WW 982: Don't Lick the Manta Rays - Breaking Down Microsoft's Earnings

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therot is here. Actually, he's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell is here. Actually, he's in Toronto. I'm here. This is Hawaii. And we're going to talk about Microsoft's earnings one week later, but we've got all the details. Also, it was earnings palooza, how all the other big tech companies did. We've got some AI news, Xbox news, and yes, whiskey. Windows Weekly is next. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the OutSystems platform. And with good reason, build, run, and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission-critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use OutSystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With OutSystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise-proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. OutSystems, build your agentic future. Learn more at OutSystems.com. That's OutSystems.com. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therott and Richard Campbell. Episode 982, recorded May 6th, 2026. Don't lick the manta rays. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And let me introduce our panel for today's show. same as it ever was from Mexico City Mr. Paul Therat of Therat.com hello Paulie hello Leo and the back of Lisa's head kind of looks like Cousin E is visiting and that is from I'm not sure where I'm in Toronto there's a view of the lake look at that I can do a view of the sea if you could but the problem is if we're worth that giant It's right behind Cousin It. Right. Yeah, we're in beautiful Hawaii in the Big Island of Hawaii. Yeah, it's really lovely. It's a beautiful day. Tonight we're going up to the upcountry. This is cattle country. In fact, the second largest ranch in America is here, Parker Ranch. It used to be the biggest, but the Texans decided they wanted the biggest. And so it's been there for a long time, like 150 years. It's still in the same family. And we're going to go up there and we're going to go to a ranch and go to a cowboy barbecue. Apparently, the cowboys here were trained by the Spanish. Before there were cowboys in the U.S., there were, of course, vaqueros. And so they learned horseback riding and cow herding and roping from the Spanish. So they have a Spanish flavor to their cowboying. I'm very excited. It's going to be fun. Yeah. Sounds excellent. Last night we visited the manta rays. I was telling you before the show, they swim right up to you. They brush your nose. The guide said, you could lick them, but don't. They're allowed to touch us. We're not allowed to touch them. He said, it's kind of like Vegas. It's a good sign that no licking the manta ray. No. It would not be licking the manta ray. They're harmless. It looks like they're dangerous. They look like stingrays. No, no, that's not the issue. It's going to be fishy tasting. You know, like, wait, nobody wants that. See, I don't know. I wish I can't value you in on the actual flavor of Manta. So that would be good. Anyway, we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about Windows and Microsoft. Yep. I'm just going to sit back, relax, enjoy the weather while you take over. I thought I was going to be doing that, too, because I was going over the notes, and I was like, man, there isn't really that much. This might be a short show. And I was pretty, I was okay with it. And then I was like, oh, wait. Earnings. You took this. I usually, because, you know, when you think about the calendar, we do this on a Thursday, Wednesday. So I go back to the previous Thursday usually for the news, you know, that's in the notes, and that's what I did. And the earnings were on Wednesday. Right. Along with the earnings from Alphabet, Amazon. They were literally coming in as we were recording last week. Yep. And I was like, oh, no. All right. So top line, Microsoft, they're doing pretty good, you know. That's crazy numbers. I know. Basically $32 billion of net income profit on revenues of about $83 billion in the quarter ending March 31. Capital expenditures, which is what they're spending on AI for the most part, the AI data center stuff, actually went down quarter over quarter, but Microsoft said that was going to happen because of seasonality, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it did go up. it's not where is this figure I have it somewhere but it did go up I want to say 45% year over year like hugely we'll go through some of that stuff the part of Microsoft that is Windows and Xbox is now the smallest part of Microsoft by far the three business units used to all be pretty roughly even you know 11 to 13 billion a quarter and they were consistent and since the cloud stuff really started taking off and then now AI you're seeing those parts of the company just explode past the more personal computing part of the company. And as we'll get to in a bit, it's actually going to get a lot worse soon. So that part of the business, $13.2 billion in revenues. Intelligent Cloud, Azure, essentially, is $34.7 billion, up 30%, by the way, year over year. More personal computing was almost flat. Well, actually, it declined 1%. So you can see where that's going. And then productivity and online services, Microsoft 365, et cetera, but also Windows Commercial, by the way, which is part of the imbalance here, $35 billion in revenues, up 17% year-over-year. So there you go. Cool. Except there you don't go because there's a lot to say. So, yeah, as I do, the next day after earnings, I always write like a long analysis piece. Lately it's been really AI-heavy, as you would expect, and I do get to that, but they made a point in the post-serving conference call of mentioning their consumer businesses quite a bit, which they don't do ever. And part of it, yeah, I mean, it's just not, I don't think this is what analysts want to hear. And I know that because these seven analysts who ask questions at the end of the call, none of them asked about any of this. But this is the part I care about, so that's what I'm going to talk about mostly. And also just, I think everyone knows this, but with Xbox and Windows specifically, there's a sort of reset occurring in both businesses where they're trying to meet the needs of their customers for the first time in quite a while. And so they're both making an explicit effort to kind of improve those businesses, right? In both cases, and I believe it was Sacha Nadella in both cases, There was some, like, nice, really positive-sounding factoid, well, fact, I guess, at the beginning of the discussion, which sort of offsets all the bad news that is the reality of these businesses. But for Windows, that factoid was 1.6 billion monthly active Windows, they said devices, but PCs. Not mentioning the fact that that is a high of all time. It's never been that high. They've thrown out 1.4, 1.5 billion at different times. It had been going down. I don't know where these numbers come from. It's kind of hard to explain what that means, but okay, whatever. He talked about all the foundational work they're doing. We're going to go through some of that in just a bit, actually. But prioritizing quality, which kind of begs the question, what were you prioritizing before? But whatever. Don't ask those questions. And then as far as the actual numbers, I've got to find what we've got here. Yeah, so if you look at the past, previous past four quarters, right, you would see gains in revenues from PC makers for Windows. And this is not strictly consumer, but pretty much consumer, because the Windows licensing revenue that goes into the commercial side of business is over in Microsoft 365 now. and those numbers were okay. I mean, given the state of the market, 1%, 18%, 3%, and 3% were the previous sequential quarters. The 18% one is obviously a bit of an outlier, but that's because of the end-of-year buying spree that occurred on the part of PC makers, right, knowing that component prices were only going to go up and that they should get these things in the channel. So there was a little bump there, and, you know, Microsoft will tell you that part of that was due to Windows 10 end-of-life as well. But we're past that. And this year, that part of the business, which does include surface as well, which I sort of think skews things in a bad way. Because they put nothing into surface. Yeah. So revenue has decreased 2% year over year in the quarter. So, you know, excluding the 18% outlier, you know, up 1%, up 3%, down 2%, it doesn't sound that bad. The problem is this quarter, the quarter we're in now, is going to be a bloodbath. And the first time this came up, I think it was Amy Hood now at this point who's doing this kind of thing, she was saying that they expected Windows revenues from PC makers to decline in the high teens. Wow. So the high teens, and then they later explicitly said it was 18% was their expectation. So this thing's going to nosedive 18%. So it was down to this quarter, it's going to decline 18%. And that is not great. They even explained where those declines would come from, evenly split between an unfavorable year-over-year comparison with the end-of-life of Windows 10. The second factor was the inventory-level declines, right, because PC makers are no longer buying bulk licenses to get that stuff going. And then the third one, the worst one, they call it a lower PC market. And what that means is people are not going to buy PCs because they're going to be really expensive, right? Yeah. Or are now really expensive, right? They are really expensive right now. Yeah, assuming they could even find them. Well, yeah, it's hard to buy them. But also, like, you can wait because you don't expect these prices to last. Yeah, yeah. And, look, this was already, look, obviously everyone knows this. It's a mature business. I know PCs and Windows sometimes are the butt of jokes. But the reality is these devices are much more secure, reliable rather than they've ever been and can last longer than they ever have. And, you know, no one is replacing a PC every two or three years. I mean, these things get spread out. No, four and five now. Yeah. And maybe longer, you know, we'll see how it goes. Yeah, no, regular consumers, I think, go much longer than that. But, you know, most systems I'm talking to are getting five-year warranties for a reason. They're going to turn them in five years. Right. And, yeah, and, look, the reality of the world is that as things have moved to mobile, even for older people like us, I mean, the PC becomes more of a secondary device. It's the thing you turn to when I want to do what I would call real work or I'm going to, you know. Yeah, when I need a big screen. Need the big screen, right. And sometimes for older people especially, I do this all the time. Like, I want to do something important, like book an airline flight. Like, I could do that on my phone, but I am not a child, so I will do that on a computer. Like, that's how I think, you know. And I think I'm going to have to do real work. Yeah. If I was a child, maybe I would do it that way. I don't know. You mean someone who can send their phone. Yeah. That's a huge problem, by the way. Yes. Yeah. How many times you do this? You're like, what is that? Oh, yeah. No glasses off. Yeah. It's on, off. It's a vocal distance that works today. Yeah. But, you know, for the broader market, I mean, most people are probably younger than I am. And so they're still not using computers as much as, say, we did at that point in our lives. Like, computers are no longer the center of this year. Well, and for most people, a computer is a laptop anyway. Like, desktop is just a rare category now. Right. Right. They mentioned Microsoft Edge, which kind of blows my mind. Edge does not contribute directly to revenues in any way, shape, or form. No. There are indirect revenues that come out of Edge related to the advertising stuff, which explains all the forced usage of Edge, Windows 11, and all this stuff. They want to get you in front of MSN and all the Microsoft advertising. We want your digital effluent. Yeah. But Slash Nadella said, our Edge browser has taken share for 20 consecutive quarters. Now, for a person like me, that's a record scratch moment because I'm like, did it? And I like that you said that because literally what I wrote in my little write-up here was, Really? How? They can share from what browser? From what? They're like, let's roll the tape. So you go to Stack Counter, and you look at Stack Counter over, you can look at it on total usage across mobile and desktop. You can look just at desktop. Microsoft's web browser obviously has higher share on desktop because it's pre-installed and Windows is huge. So, yeah. All right, we'll just give them that. What does it look like? And it does not look like they gained share for 20 consecutive quarters. I don't know where this comes from. So I don't know how you cooked that number. Edge's market share has been higher than it is now in the previous five years. It's not that it's going down. It's going up and down. And the highest high was a couple of years ago, I think. I don't remember exactly. But it's never exceeded 14% market share, or usage share, really, despite the fact that it is bundled on the most popular desktop market share by far. Well, it's the old joke, right? Edge is used primarily to download Chrome. Yeah, and the reason that's not a joke is because that is what it's used for, sadly, right. So in that same time frame, oh, I should say I went back five years because 20 consecutive quarters is five years, right? So Chrome has had over 65% share of the market the entire time. If you go back further, there was a period where it actually did fall to 61%, 62%, but Edge, like I said, has never exceeded 14% of the market. Right now it's 12.75%, or at least it wasn't the time I wrote it. And that makes it third or fourth? Actually, I think it might be second. Second? I could just click on the link and find out rather than guess. Let me look. I think it is second. Yes, and then Safari is third. Right, okay, so that's always the question is Safari versus Edge. Yeah, so Edge clearly owns it. Right. When I'm looking at it now, the number has changed. Now it's 11.51%, but Safari is 6.17%. And Chrome is 72%, really. So Chrome has actually gone up since I wrote this. So that makes us, I don't know. It's possible Microsoft is looking at numbers they don't have access to. I tried to do this, like, maybe just on Windows. You know, okay, maybe. Anyway, I couldn't find any supporting evidence for this, so moving on. Bing, same thing. We're going to throw out a nice little factoid for Bing. You know, that search engine we all love to use. Bing, listen, both guys really like it, and they don't like how mean you are to it. I'm okay with it. Bing monthly active users reached $1 billion for the first time, Satya Nadella said. I'm like, okay, hold on a second. That's the search to find Chrome to download it. I'm actually wondering if they're defining users in a different way than I would define users. Sure. For example, I would say a user is a human being. And I think what they're saying is that AI is driving traffic to Bing, and by AI I mean co-pilot typically or Microsoft products of some kind, and that they're counting that as usage, like a user. Right. Like you might describe an agent. I wonder if internally they call it unintentional usage. That's a good term because I think I wrote something to that. Let me see if I can find it. Well, the way I wrote it is the right question to ask is who uses Bing purposely? The answer to that question is into a browser. Right. It actually goes there. Or it's in Edge, and they know it's in Edge, and they still keep using it, and they can't explain why, but they do. Statistically, no one is using Bing. So when you look at, like, Edge as a distant number two in the browser market, where it has 11, 12, 14, whatever percent, whatever you want to call that, Bing's share of search is far smaller. You know, and you can do some math. It's hard to come up with exact numbers for users and the number of people who use things or whatever. But it is fair to say that the supportable bit here is looking at the same five-year time period. Bing usage has grown from 2.5% to about 5%, which is double. Yay! It's double. Yeah. 100% growth. Yeah. But it's also just 5%. It is still 5% after all this time. And I think most of that usage is, in fact, driven by unintentional usage and or AI-driven background processes, whatever you call it. Yeah. If every time you click on Copilot, it's going to involve a Bing search, that's a great way to turn that number up. I did some math in here to try to figure out, like, if there's any way on earth they could have a billion users. And there is none. There's none. And I'm not going to go through all that. Not as you define users. Like, next you're going to tell me users are P. Not as I define math and not as I define, yeah. I mean, it's like it's crazy. And this is a minor point, but Bing and Azure are important to Microsoft because they drive ad sales. and Microsoft. Now we're going to have to define a Nutella currency or a NADS. So I had to like look, if you hear it, we're in technical field here, right? So we know a lot about certain things. We don't know anything about certain things and sometimes you see a term, an acronym or something and you're like, what is this? I also like when, especially a technology company uses a tech term like an acronym but does not explain it once. So in this case I looked it up. I was just trying to see. Did they ever explain this? They don't. Search advertising revenue, XTAC, T-A-C, increased 12% in the quarter. What is TAC? TAC is what I call Spotify math. If you ignore the fact that there's a cost of doing business, we're doing great. It's literally minus the cost of paying affiliates that direct traffic to the engine. Right. So, okay, so what's the revenue when you include, or, you know, I guess it would be profit. Like, they're not talking about that, right? And that number has been sort of going down. I mean, it was 21%, 21%, 16%. It was 10% last quarter, and now it's 12%. So it's quarter over quarter. It's up. But year over year, which is how we actually measure these things, it's gone down. And this quarter, the current quarter, it is going to fall into the high single digits for growth, meaning up to 9%. So it's going to fall yet again. So, yeah, a billion users, but, oh, I'll throw a bunch of bad news. Like, okay. And I don't think that billion number is real. Okay. Xbox. Obviously, Xbox is doing fantastically. We all know that. I don't have to explain anything about the weight. And they've got a new leader. She's just figuring things out. But, like, I'm not pointing fingers. I'm not pointing fingers. I like her. I've got to say, the more I see, I mean, there's some little areas, but we'll get to this because we're going to talk about her more at the end of the show. But not this past quarter, which is the one we're talking about, but the previous quarter, which was the last calendar quarter of 2025, which was the holiday quarter. I never looked this up. I meant to, but they actually suffered a decline in revenues of Xbox content in services for what I believe was, if not the first time in history, then one of the few times. I don't remember this ever happening. That happened again in the quarter we're now discussing, right? So the first quarter, calendar quarter of this year, their fiscal third quarter, 2026. So that revenue declined 5%. And this one I'm not, I should have looked this up. They blamed a prior year comparable that benefited from strong first-party content performance. In other words, Microsoft released some game that did particularly well in that quarter, and this year we didn't have something like that, and so it went down. Okay. Xbox hardware revenues fell again, again, again, again. Jesus, like 33%. So the previous four sequential quarters, I'd like to go back. I should go back and figure out how far back this goes. but hardware revenues in Xbox declined by 32%, 29%, 32%, and 6% over the past four quarters in reverse order, right? This business is not doing great. But pay no attention to the man behind the curtain because Xbox set new records for monthly active users in the quarter and for game streaming hours. Okay. It's like saying the Nazis had an awesome party in the Reichstag right before Berlin fell. It was a great day. Yep. The rest of it's going bad, though. Wow. So, yeah, I know. Anyway, this quarter, the quarter we're in, Xbox content and services will decline in the low teens, which I take to mean 11% to 15%. Thus, those revenues will fall three quarters in a row. That has absolutely never happened. That's incredible. And the blame here is because of the prior comparable thing again, but also, hey, we just lowered Game Pass prices. See, we're listening. Right. We're not going to lower revenues, too. Well, I mean, they had to know that was going to happen. And then Xbox hardware, they didn't even guess. They were like, it's going to decline. What? Does that mean it's going to decline like 50%? I said, what are we talking about? That's insane. Like, they didn't even try. They didn't say anything vague. They just said, it's going to decline. Yeah, we know it's going to decline, but okay. So, and then AI. I mostly stuck to the consumer stuff, but we've got to talk about AI, obviously. Microsoft is now saying, I had guessed before based on what they were doing, and they had never said this for the year yet, but this past week they did. They're going to spend, in calendar 2026, $190 billion on capital expenditures related to the AI infrastructure. More than $40 billion a quarter. Yep. Remember the number last year they were talking was $20 billion a quarter, and they exceeded that. But now they're talking. They've spent $40 billion yet. It's always been $30-something. Yeah. So this quarter was, like I said, almost $32 billion. Last quarter was $37.5 billion. The quarter we're in now is going to be over $40 billion. Wow. And then, of course, the next one will be, too, because that's how that math ends up. They didn't say that, but that's math. They also had one specific, what I would call hard number, like actual number. I mean, assuming, you know, well, ignoring the fact that most of these people probably got discounts and whatever. There's a lot we don't know. Microsoft 365 Copilot now has 20 million paid seats. So 20 million is a good number. Yeah. Out of how many N365 users? I've done the math. Okay. And my math is out of date because they didn't give us a new number for total Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers, but they did the previous quarter. And that number at that time, they had their claim, 20 million paid users out of 450 million paid seats. So 3.5% of that customer base was paying additional money every month for Copilot. Now, it's probably not actually $20 a month, by the way, but there's no way to know that. Assuming nothing has changed, meaning 450 million Microsoft 365 paid seats, that figure has gone from 3.5% to 4.4%. So, yes, we have 100% growth. But when your numbers are relatively tiny, right? Yeah, so you're going from one to two, 100% is easy. Yep. And I will just point out, again, because my mind is wired this way and I'm terrible, that 4.4% is lower than Bing's market share and is lower than Microsoft Edge usage share, really. But, like, wait a minute. So, I also, this is an awesome one where this guy asks specifically, so every question was about AI and spending and return on investment. and what are we getting our money back? And it was like the change-bake thing. It's like, you know, we're going to make money through volume. So Amy Hood is super pumped. She's like super positive. Everything's great. Anyway, I think it was the first question the guy asked. Well, how does the spending actually get paid for? And this is Slash's answer. He goes, you want to start, Amy? It's a beautiful moment. I don't, it's not worth going through all of these questions on air. I wrote about every one of them in this article. It's just the same thing over and over again. You know, it's literally, and people would start at the question saying, well, I know you talked about this, but, you know, it's like, but could you do it again, please? Yeah. I'm not hearing a name that makes, you know, sense. I'm sorry, a number or an answer or whatever. And I don't know. The one thing I will point out that I thought was kind of interesting, if you think back to as long ago as last week, Microsoft and OpenAI re-engineered their partnership yet again. There was a big announcement about that. The next day, OpenAI and Amazon announced their partnership. And, you know, I think from the outside world's perspective, it feels like Microsoft is probably right to get rid of what is probably a financial and resource boat anchor or whatever in some ways. But it's also heavily reliant on OpenAI and ChatGPT for the GPT models for their own first-party services. And they can't afford to let them go completely. And it sort of feels like from on the outside that maybe OpenAI got the better part of the deal. But I'd say Satya Nadella did a pretty good job of kind of defending it and why this makes sense for Microsoft still. And I'll just read part of this because I think this is relevant. He said, you know, we have a frontier model, meaning OpenAI is, you know, GPT, 5.0, whatever it is on now, with all the IP rates, royalty-free. We have access to that all the way through 2032, and we fully plan to exploit it. That's good. I mean, that's, you know. That's what it means. No, I mean, that's it. He talks about how they're a customer, and they're not really paying them, but sort of paying them and whatever. Okay, fair enough. But I think that's the thing. We're in 2020. We're talking six years, and AGI is going to happen or not before then, right? They have access to, if it's not the top. Because it's on schedule? Is that what you're saying, AGI is right on schedule? I'm not clear that it exists or will exist. Is there any reasonable path to it? Anyway, Apple announced earnings. No, I don't know what to say about that. I don't know. Aye, aye, aye, AGI. That's what you say. Yeah. That someday. You're setting business deadlines based on a technology nobody knows how to do. So remember when defined meaningfully. Yeah. One of the big things, this came up last week, right? Microsoft was buying Activision Blizzard. They were going through the whole antitrust process. And people like me and others, I mean, others did this for trying to do the math. Like, how does this make sense to have Call of Duty be in Game Pass? And the ultimate answer is it does not. And so years later, they scale back, and they announce what they announced recently, which is we're rejiggering Game Pass again. We're going to lower prices, but we're taking Call of Duty out. And that's the only thing that makes sense financially. Yep. How did I, from the outside, know this five years ago or three or whatever number of years ago? Yeah, I would draft it right off the bat. So I didn't have time to look at this. This is a report from a third party, but Microsoft has a commitment to be, like, carbon neutral by 2030. And you have to think, with all this AI buildup, unless you intend to use the power of the sun somehow to power these AI demonstrators, I don't understand how you're going to do that, and they might actually drop that pledge. And I'm sorry, but you had to know you were never doing it. Like, you had to know. We're going to pause at this juncture for a commercial message, but we'll be right back with more earnings learnings, actually, because it was earnings palooza, as you point out. Last Wednesday was a disaster. Usually I get out of the show and I'm like, all right, I got the day. I'm sleeping late. Relax. Have a taco. It was Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. Well, Apple's the next day. But Amazon, I think AMD, well, AMD was more recent. Qualcomm, you know, like. It was all at once. Dell. Yeah. They all went to drop at once. Meta. Yeah. The only one that suffered in the stock market, though, was Meta. Everybody thought they're spending too much money on AI, which is kind of ironic. It's being shifted in the tone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's spending a lot of money. I don't know what too much means. Anyway. It's not a story. Let's take a break. And when we come back. Okay. More earnings learnings. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot. and Richard Campbell. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker's zero-trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero-trust solutions. They've always done endpoints, but now they also protect networks and the cloud. That's so good. By extending zero-trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker ensures that devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to your most vital platforms like Salesforce or Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace, and GitHub. 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Visit ThreatLocker.com to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's ThreatLocker.com. We thank you so much for supporting Windows Weekly. You support us, too, when you use that address, by the way. threatlocker.com slash twit. Now back to the show. All right, back to the show we go, and you, Paul, you're just a glutton for punishment. More earnings. More earnings. Sisyphus, the guy who pushes the rock up the hill. I'm not going to spend too much time on these companies, but I'll just do a couple of high-level things. Apple, you know, almost $30 billion in net income, which someone pointed out to me, by the way, under Microsoft's net income. Right. Microsoft actually had a higher profit. Now, in most, you know, timelines, that would make sense because Microsoft sells software and services. Apple is hard work, you know, mostly. Higher margins, they should make a smaller profit, but they've been making higher profits. I didn't go back in time to look this up. You know, Microsoft used to have really high margins because they used to just sell software. Since they've gotten into the infrastructure business. Oh, yeah. Now, their margins are going to... That quarterly margin is 36%, which for a lot of industries is wildly healthy, but that's no software business. That's right. That's an infrastructure business. Yep. So that's interesting. For whatever it's worth, the only thing I did look at was the year-ago quitter, and a year ago Microsoft also made a higher profit than Apple, so maybe it's something about seasonality. It's hard to say, but whatever. But don't worry about Apple. They're doing great. They'll be fine. Yeah, they're doing $111 billion in revenues. I know. Double-digit gains, net income and revenue. The iPhone is just about 50% of their revenue. So, probably, it's going down. I mean, it used to be like 70%. So, they're actually good. So, there's that. But what's picking up the slack? Is it the watch? No, it's not. Actually, so, watches did well with services now. Services, the second biggest business. Yes. The thing they always tried to build. Right. Well, and that's a Tim Cook thing. You know, he gets a little credit for saying, we've got to increase our average revenue per user. Yeah, we don't monetize our users enough. It's something no Apple executive should ever say. Okay, fair enough. And he did do it, and it's smart. So I can't. It is smart. It's smart. And by the way, you've got to diversify somehow. All of Apple's other businesses are really dependent on the iPhone to some degree because I think if you look at indirect benefit of the iPhone ecosystem, and whatever it is, I mean, revenue, it's probably close to like 80% of the revenues or whatever. But yeah, $31 billion in revenues from Apple services. You've got to remember, this is stuff like Apple Music, iCloud Plus, blah, blah, blah. You know, compare that to Microsoft's top-level business units. That's the same number almost as Intelligent Cloud, which is all of Azure. It's almost the same number as Productivity Online Services, which is Microsoft 365, including Windows Commercial. So Apple services, I mean, we can all make fun of that if you want, but, like, that's a lot of money. It's real money, yeah. Yeah, that's incredible. Any normal business, that would be an extraordinary sum of money. It's only when you play in the hyperscaler land, you're like, only $30 billion? Is that a Fortune 100 company by itself? I mean, it's certainly a Fortune 100 company. Yeah, easily. You're exactly right. Easily a Fortune 100 by itself. Yep. Google, very similar numbers, $62.6 billion in net income. so their margins are way better. Revenues are about $110 billion, we'll call it. The profit is up 45%. The revenues are up 22%. This thing's going to gangbusters. Advertising is, I know I put this in here somewhere. Everything. This number is actually a thing. Revenues from advertising are now over 81% of Google's overall revenues. That's gone up. That used to also be around 70%, so that's kind of interesting. Google Cloud, you know, distant number three, I guess, in this kind of market. But still $20 billion in revenue. So, again, like two-thirds of Apple's services business. Yeah, still a Fortune 100 company. Still humongous, exactly. Yeah. So these numbers are kind of hard to know. But it now has over 350 million paid subscribers or subscriptions, right? YouTube and Google One being the key drivers. So YouTube is meaning YouTube premium, people paying to not have ads, which is ironic. Or Google One is that whole, there's all these dumb names to these things now. It's like Google AI Pro, Google AI, whatever they are. You know, it's that stuff. You get the Google Drive Storage. You get the Gemini AI rights, et cetera, et cetera. So they're doing good too. I mean, that's great. Amazon also kind of kicking it. Amazon's tough because if their press release is 10,000 words, about 100 of them matter to me. It's like the most pointless, every quarter, it's like an insane list of things we've done, which don't have anything to do with anything, but net income of $30 billion in revenues of $181.5 billion. Their profit kind of thing almost doesn't matter because it just goes up and down so sharply. It's hard to even know what that means. But for our purposes, Amazon Web Services, AWS, $37.6 billion, right? So, again, that's bigger than all of Azure, you know, that business intelligent cloud. It's bigger than all of more productivity, sorry, productivity and business processes, right, which is Microsoft 365. Growth was 28% in revenues. There's a, I don't know what this means. Well, I mean, I do know what it means, but it's kind of weird. They don't really call this out elsewhere, but their chips business is the way that Andy Jassy described it, grew triple digits to, I don't know why I assume this number, but about $5 billion in the quarter. So this is, in other words, customers paying Amazon to use their CPU, TP, whatever they're calling those things, on AWS essentially, right? Right. And their advertising business all by itself is $17.3 billion, up 24%. So they're also doing pretty good. Yeah. And do you figure the run rate of a bottom-tier Fortune 100 company is $25 billion a year? Is that what it is? Okay. $25 billion a year. We're talking quarters here. Yeah. These individual business units have quarterly revenue, the equivalent of the bottom of the Fortune 100s. Okay. That's an interesting way to kind of level set this because I often talk about... If you do $6 billion in a quarter, you're ranking. Oh, my $6 billion in a quarter? So remember, and when I say remember, I mean literally this is like 20 years ago, but Microsoft would have trouble getting businesses off the ground if their expectation was that they couldn't figure out a path to this being a $1 billion business. A billion. That was Balmer's line. Don't bring anything that's in a billion-dollar business. And when we say a billion-dollar business, that's a year. It's not a quarter. Exactly. Like it's not a quarter. Exactly. So if you look at individual business units or businesses or whatever inside of any of these companies, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Alphabet, Amazon, right, the sheer number of them that are high, well, or double-digit billions, right, is, that might be worth looking at. That's astonishing. Like that's an incredible, because you can look at users, you know, Google often talks about how many of their services have over a billion users or whatever numbers of users, and they're big. But at the end of the day, it's about this money, right? I mean, your business. And that an incredible We say the number billion too casually Yeah and we also use the term big tech too casually because a lot of tech is big but these guys are big big big big like really big These are the biggest companies that have ever existed. Yes, right. I mean, people like the alien being the famous version everyone's heard of, but there's a lot of science fiction that involves how the future is run by a giant corporation, it's not by companies. Yes. And that's what you see here. The giant corporations are here. They're not quite running the government, but they're awfully close. But they are talking about putting spaceships out there, and it's going to turn into aliens. I mean, I don't know. It's incredible. AMD is one of the smaller of the big tech companies, I guess, $1.4 billion of net income, $10.3 billion in revenues. That's a 38% gain on the revenue side. Now, their data center business is their biggest business, right? And they are, you know, to NVIDIA, what may be Bing or Edge is to their markets, meaning a distant number two. But, you know, over half their revenues, $5.8 billion, came from data center. And that's up 57% year a year. At the time I wrote this, oh, I should say, I'm sorry, client and gaming, which is everything related to PCs, right? So actual chips for PCs, Ryzen chips, and then the Radeon graphics, you know, that people might buy for gaming PCs. That business went up 23% year over year, $3.6 billion. That obviously used to be their biggest business, basically used to be their only business. I didn't have this information at the time I wrote this article, but I guess in their post-earnings conference call, which I did not listen to or read, they're predicting like a big double-digit shortfall in that business in this quarter and for the rest of the year. So what's her name? Lisa Su, the CEO and chairperson for AMD, has made a big and very public bet on AI data center activities, and it does seem to be paying off. And I think this is the dark side of that because, of course, you know, they have to have that kind of growth because if they were only PC gaming, whatever, this would be a much smaller company. Sure. One of the arguments I'm making in the AI hype keynote right now is that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all cementing their leads as the world's data centers. That's right. The same way that cell phone companies have. Like, you wouldn't start a new cell phone company and expect to put up enough towers to matter. It's not impossible now. Yeah. Actually, that's a – Companies have now just met so much data centers. That's a perfect comparison. And you're also going to see the data center or AI equivalent of MVNOs or whatever they're called, the little mobile companies that are really using T-Mobile bandwidth or using Verizon or whatever it is. And, yeah, but it's really, you know, in the U.S. at least, we basically have three companies, you know, and that's it. And it turns out that's basically the world, except the world's getting really concerned about data sovereignty, which now gets into this whole MVNO model where we might now start seeing national sovereign entities that utilize a portion of this multinational data center under some different rules. Right. Yep. Yeah, this stuff's moving quick. You are in interesting times. But I also say not unprecedented because we've seen these kinds of consolidations before. Yeah, it's just the scope and, I guess, scale or whatever of it that is what's notable because our monopoly laws in the United States stay back to the 1800s and things like steel and railroads. And so, I mean, they were big and bad in their day, but, I mean, they look like a mom and pop. And those companies consolidated control, and you're seeing these ones consolidated control. Yep. Qualcomm was last Wednesday. These guys are actually down. Qualcomm is the biggest maker of ARM chips. They're the biggest maker of chips that go into mobile devices. Mobile devices like PCs are having a down year, especially smartphones. So their revenues actually declined 3% year over year, which honestly is probably not too horrible, to $10.6 billion. But they had an income of $7.4 billion on that. So their margin is crazy high for a hardware business. That's amazing. The vast majority of that, like nine of the 10.6 billion, came out of the hardware divisions, the part of the business that makes the chips and all that kind of stuff. But not specifically the X and X2. Not specifically the what? The X or X2. No. The Snapdragons. Right. So, well, actually, the way it's structured now, let me look at this before I say this, it probably is part of that business now, like a small part. Yeah. And I would think it would be, but I think their broader arm mobile manufacturing is a far larger portion of their business than laptops. But I have this vague memory that that stuff used to be here. I want their laptop chips to dominate, to be monsters, to be the best thing that ever happened to them. Right. But I don't know that that's true yet. I mean, look, I question them getting into the PC business because, relatively speaking, it's so small. And it's already locked in. But if anyone was going to make Windows on ARM come true, it was these guys. Of course. But in other words, let's say they, this won't happen this year, but in good years we'll have like a billion of these devices go out. So they're selling a billion of CPUs. They're selling a billion of wireless chips and other things. They're selling billions of chips, right? If you go gangbusters in the PC market and get like 10% somehow in the first year. It's 20 million. Yeah, it's like, it's not a sounding error. That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter how successful it is. It's never going to be huge, you know. Well, this was Strategary's argument always about when Intel missed mobile, they missed the opportunity to go to the ultra-high nanometer stuff because you need billions of sales to make that make sense. Right. And you know what? I think just on behalf of the planet Earth, I'll just say thank God they never figured it out because x86 on mobile would have been. but they really tried man, but it's not the chipset for it right, exactly, what anyone ever thinks about x64 or x86 versus ARM, whatever, but yeah I'm sorry, but on these types of devices you need you don't want a fan you don't want it to be an issue if you're going to carry design elements from the 1980s forward, you're going to pay for it I was explaining the Itanium and the x86-64 architectures the other day. And just how badly Intel got punished for making a new chip for scratch. And gee, I wonder why they're jumpy about trying to do that again. I mean, don't get me started on Itanium. It'd be like if you were driving around in a car and then had to pull a second car that was just a battery. That would be Itanium. It's like it was just so big and heavy in the wrong direction. But, you know, they blame it on the customer only wants us to maintain our old design, not we couldn't make a new design to save our lives. Right, right. That's depressing. Okay. Just two more points about Qualcomm. They previewed the fact that they are going to very soon announce a data center-based chipset, right, for AI, of course. So they claim a leading hyperscaler has engaged with them on a custom silicon engagement. Could you be more vague? No. You'd be down to five companies. Okay. Yeah. So June 24, they're having an investor day, and they're going to announce that stuff there. And some other things related to what they call physical AI, which I think is going to be for wearables, like pins and whatever comes out of that. which is IoT is the smallest part of their business, basically. But that, you know, maybe will help change that. The other one is that there's a bunch of people I really like at Qualcomm. And this guy is one of the good guys. And I'm going to butcher his last name. I'm so sorry. But Alex Katuzian, who was an executive vice president and group general manager of mobile, compute, and extended reality. So he was one of the guys, you know, behind Snapdragon X. was hired away by Intel. Interesting. Yeah. And he will be, it's a similar position. Let me see if I can find this. Where is this thing? Yeah, he will assume the role of executive vice president and general manager of client computing and physical AI. So that's the thing I was just talking about, right? So client computing is, you know, x86, and physical AI is hopefully something that's not x86. But whatever. That's surprising. I assume the Intel truck backed up. and dropped a bunch of money on his front line. I don't know. But good luck, obviously, to him. He's a good guy. Okay. I didn't write about this, but late last week, I think it might have been Friday night, Marcus Ash, who's a guy I've known for a long time, when we took the kids to Germany five-ish years ago, we met him. He was working at Microsoft in Germany at that time. and he's a great guy. But he's now one of those people that's back in Windows doing some of this stuff to address all these pain points. And so he was over in MSR, wasn't he? I don't think so. He was doing, it was like mobile apps, and this was a while ago. It's possible between that and now he's done something different too. But, you know, it was like the one, was it OneNote? I don't remember. It was a bunch of mobile app stuff. Oh, remember they bought a company from Germany that did the ToDo app. Not Todoist or I don't remember. Oh, yeah, yeah. It had a funny name. That's where those – that team was there. Like they were in Berlin. That's where that was from. And it was – so they moved. They did – It became Microsoft ToDo. Microsoft ToDo, right. Oh, Wunderlist. Yeah. Wunderlist. Wunderlist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was a lot of that group was from that team of people, right? And he moved to Berlin. Yeah, he was living in Berlin for several years. Right. So now he's back, and he's working windows, like I said. So we're starting to see these guys. They're communicating. They're tweeting, whatever. So back a couple of months ago, Pavon Davluri comes out and says, look, this is what we're going to address the pain points. We went over that whole thing. I made the point of saying, well, you're not addressing some of the big insurance certification stuff, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I didn't write about his little post here because we've already covered all this elsewhere, and we wrote about it as it was happening. But I do think it's worth just kind of doing what he is doing, which is just providing a progress update. So what has happened in just a month or so, right, which is kind of interesting. The only problem I have with this is that some of this is shipping in the Insider Program only, so it's like experimental right now, but we'll get it in what Microsoft calls retail now, What I think of as, I don't know, as stable, you know, instable or whatever, you know, not in the insider program, right, in the next couple of months. Some of this is already shipping to stable or retail. I'm going to have to wrap my head around that term. The two big ones, of course, are the ones we talked about last week or the week before I don't remember. the changes to the Insider program where you can now enroll in two new top level, well, one of two new top level programs or channels, I guess, right? Experimental and beta. It's a little more complicated than that, but that is available. And then the Windows Update improvements where you can basically spread that thing out as long as you want. You can pause it basically forever. And so, like, that's happening. I mean, that's cool. they've started removing the co-pilot icon from superfluous places in the UI like a notepad for example as a reminder that does not mean they're getting rid of the AI features they're just getting rid of that obnoxious icon that everyone seems to hate so much and then some of this is I've not seen this but Microsoft is going to configure widgets the way I actually configure widgets which is fascinating to me, meaning by default. Like, in other words, I go in and make changes so that this is what it is, but now this is going to be what it is. And what that is is that feed will be off by default, so it will just be the widgets. You won't get all the garbage in your stories. Nice. You won't be able to hover over the icon and have it pop up inadvertently, which I do all the time by mistake. That's when I remember to turn it off. And it will do far fewer interruptions, meaning, like, notifications, little alerts about, like, stock market went up or down. of blah, blah, blah, whatever. Now, you can turn all this stuff back on if you like it and are a child, but they're going to go to a default configuration that, to me, makes sense because, like I said, it's what I do. The other things that they're doing, and again, it's not 100% clear to me with each of these where this is, meaning if it's happening in the Insider Program or if it's happening in Stable slash Retail, but we're still CFRing to some degree, so your mileage will vary. But performance across File Explorer for things like performance and reliability, consistency, et cetera, and then there's going to be some deeper changes coming down the road. System performance across the board, like smaller memory footprint, be more aggressive of book giving RAM back to the system when it's not being used by anything, improve the responsiveness of the core shell experiences, meaning like start File Explorer, Taskbar, et cetera, that kind of stuff. That's pretty much most of it. And then the taskbar update, the thing where you're going to be able to move it around and hopefully make it small, by the way. They don't talk about that as much. The start updates where they're rewriting parts of it to be not JavaScript but native or when UI code, whatever, is happening soon. I take that to mean we're going to see in this month of May those things appear inside our program as soon as this week, right? So Friday maybe, we'll see. And then the updates they promised to search will come later. So I take that to mean June. And then they explicitly did say that they will have another update like this for build, which happens in June. So, yeah, soon. It's like, yeah. When will then be now? Soon. Yeah. But it's happening, right? Doesn't this feel to you like this is this, Pavan started in sort of January. Like now we're a few months on and they're starting to build a list of what people want and what they can do. Sort of the prioritization getting, getting, getting, taking a long time to get here. But here we are. Yeah, the two things they're doing right, and these are the same things that the Xbox team is doing right now, is communicating what they're doing and being, you know, really clear about it for the most part, and then providing updates, right? This is a nice status update because it's only been a few months, and maybe arguably less than a few months. We'll call it a few months. And that's just a pretty good, you know, it's like, look, this thing is out in the world. We're not changing code for something that no one, this is a billion people have this thing, right? Like, you know, you have to be – we all want these changes. It's great. But you have to, you know, there's a certain bar they have to meet here as well for quality and so forth. So, I mean, I think this is good. This is keeping us apprised of what's happening because some of the stuff wasn't completely obvious. The back-end stuff, you know, you might not notice or know, you know, even though it was happening, right? So it's nice. I think it's nice that they're doing this. Now, let's see. This is – where are we? It's May. So next week, right? Next week? Let me make sure that's correct. Yeah, I think next week. Yes. Next week on Tuesday's Patch Tuesday. So this will be, I think this is right, the first month this year where we're actually going to get some major feature updates in Windows this year. Last year, we had major feature updates all but one of those months because January is kind of an off time. So this is a nice change, right? But we are getting to big changes, right? So one of them is Xbox mode. This is the replacement for game mode. This is also the replacement for full-screen experience, which debuted on those Xbox Rock Ally gaming handhelds. I do not see this on any of my computers, and it's freaking me out. I'm sorry. I should explain why I said that. Last Tuesday, or no, well, sometime last week. I don't think it was Tuesday. They released the Week D update, right? This is a preview of next month's Patch Tuesday update. So, right, if you want this now, you can go and it's available in preview. You can kind of go look for this. I've installed it on multiple PCs. I'm not seeing it. I think we're still stuck with the CFR thing for a little while. And then the other big one is AI agents on the taskbar. And that's big because of what I just said. It's AI agents on the taskbar. It sounds really big. But you're not going to see this, right? Like, you're not just going to, like, wake up one day and some agent thing is going to pop up. They're like, hey, we're here. What do you want us to do? It's not like that. So this is the capability in the operating system that enables this to work. And so if you have a Microsoft 365 co-pilot subscription, there is a researcher agent that is available now that you could potentially run and it would do this thing. The thing that was so outrageous last fall when he made the stupid move of talking about it ahead of Ignite. So I've not seen it. I've only seen the demos they've done, so we'll see. But this is a big change, and, you know, it's going to go down, like, a lot of medicine poorly. And then there's a bunch of minor things. The drop tray is being renamed, but they're also making it a little more elegant, meaning small. I just turned it off. I hate that thing so much. And then minor, you know, File Explorer, Microsoft Store, et cetera, whatever. The other stuff's small. But Xbox mode and AI agents on a taskbar is interesting. Yeah, that's great. We'll see what happens. Yeah, we just got to figure out where the customers are actually accurate. The devs you're getting are using a bunch of agents, but they're using it through their own tools. They don't need it on the taskbar. I know. A regular mortal user is going to have one-out-a-teaching widget wiggling away on the taskbar going, hey, I got something for you. Yeah, this is not like, you know, if somehow I was magically in charge of UX at Microsoft or whatever, I would never have found up with this scheme. But I will say that watching that demo from Ignite and that, you know, that session or whatever, I was like, okay. I mean, like, you know, they're making it make sense within the context of how Windows has worked for, you know, since 1995, basically, right? So it's like, yeah, maybe, you know, we'll see. I still feel like agents are complex and for technical users only at this point. It's going to get there. I mean, it's going to get there quick. But, I mean, you know, it can't help any normal human being when some stupid thing pops up in a task frame. Like, what fresh hell is this? You know, and it's some agent thing like, hey, buddy, we can blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, no, I don't want to do that. I do not want that. I don't know. We'll see what happens. But it will go great. And then finally, a security researcher, hopefully not the same guy that found the supposed security problems in Recall, discovered that Microsoft Edge is loading all of your saved passwords into memory in clear text. Don't save. Even when you're not using those passwords. Like it just does it as part of its boot process. Don't save passwords at Edge. For a bit more than that. Jeez Louise. Yes. Holy cow. I don't I don't know what to say to this like that's not good so maybe Microsoft could talk to Anthropic and get a little red team going there and I wonder if that's what's actually happening and some of these things are starting to leak after the Firefox experience if you've got a commercial piece of software if you're not on this right now I hope that everyone that is running any kind of a software organization should be pointing to this and saying, we need to do this right now. Right now. If that's not your response, if your response is to do the, you know, ostrich head in the sand thing. That's going to be fine. Yeah, you need another job. You're doing the wrong thing. Well, and Microsoft has access to mythos, so this may well be a mythos. I presume that it's in work. This is the one that's. Well, the thing is, this is an external researcher supposedly. Oh, it wasn't Microsoft. No, no, no. They haven't said this. No. No, Microsoft would do this in what I would assume a fairly responsible way in saying, this was happening, but we have fixed it. You know, and that you would find out about it after they'd already fixed it. Yeah, no, my expectation is that every one of these companies is going to abruptly announce 200-plus patches, security patches to their products. We already, I didn't, I don't know who has this kind of ADHD, but like somebody last, yeah, last patch Tuesday was like, This was the most security vulnerabilities Microsoft has ever fixed in a single month, ever. Yeah. And it's like, okay. I mean, you don't really see that in the top-level announcement, you know? Microsoft doesn't say it. I think Steve Gibson said it was the second thing. The second thing. Okay. Yeah. It was just enormous. But it was like, yeah. And you have to think that has to do with it. And, yeah, Firefox 271 vulnerabilities, not vulnerabilities, bugs. They didn't say vulnerabilities. We don't know how many of them were actually security laws. Yeah. Yeah. I guess this is, right. So, yeah, there's the vulnerability bar or whatever, but then there's... Many bugs lead to vulnerabilities. That's the lesson I've learned from doing security now for 20 years, that it's often the bug that then gives you an entry. Buffer overflow says, hold my beer. And Steve said, and I think this is true, that you can count on AI not to make those kinds of dumb mistakes. It might make dumb mistakes, but it knows about buffer overflow. But only when that aspect is prioritized. Well, right. But I think I would imagine. The adversarial models we're starting to use now is literally you have a tinfoil hat agent attacking every piece of code for its vulnerabilities and spitting out issues to fix them. Yeah. And ChatGPT has done the same. They've announced the security model. Everyone's doing it. Everyone should do it. It's fantastic. Yeah. It's going to make things better. And it speaks to sort of the reality of what's happening as we get faster at building code is we're building more code. You know, they fell right on our long list. Yeah, because there is a lot of AI swap out there, too, now. Holy moly. We're going to talk in the next show on Intelligent Machines to Troy Hunt, the legendary founder of Have I Been Pwned. Oh, nice. And, of course, he's the guy who's been cataloging all these breaches. Troy. Yeah. Troy's amazing. Australian fella from the Gold Coast. We need people like this. This is like, did you? Yeah. This wouldn't be my area ever. Like, I just am not inclined or whatever, but I love that these people exist. Oh, you know, he's, so you remember, we always talk about that XKCD cartoon where the entire internet is supported by one developer. This little brick, this whole house of cards. That would be funny if it wasn't true, by the way. But he's a guy. Let's say like 14 billion requests a day from every browser. Every open source maintainer on Earth is like, yeah. It's Troy Hunt and his wife doing this thing. Charlotte. I mean, it was an accident, really, right? They made a thing just to sort of demonstrate, look, you can't reuse passwords. The fact that it turned into a business was kind of accidental. He was working on an app. And now it's all-consuming. Richard, as it turns out, you can reuse passwords. It's a hugely problematic thing to do. It takes you a lot of time. Oh, my God. All you have to remember is one password. It's fantastic. Monkey123, and you're done. Bob's your uncle. I was on his beta, and so the first time he put the thing up, I was already in a breach. Yeah, I was in one of the original Stratford breaches that was on its system. Yeah, I think that – so he put it up as a kind of project when he was at Pfizer, and then there was a big Adobe breach, and all of a sudden everybody in the world is coming to have I've been pwned. And he said, you know, it's a business. You're a terrible Australian accent. I will never do it again. That's not a vulnerability. This is a vulnerability. Hey, let's pause for a minute and then we'll get back with more Windows Weekly in just a bit with Paul Therott in Mexico City and Richard Campbell in beautiful Toronto. You're there for what? A conference? Yeah, NBC Toronto. Nice. Speaking? Yeah. Yep, doing this. The N stands for Norwegian, I think. Oh, yeah. That's what the Norwegian developers are correctly named. You know, that's in Toronto. That's part of Norway that's in Toronto. Yeah. Like, I'm an American, so I don't quite understand geography, but, yeah. But I'm really looking forward to, yeah, one of my favorite talks, and one of my favorite books I've never finished writing. and Hanselman's here there's some great I love Scott Hanselman he is exactly what he got at a company I bet he is alright we'll have more right after this hey everybody this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Delete Me ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see don't look it's a lot more than you think your name, your contact info, your social security number, your home address, even information about your family members. It's all being compiled by data brokers. And you know what? 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And please don't forget to enter the code twit at checkout. Again, one more time, joindeliteme.com slash twit. Offer code twit. We use it. You should use it too. Join, delete me. Okay, the second time. Joindeliteme.com slash twit. Thank you, Delete Me, for your support of Windows Weekly. And now back to Paul and Richard and some guy named Leo. I think he's in Hawaii. Is that possible? How could it be? Look at the beautiful Hawaiian day behind me. Sort of. Yeah. It's a little bright, so I have all these. It's really silly. And I think at some point window washers are going to come, and they're going to be behind me on ladders. That's awesome. A word of warning. Let's go on with AI. Paul? Yeah, I don't want to talk about any of this, but I'm going to just do this. So Microsoft announced something called Microsoft Agent 365 at Ignite. It's been in preview probably since then, I guess. It's out of preview now. Okay. I guess it's an agent for monitoring agents. It's like, what? I don't know. It's an open cloud something. I don't know. Jeez, I don't know. This is, like, gross. Also a related Microsoft 365 for agents. This is in public preview, or I guess semi-related. I'm not sure if that's related. Whatever. Anyway, also on the phone, and this to me is slightly interesting, only because we were talking earlier about this Windows 11 UI for agents where they'll behave like apps, sort of. will there be an icon in the taskbar and notifications, and that this is a familiar way to interact with this stuff for people who are used to Windows. So if you now let's think about mobile a little bit, right? So in partnership with Anthropic, interestingly, Microsoft created a co-pilot co-work capability, which is now available on mobile, right? And this is a way to, and I should say it's extensible with reusable skills, 30-party plug-ins, right? This is an early preview. So the AI era version of what used to be like the RDP program, right, the rapid deployment program Microsoft used to have for a long, long time, is called the Frontier program now, right, from Microsoft Frontier. That's where it's at. So it's not like you can't go to the app store and just get this thing. But there is a, I'm going to call it a, yeah, co-pilot co-work app on mobile that can send autonomous agents out into the world to create multi-step tasks or complete multi-step tasks on your behalf, which is very similar to what cloud co-work, right? So same thing, cloud code or whatever. The UI is almost ridiculously friendly. It reminds me of something from the distant past in the Microsoft sphere, but it's basically just big buttons, you know, and it's stuff like organize my inbox, arrange my will. You sure it's not a paperclip. One of them is a paperclip. Prep for a meeting. Research company, right? So what you can do is connect this to whatever data source is, and this is where it gets. It's a pretty UI, but it's stuff like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamic 365 sale, Fabric IQ, and then whatever third-party services, right? So it's like it's not for – but the UI is so – it's like silly, you know? So obviously if you're using Microsoft 365 Copilot, you're going to have different entry points into this thing, right? You could do this from the web. You could do it from a sort of native app on Windows. You can access it from within individual Microsoft 365 apps, you know, like Word or whatever. And now mobile is – well, mobile – there's already a mobile app, But there's going to be an app for agents. And the way this should work is that you get some kind of a, you know, native or normal or familiar kind of mobile-like UI on mobile, but you could then go back to your PC, you know, boot login, and maybe you get, like, a notification on the taskbar because that's how we do it on Windows, right? So I'm kind of curious to see how this stuff all interacts, you know. I hope they coordinate together with each other. Yeah. That hasn't been my experience so far. One of the connectors, by the way, is from Notion. Okay. Interesting. And then my least favorite story of the week, Microsoft has announced a legal agent for Microsoft Word. Why don't you like this idea? Because there are already examples of lawyers who have used AI to fabricate legal precedent or whatever it is, or write their arguments and so forth, and this thing literally is designed to do exactly that. I mean, this is not trying to do legal cases. This is just trying to be a legally intelligent contract editor. I think I put it in the right place because you usually open contracts in Word. Yes. So the idea that then there's a tool there that has some visibility into legal language is interesting. It's inevitable. I mean, I accept that this has to happen. I also just think the timing's not totally bad. There wasn't a famous case last week we can point to say, you're doing this now, but there are, unfortunately, several examples of this kind of thing. But that lawyer did it to himself. He asked the tool to come up with citations, and it fabricated citations, and he showed it to a judge without validating it. That's on him. No, 100%. Yeah, you're right. So, yeah, look, this is the, without being cynical, which is hard for me, I mean, this is the definition of what AI is and should be used for. Like, you're going to save people time, save the money, et cetera. You're going to get some of the gross work out of the way. Hopefully. Well, just a legal translator. You take a paragraph of legalese, you're like, what does this actually say? Okay, yeah, yeah. No, this is a good – I hate this. Let's move on. All right, so I just hate this so much. But this is the kind of integration. This is not, hey, go to my new app, check out my new icon. It's like, hey, in this tool that I use all the time, I was trying to do this thing. And all of a sudden, the tool got better at doing that thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the last holdout major use case for WordPerfect was the legal market, right? That was a big thing for them. And so Microsoft obviously got that going at some point, and now all lawyers, like everyone on Earth who uses Microsoft Word. So, yeah, I understand. I'm looking forward to, like, the nuclear reactor agent. It's like, just please don't tell me about these things. So you want to build a nuclear reactor? It looks like you're trying to shut down Reactor 5. Would you like to help? And then these two are just interesting because of what the companies are and the different approaches. The first one, which is Apple, is a leak, in this case, from Mark Herman. It's super reliable, so it's almost certainly true. And the next one was an actual announcement from the company, which makes it also interesting. But Apple is going to do in its platforms what it's doing now, which is for ChatGPT, where you can kind of hand off to this third-party AI, but they're going to expand it to basically any AI. And that makes total sense to me. And this is a – it also is a punt by Apple. This is not how they presented their plan for AI, that they were going to curate the best version of it, so you'd have an excellent experience. Now they're going, yeah, we don't know. Use what you want. I mean, there is a $250 million settlement because Apple over-marketed an AI that still to this day does not exist. Does not exist. It was complete vaporware. Anyone who bought an iPhone 16 and or 17 will get between $25 and $95 per device because of this. So, yes, to your point, that's true. I mean, what it does is it says to Apple, it says to all of us, Apple is a mortal company also. Well, or I'll give you a different interpretation. Apple realizes that there's more money to be made being a hardware company that provides a portal to the AI of your choice instead of trying to become an AI company. It's going to be pretty hard to compete with Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon. Apple didn't try and compete in the search space. They just brought the best search engine to the phone. Exactly. So this is not what they're doing here. What they're saying is we don't know what the best of anything is. Well, as a user, I'm thrilled. I want to be able to use the marketing department. I want to just be clear, they will never say that. Oh, that's true. You're not going to get it. But, yeah. These guys were supposed to be the curated experience. That's why you live in their walled garden, and now they're doing what everybody else is doing. The privacy, if you sign up for a patch, and you decide to use them as your model, it's all going to OpenAI. Yeah, if you sign into that account, right? I mean, one of the things – I think there's a model here for Microsoft as well. if Copilot continues to tank, et cetera, et cetera, giving customers the ability to either choose the model they want to use or the AI, whatever, or automatically kind of orchestrate that on their behalf is a bunch of things. I think you've seen this example with Claude Cowork, right? Claude Cowork booted M365 Copilot in the butt, and Microsoft responses to bring Cowork into the product stack. That's not unusual for Microsoft. They will always go and recruit elsewhere when they can. Apple, a little more hubris. Yeah. No, that's true. And I'm not saying Apple's making the wrong choice. What I am saying is this is not how Apple normally presents itself. They normally present the curated experience. You're going to still say, and you want the curated experience, we're hosting Gemini, which they're paying for, on our servers, and you'll have that. Yep. I guess the question is, Apple so far has said, well, people want AI to do things like correct grammar or writing or summarize emails, very simple things, which I guess people want. And they say if you want the heavier-duty inference, well, you're going to want to use a heavier-duty model, and we'll let you do that too. You know, Walmart is apparently making new devices that are going to have Gemini built in. So Walmart is a big Google partner, and Google has first-party hardware for things like TV streamers and smart speakers and little smart devices, whatever they are. That's not a failure for Walmart. No, I mean, Walmart is going to sell a lot of devices, right? They're going to sell for cheaper, and a lot of them are actually fantastic. I mean, the Walmart version of whatever the Google TV streamer is called looks identical to it, and I think it's like one-third the price. I guess the question is, going forward, how important is it for Apple to be an AI company? and there are some and maybe you feel this way Richard that's going to be critical to their future success I think they're a hardware company and if you're a hardware company they always have them so this is the difference between kind of fully embracing I hate to say this term but like vibe coding essentially to allow people to do fun things in the UI of whatever system or whatever it is versus kicking them out of the App Store you know which is kind of The Apple approach is a little different. The App Store is Apple's Achilles heel. There is no doubt about it. That's part of that services income. They make so much money on it. There's no disincentive to let anybody do anything different, but it's not a long-term strategy. It's a reminder that security was once an app in the App Store. Which they then bought, right? Yeah. I was just reading. Oh, go ahead. You have one more story, I mean, then I want to mention something that I thought would be interesting. Go ahead. Okay, sorry. Just Canonical which makes the Ubuntu Linux distributions announced how they going Did I talk about this last week Actually as I saying this I feel like I kind of did something I don think so I don remember So they announced how they going to roll out AI functionality into Ubuntu Now, if you know anything about anything, right, and in my world, I deal with, like, the older, more set in the way, it's like technical people in the Windows community. That's everyone in the Linux community. I mean, like, literally. And I saw this, and I was like, oh, this is not going to go well. This is not going to be happening. He is being completely reasonable, and he is going to get eaten alive. And that's exactly what happened. It's literally like, all right, so we're going to fork Ubuntu, so there's a version without this crap, or what other distributions can we move? This is literally what's happening right now. But I have to say, this plan is a solid and smart. It's a little bit like the thing that Mozilla is doing with Firefox where they're saying, look, we understand there's a big segment of our population that's knee-jerk, just doesn't want this stuff. But there are features in Firefox that are actually AI where they're like, whoa, hold on a second, I want that. And the version for Firefox is language translation, right? And that's why in that UI in the browser, you can turn it all off, but then you can go turn on individual ones if you want, and the top one is language translation. is that even the people that hate AI viscerally are like, well, I need that. You know, like that works. I mean, and that uses the local model. It's interesting. And so they're differentiating, in Ubuntu's case or Canonical's case, I guess, they're differentiating between what they're calling like explicit and implicit AI. And implicit AIs are AI features, are those features that are just making something that's an OS feature a little bit better. And so instead of language translation, they're talking about speech-to-text and text-to-speech. In other words, we already have this, and maybe it doesn't use AI today, maybe it will in the future. It's not about AI. It's not like, look, a co-pilot icon. It's like this is – and there's all kinds of – they don't really say this exactly, but system-monitoring tools, whatever you want to call it. You could imagine where they would want to use AI where it makes sense to use AI. That's kind of the way to say that. So what they're going to do is there'll probably be a checkbox and set up where you could just turn this off. Yeah, an initial setup. But unless you choose otherwise, those implicit features will be on by default because they're just augmenting something that already exists. And not, you know, they're not actually they do have some. These are general, but these are things that might be. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, actually, they don't. I'm sorry. The examples that we're going to give are for explicit AI. So explicit AI is new features, like features that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for AI. This is a thing we're doing because of AI, right? And these are AI-centric features, right? So authoring new documents or applications or automating or troubleshooting workflows or personal automation, you know, things like that. And so those will be off by default, and they will allow you to turn those on if you want them. And, you know, they bring up the whole AI slump thing. You know, we're not doing that. It's all very, it's honestly, it's logical and, you know, even thoughtful. And in their language, deliberate, secure, and aligned with their values, et cetera. Yep. And nobody wants it. Like, the reaction to this, I saw this. Yeah, it's obvious it was going to be. I told my wife about it, knowing I'd have to explain why this was so serious, because she doesn't know anything about this stuff. Like, what would she do? She's normal. But I was like, oh, my God. This is going to be a little bit of a theater. He's calling gamers, hey, you're going to love all the AI in the game. We're only going to do it the right way. The next Call of Duty is going to be all AI multiplayer levels. You're going to love it. It's going to be awesome. They're going to be personalized to you. Hey, I'm an AI lover, and I'm a Linux user, and I don't want AI built into the operating system. I can handle it. Just let me do it. I don't need you to do it. So I don't think you're unique in that particular regard. No, I know I'm not. Most of those people probably actually are AI haters. Not necessarily. I mean, Linux is really popular among the Vibe coding crowd because we're mostly working in the terminal anyway. I see no reason. You know, every time I use Google Docs now, I am so annoyed. I want to turn off all the AI features. It's just intrudersive. This is going to come up in the first scamming story, but this is very specific to Microsoft, but this happens everywhere. You're doing some work, and something pops up in your face. I don't want it. And maybe you were typing and can't type anymore. What are you doing? Out of my way. Why are you interrupting me? And then the worst, the most offensive of those are, hey, could you take a second to rate this app? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I can. I can. You're not going to like it, but I'm going to do it. that. I hate that. AI would be particularly offensive in this regard, I think, because there's already that kind of visceral thing, and God help people if that happens. Some AI thing pops up like, hey, hey, buddy, I got some AI for you. What are you thinking? Click the button. I'll click it for you. I honestly think this is where Firefox has the right idea. And Vivaldi, too. No AI. Well, Vivaldi There's literally no AI. I mean, Firefox gives you the kill switch, which I think is smart. You can turn it off. That's actually the way to do it, right? Yeah. But this is essentially what Ubuntu is doing. I mean, it's very similar. Well, I'm never going to install Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu, so I don't really care. I know every other Linux distro will do what Firefox or Govaldi is doing, saying, hey, don't worry, we're not putting AI. Go right back to Debian. I don't care. I don't even need access to an admin account. So I think that's very common. I will be quoting that SNL Uber Eats end-of-year wrap-up skit for the rest of my life where it's like, oh, no, I know what it is. I just do not want it. And I think this applies to, like, AI in Linux. Absolutely. Actually, we talked a lot on Security Now yesterday because Google, without telling anybody, just started downloading a 4.7 gigabyte. So is that true, though? Yes. They're downloading Gemini in Chrome. So when you get Chrome now, you're going to get a Gemini Nano model. Wow. And also a low disc warning because what? 4.7 gigs. Yeah, that's the Nano model. It's Nano. They wanted 22 gigs, but they realized nobody would do that. You know, it's funny because in our Discord, our AI-loving Darren Oakey said, That's great because developers will use that all the time to help with code. So he said, you know, I always have to figure out if somebody misspelled Dubai in my code. Well, now I can figure out that. This is a prop. So this is the modern equivalent of we are going to design features for Office because we know you have all of the apps. And before we had to do all these if-then-elses because maybe you don't have PowerPoint and maybe you don't have whatever it is, right? So you can see the benefit to it. But it's also gross bundling and enormous, I guess. It's a huge land grab because if suddenly every website says, oh, well, you have to have nano, that means you have to have Chrome. Yep. That's not, but that's exactly Google's point, by the way. They're establishing a standard. The Google search antitrust thing in the United States where one of the DOJ proposed penalties that's not happening was to strip Chrome away from them. Now you see why. Exactly. And then Google fought very hard on this one because, you know, it's AI and search, you're not the same thing. And then, you know, but you use this as the distribution point for both. And this is how you, I forget which of you said this, I'm sorry, but these companies are all maintaining their dominance in their respective areas into this new era. I think it was Richard, but whatever. This is how they do it. I mean, of course. So I wanted to bring up, and we're going to talk about it next on Intelligent Machines. O'Mallick, who I love, wrote a very interesting piece about how AI is changing Internet consumption patterns. And Microsoft is one of the four hyperscalers. He talks about Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta, all of which are building their own proprietary interconnect network data centers. Because it turns out that we thought that, you know, traditionally in the past, Everybody said, well, Internet bandwidth use is going to go up because people are going to be sending data to the cloud. Right. That, what they call north-south data, is not as important to these hyperscalers as the east-west data, the interplay between GPUs in a single data center and multiple data centers. And so Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have all developed very sophisticated, completely incompatible, completely proprietary ways of having interconnects between data centers. Microsoft now has half a million miles of fiber. And it's not single-strand fiber. The standard now is 24-strand fiber, these giant cables. Can I make a joke about how you need more fiber? Well, you do if you're a data center. He also talks about how it's changing geographies because companies are building data centers where power is cheap, where land is cheap. And so most of the bandwidth of the Internet is not coming from cities anymore. It's coming from, you know, Memphis because the land was cheap and the power was cheap. So it's a complete reworking of the economy thing, of the data center economy and Internet economy. It feels vaguely like the allegations that, you know, Google and some kind of industry group had made against Microsoft about expatriating, exporting whatever code or user data out of Azure in this case to other clouds was made difficult through licensing cards. And it was really just artificial. And at one point they were all doing it. I mean, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were all doing it. And then after Amazon and Google stopped doing it, they started complaining about Microsoft. And so Microsoft did it for a little while more, but they got in trouble, and now they just let people migrate their data. You know, but this, that could, I mean, that could also be a, what do you call it, a competitive strength, right? Oh, absolutely. Listen, if one of them figures it out, you know. Well, they're all competing. Yeah. Microsoft, and the only reason we talk about Microsoft is because Google doesn't disclose. But Microsoft does for some reason. They haven't. Right. In that November of last year. Don't tell them. Don't tell them. They added 120,000 new fiber miles in the year 2025 to extend their WAN, their AI WAN, which connects its Fairwater AI superfactory campuses into a single system. Powered by Enron. Azure's overall WAN capacity reached 18 petabits a second by late last year. That's tripled in one year. 18 petabits a second. and that's all interconnect. That's not inference. That's not talking to us. That's talking to yourself. Yeah, internal. It's also one of the best arguments for why we can't do data centers in space. Right. Right. Think of the interconnect issue. You think the latency is bad on your cable modem. It's not just the latency. It's the bandwidth. You can cram so much data down fiber, and you can put bundles of fiber together, and it just doesn't work that way in orbit. Right. But Ohm writes, the hyperscalers are no longer just buying fiber. They're reinventing it. Microsoft has a new hollow core fiber technology that is 47% faster and 33% less latent than single mode fiber. I never read short lengths, though. Ah, interesting. And he also, well, but if it's within a data center, that's right. Within a data center makes a huge difference. I do the whole undersea cable infrastructure talk, and it's like, what about hollow core? It's like you don't get that under oceans. Yeah. They're not making a thousand kilometer strands of hollow core. Although, they're buying cable, subsea cables like crazy. Oh, yeah. No, mostly it's the hyperscalers putting the cables. They're still putting them in the overall network, but they're the ones building them now. You know, it's hard to just, you know, the wires that are hanging around Mexico City here, they have the biggest data center on Earth. Before 2012, the four hyperscalers collectively accounted for less than 10% of the total subsea cable usage. As of 2024, they now have 59 cable systems. Google has 33, Meta 16, Microsoft 6, Amazon 4, 71% of global subsea fiber capacity. Capacity, yeah. There's about 1,700 cables total. They don't have that many cables. The cables they're laying now individually are terabit cables. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It's a table laid about four years ago that represented more bandwidth than was laid in total before 1999. Right. And this, you know all about this, Richard, but it's something I don't think people think about that often. It was a really good article by Om about how really this is going to change network topology. I did a whole hour on it. I should probably make the podcast too. I wish you would. Yeah. I wish you would. It's a token ring technology. Of course. Actually, they have something called Sonic, I think, that they're using as their fabric interconnect. Also proprietary. He says, I love this, he says, he first pointed out Netflix was the first killer app of broadband many years ago. He says, now it's just a matter of time when AI will be the new Netflix. Oh, boy. Yeah. I'm looking for something like, and then it just comes on. Yeah. We are in the future, folks, in some really interesting ways. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I have to wonder if the granddaughter is just going to make her own stories. It's going to be divisive. Oh, 100%. Yeah. But I thought it was interesting. Inference is not really the driving force here, that north-south traffic. It is really the fabric of the east-west traffic between data centers. Because there's so many. I mean, there's hundreds of, they're saying they're going to get to a million GPU data centers. I mean, it's mind-blowing. I'm going to go back and use an Amiga 1200 for my life and store everything on floppy disks, which I guess you cannot buy anymore. I think Zip disks are the thing. Yes, I love Zip disks. Xbox, coming up in just a little bit, you're watching Windows Weekly, Paul Farratt and Richard Campbell. But first, this word from some guy in Petaluma. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Helix Sleep. How are you preparing for spring cleaning season? Well, I got an idea for you. Time to upgrade to a Helix mattress and get a good night's rest. That's what we did last spring. We replaced that old mattress. It was, I think, eight years old. But you're supposed to replace your mattresses. 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The Happy with Helix guarantee provides a risk-free, customer-first experience, ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixsleep.com slash windows right now for 27% off site-wide during their Memorial Day sale Best of Web offer. This is exclusively for listeners of Windows Weekly. That's helixsleep.com slash windows for 27% off, and it's site-wide. Make sure you do enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. And the offer, of course, is going to end May 31st. So go now, but if you are listening after the sale, don't worry. They have great deals always at helixsleep.com slash windows. Thank you, Helix Sleep, for my good night's sleep and for supporting Windows Weekly. Now back to the show. I actually say with confidence that I miss my Helix mattress here in Hawaii. I sleep okay because I'm exhausted. Because we're doing a lot. We're doing a lot. Except the busy area. Yeah, we've made a lot of plans. We're so glad. Yeah, this is coffee country, too. I'm really excited about getting a bunch of Kona coffee in my veins. Here's something that will pep you up. The world-famous Xbox segment. You establish expectations. So there's a lot of Xbox news this week, actually. So Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has been in the news a lot. CNBC has been in a role for a month. I know. Very vocal. I like it. This is not something they announced publicly. I feel like at some point they probably will. But CNBC has obtained an internal memo. Sorry. That's a difficult word. Jeez. Okay. Anyhow, big shakeup in the organization. And this is when you called Firefox firefarts, but that's okay. Yes, you did. And I wasn't going to say anything, but did I do that today? Yes. Okay. Well, I need to sleep more. What would you do with the mattress? Felix, Felix, go get one. All right. I did not sleep well last night. Honestly, Firefarts is not a bad name for a browser. It might just be my accent. You know, maybe. It could be. Highfarts. Okay. So, two senior executives, Kevin Gamble and Rowan Soans, are leaving. The latter is taking a leap of absence and will be an advisor in a future meeting. She's gone. And then Shimer picked four senior executives out of Core AI, which is where she was at Microsoft previously, to form part of a new leadership team in Xbox. One of them is named Tim Allen. I assume that's not the comedian. Jared Palmer, Jonathan McKay, and Evan Chackie, none of whom I'm familiar with, unfortunately. That's interesting. And, look, you could, it's reasonable to question someone coming in running Xbox who's never been involved in this part of the business. It's like, okay, and then, you know, I like what I've seen so far, but then you, like, poach executives from, like, Core AI. Mm-hmm. Where you came from. And they also don't know, seem to know much about gaming, and in the process seem to be forcing out a bunch of gaming leaders from Xbox. Right. I'm not sure what to say about this. I'm concerned. I'm concerned that you're crafting a bubble around yourself that doesn't know anything about gaming. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So, okay. And I guess part of this, too, is I think it came out of this same memo. No, I'm sorry. She said this. Actually, I'm sorry. Since then, she has tweeted about this a little bit. But she's also said that they're getting rid of the gaming co-pilot that Microsoft announced for the console. But I don't think ever released, or if they did, they're retiring it. And then the similar of the gaming co-pilot that is on mobile for some reason is being retired. And okay. And then the thing we have on PC, this is kind of, it's a little strange, but there's an AI assistant built into the game bar experience, right? Yeah, the game bar experience, and that's still going to be there. This is the thing where you can bring up kind of like a mini web browser, because you're stuck in a game, and it's very common for people. You don't want to switch to a different app or whatever. I guess that's still going to stick around. I think this is another example of that thing where it's like you're in the middle of something. You're playing a game in this case. and this little frigging clippy thing pops up. It yanks you out of your experience. Yep. It looks like you're having trouble getting by the goblin there, big guy. You want some help with that? And you're like, who are you and what are you doing on my screen? Even within games where this is part of the UI, there are UIs that pop up that I find confounding. Like in Call of Duty, typically you be the red button out of something, whatever it might be. So you go up and you look at whatever the scoreboard is or something, and then you go back. But there are a couple of UIs that pop up that that does not work with, and you have to hit a different button, and it's like, guys, get off of my screen. And that's part of the game. Like, I don't want that. I don't think many people want that from outside the game. So that's a little. Don't interrupt me while I'm playing. Don't interrupt me when I'm doing anything. Yeah, don't interrupt me. Yeah, respect my time or my whatever. My ability to concentrate and mispronounce Firefox, one of the simplest words on the planet. Anyway, so this is tied. I don't know why these are separated, actually, but yeah. So Forza Horizon 6 is coming out this month. It's going to be one of the games they release to Xbox Game Pass, along with several others. And a couple of things in here. Well, May 19th is Forza Horizon 6, so Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Aren't they going to get that? That must be day one, right? Doom the Dark Ages, which is from last year, I think. May 14th, coming to Game Pass Premium. Call of the Elder Gods. Some good stuff in here. This is a pretty good Final Fantasy V. Yeah, some good stuff. So, you know, across whatever the platforms are. So you're going to be hearing a lot about this Forza Horizon game. This is just a PR. It's a great series of games. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. This must have happened right after the show last week, too, but they released the April update for Xbox, and this time there's something for everybody, literally. So on the console, you get that up-to-10-groups feature we've been talking about, the ability to turn off quick resume on a game-by-game basis, super important. That stuff's happening there. The Xbox app on Windows 11 is going to let you manually add any game or app to your Xbox library and then customize the name, how it looks, the icon, et cetera, et cetera. You can pin games, et cetera, et cetera. A bunch of stuff there. There are wish list alerts on mobile. There are some really cool updates coming to Xbox LA Gaming Handheld, although since I wrote this, I'm hearing that some of these aren't so great, but including things like automatic resolution when you dock, et cetera. the game gamepad cursor which is actually in the Xbox app on Windows 11 as well support for Bluetooth LE audio and enhanced vibration you know lots of stuff there so and then some changes or not some changes there's a promotion now in the Microsoft rewards program where there's a total prize drop for a chance to win a million dollars like Dr. Evil a Mercedes Benz I swear to God Xbox gift cards or something, whatever. You're not going to win any of that. But anyway, it's all happening. Activision has tweeted, announced, I guess, that the next Call of Duty is not coming to PlayStation 4, which is the previous-gen console or Xbox One. Okay, also previous-gen console, so XS and PS5 only. That's right. And PC. Yeah. And, okay, I mean... It's very good to draw a line somewhere. Yeah, several years. You know, it's been a while, right? PlayStation 5 is getting close to 100 million users, which is amazing. The customer base is big enough now, and it'll save them coding costs and possibly make the game look better, too. Exactly. And people tend to upgrade within the platform. So if you were on PS4, chances are you'd move to PS5. Yeah. That one's understandable. This one is not quite understandable. What's that? Sorry. You okay? What's not understandable? Microsoft's announced that Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition is going to be released on the Mac. Yay! They're doing it for me, Paul. They're doing it for me. And they said there was four. Oh, what? Okay. The third version of Age of Empires is four. Why are they doing two to the Mac? Oh, I see. It's the Definitive Edition. Yeah, they rematched it on the iPad. So this is over the past year or so. So, like, this probably, I don't know. Oh, that's interesting. Maybe that's how they're doing it, actually, then, right? It's probably just the iPad app, essentially. Okay. But it does say Mac OS specifically. Yep. Yep. It requires an M1 chip or newer. Not an M0. Well, you know, it's Apple Silicon Mac, whatever. Yeah, whatever. As Laurent, who wrote this article, points out, Mac Gamers account for 2% of the user base on Steam. So, I don't know. Whatever. I know. Presumably, Claude did all the work. There's weird stuff with Mac gaming. Like, I've been trying, you know, there are a handful of AAA games, and they're okay, right? But I have a MacBook Air M3, so it's not completely up to date, but it's also not completely ancient. And a game like Control, which is probably like Ultimate Edition, whatever, runs horribly on this laptop. But they just made it available on the iPad. So I bought it because it was like six bucks or something, and I'm like, okay, fine, let's try it. And I was kind of surprised. It doesn't run well. Like the Resident Evil games I have, those run great. But then I put it on the iPad, and I didn't have to pay extra. It's like a, what do you call it, like universal purchase or something. And it runs awesome on the iPad. It's like the iPad. The iPad is not as powerful as the, yeah, probably. Although I guess it's an M3 too. Come down to the dev work, how they, I don't know. Anyway. And then my favorite news of the week, the Supreme Court has declined to grant Apple's emergency stay of its order in Epic v. Apple, which is the U.S. antitrust case, where Apple won most of this case and then belligerently just didn't comply with the order. Two executives were found to have lied under oath. And she just imposed all these new restrictions and new whatever. And the thing that's amazing about this is there's been an appeals process, of course, that's going on, and they've lost it every step of the way. They've already been to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court threw it back down. They said no before. They said no to Google, same thing. And, yeah, actually, let me reload. This was fast because Apple appealed yesterday. Well, because they almost immediately said no. They were due to, they had to legally comply otherwise, right? Right, right. So just as that last ad was playing, I looked at my email, and I got an email from Epic, and they were like, hey, we have a quote about this now up on Twitter or whatever. So that was not available. There was really little information about this. I tried to find the Supreme Court anything. Like, even if it was like we just declined, I couldn't find anything. So what they're saying now is great news. The Supreme Court denied Apple's delay tactics. Now we head back to the district court to determine what Apple can charge for only the necessary costs of implementing external purchase links. In other words, what Apple was doing before was they had a 15-30% fee for all in-app purchases, etc. And because of this ruling and other rulings elsewhere, they imposed this new system where, yeah, it would go down to like 27%, but then you would have to pick up the fee structure from whatever third-party payment thing you were using. And the point of it was to make it more expensive to go a third-party route. and what Epic wants, and not just for them, but for everybody, is for this to be lowered because Apple should be paid if they're incurring a cost, of course. Yes. But they're just sucking in money for doing nothing. And so it's going to be interesting to see how we can figure out, like, what does this actually cost Apple? I've seen a lot of commentary on this, including some information that came out in one of these, probably this store case, business. And he was like, oh, did we lose something? Oh, okay. Okay, deal. He said, oh, no, this thing is hugely profitable. We don't even need these revenues. Like, there's nothing about this business that requires this kind of payment. Like, it's ridiculous. I mention this not only because it makes me smile, but because, you know, Microsoft last week, I think it was, or two weeks ago was talking about how, like, we still want to do this mobile Xbox Game Store thing, and this happening is what's going to make that possible, right? Because they can't. Apple denied them this, right? They wanted, well, not this story. I'm sorry. Apple denied them the ability to do Xbox Game Pass Cloud Gaming, which is the game streaming service, because they wanted a per-game payment for someone streaming a game that they get through the subscription? And it's like, you don't charge that to Netflix for streaming movies. What are you talking about? So this is kind of a big deal if you want to see the Xbox stuff. Fun little footnote on this, the judge who spanked Apple. Yeah, I know what you're going to say. She was really angry at them. Yeah, really angry. She basically said, you lied to me. By the way, I think this is the same woman who's overseeing the Elon Musk. That's where I'm going with this. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Yep. She is now equally pissed off in the Altman versus Musk case. She's like, I don't want anything to do with big tech after this. No, no. She's great. You know what? She said, look, I'm not going to let you guys talk about AI dumerism in this trial. That's not on the table. That's not the topic. Yeah. Look, she has tight control of her control room. Control room. Her courtroom. And I think that's good on her. She's not taking any guff from big tech. Right. Get for them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like these people are, yeah, they're behaving like babies. Treat them like babies. Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful. And one of the things we learned in Apple versus Epic and Google versus Epic is that these trials are always bad for the companies involved because of, you know, these court discovery and testimony always ends up, you know, being embarrassing. Right. Emails and so forth. And the same thing's happening in Altman versus Musk. It's embarrassing. You don't want this to go to court. It's dirty laundry. Listen, if my experience over three-plus decades covering Microsoft has taught me anything, it's subtle. Have some say over your future. Do not allow a judge or a jury or whatever to tell you what you have to do now because you were so belligerent about your 30% fees or whatever. The line I've always used is nobody wins a court case. is like winning an earthquake. It's not a thing. Here's my line. Discovery's a bitch. You really don't want them going through your old emails. You really don't. Right. Yep. 100%. And Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, just embarrassed himself yesterday on his stand. I mean, it's just... Apparently this guy keeps a dream journal that he, for some reason, shared with everybody. How come this journal that he's been keeping is in the court record? I can actually tell you why. I mean, like, legally why it's there. But I still want to understand the decision behind letting this happen. OpenAI's lawyers introduced it as evidence. Yeah. Dear diary, today I'm going to steal money from Elon. I hope that's okay. What am I going to do to get to a billion-dollar valuation from me? What? And then Brockman, the OpenAI, I'm sorry, Musk's attorney is saying, well, you know what this suit's about. And he says, no, I have no idea. And he said, well, let me read you the suit. I still have no idea. And he's just making an idiot of himself. It's really... So I think it's an earthquake. Every once in a while in companies, you'll find a person that just keeps really detailed notes about things. And so I think part of it is to show timelines and whatever. But the problem is you don't get to pick and choose. You don't put it in writing. This guy is probably writing stuff about his relationship with his wife. It's like, dude, what are you doing? Just don't put it in writing. Yep. It's really stupid. Or, you know, if you do, get one of those diaries that has a little lock on it so that the lawyer has it. Like a TSA-approved lock in the 1970s. Yes. And if you are going to write it down, don't litigate with it. Well, I'm still puzzled. I have to really look into this. Why his diary? How that becomes. I think it's because they introduced it. So OpenAI introduced it into evidence. That was on that. Oh, that's their mistake. Okay. Well, there you go. But I think it's because there is other things in there. You know you're going to be embarrassed by this. You know it. But you're so angry that you don't care. This is a purse fight. OpenAI already does have my diary. The agent is reading it every day. So here's the thing. We already know these people are all terrible. Every one of them. They're all off. They are borderline antichrists. But now we just have the details. We didn't need the details. It's so embarrassing. We already knew you were horrible and robotic. It's so embarrassing. It's terrible. But to also have the documentation that you're terrible. Oh, yeah. No, you have no idea how terrible I am. Look at my diary. Like, why? It's your diary. Why? Today I stole another billion from the people. No good to be rich. Yep. All right. Let's pause. The pause that refreshes, because you know what's next? The back of the book. And we've got some whiskey. Actually, you did, I think, a piece about a Hawaiian whiskey distillery. I did. And we are going to go visit that this week. That's fantastic. Because of you. They make it out of honey. The honey's in it. They do. The honey meat distillery, yeah. Yeah. So we're going to do that and coffee. I'm trying to decide which order is the best. It's a lot of, like, former sugar refinery stuff in Hawaii, which you wouldn't expect until you go and see it. Like, it's out there, like, rotting away, like the... Oh, the refinery still works. Yeah. You know, like, yeah. But they're all gone. There's still some sugar cane. You can buy it on roadside stands. But no, that business is long gone. You got any teeth left? This will take care of it. Somebody else. Just like this. Chew sugar. Yeah. Good idea. We'll be back with more exciting, gripping, thrilling information on Windows Weekly with Paul Therott and Richard Campbell right after this. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by, I mean, quite literally, brought to you by Cashfly. CashFly has kept our content moving for years. Every stream, every download, every on-demand episode. 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They just added some new features. advanced analytics for deep CDN visibility, either in the portal or your observability stack, edge control for programmatic requests and response handling at the edge, and Terraform integration to manage CDN resources as code. They're so impressive. With more than 75 points of presence across six continents, over 5,000 customers, including us, and a 100% uptime SLA. 100% plus the best 24-7 engineer-to-engineer support. And very important for us at the time, you enjoy flexible billing, no strong-arm contracts. They will work with you to make it work. CashFly is the CDN built for your business. Look how you can get your first month free at CashFly.com. Say it with me because I've been saying this for 20 years now. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by CashFly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com. slash twit. Thank you, Cashline. Now back to the show. This would be the time that we go to Mr. Paul Theriot for his tip of the week. It's the back of the book we all look forward to. Paul, you know, this is an amazing coincidence. I got an email recently from Netflix that told me that my subscription price was changing, which was the word they used. It's not going down. In case that was a mystery. It's not going down. So now I'm paying this company $27 a month for Netflix, right? So here's the thing. If I paid them what I actually technically should be paying them, meaning I have kids who are my kids, but they live in different households now. They're outside the house. They would charge me $10 a month for each. So I could be paying them $47 a month if I wanted to, and I am not doing that. It's like a cable company subscription. Yep. Yep. So, Leo went into the ad there, and I went over and looked at my email, and I swear to God, I got an email from Google Workspace. This is the same thing. Price changes your upcoming Google Workspace renewal. Yeah, price change. I bet it's not going down. Guess what? It's not going down. And so, look, the notion that we all have too many subscription services, we're paying too much, most of us don't know, So, you know, built into this business model, literally, is the notion that people will pay for a service they never use. Those are the best customers. I am an excellent customer because I do this for a lot of things. Now, some of the stuff that I pay for every month is ostensibly work-related, and I've been taking these steps to kind of wean myself off of this stuff. Like, you know, with the NAS, I can use Synology Drive instead of OneDrive or Google Drive or whatever it is. But when I start listing out the sheer number of things that I pay for, I think to myself, A, this number's too big, it's too much money, and there's too many of these things, and B isn there some happy medium balance whatever you want to call it somewhere So also just a weird coincidence I was literally I had written the beginning of this thing and I got an email a PR email from, it doesn't matter from whom, but from a book publisher, and I get these things sometimes, and I usually, I don't even know why I get some of them, but this one was about a book that's coming out late this year that's about convenience and how we, the price of convenience is actually much higher than we understand. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, send me the book. I'm going to read this. I'm going to review this. This is really interesting to me. Now, I've not really looked at the book yet, but that's what this sort of is. And I mentioned this to my wife, and she said, you know, they have a term for this now. And I'm like, I'm not going to like it. Don't tell me the term. And she goes, it's called inconvenience maxing. Nice. And I'm like, I will punch anyone in the face who says that term to me. That is, with two X's, by the way. No, I'm not doing this. This is out there with my disdain for terms like daily carry. It's like, are we stupid? We have to have like. So obviously there are influences out there. There's like looks maxing and I guess inconvenience maxing. And this is not about inconvenience for inconvenience sake. It's not about just being inconvenient. But I do think, you know, there should be like a little bit of a bar for certain things and that maybe some inconvenience is an okay alternative to the hyper-convenience of just paying so much money for all these subscription services. So I didn't intend this, but I think this is going to turn into like a series of things. But like one of the – I'll just throw out one example because I use this in the article. But I'm currently paying for free music subscription services because I'm an idiot. And part of it is because two of them are tied into other subscriptions where you just kind of get it as part of it or whatever. but one of them is because my wife and one of my kids still use Spotify, so there's that. But if you add this, I'm not going to add it. It doesn't matter. It's a lot of money. So I'll be out in the world. Even though I'm almost 60 years old, I'll go out in the world. I could be in an Uber, a bar, a restaurant, whatever it is. I hear music. I open my phone. I shazam it, or if I'm on a Pixel, I use the Google built-in thing, and I find out what the song is. I'm like, cool. And it creates this list of those things, And then, you know, every couple of months or whatever, I go through that list and I listen to it for a little while. I'm like, yep. And I'll put it into my playlist, right? Which is super easy because I'm paying every month. I have access to all of the world's information, you know? If I added up, like even just the cost of one of these subscriptions, and instead of instantly just getting it for free as part of the thing I'm paying for, I went to some service and paid for the song. would I pay more or less doing that because that's how I discover music and I would pay less it would be a little less convenient it wouldn't happen instantaneously but I think I'm going to go there I think I'm doing this I think my goal is going to be to call this stuff so this is going to be something that comes up again and I'm going to look at this across all kinds of things and of course my wife because God help me smarter than me but also not in my industry and does not care about tech. When I say this to her, the first thing that comes out of her mouth is like, well, you know, it's not just digital, right? I'm like, what does that mean? And she goes, well, everyone pays for gym memberships and never used to. And I'm like, please don't, please, please, dear God. This has to stop somewhere. You know, even in Mexico, which is not a rich country by some measures, right, or at least the people here don't make a lot of money, it's astonishing how many food delivery services there are here, including some we do not have in the United States, right? And people are delivering, like people are on a bike or a motorbike or a moped or whatever, driving to a restaurant, paying with some kind of a barcode thing, putting it in the back in some kind of, you know, heated bag thing, driving it across the city, delivering it to some person who makes 28 pesos a day or something. And somehow that makes sense to these people, you know? Right. And we have, I think convenience is a disease. I mean, and this is something, really, I mean, you know, so I invented this definition of hipster. A hipster, in my definition, is someone who is nostalgic about something they never experienced, right? This is someone my kid's age who's like, I want an iPod, or I want a record player, I want a cassette player, I want a CD player. And they're doing stuff like I used to do, and there's a reason we move past all that stuff, right? But there's also this kind of misplaced nostalgia where we have, if you did experience something, you remember the good things, but you kind of forget the downside, right? And so when you go from like physical media to digital and you're buying digital and you own this thing, you have a file, you can move it around devices, it's not super convenient. I actually do feel that that level of inconvenience, it's still better than physical media in many ways. And I know, I know, vinyl is warm, whatever. But the subscription service streaming thing is like it's too far. So, yeah, I'm doing the thing I complain about, which is I do think this thing that we had before is better than the thing we have now. And mostly it's about my soul and my pocketbook or whatever you want to call it. But anyway, I'm going to. I mean, the problem is canceling a gym membership is a nightmare. canceling Netflix is a breeze and you know it's even easier than canceling Netflix signing up again I came to this independently but I see that many many people have as well which is like one strategy for streaming video and by the way thank God I don't have a need for like a live TV service talk about a $100 a month outlay unless you can throw an antenna on your roof or whatever I would just go like this month we're going to use Netflix, you know, and then we're going to quit. And maybe this month we're going to use. Yeah. Just queue them up, you know, use them up, put them down. This is something that I feel very strongly is an excellent idea. I've never done it. Well, we sign up for live sports when curling is on. That's when we have live sports in the house. Right. As soon as the curling season is over, we shut that account down. Is it live, though? It feels a little. It is really live. Yeah. Okay. a snail is alive no like I we run into this problem on New Year's Eve because we have like you know 10 to 20 people over defending and we want to watch the ball drop on you know TV and I do not have live TV so usually my brother-in-law will bring over like his fire TV stick or something and we just use it for that night or something or maybe you know the kids will come home over the holidays and Mark's like I want to watch basketball on you know NBA on Christmas Day and I'm like well enjoy driving over to your cousin's house because we don't have that here, sorry, you know, or whatever. And so it's not convenient. But you know what? I'm also not paying YouTube Music 100 bucks a month for a service I never use. So it's okay. Anyhow, anyway, like I said, this could turn into something really ugly and big. I'm kind of nervous about it. But there's Prof G, who's Scott Galloway's, you know, unsubscribed thing, which he did, I think, back in February, which is more of a protest. but it was also just a reminder. You have way too many subscriptions and you just pay attention to this. Like sometimes people find out they don't only have a Netflix subscription. They have three of them. I had a, so this is a little, this is borderline unethical maybe, but like one of the things you can do is subscribe to a publication like the New York Times or Bloomberg or whatever. And with a new email address, because you get some entry price and it's not something they offer to existing subscribers. You can save money that way. Right. So a year ago, literally a year ago, I dropped my Bloomberg subscription and I bought one under a new address and saved money. So I had an email reminder, cancel Bloomberg and do this again. And I'm like, look, I'm smart. I'm not going to do this the wrong date. I probably get built a week to 10 days of wiggle room into this thing. So I let the day go by and the next day Stephanie's like, hey, you got a bill from Bloomberg. I thought you were getting rid of this thing. And I'm like, so I was thinking I must have paid too much because it renewed. So I looked it up and actually the price I paid for a year, you pay for a year, was less than what I paid last year. And I was like, yeah, I'm just going to keep it. I'm going to get this wrong off the top of my head. But I want to say it was $120 and it would normally be $200 or $300 a year, whatever the price. And I was like, yeah, I think last year I paid $140. So I guess I did okay. I don't know why. So I screwed that one up. But you talk about trying to make a useful agent. How about a subscription management agent, man? That's, by the way, nice. That's a really good idea. Yeah. Anyway. And the double whammy of monitoring the output of your – or the feeds of your house and say, these are the services that are used. Here's how much you're used. Here's the ones that are not used. I'll unsubscribe to these. You know, off we go. Yep. I got to find – yeah, no, that's an excellent idea. I might work on that. I'm going to make a useful agent. If you're going to tie up an icon on my taskbar, at least do that for me. I mean, it has to have access to what you're subscribed to, right? So one easy way would be like, here's my checkbook. And I guess I want to be careful with that. No, but that's still an excellent idea. Sorry. What's a checkbook? I don't know why I keep using these terms. I think I've established that I'm old. There actually are. I know one of our sponsors does something like that. There are a number of apps. Yeah, I know. There are a number of subscriptions. Because they have access to your checkbook, so they'll see. you keep paying this every month. Do you want to keep doing it? There are even some that will cancel it for you. Right. But you're right. This would be a better, I think an AI agent. I like this. I like that. I'm going to see if I'm probably going to have difficulty with this, but I'm going to look into that. That's a good idea. You can ask an LLM about building it. My current recommendation, Paul, if you're curious, is there's something from News Research. We've interviewed their founder, Jeffrey Canel, called Hermes. It's a really good agent model. You can use Anthropic with it, but you'd have to use API keys. But ChatGPT lets you use a subscription with it. And ChatGPT 5.5 with Hermes can do almost anything. Lisa was saying. So Hermes, this is like Herbie's finance? Hermes is like the Mercury, like the winged messenger. No, no, I mean, but it's essentially a finance. It's like Claude Code. It's a harness. So it runs in the terminal. But you then set it up, and it will run actions in the background. It's kind of like OpenClaw. And so I'll give you an example. Lisa said, you know, I keep seeing this rumor that, oh, what was it? Some celebrities date some other celebrity. Tom Cruise is dating, I can't remember who it was. And she said, but I don't know if that's true. I said, well, and so I had Hermes every six hours. It was checking. Are they dating it? Are they dating it? I finally turned it off because they weren't. This is that message protocol joke from last week. It's like, is anyone there? Yeah. Is anybody there? Hello? Is anybody there? Easily, the problem is you're right. You'd have to give it access to your bank account, and you might not want to do that. The road to hell will now be paved by the services I make available to some AI agent. Exactly. That is then running off. I'm actually in the process of setting up access to my cameras, my ubiquity cameras. It turns out it can do that, and it can see the video, and it can process the video, and it can tell me stuff, like you just got a package or there's some guy lurking around the backyard. So I have a blink camera on my balcony. It points west, right? So when the sun sets, you see the sunset. So it has motion detection. It has a microphone. It does all this stuff. And let's just say not a lot happens out there. It goes down. But every once in a while I get like an alert, like, hey, it's our vehicle. Like, really? I'm going to see what that looks like. Or it'll be like motion detected. Like, nice. And so sometimes there'll be like a bumblebee flying around in front of the camera. Twice it's been like a bird. You can see it's like feathers. It's like scratching itself or something. But the one that was a vehicle was my hand because I slightly, I changed the direction just to look like up by a hair when I get a camera. And it's like, no, it's not a truck. It's my hand. Also, we're six stories up. It's probably not. There's no vehicles out there. Unlikely. There better not be. Something's gone horribly wrong. It's a VTOL. Yeah. Sorry. That was just the pick. You got a tip. I know. I'll make these quicker. No, no, it's fine. Two picks. Look, you guys do this. That doesn't apply to whatever feed you use. You see news headlines and things. In my case, every morning I'm looking at tech news and figure out what's going on in the world. Sometimes I see the headlines where I'm like, oh, I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. I'm like, ignore it. Ignore it. don't look at this and then it appeared the next day again and i was like all right i'm gonna just i'm gonna look at this and it was pc mag probably and it was uh a guy i actually respect he's been around for a long time but he he was like you cannot trust the antivirus built in windows you get a but you have to have third party antivirus i was like yeah no you don't so i was like um so i read this thing and god help me i read the whole thing and i'm like i there was not a single salient point in this entire, and I'm like, oh, don't, I'm like, I gotta write about this, I gotta write about it, goddammit, I hate me. I don't want to go after a person, and that's not my point, I wanted to be super clear, I do respect this person, but I'm like, no, you do not need this, and goddammit, I went through this line by line, and I quoted him everywhere, and it was like, nope, nope, nope, no, no, no, I'm a security expert, I, listen, whatever. I will say I was vaguely excited to see the next day. I think it was Jared Newman or one of these guys I get this email newsletter and he wrote an article about this exact thing and he was like no absolutely not and I was like thank you like just thank you. So there's that. You don't need anything else. The thing you have built in is fine. Please dear God do not pay for one of these things and all that extra nonsense that they give you, most of which you don't need, either because it's just in there already, or you're getting it through your password manager. Like, you know, I have advice about security involving. You should have a third-party password manager, which does pass keys. You should have a third-party authenticator app, 2FA. That's separate from that thing, by the way. And I have whatever set of advice I have, but, you know, you're using a computer? No, you're fine. Enterprise, however. Yeah, well, to some degree. We use a security monitor. Yeah, maybe we wouldn't call it an antivirus. No, look, I'm very specifically... You definitely look for malware on it. I'm coming at this from the perspective of an individual. When I review laptops, whether it's a commercial class PC that with HP is like HP Wolf, which I'm sure is fantastic and is a managed service, whatever. I mean, I get rid of that immediately. And, you know, McAfee, which is basically a virus, which, by the way, has two installers, and they cannot be uninstalled from the same place in Windows. Dear God, this is malware. Stop. I remove that stuff immediately. Like, this is ridiculous. Look, if you're – I almost want to say, like, just using Windows as configured with some common sense, you don't even need common sense. Just don't touch anything. It's fine. Like, you're fine. The only thing in Defender that I turn off is that stupid weekly announcement where it's like, hey, a week went by, nothing happened. Yeah, thanks. Turn that thing off. Which, by the way, triggers a UAC control, which is unbelievable, but it's just an informational notification. I don't need that. I know what it is, and I do not want it. You need the administrator to find out nothing happened. Exactly. So there's that. And just the other one real quick is there was an X. So the guys that made Atom, which is the developer, one of the developer editors, right? I think it was Atom, decided they were going to start from scratch and make a completely new software coding editor written entirely in Rust. And they just released 1.0. So it's cross-platform. This thing is faster than, it's unbelievably fast. Like, I don't have a problem with Visual Studio Code. I just don't. But this thing is notably fast. Like, it's awesome. Well, it doesn't have all the plug-ins either, I imagine. No, it doesn't. But it does have plugins, and it supports a number. It's got some number, whatever. But it's free for personal use. It's worth looking at. It's called Zed, and it is, what's the website? It's Zed.dev. Look, if you use this kind of product with Visual Studio Code, whatever it is, you should look at this. Especially if you're in this thing all day long, if this thing had like a nice, it does edit markdown. like it's fine with Markdown, but if it was like a good Markdown editor, I could see using this thing. It's awesome. It's super, super fast. Yeah, worth knowing about. All right. So that John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, mentioned you, wrote a little piece saying, oh, I see Paul Therott, whose career has paralleled mine in many ways, is about to write a Markdown book or is considering it. Yeah, I think I'm going to talk to him about this. You should. I mean, he created it. I mean, Markdown has its life of its own at this point, and there are many flavors of Markdown, as you well know. No, but I think the thing he wanted to say, yeah, I mean, it's interesting, if you go back to his original announcement post, Markdown was two different things. It's the syntax of the, you know, the styling and the plain text document, but it's also this parser, which in his case he wrote in Perl, I think, at the time. Yeah. to take the markdown document he was creating and transfer it into HTML so he could publish it to the web, which is excellent, right? But today we have these markdown editors, some of which work like word processors. We actually just use, like, Control-B, and it does the bold formatting, whatever. And then you can use something like IA Writer that is kind of a mix of actual code, or you can use those shortcuts, whatever. It's a little different, but in the same way that it met the need he had, which was probably, what, 10, 15 years ago, a long time ago, So it absolutely meets my needs for writing. And look, 20 years ago, I said this, like, Microsoft Word is amazing. It's a battleship when I need a sailboat, you know. And I'm a professional writer. I mean, I'm only using some tiny percentage of what's in there. I don't need it. I know what it is, and I do not want it. And, you know, to me, Markdown is perfect. It's perfect. Human and machine readable. Perfect. Yeah, I mean, I laugh. I mock all of these things. and the Markdown because I use Emacs, which invented – I mean, org mode predates Markdown by several years. And I think Emacs is probably an excellent Markdown editor if you want it to be. It absolutely is, and it will convert it to HTML. And it's not written in Rust. It's written in Lisp. The problem is, for me, Emacs on Windows is a big, heavy thing. Oh, I wouldn't use it on Windows. No, it doesn't make as much sense on Windows for whatever reason. It's too bad. Yeah. And by the way, Aaron Schwartz also worked with John Gruber on Markdown. Yeah, you get credit. Yeah, you get a lot of credit. Mr. Richard Campbell's next with Ronan's Radio. This week's episode is the one that I've got at Zero Trust World, where I talk to Spencer Alessi about securing Active Directory, an ongoing theme. And Spencer's particular approach, and he is the tooling side of the equation. So actually, this is borrowing from Troy Hunt's you-should-hack-yourself kind of mindset. It does that be. You know, the active directory is not particularly exploitable from the outside of the network, but it is a lateral vector. So when a phishing attack is successful, it's very common for the black hats, once inside the network, to immediately try to get to an active directory server because your goal is always to get off the workstation you exploited. You're trying to get into the, in your ideal case, you'll get into one of the servers that's always on, that's not managed the same way, that kind of thing. And Active Directory has some challenges. Now, it can be made secure, but most people that are operating AD are kind of doing it in the default mode with not a lot of security put in place and so forth. And so we talked through a bunch of the various enhanced security tools that you can use and tests you can do inside your network as if you were the black hat to show. You have these lateral vectors you're vulnerable to, and now it's well worth locking things down. He has his own Active Directory security resource kit if you want to get further into it. But there's lots to learn there. And just a reminder that we do defense in depth. We're not just talking about don't get through the perimeter. Don't count on people not being phished. Count on the fact that after they get phished, because it does happen, nothing happens from there. But they can't get off that machine, that your cleanup of that computer is efficient, that they got nowhere after that. That's really your goal. All right. I think if my calculations are correct, it would be time to talk about brown liquor. Yeah. And that 12th Hawaii Distillers Reserve, which was the mead whiskey, yeah, it's on the Big Island. And that was about a year ago. That was show 928. because it came to me from the MVP summit. John White brought it to me. Yeah. So it makes sense that it was the unthought of you. Was it good? I can't remember. Yeah, it was great. It was a really cool, you know, it was different, right, to have distilled honey rather than to be distilled grain. Lisa really wants to visit that, and I really want to visit one of the Kona coffee plantations. Yeah, no. Well, I'm just trying to decide, should I do coffee then whiskey or whiskey then coffee? I don't know. Whiskey then coffee. Okay. Coffee then. I could do both at the same time. It's a speedball. So last week while I was at home, we talked about Rifle Rye, which comes out of Alberta Distiller. So one of the biggest manufacturers of whiskey in the entire planet. All this was a specialty edition they did, and we got into the whole prohibition and so forth. So being in Ontario, I thought, I'm going to go find an Ontario craft whiskey. And I lucked into this stock and barrel. And Stock and Barrel was created by, was the first micro distillery in all of Ontario, actually. And Ontario has not been easy on the micro distilleries. They haven't done the same kind of excise tax breaks and so forth that places like British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada and the U.S. have done. So this is the two Barry's invented this. This is Barry Steen and Barry Bernstein. Barry Steen had a background in logistics. Barry Bernstein in software. So he had made some money in the software industry. And so back in, they were both fans of whiskey. And back in 2005, they decided to found a company to start figuring out how they could make whiskey. And 2005 is way back there. You know, this is, again, very much before the craft whiskey movement had taken off. So they were a bit ahead of the curve. They set up another entity in 2007 they called Premium Bottlers. And that was because they realized how long it was going to take to get into production. They were getting through the licensing process. They wanted to build out this distillery, which took a few years. And so being a bottler is much simpler where you buy your whiskey from elsewhere, make your own blends, make your own label and bottling, and then sell it. And so that's what they did with premium bottlers was they started to do their own branded whiskey, which they also called Stalk and Barrel. The actual distillery that got built in 2009 and into operation is called the Stillwater Distillery. And, of course, again, challenges of building whiskey is it's easy to do the distillation and so forth, but then you've got to lay up those barrels and store them for a while to let them age. So in addition to starting to lay up whiskey, they also start to produce a vodka. So they get some income going. Plus they have these blends they're doing through premium bottlers. And it's not until 2013, so a good eight years after they first started going, that they made their first single malt, and they actually did a two-row barley single malt that they sold through the, here in Ontario, liquor distribution is fairly strictly controlled. So the LCBO, or the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, is in charge of all alcohol. So the government controls alcohol distribution in this province, and they're quite powerful. They're also the reason that there's exactly no bourbon in Ontario at this particular moment. It's all in storage. And when I go down to the local bar here and want to get an old-fashioned, it's going to be made with Canadian whiskey. It's after they're in operation that Ontario finally gets a small distillery program in 2017. So the county came to it late. And it's not excise tax breaks. It's actually cash grants for small producers. So as a small producer, you report into the service run by Agricorp, and they look at how you're doing and the size of things, and they'll actually grant you some cash to ease things off. So stock and barrels claim to fame was always to be totally lost. You know, start from the stock all the way to the barrel is to buy barley, rye, and corn from local Ontario farmers. Of course, barley is what goes into their single malt. They did all of their own maltings. Of course, no peat. That's not a thing around here. Typical fermentation, 48 to 72 hours, many other types, using column and pot stills. although apparently their single malt was only distilled in the pot still, so the double pot still aging there. And as they note specifically, they age in ex-bourbon cast, both from Tennessee and Kentucky. And Tennessee, of course, would mean jacked eggs. Their warehousing technique is a hybridized rack house, so on the horizontal stack three to five high, aging three to five years. And traditionally in their production, they were doing both cast ranks and a 46%, which is your typical high cut. And that is not this whiskey. This is a different whiskey entirely. So we've got to talk about the changes that are happening. This is a 40%. This is the only one that's on the shelves, the LCBO now. So I had to start digging into their background more because, and in many ways they were pretty hush-hush. We've got a lot of stuff on the website. I ended up spending a lot of time on archive.org and looking at the old versions of their sites. And so up until August 2021, they actually had four different editions on the Stillwater Distillery site. They had their red and blue labels. These were the blends they made through premium bottlers. And we don't know anything about what they were combining, but that was their original products. And then they had both a single malt and 100% rye. Great. But in the fall of 21, shortly after that, this website goes to be back soon. and it'll be that way for like 18 months. So it appears, and now I've found additional evidence of this, that the Barry's decide they're going to sell the company. Now it's the pandemic times, right? So it's a challenging time to be operational. They also send up a new website called PureTrack, which is a software site. Remember that Barry Bernstein has actually got a background in software and apparently had written all of the software to operate the entire operation of both the distillery and the bottling facilities. And so now he was offering a complete distillery management solution. In this whole time, they also own the domain called stockandbarrel.com, which is the link I provided in the notes. And that, up until 22, always pointed back to the Stillwater Distillery. So there was no stock and barrel separately. But in May of 22, it suddenly points to this whiskey. and only this whiskey, this particular version of Stock and Barrel. And weirder yet, if you dug in a bit, it actually says that the parent company of Stock and Barrel is Iceberg Vodka Corporation out of Newfoundland. What? So, and then in December of 22, so the site for this whiskey goes up in May of 22, and in December of 22, the Stillwater site comes back up with a different list of whiskey. All the blends are gone. Now they just have the single malt and the 100% rye, both in regular shranks and cast shranks. And then this year, the site changed again. And now it's really changed because now there's a whole conversation on that site about these two fellows named Kelly and Lucas Wood. And Kelly and Lucas Wood talk about how the berries have retired and we've taken over. And they're selling their own whiskey. They call it $3 and $8. They've got a whole other branding going on there. But if you dig into their site a bit, you find out they still have the old stock and barrels, which they'll sell only online. They're not in the LCBO. The only thing in the LCBO is this one sold by Iceberg Vodka. So what the heck is going on here? I thought I had a nice little craft whiskey story. And apparently if I had picked this whiskey in 2022 or so, that would have been fine. Right. But I picked it in 2026 where everything had changed. I went and found stock and barrel in the LCBO, in the liquor store, and I bought a bottle. And, you know, I've already had a few tastes of this because it's pretty good. But it's also very inexpensive. The original single malt, the 46%, and the rye, they were about $65 Canadian, so somewhere around $45 American. This is 35 Canadian, so like 20 bucks American. That is very, very cheap. Doesn't smell too threatening on the nose, but it's only a 40%, right? So like a very mild Canadian whiskey. And that's exactly how it drinks. At $35, I mean, this is a bargain, right? You kind of can't go wrong. It's just a question of what's really going on. And so we have a lot of liquors in general as these big companies come along. Well, yes, this would be a very normal craft distillery story, that the old guys wanted to retire out. They sold to the younger generation who are now making their own whiskey and selling off the old lot. The weird part is the iceberg vodka. And here's the thinking. When you get into the LCBO, which is a big deal, right? This is the main liquor seller in Ontario, and you have to sign agreements with this. You're under contract to produce a certain quantity of whiskey, right? Again, Ontario is fairly hostile to craft distillers. Today, there's more room for you to sell online and so forth. But to be in the LCBO, you have to produce minimum quantities of things. So I think when these guys wanted to sell in the early 2020s and they got these two guys on board who wanted to buy it, they realized they did not want the LCBO requirement. It was too much baggage. It was too costly to them. And so they turned to a very large experienced producer, because Vodka, Iceberg Vodka has been around since the 90s, and said, hey, this has got position in the LCBO. Do you want to finish out the contract? Maybe make some money. And since Premium Bottlers does contract production, I suspect they just made an inexpensive version of their whiskey, produced by Premium Bottlers, sold through Iceberg to fulfill the LCBO contract, and got it away from the new owners. Not that they've talked about any of that. It's all sort of hush-hush and probably under NDA. And this is the sad part, and what maybe I should have done if I was really going to finish the research, is go hunt down a bottle of their single malt, which I may not be able to do. They may be all gone. Because this is a very inexpensive, basic whiskey. There's nothing wrong with it. There's just nothing special about it either. And at $35 Canadian, that's a bargain. Like, don't worry about it. You're drinking local whiskey, right? Presumably, they're not lying on their bottle that this is locally made, which premium bottles could do it. It's made from local grain, totally reasonable, just a low price point, probably a column distilled whiskey that's likely to fulfill an LCBO contract. And when that contract's done, maybe they'll continue production, maybe they don't. Well, there's no way to know. All of this has largely gone down in just the past couple of years, so it's probably got a ways to go. But it's just one of those wacky stories that I spent several hours on trying to untangle. And a bunch of this is speculation on my part, but I think I probably got it right. The handcrafted part bugs me. It says handcrafted on the bottle. I'm betting that's not true. But, you know, there's no particular requirement for handcrafted. That's not a legal term. So, for those of us not in Canada, the LCBO is what? The LCBO is the Ontario Government's liquor distribution board. There aren't liquor stores in Toronto. There are liquor stores. They're just run by the government. Right. Yes, they're not independent. Like God in Pennsylvania intended. So it's a big, I imagine, bureaucratic nightmare then to get into the LCBO. It's a fairly hefty job to do that. Now, you said there's legal, minimal, or crushing requirements because there's a bunch of stores you have to be able to stop those stores. So that's not good. That means You don't go to an LCBO and buy some small batch. You can't get something really, really good there. Is that right? Well, really rare anyway. Now, since the Craft Distillers Act came in in 2017, those craft distillers that don't have to be in the LCBO to sell, they can sell directly on their websites. So there is a way for a small distill to do that. But normally you would not find these guys in the LCBO. But when these guys started, when Barry and Barry set up, that didn't exist. They got up and running in 2009. So they broke themselves, arguably, to produce enough to get into the LCBO because it was the only way to sell. And now I think that contract probably was too heavy for the woods, the new owners, to deal with. And so this was the workaround. It's like if you wanted to get into Walmart. You'd have to make enough whiskey to get in every Walmart or they're not going to look at you. They're not going to do it, right? And what if the only way to sell was through Walmart? Like in 2009, they wanted to sell whiskey in Ontario. Yeah, so in some ways I wonder about, yeah, the berries got out of this because they were under these things. Now, the funny thing is they're still sort of adjacent to the business because they have PureTrack. They sell services to Canadian distillers. And on their site, you can see their pictures, and they're still talking about, yeah, we used to be in the distilling business, and we can help you be better with yours. We figured out how to get around these governments. This is socialism at work, ladies and gentlemen, and this is exactly why we're glad we are not Canadian. I don't think any of that is true. Where do I start? You know, we're just like you, just no guns and a health plan, right? Oh, yeah, oh, that. This is apropos of nothing, but I just saw the word Pennsylvania written in the disc card, and I have to tell you this story, which you will love, which is nobody here knows anything about Pennsylvania or anything is whatever. So everyone, it's always like, so where are you? It's like, we're near New York, you know? So my wife gets her fingernails done every so often here, right? It costs like two cents or something. And the woman says, you know, where are you from? And she says, Pennsylvania. And she goes, you must have a lot of vampires there. She's like, no, not so much. Oh, that's amazing. There's a lot to add to that. Like Transylvania, only different. Yeah. If you think about it, they're the two vanias or whatever. Of the world. Yeah. Sylvanias. Sylvanias, yeah. Yeah. Mr. Paul Therat, he is at therat.com. That's where you'll find all of his good stuff. And, of course, even more good stuff if you're a premium member. In fact, one of the good things you get as a premium member is copies of all of his books. windows everywhere the field guide to Windows 11 the new D&Shittify windows all of that also available at leanpub.com that's where his books are published and maybe soon a markdown book as well it'll be short I can tell you that it'll have lots of asterisks and underscores it'll be a lot of ampersand it's nice Richard Campbell does Run As Radio and .NET Rocks, two great podcasts on one great site RunAsRadio.com. Together they are the dynamic duo of Windows journalism. They join us every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Hawaii time, as I have learned. Nice. There you go. Which is also, I think, like a breakfast Mai Tai. Yeah, you know. I leapt out of bed just to do this show. You're having more of my experience now, Leo, right? Yeah, exactly. I was at the farm in New Zealand and doing the show at 6 a.m. I don't think I've ever leapt out of bed. You do if it's 7.30 and you've got a show at 8. I think you do. We will be back next Wednesday. I will be back home. Paul will be in Mexico. Where will you be, Richard? I will be in Antwerp, Belgium. I don't know how he keeps track. I don't know how he does it. You can find the show online. I mentioned the live times because you can actually watch it live. If you're in the member of the great Club Twit, which I think we really ought to thank the Club Twit members for making this show possible. It's their support of independent podcasting like this that makes such a difference to us. We really appreciate your membership. If you're not a member, Club Twit is at twit.tv slash Club Twit. And you get also access to the Discord. That's where you can watch in the club. After the fact, oh, I should mention, you can also watch live. Everybody can on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. We stream on all those platforms to make it easy to watch live. But after the fact, you can get on-demand versions of the show at twit.tv slash dub dub. You can also watch it on YouTube. There's a video on YouTube from every show. And, of course, the whiskey segments have their own YouTube playlist, which you can easily get to by going to somethingweirdfrommycloset.com. And it's a podcast, so you can get it in your favorite podcast client, audio or video. Subscribe to Windows Weekly. You'll get it automatically. You won't have to think about it. Make sure you have a copy every week for your enjoyment. If you want to talk about the shows and you're not in the club, we do have, of course, forums, the best place to comment on any show, at twit.community. All Twit listeners are more than welcome to join. We'd love to have you. There's also a Mastodon instance just for Twit listeners, twit.social. So twit.social for Mastodon, twit.community for our discourse forums. I don't mention them enough, and they're really a great place to hang out. Club members also get to comment on the shows in the Club Twit Discord. All right, that's enough. As I mentioned, Troy Hunt is coming up in Intelligent Machines in just a little bit if you're watching live. We're going to talk about Have I Been Pwned and his new AI agent, which he calls Bruce. After the shark? Yeah, I guess. You know, it's funny. When we were swimming for the manta rays, there are sharks in the harbor here. I was hoping, by God, that was like a callback. Quite a few sharks. But they said, don't yell shark if you see a shark. We don't want to scare anybody. Just say, Bruce. Is that from Finding Nemo? Where is that? I think that must be. Well, no, Bruce was the name of the shark in Jaws. Jaws. Oh, okay. That was mechanical shark. Yeah, I mean, not in the movie, but behind the scenes. Mechanical shark. Hey, Bruce. All right. This is also a sort of classic Australian hick name, right? It was a Monty Python sketch where they were all drinking fine Australian wine, and they were all named Froost. That's great. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us on Windows Weekly. We will see you next week. Bye-bye. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Richard. Okay. Ahighh