Windows Weekly 396 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here with more news about Windows 10, a couple of new Windows Phone handsets, and a lot more. We have a lot to talk about, including the Microsoft - Google rivalry. This is war! It's all ahead next on Windows Weekly.

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Leo: This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, Episode 396, recorded January 14, 2015

Courier in the Bunker

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Leo: Time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk about Windows weekly with Mr. Paul Thurrott of thurrott.com fame. Is that true?

Paul: Hello Leo.

Leo: Is that true? Is it yet thurrott.com or is it still?

Paul: Soon.

Leo: Soon. Any minute now.

Paul: Don't go right now, apparently it's not working.

Leo: Well we will keep it at winsupersite.com for the time being.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: But soon by friend, soon. Mary Jo Foley, she is still at AllAboutMicrosoft.com because they give her a personal brand. She doesn't need to make one, or something. Hello guys, how are you? Things going well?

Mary Jo Foley: Good, yeah, it's getting busy.

Leo: 2015, big new year. Now one week from today is some event. It's not in San Francisco this time?

Paul: No, it's in Redmond for a change.

Leo: Oh, Redmond, Washington. Home of Microsoft.

Paul: Home of the Fighting Redmond Eagles.

Leo: Do you fly into the Redmond airport or nearby Tacoma?

Mary Jo: That would be awesome if we could fly into Redmond.

Leo: That would be nice. How far is Redmond from Seattle?

Mary Jo: It's kind of far.

Paul: Well from the Seattle airport it's 30-40 minutes.

Leo: Oh, so it's a bit of a distance. Do you stay?

Paul: Redmond is not much further than Seattle. You just go up the I-5. Mary Jo doesn't drive; she's not even paying attention.

Mary Jo: No, I take a bus.

Leo: She says I get in a cab and they take me there.

Mary Jo: I take a bus.

Leo: Oh, a bus? Aren't you frugal?

Mary Jo: Aren't I.

Leo: And the bus takes you to a lovely hotel in Redmond, Washington? Or you stay in the Seattle area?

Mary Jo: I do both. My sister lives in Seattle, so I usually spend some time there. This time I am staying in Bellevue because that's where they are having us all coalesce. Then we are taking a shuttle to some undisclosed bunker.

Leo: Oh, you don't know where it is going to be?

Mary Jo: We know it's on campus. That's all we know, though.

Leo: And what are they going to show you?

Paul: 520, that's the 520.

Leo: The 520?

Paul: It's been so long since I have been there that I forgot.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's been a year since you have been there, right?

Paul: Yeah, that's crazy. I've never not been there for so long.

Leo: Now I understand why Mary Jo goes so often. She can visit family too.

Mary Jo: I can.

Leo: That makes it more fun.

Mary Jo: It does.

Leo: So Bellevue, and you are going to have a meet up there? I guess we should mention that as well. At the Bellevue Brewing Company.

Mary Jo: We are. Anybody who works at Microsoft, worked at Microsoft, or happens to be in the Bellevue area who wants to meet up with us and a bunch of other bloggers and folks should come to the Bellevue Brewing Company on January 21st at 6:30 pm until 9 or so. We have a lounge area reserved for us. Just say where is that meet up?

Leo: That's good.

Mary Jo: They have some awesome beer. They brew their own beer there.

Paul: And they say it's within walking distance of where I am going to be sleeping. I can assure you that once I get to this place...

Leo: A little Oatmeal Stout and he is out.

Mary Jo: He's a little tired. I know.

Leo: This sounds great. So this is after the event? A daylong event?

Mary Jo: Yeah, day long.

Leo: And it's going to be the consumer version of Windows 10 you think?

Mary Jo: We think. That's our understanding.

Paul: Let's put it this way. The October event was the Enterprise features of Windows and they didn't show a single Enterprise feature. So I would imagine at this consumer event that we will see the Enterprise features. I don't know. We will see. I think this is going to be a big one. Obviously the unveiling was big, but it was a very quick event. Just the fact that they blocked out the entire day suggests to me, or blocking out more time then I guess you are going to see on the live cast I should say, suggests to me that it's going to be a bigger event.

Leo: My question to you is what does the Tricaster, who lives in the Seattle area, mean when he says maybe they will show you the Courier in the bunker?

Paul: Well, the Courier being the cancelled Microsoft project to make the dual screen monitor.

Leo: Ah, that courier. There is two things they could do. They could do the Surface RT Mini or the Courier.

Paul: Wow, that's like Dukakis or Mondale.

Leo: Old news, old news. No, no, we are not going to bring it back. What do you expect? To be given a briefing, to get hardware, I'm sure you will get some software, yeah?

Paul: I'm not expecting any of that. I don't know. I don't have any actual expectations beyond a lot of information. I don't know any details. 

Leo: And yet you are trekking across the country thousands of miles?

Paul: Leo, we have had this conversation before. Microsoft snaps its fingers and I stay in a really crappy hotel in San Francisco and hate myself for a couple of days. That's what happens.

Leo: Well, that's your job. It's interesting, I just have to say, this is why Microsoft doesn't have to do CES anymore, or COMDEX. They say we will just stay here and you come to us. Then they own the news cycle too, unless Apple has an event the next Thursday.

Paul: I think this is better for all of this. I think that except for a couple of small exceptions that most of the people going to this would not prefer to be in San Francisco or anywhere else. Obviously if they do two events, one in New York and one in San Francisco that's fine too, but I think for a lot of us we like to get out there every once in a while and have an opportunity to meet more folks. Just being there means that there will be more Microsofties around. For me personally, and for Mary Jo too I'm sure, we have friends in the area that we don't get to see a lot. It's nice to get out there.

Leo: Yeah, and a lot easier than CES.

Paul: And a lot more relevant, by the way, to what we do.

Leo: Yeah, yeah, although like we said last week there were some interesting PC's at CES. I'm sure Microsoft had a suite somewhere or something?

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah, they were showing stuff off. They had a hospitality suite and they had a party for their customers and partners at CES.

Paul: They are like bedbugs Leo. You may not see them but they are milling around.

Leo: We talked last week about the Dell, the new generation Intel Broadwell. I couldn't resist, I bought it. It was like my finger was hovering. So I will have one of those in a couple of weeks.

Paul: I do a lot of that with these kinds of things.

Leo: I will be honest, I was going to wait because I figured Apple will do a MacBook Air exactly the same.

Paul: Same platform, yeah.

Leo: Yeah, not running Windows obviously, but on the Broadwell and it would probably be very similar screen wise and everything. Especially because they can do that big battery life thing. But my Mac experts, Andy Inhatko and Rene Ritche said don't count on it. Not soon.

Paul: It's been rumored for a while, and my understanding was that when that chip set was supposed to come out in the fall that that machine was going to be the first one and they were going to announce it in the fall. When that all got delayed that pushed the Apple stuff back.

Leo: Then Apple must have walked away and Dell decided they could do it, and Lenovo, right, and others. It's looks nice with no bezel.

Paul: I'm interested in it. I'm more interested in the ThinkPad personally, but that's just my own personal...

Leo: I went against your recommendation. I got the QHD screen. We shall see.

Paul: On the dell?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Is there any other option?

Leo: Yeah, yeah, yeah, remember? You can get the 1080p or the 1800p.

Paul: Wow.

Leo: It's almost 273 dpi I think. Now Windows took out that setting in Windows where you could set the dpi.

Paul: Oh, it's in there.

Leo: It's still in there?

Paul: Yeah, it's a little harder to find, but if you right click, I don't need to tell you now.

Leo: Wait till I get it then you can help me set it up.

Paul: It's in the display control.

Leo: So you can kind of do a high dpi thing?

Paul: You can do the same one if you want. You just have to turn on custom scaling, then you click on an option, and that exact interface comes up from Windows 7. It's just a little more hidden.

Leo: Can you do that in the Surface as well?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: A friend of mind has a Surface Pro 3. He loves it, but he says...

Paul: Oh the scaling drives me crazy on the Surface Pro 3. So I spent a considerable amount of time with that particular device because I really wanted to make that one work. I love it otherwise. I tried different variations of scaling to try to get something that looked good on the desktop. Frankly, the way that it is configured out of the box is sadly the best it gets.

Leo: You've got to go dot for dot?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Alright, good to know. I found the little slider, I slid it up a little so it's bigger, but it didn't seem the same capabilities as the dpi setting. I'm sorry, I did not mean to derail you. Sorry, we are back. Let's go back to beautiful Bellevue, Washington. Build is coming up, I see that the registration is opening up a day after this event.

Paul: It's going to be a busy year Leo.

Mary Jo: It's kind of perfect, right? It's like they are going to show us all of that Windows 10 stuff, and then the next day, hey, do you want to pay $2,000 to go to Build?

Paul: That suggests a certain amount of confidence, doesn't it?

Mary Jo: It does.

Paul: That they think that what they show off on Wednesday is going to be exciting enough that on Thursday the developers are going to plunk down a couple of grand to go to Build.

Leo: When is build?

Mary Jo: It is the last week of April, right?

Leo: You have on your blog, AllAboutMicrosoft.com, Mary Jo has the entire schedule.

Mary Jo: Yep, what we know about so far where Microsoft is likely to appear or do something significant.

Leo: Holy cow.

Paul: Build is at a different time of the month than it usually is, and it's right on top of TechED which is Ignite, right? It's too bad in a way that those are so close.

Leo: So January 21st, a week from today, is Windows 10: The Next Chapter by invitation only. Tech Days Online in the UK is in February, then in March Mobile World Congress. I think we should all meet in Barcelona for that, don't you think?

Paul: I'm listening. I really want to do that. In fact, I'm going to have a conversation with Microsoft very soon that says I want to go to Barcelona, is there a reason that I should possibly go?

Leo: What for you would do that? A high end Windows Phone?

Paul: Yeah, an actual flagship Windows Phone would do it for me, yeah.

Mary Jo: But don't you think that it's the wrong time to get one of those right there, right?

Paul: Yep, it is.

Mary Jo: You would think that it's going to run the mobile version of Windows 10, and if it is that's not going to be out for months still. So it would be weird if they show off any flagship.

Paul: By the way, you are right. We don't know what they are going to talk about next week, but if you think about the Windows devices that they just announced at CES and you think about how Windows 10 is coming out 6 to 9 months after those devices, they are not a bad deal now because they will run Windows 10 effectively, right? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see any big hardware advances coming that will obviate the use of these devices going forward. It's possible to ship a similar type of device for phone, especially a high end device, where they can maybe have a guarantee that you will be getting Windows 10. They might choose to do that because they certainly have ways to do that. I'm basically dreaming and I am dragging you down into this hole with me.

Mary Jo: I would like you to be right.

Paul: I'm just saying that it's not impossible.

Mary Jo: I'm betting if they do show new phones in Barcelona that they will be mid-range and low end phones. That seems to be where they are going right now.

Paul: They are like chicklets now.

Leo: That's the right thing to do, etc., etc., but they just don't capture the imagination of your elite tech press the way a flagship does.

Mary Jo: It doesn't.

Leo: I look at this 1620, and I finally kind of resurrected it, and it's really kind of a great phone.

Paul: Yep, it really is.

Leo: The only thing missing, and I blame Google; I've now got pretty much everything except Hangouts. I need Hangouts because that's my SMS messaging system. Because I use so many phones that I just have it go to my Hangouts number.

Paul: It seems like the Google stuff should be possible, even if only through 3rd parties, right? Google has API's for everything that they do.

Leo: We will talk about Microsoft versus Google later because therein lies a tale. It's clear that Google just kind of has it in for them a little bit.

Paul: They are not ambivalent about Windows Phone, they are literally working actively against it.

Leo: That's working actively against users. Maybe it's not a lot of users. Maybe it's only in the few hundred thousands or millions, but that's users.

Paul: Microsoft has really shown up for Android in the past year. Obviously they have a reason to do that; Android is huge. You think that they could throw Microsoft a bone. They could throw two interns on some Windows Phone apps, it's not going to hurt anybody. I'm surprised that they don't try at all. 

Mary Jo: I'm not really surprised. They really want to thwart them. They really do. It's the same reason that Amazon is not doing anything with the Kindle app; it's all rivalry. Microsoft has always been the big guy, so it's like hey, let's stick it to them.

Paul: But Microsoft is providing apps to Kindle on their phone and their devices aren't really big sellers.

Mary Jo: They don't care. That's helping Microsoft, right?

Leo: I wasn't going to go down this road because we have a whole section devoted to it. So I will save it.

Paul:  I just hate them so much.

Leo: I'm sorry, back on track. Stop it Leo, stop it. Knock it off with your regressive ways. Any other things? I'm looking at the rundown of events that you put together on AllAboutMicrosoft.

Mary Jo: We've got WinHECK coming up in March. WinHECK is back.

Leo: Wait a minute, I thought they got rid of that.

Paul: They did.

Mary Jo: It's been 7 years since the last WinHECK, but it's back. If you want to go to that you have to request an invitation. That's usually for OEMs and ODMs.

Paul: By the way, to be clear, there could be 7 WinHECKs this year.

Mary Jo: There could. That's true.

Paul: This is a WinHECK. They are going to hold them near to where hardware devices are manufacture red. So they will be in China basically. I don't think this is going to be the only one, and I don't think that any of these are going to be huge events per say, but there is no reason that they couldn't generate a headline or two just by making some announcement with it. That is something that I would expect. So when is that, March?

Mary Jo: It is. It's a couple of weeks before Build, is it? I'm sorry, it's a month before Build.

Paul: Mobile World Congress is in March this year, isn't it?

Mary Jo: Right, first week of March.

Paul: Okay, so it's after that.

Mary Jo: The other rumored big event, potential big event, from Microsoft this year is E3. There are some people who think that they may announce the gaming helmet thing at E3.

Paul: Not officially named by the way.

Leo: Get your gaming helmet on!

Mary Jo: Get your gaming helmet on.

Paul: Alright kids, get your gaming helmet things, we are going in.

Leo: It might work, I don't know.

Mary Jo: It might. Who knows. Who knows. Then we believe there will be a Windows 10 launch, probably in Q3. But we don't know where or when for that. 

Leo: So E3 is the middle of June.

Paul: By the way, I think the biggest event, and we can all agree, is the Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando in mid-July.

Leo: Beautiful Disney World in July. Nothing sweeter. Get your deet kids, we are headed to Orlando.

Paul: The weather is going to be perfect that week.

Mary Jo: Although, at the Partner Conference, it will be hot, but there will be news. There always is.

Paul: You can cut the air with a steak knife.

Leo: Well they got a deal in July.

Paul: Sure

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Actually I'm going to keep this calendar around because we will probably have stuff around it. How are we going to handle next week? You got a room?

Paul: So I sent out an email about this. Unfortunately, the long and the short of it is that we basically have two options which are 4-6 on Wednesday...

Mary Jo: Pacific Time.

Leo: We could do that.

Paul: Or Friday.

Leo: We could do 4-6. You said we are going to get a room?

Paul:  I would prefer it, and I think that Mary Jo would too. I keep speaking for her for some reason, but I think that she would.

Mary Jo: I would prefer to do it Wednesday.

Paul: If possible I think that would be kind of fun.

Leo: There would be more people around.

Paul: It's going to be fresh.

Leo: The Laddermilk twins will be there.

Paul: We will try to keep them at bay.

Leo: Okay, we will plan on that for next week. Instead of our normal time at 11 am Pacific, I will have to check with the boss, but I think that we can do it right after Tech News Tonight which is at 4 pm Pacific. So we can do 4:30-6:00 or something like that.

Mary Jo: That would be cool. Plus we can tell you guys what happened right after.

Leo: That way we can get all of the news.

Mary Jo: The morning is going to be webcast live we believe. We do know that it is going to be webcast live, we just don't know what the URL is yet for that. The afternoon is not going to be webcast, but we are going to be there, so we can tell you what we saw.

Leo: That will be the most important stuff.

Mary Jo: ND8, which is don't think that it will be. So that should be fun if we can do that.

Paul: Either that or we will be under ND8. Thanks for changing the schedule.

Mary Jo: I think that if we can do it that day it would be great. They have a room for us on campus, so we will be set if we can. It would be great.

Leo: I'm sending out a note. It looks like it will be at 1:21 right after Tech News Tonight. I can't remember what comes later. I think that it's Ham Nation and it doesn't start until right around 6, so I think that is...

Mary Jo: Awesome. Then we will go drink beer at our meet up right after that.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: It will be a long day, but it will be a good day.

Paul: Yep, it's going to be a good day.

Mary Jo: We think that we are going to see the consumer preview. We think that we might see Touch First Office there. We think that we might see that Spartan browser there. So there are a lot of things that we think that we are going to see.

Paul: There is this phone tablety thing; we think that we are going to see it probably. I don't know the schedule.

Mary Jo: I think that we are going to hear about PC gaming because Phil Spencer from Xbox is going to be there. There is a lot of stuff.

Paul: They will probably announce another version of their flight simulator. They are making a big comeback.

Leo: Very exciting, very exciting.

Paul: Games for Windows Live.

Mary Jo: You guys can watch the live stream, Leo, too. We aren't sure on the time exactly. We think 9 am Pacific.

Leo: What we can do, of course Tech News Today is 9:00-10:45, what we can do is start the coverage, do Tech News Today, and then come back. Since you won't be doing Windows Weekly we will have that time. We might as well stream that whole thing until they shut it down at lunch.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Good. Alright, I will chat with the staff and make sure that we have an engineer on duty. It's not easy anymore. It used to be, yeah, I will come in. Now we have got to get people. Excellent. So I am disheartened because yesterday Windows 7 died.

Paul: Yep, moment of silence everyone.

Mary Jo: That's what everybody said.

Leo: Yeah, it's so interesting.

Paul: Some of the headlines that I saw were unbelievable.

Leo: Like what?

Paul: I don't remember the exact wording, but it was just...

Leo: Microsoft ends support for Windows 7! Forces users to use Windows 8!

Paul: The click bait headlines that we use today, like "Microsoft killed off Windows 7, and you are never going to believe what happened next..." It's like guys, come on.

Leo: Just to be clear, this is what they call mainstream support, what do they call it?

Mary Jo: Mainstream support.

Leo: And that means just that nobody in Redmond is writing a new minesweeper for Windows 7.

Paul: There is no overthinking required. I want you as a Windows 7 user to think back to the last 2 years. Think about all of those amazing software updates that you got in the last 2 years

Leo: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Remember all of those?

Leo: Remember the plus pack for Windows 7?

Paul: You didn't get any, right?

Leo: Service pack 2?

Paul: You didn't get any. Nothing changed. Nothing changed.

Leo: So they for another 5 years will continue update support and all of that?

Paul: It will be just like the past 2 1/2 years, yes.

Mary Jo: Yep, and you get them for free from Microsoft. You don't have to do anything to get them.

Leo: Good. At this point, I do have to say, you probably should move on to Windows 8.

Paul: This is like somebody turns 40, and you show up at their birthday party and you say I'm sorry that you are half dead.

Leo: It's like those cards they send with the Grim Reaper and the scythe.

Paul: It's crazy.

Leo: So that's good to know. I think that anybody who listens to the show knew that. It cannot be a surprise to them.

Paul: I'm just outraged by the coverage that it's gotten. I literally wrote nothing about this because nothing changed. There is nothing to say.

Mary Jo: I wrote about it because I saw all of the crazy headlines going by, and I said you know what, I better just throw this up there because people are freaking out.

Leo: Here is a question. If I buy this Dell for instance, a Windows 8.1 machine, 10 will work just fine on it, right?

Mary Jo: As well as it could.

Leo: In a year. I'm not talking now during the preview.

Paul: It's not running Windows RT, right?

Leo: Yeah, as long as you are running a modern Intel chip set, when 10 comes out you will just, as you always have, upgrade. Presumably most Windows 7 machines will be fine.

Paul: I was just going to say, I think that Windows 10 is going to run great on Windows 7 hardware, on Windows 8 hardware, and Windows 8.1 hardware. I think that it's going to be absolutely fine.

Leo: For a long time you couldn't put the new operating system on because it was bigger and slower. They turned that around I think with 7. 7 was faster than Vista, right?

Paul: That's right. That was the first time that that had happened where the new version was smaller, and faster, and had fewer hardware resource requirements.

Leo: The driver model sometimes changes and things like that, but essentially if you have the hardware that can run Windows 7 well it should be even better, right? Is it still that way? Did they continue it with 8? 8 was faster than 7.

Mary Jo: I think that they have said that any machine that runs Windows 7 will run Windows 10. Didn't they say that somewhere? Or am I making that up?

Leo: So this is completely different. Ever since 7 it's been lighter and faster instead of bigger and slower.

Paul: What a concept.

Leo: Actually what that shows is also an evolution in technology. All of the things that you needed to graphic interface are done, and the processors that are current are fast enough, and the RAM that is out is sufficient, and now in fact if you are going to update your operating system you might well tune it to be more efficient as opposed to well now we can finally do Arrow.

Paul: First of all, there are a couple of factors. Windows Vista was very big, and bloated, and fat. Moving that back for 7 was easy.

Leo: XP was like that too compared to 7, right? 7 ran better than even XP.

Paul: Yeah, I don't have as big of a handle on that one. We know that Vista was very inefficient. That said, the other thing that was happening in the background was the componentization of Windows. Of course, in the modern age where that is important is pushing Windows on to ever more mobile devices, devices that have only 1 GB of RAM, have 16 GB of onboard storage, have very small screens, touch interfaces, and so forth. So by componentizing the system you get to some version of Windows where you can lop off a bunch of stuff that isn't needed on such devices. The underlying thing, that kind of core part of Windows, is a lot more efficient and smaller than it was before.

Leo: I presume that will continue.

Paul: Yeah, I would think so, sure. We have Windows Phones that have 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of storage.

Leo: Very efficient. Alright, let's take a break. When we come back there are some more Windows 10 leaks. We will find out more about them. Paul Thurrott is here. So is Mary Jo Foley. Paul did a nice job on his hair. He went to a barber and got it cleaned up a little bit.

Paul: I considered having him cut my hair that day, but my kids were so excited.

Leo: No, no, that was more fun.

Paul: He said this, and virtually everyone who has seen me has said this, it's some variation of did you lose a bet? I say, no, I actually did this for charity. They say, oh, that's very nice. This has become very acceptable.

Leo: I think that Mary Jo will agree, you look good.

Mary Jo: I think that it looks good.

Leo: He looks so macho and great. Paul has always been, and you will forgive me for saying this, a handsome, handsome man.

Paul: I accept that compliment Leo. I have to say that I'm vaguely considering leaving it very short because I get up in the morning and it's like a phantom limb syndrome.

Leo: Yes, where is my hair?

Paul: I feel like my hair is really messy, like I'm all bedheaded, and then I walk into the bathroom, and I look in the mirror, and it's like nice.

Leo: Exactly, nice!

Paul: I feel like there is nothing to do.

Leo: Exactly.

Mary Jo: You save so much money on products.

Leo: Matt Lauer says it's the best thing that he ever did. Another very attractive, powerful media personality, he says...

Paul: Yes, we have so much in common.

Leo: I think it is the new look. I am, on the other hand, absolutely growing mine back as long as I can to hide whatever part of my head that I can.

Paul: My hairline was some form of subterfuge. He said that my hairline was much higher than he thought it was. He had clearly been lying to me for years.

Leo: This is the definition, the very definition, of receding.

Paul: I think that this is just what hairlines look like. I don't know what to tell you.

Leo: Anyway, I don't think it is a bad look for you especially because you have such a nice manly chest, your hairy chest.

Paul: Yes, I should have shaved that too.

Mary Jo: That's next year's bet.

Leo: Paul is a good looking fella and yeah. Paul did this because we raised $60,000 for UNICEF. The final count is much closer when we include the auction to $75,000. Thank you for doing that Paul. I've been told that there is no reason that people couldn't continue to go to unicefusa.org/twit and keep the contributions coming in. It's a very good cause. It does seem to continue to go up, $63,349 now. Thank you to all of those wonderful people.

Paul: $3,349 from me having hair. 

Leo: I think that it was drmom who put us over the top there. You know, I could say that it is a success. Now if you were wanting to keep bicing it, that is such a terrible name.

Paul: Bicing?

Leo: Bicing, b-i-c, like those cheap disposable razors. If you wanted to keep doing that, I would first of all say don't use a Bic. In fact, don't use any of those disposable razors. The expensive fancy razors are frankly way overpriced. You want Harry's, not just for your face, but for your head and any other part of your anatomy that you wish to keep hair away. Keep the hair at bay with Harry's. I am a big fan and I know you will be too. Let's go to harrys.com and show people the great deal. Harry's was started because it's actually a truism, it's almost trite to say they give away the razors and they make it up on the blades, but that is exactly the business model for most of the big shaving companies. That's why the blades are $4 when you go to the drugstore. They lock them up they are worth so much. Not Harry's; Harry's has decided that they can make great blades, I would submit better blades then are available at the drugstore because they bought the factory in Germany that makes these blades and they give the instructions to the factory. They say we want the best blades, we want them engineered for sharpness and performance, and nobody should ever again cut their face and their head with a razor blade. By making the blades and selling them directly to you you save more the half of the overpriced blades. Even the razors are very affordable. Take a look at the great kits. This is how you start with Harry's. They have the Truman set and the Winston set. The Truman is a plastic handle, very attractive in four different colors; $15. That gets you not just the handle, but 3 blades, the travel cover, and the Harry's shave gel which I am a big fan of. It smells great and it really works well. Now if you want to spend a little more they also have the Winston set with the metal handle and engraving. That's still only $25. We are going to take $5 off if you use the offer code WINDOWS when you buy. Harry's, h-a-r-r-y-s.com, and use the offer code WINDOWS, take a look at the kit and subscribe. I love Harry's, I shave every day with Harry's now, and you can't get a better shave. Harry's, h-a-r-r-y-s.com, use the offer code WINDOWS for $5 off of your first order. 

Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, time to talk Windows on Windows Weekly. More leaks on is this the consumer version of Windows 10, or what do you think that we are seeing here Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: Yeah, I think that it is. I think that is a screenshot leak and the Spartan browser leaks that we say.

Leo: We talked about Spartan browser last week?

Mary Jo: We did. So Spartan is a new browser that Microsoft is building that is going to use the Trident rendering agent, not WebKit, and the JavaScript Edge. So it has some of the same underlying parts as IE, but everything that we are hearing is that it's a different browser, or at least Microsoft is going to market it as a different browser.

Leo: Again, the press can't always be relied upon, but that's what they are saying. Microsoft is abandoning IE! At most you can say that they are abandoning the name IE.

Mary Jo: Right, yeah. They are going to keep IE around for backward compatibility and for businesses who want legacy apps to be able to work with the version of IE that is going to ship with Windows 10. We think that there is going to be IE 11 or maybe 12 with Windows 10. But Spartan is the one that is going to be a Windows Store app we believe. So that means that it will actually be deliverable through the store. That's very different, because right now you don't get IE through the store, it's built in as part of the operating system. The thinking is that if you can get it through the store then Microsoft will be updating it more frequently that way. It's also expected to be more of a lightweight browser and possibly to support extensions in a way like Google Chrome does. It might be a different browser, and the screenshot leaks that we think are probably real make it look like it is probably going to be a different browser. It does not look like IE. I forget where they were from, but there were leaks from the ON on what the browser looked like, China I think, Paul?

Paul: CMBeta website.

Mary Jo: CMBeta, right. There are some leaks on what we think that they will look like there that came out last week.

Paul: That that UI thing that there have been enough leaks that correspond that clearly they are showing the same thing.

Leo:  If it was Photoshopped you wouldn't see it cut up for everybody.

Mary Jo: You would think. We think that we are going to see it at the Windows Event next week in Redmond, but we don't know if we are going to get it in the fix that people get. We are not quite sure if it is ready enough, or if it is too buggy.

Leo: Will Spartan only be available on 10?

Mary Jo: We don't know that. I think that it will because of that Windows Store piece of it, but we are not really sure.

Leo: So we will still be using IE on previous versions?

Mary Jo: We think. The other thing that we don't know...

Paul: That's a good question.

Mary Jo: I know, I hadn't really thought about that either. The other thing that we don't know is if Microsoft at some point will take Spartan cross platform. Will there be a Spartan for IOS and a Spartan for Android? I don't think that will happen anytime soon, but there is no reason really...

Paul: As long as they don't ship it first on iPhone before they ship it on Windows Phone.

Mary Jo: Oh geez. If they ship it on Windows and Windows Phone first that would be a nice departure.

Leo: Holy cow.

Paul: You remember that scene in Frankenstein where the people are running at the castle with torches and pitchforks?

Leo: God.

Mary Jo: So there were a couple of other Spartan leaks and rumors last week. Tom Warren at The Verge said he has information that Spartan is going to include digital inking support. The idea is that if you pull up a page in Spartan that you will be able to annotate it with digital ink, save it in to OneDrive, and anyone with any browser will be able to pull it up, see the annotations, and annotate it themselves, and then save it back into OneDrive. That would be pretty cool if that happens. A few of us have heard about this feature that they are trying to build into Spartan, according to sources they are called Group Tabs, or may be called Group Tabs, where you will be able to open multiple tabs and have them next to each other for comparison sake so you won't have to keep going back and forth between tabs. They will all be in a single pane somehow. That could be kind of interesting too if they end up bringing that to the browser. It sounds kind of interesting, I'm actually very interesting to see Spartan.

Paul: Yeah, I am too.

Leo: You sound skeptical.

Mary Jo: You sound skeptical.

Paul: I sort of just doubt the strategy here to get another version of Trident. I think that the world has moved on.

Leo: Quickly, there is WebKit, which Chrome uses. Actually Chrome doesn't anymore.

Paul: No, but let's call it WebKit. Really it's WebKit and its derivatives.

Leo: So really this actually goes back to is it GTK?

Paul: HTML and...

Leo: Yeah, this was a Linux gooey extension.

Paul: KDE.

Leo: KDE extensions, was part of the KDE manager, and you get the KDE browser with it.

Paul: Which, by the way, if you would have told me at the time that this was the browser that would dominate the planet I would have told you that you were shameless.

Leo: It's a good engine. So Google adopted it, Apple adopted it; WebKit is all over. In fact Apple contributes back into it. They created it as WebKit but it is really KHTML originally. That is where it all originated. Google has forked it now. Apparently what they did is that there was so much code in there to support kind of old stuff and deprecated things that they said we don't have to bring that whole code set along with us, so we are going to fork it and get rid of the out of date support. I think that they call it Blink.

Paul: Blink sounds right.

Leo: Apple still uses it.

Paul: Yeah, Apple still uses it. You know, Apple uses it on the 1 billion or so devices that they have shipped, or 750 million, or whatever it is.

Leo: Firefox design has its own engine, which was Gecko. I'm not sure what they are using now. So the engine is underneath the browser. It's the rendering engine.

Paul: Right, and the thing is that I feel like there is plenty of room for innovation on top of that thing. It's like saying that we can't change the SMB file system because Microsoft uses it or something.

Leo: Well the UI is on top of it, so the menus, and the options, and everything is on top of the rendering engine. In fact it used to be called the chrome like the chrome on a car. That's why Chrome and Chromium have the name that they do, because really they are on top of WebKit. So Trident, how long has Microsoft been using Trident?

Paul: Since 95. Trident dates back to the mosaic stuff that they licensed from Spyglass in the 1990's.

Leo: So it's pretty old.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Not necessarily a bad thing that it's old. What I heard from some of my contacts was that they debated whether to use WebKit for this new browser, but they decided that they had so much investment in Trident, and again back to the legacy idea, they instead forked Trident and said that they are going to just stick with Trident. They actually do believe that Trident is a better rendering engine. Even though everyone else is...

Paul: I'm positive of that too. I'm also positive that it doesn't matter. You know, I mean, that's the problem.

Mary Jo: I'm pretty sure that they are going to stay with Trident. That's pretty set in stone for this.

Leo: There's not just speed and accuracy, there is security.

Paul: There is also consistency. You don't need the same rendering system to get that consistency, but Microsoft just spent the past 3 years trying to get web developers and the creators of these engines to agree on standards and hitting on things rendering consistently across browsers. No one is paying attention to that at all and it stinks. It's hard for developers, it's hard for users, and there are all kinds of problems there. Look, whatever they call this thing, Spartan for now, will have useful features from Chrome and other browsers like extensibility and all of that kind of stuff. It's great, IE obviously is lacking in various ways. IE also has things that other browsers don't have that I find very worthwhile day to day in Windows.

Leo: I think that also people when they say IE they are talking about the Chrome on top of the rendering.

Paul: They are talking about the app.

Leo: People aren't really aware of the engine or the differences in engines.

Paul: Fair enough. The developers are.

Leo: Developers are.

Paul: The whole notion of picking which browser gets more and more strange as we move over time. Of course it must. Whatever, Microsoft has done a lot of things right. This year I think that they are going to start retiring older versions of IE much more quickly than they have in the past. Basically they never really did, or they did only after many, many years. That's smart; overdue perhaps. A lot of the use space, the business users, move very slowly or don't move at all. They add an internet site or whatever it is, and they never upgrade it, and now it doesn't work in IE 11. Thus they can't upgrade to Windows 8, or Windows 10, or whatever.

Leo: Frankly that's where you get into trouble because then you are using an older deprecated insecure browser, IE 6, 7, even 8.

Mary Jo: Aren't they automatically updating everybody now to IE 11? Didn't that happen or isn't that happening?

Paul: I thought that was happening later this year. Maybe businesses have a tool that can prevent that. I thought there was some time frame for this year where that was going to start happening.

Mary Jo: Once that starts happening that's going to take away a lot of the problems where people are running the updated versions, right?

Paul: Well...

Leo: That sounds like a nightmare though. I know sites, bank sites and such, that require older versions of IE. They won't work with 11.

Mary Jo: They are doing something, I'm sorry I'm so rusty on this, I haven't written about this in a long time, but they did something in the code so if it detects you are running an older version that it is going to somehow make it so it thinks like if you are running IE 8 it makes it so that it is actually running IE 11 but it pretends you are running IE 8. I'm explaining this so badly because I haven't written about it in so long.

Paul: Yeah, it doesn't sound familiar to me. Gary Share is rolling in his grave.

Mary Jo: Yeah, he is. 

Leo: One of our chat room members, thegrayarea, who is a realtor, he says the multiple listing service won't work with IE 11. So all of the sudden you have all of these realtors with I don't know what, Vista or XP, means that they can't use the tool that they have the computer for.

Paul:  Right, so if you are in XP, I think what it it, IE 8 is probably most used?

Mary Jo: Enterprise Mode, boom! I found it.

Leo: What is it?

Paul: Enterprise Mode is not a full compatibility solution. That's kind of a half step.

Mary Jo: Is it? Okay.

Leo: Business, business, it's about business.

Paul: It's about Flash and Java versions.

Leo: Flash? Come on, really, Flash?

Paul: We are talking about legacy stuff here.

Leo: Oh, ActiveX. Our bank, I don't want to say names, installs an ActiveX control so that you can do online banking. It's not a big bank, it's a little bank.

Paul: I remember being in San Francisco, and this would be almost 18 years ago, and I remember hearing about ActiveX and thinking that this was the greatest idea I have ever heard. You know, like light weight software components that can run on the web. This sounds awesome. Yep, it's like hearing a disease that wipes out mankind.

Leo: You know, that tuberculosis can really be great. On the bright side you would be giving up smoking.

Paul: Yeah, but you know that it exposes these other problems.

Leo: So really the ActiveX is an issue because arbitrary code can run a program with full access on your computer. 

Paul: But Leo, it's so light weight.

Leo: Anyway, I think that the Spartan thing is overblown. If it's the same engine than it's the same problems as far as I'm concerned.

Mary Jo: I would like to see how different that it really is. I have seen a number of web developers saying oh great, another browser. So if it's too different that also works against them. If it is made for Trident and it's coded for Trident then that's not so bad.

Paul: Here's another little issue if it doesn't run anywhere but Windows 10. I could support everyone over here or the 17 people using the latest version of Microsoft OS. Is that what you are telling me? They need to make it so it works.

Leo: I think that the real issue for most developers is how much compatibility issue am I going to have with JavaScript? Am I going to have to have a K statement that says if Spartan is only open...

Paul: It only supports F Sharp, Leo.

Leo: With nowadays web statements, it really was in the old days of coding that said ok, which browser are you? Okay, use this version. That is, I think, all gone.

Paul: Well version checking still has to occur. It's not just to pop up a page, but sometimes you want to use a certain feature and it works differently across browsers, and sometimes doesn't work at all.

Leo: Right.

Paul: So that could be a problem.

Leo: I'm not a web developer, so I don't know how much of that you have to do. 

Paul: You have the hair of a web developer Leo.

Leo: Not the brain alas, just the hair.

Mary Jo: Somebody listening to the show, @jacobfierce on Twitter is saying, I am a web developer and tried it. I almost always renders the same as Chrome. It's trivial for me to support.

Leo: That's what you would expect and hope for because it's not 1998 anymore.

Paul: There was a trick in Windows Phone 8, maybe Windows Phone 8.1, where if I'm not mistaken, if you hit a website with a mobile browser it will fake the site into thinking that it is Chrome just so you get the correct looking site. 9 times out of 10 it looks absolutely perfect on Windows Phone. They would see IE and they would throw up the desktop site.

Leo: Given how much we are going to be living in the Cloud, how important thin clients are going to be not just for Google, but I think for Microsoft...

Paul: X is making a comeback Leo. They are putting it in the Cloud. 

Leo: No! I think it would behoove everyone not to.

Paul: They are going to have a password prompt in every ActiveX website.

Leo: In our chat room, what is his name, luigithecat, says the wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. So there you go. Who would have thought such brilliance from somebody named luigithecat? Anything else?

Paul: Where are we at?

Leo: Where are we at? Oh, Windows leaks. Item 2 in the rundown. What's next for OneDrive? You know, I have to say, I'm loving OneDrive more and more because all of my phones now, I save all of my photos to OneDrive and that unlimited storage. So when I revived that 1520 there is all of my stuff. The pictures that I take on the 1520 are on every other phone, even the Google phones.

Paul: My wife's phone just had a problem with the Micro SD card. It took a while to figure out that was what the problem was. We popped the card out, she is upgrading soon, I said, look, you can live without the card, don't worry about it, for two weeks. Now her phone works fine. Here is the thing, we were out the other night, and I said, oh, show them those photos from the whatever. They are not on her phone because they were on the Micro SD card. I said surely you were backing these things up to OneDrive because then I could show them. Nope. It's like somebody, seriously. You know, all of your pictures would just be in the same place.

Leo: It's so nice. I love it.

Paul:  Yep, for me with Windows Phone, and I test a lot of phones, obviously it’s a different equation.

Leo: Well we face it constantly.

Paul: It doesn't matter because I could go out one night, take a bunch of photos, with one phone, show up the next day with a different phone, and be like look, here are the photos I took last night.

Leo: Yeah, I'm loving it. They are all here. Just go to OneDrive, there's everything, it's great. I just wanted to kind of be ready for whatever is about to happen with Windows Phone, so it was like, I have one, let's keep it up to date. It's Cyan, right, that's as far as I'm going to go on this one.

Paul: No, you will get Denim on there.

Leo: Someday?

Paul: Someday, yeah, should be someday soon.

Leo: It's an AT&T one, so.

Paul: A 1520? Oh, you go the international version.

Leo: No, that one died. This is the one that Microsoft sent me, it's an AT&T.

Paul: I don't know what the schedule is.

Leo: Denim will sometime happen?

Paul: You will get Denim. That's another thing that I have a hard time keeping track of, which phones get what.

Leo: Me too, I was looking and it said Cyan. I remember that I wanted Cyan, I don't remember if it was the last version.

Paul: Cyan is the one that shipped with Windows 8.1, so it dates back to April, but the mainstream roll out of it didn't really start until summer. Then when they released update 1 for Windows 8.1 they also released Denim. I should say finalized, because it is just now rolling out, Denim is now rolling out and you see it on the new phones.

Leo: Yeah, my phone is up to date.

Paul: It doesn't feel like it, does it?

Leo: This is the dance that everybody with a smartphone gets. Did it update yet? Cortana is great. Love the Cortana. I love the gooey is beautiful. It deserves more respect frankly. I was just looking at statistics on Pornhub, and it's like a 53% increase in usage on Windows Phone on Pornhub.

Paul: Here is my take on that Leo. We are going to take the wins where we can get them.

Leo: Press release you think from Microsoft?

Paul: Yep, yep, biggest "growth" of any smartphone platform is for porn.

Leo: I'm glad you said that not me.

Paul: Yeah right.

Leo: I was about to and I thought better of it. Sorry Mary Jo, it's just boys.

Mary Jo: Boys being boys.

Leo: Boys being boys. What is the latest on OneDrive on Windows 10? Is it in there now?

Paul: So this is a convoluted story, but the short version is that back in November Microsoft released the final preview build of 2014, and it included a version of OneDrive that nobody was happy about because it really got rid of the placeholder system that everybody really liked in Windows 8.1 and went back to the old selective sync system that is in Windows 7, Windows 8, and it's also on the Mac. Honestly what they did this week is just reiterate what they said and what it boils down to is that's not really changing. We had to change the sync engine, they already explained why, they wanted consistency and reliability across all of the platforms and all of the kind of stuff. They are merging the underlying sync engines, big deal. They are going to add new functionality which was impossible to do under the old placeholder system. They are going to get people access to shared OneDrive files and folders for example. They are also going to make some improvements, which they haven't detailed yet, to the way that we share and view photos, which becomes more and more important with unlimited storage. What they have pledged to do, and again this is not anything new, they have already said this, is post the release of Windows 10, but before the end of this year they will try to bring back some of the functionality of the placeholders. They have not said how they are going to do that, but I take that to mean something very vague like the primary thing that was so awesome about placeholders is that it allows you to see everything that is in OneDrive from the file system. The primary problem with placeholders is that when you see everything that is in OneDrive you think it is on your computer, you get on a place, you double click on a Word document and it doesn't load because it is just a placeholder, it's not the real file. So we don't know how they are going to implement this, or when really. They basically just came out publicly and said what we talked about months ago, so I guess thank you for being clear.

Mary Jo: They did, though, throw in their blog post a few little details that you have to read the thing 10 times to see these.

Paul: We never have to do that with Microsoft usually.

Mary Jo: So they said, they also did say on the blog post on the OneDrive blog that they are going to make the sync engines common for OneDrive for Consumer and OneDrive for Business. Right now OneDrive for Business is not OneDrive at all really. It is group workspace from an acquisition that Microsoft made years ago when they bought Groove. They decided to call that OneDrive for Business, which is very confusing to people because it isn't OneDrive, or what you think of when you think of OneDrive for Consumer at all. So they are going to create a single sync engine, in fact the code name of it is OneSync, one sync engine to rule them all across Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, it's going to be OneDrive for Business and OneDrive for Consumer and they are all going to share this one common sync engine. I think from that blog post you can say that the common sync engine will be done sometime this calendar year. The other little tidbit that is mentioned just in a tiny mention in that blog post is that OneDrive for Business for Mac is going to be available for preview this month, January. Originally they had promised that would be out in calendar 2014, but now they are saying the preview of it will be out sometime in January. This is one of those things that you wouldn't think would be a big deal, but I can't tell you how many times I get asked on Twitter and on email where is OneDrive for Business for Mac? 

Leo: Interesting.

Mary Jo: A lot of people want this. It's coming.

Leo: Every time I use OneDrive it says are you sure you don't want to upgrade to OneDrive for Business? I already have unlimited storage. What more would I want? What more would I get?

Paul: You get less today. You do. You get less in the sense that it is not as nice as OneDrive. There is no selective sync on OneDrive for Business today. If you choose to sync OneDrive for Business on your PC it is all or nothing, so whatever you have in there it is going to come flying down to your PC. If you don't have enough space then tough, there is no way to fix that. Clearly the client need to be fixed. On the mobile side they are already combining the clients into a single client called OneDrive that you can connect to both your consumer and business account. In fact, you can connect multiple business accounts because some people may have Office 365 and they will also have something through work or that kind of thing. That's great, and I think that in tandem with what Mary Jo was saying about unifying the sync engines, I expect them to continue to unify the clients as well. Not just the mobile clients, but also the PC clients, the selective sync clients. I think you are going to see that capability in there as well. That, in some ways, would effectively make OneDrive for Business part of the OS. Maybe it would just say accessible through the OS more easily like OneDrive is today. I think that it would also allow businesses to save setting that are synced from PC to PC in OneDrive for Business, which is where they are going to want that stuff, not in the consumer Cloud that is just Consumer OneDrive.

Leo: So I should be seduced by the blandishments…

Paul: I’ve spent a lot of time on this stuff. And we do keep the Windows 8.1 book in OneDrive for Business for a variety of reasons. But it works out that sharing documents between two people is easier for a variety of reasons. Everything else about it’s worse. And the other books that I work on, I’ll put it on OneDrive. The OneDrive client is a million times, even the Windows 7 client is better than…

Leo: No kidding. So the fact that it’s out on Mac now, I shouldn’t worry about it?

Paul: Well we’ll see because I actually fully expect them to upgrade the clients across the board. So I’m actually very curious-this would enrage people-if the Mac client came out and was in fact just a feature of the OneDrive client. That they integrate that one first. Or as part of a general release of upgrades across different platforms. We’ll see. It doesn’t make sense to me that they would release a standalone OneDrive client for Mac right now. Why not just integrate it with OneDrive?

Mary Jo: They say in this road map too, the ability to-we were just talking about-sync/shared folder like Dropbox does. And do selective sync across all platforms. That’s going to be part of the common sync engine. So that’s where that’s going to be introduced and how. Because right now especially for OneDrive for Business, that’s a disaster like you just said. So it’s all good. I’m glad to see them finally doing this. It’s kind of weird it took this long. I’m sure it’s really hard to do, that said. But the naming thing made it tough. People all the time are like wait, what’s the difference? Isn’t OneDrive…

Paul: Oh the name’s always been terrible. Well OneDrive for Business is really weird because when you go back through versions of office it was called Groove. Then for a while it was called SharePoint workspaces, I think. Then it became SkyDrive Pro.

Leo: So all this is really about… that makes sense. So it’s more like a SharePoint, like a collaborative space.

Paul: Yea, it started as a SharePoint. Well it started as Groove outside of Microsoft.

Leo: Ray Ozzie’s fabulous product. I wonder where Ray is today.

Mary Jo: He’s doing startups again. He’s doing that Talk IO.

Leo: That’s right. He got a lot of attention for one day.

Paul: That’s the most we can hope for these days, Leo.

Leo: I’d hate to be an optic printer. It’s like yep, did you get enough people on that first day because that’s all you’re getting.

Paul: Yea, because you’re done.

Leo: You’re done.

Paul: Because tomorrow Russia’s going to invade the Ukraine or whatever.

Leo: News cycle moves fast, even in just the tech news cycle.

Paul: I’m still not done thinking about what the guy from Facebook is going to read next month. That’s really exciting to me. What is wrong with this industry?

Leo: What are you talking about? Zuckerberg is…

Paul: Mark Zuckerberg is starting a book club and it’s like a news story. Like listen, I’m really excited to reading it, I am.

Leo: Actually more important and perhaps of interest to Microsoft is this move from Facebook to do a Facebook for work. An enterprise version of Facebook. That goes right up against Yammer and all the Microsoft enterprise suites.

Paul: It’s just weird because those guys were such big partners. Who knew? Who thought that Facebook would ever bite Microsoft?

Leo: It strikes me, BYOD changed hardware in enterprise. Because all of a sudden people are bringing iPhone in. And I think Zuckerberg’s going you know what about BYOS? Bring your own social network? Maybe people even though we have all these great business tools for collaboration that are business-focused, maybe people would prefer to use something that looks like Facebook. Here’s an opportunity.

Paul: To be fair by the way, Microsoft thought of this first. Actually not first. Before Facebook did. And certainly implemented in on their own in SharePoint. Social networking in SharePoint. Yammer was there and they were doing their own thing. Obviously there’s some crossover functionality there. But they bought Yammer. So Yammer was also doing this.

Leo: And Skype.

Paul: This concept is not new.

Leo: They have all the technologies.

Paul: Yea but the fact that Facebook has kind of woken up to this is interesting. I will say that when I first read the concept of enterprise social networking, that sounded like an oxymoron of some kind or some kind of weird mish-mash of words. But it’s actually a pretty compelling case around this because actually your BYOD example is a good one. It’s a case of bringing in tools that people are familiar with. And that’s what users are looking for. I agree with you; something that looks like Facebook is pretty good. Something that literally is Facebook may actually be better.

Leo: Fascinating.

Mary Jo: Look at Chatter, Salesforce Chatter. And when Microsoft first started doing social enterprise integration into CRM online. It looked just like Facebook. Like everyone’s like oh Microsoft just copied Facebook. It’s just a design that I think really works. The whole idea of a news feed and all of that. So it’s already been something that Microsoft has been emulating in Salesforce. And other companies have been emulating. But I wonder if they ever did think hey someday Facebook is going to design this too. I’ve had people on my feed this morning on Twitter saying yea, that’s great. But who’s going to trust Facebook for work? And they have all these privacy things.

Paul: Who’s going to trust Google for work?

Mary Jo: I know. Yea.

Paul: There are companies using Google.

Leo: Well and that’s the point of BYOD. People are already using it. People are already using Facebook at work. I think it’s actually kind of smart. I’d be very interested to see what they do with this. IT’s a real opportunity.

Mary Jo: I think security and privacy are the things they’re going to have to prove to businesses that they have mastered. Because right now they’re not seen as…

Leo: And the IT guy is going to go oh come on! Oh please!

Paul: The business needs to be able to control everything, including the ability to end of life any information in there.

Leo: Not on my watch.

Paul: Someone should say that.

Leo: Fascinating. Outlook attachments by the way can be saved to OneDrive. I see that here.

Mary Jo: Yea, that’s just a quick mention. They added a dropdown so if you can have a one-click and see your attachment in outlook.com; straight to your OneDrive.

Paul: That happened just before we started so I didn’t look at it yet. But I know when you auto-save things to OneDrive from certain apps-Office Lens is an example-actually in that case you’re saving to OneNote, but it gives you the opportunity now to determine where that thing goes. I don’t know how this works but what I would like to see in this thing is the ability to have a folder that you specify for these attachments.

Mary Jo: I think there is.

Paul: Okay. That’s cool. I just haven’t looked at it.

Leo: You might call it attachments.

Paul: I know. I know I’m like captain obvious here.

Leo: Just a thought.

Paul: What did you call it? I call it violet. How do you know which one it is? It’s the purple one. Why do you do that?

Leo: Violet. Windows Phone, let’s see here. I wish I had known they were going to make a gold 930.

Paul: The blingy version.

Mary Jo: You’re waiting for that.

Leo: I have opulence.

Paul: It’s not actual gold, Leo. I don’t think it’s gold-plate either. It’s gold color.

Leo: The Apple Watch is actual gold.

Paul: Well yes, Leo. Worth its weight in what?

Leo: Solid gold, my friend. So we got a 435 and a 530. You know, I know the numbers and all that. But I can’t keep track of them anymore.

Paul: Honestly at this point, it’s number soup.

Leo: Yea well that’s the point.

Paul: Here’s the problem. You might look at a number like 435 and say well, this is a letter phone than the 530 because it has a smaller number. Thing is, this thing has several sensors not found in the 530. It has more RAM. It has more on-board storage. It couldn’t have a worse screen. I don’t know if it has a better screen or not but it couldn’t have a worse screen. They don’t make worse screens. You’d have to go back to when they had… a passive matrix screen? It probably doesn’t have a passive matrix screen.

Leo: Green on black. Amber on black.

Paul: So yea, it’s getting a little crazy. In their defense and defense is a strong term, but just to take their side for a moment; these devices will probably only be sold in countries that this conversation doesn’t matter much anyway.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And there’s some hope that by establishing this new baseline with these devices. Which by the way, they’re not horrible devices.

Leo: They’re both under $100.

Paul: Under $100. These things for the money are very interesting. Dual SIM variance availability, etcetera.

Leo: Ars Technica has a table; let’s see here.

Paul: Maybe this means going forward that what we’re going to see is better specs on the phone up the line as we go. Because these phones are very simple.

Leo: The Snap Dragon 200s for the most part.

Paul: But you can see the disparity, when you go from the 435 to the 530, you get less RAM, less on-board storage.

Leo: Weird.

Paul: Yea it’s really strange.

Leo: Maybe they don’t intend to sell them in the same market.

Paul: Yea.

Leo: Okay so the 435 is dual-SIM. The 530’s not.

Paul: Everything I said is represented in this.

Mary Jo: Didn’t Microsoft say recently that they were going to fix the naming on Windows phones?

Leo: Yea, we’re going to take the word Nokia out of it. Because that’s very confusing.

Mary Jo: No I think they said they were going to take the numbering thing out of it.

Leo: They’re all Lumias!

Paul: By the way, this is just like the car market. You can pick out any car and make you want to talk about. BMW used to have 3-series, 5-series, 7-series, very simple. The numbers meant something. It meant whether it was gas or diesel, it meant the size of the engine. Today BMW makes like 181,000 different kinds of cars. I have no idea what’s going on over there anymore. They have 2-series, 3-series, 4-series, 8-series…

Leo: I can’t tell. You’re right.

Paul: Crossovers and… it’s just like an explosion of niche devices here.

Leo: It looks like the 530 is U.S.-variant. Because it’s going to be $50 at T-Mobile.

Paul: Well no, the 530 is an older device. So this one’s been around for a while.

Leo: Oh I’m sorry. The new one’s not this. The 532…

Paul: The first and the third one. What I think people are saying is let’s look at this chart and you know what, get rid of column two. Which by the way is what I said when they released it. Which is this thing is a piece of crap and nobody should be forced to buy anything this terrible. And now they have something that is as a lower-end kind of model number. And it is in fact a better phone. And that is a perfectly acceptable entry-level device. Where the 530 was not.

Leo: But it won’t be sold in the U.S.

Paul: Not at first. Probably not ever, yea. The 530 shouldn’t had sold anywhere. That’s like a punishment; you’re a prisoner, here, here’s your phone, the 530.

Leo: I understand this is where Microsoft sees all the growth. They really want to be making money and this but isn’t it important to have a flagship phone just to carry the brand forward?

Paul: Yes.

Leo: I think, Nokia got a lot from the 1120, from the 1520, even from the 930.

Paul: Leo, you can buy a Hyundai that looks like a Mercedes Benz. Kia makes a very nice car, probably lots. Yes, you have volume. But you also have to have these aspirational vehicles. Chevy has a Corvette. They don’t sell many Corvettes. They sell a lot of Fiestas. But you have to have… and there will be little things in there that are common. Where someone who can’t afford it sits in their Fiesta or whatever else Ford makes, the Fusion. And there’s one little piece like a knob on the stick shift or the switch for the wiper blades or whatever. It’s like this is the same car as the Corvette. This is nice. You have to give people that. And by the way, we’re getting anxy over here. It’s really only been six months-ish since they’ve released a flagship device. We probably shouldn’t get too crazy. The problem is they released like 117 small phones. Like, what are they doing?! Like there’s so many of these things. I don’t know. These two are okay. I just want to say, you know I complain about the slide. These two phones look okay to me, these are fine. It’s just that they’re just two more phones that get tossed into this gigantic mess.

Leo: Big stew pot. And then the 930 which is the Icon, right? And the 830, will be coming in gold.

Mary Jo: Woohoo!

Leo: Yea! Mary Jo is going to run right out! Get an upgrade!

Paul: Who do you think that was aimed primarily at, Leo, if you had to guess?

Leo: China?

Paul: Yea.

Mary Jo: Asia, yea.

Leo: They look pretty! It’s not all gold. It’s gold trim.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Those are nice looking phones.

Paul: It’s like getting the gold package on your Lexus since I keep talking about cars.

Leo: No, it is.

Paul: It’s just a little bit of bling.

Leo: I love this picture. Who took this picture? Gold Lumia 830 and 930 all day. On the Appointment. Nice.

Mary Jo: Wow.

Leo: All day, man. I could go all day, man, with this one.

Paul: Talk about a one day news cycle. These devices have a 10-minute news cycle.

Leo: They’re in gold. And PayPal has a card reader kind of like the other one.

Paul: You mean exactly like Square?

Leo: Yea, just like Square.

Paul: Leo, guess what shape the PayPal one is. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not square. And I think that’s why.

Leo: It’s a triangle just like the office tablet was a triangle. It looks exactly like that.

Paul: It goes right in the headphone jack. It will work on Windows Phone which didn’t get a lot of press but that’s part of it.

Leo: It will also work on a Surface, which is cool.

Mary Jo: Isn’t this the first time it will work with Windows 8 at all?

Paul: PayPal?

Mary Jo: Yea.

Paul: Oh in other words, yes. They’re writing a modern app because that’s part of the deal. I think that is true.

Leo: Nice. I would guess the Surface is a good POS-point of sale-hardware.

Mary Jo: I’m glad you clarified.

Paul: Let’s be clear on what he means by POS.

Leo: I see a lot of people using iPads and they’re not very capable.

Paul: Yes. But by the way I read their little PR thing. I read PayPal’s little PR thing. And honestly they said something that rings very true to me because I know several people who own small businesses that have a Square device that they use to sell things in their shops. In fact the brewery I talk about does this. And then they use an actual computer to conduct business that they use for themselves. And what these guys are saying is look, we have one device that can do both of these things. I’ve got a friend that owns an art store in Denim’s Square. And she has a laptop that she uses for her business stuff. And I think they use a handset, but a smartphone with a Square device to conduct business with customers at retail. If you could have one machine that did both, that’s a big savings for these guys. These are the companies that are working on razor-thin margins. And I think there’s actually a point to this, one machine that can do both.

Leo: One machine to rule them all.

Paul: I mean Chromebook would be the obvious choice if they could just figure that out.

Leo: Yea, well… Microsoft is starting a pre-release program for Skype on iPhone. Wait a minute, I thought Skype was on iPhone.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: So what’s new about this?

Mary Jo: Microsoft announced today that if you’re using Skype on iPhone and you want to be in a pre-release program for announced features and stuff, you can sign up. So of course as soon as this was announced, all the Windows Phone people were like how about us. Nope. This is for iPhone people, sorry. And to get into this, you go on the Skype site and they have a link. And then you can ask to be in the program. If you get in the program it sounds like you’re obviously going to have to sign some NDAs or at least agree to NDAs. Or you’re going to get tossed. Yea, it’s interesting that they’re doing this for iPhone. I don’t think there is a Skype for Windows Phone pre-release program. Is there, Paul?

Paul: No there is not. Not that I’m aware of.

Leo: Or, let’s be fair, Android.

Mary Jo: They’ll probably do one for Android next.

Paul: Just to give you an idea of where our heads are at. Yea.

Leo: If it makes you feel better, Office for Mac is still way late.

Paul: Oh gee, I hate Office for Mac. It’s so old-fashioned.

Mary Jo: Second half of this year you’re going to get it.

Leo: I’m just trying to give him something.

Paul: And not a second too late.

Leo: We were reporting I think on Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly the increase in Mac sales. But that goes along with actually an increase in PC sales as well. Fourth quarter was actually a growth quarter for sales of computers.

Paul: Some people misunderstood my comments about PC recovery because when you look at the full year it was still kind of a slight decline overall. But the point is it was a big decline and then a slightly less decline and then it was almost break even and then it actually grew a little bit in the fourth quarter. So that’s what I mean by recovery. It’s been a progression. And so I’m expecting, especially if you look at those devices they announced at CES, you think about Windows 10 and everything; I think they’re going to continue that trend.

Leo: I did my bid. I bought that new Dell. You guys?

Paul: And honestly when I think…

Leo: Mary Jo is going to sit on that S7 for another three years.

Paul: That’s very pragmatic though, Leo.

Leo: She’s like a business.

Paul: She doesn’t like crack open her sleeve and a credit card comes out to buy a new computer.

Mary Jo: I like known quantities.

Paul: By the way, I’m getting there. I have to say after years and years of testing software, I’m really…

Leo: It’s a pain isn’t it?

Paul: I’m getting tired of this.

Leo: Stability’s not bad.

Paul: The one thing, bringing it back to the PC thing, the thing I really am most happy about looking forward to this year and thinking about Windows especially and Microsoft in general is this kind of notion of a PC resurgence. Because ultimately the device stuff will always be interesting to me. I love Windows Phone and all that stuff, Cloud service. But the PC to me is still the heart of what this is all about. And I feel like in the Windows 8 generation we got away from that. Right before Windows came out, Microsoft believed very deeply that the future of personal computing was these devices. And that was it. And I think what they underestimated was the amount of interest and need for actual PCs, just productivity devices. These things that work really well. That are what Mary Jo just called a known quantity. I’m really happy about that. Ultimately I really just care about that stuff so much. And this is all reminding me of how we had kind of lost that for a couple years there.

Leo: Yea. I mean I wouldn’t jump up and down and assume that desktop computing is back, baby.

Mary Jo: I would.

Paul: Leo, desktop computing is back, baby. I’m told by the way there is in fact a Skype doc for the program.

Mary Jo: Oh, okay.

Paul: I think it’s private.

Mary Jo: It’s not for the everyday people like us.

Leo: Most of those PC sales I would imagine were laptops and hybrid things like the Surface, right?

Paul: That’s correct.

Mary Jo: And some of the cheap ones too, right?

Leo: Like the HP Stream. That’s got a really big success rate.

Paul: Those to me are the two huge trends. Not just cheap devices. But cheap devices that are really nice, desirably cheap devices like the HP Stream 11 and 13, etcetera. But also these hybrid devices where if you went back to the original launch of Windows 8 we didn’t see much of them. The ones we did see were the hokey and not quite there yet. Now we see really mature devices that are great and are really nice. And even something simple, I think Mary Jo’s laptop has touch on the screen. You could get a version of the Dell laptop we’ve been talking about with or without the touch. Then they have the ones where the screen pops off or turns around. They have a different name every two months, but what they’re calling detachables today. I think these things have finally come into their own… they are a thing now. I think they’re starting to sell.

Leo: Microsoft versus Google. We’ve put it off to the very end. And I’ve been looking and looking for a Hangouts or solution of some kind for Windows Phone, third-party. And there doesn’t seem to be anything. I have to say logging into my Google account on 8.1, on Windows Phone does solve my calendar-phonebook issue. So that’s nice.

Paul: Yea, it does your email, contacts, calendar. It works great.

Leo: Yea, my Google email is right there.

Paul: Windows Proper can’t do it…

Leo: So that actually was a pain point that kept me from using this.

Paul: So it’s there.

Leo: We’re very close. If I had Hangouts. Then of course the other story…

Paul: Someone listening to this must use Google Hangouts on Windows Phone.

Leo: Someone, please, tweet me. The other thing of course and it’s a big story this week, is how Google for the second time in a row now has revealed a Microsoft Windows vulnerability. It kind of relates to the first one, after a 90-day waiting period. But still refuses or can’t-I think really the word is can’t-fix a massive, serious vulnerability in all versions of Android prior to 4.3 I think.

Paul: I didn’t add that to my story about this because that’s kind of an easy dig to make. I’m more outraged that they’re handling this Microsoft bug. And maybe you can explain this to me, because I don’t feel like I quite understand it. But Google created a security initiative called Project Zero. And the point of this thing was… and they’ve been hiring security researchers and experts to be part of this thing. And they’re looking for security vulnerabilities, the notion of making zero-day attacks a thing of the past, right? But it’s about transparency and communicating these things publically. So my understanding of what happens is they discover a vulnerability, they communicate that to the company that’s responsible for it-Microsoft in this case. But then the clock starts ticking because they have their own arbitrary schedule. The notion being what, that they guilt people into fixing these things quickly or something? Is that the point? And then they communicate it publically? Is that literally the plan?

Leo: See I asked Steve Gibson this and I didn’t really get a good answer. But it’s my understanding that all security researchers do something like this. If you find a flaw you first privately communicate with the company that creates the software and say there’s a flaw. But it’s completely normal at some point to publicize the flaw because the thinking being-and I think this is not incorrect-that if the company doesn’t fix it then the public has a right to know it exists. Because hackers will find it eventually.

Paul: The problem is once you’ve alerted the public, hackers literally know about it immediately.

Leo: Google in both cases published sample codes. So it’s a trivial thing…

Paul: Well that’s very helpful of them.

Leo: Right. This particular vulnerability is physically at the machine. Even Microsoft says yea, we’re going to fix it. In the next patch I think on Tuesday.

Paul: They fixed it two days later. And that’s the problem. So in other words…

Leo: But that’s the thing, Microsoft could have fixed it sooner and should have.

Paul: Could they have?

Leo: Well obviously they had that patch in the works if they could get it out a day later.

Paul: But why would Microsoft change an established schedule, and I mean like a decade-plus established schedule by three days?

Leo: Three months. They gave them three months. The reason it’s loaded is because it’s Google and Microsoft. Let’s say it wasn’t Google. Let’s say it was a company called W00w00 Security and they found this bug.

Paul: Okay, so we need more information because part of the problem is it is Microsoft. In other words, if it was this company you’re imagining, they have 31 users. Microsoft has 1.5B.

Leo: No, I’m saying W00w00 founded… W00w00 is actually a real security company that has complained for years that Microsoft ignores the security fixes. I remember talking to Matt Conover over at W00w00 10 years ago. He said we have a security flaw, a major flaw in Windows that we’ve known about for over a year. And we keep saying to Microsoft, fix it, fix it. I think that’s what happened is the security community finally said you can’t wait forever. You got to get the fix done because Google used the term the public has a right to know.

Paul: Yea. I don’t know. I guess, I mean it’s not clear to me what benefit to a user there is to knowing about this. I don’t know. That seems kind of far-fetched.

Leo: I don’t know either.

Paul: It seems like the only people you’re telling here are the hackers. I honestly believe this boils down to some sort of blackmail. High-minded people trying to do the right thing want this stuff to be fixed. And know that by publically outing them, it will force that company to fix the thing. And we’ve done the right thing. And that’s a morally dubious line to stand on.

Mary Jo: On Twitter, Mike Babb points out a very valid thing. He said none of us outside of Microsoft know how long it takes to write and test a patch. So for us to say it was three months, we don’t really know the timeframe.

Leo: Good point.

Paul: Yea, that’s my thing.

Leo: But there is this kind of… who knows what the right amount of time is? But it’s not forever, right? If you know of a flaw in something and you tell the company about it and they never fix it, should you just shut up?

Mary Jo: I mean other companies have done that and have gone public with flaws.

Leo: It happens all the time. I think this is SOP. I’ll be honest, I think this is SOP in the security community.

Mary Jo: The question is what’s the right time. And the other question is did Google know they were going to patch it two days later? I don’t know. Because we’re going to talk about why they might not have known that in one of my tips.

Leo: Here’s one thing for sure, I would hope, that somebody from Google the day before they go public, calls somebody high up at Microsoft and says, dude we’re going to publish.

Paul: This is the problem. And I wonder if that actually happened. That’s a good question.

Leo: And the reason people are bringing up this flaw on Android, it’s not like… Google lives in a glass house. It’s not like they’re perfect. But that’s why I don’t think it’s like throwing stones. It’s at least intending…

Paul: Every time something like this happens, someone will say something like Microsoft should start announcing Google’s security flaws. Guys, seriously. That really isn’t the point.

Leo: Others will. That’s what happens. Security flaws happen.

Paul: That’s not what this is about.

Leo: And it’s kind of embarrassing for Google because this Android flaw is frankly something hard for them to fix.

Paul: And by the way, I feel like that’s a separate issue. The one thing I would say is it highlights a very interesting point for us Windows folks. As we know, one of the big anx issues is Microsoft can never update Windows Phone. As it turns out, Google has the same problem. And I would argue that having so many more users on mobile, it’s a much bigger problem. In Windows Proper, we can deliver security updates very easily. What if there was a security flaw on Windows Phone? Could Microsoft deliver that in Windows Update and just have it happen? Regardless of carriers? Probably not. It seems like that’s what’s happening on the Android side.

Leo: Exactly. In fact Google changed how they do their browser now so that they can update this. They I think realized oh we’ve got a problem here because we can’t update. We have to push the patches to the OEMs and hope they do something. And so it goes Google, OEM-like…

Paul: By the way, Microsoft did go to Google and ask for two extra days.

Leo: Oh, well there you go.

Paul: Officially, yea.

Leo: And they got it, right?

Paul: Nope, they didn’t get it.

Mary Jo: How do you know that? Is that public information somewhere?

Paul: It’s in the Microsoft blog.

Leo: Well it’s just more of this sniping then. If it weren’t Google and Microsoft-that was kind of my point with the Woo example…

Paul: In other words, it’s not just soap opera, right? We like to see Godzilla and King Kong go at it, that’s fine. But there’s a reason it’s fun. It’s because these guys both have millions and millions of customers. And in this case, showing a disregard for customers is a dangerous stance on Google’s part. And they do it a lot. They do it with all their anti-privacy activities and so forth, too. I just think there’s kind of a trend there where they’re… it’s almost like they’re engineer-focused and they have a hard time with the human part of it. You know? I’m just surprised there isn’t more outrage.

Leo: I think there’s a lot, actually.

Paul: Is there? There should be.

Leo: Okay, moving right along. Oh, one other little bit of something. Microsoft has decided to bury the hatchet in Google’s back.

Mary Jo: Sort of.

Leo: Scroogle’s is over.

Mary Jo: Again. Last year, somebody who worked on the Bing team said in a very public forum, oh by the way we’re not doing Scroogle’s anymore. It’s done. Microsoft denied at the time that they killed Scroogle. And so this past week when beta discovered that Microsoft’s Scroogle site now redirects to whymicrosoft.com. They don’t have the Scroogle site anymore. When contacted again, Microsoft is still denying that they killed the Scroogle campaign. And they said you know we might resurrect it at any time. It’s not dead. It’s dead, guys.

Leo: It’s dead. This was the campaign, the anti-Google campaign.

Paul: Actually can I describe it slightly differently?

Leo: Yea.

Paul: The single greatest thing that Microsoft has ever done.

Mary Jo: You know what, I’m really sad I didn’t get Paul a Scroogle shirt before they did away with it. I’m going to try to find one when we’re in Redmond next week.

Leo: Please, somebody must have a Scroogle shirt. Send it to Mary Jo so she can gift it to Paul.

Mary Jo: I’m going to. He needs to wear it.

Leo: You don’t remember, Mary Jo because you weren’t here at the time, but Paul hated those anti-Microsoft ads that Google did. The switcher ads with John Hodgeman and kept saying why don’t we fight back?!

Paul: Why did I hate them? Because they were lies. The Scroogle thing I through was great because it’s all true.

Mary Jo: Sort of.

Leo: It’s true in the way that a political attack way is true.

Mary Jo: Exactly. In fact, who created, or was one of the master lines…?

Leo: Mark Penn.

Mary Jo: Speaking of political campaigns.

Paul: The single-greatest human being that’s walked the earth, that Mark Penn?

Mary Jo: You missed getting his autograph that one time we saw him, Paul.

Paul: I know, that’s because I turned around and he disappeared in a cloud of vapor.

Leo: Greasy smoke.

Mary Jo: With his evil cape.

Paul: The smell of eggs in the air.

Leo: You know, Hillary Clinton is probably going to be running for President in a couple of years. I think Mark might have a job in that campaign. That’s where he came from.

Paul: Then I’ll start a campaign called Rom-Need.

Leo: Rom-Need! Alright, let’s take a break. When we come back, back of the book. We’ve got your tips, your tricks your enterprise picks. And of course your beer of the week. The show brought to you by the phone system we know and love and have used since we moved in here four years ago. I probably don’t have to even tell you. Ring Central! It is just like everything else we talk about, in the cloud. In the past, and I’ve been partied to this at other businesses, you had to get a PBX. You’d go to your local phone company-here it’s AT&T-and the put a thing in the basement that had to have an engineer and there were cards that slot in. And it was crazy! With the cloud, you get all the functionality of a PBX for a lot less money. There’s no setup fee, no startup costs. You get much more capability. Ring Central connects all your offices together in one system. So one 800-number for instance can call anybody who works for you no matter where they’re at in the world. Even if they work at home! Plus, Ring Central works with your smartphone. So my staff can still use their smartphone to make outbound calls from our number, our business number. They can even send text messages from our 800-number. You can customize your system from the web browser or the mobile apps. Mobile apps are free of course. You’ll save time, money, and all the hassles of a PBX, and get much more! By the way, this is now days something everybody’s concerned about: your calls are encrypted. Full-time encrypted and private using Secure Voice. So this is such a good solution. You can port your current number over, no problem. Even toll-free numbers, local extensions, even vanity numbers; they can all move over. We use it here at the brick house and we love it. There’s so many features. I can’t even name them all. Shared lines, call parking, paging, advance call forwarding with flexible answering rules, call log reports, and of course free 24/7 customer support. No setup fees, no activation fees. And Ring Central starts at under $25 per month per user. That includes a bunch of minutes and a ton of features. And you can start right now, free. A 30-day free trial awaits you if you visit ringcentral.com and use the offer code TWIT. Or call 800-543-9980 and let me sweeten the pot a little bit. When you do that risk-free trial, you’ll even get this special deal. For every desk phone you buy, you get a second phone free. By the way you can use Ring Central on your computer as well as your smartphone. So you don’t have to buy a phone. But if you buy a desk phone, and you know a lot of employees say where’s my phone, you’ll get a second phone free, up to 20 phones. Ringcentral.com, use the promo code TWIT. Or call 800-543-9980. We love it and you will too. Ringcentral.com! Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, let’s kick things off, back of the book. With Paul Thurrott’s tip of the week.

Paul: This is a cheap one I’ll admit.

Leo: It’s a good tip, Paul. It’s a good tip.

Paul: I’m switching to thurrott.com over the weekend. The official launch is actually Tuesday but we’re going to soft launch it on Saturday. So if you would, go to the website, register, and so forth. I just would say in general because I’m starting over, I’m very curious what people want to see on the site. I have some ideas around different articles, series, and so forth. I talked a little earlier about PCs and I want to do things about building and upgrading PCs which is something I haven’t written about in the past. But if you have anything you want to see on the site, my email address is very easy to remember, assuming you can spell my name. It is paul@thurrott.com. And let me know.

Leo: Double R, double T.

Paul: Yes. Have to say that. And please register. We won’t sell your private information too much.

Leo: We should talk, Paul. Maybe we should get you on the radio show semi-regularly to do PC tips and hints and that way you can plug the site and all that. We’ll talk about that. I think that’d be good. So it’s thurrott.com. Don’t go now because it’s Zune brown.

Paul: Actually I think it’s fixed. In other words, right now you can register. But we should be live over the weekend.

Leo: I’m going to register.

Paul: It’d be a news slider on everything.

Leo: There it is. It’s nice. Is it going to be all the stuff that would be on the Super Site, only…?

Paul: Yea, it’s consumer-focused.

Leo: No enterprise here. The coffee’s always hot.

Paul: No, this is my step away from the stuff I used to be doing. I think the business stuff is not as interesting to me.

Leo: I’m with you. And we reluctantly and slowly went into enterprise because it’s a specialized thing but consumers, I know people say oh no, nobody cares anymore about building computers and stuff. Sure, most people probably don’t. But I love this niche of people that really do care.

Paul: I do, too. There is a segment of the business…

Mary Jo: Guys… guys…

Paul: Yes?

Mary Jo: Don’t diss the enterprise.

Leo: No! We’re not dissing the enterprise. We just don’t want to do.

Mary Jo: Somebody has to do it.

Leo: You’re great at it.

Mary Jo: Think of the Hidos.

Paul: I don’t want to think of the Hidos.

Leo: And both of you guys have been on This Week in Enterprise Tech. And we do enterprise programming. But thank goodness I’ve got Mary Jo and Robert Ballecer because I don’t want to do it.

Paul: Plus on this show, Mary Jo, I can be the ying and the yang. Of consumer business.

Leo: No, we’re really glad we have Mary Jo to talk about it so we don’t have to.

Mary Jo: I’m feeling unloved.

Paul: The small business stuff, I’m particularly interested in device management, BYOD, very interesting to me.

Leo: Trends.

Paul: Portable computers, very interesting.

Leo: Software pick of the week, Paulie.

Paul: I have two. I did a small one, thanks to someone on Twitter. But the first one, the original one I had, Microsoft quietly and strangely released something called Phone Insider for Windows Phone 8.1. It’s an app obviously or Windows Phone 8.1 and what it appears to be is a version of their previous preview for developers’ app aimed at Windows 10. So in other words, when this thing goes live you’ll be able to use this app to prep your phone so you can get the Windows 10 beta-or whatever they call it-for Windows Phone. You just have to get ready for it; the app won’t do anything for you now unless you work at Microsoft. You can download it, install it to your phone. It may be U.S. only, I’m not sure what the exact availability of it is. But I have it on my phone; it’s still there. You can still get it assuming you live in a place where it’s available. At least in the United States. And based on what it looks like and what it says and my experience with the preview for developers’ app, it appears to be that thing. That’s not it.

Leo: Oh, this is something else.

Paul: So if you click on the link that’s in the OneNote notes. Go to the right place. Oh actually that goes to my stories. So in my stories, I have a link in my stories.

Leo: We should all go to Paul’s website first. There you go. Phone Insider. New Phone Insider app. It’s got a lock and key, that’s how you know.

Paul: It’s unlocking your phone on Windows 10. Also, on Twitter, David Benedict just mentioned to me that one of my previous picks which was NBA Jam for Windows Phone is now available for 99 cents. Microsoft has these red stripe deals every week. Can you tell me what that means, Leo, red stripe?

Leo: It’s a Jamaican beer as Mary Jo would be glad to tell you.

Paul: No, I know that. But as far as…

Leo: You know, I think it comes from the red tag sales that Walmart or K-Mart… K-Mart! They used to do red tag sales. Attention K-Mart shoppers, then you’d go and run. I think obviously K-Mart’s trademarked red tag. So this is a red stripe.

Paul: So this is like their recycle bin to K-Mart.

Leo: It’s the remainders. I’m sorry, blue light special is K-Mart.

Paul: I don’t remember what it normally cost, probably $10.99

Leo: The story I told you was completely apocryphal. It has nothing to do with anything.

Paul: Except that it was fact.

Leo: I said it with such authority that you went oh yes, of course.

Paul: Oh hold on, Leo. I’m taking notes.

Leo: It’s a blue light special which everybody in the chat room knows perfectly well.

Paul: This is something that Microsoft does. So when you go to the Windows Phone website, they have red stripe deals on apps every week.

Leo: I do think that red tag is kind of a traditional thing. So it’s their version of the red tag. It wasn’t K-Mart. My favorite imagination.

Paul: I should have looked it up.

Mary Jo: It sounded really good.

Leo: Alright, moving on! NBA Jam, 99 cents. I should get that too because it would look really nice on this giant screen, 1520. Enterprise time! Mary Jo Foley with our enterprise pick of the week.

Mary Jo: This is somewhat related indirectly to the Google news about them disclosing patches this week. Microsoft announced early this week that they are no longer going to make available what they call the advance security notifications service publically for free to administrators. So what this was, it’s a 10-year old service. It is very closely aligned with patch Tuesday. Remember how Microsoft used to post up… these are the kinds of vulnerabilities that we’re going to patch next week when it’s patch Tuesday? That was what the advance notifications service was. Well, they decided they’re not doing that anymore. And the only people that are going to get those advance warnings now are paying Microsoft premier customers, which are the really big enterprise shops. And some of the security companies that work hand in hand with Microsoft around patching. Everybody else, it’s just going to be a surprise now what happens on patch Tuesday. And the reason Microsoft decided to do away with this is because they claimed not many people were taking advantage of it. Administrators were just dealing with patch Tuesday announcements as they happened on patch Tuesday. And they didn’t really need the advance notification. That’s their story; they’re sticking to it. This week was the first patch Tuesday where there was an advance notifications service bulletin ahead of time. And Microsoft has said, hey if you’re an administrator, you can use this thing called My Security Bulletins Dashboard and that’s where you’re going to see what we’re going to be patching. Well patches came out on Tuesday and for quite a while the advance, sorry the Security Bulletins Dashboard was completely blank. So I had people on Twitter saying to me, hey the patches are out but my dashboard is blank. What did they patch? What am I getting? I need to know this right now. So yea, the first patch Tuesday without ANS was not a banner patch Tuesday. But I think Microsoft has decided no more ANS warnings are going to be publically available. So it’s something that administrators are going to have to figure out how they’re going to deal with that and how they’re going to work around. Again, they say that not many people are using it. Based on my Twitter screen and my email, I think quite a few people were. But again, that’s just anecdotal data.

Leo: Well you said it’s no longer publically available. Who gets it? The high-end enterprise people?

Mary Jo: Microsoft premier customers who are the large-volume customers. And then some of the companies that work hand in hand with Microsoft around patches and developing patches, figuring out disclosures. There are some people that are still going to get it. It’s just not going to be publically available and not posted to the web as it has been for 10 years.

Leo: And they say they want you to use My Bulletins?

Mary Jo: They want you to use My Security Bulletins. They have a couple of other things they’re suggesting. I think they need to make sure those are going to be really solid before they say that’s what people should use. It was a little rugged.

Paul: What do you think about this though? I mean, what do you think about this decision? Even if very few businesses ever use this thing.

Mary Jo: I don’t understand why they did it, I don’t.

Leo: Yea, because you’re creating it anyway.

Paul: We live in this age of transparency, right? And what… why would you do that?

Mary Jo: My thinking when I first saw the announcement was it doesn’t look good for Microsoft to have to bring up two weeks in a row, hey we’re going to patch 75 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. That’s not something you want to have trumpeted around in headlines. That was my first take. They don’t want to have this be made into a really huge deal like it is every single month. One week before patch Tuesday and then on patch Tuesday. They have to fix like 90 things wrong in Windows. I took it as something they just didn’t want to have the bad headlines. That of course is not what they’re saying was the reason. So yea the enterprise pick is if you’re an administrator, get in there and start figuring out how you’re going to deal with patch Tuesday now that you don’t have this. If the advance notifications service was something you relied on.

Leo: Maybe Microsoft just wants people to stop thinking and just apply them.

Mary Jo: That is what they want.

Leo: Don’t question, just do it!

Mary Jo: But with the bad track record and especially last year, patches failing, and patches breaking things…

Leo: Not that that advance notice would prevent that.

Mary Jo: No, it wouldn’t prevent that. But I think it helped people plan in many cases. Like oh, okay is it going to be a big patch Tuesday, a small patch Tuesday? Is it mostly IE or is there other stuff that I normally wouldn’t worry about.

Paul: How does this patch affect me? Is this something I need to think about? I think a heads-up is great.

Mary Jo: Me too. So I’m not really clear what the decision was other than what they said. Not many people were using it. But you just said, Paul, if you’re already producing it, why not just make it public?

Paul: Right.

Leo: I think you nailed it, Mary Jo. It was a PR thing. We don’t want to see it twice.

Mary Jo: I agree.

Leo: Once is enough. Let’s not belabor this. Code name of the week?

Mary Jo: Code name pick of the week; I’m going way back in the code name archives for this one. And the reason I’m bringing it up again is because I think we’re going to hear some things about it next week at the Windows 10 event. The code name I’m using for the pick is Gemini. And the very first time I wrote about Gemini was in 2013. It was when I heard that Microsoft was working on Blue, which was Windows 8. And that there was going to be an Office version for Blue and the code name was Gemini because Gemini was the twin to Blue. Over time I’ve kind of used the word Gemini very loosely and it has come to mean to me and many people the version of touch-first Office that Microsoft is developing and going to release later this year. But that’s not actually what Gemini is or was. Gemini was the code name for all the waves of different things that Microsoft was building with Office. And they’ve already had a number of waves of Gemini. I think the very first was when they came out with… I think even Office for iPad and Office for Android were part of the Gemini wave. So when we next week, if we do hear about touch-first Office, I think the way that Microsoft is going to refer to this is Office Universal. And the reason I think they’re going to call it that is that they’re building touch-first Office as a universal app so that almost the exact same code-base will work on Windows Phone and on this new mobile SKU that we’re going to see next week for Windows 10. So that will be part of what was known as the Gemini wave. But even though I have called it and others have called it in the past Gemini, that thing I think we’re going to see next week is actually an Office Universal app written to the Windows RT API. So I just want to bring up again what Gemini is so if they don’t call it Gemini next week, you won’t be surprised. Gemini is just a name of the waves, like Blue was the name of the waves for Windows 8. But I really do think we are going to see touch-first Office next week. I think we have to see it because we don’t think there’s going to be a desktop in this mobile SKU for Windows 10. And if there’s no desktop, people immediately panic and say how am I going to run Office. Because right now on Windows 8, you need the desktop. But with the touch-first Office being a metro-style/Windows Store app, you should be able to run that without having a desktop. That’s my code name this week, the good old Gemini.

Leo: Gemini. Quick bulletin coming in, I don’t know how much truth there is to this but certainly the market believes it. Blackberry stock jumping by 30% just a few minutes ago because of a rumor that Samsung’s made an offer to buy Blackberry for $7.5B. Samsung had been rumored to pick up or be picking up Blackberry or interested in that for the last three years. So I don’t know if this is an old rumor that’s resurfacing. Reuters has the story; certainly Blackberry which had been looking for a buyer for some time, and hired a turnaround specialist to run the company. While it’s not exactly in play at the moment, I think they might have a hard time turning down that offer and it’s certainly the stock market believes it, pushing Blackberry’s stock price to $12.59 at this moment. Which is still lower than the Samsung offer. Which is roughly $13-15 per share. So it’s speculation. But I thought I’d mention it. And let’s all have a beer before we go home.

Paul: Sounds good to me.

Leo: I think. What do you think?

Mary Jo: I think this is a beer pick that everybody will like. At least everybody on this show will like. It’s from Rodenbach in Belgium.

Leo: We love them.

Mary Jo: Yes, and you often hear Rodenbach Gran Crew which is a Flanders red-style Belgian beer. But I get to taste this other Flanders red recently called Caractére Rouge. And I guess the reason it’s called that is because it’s made with red fruits: raspberries, cherries. So a Flanders red is kind of a reddish-brown beer that usually is a little bit sour and has a lot of fruitiness and spiciness. It’s a really nice and easy-to-drink beer. This one with the cranberries, cherries, and raspberries, all I could think when I was tasting it was wow this would be amazing for brunch. It would be like having a mimosa in beer form.

Paul: I need this beer, Mary Jo.

Leo: A beer mimosa.

Mary Jo: If you can ever find this beer… it’s a little harder to find in the U.S. I think it’s easier to find in Europe. It’s really great. I think you guys would love it.

Paul: See if I can get it.

Mary Jo: You’re plotting; how can I get this beer.

Paul: I can get this beer.

Mary Jo: You can? Where?

Paul: At the brewery, I’m sorry. At the liquor store we go to.

Mary Jo: Wow. Get it in.

Paul: It’s expensive. $10.49 for a 750ml.

Mary Jo: It’s really worth it.

Leo: It’s a celebration beer. Party beer! Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes this edition of Windows Weekly. Next week Paul and Mary Jo will be broadcasting from Bellevue, Washington where they will have just heard the latest on the consumer edition of Windows 10. We will be broadcasting at a slightly different time so that we can do that. Right after Tech News Tonight. So we’re talking about 4:30pm Pacific, 7:30pm Eastern, 24:30 UTC on live.twit.tv next Wednesday the 21^st. So just a little programming note. Very interested to hear what Microsoft has to say there. And I know you are too. In fact I think, I’ll have to talk to Mike Elgin, but I think we’ll probably stream at least some if not all of the Microsoft stream that morning. But they’re going to have special stuff afternoon.

Paul: I think it’s going to be worth doing.

Mary Jo: Me too.

Leo: Everyone wants to know about the new version of Windows. That’s good stuff. Paul does his thing soon, starting this weekend at thurrott.com. We’re going to have to change to the lower third now. Thurrott.com. Go there and sign up so you’ll be ready on Saturday when the soft launch happens. Mary Jo Foley’s at allaboutmicrosoft.com. She has a blog and they both join us every week on Wednesday to talk about Windows. Thank you so much, guys.

Paul: Thank you, sir.

Mary Jo: Thank you.

Leo: Safe travels to Washington State. We’ll talk to you in Bellevue next week. You know what, I should reiterate, there is going to be a meet-up. If you are in the area at the Bellevue Brewing Company, 6:30-9pm, no RSVP. Just show up, mug in hand. Stein in hand.

Paul: Right.

Leo: With a good appetite because it looks like the food is really good.

Paul: Just make sure there’s nothing hoppy in it.

Leo: Wait a minute, you mean like this IPA. Oh no.

Paul: A prominently-displayed IPA on my website.

Mary Jo: They have other beers.

Leo: They do. In fact, it really looks good. And the food looks good.

Mary Jo: Yea, everybody says the food is delicious.

Leo: I can’t wait. Maybe I’ll just fly on up.

Mary Jo: You should. It’s not far.

Leo: I should. I really should. But I won’t. I have other duties here at the brick house studio. Hey thank you lady and gentleman. And we’ll see you next week at a special time for Windows Weekly! Bye bye.