WW 923: The Bouche is Amused - Remote Desktop outrage, GroupMe, RIP Woody

Windows Weekly (Video)

Your Patch Tuesday is showing. Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte go over the latest features for Windows 11 with the KB5053598 update. Also, the hosts discuss Press to Talk for Insiders, the Windows app replacing Remote Desktop, the agentic future of browsers, Copilot integration in GroupMe, Gemma 3, issues with Xbox Wireless Controller 5.23.5.0 firmware, Pocket Casts Web Player, and the "vibe coding" era. Plus, Fences 6 is now in Beta, on sale!

Woody Leonhard, RIP

• Like Jerry Pournelle, a major influence on Paul's career and writing style
• He had a mysterious life in latter years, not clear what happened

Windows 11

• Windows 11 gets all the features we've discussed recently
• Are we heading towards something bigger this year? Or just more of the same?
• New Canary and Beta (23H2) builds
• New Dev and Beta (24H2) builds
• Copilot in Windows 11 is getting Press to Talk
• Microsoft follows through on threat, kills Remote Desktop App - our latest outrage
• Arc crashed and burned but we can still evolve web browsers
• What about sidebar apps as a UX baby step forward?
• Does Edge need to restart every three days now to install updates?

Microsoft 365

• Google promotes ChromeOS/Chromebooks as the right client ... for Microsoft 365

Dev

• Build 2025 registration is now open

AI

• It's Microsoft's 50th anniversary, so it's going to announce AI something something
• Paul has agreed to attend this, from Mexico
• Also, report that Microsoft's in-house models now rival OpenAI is a hint
• Microsoft improves Think Deeper in Copilot using OpenAI o3-mini
• Google secretly owns 14-15 percent of Anthropic
• WTF is going on with Big Tech and regulatory evasion?
• On that note, CMA clears Microsoft + OpenAI specifically because of change to partnership
• Also, Google launches Gemma 3
• The Siripocalypse - AI is a hard computer science problem and Siri is the dumb blond in this space
• Amazon will use AI to dub movies and TV series because obviously

Xbox

• Rumor: Third-party portable Xbox gaming handheld this year, console resets in two years
• You could have cobbled this together solely based on what Microsoft has said publicly
• Xbox controller firmware, we have a problem

Tips and Picks

• Tip of the week: Code with AI
• App pick of the week: Fences
• RunAs Radio this week: Strong Certificate Mapping in Active Directory with Richard Hicks
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Ardbeg 10

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

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