Windows Weekly 847: JUSHED!

Leo and Paul discuss this week’s blockbuster news: Panos Panay, the Xbox leak, and the Microsoft Special Event in New York.

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We’re down a Panay

After his curiously off-kilter performance at Build 2023 this past May, Microsoft reveals that it is parting ways with Panos Panay. Are these things related?

• He’s landing at Amazon devices, which makes sense given David Limp is retiring
• My take on Panay. It’s complicated
• Related: Multiple Microsoft executives and employees have reached out to my privately about this. Here’s the consensus on Panay
• Comparisons to Terry Myerson’s exit (which was only 5 years ago!?)

Blockbuster Xbox leak

Major Xbox leak reveals Xbox Series X|S mid-season upgrades, next-gen console, new controller, more

• This is one of the top three Microsoft leaks that’s happened in my nearly 30 years of covering this company
• An analysis of just one of the documents in this leak reveals an incredible amount of strategy information for the next 10 years
• And one about the reaction to the PS5 reveal
• And coming soon … Microsoft may have looked into acquiring Nintendo during the time they were going after Tik-Tok
• Oh, and that new controller? That was my idea 🙂

Microsoft’s AI event is tomorrow

• My expectations for this event, which I see as the kick-off for Microsoft’s full-on client AI push – and now Microsoft has confirmed this. Internal memo: ”This Thursday at our event in NYC, we’ll share the next step we’ll take to further build on this work and lead in this exciting new era. I will keep the news of this event confidential until we tell the world later this week, but it will lay out the vision for what’s ahead.” — Yusuf Mehdi
• Sub-analysis: This could be Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott’s “Ray Ozzie moment.” There’s a profile of this mostly-unknown in the WSJ
• Related: Intel announces NPU-powered Core Ultra CPUs – off schedule? Related to MSFT event?
• Related: Bing Chat gains two new mobile integrations
• Related: Paint keeps getting AI features – layers and transparency – background removal – Remember when Paint was the laughing stock of Windows 11 apps? Here’s why this is happening now

Windows

No new builds (of substance, there was on RP build). Guessing this is related to the event

Windows Photos, Snipping Tool, and Phone Link are all getting new features in Insider – Is Microsoft finally taking its in-box apps seriously (again)?

Related: Google extends support lifecycle for ChromeOS, solving the single biggest criticism of this platform. This is problematic for Microsoft.

Microsoft 365

Report: EU will reject Microsoft’s offer to unbundle Teams from Microsoft 365. I have an educated guess why

Surface

Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Laptop Go 3 leak – will likely be announced at special event

Xbox

Microsoft announces more Xbox Game Pass titles for September

Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls VI will be an Xbox exclusive

Tips and picks

Tip of the week: Consolidate and organize your online accounts

As part of my now-six-week digital decluttering journey, I’m taking on another related and overdue task: consolidating and organizing my online accounts. Dividing between work (Google Workspace, M365 Business) and personal (Gmail, MSA). Moving services (Google Photos, YouTube, YouTube Music) as needed. And the difficulty of this is a good reminder of why I’ve never done this before.

Why? And why now? Moving to Thurrott.com was a trigger—it’s my identity—and now I’m mixing work and personal. Moving my video archives to YouTube was what put it over the top.

The scariest thing you can do is delete data from an account. (Think about password managers. This is 1000x worse.)

There may be easier ways. For example, Google accounts support “brand” sub-accounts for YouTube, etc. And third party tools will help in some cases. As will…

App pick of the week: Google Takeout

Say what you will about Google and privacy, but this company gets at least one thing right: Its Takeout service lets you download all of the data in any or all of the Google services you’ve used. It’s worth taking a look. And maybe downloading some data—or even doing so on a schedule—even if you’re not leaving.

Why? You may learn something. I’ve downloaded my Google Photos library for example, and it was 550 GB. And … it doesn’t have all of my photos like I expected. So I have work to do.