Windows Weekly 392 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte:  It's time for Windows Weekly.  Yes, I am back.  Thank you Mike Elgan for filling in.  Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here as well.  We will discuss the latest about Windows 10, Kevin Turner's interesting statement that Microsoft has found a new way to make money on Windows, we don't know what that is, and we will answer some questions from the Twitter.  It's all coming up next on Window Weekly.

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Leo:  Hi, this is Leo Laporte, and if you would like to help us design our new website I invite you to visit twit.to/navtest.  We have got 8 quick questions that we would like to help you that would help us make the navigation easier to use.  That's twit.to/navtest, thanks a lot.

(Intro music plays)

Leo:  This is Windows Weekly, Episode 392, recorded December 10th, 2014.

Building Fort Kickass

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It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk about the latest Microsoft stuff.  I'm back baby.  Thanks to Mike Elgan for filling in last week.  I was a little under the weather.  Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, though, they are always here, whether or not.  Paul Thurrott from the Super Site for Windows, winsupersite.com.  Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet allaboutmicrosoft.com.

Paul Thurrott:  That's like a little play on words by the way.

Leo:  What's that?

Paul:  You are under the weather and we are here whether or not.

Leo:  No, I'm sophisticated that way.

Paul:  That's pretty good.  It took me like 10 seconds to get it.

Leo:  We lost Paul for 10 seconds, he just went poof.

Paul:  It wasn't my video pausing for once, it was literally me brain freezing.

Leo:  Now we have got a big storm.  You just had your Nor’easter, right?  It's snowing in New York right now.

Mary Jo Foley:  It is.

Leo:  But we are apparently going to get a very big storm tonight.

Paul:  It's the end of times.

Leo:  If for some reason you don't hear from the TWiT Brickhouse for a few days that's why.

Paul:  Good thing it is made of brick and not straw like that last house you had.

Leo:  Blew it right over.  More concerning is flooding because apparently the entire town of Petaluma is on marshland.  The basement of this building, it's very rare to have basements in California, but this building has a basement and apparently this building's basement is occasionally prone to flooding.  There were rumors, and I've never been able to confirm them, that all of the older buildings in town had tunnels that led down to the river.  This was a furniture factory in the late 19th Century, and the premise was that they could bring the furniture right down to the boats via the tunnels, but we have never confirmed that.  Although, I haven't seen Father Robert Ballicier in about 3 days.  It could be that he found one of the tunnels.

Mary Jo:  He's down in the tunnels.

Leo:  Did I miss anything?  Last week was kind of slow, right, nothing much happened with Microsoft last week?

Paul:  Yeah, it's been slow.

Leo:  We are still working on Windows 10.  Did they push an update or anything?  Anything to say about that?  Guess not, okay.  We are going to take some Twitter questions later on.

Paul:  What's happening?

Leo:  I did like that interview with Kevin Turner, I thought that was interesting that he said that they are going to have to find new ways to make money with Windows.  What does that mean?

Mary Jo:  If only we knew, right?  He said we are going to hear more about the new business model that Microsoft has for Windows 10 in the early part of next year.  But he definitely was hinting around about the fact that attached services are going to be how they think that they can make money in a world where Windows is increasingly being given away for free.  So that's not new to us because we have been saying this for a while now that they have been looking at things like OneNote, and Xbox Live, and Office 365 as the attached services where they hook you in an make money from you going forward.  But a lot of people seem to find this surprising I guess, or they misinterpreted his remarks to say that Windows is going to be the service, which if you read his comments, he didn't say that.

Paul:  I was just going to comment on that.  I read what you wrote and I read my own thing obviously, and you kind of parced what he says.  He never suggests Windows as a subscription service.  He very clearly says that we don't accept the fact that Windows is going to be a loss leader, although I think that they will get to that point, frankly, directly as a loss leader.  They are going to make money indirectly elsewhere.  Yeah, he doesn't really say what it is, he says that sometime next year they will reveal what their plan is.  We have a plan, and we are going to talk about that plan.  We are just not going to talk about that plan today.  

Leo:  As you point out Mary Jo, it's been apparent from their moves all year that this is the way that it is going; giving away stuff, trying as hard as they can to get people signed up for things like Azure and OneDrive...

Paul:  Open sourcing stuff, releasing it on IOS.  There is all kinds of crazy things that they are doing now.

Leo:  Progressively across platform which means Windows is no longer the center of the universe.  All of these things.

Paul:  The one thing that I didn't write up yet, I meant to do this, is that I think that it's pretty clear that the zero dollar, low cost Windows licensing thing has worked in the sense that we have seen renewed interest in not just low priced Windows machines but high quality low priced Windows machines, which has been kind of surprising.  The thing that hasn't worked, and this is related to this, I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention, is before they announced that they announced that they had signed on a bunch of Windows Phone partners.  We now know that that was because Windows Phone will now be free.  Man, we really haven't seen a lot of new Windows Phones, have we?  We have seen a few.

Leo:  Well, in the third world we have, haven't we?  

Paul:  But not really.

Mary Jo:  We've seen more there.

Paul:  Yeah, but still not the explosion that one might have expected.

Mary Jo:  I think that they are probably waiting for the next version of Windows Phone OS too, though.  It's going to be pretty different in terms of what is underneath from what we know.  It's going to have the Windows 10 core for one thing.  So if you are an OEM are you going to run something out now or are you like you know, they are going to put this build out pretty soon of Windows Phone 10.  Maybe I should wait.

Paul:  I wonder though, that Microsoft wouldn't incent them to do that because the more time that goes by the worse of a problem that this is for Windows Phone.  We are not exactly clawing our way back here.  This time next year it is going to be even worse.  I just don't see anything on the horizon, Windows 10 of course, but it's too bad.  Even Microsoft itself the big issue is the lack of any flagship phone of any kind, and no real concrete news about a new one.  The ecosystem needs a little jumpstart and I really felt like by this time, the end of the year, that we would be able to look back and say, wow, look how this made a difference.  But it really hasn't, we see those Windows Phone statistics every month, Nokia is 95% of the market still, Microsoft / Nokia, of the Windows Phone market.  You don't see Blue making headway or any of these companies that are coming to India or Asia really making any headway at all.  It's just really kind of remains static.  That's too bad.

Leo:  On the other hand I think that their cross platform strategy is working, their Cloud strategy is working, I mean, how important is phone?

Paul:  To me?

Leo:  Well, I know to you.  But seriously, couldn't Microsoft at some point, and I think this is likely, say well it was a nice try guys.  We are going to abandon that phone thing.

Paul:  You just stabbed me right in the heart.

Mary Jo:  I know.

Leo:  I know that it would be bad for your books, but seriously?

Paul:  I'm not retiring on these Windows Phone books anytime soon.

Leo:  Is there some reason that Microsoft has to keep doing phone?

Paul:  Well, Mary Jo I think has seen some of this, and I think that actually I didn't write much about this either, but one of the things that I caught in Kevin Turner's speech, the written version, I didn't listen to it I just read it, was that he co-mingled phone and tablet in the same way that he co-mingled laptop and desktop PCs.  When he talks about Windows 10 as a shared platform across phone and tablet, PCs of all kinds, Xbox, imbedded devices as well; phone and tablet to him are the same thing.  I think that is Microsoft's strategy going forward.  If you look at Windows, big Windows, I think that likewise the thing that is struggling with that is the tablet part.  The tablet part is a mess, in fact it's kind of a mess in even bigger ways than the phone is.  So those two things being together I think is good from a platform perspective because it makes sense that those things would be the same in the same sense that iPhone and iPad would be the same in IOS or an Android phone and a Nexus tablet would be the same, or whatever.

Mary Jo:  We know with Windows 10, we are pretty sure with Windows 10 that they are going to be one thing, that's one SKU.  These smaller tablets, whether they are ARM based or Intel based, they are going to run the same SKU of Windows as Windows Phone does with Windows 10.

Paul:  I think that makes sense.

Mary Jo:  Yeah, it makes sense, and it's probably going to look and feel more like Windows Phone even on those tablets.

Paul:  I think that makes sense too.

Mary Jo:  Right, they have this other thing that is Windows 10 that is being tested now by you brave technical users.  Crazy, brave, I don't know.  But that is kind of a different thing, right?  That is something that has a desktop and that is more familiar to desktop PC users.  The thing that they are going to build for the small tablets and for phones isn't going to have a desktop we believe. That is going to be something very different.  It will look like Windows Phone OS, but it will be very different from the other Windows.  So like big Windows small Windows or whatever.

Leo:  Or mobile.  I guess you can't say mobile because the Surface is a mobile device.

Mary Jo:  They might.  The rumor is that they might call that Windows Mobile.

Leo:  A name that will live in infamy.

Mary Jo:  Forever.

Paul:  Well, actually, to be fair to Windows Mobile, maybe I'm just being unfair to other products, Microsoft has had other things tank enough that Windows Mobile doesn't actually sound that horrible.

Leo:  It doesn't.  It's like, oh, I remember that.

Paul:  It's like comparatively speaking it's not that bad.  I think the name Windows Mobile is fine.

Leo:  Is there any compelling reason to keep a thing called a Windows Phone around?  I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with Windows Phone.  People say, oh, Windows Phone is great.  I'm not saying that.  Maybe it is just time to say that hey, this is not a market that we are going to win it.

Paul:  We could sort of debate whether Windows Phone can or can't be successful in a market, but I do think there is kind of an end to end solution that Microsoft could offer to developer, and then to the rest of us to use.  It's easier to target all of these things on a single platform, and that makes sense from that perspective.  There are always going to be businesses that will want to go in that direction.  

Leo:  So there is a compelling market because businesses want an end to end solution?

Paul:  Remember, when you co-mingle phone and tablet you are really talking about this one system.  It may be that the minority percentage of these people are actually picking the phone up and putting it to their ear because only some of them will have that capability.

Leo:  Or even care.

Paul:  Today we call that thing Windows Phone, tomorrow Windows Mobile, or just Windows, or whatever.  It may never catch up.  Maybe a year from now we will see bigger changes in those new markets, emerging markets, maybe there will be some difference that will occur.  Frankly, when they announced all of those partners at the beginning we thought we were going to see some movement there before the end of this calendar year.

Leo:  OEM's are telling Microsoft that we don't want to make them.  You, maybe it makes sense for you as an end to end solution to have such a platform, but we don't see a business there so we aren't going to make them.

Mary Jo:  They just signed on all of those Windows Phone partners that Paul just mentioned, so there are people out there who think that they can make them.  The fact that Microsoft just bought Nokia and owns a phone hardware making company means to me that they are going to at least give it a try because they didn't dump all Nokia employees.  They dumped about half, right, when they bought them?  I don't know how long they are going to keep trying.  That is the question to me because Satya Nadella is pretty clear in that he is not going to let businesses inside Microsoft that are not making money stick around.  He's showing that already.  When does he say that the cutoff comes?  If they aren't over 3% next year is it time to say that you know, we aren't going to stay here in this space.  Or is it going to be in 2 years, or 4 years, I don't know. 

Paul:  There is also this notion that markets consolidate into one or two major players and when it comes to smartphones specifically one thing that I have been observing recently is that we as technology enthusiasts will tend to discuss and debate features of the operating system itself, or the platform, you know Windows Phone does this, and IOS is good at this, and Android is good at this, and so forth.  I think that most people actually use these devices as obviously sometimes they make phone calls, or they make text messaging, or things like that, but mostly they run apps.  They don't really think about, you know, Windows Phone has this hub system and technically it is superior, and you can see all of your stuff.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody cares.  Nobody cares about that stuff.  I care about it, and I know that people listening to this probably do too, but the truth is that people are like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, whatever they do.  They just bounce in and out of these things and that is the mobile experience.  Microsoft was very thoughtful in the creation of Windows Phone.  I think that they did some really  innovative stuff, I just don't think that anyone was listening or cares.  The way people use these platforms it really doesn't matter.

Leo:  You don't have to defend it, and we aren't saying that there is anything wrong with it, but I was just wondering if there was a market for it.

Paul:  Oh, there is something wrong with it Leo.  There are many things wrong with it.  There are things right about it.

Leo:  Didn't Ed Bott just say that I'm giving up on Windows Phone?

Paul:  That doesn't resonate in any meaningful way.  He wasn't exactly a giant Windows supporter from day one or anything.  I think that people tend to think of Ed or Tom Warren as these Windows guys when in fact they write about technology.  That's not the really big deal.

Leo:  It's kind of like when Andy Ihnatko said that I am giving up the iPhone for Android.  It was a big story but the reality of it is that we are tech journalists, we are not tied to a platform.

Paul:  It's more important I think for the big trends in these markets.  The big trend is that Android is winning huge worldwide and Apple is winning big in the United States.  You just can't avoid that stuff.  When I look at Microsoft I think what would be the best way for them to spend money on mobile?  Maybe it isn't on Windows Phone.  Maybe it is getting high quality apps, getting their Microsoft experiences on these other platforms, because like I said, the platforms don't matter.  If your workplace is facing you to choose between Android or Apple then good news; Microsoft's apps have never been better on those platforms.

Leo:  Well it seems to me, that's what I'm kind of seeing, it seems to me like Microsoft has absolutely hedged its bet.  

Mary Jo:  Oh yeah, they have.  The thing that is going to be really interesting is next year when we see the Windows Mobile Preview around late January we think when they showed it off to you, the Windows 10 Mobile Preview.  Is there anything in there that makes Windows Mobile a better platform for those apps then Android or IOS?  If the answer is no then there is really no reason to go on Windows.  If the answer is yes and they have done something that you can't do on Android or you can't do on IOS, then maybe you see that's why you want Windows Mobile instead of them.  Right now we don't have that answer.  We don't know what is better for Windows.  Which is crazy.  It's crazy that we don't know that, but that is the new Microsoft right now.  

Paul:  Yeah, sure, okay.  I've been doing psychological therapy for people for the past year and I'm sure this will continue into the future because at some point you just have to wake up because either because you have to or because of circumstances beyond your control you are going to use Android or you are going to use IOS.  Just don't lose sleep over that.  As a technology enthusiast I really do care about the stuff that Microsoft did and is doing in Windows Phone, but pragmatically for whatever audience is listening and reading my stuff I think that this is not something to get in a bunch over.

Leo:  There is a couple of cases that you can make.  Mary Jo made one that businesses, many businesses, want end to end solutions which would include a mobile phone.  There are research areas like Cortana where a mobile phone makes the most sense.  If you are all in on Cortana you may want to continue to do a phone device even if it is adopted in a small number of places because the data you get from that, the information that you get from that can then be extended to other platforms.  There is a large developing world that doesn't have a prejudice to Android or IOS yet that perhaps they could win in.  Although, I don't see that as a big profit center or a big business.  How expensive is it for them to continue to make Windows Phone?   Let's ask that question.

Paul:  How expensive is it for them to get rid of it?

Leo:  They would have to write off the Nokia acquisition.  I don't know how much it would be to write that off.  Write off is not such a bad thing to have.

Mary Jo:  I don't think that they are going to write off, or even write down that unless they get a band in the market.  What they did was they paid the integration cost of actually acquiring Nokia, which what was it, $8 billion?

Leo:  Just because the decision was made to acquire Nokia I don't think that Satya Nadella wants his hands tied because that happened.

Mary Jo:  Right, in fact there were a lot of rumors through Bloomberg that he voted against it when it was up for a vote.  

Leo:  I don't know how these corporate governance things work, but is it impossible for him to go to the board and say I'd like to get rid of Nokia or I would like to write it down?  I'd like to get rid of Windows Phone.  Would the board say, no, we spent too much money for it.  

Paul:  By the way, it's not that they spent so much, the board is also the group that elected to buy it, right?  So they had reasons for that.  We've been talking, I don't think that the future of this is phone, it's mobile.  Part of that is that some of those devices will make phone calls.  Maybe just a differentiation is what allows this to continue, and this modern whatever stuff that they created for Windows Phone and for Windows 8 continues as their mobile play, mobile gentle, mobile touch, and tiles, and all of that kind of gunk.  

Leo:  Is it similar to why don't they spin off of Xbox?  Not really?

Paul:  No.

Leo:  Because Xbox has no position in the Enterprise.

Paul:  Right.  It's got no reason to live Leo.

Leo:  It's not an important strategic part of Microsoft.

Paul:  They think that it is.  It's their one cool consumer product.  It's the one product that they have that has the Apple like fan base.  

Leo:  Does Microsoft really need to be cool with that consumer group?

Paul:  They need to be cool.

Leo:  They want to be.  So do I.  But sometimes you have to acknowledge that it isn't going to happen.  

Paul:  My daughter reminds me that all of the time.

Leo:  Dad, you may want to be cool, but that won't make you cool.

Mary Jo:  Remember when they said the new mantra for the company was productivity and platforms?  They were like yeah, we are still making Xbox, and Surface, and Windows Phone.  Those things are meant to showcase what they have for apps and services.  They were really downplaying what they have for hardware I have to say.  They are not ready to say that they are not in hardware, but now it's kind of a supporting thing instead of a star as it was with Steve Ballmer there.  It's a very different emphasis now.  

Leo:  Interesting.

Paul:  We said this last year too, the next year is going to be interesting.  Everything is changing, and there is going to be some kicking and screaming, and we are going to do down some false starts.  It's interesting at least.

Leo:  We were supposed to be talking about Windows 10 in this segment.

Mary Jo:  We got off of the trail.

Leo:  That's my fault and I apologize.  It's because of Kevin Turner's comments, right?  That's where we got started.  

Paul:  This is like when remember when Julie Larson-Reid used to get up on stage in different places, and who was her successor, her partner there?  

Mary Jo:  Tammy Riller.

Paul:  Tammy Riller.  It was the same thing because you were always interested to get these people get up and talk, and they say a few things that are revealing, and you look for hints that give us a glimpse about the future.  He was very explicit when he said that we are changing the pricing model for Windows but I'm not telling you to what today.  Sometime in 2015 we will talk about that.  I don't think that it's going to be Windows 365.

Leo:  Let's take a break.  We have more to talk about with Windows 10 and we will do that.  Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, and Windows Weekly, we are talking about Microsoft in obsessive detail.  I love it.  Really, we talk about things that no one else even things about.  Maybe the Laudermilks.

Paul:  How dare you sir.

Leo:  Maybe those guys.  But seriously, that's why the mainstream press was like what did Turner just say?  You guys are going well...

Paul:  Maybe the Laudermilks.  I bet that's what he thought.

Leo:  With the exception of the Laudermilks.  

Paul:  With the exception of those two guys.  That's good.

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Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, Windows Weekly; we are talking about Microsoft and the latest.  How is the Windows 10 preview?  I don't understand what they did, they said Office, I don't understand what happened there, they said that Office doesn't work?  

Paul:  Leo, this is exactly what we are asking ourselves.  What happened there?

Leo:  What happened there?  What happened there?

Paul:  This latest build has been horribly buggy, as you probably recall.

Leo:  They want you to uninstall Office?

Paul:  Well, the initial advice was, they have released several patches for this build.  They are doing this in part because they said that they are not coming out with a new build until next year, so they know that people are going to be using it, they want to keep them up to date and so forth.  As part of patch Tuesday, one of the three updates for the Technical Preview is a security patch.   In certain configurations you would have to uninstall Office before it would install successfully.  You would have to install the patch and reinstall office.

Leo:  That's not a big deal, Office still works.

Paul:  It's not a huge deal to ask people who are tasked to beta test software.

Leo:  Exactly.  

Paul:  After warning everyone about this they came back and said just install one of these three patches, reboot, and then install the other two.  If it works you don't have to worry about it.  Most of the people that I have heard from have said that it works fine.  That hasn't been a problem.

Leo:  Fear not.

Paul:  Just the way that they announced it, you know, it was like here we go again.  We are never going to get away from this build.  

Leo:   I have go to tell you though, if you are doing the Technical Review, the real problem is that Microsoft opens it up to everybody and they are like, hey a free version of Windows 10.  This is not for the faint of heart, this is normal stuff that is happening.  They are testing it.

Mary Jo:  It's an alpha.  It's an alpha.

Leo:  Yeah, it's not even a beta.  

Mary Jo:  It's not even a beta.  They are just not used to this, right?  I think that the way Microsoft dolled this out in the past was that you got a build, you waited a few more months, you got another one, then boom, hey it's RTM.  This is different and I think that it's hard to wrap your head around it at the beginning.  

Leo:  What's the ruckus kids?  It's great that Microsoft is doing this.  Just don't be dumb.  Understand, don't put this on your production machine.  Expect there to be hassles.  

Paul:  Two things.

Leo:  Go ahead Paul.

Paul:  First of all, in the distant past Microsoft used to give beta testers a new build every single week. 

Leo:  That's true, that's a good point.

Paul: You would be okay.  The other thing is, they had two really high quality builds, those things came in very rapid succession.  When they released a build in early to mid-November the expectation was that this wouldn't be the end.  The mistake that they made I think is not the bugginess, it just happened that way.  They also dropped two bombs on us that day, one was oh by the way, we are going to break OneDrive forever, sorry about that.  Number two was this is it for the rest of the year, so have fun.  I think that the combination of those two things has left a bad taste in people's mouths.  If you go back to from before this build you may recall that the biggest issue with the technical preview was hey, you guys have been blah blah blahing about all of this feedback and everything, but we haven't seen a single new feature added to these builds based on feedback.  When is that going to happen?  I don't remember when they added the you can remove those two buttons from the taskbar, but a handful of really small things, and that was all that they have done for this whole period.  People were already a little burned by the growing feeling that they really weren't listening all that well even though they've been talking about listening.  Then the build came out, it was terrible quality which was unusual based on our previous experience, and they killed OneDrive in a very meaningful way.  We are not just complaining to complain.  There is a lot going on here.  I know what I am getting into, I have been testing beta software for 20 years, I'm not new to the game.  If I have to restart Explorer 5 times a day I can handle that.   I am an adult.  But there are some things going on.

Mary Jo:  I think that you get it.  

Leo:  Oh yeah, it's not Paul.

Mary Jo:  I think that you get it, but I see so many people going what, this is so buggy.  

Paul:  I'm going back to Windows 8 forever.

Leo:  The answer to them Mary Jo, let's all just do it; duh, duh, duh.

Paul:  People will say, Paul, was build 9888 good enough?  Was it stable enough for me to use every day?

Leo:  No.

Paul:  To which the reply was, if you need to ask me that question then you have no business installing this.  You need to go into it with the intestinal fortitude to handle problems and you need set it up so that you don't lose any day, you don't lose anything.  If you have to pick this thing from space, and you have to go to previous versions, or a previous version of Windows then whatever, you can handle it.

Leo:  Yes.  

Paul:  If you can't then I have a little website here that I have been writing for 15 years.

Leo:  Yeah, but people say, hey, it a free version of Windows. 

Paul:  It is a free version of Windows.  Nothing is free Leo.

Leo:  Having said that, Mary Jo I know that you are not using it, but Paul, you are using it day to day, right?  And it's fine, right?  It's relatively fine?

Paul:  No, this build is terrible, but I still do use it.  Interestingly, I will say that before they released that original patch for crashing I was one that I was like, okay, I think that I need my main desktop computer because I just need to get work done here.  Maybe I need to go back to Windows 8.1.  Then they released that patch which surprised me.  I still have problems, though.  I have just resigned myself to this is my lot in life and I will just deal with it.  Sometimes I actually have to reboot it.  Mostly I can get into task manager, crash the UI, and bring it back.  It's frustrating when you have to start closing things.  The other thing is that the Explorer in Windows is like the bastard son of a thousand fathers or something.  It's like Internet Explorer and File Explorer are intricately attached, which was the most bone headed decision that Microsoft has ever made in its history.  That thing dates back 15 years.  Sometimes just closing Internet Explorer Windows will fix the File Explorer problems.  You can see the linkage between them in that.  It's just hard to deal with.  Sometimes I think that I'm rebooting because I can't task manage my way out of it, and I start closing windows, and all of the sudden everything is back and it's fine.  It's a lot of fun, you should get into beta testing, it's good stuff. 

Mary Jo:  I was just thinking no.

Leo:  It is fun, but it's alpha testing.  We are going to say that again.

Mary Jo:  You have to be someone who likes doing what you are talking about, so what, restart it 5 times.  That's not me.

Leo:  No, it's not for you.

Paul:  I see little glimpses of normal life. I took my 2 year old 15 inch Ultrabook, I restored it just the other night, and it goes back to Windows 7 because it's that signature piece that I bought from the Microsoft Store.  My original thing was that I was going to take that and upgrade it.  I used it, and it was all clean and everything, and I thought, I'm just going to leave it here.  God help me if I ever need it, but if I do this thing will work now, and maybe I will just leave it alone.  It's the type of thing where stuff just works.

Leo:  Itsme in our chat room says, "Leo, it's not free.  You pay in blood, sweat, and tears."  

Paul:  Mostly tears, yes.  Yes, yes.

Leo:  Paul Thurrott Windows and PC gift giving guide.  Yes, it's back each and every year.  We look forward to this moment.  You are helping me because of course for the next two weeks radio stations are going to call me, the morning guy, and say, hey, it's Bubba in the Morning from WZZZ here in beautiful Indianapolis.  Leo Leporte is on the line with his holiday gift giving ideas.  Leo, I want 23 gadgets for a kid under $50, go.  This is what they want.

Paul:  This article is not like a full gift guide.  It's more about being very specific to the PC market.  I think cynically from the outside if you didn't look at these machines, if you looked at these low cost machines you would say that this is Netbooks all over again.  The thing that really differentiates the laptops is that they are not just like cheap, which may be interesting in its own right.  I just noticed the term forkuse in the notes.  

Leo:  The future .net.

Paul:  I was just thinking that that was the type of thing that I would write, but I didn't write that.  

Leo:  You are rubbing off on Mary Jo.

Paul:  HP I think has done a really good job with this.  There are other good examples out there, and I have other low cost machines, but between the HP Mini Tablet, and the HP Stream, which are their low end laptops, non-touch based laptops, we are talking about machines that start at $100 in the case of the tablets or start at $200 in the case of the laptops and they are actually really nice for what they are.  You aren't going to replace a MacBook Air 13 inch whatever with an HP Stream 13, but the build quality is nice, the feature set is nice, the available resource is nice, the available features are nice, you get Office 365 personal, you get Microsoft Store gift card, they are really good values.  I think that I will probably before the holidays are over write something about phone because I think that there is some similar value on the phone side on the low end.  I think that this is kind of where the sweet spot is for Windows in general.  Microsoft makes a very high end tablet, the Surface, and they are very expensive.  Lenovo sells some high end stuff, and some other companies do too, but I think that the sweet spot with the masses is going to be with the people who don't have $600, or $800, or $1500 to spend on an Ultrabook, or some super high end tablet, or whatever.  I think that this is the sweet spot.  I think that I have the most experience with the HP stuff, but do you remember the company Nextbook?  They had made some crazy claim about being the third biggest supplier of tablets or something, and they can apparently justify it.  I just got their little 2 in 1, their little 10 inch with a clip on keyboard and everything.  It's under $300, and this is a nice machine.  You pick it up and it feels like high quality.  It just has a nice feel to it.  It's just not a piece of plastic that you are going to snap over your knee by mistake, it's well made.  It's really nice.  There are machines like that, Acer makes a machine like that.  There are others as well.  I just happen to have a lot of experience with the HP stuff.  

Leo:  I'm seeing lots of positive reviews, I just didn't expect it for the Stream.  For that price you just think that it's a piece of junk.

Paul:  People think that it's a Netbook.

Leo:  It's not a Netbook, though, right?

Paul:  Yeah, it really isn't.  I like it, it's nice.  I use the 13 around the house, it's nice.

Leo:  This could be huge for HP.  Although I doubt there is much money in it.  How much profit could there be in a $200 computer?  

Paul:  I talked to the guy, by the way Mary Jo knows this guy too, Mike Nash, a Microsoft guy from way back, runs their consumer PC business and he was telling me that they evaluated this business and they said why don't we just do something that nobody else does and actually make nice devices that don't cost a million dollars?  There are things that are put into the build of the devices that make them high quality.  It's nice, it's got that kind of double shot paint look on the lid that goes around the keyboard and the trackpad.  I think that I mentioned that my daughter and my wife had come in from wherever one night and I had the HP 11, the Stream 11 open, and both of them gravitated to it and talked about it.   These are people who don't normally care about technology at all.  My wife is using one of these on here standing desk upstairs as kind of a secondary.

Leo:  Is the 11 okay or would you get a 13 or a 14?  Do they make a 14?

Paul:  Spec wise they are virtually identical.  

Leo:  So what you are paying for is the screen.

Paul:  Yeah, there actually are some other differences.  One of them has a SD versus a Micro SD expansion, but otherwise they are the exact same device.  

Leo:  I'm actually tempted to get one.  

Paul:  They are really nice.

Leo:  Basically they are Chromebooks with Windows, right?

Paul:  Yeah, go ahead Mary Jo.

Mary Jo:  I know that you said the keyboard was pretty good, but...

Paul:  It's great.

Mary Jo:  If you were going to choose like say a Dell Venue Pro 8 or this?

Paul:  Okay, I'm talking about two different things.

Mary Jo:  Two different things, right.

Paul:  On Dell's side, they have a ten inch with a clip on keyboard.  I find the 10 inch to be a little small.  Dell makes different clip on keyboards, in fact they make hardware for clip on keyboards.  In other words, not like the type of cover that we have on Surface.  I can tell you that the keyboard on the HP Streams is better than the tech cover.  So as far as the typing experience goes it's actually better than that, the screen is bigger on the 13, and it's a real laptop so you don't have to worry about that lapability thing, it actually works in your lap.  Again, it's a Celeron Processor...

Mary Jo:  It depends on what you want it for.  

Paul:  Right, you can use it around the house.  They actually have pretty good battery life.  The one thing, and I'm going to return it because it's such a piece of garbage, but I actually bought a $200 Chromebook that was on sale.  I think that the one that I got was normally $300, it's more expensive than the 13 inch version of the HP Stream.  The differentiator between the two is that on the Chromebook it actually has a 1080p screen which is unusual for this price of product.  I thought that this would be the one thing that puts it over the top.  The truth is that that screen is kind of garbage.  It's got that kind of pixelated effect and you move to the side and you can't see it very well.  You get the kind of shiny effect or the dark effect on one side of the screen.  That's an Acer, the Acer Chromebook that I got.

Leo:  I've got that one too, and it's not very good.  Is that the one that is a touch screen?  The quality of the screen goes way down with the touchscreen.

Paul:  That's right, I didn't even notice Leo.  

Leo:  Here is one.  I bought one that is a taper K1 and it's a touchscreen, and boy the quality really deteriorates.  

Paul:  I wonder if that is what it is.  

Leo:  You obviously don't touch it much.  So what would you get, the 11 or the 13?

Paul:  I would get the 13.  

Leo:  The 13 seems like just the right size, huh?  There is a 14 too?  Or is that a mistake?

Paul:  There is a 14.  It is a HP Stream, but it is not in the same design language.  So the 14 is the one that had come out earlier.  I believe that is a direct version of the Chromebook that they make.  I believe that is the new model of Stream.  

Leo:  I'm looking right now at Amazon.  You can get it in Orchid Magenta.  

Paul:  That one is sold out.

Leo:  Sold out?  Horizon Blue...

Mary Jo:  I can't believe the pink sold out.

Paul:  This was another thing that they had done.  Retailers like Best Buy said can you make this in silver or maybe one in black or something so that it's kind of normal?  HP was like no.

Leo:  Good, good for them.

Paul:  It's not a touchscreen.

Leo:  They know what they are doing, they are positioning it quite well.  Of course, we have mentioned before that you get the Office 365 for a year.  

Paul:  It's a terrible screen, it's awful.

Leo:  So you are saying the stream screen is okay?

Paul:  Yeah, it's better, I like it.

Leo:  I might get the pink one just to make everybody crazy.  

Mary Jo:  You are going to have to wait for that.

Paul:  I don't think that the stream is going to be part of the 12 days of deals.  I think that the prices you see now are as low as they are going to be.

Leo:  I think that you get 3G in there.  That's again kind of a Chromebook kind of thing to do.  

Paul:  Again, these things are made for a very specific part of the market, poor people.  No, they are in for people who are going to use them around the house.  They actually get pretty good battery life, I haven't rated them myself, but 7 or 8 hours.  They are really designed to be used, this is not a machine that I am going to travel to New York on a plane on, it's for around the house.  It's the type of thing that costs $200 or $300 and you give it to a kid because it's adorable, it's seeming, and it's inexpensive so if you drop it off the table you aren't replacing a MacBook.  No, there is not to my knowledge there is no 3G or 4G option built in.  I think that most people have a data stream plan on their phone and they can use that.  But they are going to be home so you are going to be doing the Wi-Fi at home.  

Leo:  I have no need for another Windows computer.

Paul:  I disagree.  

Leo:  What would I do with this one?  

Paul:  I build little forts out of mine Leo.  The 10 mode is very nice, that's why I built Fort Kickass over there in the corner.

Leo:  Now we know what Paul does with his Streams.  

Paul:  Yep, that's what I do.  That's how I know that they are adorable.  

Leo:  They are adorable.  Every kid in the family should have one.

Paul:  They are a foundation Leo.

Leo:  It feels like something that Microsoft should embrace heartily.  It feels like a segment of the market that they really haven't had a choice in.  HP did Microsoft a great favor.  But I think that this is the bone that Microsoft can throw to these guys.  We don't make anything in the this part of the market.  

Paul:  Microsoft makes the aspirational devices for now.  They make the tablet that can replace your laptop.  

Leo:  They have found that little niche.  I like it.

Paul:  HP had made the laptop that can replace your laptop.

Leo:  The Bingification of Office begins.  

Mary Jo:  Yes.  

Leo:  Mary Jo Foley.

Mary Jo:  This is the thing.  We talked about this on the show literally a year ago.  Microsoft showed off this demo where they said, they, would this be cool if you had Outlook and you in Outlook email and say I want to have dinner after this and see this band and in the side panel on your Outlook you could see some information about the venue.  You could see information about the band.  You could see things like what is on the menu for dinner.  When they showed this demo I was like, yeah, this will never happen.  Well, it's happening.  In fact today is the day.   They announced that they are integrating Bing directly into Word Online, which is the web version of Microsoft Word.  So if you are in Word Online, and say you are writing a school report about Abraham Lincoln, and you hesitate for a minute, wait a minute, when did he die?  I forget.  You can highlight the words Abraham Lincoln, right click, and this Bing information card will come up right in your document.  So you don't have to go out to the search engine, search, and copy your results, and bring them back in.  This is going to creep out some people, so if it does don't use that feature.

Leo:  Do you think that people are used to it now because of Gmail and stuff that maybe it has just passed?

Mary Jo:  As soon as I wrote about it people were just like, I don't want that.  Can I say no to this?

Leo:  Can you just turn it off?  

Paul:  Well you don't have to click on it.

Mary Jo:  Just don't use it.  Don't use it.

Leo:  You can, but that space will be there, you can't say that you don't want it.

Paul:  This will never be added to Office for Windows until the next version ships.  

Mary Jo:  Next year?

Paul:  They have been talking about rapid release over there, but you don't see rapid release on the client side.  You don't see rapid release.  You see mobile updates, you see mobile apps and things like that, but you don't seem to be able to update that kind of traditional client.   It's the same thing with the Mac.  We still haven't seen the new version.

Leo:  So where is this that we are going to see it?  Is this only on the web?

Mary Jo:  Yeah, right now it's only on the web, although they are hinting that they are going to be adding it to both other web versions and not.

Leo:  Is Mark Lane still working at Microsoft?  The guy that did the Gmail Man ad?

Mary Jo:  Oh, Mark Penn?

Leo:  Mark Penn.

Paul:  Mark Penn, he's my hero.

Mary Jo:  He's still there.

Paul:  That's what I need, I need to get a poster of Mark Penn for my door.

Leo:  I was wondering who was reading my mail so that they could fill this stuff in.  Is it Gmail Man?

Mary Jo:  Yeah.

Leo:  Or do they have their own man at Microsoft?

Mary Jo:  They have their own man.

Leo:  They have to eat their words a little bit because this is the same thing.

Mary Jo:  The difference is that you agree to this.  If you use this feature you are saying hey, read the content of my document.  Unlike what they say that Gmail did which was reading your mail and sending you ads based on your email.  

Paul:  They are not doing it unless you say that you want to know more about this thing that you have highlighted.  

Leo:  Oh, you have to highlight it.

Paul:  You are researching it.  

Mary Jo:  You highlight it.

Paul:  It's not like a popup video.  Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was born in eighteen sixty whatever?

Leo:  So I'm looking at the email, I highlight Abraham Lincoln, and then I right click or whatever?

Paul:  20 years ago Microsoft would have intellisensed the hell out of this thing, and it would have said that I noticed you paused, it looks like you are trying to find out when Abraham Lincoln was born?  No, they are not doing that.

Leo:  So you are actually sending for the content and saying give me some information.

Mary Jo:  What's interesting is that if it weren't hooked up to all of the machine thing and Bing indexing service, if you highlighted Lincoln it might not know if you meant Lincoln, Nebraska or Lincoln the car.  But because it's seeing the context it's like, oh, you are looking for Abraham Lincoln, so here is only those results.

Leo:  It's seeing your context?  So it is looking at more than just your highlight?  

Mary Jo:  You know what?  That's a good question.

Paul:  That's fair.  

Mary Jo:  Yeah, it must be seeing the whole thing.

Leo:  So it's reading your mail but it's only giving you the highlight.  

Paul:  It's not your mail, it's just your private documents Leo.

Mary Jo:  Yeah, this is not your mail.

Leo:  I thought you said Outlook.

Mary Jo:  Outlook was the first example, but what they added it to was Word.  

Leo:  Got it.

Paul:  You know, the real reason that this exists, and they explained in the beginning of their blogpost about this about how hard it is when you are writing a document and you can't remember when Abraham Lincoln was born, and where would I find that out?  I guess I will have to open a browser window, and type in a search query, and try to get past all of the ones that are about Lincoln cars.  The reason that they are helping you with that problem is that you search with Google, you don't search with Bing.  By integrating it into their own product now you are using Bing.

Leo:  Excellent point, excellent point.

Paul:  Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Leo:  It's a wonderful way to introduce people to Bing, too, because you are going to see the results as Bing, right?

Paul:   As I noticed in my post, it was curious to me that this was called what is it, Insights for Office?

Mary Jo:  Insights for Office, yep.

Paul:  Why isn't it called Bing Insights for Office?  Doesn't that sound like more of a descriptive name?

Leo:  Maybe it will be sometime.

Mary Jo:  If you look more at things that they are doing to integrate Bing into other products they have they never call it Bing.  Like, Cortana is Bing, right?  But they don't call it Bing.  Bing is the name they use for the web search engine, but the underlying intelligence, and their repository, and all of those things that make Bing Search on the back end, those things they are calling different things.  Like the way that you can do voice search on the Xbox, that's Bing, but they don't want to say, hey, this is Bing that is making it happen.  This is our intelligence search service or something like that.  

Leo:  Is Cortana next?

Mary Jo:  Yeah.  Cortana already uses the same back end.  

Leo:  Put Cortana in Word.

Paul:  Leo, the weather was so bad here yesterday that Cortana issued 150 warnings about the weather on my phones.  I literally had to walk around to all of my phones in my office and turn all of them off because they wouldn't stop warning me about how bad the weather was.  So, Bing powered, it was a success.  It was bad out, they got that right.

Leo:  Most people want that.

Paul:  It was the sheer, weather advisory, weather advisory, weather advisory, yep thanks.  It just never stopped.

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Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, we continue on with Windows Weekly; MDOP.  I'm sorry, it sounds like I have turrets.  What is MDOP again?  Remind me. 

Mary Jo: I'm going to let Paul do MDOP. I don't do MDOP.

Paul: Oh, man. (Laughs) All right. So —

Leo: — du hickeys ... of presents. I don't know.

Paul: The people that make MDOP are the one part of Microsoft that hasn't gotten the memo on the names of products.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) It's true.

Paul: Like, these things are —

Leo: This is like BPOS. This is old-school.

Paul: But it's application virtualization, 5.0 SB3 —

Leo: Oh, Lord.

Paul: — is the new release. it's like, are you serious?

Mary Jo: But it's for IT, right? It's for IT.

Paul: Yes.

Mary Jo: It's not — yeah.

Paul: I know, but it's insanity.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Anyway, so Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack is a suite of tools; it's available only to Microsoft software assurance customers, the [inaudible] licensing guys. Falls into three categories. There are, I think, seven-ish tools in there. Some are virtualization-based. That, to me, is kind of the heart of it. Some of them are management-based; and then there's one called Microsoft Diagnostics, the recovery toolkit, or Dart, which is a restoration tool. that should be available just as part of Windows. That is an awesome tool.

Leo: Do you have to have an enterprise or pro license to this, or can —

Paul: Yeah. Yeah, you do.

Leo: Yeah. Oh, rats.

Paul: Yeah, I know.

Leo: Is this Intune?

Paul: No.

Mary Jo: No.

Paul: No, this is separate from Intune.

Leo: Okay.

Paul: So twice a year, basically, there's an MDOP drop, if you will. (Laughs) And this version has updated versions of only two of the tools. So everything else is basically just carried over. And the two new tools are App V 5j SB3, which is application virtualization. And UEV, which is user experience virtualization 2.1, which I think is the newest of the MDOP tools. It's only a couple years old. And that's basically what we used to call roaming settings. It's basically the enterprise version of the setting sync stuff that you see in windows 8 but much more involved and centrally managed and so forth. So it works like before; you get it from the Microsoft volume licensing service center if you're a subscriber. If you run MSND and TechNet — TechNet, obviously, is on the way out, but if you qualify for this release as part of the length of your subscription, you can still get it. You can get it from those places as well. I've been saying for years, like, MDOP's great. It's obviously aimed at bigger businesses because it's for active directory-managed businesses and so forth; but I wish they'd made this stuff more broadly available.

Leo: I agree. I think any Windows user would love this.

Paul: Yeah. They do cool stuff around — all these things are cool. You know, App V does — they have, like, packages of apps so you can do, like, virtualized apps just individually.

Leo: Oh.

Paul: But you could also do virtualized apps as packages. And so you can say, Well, these three apps go together, so they'll be packaged together. They can interoperate together; they can have different settings packages for different user groups so they will interact differently according to the types of users that are using them and so forth. They're really very involved, very powerful, very useful; and they're just for the enterprise, so ...

Mary Jo: You know what? We were talking about subscription services earlier. Wouldn't this be a good subscription service?

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Like, why not say —

Paul: Right, right.

Mary Jo: — hey. Anybody who wants MDOP, you can subscribe to it.

Paul: You know, I haven't kept up on this; maybe you know this. But I have it in the back of my head that I don't think they —

Mary Jo: There was some Intune thing, right?

Paul: Yeah, I'm going to guess at what it was.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: So before — the earliest versions of Intune included a per user license for Windows Enterprise; and at that time — and it was expensive per month. It was, I think, $10 or $12 per user per month. As a way to reduce the costs of Intune per user, they took out that enterprise skew; and so now it's probably $5 or $6 per user per month. And I think, before they did that, you got MDOP as a benefit of having Windows Enterprise; but because now it's not there, I don't think it's available anymore to Intune.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: And I could be completely wrong about that, but that's how I remember it.

Mary Jo: I know. I'm kind of remembering that, too. And you have to still — even if you're a software assurance user, you still have to buy it, too. So it's, right now, at add-on that you buy.

Leo: Oh. I thought it was part of the deal.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah, you have to —

Mary Jo: Right. Yeah. It would be a good subscription bundle, though.

Paul: This stuff is so core, especially that Dart. The Dart's something they should hand out to everybody; it should be a system [inaudible] tool. It's so awesome.

Leo: What is it again?

Paul: I mean, they're all awesome in their own right, but ...

Leo: What does it do?

Mary Jo: Diagnostics tool.

Leo: So —

Paul: It's a recovery — so you don't have your recovery environment in Windows, right?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: So if you — this is a bigger deal in older versions of Windows. But if you go back to Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista, they all have their own sort of ways to recover the OS. Dart works across multiple versions of Windows, which is actually really nice; and it is far more powerful than anything that's built into Windows.

Leo: Nice.

Paul: And I haven't followed its development. It's possible, on newer versions, it does things I'm not aware of; but it's just the type of thing — like, this kind of troubleshooting, recovery tools kit should be available to everybody, I think.

Leo: I think so.

Paul: Still love the term  [inaudible], by the way.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Somebody's saying in the chat room, it comes from SysInternal ZRD tool.

Paul: (Laughs) Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Not surprisingly, yeah. Okay.

Leo: It does sound like a SysInternal. Sounds like [inaudible].

Mary Jo: It does.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: And speaking of Intune updates for Intune this month ...

Mary Jo: Yep. Yeah. This was very surprising. So last month, Microsoft rolled out a whole slew of updates to Intune, which is its mobile device management service that used to be called Windows Intune, not just Intune. And then this month, just earlier this week, they come out with a whole bunch more. And this is very unusual because Intune used to be something that Microsoft updated a couple times a year, maybe three times at most; and now we've had two really big back-to-back bunches of updates. What's most interesting, I'd say, in this December batch of updates is, there are several things in here that are starting to let people manage the Office for iPad apps. So Microsoft's been talking all along about how they're going to let you lock down not just your devices but also the content and the data on your devices, including your iPads. So you needed certain pieces to make that happen; and in these bunch of Intune updates, you're getting some of the management for Office for iPad and also a tool that lets you, if you have a line of business app that you want to run on your iPad, roll that — I mean, wrap it. Wrap, roll. Wrap it up. (Laughs)

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: And you can use Intune also to get that onto iPads and manage your iPads with those line of business apps on them. So if you're somebody who's been saying, Hey, I've got Office for iPads in my environment, I want to actually keep users from opening up data that's corporate data when they're at home, or opening up data that I don't want outside the corporate firewall, these are the tools that are going to let you manage that and lock that down. So check out those December ones if you're somebody who's thinking about managing Office for iPad devices.

Leo: These are the tools that try men's souls.

Mary Jo and Paul: (Laugh)

Paul: By the way, I just looked this up. I have half of the story on MDOP and Intune.

Mary Jo: Ah.

Paul: Four years ago, Microsoft did make MDOP available to Intune subscribers because those are the type of customers that wouldn't have software assurance.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Okay.

Paul: I don't know if — the second half of it is, I don't know if that's continued. Like, I do believe it was tied to that enterprise version of Windows skew and that they no longer offer that. But again, I'm not a hundred percent sure.

Mary Jo: yep.

Leo: Can you — and you could use these tools on a non-pro version of Windows if you had them. Like, can you put them on a disc or something? I mean, can you carry a floppy around with the —

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

Leo: — with Dart on it? (Laughs)

Paul: Well, yes. So the — like, if you think — you'd have to go on a tool-by-tool basis. So the Dart stuff, absolutely.

Leo: That's nice. So all you need is one pro account.

Paul: Application virtualization, though — I mean, you're going to be —

Leo: Yeah. I understand that's not going to —

Paul: You need a server infrastructure.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: And now we get to "Fork You, The Future of .net." Two .net stacks evolving along separate tracks.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Yes.

Leo: Sounds like a — I don't know, maybe a Robert Frost poem.

Mary Jo: It kind of does. (Laughs)

Paul: (Laughs) Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah. So you guys remember —

Leo: The track diverged.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) This is what's happening, pretty much.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: When Microsoft said they were going to open-source more of .net. They said, You know what? There's this thing called .net Core, and that's a big part of what we're going to be open-sourcing. What they didn't tell us at the time was their plan for .net moving forward, meaning the existing .net framework. It turns out that they're going to be basically forking .net. So there's going to be the .net Core that's inside things like ASP .net 5, which is the next version, and .net native. That's going to go one way, the open-source way; and they're going to be on a fast track with that, rolling out new releases of that really quickly. And then, what we know now as the .net framework also is going to continue to evolve, but in a separate track. It's not going to get .net Core, and it's going to kind of be out there maybe on a yearly basis getting an update. So we've been hearing already from a lot of .net developers that they're feeling marginalized by this. They're like, Hey, wait. Is this going to be silverlight all over again? What are they doing? Are they, like, putting us off in a corner so that they can kill us off at some point? So I don't know what to say on that. I'm not a developer; I don't know all the ins and outs of how this is going to work or what is going to end up going the .net Core route versus not. We know that there's going to be Windows Presentation Foundation coming back and evolving in some way in the .net framework side. But again, is this — I'm curious if this is just going to set things up for another divide like we had with HTML and Javascript versus .net when Windows 8 came out, or if it's actually going to get everything kind of on a better track moving forward in an open-source way and help Microsoft for the whole universal apps pitch. I'm hearing from developers on both sides. Some people, excited that Microsoft has a plan and that it looks like there's momentum again for .net; but also hearing reticence from others saying, They've killed off a lot of technologies that we were building on top of before, and now they're going to kill this .net framework at some point, too. So that's why I said "fork you." It's forked, and people are feeling like they've been forked. How's that?

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: All right. Okay.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Makes sense.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Forked, all of us. More forks.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) More forks.

Paul: That's mine.

Leo: This one is a Paul Thurrott, I think, the fork from the European Union.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Yes, although the headline is all Mary Jo, so ... (Laughs)

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: She takes the blame, but you take the heat.

Paul: Yeah. This is one of those thorny —

Mary Jo: Yeah. But it is kind of —

Paul: — legal issues I — what's that?

Mary Jo: I know. I said, it kind of applies though, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Because this time it's Microsoft saying "fork you" to somebody. (Laughs)

Paul: I think I fall on Microsoft's side of the argument here.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: I mean, what they're basically saying is that the United States can't do an electronic seizure in the same way that they can't just walk on the foreign soil and take something physical. Just because they believe someone who they know the ,_entity of has committed some crime doesn't mean that they can just seize things from them when that information is literally not physically held in the United States, which is the case here. And so this is that Irish email thing. We'll find out later this is some incredibly serious terrorist or whatever, and we'll think different about it. (Laughs) But they're kind of —

Mary Jo: Isn't it a [inaudible] trial? I thought they said it was a —

Paul: Oh, do you — I actually don't even know. Yeah, I'm not sure.

Mary Jo: I thought so, but I'm not positive.

Paul: So this is actually — it's funny. This case is a year old now. Last December, Microsoft got this request to provide access to this guy's email, and they said no. (Laughs) And so they were sued, and Microsoft went to an appellate court, and they threw it out. And they've kind of gone back and forth; and now they've officially appealed the ruling, and they're going to fight this in court, I guess. We'll see what happens. But I think this is one of those issues that The Newsroom would be able to resolve in 60 minutes, but I'm curious how this is going to play out in the real world. I think Microsoft's right. I think, ultimately —

Leo: Yeah, but I don't think they're going to win.

Paul: Well, they do — it's funny. If you read their filing, they put the story in reverse. They say, Imagine if a foreign government came to the United States and said, Well —

Leo: Right. Well, in fact, that's happened. That's happened.

Paul: — this guy's committed a crime. We need — you know.

Leo: A Canadian judge has asked for server information from the U.S.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: And the European Union's saying if you have the right to be forgotten, you have the right to be forgotten everywhere, including U.S. servers.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: So I think we're in that situation where courts in other countries are demanding data from our servers.

Paul: Yeah. It's probably not a recent theory that the law takes a while to catch up with the technology; but the way things are moving ahead so quickly these days —

Leo: This one's a mess.

Paul: — it's maybe more relevant than ever.

Leo: But they're going to lose. I think they're going to lose.

Paul: Really?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: I don't know. Yeah, it's —

Leo: Maybe not. Maybe times have changed.

Paul: I could picture it going either way. Yeah. I don't think times have changed, but we'll see.

Leo: (Laughs)

Paul: I don't know. Well, this — I mean, frankly, I mean, when you think about just the national mood and people's feelings —

Leo: Yeah. No they have — that's what I'm saying.

Paul: — about this kind of stuff — it's not just Snowden and all that stuff. I mean, the stuff that just happened with the CIA. And we've discovered how they were torturing people and who knew what and all that kind of stuff — I mean, I think this falls into that general category. And I think this kind of thing makes people uncomfortable, that we need to be better than this. And maybe Microsoft will benefit from that.

Leo: I think they have to fight the fight, whether they think they'll win or lose.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: And they may, in their heart of hearts, know they'll lose; but still, they're going to fight.

Paul: Well, yeah. This is also crucial for their business, too.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Paul: I mean, if they lose this, there're going to be lots of people, but more important, businesses in other parts of the world that are going to say, Well, guess what? (Laughs) We don't want to do business with you anymore.

Leo: We ain't storing our stuff. Even if it's in Ireland, we're not storing our stuff with you.

Paul: Yeah, we're going to go to Bobsstorage.ie and start putting it over there.

Leo: There's nowhere to go. There isn't.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Maybe you could go to Mega.com.

Paul: (Laughs) Nice.

Leo: The new cloud service.

Paul: Or the PirateBay.se.

Leo: Oh, yeah. There you go; there's one.

Paul: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Yeah. (Laughs)

Leo: I think there's no —

Paul: I hear that's inaccessible at the moment. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Speaking of inaccessible, Jeff's telling me that his Azure services have been down most of the morning. Have you heard about that, or —

Mary Jo: Oh, really?

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: No, haven't heard anything.

Paul: No, not today.

Leo: We use Azure for a sales tool that we use that he wrote.

Mary Jo: Oh. That's the first I've heard —

Paul: I mean, Microsoft's online services have had some issues lately.

Leo: All right. Maybe it's just him.

Mary Jo: Yeah. They were down in November. Azure went down really hard in November. I don't see on Twitter any —

Paul: Service dashboard ... I'm looking at the status page.

Leo: Hey, Jeff!

Mary Jo: No, wait, here's — one person complained.

Paul: "Partial service degradation" ...

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: "Partial performance degradation out west" ...

Mary Jo: Exactly.

Leo: Maybe it's just out here.

Paul: 41 minutes ago.

Mary Jo: I see Chicago, somebody in Chicago's —

Leo: It's raining; maybe the servers got wet.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Man, they've got this giant grid of services on one side and then —

Leo: That's so cool.

Paul: — territories across the top. But it makes it impossible to know how things are doing.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: I know. It does.

Paul: (Laughs) But I know in Azure, you can actually specify, right, what date —

Leo: Oh, he knows because — yeah. He knows because he was telling me, Oh, yes, it's 1900UTC, and —

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: So he knew. But it's obviously not a global outage; it's a localized outage.

Mary Jo: Doesn't seem like it, no.

Paul: Yeah, it's mostly all green, but there are some little trouble spots.

Leo: These things happen. I almost hate to report cloud outages because then —

Mary Jo: I know.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: — you get the reactionaries who say, See? You can't trust the cloud! Give me that zip drive!

Paul: (Laughs) I mean, even with my own company, I'll say, Hey, I got up this morning, and I started moderating comments or something; and the site was performing horribly. Could you do something about it? And then eight hours later they get back to me, and they're like, It's working fine now. Are you still seeing this?

Leo: What's your problem? (Laughs)

Paul: It's like, oh, guys, seriously.

Leo: It's you, it's you.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Is Azure still down for you?

(Voice says something in the background.)

Leo: And more services are going down.

Mary Jo: Really? Huh.

Leo: HTN ...

Mary Jo: That's not good.

Leo: Oh, HT Insight. Huh.

Mary Jo: What? Hadoop? Hadoop can't go down on this show.

Leo: Not on my watch, it can't!

Mary Jo: Not on this show!

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: Not on Mary Jo's watch!

Mary Jo: No!

Leo: So we did something kind of new last week with Mike Elgan; you took Twitter questions. And now I see you have a slew of them.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: We have about 20 minutes left in the show.

Paul: All right; let's go quick, then. (Laughs)

Leo: So just a few. Don't do — you're not going to be able to do all of these, but —

Paul: No.

Leo: I like the idea, but — so do a few, and then in about five minutes, I'll interrupt and we'll move on. Fire away.

Paul: All right. I'll ask a few for Mary Jo, and then you can —

Mary Jo: Okay.

Leo: Or I could be the reader. But I think you need to pick them, so I'll let you do that.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Well, I think — so we've got some service questions. I think maybe the big ones in there are RT-related, right? So with Microsoft supporting arm-based devices RT, will there be a Surface 3 RT or mini Surface RT with a pen?

Mary Jo: So —

Paul: Oh, and I should say — I'm sorry — Tom Grissom asked that question.

Mary Jo: Yes, Tom Grissom asked that. Yeah. So Microsoft almost came out with the Surface Mini last year. They withdrew that right before the launch was scheduled, and then — they had already built a bunch of them and decided to warehouse them or whatever. I heard, after that, that they were rethinking whether they should ever do any more arm-based Surfaces. Like, they were really saying, Did we get much out of having arm-based? Has Intel caught up enough now that we don't really need the arm-based ones? So I'm not convinced that Microsoft's going to do any more arm-based Surfaces. I've got one source who's a pretty good source who told me no, that from now on, only Intel-based surfaces for Microsoft. But they have not said that themselves, officially. So that's all we know. We don't know if they will.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: If they do any more Surfaces at all, I would think they are going to wait for Windows 10. That would be my guess because I would think they may want to take advantage of some of the new chips and some of the new under-the-hood capabilities like DirectX 12 that are going to supposedly give them better battery life and better graphics performance. So I'm guessing we're going to hear more about other Surfaces, maybe not Arm and maybe not till middle of next year with the actual launch of those devices.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: What do you think?

Paul: What about upgrading existing RT tablets to Windows 10?

Mary Jo: We don't know, right? We asked that question —

Paul: That one came from @Thurrott.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: @Thurrott. Hey.

Leo and Paul: (Laugh)

Paul: Am I pronouncing that right?

Mary Jo: Remember, Mr. Thurrott, remember, at the Windows 10 event in San Francisco, I asked that very question.

Paul: I do remember that.

Mary Jo: And they said, We're going to try to make —

Paul: They said something hilarious that had nothing to do with what you asked. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Yeah. It was kind of — but the answer was kind of like, Our goal is backward compatibility, and we're not committing to any specific devices. So they have not told us if you're going to be able to upgrade the existing Surface RT.

Paul: Cary Morison said the Internet is a series of pipes, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo and Leo: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: He did. Then he danced around a little. Yeah.

Paul: (Laughs) Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah. So we don't know. We asked; we don't know. We'll try asking again when the next Windows 10 event happens and see if anybody will say anything then.

Paul: Yes. What else do we have?

Mary Jo: Should I ask you one, Paul?

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Yeah. Turnabout's fair play.

Mary Jo: Yeah, yeah. Let's — since we've talked a lot about Windows Phone today, let's do another Windows Phone question. @Tnewkirk8 asks, Windows Phone 10, what do you think will be the feature or features that will help propel adoption in 2015? Any guesses on features that might be really great?

Paul: I mean, on the enterprise side, it's going to be two things: it's going to be the full enterprise mobility set, which they still kind of don't have; and it's going to be that compatibility across the stack.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Same management tools, same apps, all that kind of stuff I think is important. For users, it's going to be basically the same on the compat side, but it would just be the apps. I think the one app store, one set of apps that works across both devices — I mean, one of the — whether it makes sense or not, one of the reasons that people buy an iPhone also buy an iPad is this kind of theory that, I bought these apps, and it will work on both.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: And I think people today still don't get that the Microsoft's back-end stores are really all the same, that if you buy an Xbox video on your Windows phone; you can play it on your Windows tablet; you can play it on your Xbox One. I mean, I think people don't quite get that; and I think that, by making these things one thing, that will help. I thought 0-dollar Windows Phone licensing was going to help this year, but it apparently hasn't, so maybe that kicks in finally next year with Windows 10.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Another good one for you: @SanXeliakov — sorry, I'm sure I pronounced that terribly. Do you have any idea what happened with GDR 2 and GDR 3 —

Paul: (Laughs) That's a question for you, Mary Jo, but I —

Mary Jo: — for Windows Phone 8.1? Are they still in the picture? (Laughs)

Paul: All right. So — yeah. So this is, in other words, update 2 and update 3.

Mary Jo: Right, for Windows Phone 8.1.

Paul: All I have is a theory, and I think you can probably verify this one, which is basically that obviously — in fact, I was told explicitly when update 1 came out — and of course, they called it update, right, to be consistent with big Windows. A lot of guys on Windows Phone didn't like that. And I was told explicitly there would be further updates. And I'm not saying there won't be; but I think, right now with Windows 10 coalescing around this kind of mid- to late-20 ... what's next year? (Laughs) ... 2015 release, that they're kind of all heading toward that. We know that, on the big Windows side, at one point they were talking, you know, maybe we'll do the start menu before Windows 10; and then finally, they realized, you know what? This is all going to be one big-bang release.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Office Mobile, or whatever they're calling it — not Office Mobile; they're not going to call it that. Office Touch for Windows that will work on Phone and on tablets — ship alongside Windows 10. I think everything is kind of funneling to Windows 10 at this point. And by the way, unfortunately for Windows Phone, the big fail here this year is, in April, they released update 1 for Windows Phone; it's still not everywhere. It's not on Verizon at all; and there have been two major firmware updates on Lumias, one of which hasn't been released anywhere. You can get it on new phone only, Denim.

Mary Jo: Denim, yeah.

Paul: And so originally, the plan for that was by the end of 2014. These updates always take way longer to roll out than Microsoft expects or promises or whatever. So — I mean, the first couple of months of 2015, we still haven't seen Verizon ever put out update 1, and we still haven't seen Denim anywhere. And so I think that kind of stuff has to happen. So that's my guess. Is that anything close to what you understand it to be? (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Yeah, especially on Denim. I just asked last week about Denim because I saw somebody saying it had been pushed back; but they, being the Microsoft folks, are saying no, it has not been pushed back. This is the second firmware update after Sian. Has not been pushed back. It's still being tested in selected markets ahead of the broader roll-out which will begin later this year as planned. So they're saying this year. We're almost at a year.

Paul: We have three weeks left. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: But then, they're saying — yeah. It is expected to be available on all Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 8.1 by early 2015.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: So yeah, we'll see.

Paul: I mean, update 1 still hasn't rolled out everywhere; that's the primary problem.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Okay. And this question, from @laporte ... (Laughs)

Paul: Yes, sir.

Leo: Mary Jo is getting darker and darker.

Mary Jo: I know.

Leo: Are you being submerged with snow?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Has the snow reached your window yet?

Mary Jo: No, but it's getting dark out. (Laughs)

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. It's that time of the year.

Mary Jo: It is. I know.

Paul: We're getting close to the darkest day of the year.

Leo: That's true. As we all know, it's always darkest before the —

Paul: Before the rest of the winter.

Leo: — rest of the winter. (Laughs)

Paul: It doesn't really get much better.

Leo: I like doing this. We set up your — on your lower thirds, we put up your Twitter handles. You don't mind if people tweet you with questions and thoughts and stuff?

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: All right. And especially with scoops —

Paul: Wait. You put my Twitter handle up? How dare you.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Yeah, scoops, if you have scoops.

Mary Jo: Yeah. They can send that, too. Send it along.

Leo: Yep. @MaryJoFoley and @Thurrott. Paul doesn't need a first name.

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: Everyone knows who Thurrott is.

Paul: Nobody wants this last name, Leo. Nobody.

Leo: You know what everybody wants? Snacks!

Paul: REFS? Oh.

Leo: Snacks! (Laughs) Not REFS. Snacks!

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: NatureBox deliciously wholesome snacks. I know Mary Jo's a vegetarian. Her NatureBox will be vegan. For the holidays, NatureBox is the best way to snack. Don't go to that snack machine in the back or pull out something that's bad for you when you could have parmesan — oh, we love these — the parmesan garlic pop-pops. They're popcorn kernels with parmesan cheese and garlic. And the thing is, these are nutritionist-designed, no high fructose corn syrup, no trans fats; so they're delicious, and you feel good eating them. Let me just tell you what's in here. Corn, oil, sea salt, parmesan cheese, garlic, onion, spices — yum! Strawberry Greek yogurt pretzels. Somebody gave me a new NatureBox. I've got new treats! Yay! That sounds good. Blueberry nom noms, whole wheat blueberry figgy bars — I always eat those up — the Loanstar snack mix. If you go to NatureBox.com/twit, you'll see there are literally hundreds of deliciously wholesome snacks; and you can get them delivered monthly to your door. They have a variety of different box sizes. You can also specify sweet, spicy, or savory. And they do have a diet — they will fulfill some dietary needs. You can get gluten-conscious snacks; you can get vegan snacks. Never, though, never do they have hydrogenated oils or artificial anything, including colors, sweeteners, or flavors; no sulphites in the dried fruit; I like that. Those dried pineapple rings are just pineapple, nothing else. Don't forget: for every NatureBox you order, the company is going to donate a meal to help feed the millions of Americans who go hungry. In fact, their goal, to donate at least a million meals by the end of this year. How would you like to help? Go to NatureBox.com/twit for delicious, wholesome snacks for you and a meal for a person or family in need. Isn't that nice? Delicious, nutritious ingredients, wholesome and fresh, and you can get a sampler right now. You just pay the $2 shipping and handling, and you're going to get a delicious five-snack sampler. Visit NatureBox.com/twit. I have to warn you: They're addictive. They're so good. Start your trial today. Stay full, stay strong, start snacking smarter. I think Steve Jobs said that at the Stanford commencement. Stay full, stay strong, start snacking smarter. NatureBox.com —

Paul: It's not an exact quote, but it's close.

All: (Laugh)

Leo: — /twit.

Paul: We're just —

Leo: It's close, right? I think it was — paraphrasing. I'm paraphrasing Mr. Jobs.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: All right. Time for the back of the book. We kick things off with Paul Thurrott. He, as always, has a fabulous tip of the week.

Paul: Yeah. We're already on day 3 of this; but Microsoft is doing a 12 days of deals —

Leo: Yeah. They're good, too.

Paul: — promotion, I guess. Yeah, and they're really good. Today's deal is the Xbox One. It's a couple of different bundles, starting with the Assassin's Creed for $349. But you get a free game, which is a 60-dollar value, if you buy it today. The thing that's kind of cool about these deals, aside from the fact there's a different one every day, is if you go to the store — and you have to be there before — if you have a store locally and you can be there before noon and you're one of the first — I don't know — 50 people, whatever the number is, you get money off over the deal, too. And so, for example, yesterday's deal was a BLU Win HD smartphone, usually $179. Yesterday's deal price was $129; but if you got into the store physically before noon and were one of the first whatever number, it was only $99. So you can get that kind of thing. But the special deal — and this is true for all months — you have to go to a store to get this; you can't do this one online — is — remember, we talked about that Microsoft Work and Play subscription, right? It was that kind of uber subscription — Office 365 Home; Skype Unlimited World plus Wi-Fi; Xbox Live Gold; and Xbox Music pass. The normal price of that was $199. That's a savings of about $225 over the normal pricing if you paid for each of those services separately. If you get into a Microsoft store before the end of the month, it's available for $149.

Leo: That's an even better deal.

Paul: So that's another 50 bucks off.

Leo: If you need those things.

Paul: Yep. Well, everyone needs those things. (Laughs)

Leo: [Inaudible) (Laughs)

Paul: I don't even know what that means. (Laughs) All right, so — you've really thrown me off. So anyway. (Laughs)

Leo: (Laughs)

Paul: Yeah, so that's good stuff. And then, for the software pick, I actually have four; and so I'll just blow through these very quickly. Most of them are for Windows Phone, interestingly. But Minecraft, Pocket Edition was released today for Windows Phone. A couple of down sides: it's only for Windows Phone 8.1; so again, Verizon guys, you're kind of screwed there unless you get on the developer preview. And it's not super cheap; it's $6.99, although I'm told that's fairly common for this kind of game. Here Maps was updated — I'm sorry; not just Here Maps. I should have said Here apps because it was Here Maps, Here Drive, Here Drive+, City Lens, and Transit were all upgraded across Windows Phone. Here Maps for Windows 8.1 — just Windows, big Windows — was also updated. Am I missing something? Yeah. And if you've ever used these apps, you know that Nokia always supported something called a Nokia account; and there wasn't really much that you did with your Nokia account. But one of the things you could do with it was it would sync your map collections from app to app or to the web or to whatever. So if you created little collections in your map apps, you could access them from other devices. And so because they're transitioning away from Nokia accounts now, they have a Here account. And so if you've never done it before, you can just set up a Here account and do the same thing; or if you had a Nokia account, you'll be prompted to migrate it over, which you can do. You can do it on the web, you can do it in an app. And so I did that this morning on my phone, so that's kind of cool. And what else have we got? Yes, Office Lens was updated this week. Mary Jo is looking for the beer label support, but this one is business card support. And it lets you scan, with the camera on your phone, a business card, and then it creates a nice business card-looking kind of construct in OneNote. And on your PC or phone, you can then add that into your contacts. It doesn't do it directly; it'd be kind of nice if it went right into contacts. But I think that gives you a chance to look at it, make sure there aren't any mistakes or whatever. Works best with English. They've set up an account where you can share business card scans with them so that they can improve their algorithms and all that kind of stuff if you want to do that. And then finally, there's an app for Surface Pro 3 — I probably talked about this a couple months ago — called the Surface Hub app. And this is one of those modern apps, and the initial release only did two things: it let you program what the buttons on the pen do; and so the big one is that top button. And you can switch between having it launch OneNote 2013 or OneNote, the modern app version. And then in the latest version of the app, they've added a third function, which is to enable or disable the Windows key or the — I guess it's the Windows button — on the bezel of the Surface Pro 3. You know, a lot of people were artists or just writers, and they're using — the pen on the device will hit that Windows button, and it will go away from what they're doing and go to the Windows home screen. And if that's a problem for you, you can now disable that using this app.

Leo: Nice.

Paul: Yeah, that's everything.

Leo: That's a nice list.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: A lot of stuff.

Leo: We're going to put Mary Jo to work now with her enterprise picks of the week.

Mary Jo: Yeah. My enterprise pick of the week is sadly an unhappy pick of the week.

Leo: Oh, no.

Mary Jo: Yes. My pick is SharePoint online. And the reason it's my pick this week is it turns out Microsoft has been doing away with some features of SharePoint online without giving customers enough advance warning — or in some cases, any, pretty much, advance warning. People are finding out about some of the features going away through blogs from various MVPs or other people who keep tabs on SharePoint. And the reason this isn't good is Microsoft was kind of turning over a new leaf with Office 365 and its online services by opening up — having a public roadmap, for example, for Office 365 and trying to be more proactive about communicating what's coming, which features are being rolled out when, when things — they had announced — they decided instead not to roll them out at all — they have a whole roadmap for that online that's public. Instead now, we're hearing scuttlebutt that they're going to do away with a piece of SharePoint online next that's called Public Sites, and that's the part of SharePoint online that lets you stand up a public-facing website that's hosted on top of SharePoint. And it's a feature that not everybody used, but it's a feature that a lot of smaller businesses were using; and so far, they haven't said publicly whether they are or are not doing this. But it's sounding more and more, from various bloggers and tipsters, that they are going to do away with this and fairly soon; but they have not yet told customers this. They won't answer as to whether they are or aren't doing it when people are asking them; and I think the reason I wanted to make this the software pick is to, number one, warn people that Public Sites might be going away if it's something you're dependent on; and number two, to kind of poke Microsoft a little and say, Guys, come on. You were doing the right thing; don't go back to the old ways of bad secrecy. That's my pick.

Leo: Code name?

Mary Jo: Code name pick of the week is Fairfax. Fairfax was the code name for a service that Microsoft calls Microsoft Azure Government Cloud. The reason I made it the pick this week is, Microsoft —

Leo: I like Fairfax better. That doesn't sound good at all. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Yeah. And you know what? Because so many government agencies are based in or around Fairfax, Virginia, that's why that was the code name. And what the government cloud is — it's a version of Azure that's only for U.S. government customers. So you can be state, local, tribal, Department of Defense — any of those kind of customers. If you need certain requirements around Azure — like, you only can have a data center that's operated by U.S. citizens, or you want extra levels of security around your data center, or you only want other government customers to share the cloud with you and no other kinds of customers — this is the offering that you would want. It has a whole bunch of different certifications and accreditations that people who care about government care about, things like fed ramp and CJIS, FDA, HIPAA, has all those things, or at least they're on the roadmap, if you care about having all those certifications in your cloud. And yeah, it became generally available as of this week. And Microsoft also said that in January next year, the complement, which is called Dynamic CRM Government Cloud, which is the hardened version of Dynamic CRM Online, will be available generally to customers as well.

Leo: Cool.

Mary Jo: So that's your code name.

Leo: but really, the whole reason all of us listen to the show —

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: — is for the beer pick.

Mary Jo: It is.

Paul: Oh, not for the Call of Duty tip of the week?

Leo: Oh, you know what? That's a good idea.

Mary Jo: No! (Laughs)

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: Call of Duty tip of the week! All right, all right. How about beer instead, then?

Mary Jo: All right. Let's do a beer pick. So I made my beer pick this week the Knee Deep Imperial Tanilla Porter. And I just got to try this on tap last night at Rattle; they had a California beer night here. And what was interesting was, they had a whole bunch of imperial porters and stouts from California, along with some IPA's, too, and other kinds of beer. But this one — I've had other imperial porters before, and I've had vanilla porters, which are porters that have vanilla flavoring; but this combined the best of both worlds, a really strong, delicious, chocolatey imperial porter with a touch of vanilla integrated into it, which makes it almost like a dessert. It was very good, really liked it. Knee Deep is from California.

Leo: Is 10 proof high for a beer?

Mary Jo: Pretty high, yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: It's a porter, right? So it's —

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: — a porter's going to be more —

Paul: And I would say, from a calorie and carbohydrate perspective, this is absolutely a dessert. (Laughs)

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: Absolutely. It absolutely is, yeah. I only had a sampler-size taste of this, which was four ounces, but it was really, really good.

Leo: Mmm, mmm, mmm.

Mary Jo: Yeah. If you like porters and you've never tried an imperial porter, which is doubly strong, doubly malty and hoppy — and also, if you've never tried a vanilla porter, I would say give this one a try if you can find it.

Leo: Why Tanilla, not vanilla?

Mary Jo: I don't know.

Paul: I like —

Mary Jo: I was trying to find that. Yeah, I like the name. I don't know why, though; I didn't have any success doing a quick search —

Paul: Has, like, an Easter Island, Hawaiian kind of vibe to it.

Leo: Yeah, look at the god on the cover.

Paul: I also like the commercial description, which I assume comes from the brewery. (Laughs) Literally says, "Drink at your own risk."

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Oh, nice.

Paul: That's always a — should be a warning sign to anybody, really.

Leo: Yeah. This is a holiday beer, kind of, or —

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: You might want to be in the house when you're drinking this one.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah, exactly. (Laughs) It was good, though.

Leo: Awesome.

Mary Jo: Knee Deep Brewing, if you haven't found anything of theirs yet —

Leo: Where are they?

Mary Jo: They're in Auburn, California.

Leo: Oh, Arvin, okay. That's up north. It's kind of near Sacramento, yeah. All right.

Mary Jo: But very good. Really, really good beers from them.

Leo: All right. Wow. Again, we've come to the end of this show. It seems to happen every week this way.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: We talk for a while, and the show ends.

Paul: Time elapses, and then we're done?

Leo: Yeah. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Exactly. (Laughs)

Paul: Yep.

Leo: But get your tweets in for next week, and we'll be back here. Wednesdays, as always, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern Time, 1900UTC on live.twit.tv. You can also watch on-demand after the fact. Just download  it from Twit.tv/ww or YouTube.com/windowsweekly; or subscribe in your favorite show-catcher, and you'll be able to listen whenever you wish. But do —

Paul: Show-catcher?

Leo: Show-catcher. I don't want to say pod-catcher.

Paul: It's like a dream-catcher, but it's not quite as mystical.

Leo: Yeah. Shows floating through the Internet —

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: — and it puts out a little vibe and says, "You. I want you. And come to me," on your show-catcher.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: Thank you, Paul Thurrott, at the SuperSite for Windows. Great place to go, WinSuperSite.com, WinSuperSite.com, for just day in, day out great Windows coverage, lots of tips, lots of information. You also can read his books, Windows8.1Book.com. Did you finish the music book?

Paul: Not quite. I'm actually trying to wrap up the banned book first because it's so short, so I'll probably do that this week. It's very close.

Leo: Ah, cool. Good.

Paul: I got bogged down in the Cortana stuff. There's so much — Cortana is so amazing, actually. I mean, it's —

Leo: Yeah. There's a lot going on there, yeah.

Paul: Yeah. And you can literally do all of it from your wrist because there's a microphone on the band, and so you can just touch off Cortana anything from the — it's fairly amazing. I say things like, "Text Stephanie"; and it will say, "Do you mean Stephanie Thurrott?"

Leo: "Which Stephanie?" Yeah.

Paul: Yes. And then you say the sentences and ... "Is this correct?" And if you — and it is. But if you say no, it says, "Which parts of it are not correct?"

Leo: Wow.

Paul: "Did you want to" — you know, it's actually fairly involved.

Leo: That's neat.

Paul: It's pretty impressive, yeah.

Leo: You can also catch Mary Jo Foley at AllAboutMicrosoft.com. That's where her ZDNet blog resides. And every scoop that happens happens first at Mary Jo's blog. She is the queen of scoops. You can send her scoops as well.

Paul: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: You can, anytime.

Leo: Anytime.

Mary Jo: Please feel free. (Laughs)

Leo: She loves those scoops. Thanks for being here, you guys. We'll see you next week. Stay warm, stay dry.

Paul: You, too.

Leo: Remember, we're taking the holiday week off.

Mary Jo: Oh, nice.

Leo: So there will be no Windows Weekly on Christmas Eve. Fear not.

Paul: All right.

Leo: I probably haven't told you that. We are doing a best of Windows Weekly.

Mary Jo: Nice.

Paul: Okay.

Leo: Which will be a lot of fun, some of the great stories and moments from the year gone by.

Paul: Cool.

Leo: And then there's New Year's Eve coming up. I can't believe it's just a few weeks off now. Three weeks to New Year's Eve. Our show —

Paul: I could — you know what? I — I — I —

Leo: Ay, ay, ay.

Paul: I have not booked my travel for this. I need to do that.

Leo: Book your travel. Book your travel. 3 a.m. New Year's Eve through 3 a.m. New Year's Day.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: I have the master list. This is every time zone in the world. I think there's 27 of them. And amazingly enough, we have people in almost every time zone. The only ones we don't are those pink ones.

Paul: Okay.

Leo: And so each hour, we're going to be Skyping somewhere around the world. We are looking for people —

Paul: What are you looking for?

Leo: I'll tell you. I'm glad you asked.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: We're looking for people — and you can go to Twit.tv/nye to sign up — in the following UTC offsets: +12; +1130 —

Paul: Whoa. (Laughs)

Leo: — +7; +630; +6 —

Paul: Instead of reading it in byte numbers or whatever ... (Laughs)

Leo: In words? No, +5; -9; and -11. And I'll now tell you the places. Because it's a lot of places; it's a whole —

Paul: No, I understand.

Leo: Fiji; Tuvalu; Marshall Islands; Norfolk Island — that might be a little tough — Thailand; Cambodia; Vietnam; Jakarta; Burma; Cocos; Bangladesh; Bhutan; Kyrgyzstan —

Paul: Cocos, the restaurant Cocos?

Leo: Cocos. I don't know. Cocos, what is Cocos?

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: Kazakhstan; Uzbekistan; Turkmenistan; and Pakistan.

Paul: Wow.

Leo: Alaska. I can't believe we haven't gotten Alaska yet.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: We'll get Alaska. And then the tough one's going to be the last one, 3 a.m. New Year's Day, Jarvis Island.

Paul: It's got its own little —

Leo: It's a bird sanctuary.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Wow.

Leo: But that's pretty good, given that there's 27 and we're only missing maybe 7 or 8. So we're —

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: It's going to be fun. This is going to be an amazing event. We're taking over the street outside —

Paul: Sure.

Leo: — hurricane permitting.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: And we have a mechanical bull and a jumpy house. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Oh, I've always wanted to go in a jumpy house.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Oh, you've got to put that on film. (Laughs)

Leo: Oh, I'd love to see Paul in his socks, bouncing around in the bounce house.

Paul: (Laughs) I would just jump, and then the whole thing would, like —

Leo: (Makes a deflating balloon noise.)

Paul: — on top of me. It'd be like the Hindenburg going down.

Leo: Eric S., Stuckman S., "Is there face painting for the kids?" I don't know. Maybe.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: You know what? They're not telling me a lot of what's going on.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Because they want me to be shocked and surprised when it happens. So it's going to be a lot of fun. That's New Year's Eve. You'll be able to — everybody, watch live. It's for UNICEF; it's for a good cause. We hope to raise a lot of money for the United Nations children's fund for children all over the world. Thanks, Paul; thanks, Mary Jo. God, it got dark all of a sudden. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: I know. It's like —

Leo: Someone switched the lights off in Manhattan.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Stay warm, stay dry, happy holidays. We'll talk next week on Windows Weekly! Bye bye.