Microsoft announces Windows 11, with a new design, Start menu, and more

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Tom Warren discuss the official reveal of Windows 11 at Microsoft's event on Thursday. Further reading: The slow transitions of a lingering pandemic The pandemic made Navajo Nation’s radio stations even more vital India’s healthcare workers are busting misinformation on WhatsApp Microsoft’s own Windows 11 livestream runs into technical difficulties Microsoft announces Windows 11, with a new design, Start menu, and more Microsoft reveals the new Microsoft Store for Windows 11, and it has Android apps too Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11 with Amazon’s app store Here are the visual changes Microsoft showed off in Windows 11 Microsoft teases new File Explorer for Windows 11 Here’s everything Microsoft is removing from Windows 11 Microsoft is changing the Windows 11 minimum requirements Microsoft Teams will be directly integrated as part of Windows 11 Windows 11 is a free upgrade Windows 11’s news feed has built-in tipping to support local content creators Microsoft will let devs keep every penny their Windows app makes — unless it’s a game Satya Nadella’s closing Windows 11 remarks were a direct shot across Apple’s bow Apple argues against sideloading iPhone apps as regulatory pressure mounts Google will now consider letting your video, music or book app evade its 30 percent cut Google delays blocking third-party cookies in Chrome until 2023 Samsung’s Watch Active 4 leaks in new renders Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Z Flip 3 revealed in new leak Apple may be looking to make a less expensive big phone in 2022 Tim Cook called Nancy Pelosi to warn her against disrupting the iPhone with impending antitrust bills Why the tech antitrust reform bills are struggling to move forward Big Tech edges closer to break up after deeply unhinged markup We regret to inform you that T-Mobile is selling a 5G-branded gin Ransomware funds more ransomware Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Tom Warren joins the show. We go through everything that happened at the Windows 11 event, including running Android apps on Windows. That's a big deal. Then we talk a little bit about what's going on with the antitrust bills in Congress. And there's lightning round. Coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of multi-application environments. See, it's my Windows joke. That's my Windows 11 joke. I got, see, Dieter made a noise. I'm Neil. I'm your friend. That's Dieter.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I'm your 19th century continental philosophy expert.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  That's actually true. Like, I just want to be honest that in many ways, that's what you are for me. Tom Warren is here. Hey, Tom.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Hello there. I run Windows apps, Android apps, iOS apps, web apps, everything.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there was a lot of talk about web apps and Android apps at the same time today. Anyway, Tom is here because it's Windows 11 day. We're coming off a sprint of Windows 11 news. Tom literally just came from a meeting with Microsoft talking about Windows 11. He's on the show now. Tons of news about Windows. We'll get to it all. Actually, a lot to talk about. Windows is going to run Android apps. This is a big, big situation. But as always, I want to start to start the pandemic, which is really not quite over around the world. Mary Beth Griggs wrote a great piece for us called "The Slow Transitions of a Lingering Pandemic." Go read that. It lays out kind of where we are, the stutter steps around the world that are coming

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  because it's not quite over yet. So we're still really focused on that. But vaccination in the United States means that it feels over for us, but it's not quite over in many other places around the world, and indeed, many other places in the United States. We always talked about second order effects of the pandemic. We have a great big feature on the radio stations in the Navajo Nation and how they were broadcasting throughout the pandemic and it became more important to the community. That's like, I always think of The Verge as really just being like the movie Pump Up the Volume. So anytime we do like, how important are radio station stories? I love them. That one's great. And then Indian healthcare workers are trying to get a handle on misinformation about COVID in WhatsApp, which is a big problem. We've got a great big story about that. We're trying to do more coverage about just technology in India.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  A lot of what we see there from a regulatory standpoint, from how Facebook is used there, how WhatsApp is used there, feel like previews of what's happening here. We also have a great big audience in India, and we have a great big audience of, obviously, the Indian diaspora in the United States that works in tech. So we're working on it. There's, there's some things there. If you think about how India regulates social media apps, real big previews of some of the things that get talked about here. So we want to explore it more. And so this story about WhatsApp and how healthcare workers are using it to, to fight COVID misinformation are, is, is really interesting. Check it out. Okay. Windows 11, Tom.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  It's been a day. It's a lot of, a lot of Windows 11 today.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Where do I begin? So, I mean, we've talked about this on the verge of before, but there was a lot today. New start menu, new design, Android apps. So should we start from the design?

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  I think we should start with the fact that Microsoft tried to host a live stream. Microsoft, one of the world's biggest cloud computing providers, was not able to execute a live stream for Windows.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Was it Azure? Did, did that fail?

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  I don't think we'll ever know. I just know that eventually Microsoft executives were like tweeting out YouTube links so people could watch this thing.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  All I know is that I, I watched the majority of it through Twitter.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  And I don't typically watch Twitter videos because they crush the compression and everything, but it worked fine through there. But yeah, through Microsoft's own streaming, it was, yeah, it was terrible.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  Not great. So that was kind of the stutter start to the whole thing. Start out with, uh, Penn Aspinay, who's chief product officer for Microsoft. One thing I was not expecting, and this was the frame they put around the whole thing. They were like, oh shit, Windows is important.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that seems to be like the, the thing they realized during the pandemic, essentially.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they were like explicit about it. Pennas was like, damn, I use Windows for a lot.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  I literally just finished speaking to Pennas and he was kind of saying that basically that they obviously went in, started this work on 10x. So the last time they did a surface event in New York, it was dual screen devices. 10x was the, the thing that they were going to do. It's this new version of Windows 10, dual screen devices. And then when the pandemic comes, everyone's rushing out to get laptops and to work from home. Like they, they obviously see way more into the metrics and the telemetry and everything else than we would ever do. But I think their argument is that people are using Windows more and they're not picking up their phones when they're at home. When they're stuck indoors, you know, like you, you, and I know that I'm not like, I'm more glued to my laptop than I've ever been at my desktop.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  And I've ever been before. So I think they've obviously realized that opportunity to then try and keep people glued to those devices. When we, you know, start venturing out into the world and this hybrid workplace. But it's also that they've had to like redesign and rework Windows during that pandemic to then try and guess where people are going to be using it. Like when we start going, trying to get feel back to the office and stuff, which is kind of happening. In a lot of locations now. So it's definitely an interesting time to launch a new version of Windows under that whole era of the pandemic.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  You just talked to Panos, Sachin Adella is on Decoder. By the time you're listening to this, it'll be out. They're coming out at the same time. And he mentioned to me, he said the same thing. He's like, I never had a home office and then I had one and my girls were at home. And he got all the way to, I'm really proud of Windows update and how it works now. And I was like, oh, you were annoyed too. Like, it happened, right? Like, they all stopped using their managed computers at the office in Redmond. All of their executives are at home. And they're like, oh, we can make Windows easier and better to use. And there was just a lot of that, like, throughout this event, they were just kind of explicitly saying it.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  To me, the, the feature that like most clearly shows it is they fixed your Windows flying all over creation. When you plug in a monitor or unplug a monitor, they actually go where they're supposed to and then go back to where they were. And it's like, oh, they actually like are using monitors at home. They're actually using their devices in a multimodal way. They're not just leaving them on their desk at the office. Now they, they finally get it.

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's a little dog food and goes a long way.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  It's like they've all turned into Windows laptop reviewers overnight. They're like this one thing that never really affected me. Oh, man. Does it affect me now?

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So just a remarkable frame for an event that they were, they were honest about. I, I appreciated that. But then there's a lot of changes. So the last time you were on, we were talking about the leaked build. They went farther than the leaks in many ways. What were the big, big changes to UI?

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, because obviously the leak was kind of just scratching the surface. I feel like, like, there was obviously a lot more than, than what we thought was coming. The big sort of visual stuff, design stuff is a new start menu. It's centered. They made a big deal about that. Obviously, they couldn't really avoid it. And it can be put to the left hand side. We know that. But it's centered, new, new start button. The actual start menu itself, when you launch it, is more like a launcher now. I know we talked about this before, but like, it's, it is almost like you're an app Like you'd find on Android, like it's obviously heavily inspired by Android Chrome OS, even macOS, right? Like it kind of matches up to everything now. So it's going to be centered by default.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  You'll get like your search on there, you get pinned apps, your recent documents. It feels just a lot more usable than the current start menu. I know Di likes live tiles. I I read about it on the live blog today.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Look, I will like the new widget system that we'll talk about in a minute better, but there is something useful about having like the original, you know, Windows Phone Dream, like here's this place you go and it has all the stuff you need to launch your apps, but it also like has a little bit of information that it's just nice to see real quick while you're doing the other things. So like, oh, the weather's there. Okay, great. Oh, this is what's playing right now. Okay, great.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  But that's all going away.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all going away. But I feel like at the same way I feel about Android widgets where it's like, if everybody tried really hard to make them and keep them updated, then it would be great. But no one seems to be able to maintain that for more than like three months, you know?

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, like that's obviously going away from the start menu, that live tile thing. And then that is actually being shifted into a separate sort of section, a panel of glass, I think is what they described it as in the event.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  I think Heim said it in chat during the event. There's a lot of Vista vibes.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Through Windows 11, right? Lots of frosted transparency, lots of layers.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  A lot of Vista vibes going on here. And now maybe the hardware is fast enough to run it.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  It's very glassy.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Is the way that I would call it. Yeah. And like that frosted panel glass thing slides in and it's basically all your widgets. So we don't, they didn't really go into the detail of like how these are going to, you know, like developers are going to be able to plug into this stuff. But they showed off like news feeds, some verge articles.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  They did. There are two different verge articles in there and their demos in PR. I was like, all right, I'll take it.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  The weather's in there.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. The thing that freaked me out was when they said that this was like, there, there was like gonna be an AI and it was like the feed. And I was like, oh God, this is basically like the left of home Google menu. This is gonna suck, but it looks like you, it's a combination of widgets that you move around and place yourself. And then underneath that, all the news feed stuff. And so they're not going to try and do the Google now thing where they like, show you what you think you need there at, you know, when you need it. You're actually going to be able to organize your own damn widgets, the way you want. And then underneath that or next to it will be the news feed stuff is my hunch.

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Sure. Right. Like they know that everybody who uses Windows has a phone. And just like Tom was saying, the start menu is starting to converge on what everything else looks like. This left of home widget system is converging on what Android looks like in some way, what iOS is doing in some way. What Samsung is doing in some way. There are differences. Yes. Like minor execution differences.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  But the way Windows is organized now just roughly approximates the way everything else is organized. I think that's smart. I don't, I don't think it's the wrong thing to do. I just, the idea that this is some sort of breakthrough pattern of user behavior is like, nah, this is kind of what an iPad looks like. And also kind of what a Samsung phone looks like and kind of what a Chromebook looks like. It means it's easier to switch between devices, which I'm always banging on about making it easier to switch. They actually feel some competition, but it's also like, like you were saying, you're like, this stuff only works if people like developers participate in it. And if you're like a widget developer, like where do I go? What do I do?

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  Like, you just kind of like, actually, I'm going to make an app that makes some money instead of which.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  You know, Neil, if you think about it, this whole like, it's an entire other layer of the system. It's on top of, but it might as well be underneath the desktop full of glanceable information widgets. It's almost like a, like a dashboard.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  Right? I'm still extremely salty. For years, I had a dashboard widget that just told me what time, like, it was called chrono slide. I can't believe I'm talking about chrono slider. It would just tell me what time it was where everybody, you could like slide, you would like slide a slider and be like, it's four o'clock in my time. And then it would tell me what time it was everywhere that the verge team was.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  And they took it away from me. And now I'm just like, whatever. It's two in the morning for Tom. He's getting this slack anyway.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  And it's all because widgets don't exist.

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  Ruined everyone's life.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  That's the interesting part of this is that it all comes under this panel. You can't like drop these widgets on a desktop. You know, you obviously could in Mac OS and obviously in Vista as well. They did these widgets. They did a similar thing in Vista. Back in the day in like Windows, was it 98? I can't remember. Active Desktop, similar sort of thing, widgets. So, but these things live in their own slide out. So I'm curious about that. Like, are people really going to slide out to get these widgets?

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  Where are they putting notifications in all of this?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  On the right, same way there now.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, the notification center is pretty much the same as it was in Windows 10. It just looks better. They've changed a few things around that. And we'll see the volume fly outs and stuff like that. The one in Windows 10 right now is super annoying. The one in Windows 11 is not as super annoying. So.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 14:19Nilay Patel?

  I have to say between the leak and then this with the transparency and seeing some of these additional features, it looks a lot better than I expected from the leaks. Like some of the stuff where there's ancient parts of the elements or ancient parts of the interface and controls on there is like, yeah, there's like Windows stuff going on in here that everyone has always complained about. But just in general, it looks a lot tidier and more modern. And this like ultra flat Windows 10 interface was starting to age out. And this looks a lot better.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  And they did show you some of the dark mode stuff and it's it looks like they're actually gonna make sure dark mode is a bit more universal because I have dark mode running on my Windows 10 PC right now, but I could do stuff like going to start and run and then immediately that dialogue box is, you know, is a white mode element. So it's like they're starting to think about those sort of things that they kind of missed, which are really glaringly obvious. And just, I feel like they're getting all the touchpoints where you really interact with Windows, where it really matters. And yes, yes, there's going to be stuff like control panels probably still there, right? Like, that's not going away. Redditor is still there. All this stuff buried underneath. But I think as long as that stuff's still there for people who need it, but like you don't stumble across it from,

• 15:34Speaker 03

  you're just, you know, just using your computer for a Zoom call, whatever, then I don't think it's so much of a big deal, as long as they make it just way more usable. And this does look a lot more usable. We have to play around with it, obviously.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  I would say like, just compared to what Apple is doing in Big Sur, which is a nightmare of crap that happens on the right side of your screen. This makes a lot more sense.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, like it does. It does look like they've gone down the simplification route, which they were obviously going for Windows 10 X and it feels like they've got the right ideas. So just how it plays out.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  So 10 X was like gonna happen and it feels like they took all of those ideas and just made it Windows 11. Is that more or less what happened here?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Pretty much, yeah. Like they they basically supercharged those ideas. I think like the, even like down to the Android apps on Windows stuff, I think that was probably always going to come to 10 X at some point. It's just that's just being accelerated for, you know, get that in Windows 11, get it out to all machines. And it's also interesting that this is obviously arriving in like October time roughly. And it's it's an interesting release of Windows as well because it's it's almost going to demand like new hardware, which we haven't really seen from Windows since like Windows 8 really, because Windows 10 wasn't really a hardware thing. It was more of a like. Yeah, we kind of messed up Windows 8. So these install this immediately. It's a free upgrade.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  So that's, that's another sort of interesting dimension to see what sort of hardware comes out.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Tom, since you brought it up, I mean, we got to get into a bunch of other stuff. I really want to talk about the, the new snap guide stuff or snap layout stuff.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  I knew it. I knew that's what you were going to say.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  It's coming. It's coming. I'm so excited about it. Requiring new hardware comes like it's going to entice some people to upgrade. There's this thing where like the stylus has haptics and that might entice some people to upgrade. But can you talk about this, this issue that's been flying around today with Windows health check and you need a certain kind of thing and your BIOS and some or other?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's definitely been something that's been, been flying around. So they have actually made it so you need to have a TPM 2.0 chip, which basically it sounds complicated, but that should have shipped with any sort of modern CPU in the last decade, really.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  So, and I think it's been a requirement of like Windows PCs since like 2016. So like if you've got a relatively new device in the last sort of five years, then you should be fine. I think what people are seeing is that they've, they're in a, like they have a device that where they don't have a TPM chip maybe, or they've got it, but it's not fully enabled in the BIOS. So I'd love to see how Microsoft's going to solve that and, and tell people to dig into BIOS screens, which are always different on every single device. That's going to be like an interesting one.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, they could just tell people to go visit a Microsoft store. Oh, nevermind.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  A Microsoft Experience Center. There's only three of them in the world, but.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's why it's such an experience. You've got to get to one. It's a long, it's a long journey. Actually, dude, let's talk about Windows 8, because I think we're going to end up spending a lot of time on Android apps.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:32Nilay Patel?

  We, we talk a lot about windowing on this show. We mostly talk about it in the context of the iPad, because the iPad is horrible at it.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:41Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft is just leaning all the way into it. Like you're going to have a bunch of Windows and our system should arrange them for you. And like in reality, there's only, what is it? Six layouts that you might actually want. And here they are. And it seems so simple and it is. Kind of genius.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Well, they're also, they and I, iPad OS 15 are doing the same thing where they like, they know no one's going to ever remember the stupid swipe gestures to like snap the window into the corner that you wanted or whatever. So in the same way that iPad has and Samsung have like the three dot menus to show you the layout options, they're just doing that with the expando button, the square button on a window and they show you the tile options. And I think that's fine. I love that they're just being way smarter about maintaining your layouts. You can apparently save layouts and there'll be like a whole mix of like, your desktop is over here and then your snap layouts are here and like, people might get confused by that. But just looking at it, my hunch is that people will like find one thing that they like, it'll get saved in their doc and all that extra complexity will be there for power users, but hopefully won't get in the

• 19:41Speaker 02

  way of, you know, normal people that just want to have their windows stay where they're supposed to be.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's super interesting that they're surfacing basically what's already existed in Windows for years. These like snap areas. So you can cascade windows, you can snap them side by side. You've been able to do this in with a bunch of Windows shortcuts or just with your mouse. But it's not, you know, most Windows users, like regular Windows users never knew that you could even probably do that. So it's like, they're literally surfacing it on the maximize button, which is super interesting.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  I just keep coming back to this idea that all of their executives were working at home and they were like doing the same thing that everyone else does in like Slack or Teams or whatever. And someone's like, oh, there's a keyboard command to snap your windows to the right. And Panos was like, really? Right? Like,

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Panos, Panos knew. Come on.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. Well, no, because he's in flow. He definitely knew. Okay, I'll, I'll give you Panos, like definitely knows. He's got a macro to get himself.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  There'll be some marketing exec for sure.

• 20:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. But it's true of the iPad too. Like, what is the big theme across all these operating systems this year? They took a bunch of power user features and they just made them obvious for people and they stopped treating everybody like idiots. Right? Like, for what, a full decade, the dominant design attitude was most people are stupid and can only do one thing at a time. And that's how our operating systems work. And like, just over the past year, they're like, what if we're not stupid?

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  What if you'd like to use your computer in a multiple different ways? And we, you can handle the complexity of Windows, like when, when not Windows. You understand what I'm saying?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  And it's just hilarious to me that it, right? Like I talk about second order effects of the pandemic. This is like the 50th order effect of the pandemic is big tech companies are like, we think our users are not complete idiots when it comes to organizing Windows on a desktop. And it is just like hilarious to me that it is true of Apple's operating systems and is now true of Windows. That they're just showing you the complexity and trusting you to solve it. And everyone's like, this is awesome.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  I'd also love to know, like the stats from Microsoft on how many people in the pandemic have suddenly gone from using one screen, whether it be big, regardless of the resolution, to using two. Cause like, I just know anecdotally, people have been having to shift to work in the living room. Have had gone out and bought, you know, a monitor, a 24 inch monitor and then used both. Like they're using their laptop screen. Whereas in, in the office, they would just be using the monitor they've got in their office and not, not, not even necessarily using both. They might have a machine in the office. So I'd love to know that because that like plays into this snap thing is that these snap groups obviously save where all your windows are, which has been a real big problem when you connect up

• 22:28Speaker 03

  a Windows laptop to another monitor and all your windows just fly around.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's what Dieter was saying.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  They all had that experience of, um, on this call, but the kids are being loud. I gotta unplug my laptop and go somewhere else and then plug it back in and everything is messed up. Yeah. I don't, there's like, I don't know why, maybe it's because they were so honest about their rethinking of Windows because of the pandemic. I just look at this stuff and I'm like, oh, a lot of people had to actually use their products this past year across the companies. And they're doing things that previously they insisted to us that only some small percentage of people actually wanted.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, that obviously brings us to Android apps and Windows, which I guarantee you only some small percentage of people want.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  You know, another thing that every single Microsoft executive was forced to use during the pandemic was Teams. And now there's a big damn button for it in the taskbar.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  It's everywhere in Windows 11. You know what's not everywhere in Windows 11? Skype.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Wop, wop.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Because Teams is, Teams has taken over, right?

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Skype, Skype.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  It's just about time. And that's years in the making. So here's, so they put Teams in a start button. They're giving a Teams account to everyone now.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:39Nilay Patel?

  Which is one of those, we're making it great for you. Also, we're a giant dominant monopoly. Now, everybody has a default Teams account. Which one do you think it is? And they've got this feature that Dieter, I'm just assuming you understand, maybe only you understand. So you can message anybody in Teams across a range of formats.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, if the person you're trying to message doesn't have a Teams account, it'll fall back to SMS using

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  your phone number.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Using your phone number.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  That's what they have said.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  I have tweeted someone to please answer how this works to me. I've hunted around a little bit of Microsoft site, can't find it. And I've also emailed Microsoft PR and said, how does this work? And I have yet to find an answer.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, because the other option is every Windows machine gets a new phone number that can use SMS.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Which seems even more unworkable than then using SMS.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  It's unclear. Like, how do they, how, if they're, if they're texting from your phone number, there's like two ways to do that. Three ways to do it. One, you like mirror to the Android phone. You could do that now in Windows 10. You can like set up a web app that mirrors to your Android phone. You can do that on any platform. Or you text from the phone. That's a way. You just use the phone, but that's not obviously what this is doing. Or you set up a deal with every single carrier on the planet and let them give you a backdoor into their SMS system, which seems unlikely to me. So they must, I have no idea how this works.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Unless, because SMS is so sketchy that you can just pretend you are that number.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  That's possible. You could do that.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm just gonna read you that, this is in their blog post. Now you can instantly connect through text, chat, voice or video with all of your personal contacts, anywhere, no matter the platform or device they're on, across Windows, Android or iOS.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  If that's all about Teams, right? That's what they're saying.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  If the person you're connecting to on the other end hasn't downloaded the Teams app, you can still connect with them via two-way SMS.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  No further information.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Here's, here's my hunch. They get a text from a random number saying Neelai wants to chat with you. This is what he said. And then they can reply to that thing and it creates a relay that texts back to you until they finally give up and install the Teams app.

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. At the end of every message is download the Teams app here with a short link.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Sent from Microsoft Teams short link.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  I will tell you that, uh, one of the only companies to sign on to promise that they would someday adopt RCS was Microsoft.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  No, God. Now, this is a direct call out to two-way SMS.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  There's no, there's no RCS in here. I just, yeah. They called it out. They're excited about it. No details on how it works. If they've actually managed to figure out how to let your Windows computer just do SMS through Teams using your phone number, that's a huge deal. We just don't know.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  I'd imagine it's something to do with your phone.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  No, but because they said iOS too. You don't need, you don't need an Android phone to do this.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  And they have no deal with Apple as far as I know.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Although in, in his interview with Joanna Stern, Satya said that, um, anything Apple wants to do with Windows, whether it's iTunes or iMessage or what have you, we would welcome that.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  So. Hold your breath there, Satya.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, that brings us to like the biggest thing in Windows 11 in terms of architectural changes, which is there's a new Microsoft store. That store will let you discover Android apps. And then when you go to download one, from what we can tell, it will open Amazon Android App Store.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Inside the Windows store.

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  We don't, actually that's unclear.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Okay. Great.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. They didn't actually really show it and they, they, they're like, we're not quite sure what it's going to look like. So, yeah.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  My guess is that there's a separate app, the Amazon Android app.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that you have to install.

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  So you'll discover the apps in the Windows Store. And then when you go to download the Android app, you'll open the Android App Store. And then that will download Android apps and then you will be able to just run Android apps on your Windows PC.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Right. Oh, so it's discoverable in the Microsoft stores. Like you can search for TikTok, it'll show you, but then there's a button that has a little arrow going away saying get from the Amazon Store. So there it is.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  And Nadella told me that if Google wants to participate, they would also support the Play Store. One imagines they've asked Google and Google has declined to participate. Hence, we have the Amazon App Store, which, to be fair, has a bunch of stuff on it. It does have TikTok and Snapchat, all these things that people use on on Fire tablets for the most part. I think you download the Amazon App Store on Google, you can like sideload it. No one uses it.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it has a bunch of outdated Android apps. It's probably the best way to describe it.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so my hope is that maybe this will be the thing that incentivizes developers to keep their apps on the Amazon App Store updated or even submit them to the Amazon App Store. And then we might have some better App Store competition on Android. That could be interesting.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  So this, we'll get to that in a second. So you download the, the example they kept using was TikTok, right? TikTok is a very popular app. Panos went so far as to claim it was his favorite app, which is hilarious. I would love to see what Panos Panay's TikTok algorithm serves him.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Weightlifting because he's pumped.

• 29:00Nilay Patel?

  It's just designed for, you know, it's just like close ups of like chafers and hinges. It's a great TikTok feed and I'd love to look at it. Anyhow, so you download TikTok in some convoluted way. It delivers, it gets full windowing support on Windows. So you can like pin it to the side, you can stretch it. Most Windows computers are touchscreen. Like the ad that is coming is somebody scrolling TikTok on their laptop while doing work over here. And of course, Apple has no recourse for that because they refuse to put a touchscreen on their laptops. I think that alone, even if all you did this and it's kind of janky, but you get to make that ad, super worth it. Yep.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 29:40Speaker 03

  And it's also Android mobile games as well. Like, there's a surprising amount of people that do actually want to run those on, on their PCs. That like carry on their gaming session that they had on their phone and they just have it running on their Windows PC. If you like BlueStacks and all those sort of connectors.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  I could definitely see the value in it and like, I think most people probably don't really need Android apps on the PC. But there's some stuff like home automation apps that just aren't available on the web or on your desktop PC. So like, there is, there's some apps you might, I'm sure everyone has one app that they would be like, huh, okay, that's kind of useful to have that on my PC. It's just, what is the app?

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  But. Yeah. And is it available on the Amazon App Store as opposed to Google Play?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  That's the big blocker.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  Again, a preview of the conversation on Decoder, I was like, is it's not great. Do you think it's good enough? He's like, I hope that all gets better. Like, they're going into it eyes open, but they have this other avenue. And he was like, it will be very interesting to see if Google participates and there's competition between app stores.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  So I think that's the bigger deal about this, not necessarily the Amazon App Store and all that sort of stuff. It's the pure fact that they've opened up the App Store to rival app stores essentially within their store. So I spoke to Pennas like moments ago about this and he, he was basically open to like, you know, Steam being there, Epic Games Store being in there. It's like, they basically want the store now to be the place where you get all of your apps, regardless of whether you're getting them from the Windows Store or not. And like, that's, that's more of an interesting shift than even Android apps on Windows, to be honest, because that actually makes the store that much more interesting. And useful and, you know, the center, the center to get all your apps.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  I want to wrap up Android one last thing, which is why not sideload? You can install Android apps directly, just like you can any other app on a Windows PC. So maybe that'll be open and that'll be a fun world of piracy to think about. On the App Store, if they can succeed even a little in getting other app stores to participate, even just a little flag that says, I have installed these things. So that I can have one place on Windows where when I set up a new PC, I could be like, yep, reinstall these things.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  That would be so nice. That's all I want. I don't want to have to keep a doc. I keep a notepad document. That's like all the stuff that I install on a Windows computer. And just like, when I set a new one up, I just like, go down the checkbox, like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think the other, the other thing about Android apps in particular is unclear how well they're gonna run. Right? It's a big question. These things are designed, for the most part, for ARM processors, particularly Qualcomm ARM processors. The vast majority of Windows PCs run x86 processors from Intel and AMD. Microsoft has been talking about the fact that Intel Bridge is the reason they're using this. That led a lot of people to wonder, this is Intel only. Microsoft has since clarified, it will work on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. And Intel's like, oh, it's just a technology, but it'll work best with Intel processors. So we'll see. We don't really know what the CPU requirements are.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  And we've just been told that like, the real big constraint here is RAM. It's an interesting thing to have been told as directly as I was told it. So we'll just see. Like, iOS apps on M1 Macs are not the greatest experience in the world. And that's the same processor architecture, literally the same processor as the iPad. There's just a lot to sort out here. And all these developers have to participate. They have to be in the Amazon App Store and they have to decide that they want to distribute to Windows. So yep, they got TikTok to do it, but to Tom's point, that huge long tail of Android apps, all of those developers have to want this distribution. I think Microsoft's argument is, why wouldn't you want to distribute to another billion devices?

• 33:29Nilay Patel?

  Just go get them. That's a reasonably good argument, but as with everything, we have to get it, we have to try it to see how it actually works.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's obviously the benefits for Amazon partnering with them here is that they're gonna get probably more developers porting their apps over, right? Like, there's gonna be a some percentage of developers that will do that now, whereas they probably wouldn't have before. But like, it really does depend on the apps. I think home automation apps are the, are the key ones. Stuff like Ring and all those sort of apps. But like, beyond that, hmm, I don't know. Like, it's not something that I'm like dying for on Windows. Like, I do most of my work in the browser. And I think that's the same for, for a lot of people now, so.

• 34:12Nilay Patel?

  That's why Microsoft, you know, even when they talked about app support, it was never just about Android apps. It was.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Universal Windows apps, regular Windows apps, progressive web apps and Android apps. Like that was the list they kept on saying, because they're like, we kind of don't care. We just want you to use Windows.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think if you can get all of those into the store in a coherent way that like makes sense, like if I, if I go in and search for, I don't know, Fortnite and then, and then I search for it in the Windows store, I click a button and it pulls me into the Epic Games Store. Great. Like, yeah, that's fine. Like, like it's a little bit of a janky experience, but like, that's kind of fine. Like, you know, that is kind of Windows and I prefer that to like, having to think, where is Fortnite installed on my, like, what launcher have I got to use to get to that to update it or to launch it or whatever. So I think if they can pull it off and be open in the process, which it seems like they are, like, yeah, that's, that's good news for people who use Windows for sure.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Tom, how, I'm, I'm going to hold myself back from talking about progressive web apps. You're welcome. Uh, how big a deal is it? Do you think that they're opening it up to like Win 32 and just like any app that runs on Windows, it's hap, we're happy to have it in our store. They're gonna, you know, I'm sure they're gonna have some requirements about, I don't know, some content stuff, no Nazis, no porn or whatever, but other, like from a technical perspective, they're like, yeah, come one, come all.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, like that's another big part of this, right? Cause when they first launched the store, you couldn't have Chrome in there. So everyone was like, okay, the number one browser I can't get and you're going to force me to use Edge, which is obviously Edge is better now, but it wasn't then. Um, there wasn't iTunes, which obviously doesn't matter now, but it did then. And it's just like opening it up to all these apps. Adobe Creative Suite is not in the store. So like, if you want to get Photoshop, you, you get like some touch version or like some really lightweight version that, let's be honest, no, nobody really uses, do they? They just go for the, the full, full version of Photoshop on Windows. So like having that stuff there is, is, yeah, like that's, it, it goes to your point again, like you, you have a, a list of apps you install on your Windows device, right? Like,

• 36:16Speaker 03

  and all of those apps, you have to go search out onto the web to like find them and stuff. And it's just centralizing it in one location where it should be.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's, let's take a break right there because there's some big business side stuff to why Adobe chose to be in that store that we need to talk about at length, but we gotta take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 37:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. So Tom, you were just talking about Creative Cloud in the Windows Store, Adobe is there, not their wacky touch versions. You're talking about maybe the Epic Store will be there. Kind of a huge point of emphasis for Microsoft, for Nadella around Windows is that it's a platform for other platforms. And a huge term in the store that they are changing is their cut, if you choose to use their payment processing, all that stuff, is 15% now. So instead of the 70/30 that we've just heard about endlessly with Apple and Google and whoever else. Microsoft's going to flat eighty five fifteen and then you can just not use it. So you don't have to use their payment systems or whatever.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  You can put your apps in the store, use your own payment and obviously do zero percent. You're responsible for whatever costs of rolling your own payment solution, which is why Adobe is putting Creative Cloud in the store.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so there's, there's a few things to this. So the eighty five fifteen split for apps has always been there on the Windows Store. But like apps like Creative Suite just wouldn't, wouldn't go for it. Not necessarily for the revenue split, but also just because they couldn't have their own updater in there. So they couldn't control how all their apps are updated. So like, that's also a part of it. But it's also like the split between apps and games is really like apparent here. So, so it's eighty five fifteen for apps, eighty eight twelve for games, which is coming in August, which they've already announced. So they've, they're pulling it back a bit. But if you want to use in-app purchase systems, so if you're Fortnite and you want to be in the Windows Store, that doesn't apply.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Like that free, open approach doesn't apply to games.

• 39:39Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  So it's only for apps. So yeah, it works great for like Creative Suite, whatever. I'm trying to think of other sort of subscription based apps on Windows. But like for those sort of apps, it works fine. But for games, which is really where revenue is generated in these stores, no. Like you have to use Microsoft's payment processing platform.

• 39:58Nilay Patel?

  Google draws a similar line on the Play Store, actually. They have different rules for games than they do for everything else.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  It's because, yeah, like that's, that's literally where people spend their money, right? Like it's not many apps that people buy.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  Another decade of asking, what is a game?

• 40:13Nilay Patel?

  I mean, right, but this is because we know that the vast majority of the revenue for all these stores is in-app purchases in games like Candy Crush and whatever. They're not going to turn away from that. And the game developers, except for Epic, are generally like, yeah, we're making a lot of money. Like, we'll just pay some of it to the app stores because this is our whole business model. It's baked in, whereas companies like Adobe and others, like, what are you even doing for us? We don't want to pay you this money. We'd rather just run our own, our own stack and be okay with it.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  What do you make devil's advocate of the argument that what the, another reason that games have different rules is they're also like the place where most of the like fraud and dark patterns to trick kids into making purchases happens. And so forcing games to go through the app store system means that they can provide a little bit more protection to consumers. I'm like 50 50 on that at best.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but on Windows, it doesn't matter.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  There's just like, there's also the Wild West and other game stores and whatever else have you. What you're really getting is, again, I asked Nadella, like, what do you get for your 15%? And he was like, you get discovery, you get promotion, you get all this stuff Microsoft will provide, which is the right way to think about it. And I don't like, that's kind of what Apple says, right? Like, we bring the customers to you, but they're also the only way that you can get customers for an iOS app. So it just rings hollow. Whereas Microsoft is like, pay us the money. And then over time, you can evaluate whether you think that money is worth it and leave if you don't think so. Which I think is just a much healthier dynamic for these stores. Like, it'll put pressure on Microsoft to actually deliver discovery and users and all that stuff in a way that Apple clearly doesn't feel any

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  pressure to do. That's, Dieter, you wrote about this, like, that's kind of where Nadella ended the whole event, right? Just talking about how open Windows is, talking about being a platform for platforms. I think you and I read it the same way or heard it the same way. And you wrote about it that, wow, that's a lot of direct shots at Apple.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  There's a lot of direct shots at Apple. This is the part where I get to talk about Arthur Schopenhauer. I'm not actually going to do that. But he did quote this, like, random philosopher who believes that nothing is real and everything only exists if you perceive it yourself. I'm not going to go there. He quoted at the end, it's like, you know, there are some creators that are meteors and they flame out. And there are some creators that are stars that own a permanent place in the firmament of the galaxy. And that's what we want to do is we want to make stars. Very, very soaring. But leading up to that, he said some stuff that, like, here's, here's, here's a line that alludes to Ben Thompson. Windows has always stood for sovereignty. For creators and agency for consumers. And on both of those fronts, those are shots at Apple.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Agency for consumers, he's got some stuff about like, you can build your own PC. You can, it's your PC. You have agency over what happens on it. You can choose what it does. It's yours, not controlled by us. And then on like sovereignty for creators, it's like, creators are able to like be in control of their own destiny and not have the money that they make come through, you know, App Store fees. Although maybe if you use their direct tipping feature, uh, maybe that's because you can get paid in Microsoft points in their new direct tipping.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  I know, it's like amazing. If you're a local journalist and you get paid in Microsoft points, I would be so mad.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I'd be so mad.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  You could buy an Xbox Series X and then put it on eBay.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  You can't.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, true.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  But yeah, he's got like lines like, Windows recognizes there is no personal computing without personal agency. Personal computing requires choice. Like, tell me that's not a giant shot at Apple.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And this thing about sovereign creators and owning your own business, like, okay, here's a cynical read.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I definitely share this.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the obvious cynical read, which is no one uses this App Store.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  Until this pandemic, Windows was an afterthought even for Microsoft.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  They've got a big opportunity with soaring laptop sales and work from home and everybody to attract developers to say, you're mad at Apple. Come on home, come on home to Windows. Here's a billion users here. And to be the more open platform, because that's how you compete against the dominant closed platform.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:33Nilay Patel?

  Which is exactly what Apple did to Microsoft in the early 2000s. Right? Like Microsoft was the big dominant platform with all the antitrust scrutiny and all the bullshit. And Apple was like, our computer runs Unix. Our computer is good at the open web. It's so good at the open web that we actually let Microsoft put Internet Explorer on it. Cause that's what y'all motherfuckers want to use. Apple, the Unix computer that's easy to use, like, straight up, that's what they said to developers. And all this web development moved to Apple. Now you got Microsoft, it's like Linux runs on Windows, first-class citizen. Android runs on Windows, just another Linux, really. Also, our store terms are easy. Like, don't you want to be here where everything works and everyone's happy? And also, you definitely have to have a Microsoft account to use Windows.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  And we're definitely just sort of doing telematics on Windows a lot. Never mind, don't worry about that. It's, right, like, that's the super cynical read of this. I think the other read of it is, and Nadella alluded this to in his remarks, and he said it on Decoder, which is, this is always what Windows has been. Windows is where the other biggest software businesses in the world have come up. To some extent, he even tried to take credit for the web on Windows. It's hilarious, given all the antitrust battles they faced. But he's like, SAP was built and born on Windows. It's a huge software company, and we have no part in it. They just run their apps on Windows. There's a tension there, like, I don't know, the idealism versus the cynicism, like, what the right ratio is. But it's, it's both, to some extent, right?

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's, it's also, Windows was the default for so many years, right, on the desktop? So like, of course SAP would have been built on that. And like, PC gaming is, is built on top of that. And it's, and I think the problem with Windows is that, yes, it's gray and it's been open. And like, Nadella can take credit for some of that, if, if he wants. But the problem with it now is that it's, it's escaped their control, in a way. And so they've tried all these different ways to like, bring the control of Windows back. And it hasn't really worked. So now they've just been like, right, we're open again.

• 46:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so that list is like Window, Windows 10S, that all the modes they've done. They went from Windows S mode to Windows Shruggie mode. Whatever, do what you want.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Like, they would have loved to have had the app model that Apple has, right? Like, that control.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they tried and they failed.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  It's failed, and they've had, they've had to be open. They've had to embrace this openness, which has been great for them, like, as, as a company and like, for consumers, it's great, right? They've turned Windows into an actual dev box that developers aren't like laughing at. They're like, oh, well, it does all this stuff? Okay, maybe I'll, maybe I'll get one. And it, yeah, it's, the open approach is, is obviously for the best, but it's definitely because they've had to.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I wrote that the underdogs always agitate for openness. That's always how it works. And then when they become top dog, they close it up again. But the other thing is like, it doesn't cost Microsoft anything to do this. They get, they get to have the easy shots at Apple during the, all this antitrust scrutiny. And it's not like their stores were successful in the first place. So they're not losing anything by saying, come on, come on. They're losing like potential future revenue, maybe if they figured out a way to turn it around, but they're probably not gonna. So they're just gonna stop trying, take the easy, cheap wins now rhetorically against Apple or whatever, and maybe build up some goodwill if people come to do it. And as far as the idealism versus cynicism thing, I think the answer is yes.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Like, in the same way that Google is a, you know, their business model is based on the web and based on advertising and do they care about privacy or they care about advertising? It's like, well, they're trying to do both. And when Apple starts locking things down, it's like, well, are they locking things down because they care about privacy or are they locking things down because, you know, it's good for their business model because everybody has to pay for stuff directly through their models? It's like, well, yes, it's, it is possible for their philosophy and their business model and the way they make their products to like, all come together. And I think that's kind of what's happening here. And there's definitely some cynicism to think about with it. But you, you know, not so much that like, you shouldn't take advantage of the things that they're giving you, you know, because they're cynical. You know what I mean?

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I also said that on Decoder. He was like, other companies do things for different reasons and they're internally consistent for why they do them. But this is our choice and we feel internally consistent about it. And I think part of that is, you know, three years ago or whatever, he, he was like, we could just rename Windows Azure Edge, but no one's gonna let me.

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? And he's saying Windows is not, the operating system is not the most important layer for us. And I, I think that's still true. He basically said, yeah, that's still basic, that's still true for us. Right? Like Azure and our services businesses are the big businesses and they deploy to Windows and the Windows team relies in the fact that we run a huge cloud platform to do a bunch of stuff. And it's all one thing and I don't have to make money on Windows the way that we used to. And he's like, other companies make money in different ways and that leads them to different results. And I think that's, you can feel about that a million different ways. Like, at the same time, we're talking about antitrust and browsers and defaults and other platforms working on it, Microsoft is like, Teams is in the start button.

• 49:40Nilay Patel?

  Teams is everywhere now. Like, we're gonna make Teams the default communication app for business as aggressively as we can, because that's the future of Microsoft's like workplace productivity business. And they're gonna be aggressive about it. But at the same time, if they are gonna be idealistic, they have to let you replace it, right? And if it's not easy to get rid of all the Teams buttons or replace them with Slack buttons or whatever, but I think they open themselves up to some criticism. So we'll see. But I think you're right, Peter. Like, at the end of the day, there's one major commercial operating system that lets you build your own hardware, that lets you run almost anything on it from a

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  variety of sources, that lets you touch the fucking screen. That's kind of remarkable that Microsoft is like positioning itself right there.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's Linux, right?

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  It's the year of Linux on the desk. Hey, like, Windows is Linux now, right? It's like a whole thing they love to say.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  I absolutely think like everything they've done in Windows 11, everything they've showed today goes back to that thing, I'm sure it's Nadella that said it, that they wanted Windows to be loved. Like, they want people to, and they've realized it during the pandemic, or so they say, like, you know, people using it more. But they want to keep people hooked on Windows, because they know, like, where computing's going. Like, they know they're building it, right? Like, cloud computing, everyone working in their browser is slowly becoming, well, not even slowly, it's just rapidly becoming like a thing. And it's like, they want people to move into the cloud, wanting Windows and wanting that flexibility. So that if you are gonna work in a browser, and they're gonna stream that

• 51:20Speaker 03

  copy of Windows to that browser, you'll have all of your familiar controls, all of the stuff, you know, your apps are in the store, all that sort of stuff. Like, it's definitely about keeping people on Windows now that they've got a bit of a taste for it during the pandemic. And also just, you know, just getting them to rely on it more.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think one interesting, you mentioned streaming Windows, like they're streaming Xbox.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  Like Microsoft's bet on if you can stream it, you should, or if you can deliver it via the cloud, you should, will eventually turn its way to Windows.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, like there's, there's a startup and I can't remember the name of it right now, but like I joked about it on Twitter a few months ago.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Is this the browser one?

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And it's like, when you think about it, it like, when you initially look at it and you react to it, you think, why would I pay 10 bucks a month for a browser? And then when you think about the way things are heading and the fact that people are picking up these old laptops that haven't used for years and they're like trying to work during the pandemic and trying to buy a new laptop and all that sort of stuff. It's like offering them the power of an actual browser that works that just streams straight to their computer is actually a way better experience than trying to use the browser themselves. So like that, that, that is a way that we're kind of heading with computing is especially when everything's contained within the browser now.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  What Tom is talking about is called the mighty browser. It just runs Chrome in the cloud and streams it to you. And every time I've looked at it, I'm like, I'm not letting this startup have my browsing history. And it's like, five years from now, am I going to feel the same way? Like, I don't know, like everything else has changed. Google have my browsing history.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  It seems crazy right now, but like, I genuinely think that's the way we're heading. And there'll, there'll be some, I'm sure Google will do some really interesting stuff around it particularly. And I, Microsoft knows where it's headed. Like they know, they, they're building this similar sort of service themselves, a cloud PC service. So they, they know.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  What's fascinating about all that is nothing happens in a vacuum. Like Microsoft is here positioning itself as the champion of openness and developers and creators. Meanwhile, Apple's like putting out white papers about why side loading would be dangerous on the iPhone. I mean, it's like a long, it's like a brochure. I didn't even know how to describe this document. It has like flat illustrations. It looks like one of those videos from when you sign up for a bank or whatever. It's like, you like hit play and it's like a bunch of flat graphics of like cartoon people like saving one penny a day. You know what I'm talking about? Like it's got that startup graphic design, but then it's like pirates will, will steal your phone if side loading is allowed. It's like, this is so incongruous.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  If you don't know how to describe it, Tim Sweeney has a bunch of just very descriptive tweets about it.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Certainly repress.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Sorry, did you see what Tim Sweeney just tweeted about the App Store stuff today? He said, and I quote, "The 2021 version of Microsoft is the best version of Microsoft ever!" Exclamation point.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, then he retweeted you saying Nadella's remarks were direct shot at Apple. So he's happy with Microsoft, but like Microsoft's a big Epic partner, right? They like ran on the Xbox at the trial with Apple. He was saying like, "We get value from this relationship. We're happy with this cut. We understand it. We're able to negotiate around it, blah, blah, blah." And then obviously if they do the Epic Store with the Microsoft Store.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of opportunity for him there.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  And Sweeney was on stage when they first sort of started talking about this open store model, which was with Hololens 2 a few years ago now. So like, it's been building to this point for sure. I don't doubt that he's happy after the UWP era and he was not very happy about UWP. So.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  But Tim Sweeney's quote about the Apple graphic was, "The Epic Games Store doesn't have a shopping cart. It ought to have a shopping cart. Someday it will, but in the meantime, we don't put out graphical pamphlets decrying the ills of shopping carts. It's absurd."

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  And then he is like, "There's a clear difference between our 1984 Fortnite campaign and Apple's open platforms for the devil PDF. One is a work of fiction and the other is a Fortnite video." Pretty good, but this is like a huge reversal in this industry, right? Apple's like Congress right now is marking up antitrust bills. McKenna has been watching this endless markup. They've exited committee to go into the floor.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Largely intact.

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  Largely intact. There's some minor changes, but congratulations to McKenna for watching all this. It went into like three or four in the morning and then started again today. She, a hero of a reporter for watching all this. But as Dieter said, all five out of committee onto the House floor largely intact, focused at Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook. Nadella said, "If you know, these bills pass, Microsoft will certainly feel the effects." But it's crazy that like Apple is the target of all of this congressional ire and controversy for being a bully and monopolist and Microsoft's like, "Anything you want goes."

• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you told me this 20 years, I just would not have believed you.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, everything's flipped upside down and it's it's wild.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  Google is considering letting like media apps, like video, music or book apps, get around the 30%. Like, it is amazing what a little bit of controversy and a little bit of regul- like even the threat of regulations, like, oh, we should maybe stop it so much. I don't know. So what, let's finish on Windows 11 and we got a lightning round of gadgets to. Tom, what are the minimum system requirements and when does Windows 11 hit?

• 56:51Speaker 03

  So the minimum system requirements are four gig of RAM, 64 gig of storage, and a 64-bit processor. So nothing too crazy there. The actual, like, I wouldn't say crazy, but like, the surprising element of it is that you need a TPM 2.0 chip. And that has caused some controversy, but we, we kind of talked about that earlier. It shouldn't be too much of a thing. You just have to make sure that it's actually enabled in your BIOS. So.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  There is one more system requirement to talk about, which is if you have Windows 11 Home Edition, you also need a.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  Internet connection.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Just for the setup.

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Which is still, hmm.

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because that is obviously there to force you to use a Microsoft account. Which is like.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  But there's no Cortana when you set it up anymore. Thank God.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  With some Wi-Fi here.

• 57:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  You know, that is an unfortunate part of Windows 11 and also the widget stuff. Where in that leaked build, it forces you into Edge. We still don't know because obviously the build isn't out yet. But if they, if they're going down that route as well, like, those are two unfortunate things.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is why you have five antitrust bills.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, this is a sort of a word, like, a big knock on those bills is, well, we'll talk about it in the next segment, but a big knock on those bills is it's not clear what they're gonna cause.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:13Nilay Patel?

  So we just don't know, but that's presumably that's sort of self-preferencing would go away.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, Ben, if this whole thing is a head fake and it's like, we're totally open, except you have to use Microsoft Teams and have a Microsoft account and basically use Edge all the time, but we're totally open. I'll be very sad.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, I hope, I hope that's not how it is. But we'll be digging into it early next week to. Uncover uncover these ghastly parts.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  Is that when it comes out?

• 58:38Speaker 03

  The preview bill comes out early next week. So the actual release of Windows 11, they haven't said. They've said it's like holiday time, but October, like

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Some, some point in October, probably early.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, they've got to do it before holiday laptop shopping, right?

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So October is almost guaranteed.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're going to take a break and then just a bunch of lightning round stuff we got to get through and then come back. We'll be right back.

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• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I was just talking about the, the antitrust bills. We don't know what they're going to do. I go read McKenna's report. She did sit through it. Congratulations to her. They did pass largely the same as they were before. So no self-preferencing, no conflicts of interest. The FTC gets more money for investigations, uh, data portability, all that stuff that we talked about with McKenna before. It's got to get through the house. Some big riffs in both the Democrats and the Republicans.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  Notably, all of the, all of the representatives. From California, where all the big tech companies are.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  Like united across party lines to be like, screw this. Which is very funny. We'll see. I think what the idea that I would put in everybody's head is a good, meaningful criticism of these bills. We don't know what's going to happen, right? You pass them, you'll change the dynamics of the marketplace, it'll prohibit all this stuff. You might end up breaking up a big bunch of big tech companies or forcing Amazon to sell AWS or whatever. We don't know. I think that's a fair criticism of these bills. On the flip side, what I would, what I would put into your head is it would be weird if we did know. Right? So if the bills were like, Amazon must sell AWS. I'd be a little antsy, right? Like, we know what this market looks like.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  It kind of looks like I've got some money and if I bought one Google Home, now I have to spend all the rest of my money on Google services until I'm dead. Right? Like, I've got some money, I bought one Apple device. No other smartwatches shall ever exist in my, in my life because Apple refuses to let anything else work with its platform. Like, we know what this market looks like. I think a lot of people are happy with it. We don't know what it looks like if these companies have to be more interoperable or if they can't self preference so ruthlessly. I'm kind of like, we'll just flip the table and find out. Like, they're smart, right? Like, these are the richest companies in the world, led by people who definitely think they're the smartest people in the world. I'm confident they'll find ways to make money and make cool stuff.

• 1:02:13Nilay Patel?

  And if you like flip the table, it's, it's, they're not going to quit. Whereas I think if the government was like, we're definitely making it so that when you swipe left on an iPhone, it runs Chrome. I'd be like, I don't want you to design my phone. So that's like, I would just, I don't know which one's right. I don't like, I think it's a totally fair criticism.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  I'd argue that we do know though, because we know, we know that competition is best for consumers.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  Right, but you have to imagine the outcome, right? There's like this big leap that you have to make.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but if it means splitting up like AWS from Amazon, you know, Windows from Microsoft, whatever, like if it means all that sort of stuff. Then ultimately it's just going to make them compete with each other even stronger than before, right? Which should mean better products.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  This is the idea. This is, and if you've been listening to Vergecast for however long, like, yes, I fully believe, we fully believe that if you've got some dollars in your pocket, like, you're best served if a lot of companies are trying to fight for those dollars. I'll give you the opposite example of this. Broadband in America, we've railing about the lack of competition in broadband in America for years. Optimum just lowered its speeds.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  To quote, "better align with the market." So they looked around and said, "Man, we're, our service is faster on uploads than everybody else. We're just gonna lower them." Because no one can leave. Like, what are you gonna do? You're gonna move to Dieter's crappy Comcast?

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's the opposite of competition.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Because Andrew's an excellent editor, what you don't know, listening to this, is I have cut out of this podcast recording like, three times, because Comcast is just like, "Nah, not today."

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  If you've heard me vamping, it's because Dieter has just disappeared for seconds at a time. But like, Comcast owns NBC Universal, which is a investment in Fox Media, a parent company, et cetera, et cetera. All I'm saying is, part of what you're gonna hear from big tech companies over the next few months, as these bills make their way forward, is, "We don't know what they do. We don't know how they work. They're gonna make the products worse. They're gonna force you to not have LinkedIn integrated, Microsoft Word," which is my favorite example I keep using. And it's like, I don't care. Like, I can't shake the feeling that I know what this is like.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  It's like, work it out, you know? Like, open stuff up. Like, I'm sure there's, there's obviously gonna be security concerns with platforms and all that, like, you know, the 16-page PDF that Apple puts out, all that sort of stuff. But like, like you say, they're smart. You know, they can compete. They configure these difficult things out. And I feel like it's definitely for the consumer benefit for there to be more competition.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  And if they can't figure it out, they'll die, and somebody else will figure it out, and that will also be fine.

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's just, I don't know. We haven't talked about it a lot, but the, like, the tech companies are lobbying super hard. Tim Cook called Nancy Pelosi, right? The New York Times reported, he was calling everybody in Congress that he knew to argue against these bills. The money they're spending on lobbying is out of control. They've spun up new lobbying groups. Ex-Google executives are in charge of these lobbying groups. It's like, yep, it's politics. It's kind of gross. Lobbying is just part of it. I just haven't heard a good argument yet, besides, we don't know what these bills would do. And like the the leap is, well, that's the idea, right? That you would reset the market and everything would be more competitive. And if I wanted to buy a Pebble that could send messages from my iPhone, I might be able

• 1:05:40Nilay Patel?

  to, right? Instead of that company just dying because it didn't have access to the operating system. And yes, there are securities concerns. And yes, I don't know, pirates are gonna do piracy. But like, those were the arguments I heard from the music industry when they wanted to have DRM.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, it was bad. And they didn't do it. And they figured out a new way to run their their entire industry.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  And now most of the music that people listen to is streamed in proprietary formats?

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  That's true. They did figure that out.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  I just feel like if we get to a point where like, companies like Pebble exist, and like, I'm not buying all my stuff from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, these big tech companies, or I'm not seeing these crazy startups think of something really inventive and then for it to be crushed because Apple does the same thing a year or two later. If we get to a point where that stops happening in such frequency, or like, Apple and all these big tech companies keep acquiring all these startups because they can and because there's no scrutiny for these small startups, then that's way better for consumers.

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  Dieter and I were talking about this, you can read this in one of two ways, but there was a big piece in the New York Times about Google and like, maybe it's moving in slow motion, it's not so innovative anymore.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like, I don't know, I feel that way, other people don't, I don't think Dieter feels quite as strongly about that as I do. But there was this paragraph in that story that was like, a lot of Google's products are developed and then enter something called pantry mode, where they just wait until some other startup releases them, and then they just like, fire out those products as a clone.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  And it's like-

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, why wouldn't you just do it first if you already invented it? And it's because Google's printing money and it's ad business. It doesn't even have to take any risks. And if somebody else proves that this is a good idea, they can just release a product, put Google Meet everywhere and something Google Meet. We have to pretend it's like a good, real competitor. And it's like, my computer is dying. Please someone help me because I tried to go to a Google Meet meeting. It's nuts. And that, that sort of dynamic, I don't know. I would just like to see that changed. The flip side of this is the antitrust pressure prevents them from doing good things too. Right? So like, Google wants to turn off third party cookies in Chrome.

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  I think Dieter, you understand this better than anybody. They want to turn it off, but they can't.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Right. So here's the thing. Google makes the world's most popular desktop browser. They also completely dominate the online ad industry. And if they make a change to the world's most popular desktop browser, it could, in theory, give them more power in the ad industry because it would cut off a bunch of other advertisers from tracking you. And so they want to cut off third party cookies. They've come up with this technology called Flock that's supposed to like, put you in a demographic group. Everybody hates it. Nobody trusts them. And so they're like, yeah, no, we can't do it. We just gotta wait. We're gonna like, the, the, this UK regulator, uh, they're like, working with them to like, come up with a way to do it. They're gonna spend more time trying to come up with new technologies to replace a third party cookie. And they're just like stuck.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  They're stuck because if they just made the browser, they could be like, yeah, we're gonna compete in the world of browsers. We're gonna make a browser that like protects your privacy and does all the stuff. It'll be great. But they can't do that because if they did that, it would affect their other business and would also affect their relationship with a bunch of regulators. And so they just kinda had to like, push. And so I, you know, no one should feel bad for Google, but like, the reason they're not doing it is because there's like all of these other forces being applied to their browser. And it aligns, it, you know, messes with their business model. Whereas Apple messing with their browser doesn't mess with their business model at all. So they're like, yeah, we block everything. You can't find the URL anymore. The tabs are over here and over there and who knows anymore?

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  And it's fine and it's great, but Google doesn't have the freedom to do that. Like, when this news hit that they were delaying the, the cookiepocalypse and they were, you know, not implementing Flock, blah, blah, blah, blah. Every ad tech company on the planet had their stock just leap into the sky.

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Because they all, they all got a reprieve. They get more time to like, try out more crap and figure stuff out and continue to track you for another two years.

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  So what's really interesting about Flock, besides its horrible name, is like, in the abstract, this is also Apple's answer to tracking, right? That on your device, it will figure out some set of cohort you're in, you're this old, you're in this place, you have these interests, whatever.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  And then advertisers can target that and your device will do it, but they won't know who you are.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:27Nilay Patel?

  Zoomed way out. That is exactly what Google's trying to do. But because they're the dominant ad tech provider, the dominant advertiser on the web, they run Chrome, no one wants to go down that road with them. Whereas Apple's like,

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Well, no one trusts them. No one's like, oh, Google's doing it. It must be bad. So like WordPress and Amazon and every other browser on the planet were like, nope, screw this. Mozilla actually did just put out a white paper saying, yeah, here are all the problems with Flock in such a way where it's like, they could maybe be convinced that they're, they could maybe find a not, not problem with Flock someday, but we're so far from that. So the other part of Google's announcement is they'd like, really talked about like, there's a process for web standards, you see, and this is how it works. And it's like, yeah, we know. So, but they're like laying the groundwork for being like, well, Flock was a good experiment. The web standards process had its say, and now we're doing this other thing. You know, we've evolved it and they'll like, drop it or something.

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, we talk about the web a lot, like, this is a huge deal.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  And Google cannot figure it out. And part of the reason they can't figure it out is because of antitrust concerns, because they are so dominant. So everyone would like them to stop tracking and Apple's gonna run ad after ad after ad hammering Google for tracking. But then like, the UK competition authority is like, now you have to keep tracking. Or enable, enabling cookies, which allow other people to track. So yeah, I don't know. Just like my, my other proposed antitrust rule is like, maybe we just don't let AT&T buy anything and that'll solve like a whole swath of problems in the tech industry. Like maybe the other one is like, just like Google bought cookies, like antitrust except for ad tech industry.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, just do it. See what happens. It'll be fine.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  Let's go. We got lightning rounds. Do you want to go through it, Teter?

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  We have got Mobile World Congress coming up. Surprise, surprise. It's like sort of kind of happening. Samsung is having an event. We're expecting they might do something with the watch. Maybe it'll be the first new version to wear OS watch, maybe. And Z Fold 3 and the Z Flip 3 just leaked today as we're recording this. Looks like the Z Fold 3 will be compatible with Stylus. Looks like the Z Flip 3 has a screen that isn't the size of your pinky fingernail, which is great. I have no idea if these will be announced at MWC or not. And then the other big phone rumor is, uh, Apple is thinking about making a less expensive big phone next year, which is like, welcome to 2018.

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, cheap, big phones. Who knew?

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, everybody, literally everybody.

• 1:12:52Nilay Patel?

  Actually, uh, Mitchell wrote this story for us and he's, he has this great segment in the middle of the story. It's like during the trial, a bunch of stuff that leaked from Apple was, oh yeah, they do do a bunch of market research and they do commission analyst firms to go out. And like, there's just these two graphs that Apple commissioned. It's like, yep, people like big phones and they like cheap ones.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Nilay Patel?

  It's like, yep. Pretty much. I'm glad you paid a company to tell you this information. Okay, I'm just going to end on this.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  You ready for this?

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  T-Mobile is selling a 5G branded gin.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Look, we already called dibs on mobile wireless related alcohol. It's called Scissor Vodka.

• 1:13:39Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  It has a tagline called snip, snip, cut through the night.

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  It's just cut through the night.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  It's just cut through the night, but then you say snip, snip.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  They go together. Maybe even a snipping noise. They totally just stole this idea from us.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  I love how it's called five gin.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:13:54Nilay Patel?

  And there's five ginger beer. It's good.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  I hate it.

• 1:13:57Nilay Patel?

  I will say this, a long time ago, this is a true story. A long time ago, we're back in Engadget. We ran Engadget Mobile. Engadget's color was blue. Engadget Mobile's color was pink. And T-Mobile sent a cease and desist to AOL saying that Engadget Mobile had to stop using the color pink. Cause T-Mobile was pink.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  We said no. Actually, we ran a story. It was great. Well, it's my turn. All right. Mobile vodkas are my thing, T-Mobile.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  Well, it's a gin, so technically.

• 1:14:28Nilay Patel?

  Fine. Every summer, every summer, the world tries to get me to drink gin. Have you noticed this? And every summer I drink it. And I'm sorry, I know you're British and it's like in your blood or whatever, but it's horrible.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  No, it's great. What are you talking about?

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  It's horrible. It's like drinking a tree.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  The thing I'm unhappy about is, uh, last week, we saw Dish try and launch, uh, Project Genesis where the S was a five. And now we have five gin. Stop taking the five G things and incorporating it into other words. I don't want it.

• 1:14:59Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean about the pandemic. Like all the way down the line, the branding consultants just like went. They were home. They didn't get, went and parties to go to. They have time to burn. They were just like, here's some ideas. It's bad.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  The five ginger beer was just one step too far. Five, five gin. Okay. Ha. Five ginger beer. Just look at it. It just looks crazy.

• 1:15:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's a good place to end it. I want to call it ransomware is a big thing that's happening. So I just want to call it Liz Lapato wrote a gigantic story with lots of reporting in it about what could be done about ransomware, going through all the options. Spoiler, all the options are bad. So, but check it out. It's, it's, it's very smart and Liz is just such a funny writer. So check out that story. Lots of other stories in order to check out, but I want to call that because I think Bridge Castle listeners probably. Particularly interested in that. Decoder this week was Jack Conti, the CEO of Patreon. Like I said, Sasha Nadella, that episode, bonus episode of Decoder, up now in parallel to the Vergecast, so go listen to that. Next week on Decoder, we've talked about Juul a lot, the vape on the show, because Dieter and I both have a problem. Not anymore. We're good now.

• 1:16:06Nilay Patel?

  We're, we're, yes, definitely have a healthy relationship with nicotine.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  That's because you've got five gin.

• 1:16:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, I've, I drink now instead of vaping. It's great. It's a very healthy transition. Lauren Etter, who's a reporter at Bloomberg News, just wrote a gigantic book about the history of Juul, where it came from, where it went, what happened. It's called The Devil's Playbook. She's on Decoder next week. That episode is great. And that book is great, actually. Highly recommend it. It's, it's like a lot of Silicon Valley meets a legacy industry that was regulated and couldn't end up, like, all the themes we just talked about with the big companies, like, microcosm right there. Only, there's also a lot of, like, parties and smoking. It's very interesting. So that's next week on Decoder. Nadella and Jack Conti at now. You can tweet at us. Dieter's at Backlon, Tom is at Tom Warren, I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. And we'll be back next

• 1:16:56Nilay Patel?

  week with more Vergecast. That's it. Rock and roll. Snip, snip.

• 1:17:20Speaker 06

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• 1:17:57Speaker 07

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• 1:18:39Speaker 07

  you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.