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

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

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

This week on the Vertcast, 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 and Congress. And there's lightning around. Coming up on the Verstass now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows,

and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of multi-application environments. See, it's my Windows check. That's my Windows 11 joke. See, Dieter made a noise. Yeah.

I'm Neil. I'm your friend. That's Dieter. I'm your 19th century continental philosophy expert. That's actually true. I just want to be honest that in many ways that's what you are for me. Tom Warren is here. Hey, Tom.

Hello there. I run Windows apps, Android apps, iOS apps, web apps, everything. 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 at 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 the pandemic, which is really not quite over around the world. Marybeth 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. that are coming 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 of 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 out the movie, pump up the volume. So anytime we do like how important a 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. 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 fight COVID misinformation is really interesting. Check it out. Okay. Windows 11. Tom. It's been a day. It's a lot of Windows 11 today.

Yeah. Yeah. Where do we begin? So, I mean, we've talked about this on the verge cards before, but there was a lot today. New start menu, new design, Android apps. So should we start from the design? I think we should start with the fact that Microsoft tried to host a livestream. Microsoft, one of the world's biggest cloud computing providers, was not able to execute a live stream for Windows.

Was it Azure? Did that fail? I don't think we'll ever know. I just know that eventually Microsoft executives were like Twitter. tweeting out YouTube links so people could watch this thing. All I know is that I watch the majority of it through Twitter. Yeah, same. I don't typically watch Twitter videos because they crush the compression and everything,

but it worked fine through there. But yeah, through Microsoft and streaming, it was, yeah, it was terrible. Not great. So that was kind of the stutter start to the whole thing. Start out with Pan S. Penae, who's chief product office 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. Yeah, that seems to be like the thing they realized during the pandemic, essentially.

I mean, they were like explicit about it. Panos was like, damn, I used Windows for a lot. I literally just finished speaking to Panos. And he was kind of saying that, basically, that they obviously went in and started this work on 10X. So the last time they did a surface event in New York, it was these dual screen devices. 10x was the thing that they were going to do, this new version of Windows 10, which screen devices. And then when the pandemic comes, everyone's rushing out to get laptops and to work from home. 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, and I know that I'm not. Like I'm more glued to my laptop than I've ever been and my desktop than 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 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 trying to get filled 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. You just talked to Panos, Sotianadella 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 to. 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. To me, 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 finally get it. Yeah. It's a little dog tweeting goes a long way. It's like they've all turned into Windows laptop reviewers overnight. They're like this one thing that never really affects me. Oh, man. Does it affect me now? Yeah. So just a remarkable frame for an event that they were, they were honest about. I appreciated that. But then there's a lot of changes. So the last time you're on, we were talking to leaked build. They went farther than the leaks in many ways. What were the big, big changes to the UI? Yeah, because obviously the leak was kind of just scratching the surface, I feel like. There was obviously

a lot more 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 can really avoid it. And it can be put to the left-hand side. We know that. But it's centered, new start button. The actual start menu itself, when you launch it, is more like a launch. launcher now. I know we talked about this before, but like it's, it is almost like you're an app launcher,

like you'd find on Android. Like it's obviously heavily inspired by Android, ChromeOS, even MacOS, right? Like, it kind of matches up to everything now. So it's going to be sent to default. 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 Dita likes live tiles. I read about it on the live blog today. 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. Oh, okay, great. Oh, this is what's playing right now. Okay, great. But that's all going away. Yeah, it's all going away. But I feel like it's 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? Yeah. Like that's obviously going away from the start. I mean you that live tile thing. And then that is actually been shifted into a separate sort of section. A panel of glass, I think is what they described it as in the event. I think Himes said it in chat during the event.

There's a lot of Vista vibes all through Windows 11. Oh, yes. Right? Lots of frosted transparency, lots of layers. A lot of vista vibes going on here. And now maybe the hardware is fast enough to run it. It's very glassy. Yeah.

It's the way that I would cool it. Yeah. And that frosted panel glass thing slides in. And it's basically all your widgets. So 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 furge articles. They did.

There are two different verge articles in there and there are demos and PR. I was like, all right, I'll take it. The weather's in there. Yeah, the thing that freaked me out was when they said that this was like, there was like going to be an AI and there was like a feed. And I was like, oh, God, this is basically like the left of home Google menu. This is going to suck.

But it looks like it's a combination of widgets that you move around in 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, 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. Oh, yeah, sure. Right.

Like, they know that everybody 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.

Yeah. But the way Windows is organized now, just roughly approximates the way everything else is organized. I think that's smart. 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're saying, you know, like this stuff only works that people, like developers participate in it. And if you're like a widget developer, like, where do I go? What do I do? Like, you just kind of

like, actually, I'm going to make an app that makes a money instead of a widget. You know, Eli, 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 glancesable information widgets. It's almost like a like a dashboard, right? I'm still extremely salty for years. I had a dashboard widget that just told me what time, like it was called Chrono Slater. I can't believe I'm talking about a 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 4 o'clock in my time.

And then it would tell me what time it was everywhere that the verge team was. Yeah. And they took it away for me. And now I'm just like, whatever. It's two in the morning for Tommy's getting this slack anyway. And it's all because the widgets started going to this. It ruined everyone's life. 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 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? Where are they putting notifications in all of this? On the right, same way there now. 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 also, 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. Oh, good. 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 the interface and controls on it. 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. And they did show some of the dark mode stuff and it looks like they're actually going to 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 dialog 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 touch points 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. Red JET 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, you're just using your computer for a Zoom call or 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. I will 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. Yeah, like, it does, it does look like they've gone down

the simplification route, which they were obviously going for Windows 10x, and it feels that they've got the right ideas. So just how it plays out. So 10x was like going to 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? 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 10x 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 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 also it's almost going to demand like new hardware um 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 like, yeah, we kind of messed up Windows 8. Please install this immediately. It's a free upgrade. So that's another sort of interesting dimensions

to see what sort of hardware comes out. Tom, since you brought it up, I mean, we've got to get into a bunch of other stuff. I really want to talk about the new Snap Guide stuff or Snap Playout stuff. I knew that's what you were going to say. 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 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? Yeah, that's definitely been something that's 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. Okay. 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're in a, like they have a device 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 tell people to dig into BIOS screens, which are always different on every single device.

that's going to be like an interesting one. Oh, they can just tell people to go visit a Microsoft store. Oh, never mind. A Microsoft Experience Center. There's only three of them in the world. Well, that's why it's such an experience. You've got to get to one. It's a long journey.

Actually, dear, let's talk about Windows snapping because I think we're going to end up spending a lot of time on Android apps. Okay. 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. Yeah.

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.

Well, they're also, they and 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. not 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 dock, and all that extra complexity will be there for power users, but hopefully won't get in the way of, you know, normal people that just want to have their windows stay where they're supposed to be.

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 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. 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 Panos knew. Come on. I don't know, man. Well, no, because he's in flow.

He definitely knew. Okay. I'll give you Panos like definitely knows. He's got a macro to get himself in flow. There'll be some marketing. exec for sure. 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? 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, not Windows.

You understand what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. And it, 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 it 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. 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. Because like, I just know anecdotally, people who have 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. Yeah, they're using their lap,

touchscreen, whereas in the office, they would just be using the monitor they've got in their office and not even necessarily using both. They might have a machine in the office. So I'd love to know that because that 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 a Windows laptop to another monitor and all your windows just fly around. Yeah. Yeah. That's what Deter is saying. Yeah. They all have that experience on this call, but my kids are being loud. I got to unplug my laptop and go somewhere else and then plug it back in and everything is messed up. I don't know.

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. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. All right. Well, that obviously brings us to Android apps and Windows. does, which I guarantee you only some small percentage of people want. 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 task bar. It's everywhere in Windows 11.

You know what's not everywhere in Windows 11? Skype. Wop, Wop. Because Teams is taken over, right? Skype, Skype, Skype. That's just about time. I mean, that's years in the making. So here's, so they put Teams in the start button.

They're giving a Teams account to everyone now. Yep. 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, Deider, I'm just assuming you understand, maybe only you understand. So you can message anybody in teams across a range of formats.

Yep. And then they're like, if the person you're trying to message doesn't have a team's account, it'll fall back to SMS using your phone number. using your phone number. That's what they have said. 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.

Because the other option is every Windows machine gets a new phone number that can use SMS. Right. Which seems even more unworkable than then using SMS. It's unclear. Like, how do they, how, 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 can 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. works. Unless, because SMS is so sketchy that you can just pretend you are that number.

That's possible. You can do that. Okay, I'm just going to 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. If that's all about teams, right, that's what they're saying. Yeah. 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. Yeah. No further information.

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. Yeah.

At the end of every message is download the Teams app here with the short link. Yeah. Yeah, sent from Microsoft Teams short link. I will tell you that one of the only companies to sign on to promise that they would someday adopt

RCS was Microsoft. Oh God. No. This is a direct call-out to two-way SMS. Yeah. Yeah, I know. There's no RCS in here. They called it out, they're excited about it. No details in how it works. If they've actually managed to figure out

how to let your Windows computer or just do SMS through teams using your phone number, that's a huge deal, we just don't know. I'd imagine it's something to do with your phone. No, but as I said, iOS too. You don't need an Android phone to do this. Yeah.

And they have no deal with Apple as far as I know. Yeah. Although in his interview with Joanna Stern, Satchez said that anything Apple wants to do with Windows, whether it's iTunes or I message or what have you, we would welcome that. Yeah. So, hold your breath there, Satcha. 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 inside the Windows store. We don't actually, that's unclear. Okay. Great. Yeah, they didn't actually really show it. And they, they're like, we're not quite sure what it's going to look like. So, yeah. My guess is that there's a separate app, the Amazon Android app. Yeah, that you have to install. 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. Right. Oh, so it's discoverable in the Microsoft store. So you can search for TikTok. It'll show you that. But then there's a button that has a little arrow going away saying get from the Amazon store. So there it is.

Yeah. Yeah. And Nadella told me that if Google wants to participate, they would also support the Play Store. what 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 fire tablets for the most part. I think you can download the Amazon App Store on Google.

You can side load it. No one uses it. Yeah, it has a bunch of outdated Android apps. It's probably the best way to describe it. 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. So we'll get to there in a second. So you download the example they kept using was TikTok, right? TikTok's 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 Pinase TikTok algorithm serves him. Weightlifting, because he's pumped. It's just design porn.

You know it's just like close-ups of. like champhers 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 not tops. 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. Yeah. Right. 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 through, like, Blue Stacks and all those sort of connectors. Yeah. I could definitely see

the value in it. And, like, I think most people probably don't really need Android apps on their 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. They would be like, huh, okay, that's kind of useful to have that on my PC. It's just what is the app? Yeah.

And is it available in the Amazon app store as opposed to Google Play? That's the big blocker. Again, a preview of the conversation on the Delo on Decoder. I was like, 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. 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 Panos like moments ago about this. And he was basically open to like, you know, Steam being there, epic game 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 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 to get all your apps. I want to wrap up Android one last thing, which is why not sidelode? 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 podcast. 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. 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 new one up, I just like go down the checkbox, like stick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Yeah. I think the other thing about Android apps in particular is unclear how well they're going to run. 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 X-86 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 was 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. 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 Max 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, 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. Yeah, and there's obviously the benefits for Amazon partnering with them here is that they're going to get probably more developers porting their apps over, right? Like, there's going to be 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 key. 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 a lot of people now. So that's why Microsoft, you know, even when they talked about app support, it was never just about Android apps. It was 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. Yeah. I think if you can get all of those into the store and in a coherent way that makes sense. Like if I go in and search for, I don't know, Fortnite and then I search for it in the Windows store, I click a button and it pulls me into the Epic Game Store.

Great. Like, yeah. Yeah. That's fine. 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, 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 good news for people who use Windows for sure. Tom, I'm going to hold myself back from talking about progressive web apps. You're welcome. 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, we're happy to have it in a store. They're going to, you know, I'm sure they're going to 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. Yeah, like, that's another big part of this, right? Because 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. 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 if you want to get Photoshop, you get like some touch version or like some really

lightweight version that, let's be honest, nobody really uses, do they? They just go for the full version of Photoshop on Windows. So like having that stuff there is, yeah, like that's, it goes to your point again. Like you have a list of apps you install on your Windows device, right? Like, 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. Yeah, 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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That's Grammarly.com. 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 7030 that we've just heard about

endlessly with Apple and Google. and whoever else, Microsoft's going to flat 8515, and then you can just not use it. So you don't have to use their payment systems or whatever. You can put your apps in the store, use your own payment, and obviously do 0% you're responsible for whatever costs of rolling your own payment solution,

which is why Adobe is putting Creative Cloud in the store. Yeah, so there's a few things to this. So the 8515 split for apps has always been there on the Windows store. But like apps like Creative Suite just wouldn't go for it, not necessarily for the revenue split, but also just because they couldn't have their own updata 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 it's 8515 for apps, 8812 for games, which is coming in August, which they've already announced.

So they're pulling it back a bit. But if you want to use an app purchase system, so if you want to use an app purchase system, so if you're, if you're Fortnite and you want to be in the Windows store, that doesn't apply. That free, open approach doesn't apply to games. Right. 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 revenues generated in these stores, no. Like, you have to use Microsoft's payment processing platform. Google draws a similar line on the Play Store, actually. They have different rules for games and they do for everything else. It's because, yeah, that's literally where people spend their money, right? It's not many apps that people buy. Another decade of asking, what is a game?

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 this money. We'd rather just run our own stack and be okay with it. What do you make devil's advocate of the argument that 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. Yeah, but on Windows it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's right.

There's also the Wild West and other game stores and whatever else have you. What you're really getting is, again, I asked Nadell, 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 pressure to do. That's, Deidre, you wrote about this. Like, that's kind of where Nadella ended the whole event, right? Just talking about how open Windows is talking on 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, well, that's a lot of direct shots at Apple. There's a lot of direct shots at Apple. This is a part

where I get to talk about Arthur Schopenhauer. No, I'm not actually going to do that. But he did quote this, like, random philosopher who believes that nothing is. is real and everything only exists if you perceive it yourself. I'm not going to go there. He quoted him at the end. It's like, you know, there are some creators that are meteors and they flame out and there are some craters 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 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. 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 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, maybe that's because you can get paid in Microsoft Points in their new direct tipping feature.

I know that it's like amazing. If you're a local journalist and you get paid in Microsoft points, I would be so mad. Oh, man, I'd be so mad. You could buy an Export Series X and then put it on eBay. You can't? Yeah, true. But yeah, he's got 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. Yeah. And this thing about sovereign creators and owning your own business. Like, okay, here's the cynical read. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I definitely share this. Yeah. The obvious cynical read, which is no one uses this app store. Yep. Until this pandemic, Windows was an afterthought even for Microsoft. Yep. 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. Right. 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 a 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 because that's what y'all motherfuckers want to use apple the unix computer that's easy to you 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

and we're definitely just sort of doing telematics. I'm going to 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 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, which is hilarious given all the antitrust battles they faced.

But he's like, SAP was built and born on Windows. that'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 both to some extent, right? Yeah. And 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, as built on top of that. 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 he wants. But the problem with it now is that 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.

Yeah. So that list is like Windows 10S, all the modes they've done. They went from Windows S mode to Windows Shruggy mode. Whatever, do what you want. Like they would have loved to have had the app model that Apple has, right? Like that control. Yeah, they tried and they failed. It's failed and they've had to be open.

They've had to embrace this openness, which has been great for them. Like, 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, the open approach is obviously for the best, but it's definitely because they've had to. 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 to have the easy shots at Apple during 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 going to. So they're just going to 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. 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 try 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 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 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 know, not so much that,

like, you should take advantage of the things that they're giving you, you know, because they're cynical. You know what I mean? Yeah, you know, 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 was like, we could just rename Windows Azure Edge, but no one's going to let me. Right. And he's saying Windows is not, the operating system is not the most important layer for us. And 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 on 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 it 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.

Teams is everywhere now. Like we're going to make teams the default communication app for business as aggressively as we can. Because that is the future of Microsoft's like workplace productivity business. And they're going to be aggressive about it. At the same time, if they are going to 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, Teter. 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 variety of sources.

Yeah. It lets you touch the fucking screen. That's kind of remarkable that Microsoft is like positioning itself right there. Yeah. And it's Linux, right? It's a year of Linux that time. The year of Linux on that side. Hey, like Windows is Linux now. It's like a whole thing they love to say. But I absolutely think like

Everything they've done in Windows 11 and 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 is going. Like they know they're building it, right? Like cloud computing, everyone working in their browser is slowly becoming, or 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 going to work in a browser and they're going to stream that 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. Yeah, I think one interesting question. You mentioned streaming Windows.

They're streaming Xbox. Yeah. 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. Yeah, like 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. Is this the browser one? Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, when you think about 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 stream straight to their computer is actually a way better experience than trying to use the browser themselves. So like that is a way that we're kind of heading with computing, especially when everything's contained within the browser now. What Tom is talking about is called the mic. browser. It just runs Chrome in the cloud and streams it to you. Every time I've looked at, 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.

I like Google have my browsing history. It seems crazy right now, but like I genuinely think that's the way we're heading. And there'll be some, I'm sure Google will do some really interesting stuff around it particularly. Microsoft knows where it's heading. They're building a similar sort of service themselves, a cloud PC service. So they know. 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. It's like a long, it's like a brochure. I don't even know how to describe this document.

it has like flat illustrations. It looks like one of those videos for 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 steal your phone if sideloding is loud. It's like this is so incongruous. If you don't know how to describe it, Tim Sweeney has a bunch of just very descriptive tweets about it.

I can certainly read this. Sorry, did you see what Tim Sweetie just tweeted about the apps for stuff today? He said, and I quote, the 2021 version of Microsoft is the best version of Microsoft ever, exclamation point. Yeah. And then he retweeted you saying Nadell's remarks for direct shot at Apple. So he's happy with Microsoft. But Microsoft's a big epic partner, right?

They're like 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, there's a lot of opportunity for him there.

And Serini was on stage when they first 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. by the way, Tom Sini's quote about the Apple graphic was the Epic Game 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. Wow. 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. That's pretty good. But this is like a huge reverse. in this industry, right? Apple's, like, Congress right now is marking up antitrust bills.

McKenna has been watching this endless markup. The exited committee to go into the floor. Largely intact. Largely intact. There's some minor changes, but congratulations to McKenna for watching all of this. It went into like three or four in the morning and then starting in today. 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 these bills passed, Microsoft will certainly feel the effects. But it's crazy that 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. If you told me this 20 years,

I just would not have believed you. Yeah. Everything's flipped upside down. And it's, this world. Google is considering letting, um, like media apps, like video music or book apps get around the 30% like, yeah. It is amazing with a little bit of controversy and a little bit of regular, like even the threat of regulations are, oh, we should maybe stop it so much. I don't know. So what, what's finished on Windows 11? We got a lightning round of gadgets to do. Tom, what are the minimum system requirements and when does Windows 11 hit? So the minimum system requirements are a full gig of RAM, 64 gig of storage, and a 65,000, and a 65,000, four-bit processor. So nothing too crazy there. 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 control ofcy, 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. There is one more system requirement to talk about, which is if you have Windows 11 Home Edition, you also need a internet connection. Yeah. Just for the setup. Yeah. Because that is obviously there to force you to use a Microsoft account. But there's no Cortana when you set it up anymore.

Thank God. With some Wi-Fi here. Yeah. You know, that is an unfortunate part of Windows 11 and also the widget stuff. 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're going down that route as well, like those are two. unfortunate things.

Well, this is why you have five antitrust bills. Yeah. Right? I mean, this is a source of where, like, a big knock on those bills is, well, we'll talk about it in the next episode, but a big knock on those bills is it's not clear what they're going to cause. Yeah. So we just don't know, but that's presumably that sort of self-preferencing would go away.

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

Is that when it comes out? 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 at some point in October, probably early. Well, they've got to do it before holiday laptop shopping, right? Yeah. So October is almost guaranteed.

All right. We're going to take a break. And there's a bunch of lightning around stuff we've got to get through and come back. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts,

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All right, we're back. I was just talking about the antitrust bills. We don't know what they're going to do. 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, data portability, all that stuff that we talked about in the Kennedy before. It's got to get through the House. Some big riffs in both the Democrats and the Republicans. Yeah. Notably, all of the representatives from California where all the big tech companies are. Yeah. Like, united across party lines to be like, screw this.

Which is very funny. We'll see. I think 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'll pass them, you'll change the dynamics to the marketplace, you'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 the bills. On the flip side, 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. Yeah. 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 smart watches shall ever exist in my life because Apple refuses to let anything else work with its pot. 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? 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. And if you, like, flip the table, it's, it's like, 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. I'd argue that we do know though, because like we know that competition is best for consumers. Right, but you have to imagine the outcome, right? There's like this big leap that you have to make. Yeah, but if it means splitting up like ADOS 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. This is the idea. 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 been railing with the lack of competition in broadband America for years. Optimum just lowered its speeds. Yep.

To quote, better align with the market. So they looked around and said, man, our service is faster on upload. loads than everybody else. We're just going to lower them because no one can leave. Like, what are you going to do? You're going to move to Dieter's crappy Comcast? Oh, God. Like, it's the opposite of competition.

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 Comtas is just like, nah, not today. If you've heard me vamping, it's because Deeter has just disappeared for seconds at a time. But, like, I, Comcast owns NBC Universal, which is an investor in me, they're a parent company, et cetera, sorry. All I'm saying is part of what you're going to 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 going to make the products worse. They're going to 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. It's like work it out, you know? like open stuff up.

Like I'm sure there's obviously going to be security concerns, platforms and all that, like, you know, the 16-page PDF that Apple puts out, all that sort of stuff. But like you say, they're smart, you know, that they can compete. They can figure these difficult things out. And I feel like it's definitely for the consumer benefit for there to be more competition. And if they can't figure it out, they'll die and somebody else will figure it out. And that will also be fine. Yeah. 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-school executives are in charge of these lobbying groups. It's like, yeah, it's politics. It's kind of gross.

Lobbing 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 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 to. Right. Instead of that company just dying because it didn't have access to the operating system. And yes, there are security concerns.

And yes, I don't know, pirates are going to do piracy. But like, those are the arguments I heard from the music industry when they wanted to have DRM. Yeah. 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.

And now most of the music that people listen to is streamed in proprietary formats. It's true. They did figure that out. 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, 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.

Dator and I were talking about this. You can read this in one of two ways. But there's a big piece in the other times about Google and maybe it's moving in slow motion. It's not so innovative anymore. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And it's like, incredible. That's horrible. Yeah.

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 have to take any risks. And if somebody else proves that this is a good idea, they can just release a product, put Google Meat everywhere in 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 try to go to a Google Meet meeting.

It's nuts. And that sort of dynamic, I don't know, I would just like to see that change. 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. I think, Dieter, you understand it's better than anybody. They want to turn it off, but they can't. 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 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 got to wait. We're going to, like, this UK regulator, they're, like working with them to, like, come up with a way to do it. They're going to spend more time trying to come up with new technologies to replace a third-party cookie.

And they're just, like, stuck. They're stuck because if they just made the browser, they could be like, yeah, we're going to compete in the world of browsers. We're going to make a browser that 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 kind of had to, like, push.

And so, you know, no one should feel bad for Google. But, like, the reason they're not doing it is because there's, like, all these other forces being applied to their browser, and it aligns, it 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, 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 cookie apocalypse and they were not implementing flock, blah, blah, blah, blah, every ad tech company on the planet had their stock just leap into the sky. Yeah. Because 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. 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. And then advertisers can target that and your device will do it, but they won't know who you are.

Right. 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 him. Whereas Apple's like... 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 could maybe find a not problem with flock someday. But we're so far from that. So the other part of Google's announcement is they 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. But they're like laying the groundwork for being like, well, flock was a good experiment. the web standards process had it say, and now we're doing this other thing. You know, we've evolved it,

and they'll, like, drop it or something. It's just like, we talk about the web a lot. Like, this is a huge deal. Yeah. 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 going to 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 enabling cookies, which allow other people to track. So, yeah, I don't know. Just like 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 Block cookies, like antitrust except for ad tech industry. Yeah. Just do it. See what happens. It'll be fine. Let's go.

We got lightning around. Do you want to go through it, either? 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 of wear OS watch, maybe.

And the 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 Apple is thinking about making a less expensive big phone next year, which is like, welcome to 2018. Yeah. Cheap big phones. Who knew?

Yeah. Everybody. Literally everybody. Actually, Mitchell wrote this story for us, and he has this great segment in the middle of the story that'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 Commission that's like, yep, people like big phones and they like cheap ones. 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. Okay. You ready for this? Here we go. T-Mobile is selling a 5G branded gin. Look, we already called dibs on mobile wireless related alcohol.

hall. It's called Cizzer Vodka. It's true. It has a tagline called Snip, Snip, cut through the night. It's just cut through the night. It's just cut through the night, but then you say snip, snip, snip. Yeah, that's true. They go together, maybe even a snipping noise. They totally just stole this idea from us. I love how it's called five gin. No. And there's five ginger beer. It's good. It's not, I will say this. A long time ago, this is a true story. A long time ago, we were back in a gadget. We ran Engadgett mobile, Engadgett's color was blue Engadgett's color was pink

and T-Mobile sent a cease and desist to AOL saying that Engadgett Mobile had to stop using the color of pink because T-Mobile was pink. We said no. Actually ran a story, it was great. Well, it's my turn, all right?

Mobile Vodkas are my thing, T-Mobile. Well, it's a gin, so technically... Fine. Every summer, every summer the world tries to get me to drink gin. You notice 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. No, it's great. What are you talking about? It's horrible. It's like drinking a tree. The thing I'm unhappy about is last week we saw DISH try and launch Project Genesis where the S was a five. And now we have five gin. Stop taking the 5G things and incorporating it into other words. I don't want it. 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, we had parties to go to. They have time to burn. They were just like, here's some ideas. It's bad. The five ginger beer was just one step too far.

Five gin. Okay, huh? Five ginger beer. Just look at it. It just looks crazy. 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 Lepado wrote a gigantic story, 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 out. 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 Vergecast listeners are probably particularly interested in that. Decoder this week was Jack Conti, the CEO of Patreon. Like I said, Sasha Nadella, that episode, bonus episode decoder up now in parallel to the Vergecast. So go listen to that. Next week on Decoder, we've talked about like Jewel a lot, the vape on the show because Deeter and I both have a problem. Not anymore. We're good now. Yes. Definitely have a healthy relationship at nicotine.

That's because you've got five gin. Yeah, it's a, I've, I drink now instead of vaping. It's great. It's very healthy transition. Lauren Eder, who's a reporter at Bloomberg News, just wrote a gigantic book about the history of Jewel 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. I highly recommend it. 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 in 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 week with more Virchcast. That's it. Rock and roll. Snip, snip.