Windows Weekly 981: Semi-Sophisticated

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. There's some big changes to Windows Update. Paul will have the details plus gaming on the new Snapdragon X2. And earnings learnings. Microsoft earnings comes out at the end of the show. We already learned how much money Intel lost this quarter. And we're trying to figure out why did the stock market go up? Insight coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therat and Richard Campbell. Episode 981. Recorded Wednesday, April 29, 2026. Semi-sophisticated. It's time for Windows Weekly. Get ready, everybody. It's time to talk Microsoft with our dynamic duo of Microsoft journalism, Mr. Paul Therat from therat.com. Looking very dynamic today. Looking very dynamic. I'm sorry, Nick. His range. More like diuretic. Hello, Leo. Hello, Paul. I'm Richard Campbell of Run As Radio. Richard is back home in British Columbia. For the minute, yeah. For the minute. Beautiful sunny day out there. Look at that. Tell us again, that is not a lake. That's the ocean. That's the Salish Sea. What do you call it, like an inland? Let's see the sky go by. That guy whizzed by, yeah, and that's Texada Island in the distance there. What a view. And a perfect thing to wake up to, let me tell you. That is a postcard we're looking at. It is. I'm just going to sit on that for the rest of the show. How about we do that? Better looking than us, guys. Yeah, just the beautiful lake or ocean or whatever the hell. It's ocean. I don't meet anyone. And every once in a while you need someone who, like, watches this podcast. And I always start off the same way. I'm like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Surratt will commence today's sermon on Windows. Yes. I'd like to begin with an apology. So, you know, this has been a good year, honestly, and there's a lot more to come. But, you know, we all know that Microsoft is working on those pain points. We've been waiting for them to be implemented, and now that has started through the Insider Program, of course. And so, excuse me, because I'm caught on a wire here. So there's two bits to what they've done. The first one is to roll out the changes to the Insider Program that they announced, right, which basically amounts to them replacing the dev channel with the experimental channel. The beta channel continues forward as the beta channel, but the focus of each changes a little bit. But experimental is the channel where you'll get future features, some of which may not actually land. And beta is features. We're pretty sure those are going to be in Windows in the near future, and then they'll move. Tell me where Canary goes. Nobody knows. Canary still has two different build screens. I don't know. I don't have Canary 1 and 2. Can we have Canary 1 and 2? Listen, it's like nobody knows more about Windows than we do. What's Canary 4? I have no idea. It's not like anybody else knows, Pat. No, I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't know. So that's in there. At some point, that will be kind of enforced in the sense that you'll have to switch over it. But for right now, you can just kind of opt into it. Eventually, that's going to change. But once you do that, what you'll see is a set of feature flags in the Windows inside of program settings interface. And this is, among other things, is where you can make sure that new features are actually there. You know, so the default setting. You can actually specify one of the AB options? Well, no, you can specify them all or not. In other words, you either get them or you don't, you know, which is better than nothing. I agree. kind of a, well, I don't think. You could select, hey, whenever there's an optional option or a watcher test, I want it. Exactly. I mean, that's super important for you. I don't think it's important for anybody else in the world, but it's important for you. You have no idea. We'll call it a throxy. I am living or dying on that hill. So I'm super excited about that. I heard you. I heard you. So that's cool. There's that. And then when you go into the experimental channel, and this is kind of an example of where it's simpler, but it's not really that much simpler. But you can, at this time, this will change over time too, you can either test Windows 11 version 25H2, 24, sorry, 26H1, right? Or future platforms. And this is optional. I think by default, it's probably on future platforms. So future platforms is those features that may or may not, you know, make it all the way. So that's great. And then they also implemented changes to the Windows Update interface, by which you would get to the Windows Insider Program Interface, actually. This was Aria Hansen. Yes, yes, right. So this is also, this is rare. I don't get to say this a lot. This is better than expected. And what I mean by that is Microsoft has a long history of over-promising on delivering. In this case, when Pavan Davalori wrote that post where he talked about pain points, and he mentioned, you know, we're changing Windows Update. He was vague, you know. He said that they would allow users to, customers, to extend the pause on new updates for longer than was the case currently. Currently, you can do it for, I think it's five weeks. But he didn't say how long. And I was like, what does that mean? Like six weeks? What are we talking about? You know, like seven weeks? What do you mean? And it's actually indefinite or infinite, I guess, or something, with two caveats. You can extend it indefinitely in 35-day increments using a calendar control, which is super easy. There may come a time where there's some kind of a zero-day something-something, and you actually have to get a security update, right? There's probably nothing we can do about that. So that may happen, but you can essentially push this out indefinitely if you want. I don't know why anyone would want that exactly, but certainly you might be working on your computer doing something like, look, I don't want this to happen right now. I'm in the middle of a project, whatever it might be. I had seen this one before, but you can now shut down or restart the PC without installing updates. You have to do it through the start menu, and then you get the additional option. So restart with installing updates if there are any pending or restart without doing that. That's nice. There's also that thing I'd seen previously, which isn't technically Windows Update, but update-related, where you're installing Windows from scratch. So you got a new PC probably, or you reset a PC. And you get to that new to 25H2 screen where you have to install a feature update. And it takes 20, 30 minutes. It takes a long time. And now there's a little link on the bottom that says, yeah, I'm not going to do this right now. Skip this, which is nice if you want to just get right in and get going. And then back to Windows Update, sorry. Fewer disruptions. And so they're coordinating updates so that they will essentially ship or be implemented together. And I kind of think about this in the sense that, you know, one of the things Apple does in their app store is if you have all these little microtransactions, they won't put them through one at a time and have some credit card fee on each one of them. They'll kind of bundle them together. And people who, if you're an Apple user, you might sometimes, like, get a little notification on your phone where it's like, oh, Apple charged you $35 or $14, some random number, and you're like, what is this? And it's because they're kind of bundling those payments together. And, you know, if you do a lot of purchasing, you're like, what is this thing? You can also, as a seeker now, and I actually don't see this yet in the build, but you can go in. Seeker? Yeah. In other words, let's say you don't think about Windows Update for some reason or you haven't looked at it in a while. So updates have been piling up. there's going to be a new available updates. It's a expander is the name of the control, but you click on it and then it shows you whatever those things are. And then you can choose the ones you want to, if you want to, and, or just wait again, you know, whatever. And so that's, that's nice. And then they're building in a kind of functional healthy one would assume had been in windows forever. It's the type of thing they first implemented in, you're not going to believe me when I say this, but windows millennium edition, when they had like an automatic driver rollback feature, which solved one of the biggest reliability problems with Windows 9X, which was that you installed a driver and then could not boot into Windows because something was wrong with it, right? That used to be a problem. Yep. So Windows.me was the first system to actually just override that and go back. They would save the previous driver every time you install the driver, and then it would automatically roll back, and then you'd be fine. You could do whatever you wanted to do. They're doing that with Windows updates now. So if there's something, I bet everyone listening has probably experienced this at least once where you actually do try to install an update. And then you're working and you're doing whatever. And you're like, oh, I'm going to go see how the thing's doing. It's like update failed or whatever. And you're like, okay. And then you click retry and you work a little while and come back. It's like update failed. And you're like, okay. And you don't know why. There's no obvious way to fix that. There are ways to fix it. But they're complicated and you have to look it up. And they're going to do this automatically, like automatic recover of failed. Windows updates, right? Nice. Yeah, so obviously, me being who I am and doing what I do, I went in and, you know, played around with this. And it's great. Like, I don't know that I have a complaint, which I have to say makes me feel, I almost threw up in my mouth when I saw it. That's very distressing. Yeah, I know. It's hard for me. Yeah. But this all looks great. Nice. I mean, and like I said, this is actually, you know, when he announced this, I was like, okay, I mean, let's see what they do before we get too excited here. And he was really big on the time frame for pausing updates. But actually, that's pretty good. You're talking about Ariadne, but yeah. I mean, when Pavon talked about it. Pavon, sorry. In his list of, you know, things we're going to fix. Well, like this, you know, we were both pleased. We were both disturbed by the outcry against Vavon, although I don't think it was really against Vavon. It was like, don't say AI. and pretty angry right now. It's the don't shoot the messenger thing. I mean, yeah. Although I thought he responded pretty well to that. And what he's working on, I think, benefits a lot of people in that. It's 100%. The thing is, I didn't write this anywhere, but, you know, as I was talking about this, you know, I often do write and talk about, like, intent. Like, what's the point of what Microsoft, in this case, might be doing or whatever? And when you think about some of the behaviors in Windows 11 that are bad or against what you want or maybe aren't opt-in and they just do it for you or they force you into, like, you know, folder update, that thing I complained about a lot. You know, you complain, and then you step back and, like, well, why are they doing this? And, you know, there are good reasons to semi-force people to sign into Windows with a Microsoft account if you're a consumer. There are business case reasons, too, right? I mean, they're trying to push you in a certain direction, of course. There's both elements there. When you think about Windows Update and the system that they had in place, I mean, there's no business imperative, like, in certification type issue with Windows Update where you can say, well, they're just making me install updates because dot, dot, dot, other than I guess maybe there are new features every month and they want you to get the new features or something. But really, to me, this goes back to the Terry Meyerson thing about we want everyone to be on the same version, which is technically impossible. But by the way, they actually solved that problem too, which is funny. But the notion of keeping everyone up to date, especially when you talk about security updates, is a good one. Like, it's a good idea. It would be better if we didn't have to reboot so often. You know, there's that kind of a thing. And so I'm curious here. they're being extremely liberal in allowing people to pause updates, which is like dramatically almost the opposite, but different than the previous policy. Yeah. And I'm not talking businesses and their group policies and all that stuff. It's a different thing entirely. Just like human beings, like just people. And I'm fascinated by it because in some ways this is contrary to what is, best for Microsoft as the maker of the platform, you know? But they're doing it. We also don't know what it'll actually manifest as to. It's just one thing for what they say and what actually comes out. Well, yeah, so time in the same way that time can heal all wounds, time also opens old wounds and it's going to be a say, time wounds all heals. So, there's that. Wow. You can get a cream for that though. Sorry, I didn't mean that. You really threw a random rubber in the floor there. That was an 8. I did that, didn't I? Is there a semi-colon in there? I completely lost my show. I'm like, what the? What I mean by this is when something is new and fresh, you're not seeing the whole experience, right? And so it goes against every grain of my being to allow Windows updates to accumulate somewhere. But I do use so many computers that this will eventually happen on some computers. So I'll be able to see what this is like. But I'm curious what the experience is like over time when you do, in fact, have maybe two months of security updates sitting in the queue and whatever those features are, whatever the other things are. Because you're going to get .NET updates in here. If you have Visual Studio, you're going to get those in there. It's going to be other things too. So there must be at some point where they're like, we get it. You don't like updates, but seriously. you know you need to reboot or something so we're not seeing that today because there are no other problems and I wonder if their telemetry is showing, hey most people are taking updates anyway, like this isn't going to affect that big of a chunk See that's the thing you could pick any choice that especially enthusiasts or technical people don't like, the Microsoft account sign-in thing the Windows update pausing or whatever it might be even if you had to go 17 menus deep to turn off all telemetry, right? Yeah. The truth is most average people, which is most people using Windows, wouldn't even bother. They wouldn't even look. Never. So why not? These are the defaults matter a lot. Yeah. Just give that to the people. If you're smart slash dumb enough to want to turn that stuff off or whatever it is, let them hurt themselves. You don't need a bike. It's not a motorcycle. They don't need a helmet. Some of them actually do know what they're doing. I mean, there might be whatever reasons. Like, I mean, there are workarounds for everything, of course. But, yeah, it does beg the question, why not stop this in the UI? Like, what's the name? This is universal. I've argued for this for a long time. Android does it. iPhone does it. Apple does it. Just give us a switch. Hide it. Like it? I've got to tell you, when my Pixel wants to update the OS, it just makes it unusable. Until I turn the phone off and on and it finishes the update. I mean, a whole bunch of stuff doesn't work. Android has one. You have to tap the word developer like eight times. Yeah, exactly. To turn on the developer settings. That's fine. Because people care. We'll share this on Reddit and everyone. The setting app added a similar thing. There was always a developer mode switch. But it's like settings, system, advanced, I think. They've lumped in all the advanced features, which includes the developer stuff. So things like I want to right-click on the icon on an app that's running and choose end task from there. I don't want to have to go through multiple steps to get into task, man, or whatever. So that, to me, is very much like Android, except that, you know, you don't have to tap the screen ten times or whatever it is. You know, the pixel thing is interesting because I have three pixels here, and I'm on the beta, so I see more updates than usual, I guess. It's pretty prickly when you don't install, you know. It really wants it. But that's right because there's security patches. Yeah. I mean, right. You need to do that stuff. Yeah. Normal people do. And that's always the problem here is when that's the balance. It's hard enough to find anyone who wants to care enough to block any update. To find it all would block certain updates that you never find. Right. That's exactly the point. I always think my wife, being a normal human being, doesn't think about this at all, doesn't care. Sometimes she walks in, turns on her laptop, and it has rebooted. And, you know, Windows is semi-sophisticated in the sense that some, you can just click, I think it's on by default now, but you can, it will do what mobile platforms do and bring up apps that were running before if they're modern apps, right? I mean, it's not perfect, but, you know, it's not. Sophisticated is what I'm always looking for in a, I mean, I'm just trying to be accurate here. I don't want to, you know. Well, look, Windows is a legacy desktop platform. It has a modern app platform in there, too, but a lot of people are going to be running some mix of these things. And so modern apps, such as they are, have whatever deficiencies, but they are easier to resuscitate and do that kind of thing with, whereas legacy apps, you know. Burke is saying that because he uses Windows Pro, he doesn't see as much nagging. No, that's not true. I don't think that's true. I mean, if you buy the LTSC version, and the Enterprise Editions are pretty stripped down. Yeah, but even those, I mean, I've tried this too. So, like, is installing Enterprise Edition some solution? You know, honestly, whatever the number of problems you might have with Windows, it only sounds like two of the seven. It's not, you know, and it's because you're running it as a person. You know, most people running Enterprise, it's a managed environment, and it's your company that's handling that, and they will determine your experience. Windows Pro, though, versus Home, I mean, not really. I mean, there were things along the way, like when Microsoft started enforcing Microsoft account sign, and they did it first with home, right? So if you had Pro, you didn't see that at first, but then they added it to Pro. So it kind of depends, yeah. I've always said Windows is best for somebody who has an IT department. Yeah, or things like an IT department. Or you do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're your own IT. That's kind of what I used to say on the radio show. If you're using Windows, you're your own IT department. Yeah. Okay with that. I mean, they're trying. I don't know what else to say. I mean, yes. Look, I just had this conversation with Laura, my coworker, this morning. But, you know, Apple, Apple would see if Jobs were still around, and Mac OS X was the primary concern there. He would make fun of Windows grabbing multiple product editions. They were like, we have one version of Mac OS X, you know, at the time. We don't have, like, Enterprise. We don't have Pro. We don't have Home Premium and Ultimate and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Fair enough. You know, Apple was able to move first to not charging for updates, like for OS updates, right? They did that before Microsoft, like on the desktop. And, you know, it's a smaller platform, obviously. It's the vast majority. There's no enterprise market. Yeah, the majority of the customer base is enterprise. And they did have a server version, to be fair. Apple did. Yeah, for a little while. Yeah, they did. Desktop. Yeah, but they don't, you know, even today, they don't have the, like, cloud-based equivalent. They don't really do that. Like, they're not, I mean, they have an Apple business offering that does, it's basically MDM stuff up in the cloud or whatever. But they don't really do the Microsoft-heavy infrastructure thing. But that's the shick. I mean, you know, Microsoft's business is, or the Windows business is for businesses largely. I mean, people use it, you know, for all the right reasons. I mean, you use Excel at work. You're like, I want to have this at home or whatever. I mean, you know, it makes sense to some degree, I guess. I don't know. But, yeah, we're dealing with the, I guess, the side effects of the different focus, I guess, of the two platforms. I don't know. Yeah, I think they're very different markets. Yeah. I mean, you know, you can move between them pretty easily. It's not like they're not that different. I mean, but there does need to be, I mean, in Microsoft's defense, there does need to be an enterprise operating system. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Apple's whole, there's one version of Mac. It's like, tell me you haven't broken another market, so they'll tell me you haven't broken another market. Right. Microsoft needs those different versions, I think. Customers agree with what they want. Right. So I've felt this for 25 years. There should be a business version and a home version. Yeah. They could have completely different UIs. I mean, the only thing that really matters is that the basic interactions are the same, and the apps all run everywhere, right? Like, so there's no, or maybe just the home version has fun themes. or something and the business versions look... The Horton version should look like XP. The business version should look like 2000. 2000, yeah. There you go. In a way, they sort of did do that a little bit. But, yeah, I don't know why they don't... I don't know why they don't do that. I guess that's a support nightmare. I don't know. Anyway, it's getting better. So, that's good news. They're working on things that people appreciate. Yes. I got the sense from Aria's blog post that these were ideas she'd had for some time and just got priority on them. So she was kind of delighted. All this stuff I've always wanted to do for you, I'm now allowed to do. There is a Windows and Xbox. There's these changes occurring right now where I think we're seeing people step in who are like, I've wanted to do this for so long. Yeah. And now I can. Now I've been given sort of open doors. Yeah, a lot of people have left the company. Rich and I have both been around a long time, know a lot of people in the company. Both have seen this huge swath of people we're friends with. There's a generation of departure happening right now. Right. And it's accelerating right now because instead of the past two years-ish of layoffs, they've recently offered these people a buyout, essentially. First time ever. They've had a retirement package. I can tell you how many people have pinged me saying, I should take this. Because it's this or I get laid off. That seems to be the sense. Yes. But it's also a reality. These are friends of mine from 30 years ago that are now, like me, in their 50s. People are always like, you know, Paul, what does Microsoft think about all this stuff you complain about? I'm like, I don't think I know anybody anymore that matters. I'm like, I used to know so many people there, and it's very different. It's going to get even more different. I was going to say worse. But just, you know, it's going to get even more so. But one of the happy side effects is, and this won't always be the case, but like I said, Xbox and Windows, we're seeing people come in who are like, I've been sitting on the sidelines for a while. I don't really like the way this is going, and now I have the opportunity to impact this in a way that's positive, and they are, and that's good because no matter how terrible any company is, if you know anyone who works there, you know these people are human beings. They want to make good products. They want everything to be great. And then you're like, yeah, but your company is terrible. It's like, I don't make the decisions, you know, whatever. And now we're starting to see that. And again, in both cases, so far at least, it's been mostly very positive. So this is good. I feel like the Insider program has been not even treading water. They've been circling the drain for years. That's a huge problem. And then I wrote a book about how terrible Windows 11 is. I mean, it's a problem. So it's nice to see that getting repressed. And it's mostly new people. or maybe people in some cases, guys like Marcus Ash and Rudy Hinn or whoever who I've known or sort of known for a long, long time. Mostly IC types like not the managers. These are the architects and so forth who in some ways kept their head down. Yep. Well, they were just doing, they were somewhere else. I mean, they were doing whatever they were doing. I mean, but you know, Scott Hanselman is in this category now too, which is very interesting. He's a great guy and a big chunk of his time is focused on Windows now. It's really neat. I want to big chunk of sound to be focused on Windows. It's good. So, anyway. Good stuff is my point. So, this is good. Oh, that's it. And that's all she wrote. And we're joining us next week, everybody. No, no, we've got lots more. Can't stop until there's whiskey. Ah, whiskey. Lisa was talking, actually, I should run this by you guys, about maybe ending the show before whiskey. But not really. Oh. Like, say, okay, that's it. Thank you for joining us. And then doing the whiskey thing. And then doing the whiskey thing and then offering it as a second item or something like that. I mean, to me, that's almost semantic in nature. It is. Because I know there's some people, oh, what are you talking about? We put it at the end. It's like, it's at the end. You can just see. You don't care. So here's why she said that. She said, but people tell me they still listen to it in case Paul says something interesting at the end. wow that is uh that's bleak in case there's the chances that are pretty swim um hope springs eternal okay well i that's interesting um no i don't think we're gonna do it but i know i mean i don't know what to say i mean like you know when mary joe was on she did a bear segment or whatever and i'm same feedback a lot of people loved it and so a couple of you were like i don't I don't mind it. And I think people, look, here's the deal we're going to make with you all. Paul will never say anything interesting after the whiskey segment. I can't guarantee I can say anything interesting before the whiskey segment. I don't know. So just in case, you're sticking around. Yeah. If you don't want to hear the whiskey segment, just, you know, pause the tape. You know what? Actually, when the whiskey segment's done, I'm going to put a band-aid on my mouth. I don't know. Paul will never say anything extra after the whiskey segment. Let's pause. More interesting things coming from Paul and Mr. Richard Campbell, because Windows Weekly has just begun. But first, before we go any farther, we might want to mention our fine sponsor for this segment on Windows Weekly, WebRoot. You know, people often ask me about which antivirus I recommend. 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Peter Norton is not dead. No. Somebody looked it up. He's still alive. In fact, what he did is he took all the money he made when he sold to Symantec. And he at the Norton Museum in L.A. is amazing. He got really into art collecting. He's got very good taste. Paul, you're muted. If you're saying something about Peter Norton, no one's hearing it. Would you say that he and McAfee went in different directions? Yeah! Let's not forget McAfee, who has passed on. Due to maybe a little too many bath salts? Something. We're being kind. Yeah, what a story that is. You're right. They went completely different directions. So I think Intel owns McAfee now. It's very confusing. Is it Intel? I don't remember. They may have spun it off. Symantec's gone. Maybe they own Intel. Symantec got Norton, right? Yeah. Yeah, but Norton. Hey, Norton. There's a Norton web browser now. Really? I mean, like an AI, yeah. I think it's called Neo or something like that. I want to give credit to Peter Norton because he wrote really one of the best programming Windows. The assembly language for DOS thing was amazing. It's classic. Yeah, not Windows. It's DOS. That's right. It's the book. Yep. And he got in the whole thing because he wrote a simple, I don't think it was a scanner. I think it was a disk. He's almost like the Steve of assembly language, if you will. He is. Yeah. You know, but. Yeah. No, so no diss to Peter Norton, but he sold it. No, but you were talking about the yellow box of the guy with the arms crossed. I'm like, who was he referring to? Just remember Fat Tie. That's the era. Yeah, everybody remembers that box. He wasn't shopping at Chess King. Comes from a different era. Norton is now owned by something called Gen Digital Incorporated. Intel bought them for $7.7 billion in 2010. And then sold them in 2017. McAfee's owned by an investment collector. Ah, private equity. Yeah. The Advent International Corporation. Okay. It's the business of the future. Yeah. Today. Yeah. Anyway. We squeeze all value out of assets until they are rent-coated. That's what Corel does, isn't it? Yeah. What if your software ended up or InZip or... And again, another great Canadian company. Corel was a great company. Yeah. But that's what happens. Was Novell Canadian or were they American? No, they were from Utah. Ah, yes. Right, right, right. So basically Canadian. They're the Canadians of America. Absolutely. They're Minnesotans, but okay. Well, Minnesotans too. Yeah, the whole area. Right. All right. Let's talk about Snapdragon. Yeah. Did you still, that Acer is still weaning on the door in Minnesota. The Asus is sitting at home waiting for me. That's the one with the awesome processor, so I can't wait to do that. But it's good because you have the first two levels on there. Yeah, so I have a Plus and an Elite. You set up for disappointment, man. You're going to get it and you're not going to be able to tell any difference at all. That would be sad. Yeah. I mean, day-to-day, that's probably going to be true. So going between Plus and Elite, you know, just like is the case with the first-gen, you don't really, day-to-day, normal productivity stuff, no issues. One of the big things that's changed over the last year for Snapdragon is games are starting to be a better experience. And that's true in the first gen, too. Even the only one I had here previously was a first gen Snapdragon X, not even a plus, like the lowest end whatever. And depending on the game, you know, you could do something like Half-Life 2, an older game. Like, that stuff works fine. Like, it's actually pretty good. But for the X2s, I wanted to test a broader range of games because I had done this again toward the end of last year when they started improving the game stuff. You know, Fortnite, I played Control. The Coastal Protocol, which is actually a pretty heavy game, was pretty good, you know, not too bad. So the first round, I went through it, you know, Half-Life 2 again, which obviously works great. The 2016 version of Doom and Doom Eternal, awesome. And by awesome, I mean, actually, Doom Eternal is even better for some reason than the first one. This thing runs, like on this computer, this is an X2 Elite. it's like 60 frames a second at 1600 by 900. Like, I mean, it's doing auto SR, so it's probably technically running at the lower res. On a long life battery, nice thin laptop. Oh, it's good. It's a monster, man. Yeah. Control is fantastic, 1920 by 1200, 60 to 70 frames a second, which is unbelievable. Yeah. That's the one I had to install. I think I guess I mentioned this, the .NET Framework 3.5. I was like, what? I played Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order fantastic so this was good enough that I was like I'm just going to get stupid and see if anything AAA from two seconds ago actually works right or at all and they do not so Call of Duty Black Ops 7 nothing which was the case before on previous gen and then I tried Battlefield 6 same thing both these things like take half a day to install and then you get it installed and it crashes immediately and you're like, ah, I've wasted my life. But, well, you have to do this, right? Yeah. We'll see what it looks like when we get to the X2 Elite Extreme-based system, but I think this is more the games than the platform. I actually do think these games could run fine and that there's some work that could be done. The fact that Activision is owned by Microsoft now tells me maybe some work there will occur, we'll see. I realize it's probably not a huge priority, but this is definitely a step up in that capacity, I guess is the way to say it. So I think the next thing, this is going to be super hard to figure out, but I want to see if there's anything that makes sense, like from a local AI perspective with the MPUs, because depending on the system, the ones I have here are both 80 tops MPUs. I think the lead stream might be 85 or I can't remember what the mix is, but roughly twice, not quite twice, but almost twice as good as before, or twice as fast, I guess. But what does that look like? So I'm going to try to figure that out. I have been playing around with local AI. I did an episode of Hands on Windows that will, we're so far ahead now, it'll probably come out in September, but whenever it comes out on local AI, which has gotten dramatically better, right? I mean, so, you know, we'll see. We'll see what that looks like. But so far, I have to say, I guess it's not surprising, but it is definitely better. Like, it's definitely a step up. If you care at all about games, I mean, obviously, if you care primarily about games, this is not the direction to go. But if you're an occasional game player or whatever, maybe you just, you know, want to play older games, especially. No problem. Like, that stuff actually works pretty good. So, that's nice. We mentioned Scott Hanselman in passing earlier. He is among his many roles, somehow. He's working with a part of the company that is doing what I would call technology preservation. And they have, over time, announced the open sourcing, or I guess in one case, the re-open sourcing of various versions of MS-DOS, 1.25, I think, in version 2, version 4. And then today they announced, or it was last night, but sometime in the past 24 hours, They released the source code for what might literally be the earliest version of MS-DOS, which is CPM. I'm just kidding. As 86-DOS, you know, Tim Patterson, the guy who created the thing that became DOS, right? They announced or released the source code for the kernel for 86-DOS 1.0, which is the thing he essentially showed Microsoft and sold to Microsoft, right? Right. That IBM called PC-DOS, Microsoft called MS-DOS. But it's not just the kernel, right? They have multiple snapshots of that kernel, which is cool. They have the source code for CheckDisk and other early MS-DOS utilities. And they have what Scott Hanselman kind of referred to as like the late 1970s version of like the GitHub commits, where it's like his handwritten notes and comments in the listings of the assembler talking about things that weren't working right and that they should be fixed and were in fact later fixed and things like that. So there's a whole body of work that goes along with this that Tim Patterson has given Microsoft permission to use and then to open source and just make available to the world. So people, this is like an insight into a, obviously a milestone in personal computing history that's really important. And it's amazing to me that anybody cares about this. Like, it's so great that they're doing this. I think it's wonderful. So it's really cool. Yeah, I don't know that it matters, but it doesn't hurt anything. Right. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, it doesn't hurt anything. and there's a whole retro computing thing going on now, which is probably stronger than it's ever been, and I don't know that anyone's going to, I'm going to make my own custom version of the MS-DOS kernel from 1980 or whatever. It's like, yeah, okay. Pretty sure I'm not. Yeah probably not Or maybe I going to write x86 assembly code that would actually run on one of those processes from back then Yeah probably not But if you I think you could learn from this I think there's any time there's a source code, open sourcing, whatever, of something, especially if it's something you use, like the Zork games or WordStars like this. It's amazing, right? Yeah, it's amazing. I love this. So this is the original Seattle DOS, right, the Tim Patterson code that Microsoft has. bought. Yep. It's not MS-DOS. Well, it becomes MS-DOS, right? So it's at the time, his name for it was 86-DOS. Right. Oh, I see. There's both. 86-DOS, MS-DOS, and PC-DOS, which is the IBM version. Oh, interesting. So you can really look at the whole lineage. This is so cool. I know. It's amazing. Oh, my gosh. I wonder if Steve knows about this because he could actually read this. Exactly. People are like, oh, I see what they did. Look at that. What were they thinking there? Right. Wow. Is this cool? You know, we talked about this some weeks ago, but one of the things I think we've lost from a software development perspective is something that everyone really wanted, which was we have essentially infinite computing resources, even with all the crises we have now, that we're not forced to constrain in any way, right? I mean, this thing had to run on a system. I'm sure that the low end was priced $64, 128K. You know, 5.25-inch floppies, maybe even 8-inch. I don't know what they had at the time. You know, the fact that it did any of this stuff is just astonishing. Yeah, it's astonishing. You know, we had a guest on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines, Ian Bogost, who is an interesting fellow. He's a philosopher, but he also teaches – he has a game company. and teaches games. Yep. And he's at Washington University at St. Louis University. And he had, he just finished up a Atari 2600 programming course. I got it. So, the next 6502 program. No, 6502 assembly language might, like, it's like if you want to learn assembly language, even today, I don't know why you'd want to, but if you wanted to, it might be smart to start with 6502 because it's such a small instruction. No, I'm serious. It's pretty awful. No, but that's indirect addressing. This is why I would start with 68,000. Write two bytes for where I want you to write. But you start with 68,000. 68,000 is a flat memory model. It's a very clean infrastructure. No, I don't want to use XA. But there are today more places you could write code that would run 6502. Well, that's true. That would run 68,000. Absolutely. Absolutely true. The other thing that was talking about memory constraints, the cartridges, I can't remember if they were 4K or 8K. Well, they could be. By the way, originally they were 2K. Probably 2K, yeah. And then one of the ways they expanded capabilities was by adding RAM to the cartridges. Yeah. But they also built into ROM a bunch of routines, like sprite routines, that you could call. So a lot of the code was in the ROM. You didn't have to. So, look, there are newish Atari devices now that run those cartridges. Commodore is back. They're doing Commodore 64s. It just announced the 64C. It may be small, but there's a market of sorts for people that want to learn how to code these things and write apps and games. Well, clearly, these students took a program in the Atari 2600. He said it was a great class. It was really enjoyable. That's the ultimate constrained environment, by the way. The Atari, even at the time, was crazy limited. It's amazing. How many things you could do between each scan line and all this. It was super, super constrained. But I'm so glad there's young people who want to learn this because there's this huge value to learning how to work within those constraints. By the way, this would be a good use of AI as well to have it teach you how to do this and kind of work along. I mean, well, that's why I'm glad these listings are on GitHub because you can absolutely say to Claude Cove, get these listings. Let's learn. Right. And I think that's fantastic. Just incredible. No, I think this is incredible. I mean, again, you know, practical day-to-day for most people, nothing, obviously. But I appreciate any form of, like, technology preservation, you know, the good old game stuff where they're, you know, not just preserving old games but allowing, you know, changing them in some way so that we can run them to just on modern hardware is awesome. I think that sounds great. Atta Sync is mentioning in our Discord chat a very cool project that actually I found earlier. I think it was on Hacker News where the guy created something called the Visible Zorker. And when you play the game Zork, which is those great text adventures, it shows you the code on the right as you're playing a game. So you can actually see. And, of course, this is not assembly code. Yeah. This is their. Oh, because they had a pseudo code thing. The parser, yeah. Yeah, so it could run on multiple platforms. Yeah. But you're seeing the parser actually work. Yep. It's pretty amazing. You can see. I mean, this was their key intellectual property. Yeah. But they open sourced this again. This is why open sourcing this old stuff is fantastic. So when you started talking about the guy who taught the Atari class, I do have a vague goal this year to figure out game programming. And what I mean by that is a game like a Windows app, or like Windows really, just sits there and then every time it comes in a circle it does something and it looks and says – It's an event. They call it an event loop. An event loop, exactly. And this is something I've just never fully understood in my entire life. And I feel like between this Commodore stuff and the 6502 like I mentioned and whatever, I want to see examples of this, especially the simpler the better, right? Like stripped down. There are these incredible videos, by the way, speaking of code and game preservation, on YouTube where a guy analyzes the open sourcing of the code from Doom and then Quake and then whatever else. And in each case, this guy's like, this is a master class in how to write. Incredibly interesting code. The best code imaginable for that era. Because, you know, John Carmack is basically an alien that came down from outer space and taught us all how to work. I mean, Jesus. Like amazing. And I'll never understand how to do that. He knew how to reticulate the splines. Yes, he did. I wrote as part of a class. I took a class in programming online from the University of British Columbia, actually. It was a really good class. And one of the final assignments was to write a kind of battle. What is it where you shoot an alien? Alien space space. That's right. You write a space space. And you write it in a scheme. It's called Racket. So this is the code. And you nailed it. This is exactly what it is. It's an event loop. It runs over and over again. And then you have to write all the things that happen in the event loop, which is really cool. In a Windows app, when I say Windows app, I mean dating back to like 1985. Literally, you kind of set up the app for your window for the app, and then you set up that event loop. And the event loop is what events are we going to choose to respond to, right? You know? Yeah. So when the mouse goes down, when the arrow key goes. Because you can just, you can do nothing, and then your app won't respond to any mouse clicks or any, you know, whatever. Yeah, you just ignore it. Yeah. But you specify the things you want to reply to. And I feel like a game is basically the same thing. It's, you know, but I say that. I think there's an event loop in Windows, you bet. No, there is. All graphical UIs. There literally is, yeah. So that's the difference between a command line program and a graphical UI. A graphical UI has to have an event loop because you have to respond to all the different things. It's the equivalent of there's a phone and you pick it up and you're like, is anyone there? Is anybody there? Is anybody there? Yeah, you poll. You poll. It's interesting. It's really, yeah, actually that's the difference between polling and interrupts driven. Right. This is a good way. You know, kids should do this. I know. That's what I mean. That's imperative to do it because of AI coding. I know, but you still, God, you can't. Listen, the only way to be truly effective with AI encoding is to know coding. You need to know what's going on. Maybe there's a Raspberry Pi version of this or something. I feel like there's got to be a semi-modern but also a semi-inexpensive and low-end way to learn this stuff or whatever. I'm going to try to figure that out this year. Yeah, definitely look down the Pi path. There's a lot of good stuff in there. it's interesting. Anyway, I like this stuff. Oh, I love this stuff. I just, uh, and you know, in some ways I'm sad that I've gotten so much into AI coding because I miss Leo. Let me, on behalf of all Twitter listeners, we're all sad. A little sad. I know. No, no, no, I'm sorry. I lost my marble. No, honestly, no, I actually, uh, in some way, not in some ways, you are literally inspirational in that way because of who you are and your, it's my job. No, no, but it's not just that. You're, Your job is to know what's going on and you do that stuff. But the way you've doved, dived into this. Dived? What's the plural past tense? Dived. Doven. I'll say doven. Look at Dove Bar. Into this is one of the ways I know it's important because you can just know what's going on in the world and not have to not do anything with it, and you still know what's going on. But, like, you, the amount of attention you've given us is important because it shows that stuff is real. Well, I didn't dove into VR headsets. But that's what I'm saying. Right. I didn't dove into Bitcoin. But when I saw this and started playing with it, oh, okay. So what you just said is that, in many ways, existential because, you know, every once in a while, someone in the Discord, then you'll repeat it. You'll say, hey, they're asking, how can we do, you know, what's this topic that's going on with Windows? I'm like, oh, I didn't even cover that because it's nothing. It's not important. Right. Ignoring something, you kind of hope everyone's picking up on it, but what's going to happen is people are going to be like, hey, this thing happened. How come you didn't write about it? Like, oh, you didn't write about it. I thought you must know about it. Let me tell you about it. And it's like, no, I didn't write about it because it's not important. That's called editorial judgment. It's kind of a hard line to draw. But when you dive into something and it's like. Sorry, did you say censorship? Curation. Curation. Curation, not censorship. Well, you're self-censoring. Yeah, I guess. Bias. As humans, we have limited attention. We can't do everything. But the amount of time and attention you are giving to this tells me, and I'm sure it tells millions of people, that this is important. No, I mean it. Or I'm a goofball. No. No. I'm getting some pretty good stuff at it. Right. That's what I'm saying. You can get some good juice. Even in the limited exposure I have to what you tell us about it on this one show, I'm like, there's something going on here. I think this is important. You know, one of the things I've been preparing for is this trip to Hawaii because I wanted to – it's all running on this local framework. By the way, coming up at 2 o'clock, we're going to interview the founder of Framework, Nirav Patel. The laptop company. Who just made the laptop company. The awesome MacBook for Linux or whatever. Yeah. And, you know, his background is interesting. He started at Oculus back in the Kickstarter days. He did that. He designed the Rift. Like before Meta. He went to Meta for six years. He was at Meta, did all the Oculus, the one and the two. So did John Carmack, by the way. Yeah. But he said, unlike John Carmack, you know what? This stuff's not repairable. It's going to end up in the land. Oh, yeah. What if we made this stuff that you could repair and upgrade? And that's how Framework started. So he's very inspiring. But he made also this AI machine. And he's very worried. This is why we're going to interview him. He's very worried that AI is going to become the property of these big companies, and you won't be able to run it. Listen, we talk about this a lot. Local AI has gotten so much better. It's not going away. If literally the world goes where most, it won't, but even if it did, most proprietary AI is the big cloud stuff, and most open source AI is the local SML, small language model, whatever. It won't. But even if it did, that stuff's still going to be awesome. Well, one of the things, so as I said, I'm going to Hawaii. The first thing I had to make sure is that I could access this framework, which is a local. So are you going to bring that with you when you go to Hawaii? No, I have scale set up. So I had to work with Claude. I did a test where I just ripped the plug out of the machine. Are you going to, like, call in from your phone and stuff? Is that what you're doing? I could talk to it from my watch in Hawaii. Nice. Hey, Dick Tracy, we're waiting in the line for breakfast. Let's get moving. You want to say? Hey, say hi to Paul and Richard. We're doing Windows Weekly right now, and they really don't believe it that I can talk to you from my watch, even in Hawaii. I want to see if it should respond soon. Can't really hear it. I'm a husband. When I talk to you. Window. You can't hear it because it's going to be a little bit. I can hear a couple. Yeah, it's coming. So that's the other thing I did. So now I can route through the Sonos speakers because I have Sonos speakers in every room. See, and everyone thought that what the hell was that, but that's what that was. I said I'm never buying another Sonos device until I realized I can actually control it through HTTP posts. Now he has a fort made of Sonos speakers in his living room. I now have Sonos everywhere. And I told him, follow me. So talk to me on whatever kind of speakers are nearest me. Which is awesome, by the way. I want the goal is to have the house. I can talk to the house and the house talks back to me. No one, listen, even people who don't like this stuff, at some point with Google or the Siri stuff or maybe back in the day the Microsoft Cortana thing, at some point stood in some room in their house and said something to that assistant and then heard a speaker in some other room go, Okay, Paul. And you're like, seriously. But right? I mean, we've all experienced this. It's using the Wi-Fi access point to locate me. So it can find that. I can figure out where I am. Can I have smart bulbs that do this kind of thing too now where it does presence sensing and so forth? I mean, this is... But the difference is instead of talking to Google or Amazon or Apple, I'm talking to this little framework here. I'm talking to my local AI that knows me, has history, has been carefully... What's the model? Well, this right now is using Claude, but the next step, and this is something I'm going to work on in Hawaii, is to make it Quen, which is probably the best. And that's their small language local version. Yeah, they have, well, this has 128 gigs, so it can run, I think, Quen, 27 for sure, and it might be able to run the one step bigger. But the thing is, for an agentic thing where you're just saying, hey, make it a calendar appointment, or can you find the email from Paul Theriot or whatever, you don't need Claude. It doesn't need to be local. I could just go as far as, I could run on a 6502. Probably run on a, well, yeah, that's a good question. You don't mean a lot of unified RAM. Anyway, this is the experiment, right? I've been experimenting with Gemma, which, you know, the latest version came out. It's very good. The Gemma? Yeah, it's really good. I have not looked at, what's the Claude one again? I'm sorry, the Anthropic version? Claude Code. No, the local. Oh, Opus 4.7? No, sorry, the local one. the small language version. I don't think Anthropic has a small language. Oh, they don't have one? Okay. Oh, no. In fact, most of these are Chinese ones. DeepSea 4 just came out this week, and that's very good, supposedly. But I'm not looking to code. I will code with CloudCode. That's really, or Codex, maybe, GPT-55. Those really are, those frontier models really are better coding. But there's a lot of stuff. And by the way, they always will be, but, right, exactly. But the small stuff's going to get, just keeps getting better. It's crazy. It's good enough now to parse documents, to do research for me. The only thing I've ever, I think I said this because I must have talked about this. Maybe it's just because I did an episode of Hands on Windows about this, but I had to do like a thing about Tolkien writing, and it just ran out of, it runs out of context eventually. It produced this like 18-page report essentially, but then it lost its memory of this. Then it ran out of Tolkien. Right, exactly. We did that pun a while ago. Last week, as a matter of fact. Right. That's the only thing. But, you know, token management, context management, that's a big part of the job. There's all these. That's why you do kind of need to be technical right now. Right now. But again, it just keeps getting better. I mean, it does. Because they're solving these problems for you more and more and more. Yep. So it's a really interesting time. I think so. Yeah. Yes, it is. It really is. It really is. And what's a challenge for Microsoft, to bring it back to Windows, is that all these companies, certainly ChatGPT, want to be platforms. Right. ChatGPT, we just got the story from Ming-Chi Kuo this week that they're going to do a phone and there won't be apps on it. Right. It will all be the platform. Well, so I've joked about this when Apple integrated with ChatGPT and only ChatGPT, still to this day, right? And, you know, from ChatGPT's perspective, like, you can have all these apps on your phone and we'll use those. That's great. but you'll never need to run those apps again. Like, ChatGPT, it's like, is there a way... It absorbs them. Yeah, like, it's right. In the same way that, like, in Windows, you could, like, change the shell to be any executable. You could have it, in the old days, put it into Notepad if you wanted. It's like, I just want my iPhone to put it into ChatGPT, you know? Yeah. Like, Apple will not allow that. No, that'll never happen with Apple. In a way, that may be the right solution. Just like we were talking about earlier, where sophisticated people will have a path. So right now with the talk, with the action button on the iPhone, when I press it, I'm talking right now to my AI. Just like Apple intended, Leo. Apple probably doesn't like it so much, but I'm talking to my AI. When I stop, it will then send it to the framework, and then it will respond, and it's going to talk to the speakers. It's going to say, what are you talking about? I don't know. Did you ask for something? It appears that you're on a podcast. So I still have all the apps on here and all that stuff. And what I suspect is that Apple will do this bifurcated thing where you'll have all the apps, but they'll, like Bixby, remember the whole idea of Bixby? This is the MCP slash semantic app thing where they'll expose their functionality so you can conversationally interact with those features. I also bought the Rabbit R1 little thing and talked to it through that too, which is a much simpler. For the 10 minutes of that thing worked. No, you know what? The new version talks to OpenClaw. Oh, okay. So I can talk directly to it. And the only problem is it doesn't support tail scale. So I have to do a tail scale funnel, which I haven't bothered setting up. So the watch goes to my phone, which does support tail scale. So I can get that back to the framework from anywhere in the world. I'm just trying to figure out the Windows app SDK, and you're living in the future. I don't know. No, but that's the weird thing is you don't have to be that technical. You just have to know what questions are. Well, you have to know what questions are asked. That's right. Which, by the way, is the thing I would have said 30 years ago. Well, we don't understand the answers you get back. Right. Okay, fair enough. Some of us I don't. Knowing where to look for the answers, you're not going to memorize everything. You don't know. It's a good partner. And really, I think the way to think of it is kind of a dumb intern. It may be better an idiot savant. Like it's really smart about some things, but it's also really stupid about some things. Yeah, it's like a Rayman situation. Yeah, you've got to know where those boundaries are and where you can expect it to do the right thing and where you know it won't. Anyway, I'm sorry. No. Here I am. No, my head's, you're sidetracking me easily because I'm just, this is all these days. Kenobi's response was, ha, Apple's whole thing is to talk to Siri, not route around us entirely. But here we are. Obi-Wan on the wrist. So it's got some personality. right? Yeah. Bypassing the Empire, tell Paul and Richard the rebellion is going well. The rebellion is going well. Oh, boy. So how did it know all that, right? Well, I built in some memory, right? It doesn't really know that. Right. But it's fooling me. I'm pretty sure Arthur is going to praise about this. It's certainly entertaining me. Well, entertaining is good, but being useful. There's some use, because I, so for instance, I used to have a calorie lager, right? It's such a pain you've got to enter all that. So now I just sell it. Yeah, for lunch I had a tuna sandwich and a bag of chips. And it figures out what the calories are. It will then say, because it knows I'm trying to cut carbs, well, Leo, you're up to 100 carbs today. You might want to try a salad tonight. I feel like there already are kind of calorie, carb, whatever, counting apps that you take a photo or something and it tries to rough it. There is. I actually tried it. It's kind of interesting. So that's their AI doing basically the same thing. But I don't even have to take a photo. I just tell it. It has a pretty good rasp. I can tell by the munching sound you're making that you're eating a vegetable. So there are little use. I log my exercise that way, and it knows where my goals are and what I'm doing. So there's little useful stuff. Memory is helpful. Yeah. No, I didn't mean to suggest it wasn't useful. No, I'm suggesting it's not. It's Richard Wright. It's entertainment. It is entertainment, but I feel like it's sort of even says it on the license. Yeah. I believe it says the word clown on the license, if I read it correctly. But it is edging into useful, and that's the goal, right? It will be useful. It won't just be entertaining. It will be useful. And that's really my goal is to be prepared as we enter this world. We're not quite there yet, but we're moving in that direction. But you're kind of performing the same role of whatever is ever, which is to be on the leading edge of that. So you're trying to be able to get people ready for this, and I think that's important work. It's good. Thank you. You've already been trying to make it. No, I mean it. You're trying to make it. Thank you. No, it's, listen, if you were being an idiot, I would say nothing. Well, you've said that sometimes too, yes. Paul's being awfully quiet over there. No, that's what I love about you, Paul. You will say what you think, and I appreciate that. No, I think it's great. Yeah, we've had our little dust-ups. We don't agree about everything, but I feel like we agree on like 97% or something. This is what I love about the job that you and I and Richard have, which is we are not talking to the general populace. We're not trying to explain computers to people who don't care. We are talking to enthusiasts. And so we really are kind of more like that because she'll be like, really? Because let me tell you what my lunch was just like. But Richard, wasn't that the case at Zero Trust World where you're surrounded by people who are so much like you that you can immediately have a conversation? Yeah, I know. You're right about it. That's, yeah. It's great. It's like we have friends because we're in this niche, in this subculture. Yeah. That's the whole thing about conferences is once in a while you're not the only one in the room. Yes. I do. You know, this would have come up when these things happen in real life, but, you know, I have a lot of friends like you guys who are just like mainstream. They're not tactical. They don't care about the stuff, whatever. They're confused by my life. And there's the same person, oddly, in both cases that I can think of. but I remember when my friend asked me about an iPod and, like, should I get an iPod? And this was, like, really early on, and I was like, yep, this is the way to go. And the other one was when he bought a new computer, and I guess Windows 8 had just come out last year, and he goes, so I can put this on Windows 7, right? Like, there's something in here that makes it go back, and I'm like, oh, I can bet this. You know, and they eventually fixed that. But in both cases, like, this is someone, not technical, a smart guy, but, like, not, you know, not in this world. And I think that's interesting, too, because one of the things that's already interesting about AI, even now in this early day, is how many people, normal people, pay for, like, chat GPT or cloud now or whatever. You know, like, close to a billion people now. Yeah, this has moved into the mainstream. Like, you know, whether it's ready or not, that's a debate to be had. But it's interesting. It's very. Thank God, because I was getting so bored of these glass slab phones. I know. Yeah. in the Microsoft language, we would, you know, we were stressing over what the next wave was, and it was never anything interesting. And it was like, oh, God, come on. Is that all it is? I remember some guy, even like, I was really into tablet PC stuff, even though I can't handwrite to save my life. And I remember some guy in a, this is, not this matter where it was, but we were, it's like a whiteboard. Someone had drawn this complex diagram using like a dry erase, whatever. And this guy's like, that's why I have a tablet PC. I can draw that, blah, blah, blah. And I was He's like, that's cute. And I took a picture of it. I'm like, whatever, Leonardo, draw your picture. Jesus, whatever. Just like I'm using the technology because I have it, not because that's what makes sense. I've been a sucker for that. I've bought a lot of note-taking. Yeah, we all have. I mean, that's the thing. I don't actually want to write. I don't want to do handwriting. No. I have all the Apple Pencils. I have a cramp set when I write a check. Why would I want to do jokes? I cannot write a check. stupid alright where were we you know what let's do let's do a break do the Intel news and your theory I would like to hear your theory look you guys know because every quarter we talk about Microsoft earnings in fact by the way Microsoft will announce earnings I think today so that's going to keep an eye on that I have over decades had this creeping sense of Microsoft not sense The creeping reality of Microsoft being less and less transparent about their earnings. All the tech companies. Yes, 100%. What was the alphabet reorg? But, hey, we want to hide where we're spending our money and where we're making it. You know, like Apple, for example, one of the things they used to be really transparent about was how many iPods, iPhones, iPads, whatever they sold every quarter. They stopped doing that years ago. As soon as they're not the dominant number, they're never going to say it again. Well, or you do something like we have Azure or something, or Azure being Microsoft's iPhone or whatever, where the growth is phenomenal for like a long, long time. And then eventually, everyone on the planet has an iPhone, and we're not upgrading as much, and it's not their fault. They're still doing great. Eventually you win. Right. And all of a sudden, that story is not compelling to Wall Street, and the reason they changed these things, the reason they stopped talking about these things, is so they have a happy story they can sell Wall Street. The thing is, in our case, because we live in the United States, like SEC regulations have not changed in this time period. They are actually... They're enforcement, certainly. has. Yes. They're legally required to provide information that will help investors know whether they should invest in this company and what the pros and cons strengths and weaknesses, whatever are. They're not doing that. And so you've heard me complain about that over many years. And then there are these other things that happen where Spotify, for example, announced their earnings. Like I've held up Spotify as an interesting example of a transparent company because they have paid and non-paid users. The non-paid users for a long time vastly outnumbered the paid subscribers, although, by the way, that's gotten closer. But the revenues from paid subscribers, which is something, you know, we talk about with Club Twit versus, you know, ad-supported people, or in my site, you know, throw a premium versus ad-supported people. Even though there's a lot fewer of them compared to the overall user base, they contribute far more in revenues, right? And I always loved that because it was super transparent. But the one thing I've seen with Spotify over the past couple of years is they've started lying everywhere. And what does lying mean in the context of reporting your earnings? Well, you say that you were profitable in a quarter in which you were not. Profitable meaning actual net income, which is profit or loss, after you add up all the money you took in and take out all the money you spent at the cost of doing business. But they were not doing that. They were ignoring that part of it. It's like saying, hey, listen, I'm going to stop paying the rent. So all of a sudden we're net profitable. That's the extra money we have. Yeah. This past week, they did their earnings. I almost had like a brain aneurysm. There's this notion of GAAP, which is generally accepted accounting principle. There's a equivalent in Europe, right? And there's non-GAAP. Legally, you are required to report GAAP earnings. You can talk non-GAAP if you want. Non-GAAP earnings don't take into account currency exchange rate fluctuation, right? If you're a U.S. company, you make dollars. the amount of money you earn is partially, actually sometimes dramatically impacted by the value of the U.S. dollar, right, versus other currencies. In Europe, Spotify is in Europe. They have a different, it's the same rule basically, but a different regulatory body, whatever, who cares. They said, like I see these headlines. Spotify growth was, I'm going to make this up, I don't remember the number, 14% to whatever number, 4.7, 5.7 billion. I'm like, oh, great. So I start writing this story. But I look at their balance sheet and their earnings or their revenues were up 8%. I'm like, where did 14% come from? They used a non-GAAP growth figure with a GAAP actual hard number for revenue. I'm sorry. That's fraudulent. That's insane. And there's a lot more of that. I don't want to go off on Spotify too much. Intel, though. I would like to go off on Intel for a moment. Intel announced a quarterly earnings. Now, this company, as you know, has been circling the drain for a long time. They were owed several billion dollars by the U.S. government, never got a set of it. And then the U.S. government announced an investment in which case they would get this money finally, which they were owed legally. You should have sued the government and just gotten it, but whatever. And they've still not been doing great. They don't have any customers that are not named Intel for their foundry business, et cetera. You know, like they're still just not the kind of tread water, right? But I saw these headlines. Intel's back, baby. I literally saw an all-caps headline, Intel is back. And I was like, oh, okay. It's only one quarter. I don't want to get too excited, but maybe they turn things around. So I'm like, oh, cool. Every headline was not positive. I mean, like, overly positive, like crazy positive. I'm like, what's going on with this company? Intel lost $3.7 billion in the quarter on revenues of $13.6 billion. Revedues were up 7%, so single digit, not great. Intel stock price jumped 20% because everyone was so excited by these results. What? What? Well, now, come on, Paul. Like, 3.7 is mostly the mobile I write down. Like, it's a bit deeper. It's also money lost on payments associated with the U.S. government's 10% stake in the company. What? What? Okay. Here's the thing. That's like, you know, look, you're right, whatever. But I'll just say Intel's PC chip business, the revenues of that were up 1%, negative. Nothing. What did go up, 22%, was their data center and AI business unit. And this is Wall Street ignoring the old school thing. No one wants to talk about this. Not doing great. But also ignoring the foundry, which they don't report as part of their own. I mean, they do, but it's treated as a separate business. And they're like, oh, data center, great. Plus, Intel gave an estimate of the current quarter for the revenues. and those were a little bit higher than the consensus from analysts. Somehow this triggered this euphoria from Wall Street, sent their stock through the roof, insanity, right? Turning around would have been fair. Back is a stretch. Turning around in one with their issues. I mean, look, turnaround to me means a year of credibility, you know, whatever it might be. Their Intel Foundry business, by the way, 5.4 billion in revenues, up 16%. This is almost insider trading, given that all that money comes from Intel, to make Intel's own chips. And so Intel, if they wanted to goose this business, could be like, let's pay a little bit more and make it look like the business is doing great. This is weird to me. So I kind of put these things all together in my brain, and I was like, what the hell, what's going on? Like, what is this? And look, this is insanity. I want to be super clear, but I feel like this is a, it's almost a conspiracy theory. The only chink in this argument being that these companies and entities, entities being governments, regulatory bodies, et cetera, are not in fact working together. They're just all doing the same thing. It's like they call me truly beneficial. The circle jerk of money that does not exist that is our AI industry, that is hundreds of billions of dollars not exchanging hands between businesses, you know. We'll talk a little bit more about some of that in the AI segment. But, like, these things are all symptoms of the same problem, which is that with the goal of making the economy seem as good as it can be, whether you're looking at it from a national level like the United States or just globally, whatever, again, not like the EU and the U.S. and whatever other countries are colluding necessarily, but it's better for their countries, it's better for the market, it's better for the economy if this stuff looks great. You know, and I just, I'm sorry, Spotify's lying, Intel's crap, they're not doing anything. AI spending is out of control and is incommensurate with the payoff, and I think a lot of these companies are just going to go out of business. You know, retirement funds are all wrapped up in this, if you live in the United States and have a 401k or whatever. And I just, I'm like, what is this? Like, what is this? So I don't know. I often, no, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like the Intel headlines, where when I looked at it, I started to write the, you know, the story that I started to write was like Intel had a great quarter. Yeah. And then I read the quarter and I was like, no, they didn't. Like, what is this? They had a better quarter. If you take the write down out, they had a better quarter than they've had recently. But not by much. That's what I mean. Like, but you can't take it out. It's part of the finance. That's like saying, well, it is an admission of a mistake, right? It's like, hey, we made this investment. It has not worked out. We're admitting we've lost money on this the whole time, and now we're finally doing the accounting of the mistake. You make that sound responsible. I feel like it is. It would be if there were no people that understood money working at Intel for the past five years. I mean, they knew what was going on. Look, these companies are all going to put the most punch in the fact that it was a blown investment for a long time. Okay. But I feel like the SEC in this case should step in and for all of these companies and whatever the EU regulatory body is in Europe, I don't know what it's called, should do the same and be like, look, we have regulations for a reason. I get that you're trying to – Earnings are not PR, except that they are because good PR is what sends the stock price up, which is what sends their market cap up, is why we're stuck with the three biggest companies in the world that haven't changed in 20 years. And the goal of these companies is to make sure we weather this AI storm and that we emerge on the other side with them in exactly the same places they are today. And I know how, like I said, I know this sounds vaguely insane. Like, I get it. Well, I'm anti-conspiracy theory. And you'd argue that the shareholders should be up in arms about all of this. Except. More investment organizations are lying to you. But you, but. Okay. But your portfolio is bigger. I do feel like we're coming into a moment. Like, so far this year, with all the prices down, you're starting to see investors, you know, the investment guys looking around going, hey, we're not actually making that much money anymore. Like, what's going on? Or just growth. The gross byproduct of consumerism and capitalism, I guess, where you have to grow and grow and grow. It's how you get something like we have a company that makes Oreo cookies, and we've saturated that market literally with both fat and people eating cookies. And now we make Oreo cookie cereal because we have to expand. And you're like, okay, well, it's sort of food. I guess that's sort of similar. But we have like a sneaker company making AI. We have, you know, like everyone gets into everything. And Spotify announced this past month paper books. What? What are you talking about? I know. That is weird, isn't it? Like, what is this stuff? There is a – I don't think this is in the story I've read about Spotify because, again, I could have gone on and on and on about this, but Spotify has co-CEOs now. There's a little – That's what all the cool companies are doing. Just got that. Well, the guy who started the company – Daniel Ek is both on. He's both on. He literally left, right? He wants to go more time with his money. Since January, the CFO of this company, the part of the company that is responsible for their earnings, has been providing the co-CEOs with what I would call fake numbers so he can make policy for the company's strategy. And they're reporting those fake numbers in their earnings every quarter. So I guess it's consistent. Now, again, they don't say fake. And that's not a good word for them. but that's what it is. They reported it. It's in the report. Like, what? Okay, whatever. I don't understand. I'm sorry. I've said this a million times. I have a business that doesn't make any money. This is why you're not a tech giant CEO. A hundred percent. Part of it is just an inability to be successful. Part of it is integrity. I don't know what you want to call it. You're limiting your ability to lie at scale. I get it. To lie at any scale. This stuff makes me sick. Let's not say lie. Let's say creatively. Well, okay, but this is, sorry. I come from Boston. I'm a mass hall. I think there's an East Coast thing. We're not passive aggressive. We're just aggressive. We speak plainly. They're lying. They're lying. And I know, you know, like I have friends, you know, Denver, Seattle, you know, they'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, like, oh, settle down. That's a little hard. Tell us what you really think, Paul. I just did. They're lying. you know? And they have been for a while. Yep. It has been some time. I think in Microsoft's case, just because I follow this company much more closely than any other company, I've seen it more clearly. And I really feel like every quarter is a little bit of a feeler to see how much they can get away with. You know, there are weird exceptions. A quarter or two ago, they actually gave a hard number for Azure. Yeah. It's the first time in history. And we used it to ripple across a whole bunch of numbers in the process. Because then you can backtrack it and say like, Oh, here's the point where we're just losing money on this thing. Well, actually, we can't really set that in making money now because we don't have profits, but just revenues, whatever. But without one major exception, they've gotten less and less transparent every quarter for possibly 10 to 12 years. I don't remember anymore. They used to say, like Apple would say, we sold as many iPhones. Microsoft would say, we sold as many Windows licenses. They don't do that. They've not done that for a long time. Yeah. Well, and it is a kind of collusion when everybody's doing it. Yeah. Right. And the collusion extends, again, to Wall Street, to the analysts, investors, and investors. Collusion. Because those guys don't want to hear about Windows. They want to hear about these high-growth new markets. They don't want to hear about bad news of any kind. So no one's asking questions. It's like, well, no one is like, hey, great news, Azure, everything's going gangbusters. Hey, how's Windows going? You know, can you give us a number there? I, I, no one's going to ask that question. No, who cares? Well, who cares? It's millions of dollars. It several We have figured out how to turn investment portfolios into a kind of financial junk food Yeah And just keep laying on the trans fats baby Like I feeling good It's sickening. And look, I'm not an accountant, you know. I liken this to antitrust, right? I'm not a law expert. I'm not a, you know, whatever. I'm not into this. But Microsoft got in this trouble in the early 90s. They went to court in the late 90s. They went to court again in the EU. They've been dragging it for 10 years. I have to learn a lot about antitrust. And so now, like in certification, you know when you see it. You know, I didn't mean to. I wasn't trying to become an expert in this. But now I'm like, I'm really clear-eyed on this. And same thing with this financial stuff. I'm not good at math. I'm not good at numbers. My wife handles our finances. She should. I'm terrible. But I do write about earnings every quarter, every single quarter, for several dozen more whatever companies. Microsoft, I write really long articles about where the money's coming and going, where it's possible to write about that. What you're really looking for is the Ozempic for financial reporting. Yes. What I'm really looking for is the truth. You're just talking crazy talk, Mr. Vance. Honestly. Seriously, there's a picture of a UFO. It says the truth is out there. Yeah. I'm not going to try and get you to go back to where it was. I'm going to find a medicine I can sell you for an excessive amount of money that will treat the issue. Hey, look, whatever anyone's opinion about this, we all know how fascinating it is when some report comes out where we received internal documentation. Sometimes it comes from a court case. Those are good, too. Where you're like, holy crap, this is what they were doing. And everybody knew it, and we were all in on it. And it's like, if our competitors do it, we have to do it, too. Yep. That's not a good way to live your life, and it's not a good way to do it. Well, actually, it is a good way to do business. That's the problem. Yeah. Anyway. All right. I'm sorry. I'll back off from this. Okay. That's how you really feel. I will. I just don't want to get sued. That's all I'm saying. Right. So the guy I worked with, he said, what if Spotify comes back and makes a statement about what you wrote? I'm like, what are they going to say? They're going to say, what we do is legal, and if it wasn't, the regulators in the EU would come after us. Yep. 100%. We've been running in traffic for years. I don't know why you're concerned about us being hit by a car. Yep. Yep. So, anyway. Let's talk about our sponsor, and we will continue on with an AI segment. It's not a financial investment firm, is it? No. Okay. Okay. I don't know. It's something we won't talk to us. Oh, sorry. I'm talking to me. I've got to get him to shut up. Lisa, this is 3 a.m. Lisa nudges me. She says, there's somebody in the house. Yeah, you're like, yeah. And I said, does it have an English accent? She said, yeah. Which would suggest to me that you knew who it was. I think I might know what's happening. We'll take care of it. Maybe this whole idea of having it talk to me all over the house was a bad idea. Well, look, you may scale it back, but you have to get it to work first, right? So I still think it's important. That's what I told her. I have to get it to work first. Putting sleep time barriers on is a good idea. Yeah, I think I might say, after midnight, please, let's just wait. You know, the feature she really liked is all of the LEDs in the whole house being turned off around 11 o'clock. She does like that. She noticed that right away. She does, yes. My wife would like that, too. And it took a minute. Early on in the whole smart home thing, my wife walked in and she turned the lamp on. I'm like, what are you doing? She's like, I'm turning on the light. Don't touch it. Don't touch that. She's like, you know what? I just want the light to work. It has to work the way I want to use it. I'm sorry. I was like, that's a fair point. It's hard living with us. I'm just saying. I'm the worst. Yeah. And I apologize to Lisa. Pretty much daily. I'm sorry. I really am. You married a geek. Sorry about that. That's what you get. That's what you get. She knew. Doesn't make it any better, but she knew. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler. Oh, we love Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. So we talk about it all the time. The potential rewards of AI for your business, obviously too great to ignore because your competitors are doing it. But let's not ignore the risks, either the upside and the downside, the loss of sensitive data. Attacks against enterprise managed AI. Generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors. You know, they're using this. We talk about this on security now all the time. Malware written by AI is helping them to, you know, plant their malicious code. Of course, they use it to create perfect phishing lures. They're even using it to do things like automate data extraction once they're into your network, you know. So there are a lot of attacks at the generative AI, the private AI even, that you're using at your business. 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So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information according to companies' data classification does not get fed into the public LLM models, etc. Thank you, Ziva. With zero trust plus AI, you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition, and you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Find out more. Zscaler.com slash security. Zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for their support. So Microsoft and OpenAI changed their partnership for, what, 17th time? I lost track of this. But obviously, each time this happens, this is, I think, the third time in a row where a lot of it is about Microsoft not wanting to pay for or provide the infrastructure that OpenAI is demanding so they can expand in their own way. And, you know, this is allowing OpenAI to go off and work with other cloud infrastructure, right? But, you know, they have partnerships with every company you can think of. But, you know, Oracle was one of the early beneficiaries of this. And when they announced this, this would have been probably Monday. I was talking to Brad about this, and I was like, well, you can queue up the AWS slash Amazon announcement. Sure enough, less than 24 hours, that happened. But one of the many things that's changed is that Microsoft, or OpenAI, rather, has the right to deliver their frontier models, you know, the best GPT models they have on other cloud platforms, right? So the exclusivity thing is not as exclusive, I guess, as it used to be. Maybe it's the way to say it. Microsoft still has the right to use all of those models. There's still a time frame on it. The time frames have shifted a little bit. We're still talking up to the 2030s, I guess. 2032, I think it was. I think it was 2030 originally for everything, and now it's 2032 for some things. There's been some changes around what happens if and when AGI happens, etc. Microsoft now has the right to pursue AGI themselves. You might know that Microsoft has actually been talking about doing that for a while, but they call it superintelligence. I don't know if they stop using that term now and just call it AGI. We'll see, but whatever. The revenue share thing continues. But the big thing to me was, you know, they're going right to Amazon. And sure enough, next day, Amazon announced and OpenAI announced the expansion of their partnership, and they're getting the whole mail deal. So the OpenAI models are all going to be available on Amazon Bedrock, which is through AWS. chat GPT codecs available through Amazon Bedrock. Bedrock will use OpenAI to manage AI agents. And, of course, now Amazon is promoting this as this is where everyone always wanted this stuff to be. This is great for everybody. And, you know, it's fair to say, like, AWS has incredible share. And I mean not just market share but, like, mind share for developers that are producing whatever they're producing, whether they're like mobile apps or cloud services, whatever. And so Amazon is, you know, the major, the major player, I would say, in cloud infrastructure. This is huge for them, you know, and it's huge for OpenAI because, you know, the funnel has opened up nicely for them. Amazon is one of two other companies, you know, essentially on Earth other than Microsoft who could provide infrastructure at this scale or better even, depending on how you want to look at that. So not surprising. It's honest that it took this long. But although it's like just when OpenAI seemed to have lost the lead to Anthropic, now you're over there. Amazon must be also annoyed. But, yeah, you've got to add it to the offer. Yes. I mean, Amazon has also a major investment in Anthropic and a major partnership with Anthropic. They're doing what they should be doing as an infrastructure provider, which is we'll give you your choice of models, and you as the developer can pick whatever you want. Great. Yeah. Because I don't see this harming Microsoft in any way. Well, the only – so the one possible way is actually Azure, the other A word, Azure growth in the future. So obviously Azure growth has slowed compared to the 70% year-over-year days, but it's still high 30s, maybe up to 40%. I mean, it's possible that this will drive some, not because of AI in particular, but if you're going to use OpenAI on AWS, you might also be using AWS across the board for whatever other infrastructure. And I think some of those folks, you know, you would actually send people to Azure because they wanted to use it. People were using Azure to some degree, perhaps, because they wanted to use the OpenAI models, you know, or Microsoft's versions of them, whatever it might be. So we'll see. This is an interesting. Yeah, I don't think anybody, I think everybody went to open AI, and so they were using Azure under the hood. Yeah, and maybe they didn't think about it. They didn't account for that. Yeah, but that could show in Microsoft's earnings in the future. I guess, you know, we'll see. We'll see. It's going to be hard to know the truth of this, but. Well, it's depending on how they do financial reporting. Exactly. That's what, yeah. Don't get him started, Richard. Did I ever mention? No. Have you ever looked at it? Not even one. Have you ever looked at an Amazon financial report? If it was 100,000 words, 99,000 of them are things we did this quarter that have nothing to do with anything. You have to really – but they do provide hard numbers on whatever number they're leading on. That's the hard number that appears. One of the things – and I'm sure we'll talk about this later on Intelligent Machines. But wasn't there language in the OpenAI Microsoft contract that said as soon as OpenAI hit AGI, everything changes? Yeah, that's changed. Yeah. So does that mean they can now announce they have AGI? Yeah. No. So that announcement has to be verified by a third party both sides agree to. And even if they do it, Microsoft can – I'm doing something out of my head. I should probably just read this to be sure. But I believe – I'm looking at the wrong announcement. I'm like, why don't I see anything about Microsoft in here? Oh, it's the Amazon announcement. Let me just make sure before I say this a lot because I want to make sure I get this right. I think, by the way, for users, this is huge because now with AWS, you have access to some really good new models. Well, AWS arguably is where a lot of developers wanted to be already, like the majority. And now they're there too. And it's like, well, that's what I mean. Like that's how maybe it could impact. Let me just look for this. This is also because OpenAI is about to IPO as is Anthropic, and OpenAI is starting to see stories like in the Wall Street Journal saying OpenAI is struggling. They're not doing as well. They're not meeting. Well, there are these reports that come out of internal documentation where it's like we're not even close to meeting our revenue expectations. We already are on the hook for close to a trillion dollars, by the way. There's no chance. By the way, there was never any chance they were going to pay that, but this will maybe help a little bit. But also, they said, I can't remember what, they had a goal for the number of users that they didn't meet. And this was one way to improve that is by going on AWS, right? Could be, yeah. Could be. I think Microsoft was struggling to meet their infrastructure demand. Well, we know that. I mean, that's a fact. Is that why? Because why would Microsoft give this up? Right. Well, so actually, that part happened a while ago. Right. Well, what does Microsoft get? So Microsoft continues to get access to their models, which, you know, depending on how you look at it, are among the best in the world, obviously. That will continue past the point that AGI is declared now. I think that's different. I think it stopped at AGI before. Microsoft continues to get intellectual property rights to open AI research. Research meaning experimental models they've created that may or may not ever become public but are testing things and we'll see where things go. And so they get access to that. That's actually kind of important. Like I said, Microsoft can pursue AGI independently of them. The revenue share agreement they have right now, which I feel is somewhat lopsided, but whatever, remains in place until either company achieves AGI. That's interesting. But here's the little financial bit. Both companies have agreed to spread out the payments for revenue share over a longer period of time, which they did not specify, which is the indication to me that neither company is even close to meeting their expectations on revenues from AI-based products, essentially. So, in other words, OpenAI is not going to have this money maybe ever, but not anytime soon. So this is an acknowledgment of that implicit. it. And we've talked about Microsoft struggles with co-pilot. Is it first party AI, whatever? I don't think either company is, you know, I mean, there's so much on infrastructure. There's some little bit of money going back and forth, sort of on paper, but not really, right? I'm sure a lot of it's in the form of what I would call Azure credits or something or whatever you want to say. It's not like they have $250 billion to spend on Azure, which was part of the requirements. Wow. Yeah. I mean, Microsoft owns a smaller percentage of the public company than they did of the private company, if that makes sense. Like 27 versus 32.5%. But at their current value, you can't sell versus 27 or something. You can. And don't know why. Look, whatever, I feel like this company could crater, frankly. Absolutely. I mean, Microsoft. Meaning OpenAI. But more like Netscape every day. Oh, gosh. Well, Netscape had a real product. No, okay, fair enough. I think that's a good comparison, actually. The real question you have to ask is, who is AOL? That's the question. They think it's Amazon AWS, actually. I think it's Oracle, but yeah. Okay. Yeah, there you go. Maybe a combination of those two. But Microsoft's stake in OpenAid, remember, this company directly, it's really hard to know how much they've spent on this company, but we know it's $11 or $13 billion. It's what they directly invested. It's $13. Yeah. That's not what they spent. No. It's a lot more. But 27% of the value of OpenAI at the time of this announcement was $135 billion. That was the valuation of the company. I don't know who you sell that to. I don't know. I mean, not that they would right now. I wonder. You know what's not in this agreement? What's the rules around the IPO? Could they unload their 27? I bet no. Because normally that's the rules anyway. Right. is the precursor investors are locked out of the sale. Yeah, there was also that weird period where Microsoft and then Apple, briefly, were going to have a person on the OpenAI board that did or did not have voting rights or whatever. It was an observer. And if Apple wanted their observer too, they're like, how about no observers? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership deal, whatever you want to call it, was good until it wasn't, obviously. At some point... Until they made demands that even Microsoft's going, we can't do that and you don't need that. Yep. Right. You're asking us to validate your growth model by building infrastructure that you want. You're never going to be able to pay for it. You're never going to be able to pay for it. Yeah. Yep. So. Yeah, Microsoft, probably every time you have to go back for more money, you have to make bigger promises until you finally start to promise more than the number of atoms in the universe. And you're like, I don't think you're going to pull that off. I mentioned this a week or two ago, but there's an Amy Hood interview in Bloomberg. Everyone should look up if they care about this stuff where, you know, she talked about some of the struggles or whatever with this kind of stuff. Because there's a – I think of it as a – I'm not sure what I think of it. Anyway, she framed the infrastructure problem a little differently than I would have, but probably knows a little bit more about it than I do. So it's just there's a capacity constraint. And as big as these companies are, there's a capacity constraint everywhere, really. At some point, Microsoft was out in the lead on a lot of this stuff and even let go of some property and power rights that the other companies grappled immediately and were criticized for. That's what's interesting. I mean, look, at some point it's going to be a what man would want them now situation with OpenAI, but they'll bounce around. They'll go to Oracle. They'll be at AWS. Google may jump in there, too. We'll see. and every time there's a new announcement, Google will be the best place. Their TBOs are the best. You know, we'll have all that marketing stuff and we'll see if they'll fake it until they make it or if they just fake it and then disappear. Google's going to have to focus on Gemini. They can't be interested in other people's models. Amazon's models just never amounted to anything. Unless it's just, I mean, a pure Google Cloud Play where it's like, look, we have infrastructure, we can host these. You know, in other words, like Amazon Google. Many things, and Pure is not one of them, right? No, but they all, sorry, you know, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and I guess Oracle, who cares for Oracle. But those three companies all have first and third-party services. And among the third-party services are what I would call infrastructure. Google Cloud is that for Google. If Google or open AI models running on Google somehow made sense to either company, well, of course it makes sense to Google. Who cares if they're a customer? But, I mean, there's a whole big chunk of Google that cares very much about if you want AI, you're running Gemini. And I think they got more political clout than GCP has. But, I mean, the Amazon model suggests to me that just being the electricity, so to speak, the infrastructure, is a good business. Yes. And in the same sense that, like, serving ads is a good business. And all those other companies want to be part of that, too. I can picture Google being like, look, Google Cloud is a distant third place in this market. It's always going to be. This might be a way to goose that a little bit. The same way that Balmer would attack anyone that would try and build something instead of Microsoft that wasn't directly beneficial for Windows. Yeah. That's where they are now with Gemini. Well, I think when you think of Google and you think of Gemini, what is Google's primary product? It's telemetry. And Gemini is an excellent telemetry generator. So why would you ever impair that? So to use Microsoft's overly colorful language, this would be like Google knifing the baby, so to speak, and they're not willing to do that. But more importantly, the senior VP in charge of Gemini has more clout than anybody at GCP, and if GCP makes any move that might jeopardize anything related to Gemini, they will be stabbed in the dark. But, Richard, that would be like Google purposely ruining search so that they could serve more ads because people had to click twice on links. Oh, they did do that. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, fair enough. No, you're right. You're right. You're absolutely right. The challenge is being cynical enough. Yes. I thought I was cynical enough, but I guess I... Look, we all have something to learn. It's okay. But, you know, we've seen these political battles between these different elements within the company. And so, you know, my immediate response is, nah, the guys running Gemini have lots of clout. And anything that doesn't give Gemini love is not going to have a chance. Yeah, I mean, Google Cloud in many ways to Gemini is Intel Foundry to Intel's chip business. It's like, look, if all you do is serve us, it's going to be all good. Yeah, and if you do anything else, we will crush you like a bug. Well, especially if it hurts us, yeah, exactly. Yeah, doesn't benefit us. Or, right, there you go. Okay, that could be. This is not my part of the world, but I think that makes sense to me. Yeah. Okay, well, that was surprising. So if you are a Microsoft 365 co-pilot customer, I'm sorry, A, and B, you now have agentic features available to you through Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. So this is similar to, I'm forgetting the term for this, but Anthropica has released these. Yeah, this is Co-Work, which is this week's run-ass, for that matter. Design is impeccable. Yeah. And it was the M365 conference last week. That's where all this stuff was announced. Yep. And we still, you know, I think Microsoft here is kind of straddling the line. I brought up the Stevie Batiste stuff last week, but you have the AI on the outside, AI on the inside. I think this is kind of a little mix of those. In a co-pilot sense, it's literally a sidebar. You know, we're kind of used to those in Microsoft Office, but, you know, but more deeply integrated into these products maybe than would be possible otherwise, I suppose. So this is – well, other than the fact that you actually do have to pay for a separate subscription to get this, right, which is kind of a squishy thing here. This is a somewhat – well, it isn't, though. I was going to say a captive audience because they're already paying for Microsoft 365. I suppose there are – and Richard brings this point up sometimes, you know, that writing the one check is more beneficial, you know, in some ways. As long as the functionality is close enough, rather than writing a second check to have it. Well, that's what this week's run is about. It's like, it was not comparable. No, it wasn't. But assuming that it is at some point, or is today maybe, then maybe that becomes a good business. Yeah. If I live long enough, I'd like to see Outlook eradicated from the planet Earth. Good luck with that one. I know. It is the, we used to call these PIMs, right, personal information managers. It's like the PIM version of cancer or I don't know what to call it. It's like the cockroach, I guess, of productivity. They're doing this to Outlook 2. So obviously there's going to be co-pilot integration, Microsoft 365 co-pilot integration, just co-pilot, whatever you want to call it, that will allow you to manage your email, your calendars, your contacts, et cetera. And pretty much the only thing anybody ever wanted from LLLFs is like, can you help me tame my mail? Right, right. Listen, if we could all spend less time in email and less time in Teams meetings, our lives would all be less stressful and healthier. And who knows? Maybe is CoPilot the cure? Or just the symptom of the bra? I don't know. CoPilot can actually search my email in my Outlook email in a meaningful way. that would be awesome, but I don't imagine it can. I was going to say, what are you talking about? Yeah, search is still that thing that should have been the low-hanging fruit and the big win for customers with AI, and it is somewhere, but to my knowledge, not so far with Copilot. But we'll get there, I think. I don't know. So speaking of Outlook and how much I hate it, it was down for quite a bit of time this past week. Specifically Outlook.com, not Exchange Online Services. Yeah, right. I'd like to see it just go down and not come back. But I guess, like I said, I don't think that's going to happen. But Hotmail. Hotmail used to be a free ESD-based HTML email system, which, you know, in the day was probably pretty good. And now it's something out of Hell's seventh circle. I don't know. Anyway, I'll just move on from this because I hate it so much. A week ago, two weeks ago maybe, we talked about GitHub Copilot was rumored and then Microsoft confirmed would be moving to what they're now calling, I called it a token-based billing model. They're calling it a usage-based billing model. Same thing. That's the same thing. You were 100% correct. I mean, it's absolutely a token-based model. Yeah, and tokens are fun because you get to be charged in both directions. But this is an interesting – the request-based model had problems. Oh, yeah. I knew folks who wrote the most extraordinary requests through those tools. Yeah. Yeah, so you could make the argument that a single prompt, I guess we'll call it, is a request. It's one unit of billing, if you will. It could generate multiple instances of things running on the server and then multiple instances of it coming back to you either to give you some bit of data or some request on its part because it needs more information, whatever it is. And those things all cost money. And I'm oversimplifying it. I have a channel in Signal where a group of us were trying to figure out what was the prompt that would take the longest to run and somehow as a single request. We got over three hours. Isn't it like that every year there's a C language obfuscation thing where you can write a single line of code that does the most or whatever? It does the most that nobody can write. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all the Lisp guys are like, ha, ha, yeah, that. I love it. Hold my beer, I got this. We were running prompts from Dune. So this is like anything else. It's like, you know, telecoms announce, like, all you can eat is internet access. And then there's, like, the three people that abuse the hell out of it. And they're like, all right, we're not doing this anymore. Now we've got a terabyte cap. Yeah. It's possible for some big percentage of the user base, this won't change things. And then it's possible for those who use it the most, this will change things pretty dramatically. And I think that's the point. They're trying to kind of right price it, if that makes sense. You know, let's actually charge what this thing costs for, you know, what an idea. Yeah. But you're seeing this movement across everything to do with these tools is, hey, we're going to have to actually start getting costs right now. This is how the bubble ends when you start caring about efficiency. The problem is, from the perspective of the user, this isn't certification, right? You gave me this thing. I got used to it. Yeah. The fact that it was costing you money feels like it's your problem. I don't understand how you didn't solve that, but okay. but now you've given me the cost and I don't like it. And so we'll see. We'll see what this looks like. It was their problem and they passed it back to you. That's right. We're passing the problem on to the consumer. Wait, that's not the phrase. They're doing, I think I just referenced this a week or two ago too. This is kind of funny. But people have been around in the Microsoft space for a long, long time. We'll know that back in 2008 they launched something called Windows Azure. And at the time it was all, this is one where I'll need rich itself. At the time it was, was it only infrastructure as a service or? No, software as a service. It was the only platform it was. The other thing. Web roll and app roll. The one thing nobody wanted. Right. Okay. Right. Well, yeah. The joke is they were describing serverless compute. Right. Five years before anybody wanted it. Yes. And we can thank Ray Ozzie for this because he had already created products that had this kind of back-end infrastructure where this was a thing. and it was like this is... It was his architect, Abitab, who was also one of those guys who would say, if you don't understand this, it's because you're stupid. Yeah. Well, compared to him, everyone is. No, no, no. He had, as is typical of smart people, he had gotten all the way to the end game. Right. Right. And you don't show your work. People wanted VMs. I bought VMs from Amazon. Sell me a VM. No. If you want a VM, you're stupid. Yeah. You want this. Okay. And the first thing Guthrie did when he took it over in 2011, he made VMs. Yeah, right, right. Made what people wanted. Yeah. I would say maybe that's the wrong term. Gave people something they understood. Understood. And you build them a path. So we should have serverless. Yeah, that's a great idea. I've had two instances in my life professionally where I went into some Microsoft event and meeting and then I didn't understand anything they said. And one of them was, what do you call it, quantum computing, which I couldn't explain that right now. My life depended on it. Feynman had this right. If you understand quantum computing, it's because you don't understand it. You're wrong. Right, right. But the other one was Windows Azure. And the day they announced it, I sat in the audience and said, probably not Ignite, what do you call it, Microsoft? PDC. Oh, PDC, okay. Not Tech, but PDC. Okay, PDC, fair enough. And I was like, wow, that was a virtual void of mind. And I walked out of the room, and they had some PR people there, and they were like, hey, we're going to have like a press-only thing, you know, 20, 50 people, an hour or more. If you have any questions. I'm like, I have nothing but questions. And I sat through that thing, and I came out and saw the same woman. She said, how'd it go? I'm like, yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about. So you were still nice enough now to say, and I'm pretty sure you don't even. Yeah, I don't think anyone here knows. But the one thing they said, this wasn't at the announcement, but as Windows Azure wound its way through development, They got to the point where they were going to release it, but they didn't know what to charge for it. So what they said, they basically were going to the same model they're doing here with GitHub Copilot, which was we're going to go to a usage-based billing model. We don't actually know if this is fair, if anyone will even like it. So what we're going to do is for, I think it was for three months, some number of months, we're going to send you a pretend bill. So you use it. Well, it's free. It's still in pre-production, whatever. And we're going to send you a bill as if you were paying for it. And then you can see what that bill is, and you can tell us if it's okay. And they're literally going to do this for GitHub Copilot. So I think it's in May, customers on, you know, these are paid plans, obviously, will get a pretend bill, which they can go look at, and then they can understand, based on their usage, that, you know, maybe they were paying, what is it, 20 bucks a month probably for the pro version as an individual. You can look at that bill, and look, if you don't use it a lot, maybe it will be less. I think for a lot of people it's going to be a little bit more, but, you know, we're going to find out. And then you start assessing value, right? Right, that's right. I've got friends with multiple Anthropic $200 max accounts. I was just going to reference this. Exactly. You were literally saying it was $1,000 they paid. Yeah. So as a person, not as a professional developer or an infrastructure guy, when I hear about a $200 anything, whether it's GPT, Anthropic Cloud, GitHub Cloud, I think it has something like this probably, whatever it is, I'm like, $200 a month. Are you kidding me? That's a car payment. That's crazy. But you know what? If you're a professional developer or whatever it is, this is like, come on, this is the cost of doing business. That's no problem. Well, you've now had enough time that this is your workflow and you're wildly productive. You've seen it work and you're like, no, $200 a month is no problem. So, you know, we'll see. I mean, again, for me as an individual, it's a problem. But I get it. Like, you know, I think this is a – we'll see. I'm really curious to see where this goes and what bills look like. You know, I don't know how transparent Microsoft will be, but you'll hear from customers and things. And we'll find out. It's going to be kind of interesting. So that starts June 1, but then in May, you'll get a pretend bill, and you can see what it'll look like. We'll see. I'm just mentioning this for the humor factor, but OpenAI is apparently working on a phone. So through our earlier conversation, great. I'm pretty sure they bought Johnny Ive and his company, whatever it's going to be called because they can't keep the name, I guess. But whatever it is. And I believe there's some period of time where they can't, in fact, release a product. But that's okay because this isn't going to enter mass production until at least two years from now. It's not, you know, instead of apps, it's going to be AI agents. It's the whole nightmare that everyone who hates AI feared this happening. It's happening. It's obviously happening. And okay. I mean, whatever. Have fun with that. Obviously, it's going to have to be Android-based, right? I mean, like, I, yeah, but with no App Store, because why would you need an App Store when you have agents? Let's ask Amazon. Amazon, why would you need, oh, that's why. That's why, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we'll see. I think the big bet here is that we see this product, see it all night a day. I know. Well, so we talked about this a little bit earlier for whatever reason, but the notion of you have AI, it could be running in the cloud, it could be running locally, it doesn't matter. It's on a computer, it's on a phone, it doesn't matter. you have apps and you have online services and they're connectors of whatever types. And we have these kind of what I would call a modern version of screenscaping for those apps that are not compliant with whatever standards we have now. I mean, there's ways to get data in and out of apps, et cetera. Yeah. The bet here is that this will be a lot more seamless and cloud-based than it is today. And that it's going to require a mindset change on the part of users. And this is something, again, this is oddly something Microsoft has been trying to do for at least three decades, which is get people to stop thinking about apps and thinking about what it is they're trying to accomplish, right? This was the document-based UI in Windows 95. It was the people-centric UI in Windows Phone. And, you know, the brands that make the apps and the services do not want this, right? They want, you know, in other words, you're not editing a photo. You're running Photoshop. You know, they want you to think app first. If I can sell Photoshop. Yeah. Yeah, but OpenAI, and I think other companies too, are kind of counting on a mind shift change, which by the way speaks to the natural language thing, and we'll talk about how this works in the creative market in a second, but this notion of some of these tools are complex. I may not want to learn them. I may not be able to learn them. I may not be paying for them, whatever it might be, whatever it is. But I know what I want to do. I want to remove the red eye from a photo. I want to take that person out of the corner of the photo, or I want to edit a document or whatever it is, and I want it to be whatever font. I want it to match our branding and our whatever style guide we have, et cetera, et cetera. You know, today, those things all require someone to know the tool and where the options are and how to use them and all that kind of stuff. And the idea here is actually very appealing, even though it's very different, which is just tell it what you want and just does it, and you don't care what it uses on the back end. If it's using Adobe Photoshop, fantastic. If it's not, fantastic. Who cares? As long as it does nothing you're asking for. So I'm not saying this isn't going to work. I'm just saying this mind shift change has never worked in the real world yet. It doesn't mean it can't. And maybe AI is the thing that does put that over the top. Maybe. You've got to make the product first. And let's face it, if that product was going to work, wouldn't it have already? Because I've got ChatGPT, I can put Perplexity, I can put any of these tools on my phone, and then notice I'm not using any apps. So I mentioned this. This year I'd like to figure out the video game thing. One of the other things I want to figure out, I think it's like a focus month. Like sometimes this year it won't be May, but sometimes this year I do want to kind of figure out some set of tasks where I can automate something and reduce the time and the drudgery and whatever. You know, like right now I use whatever apps I use to, I have a photo or an image, whatever it is. I crop it, resize it, post it onto my site. Is there some AI workflow that does exactly that and works as good or better than the manual process I'm doing now? The answer is almost certainly yes, by the way. And that's what they're betting on, right, that this will be true across the board. This is Star Trek. It's what Leo's doing, actually. You're talking to the AI, and it's doing the thing you ask it to do. I've actually not got the holodeck working downstairs. You know what you are is you're like the guy. You're in a wagon going across the country. You have no idea what's out there, but you have a dream, and eventually we're going to have California. And, you know, like right now, maybe you're the Donner party. People are going to die of death. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, be feasting on leg of Paul. Basically. Like a Paul. Ooh, nicely marveled. No, but, I mean, we need the pioneers, right? Yeah, you can't have a revolution without a Donner party. That's right. Sooner is in the bed. Blood will be spilled. So we'll see. Anyway, that's the vision. And without even knowing the pride, who cares? and it's at least two years away. But I think there's something to it. I have to say, the notion that people today, and Leo does, and some others do, and it will get better, they can just talk and it does the thing and it works. And, you know, you have to have enough experience with it where you stop thinking about it, it just does it, and you're like, my God, this just works. And then we're going to look back at what we're doing right now or 10 years ago or 50 years ago, whatever it is, and be like, wow. It's going to be like, I cannot believe we used to dot, dot, dot. And right now we're saying, I can't believe in the future we're going to dot, dot, dot. But, you know, that's how life works. Some of this is my own timing as I age. I want to kind of have this in place when my memory starts to fail so I can have a little help. Right now. Right. I think I made this comparison on a previous show, but it's like in the show Veep, the guy whispering into her ear. Yes, that's the guy. I want my bag man. Yes. Yes, that's one of the roles AI will provide because we go out in the world here, we know people, we don't remember people's names. I have to remember dogs' names. I'm mad at this. I have a notion note for all this. I don't remember things like that. Is it a crazy idea, though, to think that? I think it's just an augmenter of some kind. Of course it is. In other words, when I see a person I recognize and I know them, and I immediately have warm feelings for them because I know them, and we exchange whatever pleasantries. And this thing can be like, by the way, his birthday is tomorrow. Exactly. I'm sorry, but that's undeniably useful. Now, in the beginning, it's going to require stupid glasses. Eventually, it will be some kind of an implant. Whatever. I'll be there ready, though. You have the flower that skirts water out of it, but also is recording everything. Whatever it is, whatever the form is, it's going to wobble. Undeniably useful. That's all. I think glasses are a good form, actually. Yeah, but they're also an interim form, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't know what it will finally be. I say that having spent, like, you put a contact in, it's backwards, take it out, reverse, put it in, it's backwards, reverse, put it back. Like, what's happening? So maybe glasses are actually the best form. I don't know. Yeah. You're right. Smart contact lenses might be. That will be a step. There's no doubt about it. It will be a hearing aid type thing. He was all over this. Yes, he sure is. I've been trying to get it on the show. AirPods will do this, right? Yeah. Now that we made it acceptable to wear earbuds in public and actually by the way not only acceptable but preferable to idiot on his phone watching a video or having a call where everyone in the restaurant gets to enjoy this right It actually better that you wear earbuds We've made it socially acceptable, so that will be part of it too, right? There's no doubt Apple will come up with something if they ever figure it out. Anyway. Well, they're certainly going to announce something at the WWDC in about a month. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, they're the most likely I think, company to try something like this. Of course. Oh, my God. In the home and then just generally for consumers who are out in the world, right? But we don't know if they'll do what we need. We just know that they'll be trying for sure. This is the future. Yep. I think you're right. All right. A little – That's a little wrap. I'm sorry. Just too quickly. Sorry. There's just two more. They're related. Adobe released their Firefly AI assistant in some kind of a public beta. So if you were waiting on that, that's there. and this is that describe what you want, and it works across the apps in Creative Suite. So, you know, if you're a creator type, you use these apps, you pay for this thing. There it is. And we'll see. And, you know, I think a lot of that workflow is going to be heavy app-based in the beginning, but will become more and more of the conversational thing. We'll see, you know, we'll see where that goes. And then Anthropic about 10 days ago announced, I don't think, did they call it cloud creator design? Yeah, which is a capability for cloud where it can create design assets for creators, right, which is really cool. Today they announced just a long list of partners. It's like Affinity, Adobe, Autodesk, Blender, like across the board, connectors so that those things can work with cloud, right, so you can go in either direction. In some cases, like in Blender, there's going to be a cloud plug-in in the app where it's there. You're going to be able to do it. It's a cloud, right? Cloud, I'm sorry. I don't know how to pronounce this. It's not cloud. Look, I still say P-interested. You've got to understand, I'm never going to get this name right. Cloud. Cloud. Is it cloud or clod? It's clod. C-L-O-D. C-L-O-D. C-L-O-D. That's a terrible word for an AI. Anyway, well, you know, the new model from OpenAI is called Spud. So, okay. There's that. We're going to use it to grow plants on Mars. Okay, Spud. Yes, exactly. Whatever. Spud. Like Spud Webb, the little guy that played basketball that could dunk. Right. Spud the dog. Oh, Spud. Right. Isn't it the Budweiser? No, that was Spud. What was that dog's name? Was it Spud? It attacks Paul's brain. I know, geez. I can't hold on to things I know. Spud's McKenzie. Spud's McKenzie. There you go. Spud's. Hilarious. Yeah, eventually we'll have a Budweiser AI, and they'll probably be Spud's. It'll be a Frontier model. God knows. It will hallucinate a lot because it's drunk all the time. Actually, I did get an email from him. He said, could you tell Paul I have to call it cloud? This is like calling someone's parent. I know. I get the emails. You know, you really ought to tell Steve that not at all. It's like, you know he's available on the Internet, too. Well, interestingly, one of my tips today is based on an email just like that. So we'll go in the opposite direction. Okay. Anyway, so 50-plus tools across all these major apps. So, look, this is the thing we were just talking about. This is it happening in the creative space. It's exciting. Yep. Now it's time to prepare yourself because the back of the book is coming up. But before we do that, ladies and gentlemen, Paul Farratt, Richard Campbell, you're listening to Windows Weekly, and it's time for the Xbox segment. Paul? Yeah, how are we doing on time? I'm going to try to rant. I'll try to rant. I want to go too long. I always feel like I'm short-sticking. No pressure. I'm going to spend six of it doing this. You should never do radio, man. Exactly. It was, man, that network clock. We've all done the thing where you're sitting on stage and there's a little timer down there. It's hard. You know, this stuff's hard. By the way, Alphabet and Amazon just announced earnings. fantastic. Oh, yes. Today, Microsoft Meta and the Alphabet. Yep. The rest of my days is what I just saw. Okay, fantastic. So, big news out of Microsoft last week, or out of Xbox, I guess Microsoft Gaming, part of the return of Xbox was not just a phrase. Asha Sharma announced that the Xbox as a business, or, sorry, Microsoft Gaming, which is the overreaching business for all this stuff, will be renamed, rebranded to Xbox, which I think a lot of us are like, yeah, nice. That's what it should be, right? And, you know, they're saying all the right happy words are on Xbox. The one thing I really like is how vocal they're being and how public they are. Asher Sharma and then Matt Booty, who I think is like the chief content officer of Xbox, right? He's the guy who's been around for a long time. He's been around almost 20 years, I think, are just talking to everybody and just saying all the right things. I mean, obviously, there's certain things they can't say. A lot of people are asking about exclusives. And it's like, well, we're talking about it. I don't think the endgame is that too much changes, but they're doing what Windows is doing with this pain point thing in Windows 11, which is like, look, we hear you. We're going to address this stuff. You know, they lowered the price of Game Pass, et cetera. They're making a lot of good noises. I like how vocal these guys are being and how positive the news is. It's been nice. We've had a couple of really rough years with Xbox, and I'm not blaming Phil Spencer or anybody who ran that part of the business at the time, But it's really neat that, like, you know, Asha Schaumbel is kind of an unknown. She came in and everyone was like, what's going on? Are they winding it down? Is that what this is? Like they want her to fail? No, it's very clear. This is a big thing for Microsoft. They want this to succeed. It's awesome what's happening. So I'll just leave it at that for now. Among the things that people have asked her about is Microsoft two years ago, I think, back when the antitrust stuff with the App Store started happening with Apple and, of course, Google as well. So Microsoft started saying, yeah, we're going to put an Xbox mobile game store on iOS and Android, and then they never did. So the deal there is she's like, look, I just walked into the job two minutes ago. Give me a second, but this is still on the table. We still want to do this. A lot of it's going to be based on whether enough regulators around the world reign in these app stores, and I think they will. So the plan still is to have some form of Xbox mobile game store on mobile. So there's that. I think it was November, but maybe December, whenever it was, Valve announced this new Steam computer. It's a Steam, not Steam Deck, but like the Steam machine. Yeah. Called the Gabe Cube. Yeah. The first thing I thought, you know, was I noticed, I'm like, you guys never mentioned how much this is going to cost or when it's coming out, and then they never released it. But they just announced the big peripheral for this thing, which will still work with other things as well. it's kind of a first-class peripheral for any platform, really, is the Steam controller. And if you were worried that these things were going to be expensive, you were right, because this thing's going to be $99. Wow, for a controller. Oh. Yep. So a list price on a standard Xbox wireless controller these days is probably $69.99. You can often get them for $59.99 or less, you know, the thing on sales and stuff. So, yeah, that's expensive. it has the two sticks and all the buttons and all the you know the D-pad blah blah blah but it also has two yeah but below those sticks are two track pads one on each side right? Yeah touch pads and that's interesting very well placed to be bumped accidentally by your thumbs while you're on the sticks based on my inherent clumsiness and my problems typing you know this would probably be me shooting myself on the head in Call of Duty a lot or whatever the equivalent is, but it's interesting. So $99. I mean, I would be shocked if the Steam machine came in at anything under $1,000, frankly. $1,000. But honest to goodness, I was thinking, you know, the next Xbox is going to be in that price range, too. Now, they're making happy noises that it won't be because one of the core tenets of this new Xbox, so to speak, is that things will be affordable. Now, this is a razor, razor blade kind of situation. Maybe 2028 and the RAM crisis will be over. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's going to be. Yeah. We'll see. So we'll see. Yeah. We'll see. All right. See, you've got it done in five minutes. You mowed that down, Fred. You mowed it down. I had incentive. I had incentive. You just want to hear about Prohibition. That's right. Yeah, whiskey is around the corner. Unfortunately, I'm probably going to be writing an article about someone's earnings. But, yeah. Yeah, well, Microsoft earnings just around the corner. Probably right about now, right? I know, that's what I'm looking at. Is it out? Oh, cheers. All right, you look at that while I tell everybody why. It's so important to support this kind of independent content, right? Podcasting is really a miracle. It's RSS, so we can't spy on you. Can't say that about, you know, Spotify or Audible or Amazon or anybody else that requires you to use a special app. We don't have that information. We don't want that information. It's also independent because we're not owned by a big company, which means we can tell the truth. We're not beholden to anybody. And everybody who works at Twit is very careful to protect their independence because we know that's important to you. Our integrity is important to you. We'd like your support. Now, yes, we have ads. You know, I mean, just between you and me. If we didn't have to, I wouldn't. I'd be glad to get rid of the ads. But to do that, we need your support. To actually keep doing what we're doing, we need your support. Ads only cover about 70% of our operating costs. So help us out a little bit. Twit.tv slash club. Twit. Show your support for independent, high-integrity tech journalism. That's what we do. We're very proud of it. We want to keep doing it. $10 a month gets you ad-free versions of everything we do. No ads for you. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord. Smart people hanging out, talking about everything we care about. It's the place where the geeks go. We also have special programming we don't do anywhere else. Micah's Crafting Corner, our AI user group. I'm actually really thinking about making that every other week at this point because there's so much going on in AI. We've got Stacey's Book Club scheduled for next month, a couple of weeks from now. Great book. That should be fun. The Photo Corner, also coming up next month with Chris Marquardt. There's a whole lot of stuff that goes on in the club, and we'd love to have you there for it. Twit.tv slash club. If you're not a member, join. Join. It helps us a lot, and it supports the kind of programming we do. And if you care about that, then join the club. That's all I'll say. Now, it's time for the back of the book. Paul Thorat's going to kick us off with his tip of the week, Mr. T. Yeah, so I had a Twit listener. I think it was MacBreakWeekly. He described it as a Mac OS feature, but there's a Mac app or solution called UTM, which is one of several ways to run virtual machines on a Mac. This is a little problematic under Apple Silicon for whatever reasons, but most people have heard probably of Parallels Desktop, which is the big way, but it's paid and you pay every year, so it's kind of a problem. And then I think VMware still makes Fusion on the Mac, but I haven't looked at that in a while. But the question had come up, like, one of the problems is you can't, like, buy, like, Windows 10 on ARM, you know, Windows 11 on ARM, sorry. And, you know, in Parallels, they offer, like, a push-through thing where it goes to whatever online store. But the thing is, the two things you need to know are, if you buy this officially, what you're buying is a Windows product key, and a Windows 11 product key works on x64 or ARM. So you could just buy it. You could buy it from Microsoft directly. You could find a store that sells it. You could buy it there. It doesn't matter how you get it. But what you're getting is a product key, and you can enter that in Windows running virtually on a Mac or wherever, and it will work. It will activate, and it'll be fine. So you can do that. That's one thing. The other one is, yeah, don't do that. So I have my MacBook Air here. I don't remember if I did this right after I got here or right before I came here, but I did reinstall everything. I was trying to just use the Mac by itself without Parallels. There's a couple of Windows things I really need, so I did eventually reinstall Parallels. And the one thing I've been doing on this trip was I just didn't pay for it. I mean, I actually have product keys I could use. I have paid for Windows if I wanted to. I kind of wanted to see how long it would go. And every once in a while, it's like, hey, you should activate this. I'm like, all right, close, and I don't do it. And it works fine. It's fine. Now, if you're running apps full screen or if you're running in a virtual environment, you will actually have a not activated watermark, which is not great. I just run the apps in whatever it's called, coherence, and so I don't see this. I don't really care. Do not buy this thing from Microsoft and pay $200 or whatever the price is. There are product keys everywhere, and this is like the argument I made about Spotify. If it was illegal, Paul, the EU would step in and prevent it. But you can go – I have bought product keys myself from productkeys.com, game card shop, show when in office is one. You can get a valid Windows 11 Pro license fee for as little as $9.99. Do that. Because, by the way, let's say a year from now it falls apart, somehow it stops working. You only pay $10. Don't worry about it. Who cares? Like, that's all. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You can tell them Paul sent you. No, don't do that. The other thing, well, so that was a listener, I guess, wrote in. But just yesterday, Microsoft released PowerToys 0.99. Someday, 1.0, baby. It actually has two new utilities, and both of these are awesome. One is called PowerDisplay. If you enable it, it puts a little monitor-looking icon down in the tray, and it allows you to control the features of multiple displays without having to go into the settings app, which is actually kind of a pain in the butt, by the way. So this is especially, this is useful for anybody, but if you have multiple monitors, like on this system, the three, you can adjust the volume, the brightness, contrast, color profile, and other features just from a little flyout. You select the monitor, and it has the features right there. Awesome. So that's cool. The other one, this is interesting how people have described this. The other one is called grab and move. And what you basically do is a keyboard shortcut, and then you can grab any window running in Windows, like an app or whatever window, And you can move it around. And so people see this like, oh, Linux has had that for 20 years or whatever. And it's like, yeah, but that's not actually why this thing exists. If you are familiar with Windows, you can do this yourself right now, unless you have installed something that overrides this. For literally getting back, I think, 30 years, there's a keyword shortcut called Alt Space that brings down the window menu of any application, including modern applications. And there's some options in there. You can close it, minimize it, whatever. But one of the options is move. And if you select move, there's a submenu. No, I'm sorry. No, it just puts it in move mode. And then you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move that window around the screen. Oh, that's nice. Because dragging is so. Well, the reason this is good to know is because you can have an app window that's slightly off screen, especially in a multi-screen environment, by the way, where you're like, I can't grab the thing and move it. It's off screen, like the title bar is off screen, so I can't even access that thing. So if you know this keyboard shortcut, you just do alt-space and then move the arrow keys and then you can move it around. Except in modern days, there are multiple apps, including some built into Windows, that actually override this by default. So one example is Copilot. Copilot seizes the alt-space keyboard shortcut. If you install PowerToys, ironically, there is a utility that is sort of a start menu replacement that I've just zoned on the name of. It doesn't matter. But anyway, it by default overrides that keyboard shortcut as well. So for people that are using something that overrides this, this is another way to do it, right? So it's the same thing. It's a way to grab the menu and then move it around by holding down a key. I think it's like Alt plus right click by default or whatever. But you can map it to something else, which is good. And this is kind of a way for these things to work in harmony. So the point of this is you always have a way to move a window, even if you can't select the title bar or the window. Right. So super good. And then a bunch of improvements across several of the utility. Oh, Windows Command Palette is the name of the thing I couldn't think of. That thing picked up a clock and a calculator history and a lot of other features. Keyboard Manager, which is awesome, especially if you want to kill the co-pilot key, which I always do. ZoomIt, which is the Mark Brzenovich utility. Imagery size, et cetera. This is like a giant release. Strongly, strongly recommend anyone using Windows uses Power Toys, and it just got better. Nice. Love Power Toys. Awesome. Good stuff. Now it's time for Mr. Richard Campbell and our run as a radio. I'm going to mute myself. I apologize. I'm going to try to work. Yeah, yeah. You know what? Before we do whiskey, because I already promised at the beginning of the show that Paul would not say anything of importance. Oh, I'm going to mute myself right now. I won't say anything important until Friday. No, no, no. We have earnings palooza. Paul will give us just a little summary after the run is radio before we go into whiskey. So if you can, just a little, you know, I noticed Microsoft stock is going down. I thought seven minutes was a problem. You're talking like two minutes now. You're going to have two minutes after Richard. And then he will hold his piece until next Wednesday. Okay? Fair enough. Don't hold it too tight. All right. Now, Richard, I may have made a mistake with this show because I actually recorded this show at the end of February. This is my friend Sharon Weaver, who has been in the consulting business for years and years, SharePoint and M365 and so forth, and has always been an advocate for M365 Co-Pilot. But then she took Claude Co-Workout first back in January and just said, like, this is what you were wanting from M365 Copilot when it came to stuff like Excel and PowerPoint. And so it's like, well, let's talk about it. And, you know, we actually got dug into this idea of I think Microsoft's trying to do too much. You have all these different groups inside of the Excel team all trying to make their contribution. And so in some ways doing everything meant nothing worked. where with Cod Copilot, their approach to their Excel co-work tool was, you know, here's the six things lots of people need to do, and it does those things really well. Like just the layout, ability to tweak the look of your sheet, you know, move things around and so forth, incredibly impressive. So we were very wowed. And I probably should have put this out a few weeks ago because, of course, Microsoft has had the response of working with Anthropic immediately, and we just had last week the announcement about agentic AI for Excel. Things move so fast in AI, you know? Well, and you do. And I remember debating at the time, it's like, I don't know how quick to drop this show. You know, I had a certain number of things already ready. I clearly held on to it longer than I needed to. But it's a great conversation with someone very knowledgeable. Yeah, there's good information in here. Yeah. Yeah. And just, you know, if you haven't taken co-workout for a spin, you probably should. It's impressive. And it also speaks to the advantage of being arm's length from a product. In fact, like, they didn't have the ability to talk to the product team about how to do stuff. What they did was talk to the users, talk to people who use Excel and say, you know, what can I do that will make the most difference for you? And that's clearly the direction they went in. And I understand, you know, the success of CoWork hit the Microsoft people very hard, and they are very much taking the same viewpoint now of we just got to focus on the brass tacks, the things that matter the most. So, in one sense, I'm really excited there's competition in this space. because it will definitely make better products all around. But on the other point, we've been talking about this for a while. Anthropic seems to be running away with this. They're clearly using their tools to build more software and more tooling that is beneficial than just about anybody else. Cool. That's impressive. All right, we have whiskey. We are going to do whiskey. We do, and it's a fun one. Yeah. Before we do that, Paul's typing furiously. Weeding, Paul. So before we do that, we're going to just get a quick top line because this is earnings palooza today. Microsoft, Meta, and Google all announced earnings today. Tomorrow, Apple. So it's crazy. And we will talk about this in more detail next week once the earnings, learnings become apparent. But just top line. Top line, $31.8 billion in net income on $83 billion, I'll call it, in revenue. Those are both double digits against 23% and 18% respectively. You know, then they get the fake, you know, like, our AI business surpassed in the annual revenue run rate. Who cares? That's, you know, it's easier. Annual revenue run rate, you know. Fake, fake, fake. And we lie. Yeah, lie, lie, lie. Anyway, CapEx spending did go down sequentially quarter over quarter. That was $31 billion. It was $37.5 billion in the previous quarter. They did indicate that that was going to be the case. The thing you actually compare that to is a year ago, and it's double the number a year ago. So it's still up. I haven't had time to look at the individual businesses, but since this is Windows Weekly, I just look at more personal computing real quick. Windows OEM revenue declined 2%. Yeah, let's not look at that. So they need a lot of money, and I need more time. Yeah, take your time. We don't want to rush you. There's lots to know. Yeah, there's lots to know. And, again, these are obfuscating documents, truly. Yeah, it's a wild appeal. Do you ever feed this to an AI just to say, hey, analyze this? Leo, I'm going to ask you the question. I ask everyone who asks me a question like that, which is, why would I want to save time and money? I mean, I'm not saying it's stupid. Are you serious? I don't know. He's probably pretty good at analyzing questions. No, of course. Yeah. Right. He does corporate speak very well. He does. It's got a lot of it. Especially when you want to do comparisons over a long period of time and you can look up that. That would be smart. Next week. No. Next week. We didn't have time. It just came out. Right. It just dropped. It's unfair. They should drop this up on a Thursday. And in about 18 minutes, we are going to have the founder of Framework, Nirav Patel, on intelligent machines. But that gives us 18 minutes to talk about brown liquor. Yeah. Time for a whiskey pick. Well, I'm back in Canada, so of course I pick a Canadian whiskey. And I've been meaning to talk about this one particular one for a while. This is the Rifle Rye. Great name. They've got their own webpage, riflerye.com, which is sweet, because it's actually Alberta distillers. And we've talked about Alberta distillers before, so I'm kind of cheating here in the sense that, you know, there's so many other distilleries talking about. Why would I go back to this one? It was 939, so about a year ago, that we talked about rare batch, Rare old batch number one from Alberta Distillers. Although Alberta Stills makes all kinds of things, including a bunch of American stuff. They're obviously based in Alberta. They're just outside of Calgary. Currently, they started in 1946, went through a bunch of different acquisitions. Today, they're part of the Suntory Global Spirits brand. And this is a large-scale, bespoke operation. If you want to make booze, you can call these guys. They have a bunch of their own brands. They make a bunch of different vodkas. They make a ton of different whiskeys, which Rifle is one of them, and also manufacture for other brands, including guys like Whistlepick. What they're famous for is making 100% ryes, and we've talked about this before, that making straight ryes are very, very difficult. It's a difficult grain to work with. It's expensive. It's sticky. It has a lot more polysaccharides in it, and so the way you solve this problem is what Alberta Distillers has done is you employ some microbiologists who literally optimize a kind of enzyme, they call it a purified enzyme, as Shannon Thomas, so that they can properly digest the rye to be able to process it better. And that's their business all around. Now, I want to talk specifically about the Rifle Rye because George Rifle was one of the founders of Alberta Distillers back in 1946. And that's where the name obviously comes from, although he had nothing to do with it because he passed away before this actually happened. But the story of the Rifle family is kind of epic. So we've got to go back to George's grandfather, Henry Rifle, who arrives in Vancouver in 1888 at the age of 19 with his brothers Jack and Conrad. They're German immigrants from the area around Bavaria, beer-making families. And they actually landed in San Francisco first, missing the end of the gold rush. And they worked in breweries there and then moved up to Portland and were working breweries there. By the time they get to Vancouver, they think they can open their own brewery. So they opened a brewery at 11th and Main. And this is in the late 1800s. They called the San Francisco Brewery. Clever. It doesn't go well for them. I mean, they were in the right location. There used to be a creek running down 11th that's all been covered over now. The city has grown a lot since then. But there was Brewer Row then. And so they go broke. The other brothers got out of the biz entirely. But Henry goes. He thinks he knows what he's doing. He gets back into it again. He creates a company called the Canadian Brewing and Malting Company and does very well for himself. Until World War I. There's a couple of problems with World War I. The first was he was a German immigrant. And World War I, he was on the wrong side at that point. So he had problems there. But also, in 1917, British Columbia brought in alcohol prohibition. And so being a beer maker was a problem. And Henry, recognizing he was struggling to be in Canada anyway as an immigrant, and his business was jeopardized, grabbed his son, George, not this George. This would be the father of the George we're talking about. We'll call this one George C. It was the middle name. It starts with C. And they went to Japan and founded a company called the Anglo-Japanese Brewing Company and started making beer in Japan. They even learned how to malt against rice. They learned a bunch of other things. But in 1921, Prohibition is repealed in B.C. And he still has a bunch of family there. So he sells off that business and comes back to Vancouver. And Prohibition is still in full swing in the U.S. So, you know, loaded with cash and experience, they set up a new set of breweries, but they also buy a distillery in Westminster, and their operations are in an area called Delta. This is along the Fraser River, and it's called Delta because it's literally the delta of the Fraser, which breaks into a number of arms. And so they have this big piece of land along Waltham Island that's all marshlands, which is ideally set up for rum running. Now, today that area is known as the George C. Rifle Migratory Bird Sanctuary. When they got out of the biz, they then donated the land to the government to protect birds. But it's a good bird sanctuary because it was full of plants and things and good at hiding the illegal shipping that they were doing. So they've got this big distillery. They're producing a lot of whiskey. Their largest ship was called the Malahat. And it could carry 100,000 cases of liquor. And so they'd go out of this big ship down to near California, Mexico area, about 12 miles offshore. So they're outside of the legal limits. And then smaller boats would come out, load up with them, and then smuggle in. They made a huge fortune, just a pile of money running in this. Until, of course, 1933, when Prohibition has ended. And then wisely, they get out of the business. They were being investigated by all sorts of governments. And so the moment the business model didn't make sense, they got rid of everything and just settled down. Now, in the meantime, they made so much money, they built this phenomenal mansion in the wealthy area of town. For folks who are from Vancouver, the Rifle family built the Commodore Ballroom and the Vogue Theatre along Granville Street, which are two landmarks in the city. And it seems like the research I was able to do, the Canadian government largely backed away. was just like, we're not in this business anymore. It's not us at all. But in 1934, when the rifles were in the U.S. for a visit, they were arrested by the government and charged with smuggling. The indictment included a charge for $17.25 million in 1934. They were required. They were offered a bond at $250,000 and negotiated that down to $100,000 each and then immediately went back to Canada with no intent to go back to the U.S. at all. but then negotiated a deal with the U.S. government to settle, giving up their $200,000 worth of bond, plus an additional half a million dollars to settle out of court. So pretty good deal for them all around. And George C. then had his son back in 1922, which is George H., and that's the George of Rifle Rye. And he's also the guy who founded Alberta Stillers in 1946 and passed away in 1992. So, you know, lived to the rifle at the age of 70. This was launched in 2022, so 30 years after George passed away. And let's talk about how this works. If you look at the website, you will notice that they talk about a classic cocktail with rifle, right? Known as rifle on the Rockies, which is to say on ice. Very clever. So I got a big ice cube here and a big glass and I'll pour a little rifle into it. It is 100%. It's just rye whiskey on ice. It's rye on ice. It's properly made. Hmm. So, no mash bill, right? That's an American thing. The way they make this is they make pure 100% rye distillate. That's what Alberta Distills is known for. They age it in UI coat and ex-bourbon casks. But then they blend it. So what's actually in the bottle is 91% of that rye distillate. but also 6% Old Grandad Bourbon and 3% Oloroso Sherry. Not aged in those barrels, actually the liquids. That's a weird mix. Well, remember when we did the Canadian whiskey story back in the day and I talked about the 111th rule? Yeah. Well, the 111th rule means that up to 9.09% of a Canadian whiskey can be anything else. And so if you do the math, 6% Old Grandad, 3% Sherry is still under 9.09. So this is a Canadian whiskey by the rules. Now, this is not the first time that a bird has distilled this. They have, back in 2015, they released something called Alberta Rye Dark Batch, which is exactly that same ratio with 6% Old Grandad, 3% Oloroso Sherry. And interestingly enough, Old Grandad bourbon, owned by Centauri, And they don't, now Sontari doesn't own any sherry bodegas, but they do have operations in Spain for wine and distribution, so they have a good deal to be able to put this all together. And, yeah, so it's, you'll only make this in Canada. Nobody else would do this, right? It's only because of that rule that you have this option to simply add things to it. And I tell you, you can taste it. There's definitely, like, a sense of the sweetness of bourbon. It's not that spicy. The relationship that most people have with rye is in bourbon, which is mostly corn, a little bit of barley for the amylase, and then in between will be a flavor grain, and that flavor grain most of the time is rye. And we talk about the rye being the spiciness. Well, that doesn't happen here. It's a very light, drinking, easy Canadian whiskey to drink, right? And by the way, it is a Canadian rye whiskey. But according to the rules of Canada, there doesn't have to be any rye in a rye whiskey. There happens to be rye in this one, but it's not a requirement. And it begs the question, like, how did we get to this situation? And the reality is that during the U.S. prohibition destroyed their rye market entirely, and the Canadians continued to produce rye the whole time because the different provinces had prohibition at different times. And so by the time prohibition ends in the U.S., there's nobody left that makes rye down there. It's made a comeback now. We've talked about that. And so generally speaking, people associated rye with Canada anyway. So Canada just started putting rye on everything and never made a requirement. There actually has to be rye in it. The idea of 100% rye is very weird. Again, we've talked about this a number of times, and they do have that problem solved. It's not a requirement, nor is it a requirement to only have Canadian whiskey in your whiskey up to 9.09%. This is $50 Canadian. It's about $35 U.S., and yes, it is available in the U.S., but only spotty. The big dealers don't handle this. You'll have to look around for it. But at that price, it kind of go wrong. It's 40%, 2% ABV. It's eminently drinkable. And do you taste the sherry? I mean, it's weird to have... No, 3% is barely there, right? Probably the same kind of roughly that you'd get from a sherry barrel, you think? Yeah. And the original excuse for the 111th rule was that the Canadian distillers were having a tough time buying the sherry barrels because they were largely locked up. You know, Scott's kind of had that tied up. So it was like, hey, can we just add a little sherry? Because in the end, it's not what you're doing when you put it in a sherry barrel anyway. Right. Yeah, okay. But only up to 1 11th. How about that? Okay. And what does the old granddad bring to it? Smoothness? Yeah, and a little more sweetness, too. Sweetness. You know, that's got corn in it. Yeah. Yeah, and it's a bit more mature. Like, this is probably only, the rye is probably three years old. Like, with the exception of that one that I talked about on 939, which was a 20-year-old rye, which is very weird, right? Like, most of the time, these things would be no more than five years old. They're only required to be three. The fact that there's no age declaration on it lets you know there's no way it's much more than three. Well, they're winning enough awards that they're doing something right. I mean, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, you know what? It's a cool drink. No choice about it. But understand, if you've spent time in awards ceremonies and so forth, it's more about how much you spend on the awards programs than necessarily how you get your drink, per se. So, you know, there's some I respect more here than others. But that International Spirits Awards are pretty good. But most of the other ones, like, listen, I've done this in some of my startups, too, where it's like, we need to win some awards. That's hard to pull off. You can figure that out. You know, maybe that's where I've gone wrong. I need some awards. You could just go, you know what, if you went and played ball with some of those podcasts, comments and stuff where they run those awards. We won some awards. Paul and I spent some time back in the day doing conferences where they had, you know, best ofs and so forth. I was there, and it cost a lot of money to be in those things. A shelf of awards, and I threw them all out. And then, unfortunately, the only award I really cared about, my Emmy Award fell off the shelf in the windy day, and it broke. And dies. Because I've trapped it inside my Webby Award. Oh, nice. You pick your Emmy and your Webby. I like that. It's kind of a metaphor about the future of media or something. You can cram them all together. An Emmy trapped in a Webby. Yeah. Richard, excellent job. Paul, don't say a word because we've promised. I got one thing to say. Okay. I won a writing award. It's a big plaque, you know. So 15 years later, my wife won a writing award. And my daughter was like, that's impressive, right? I'm like, yeah. I mean, I won one 15 years ago. And mine's bigger. But, I mean, you know, but good for her. And to be clear, when you win an award like that, especially like an Emmy and stuff, you have to buy the award, right? It's not free. They don't buy it. I had an employer at the time. You know, I don't know how it happened, but. You have to buy to enter those. You have to buy to enter them. They have to pay the awards themselves. They're all so pricey. Somebody entered it, I guess, but, you know. I think the Emmy I won fair and square. I don't know. I don't know about the Webby. You're saying mine's bigger. That's what I'm saying. Mine's dustier. I'll say that. I bet you you could contact the Emmy organization to have that thing remade for you. You can, and you pay for it, just as you said. It's very expensive. They're excited to make a new one. Yeah. They're happy. Very profitable. But I think this is kind of humorous. I think that's super cool. I love it. She's trapped in a prison of a road making. This was like the beginning of Superman, where they're the phantom zone or whatever. Yeah. Absolutely a metaphor for the whole thing. It's carbonite, yeah. New media, carbonite. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this thrilling and gripping edition of Windows Weekly. You will find Richard Campbell at his website, runesradio.com. There's also another great podcast there that he does with Carl Franklin called .NET Rocks. By the way, episode 2000 publishes tomorrow. Wow. That's impressive. Holy cow. He's been doing it longer than anybody. That's really impressive. Well, arguably the longest-running podcast on the planet. You know, certainly a strong candidate. Yeah. It's amazing. Also, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paul Theriot, you see him to my left, to my right on your screen. He's on my left. Never mind. Paul's there in the middle of this Windows release. Actually, the three of us do look like those superheroes from the beginning. Yeah, exactly. I'm the oafish one. Paul is at theriot.com. Become a premium member. You'll get all the goodness. But there's lots of great free content there as well, including, I'm sure, any minute now, his wrap-up of Microsoft's earnings. Oh, sorry. I'm going to get an early look. Yeah. No. Also, his books are at leanpub.com. Although, if you become a premium member, you get the books for free. That includes Windows Everywhere, The Field Guide to Windows 11, and its newest, De-Inchidify Windows. There's a certain kind of arc to that. Yeah, one in the direction. Speaking plainly. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday right around 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC. Club members can watch us in the Club Twit Discord, of course. But everybody's invited to watch live. YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at the website, twit.tv. Video is also available at YouTube.com. There's a dedicated Windows Weekly channel. Good place to share clips because everybody can watch YouTube, right? So you just say, hey, this was good. And we share it. Actually, that's what we do with all of those whiskey segments. We put them. Kevin King, our editor, has done a great job of compiling them. You know, he's not quite up to the present, but he will be. I think we've established Kevin's kind of a slacker. I mean, there's more than 100 there. And the easiest way to get there is somethingweirdfrommycloset.com, Which is a dedicated redirect that brings you to the YouTube playlist. When it works, but yeah. Yeah. Or just go look for it on YouTube. You'll find it. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We really appreciate it. We'll be back here next Wednesday with the full Microsoft Earnings. Yeah. On behalf of Paul and Richard, I'm Leo Laporte. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. On Wednesdays Weekly. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Nameless