up over 3,000 attendees now, so we're pretty excited about it. But if you use the code word runaz when you register, you'll get a discount.

2:10:54 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, there you go. Little tip for you and PaulTherot of Therotcom how about you, friend?

2:11:01 - Paul Thurrott
I mean I don't have anything to do. You can look at my books at leadpubcom, the Windows 11 field guide and Windows Everywhere. But yeah, I mean just follow on Instagram. That's how you can keep up with the call.

2:11:17 - Mikah Sargent
I'm barely awake Sounds good. Well, I will be back next week for another episode of Windows Weekly. Leo will be back after that. Thank you all for tuning in to this week's episode. Thank you to all of you who hung out in the Discord with us today to chat, and we'll see you again next week. Bye-bye.