Windows Weekly 407 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It´s time for Windows Weekly, Paul Thurrott´s here, Mary Jo´s  here, it´s April Fool´s day, we will not fool you but we will take a little tour of some of the April Fool´s jokes from the Redmond Campus, and lots more news about the Windows 10 technical preview, a big update just came out. It´s all ahead, on Windows weekly.

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This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, Episode 407, recorded Wednesday April 1st 2015.

Windows Phone 3.1

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Leo: it´s time for Windows Weekly the show where we cover Microsoft in all its infinite glory, and nobody better to do that than the glorious Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott. Hello folks, nice to see you.

Mary Jo Foley: Hello.

Paul Thurrott: Hello.

Leo: Mary Jo in New York City, she is the doyen, I figured out a word for you, doyen.

Mary Jo: Doyen? Wow.

Leo: At all about Microsoft.com. Paul is the interlocutor at Thurrott.com

Paul: The saboteur.

Leo: Saboteur. I saw you sip from your nice cup, are these pre washed or should I wash it before I use it?

Paul: My understanding is that the ones that we were giving out to people can be washed, you know, in a machine. But I guess I would be careful.

Leo: Oh, you have a prototype?

Paul: I think so, I have a prototype, this thing would fall apart.

Leo: You know I actually had a discussion about whether one should wash stuff before using it and I´m of the opinion that my sponges are so filthy and full of bacteria that it´s probably better just to rinse them.

Paul: This stuff has always changed you know, I don´t know if you guys wear contacts but.

Leo: I just put mine in yes.

Paul: You´re supposed to clean your hands vigorously and then you put your contacts in, and recently what they´ve started recommending is clean your hands obviously and then dry them thoroughly, you don´t want the water left on your hands because the water could have stuff in it.

Leo: Precisely. Then you have to dry them with sterile rags.

Paul: Yeah, I mean, right, so you know, I live in filth what do you want me to touch?

Leo: And then there´s the counter example where if you don´t continually inoculate yourself with filth you become weak, you´re a weakling. So it´s good to do this.

Paul This is something I last taunted naturally, one of my friends, my first friends had a baby and they went off the deep end with the really cleanliness stuff.

Leo: Bad idea.

Paul: You know what? I think you want the kid playing in mud.

Leo: Let them eat dirt.

Paul: It seems like that, it just seems logically like that´s what you would want. You´re destroying his immune system.

Leo: Exactly give them a chance to fight it back. Nothing too strong, we don´t want to kill them.

Paul: Well that´s the whole theory behind inoculating against viruses.

Leo: Well those are dead.

Paul: Against the flu or whatever, you basically give them the disease, that´s how you fight things like allergies.

Leo: This is risky but I am now transferring the contents of Twit into Thurrott.

Mary Jo: That is risky.

Paul: The volume will be.

Leo: The volume is equal that´s good to know, I slurped a little bit but that´s okay, that´s why I have this coffee stained mat on my desk.

Paul: That´s my little joke to everyone.

Leo: What?

Paul: It´s like a dribble mug, you drink out of it and it spills down your throat.

Leo: Alex knows me, he immediately comes running in with a giant role of paper towels. Whoa look at that.

Mary Jo: We´re the beer steins, I want to see the Thurrott beers steins so.

Leo: No you mean MJF beer steins.

Mary Jo: Yeah that would be cool.

Leo: You know they said this but I didn´t believe them coffee does taste better in a Thurrott mug.

Paul: See.

Leo: Mmmmm! Ah that´s good! That´s good, vodka too. So it´s April Fools, happy April Fools.

Paul: it´s coming off the enamels sorry about that.

Leo: Did you, Paul Thurrott, did your children prank you in any way this morning?

Paul: No they didn´t thank God.

Leo: You know I didn´t either. What´s wrong with kids today?

Paul: It used to be a big thing for my kids.

Leo: Yeah. I remember putting salt in my father´s sugar bowl as a child.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Because he would, every morning have his cup of coffee and he´d put two teaspoons of sugar in. He almost killed me, I do remember that.

Paul: It´s too early now, they´re in high school, they get up so early they´re certainly in the morning. No one is in the mood for pranks.

Leo: Yeah, exactly, that´s exactly what it is. Everybody´s too tired. However Microsoft apparently not, let´s take a look at the latest from the folks in Redmond.

“In August 1981 Microsoft laid the foundation for the future of personal computing.”

Leo: Look at that.

“MS Dos was a monochromatic milestone in the history of the PC. Installed on millions of desktops, it´s where our productivity story started. Today we´re going back to BASIC and booting into DOS one last time. Today we´re announcing MS Dos Mobile, a new operating system.”

Leo: You’ve got to get an English guy to do that.

“We realize we have to go back to the beginning.”

Paul: I think this came out of Microsoft England.

“To when we first reinvented productivity. Black and white text has never looked so good. For me personally it´s a dream come true, MS Dos is my first OS, gray scale is in my blood. So to come back on mobile is a real honor. You can download the technical PDF from the marketplace now, it´s beyond belief. You might wonder why MOS even needs a designer, and when the team told us they were rebooting Dos as an OS, that´s exactly what we asked for. We were able to strip everything right back and focus on the essence of an OS. It´s a metaphor for modern life.”

Leo: He´s holding up a Lumia with the command line.

“MS Dos Mobile is simple to use, load it up and you´ll see the classic C: drive prompt. Just type your command and our 8086 processor emulation will whirl into life. MS Dos Mobile is forward compatible too, you can use it to launch apps you already have on your phone. You´re stuck to the screen meaning that you can launch messages, phone , contact, camera, settings and plenty of other apps with just a simple command.”

Leo: Actually I want this.

Paul: It works.

Leo: Can you get it?

Paul: Oh yeah, this is an app.

Leo: Oh I love it.

Paul: Yeah it´s the real thing.

Leo: Oh that´s awesome.

Paul: You can even run Windows 3.1

“And they told us we should´t do it, but you know what? We´ve done it anyway.”

Leo: Wow! MS Dos. And there it is, wow! You know what? It does look better than it ever did before. It´s copyright Microsoft Mobile 2015.

Paul: I don´t know if you have to go to a particular directory but type WIN.

Leo: W-I-N. Do I check win31 or just win?

Paul: No, just win.

Leo: OMG! OMG! What the heck!

Paul: Now it´s an iPOD or an iPhone.

Leo: Oh, oh, oh. Wait a minute what should I, oh, oh, oh. Look it works. Oh but then it goes to actual apps. That´s too bad. Oh did you hear that? It´s got a modem, modem sound. Oh this is, this is more than awesome. This is amazing. Wow! Too bad it goes to, I would love.

Paul: I think I spent half of my morning on Twitter convincing people this was real.

Leo: Yeah, I thought it was a joke.

Paul: Because everyone assumes it´s just a joke.

Leo: Here´s maps, you´re taking a long walk off a short pier. Wow that is so cool. It minimizes? No, those buttons don´t do anything. That is awesome.

Mary Jo: How about the camera? Isn´there a camera?

Leo: There´s no DOS camera. Come on Mary Jo get real.

Paul: You can run it from the command line I think.

Leo: In DOS I can run it? CD programs. Holy cow! Does it do pip? It´s going to do LS, no. D-I-R, ha we got phone. So should I cd phone?

Paul: Yeah, there´s nothing in Office.

Leo: Why not?

Paul: At least there wasn´t for me. I don´t know. I´m not sure.

Leo: Oh look at that camera exc, contacts, email, internet. I don´t know why they put a.

Paul: Yeah they probably didn´t find an icon or something.

Leo: You actually can type pretty well on this. Launching camera, Oh my God it´s 8 bit, oh my God and you can do an askey, oh, oh, OMG! Let´s share that askey twit out. Alright I´ll let you do that Alex. That is so cool. They´re putting some effort into that.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: They did.

Leo: I am impressed. That is very nice. And then also apparently Nadella has announced a new driverless vehicle called Cartana. It´s Cartana. Pack your Cartana. He announced it at Oslo of course. Let´s see Microsoft.com/cartana. No, these are other things though. Wash multifamily laundry. Did you see, I went to Amazon last night, March 31st, and they had this button that you order stuff.

Mary Jo: I thought it was fake.

Leo: I thought it was a joke, it´s not.

Mary Jo: It´s not. I know.

Leo: I immediately ordered one.

Mary Jo: Which one?

Leo: Now of course Amazon´s doing the Amazon.com the old fashioned Amazon.

Paul: Oh geez look at that.

Leo: They call it retro, so I don´t know if I can find the button on here. But that is the weirdest thing , I thought totally it was a joke. You put this button, like okay the example they give you is on your washing machine when you run out of detergent you press the button and it just, and in 2 days, you have to be prime member, it´s free to prime members, and in 2 days you get more Tide. Did you order one Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: I did not. But I saw the knock off version of this on Twitter today from KC Lemson at Microsoft. She put that ninja cat, ninja riding the, ninja cat riding that unicorn on a button and it says hey if you push this button you´ll get the latest Windows 10 build.

Leo: I did this morning, I got a Windows 10 update with Sparta, Spartan.

Paul: The truth is if you press that button all it will do is send a complaint to Microsoft that they´re not releasing builds fast enough.

Leo: More builds, more builds. I´m on the super-fast track, the push button track.

Mary Jo: I think they should put Gabe Aul´s face on a button.

Leo: Amazon dash button. Now I don´t know, there´s branding on some of these to continue, how does that work? Maybe it comes with a bunch of different brands you can add to it.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: It´s free.

Mary Jo: I really did think this was a joke.

Leo: This is totally an April fool´s joke, isn´t this?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Except it´s not.

Mary Jo: It´s not though right? It really is not.

Leo: Yeah it really is not and that´s what I don´t like about April fool´s is that you can´t tell.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Although it would be really funny if Jeff Bezos, if like the button does nothing.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: He sends buttons out to everybody and does absolutely nothing.

Mary Jo: Sends a drone to your house right?

Leo: Yeah, well imagine with a drone. It´s Amazon.com/dashbutton. If you´re a prime member. I don´t think you can order more than one which is odd. Don´t you think you´d want one like on everything? More coffee. Anyway none of the rest of this show, do I have your word? None of the rest of this show is  phony or fake, right?

Mary Jo: True.

Paul: Yeah, that´s true. I mean, probably.

Leo: Uh oh.

Mary Jo: Most likely.

Leo: Now I´m worried.

Mary Jo: We might throw one more April fool´s in but, you´ll know.

Leo: That concludes the April fool´s portion of Windows Weekly. So you had the scoop on this Mary Jo a couple of days ago, a new Surface, Surface 3 not Pro.

Mary Jo: We, you know what, we, this was kind of one of those catch 22s, like all these rumors were popping up about this and Paul and I has just gone under nda on it so we couldn´t really say anything about it, but we did get to talk to Microsoft about it and I got to actually hold one.

Paul: I could´ve held one but I would´ve had to come to new York. We did Skype.

Leo: So when did you know? When did you find out?

Mary Jo: We knew a few days before they made the announcement.

Paul: The interesting thing was how much of the rumors were wrong. A lot of it was Core M processor, announced a build, I had people sending me stuff did you know about this? And I was like, sorry, I mean.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: That´s why I don´t do NDAs because I want to be able to talk freely.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: But on the other hand you got to see it and touch it, now we can talk about it so thank you for doing NDAs. It´s light, just a little over a pound, does it feel that way, noticeably light?

Mary Jo: It did, when I held it, I had just been using my Surface RT when I was on vacation so it felt way, way lighter than that.

Paul: Really noticeably lighter? That´s interesting!

Mary Jo: Noticeably lighter, yeah.

Paul: Okay, I´d assumed it would be similar. That´s cool.

Mary Jo: They definitely, like it felt much, much lighter. I think Surface, I forget how much Surface RT weighed but that was the first model right?

Leo: It was kind of big and clunky, wasn´t it?

Mary Jo: It was a little weighty.

Paul: I´ll look it up

Mary Jo: So it´s a very similar screen size though.

Paul: Sorry to interrupt, pound and a half on Surface RT.

Mary Jo: Pound and a half, okay.

Leo: So it´s not that much lighter, it´s like a pound and a few ounces.

Mary Jo: I think they balanced the weight more, I think they´ve got a different battery in there more distributed maybe? Because it definitely feels, it feels noticeably lighter for sure.

Leo: Surface, somebody´s saying I think his name is Paul Thurrott that it looks like a Surface 2. Is that the closest analog?

Paul: that´s what it looked like to me. I saw it virtually so I did a Skype video call you know because I didn´t go and you know they´re holding it up on the Skype window and to me, I said if I didn´t know any different, and there´s a different logo on the back but it looks just like Surface 2, the styling of it, the general size and shape.

Leo: And it´s not RT we should hasten to say this is Windows 8.1, is it with Bing or Pro?

Mary Jo: I think it´s just um.

Paul: That´s a good question actually.

Mary Jo: I know that is a good question, I was.

Paul: I don´t believe it is with Bing.

Mary Jo: It´s not with Bing as far as I know.

Paul: I think it´s just Windows 8.1 core.

Leo: Yeah, not the pro version.

Paul: I´m not 100% sure, I think that´s what it is.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I think you´re right.

Leo: $499 without a keyboard.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: They do have keyboards though right?

Mary Jo: They do, still. $130 dollars for the keyboard. And something worth knowing is you can use your existing keyboard from your other Surfaces but it doesn´t fit exactly right, it does connect fully but it doesn´t cover the screen completely. So there´s a strip where if you want to use it as a cover, you´ll still see the top.

Leo: But this is smaller.

Mary Jo: It´s a 3:2 ratio aspect to it on it, more square.

Leo: Oh it´s squarish.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So, it´s not, okay. That´s weird. Because I would think oh, the keyboard would be too small, too big for it.

Paul: I do think it´s too bad they couldn´t just make this the same size and you could´ve used the same dock but I guess it wouldn´t work because of the connector, but the same type covers anyway.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: I don´t think there´s a lot of people who are going to be upgrading from a previous Surface to this, I think this is more for this big new audience people that look at Surface Pro 3 and like it but think it´s a little more than I want to spend, and it´s kind of hitting that market.

Leo: And it´s more mobile right? It´s lighter, it´s thinner.

Paul: Right.

Leo: It´s also fan less right?

Mary Jo: Yep, fan less.

Leo: I think that´s really interesting. I´m reading this, Becoming Steve Jobs book and it talks about the Apple 3 and Steve really did not want a fan in the Apple 3. So they made it an aluminum chassis and they had convection, nevertheless tens of thousands were returned because the thing got so hot it would melt the solder this was in the days when it still soldered stuff on there and chips would literally pop off.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Remember that? You had to, if you had problems with your Apple 3 you would pick it up and drop it?

Paul: Six inches off the table.

Leo: So here we are like 40 years later, 38 years later we can finally get a fan less computer, Steve you were just ahead of your time that´s all. It doesn´t come with a stylus but you can the Surface Pro 2 stylus right?

Paul: it´s the same one from Surface Pro 3.

Mary Jo: Yeah, but they have some other colors if you want. There´s going to be new colors too, red, blue, black, silver.

Leo: Did it feel really thin? I mean 8.7 mm is try thin, that´s like iPhone thin

Mary Jo: It did, it felt thin. Yeah, it definitely did. The part that I was kind of bummed out about though I should´ve figured it would be the case, is it´s still not lapable for me, doesn´t fit on my lap still.

Paul: They´re lapping it wrong.

Mary Jo: Yeah, exactly. But you know, I know that´s not an issue for everyone though I would say since the, one of the main audience for this product is students, I would think they would use these in laps too so. I don´t know, I.

Paul: I think the observation lap thing is that it works for some people and not for others and it doesn´t work for me either by the way. But I think the bigger thing for students is you through it over like a tablet and write on it. You know take notes and stuff.

Leo: Yeah, it´s in some ways an iPad competitor, I mean I don´t think the $499 price is an accident. That´s directly aimed at the iPad.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: And then battery life, I mean you didn´t have it long enough to know but what are they saying?

Mary Jo: They´re saying 10 hours of continuous video play.

Leo: Wow. That´s good.

Mary Jo: But you know, I´m a big skeptic on the battery on Surface because the numbers they promised on previous ones I have never matched the battery life.

Paul: Well and not to, I´m just doing devil´s advocate here.

Mary Jo: Yeah, do it.

Paul: They, this is the first time they´ve ever said for video play back and because Microsoft was involved with the creation of the HP laptop that came out recently I know how they test that and it´s using the Xbox video modern app, which is particularly good for battery life and performance and so forth, and it probably does get up to 10 hours of battery life for that scenario, so the question here is really the same but it´s not that they´re not trustworthy it´s that we still want to see what it looks like in real life you know.

Mary Jo: Exactly. No, I believe they get 10 hours of continuous video playback, but I just know, I, when I use it the way I use my device and I don´t run any heavy duty apps on it.

Paul: Like 5 or 6 hours.

Mary Jo: Yeah, pretty much.

Leo: Well your mileage may vary that´s true of everything.

Mary Jo: It is, it is. we´ve talked about battery like and how difficult it is to give a real number.

Paul: You know what, is it true everything? Here´s one thing that´s not true, an iPad.

Leo: No.

Paul: Like those things get what they say they get you know and a Macbook Air with Mac OSX gets 10, 12 whatever hours of battery life, it really does, it´s impressive so we have an issue I think on the Windows side of the d¡fence with battery life and it´s kind of like the EPA claims and cars whatever, um, what are the EPA claims, and we´ll see you know, if we ever standardize on something or whatever but you know, video play back is one of the things they can test. Obviously they have bench marks for this, you can test in various ways.

Leo: They should figure out what Apple´s doing because Apple was just as bad as PC makers until recently, a few years ago, and they said no,we want to give you real numbers and starting with the iPad, starting with 2010 I guess the numbers have been pretty reliable.

Paul: They´ve been realistic. They used to always be laughable, that´s absolutely true in fact the iPhone when it first came out, first few gens, the iPod touch same thing, wasn´t even close and something happened and now it´s very accurate.

Leo: They changed the methodology, they actually changed how they measured.

Paul: It´s not just that they´re accurate, it´s that the battery life is really good you know, like it´s really good in real life and I think that´s obviously the goal for everybody.

Leo: Well this is an Intel right?

Paul: Yeah, but even on Macbook airs.

Leo: That´s true. I don´t know, I don´t know what magic they´re doing but it can´t be proprietary.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Well, so we´re going to get our review units I think next week. Paul and I are both getting them so we should be able to try them out.

Leo: When do they hit the stores?

Mary Jo: May 5th, right?

Leo: Oh so it´s a way off, a month off.

Paul: But by the way regarding the version of Windows, it is a 1 core, you know the consumer version, businesses will be able to order it like probably through resellers, I´m not sure how, with the pro version if you want to get it with that preinstalled.

Leo: 3 position kick stand, not the continuous one of the Surface pro, Surface 3. Can we officially call RT dead now, I mean this would be the RT device.

Paul: I think we´re overdoing that, if there are flies, it smells bad, um, nobody wants to walk over it. yeah, nobody´s opening a drawer anymore.

Mary Jo: I feel like we´ve been saying it because we´ve said Windows Mobile is a succussor to Windows RT but the thing I want to know, I want to know is Microsoft ever going to make another arm based tablet ever? And they won´t say no to that.

Paul: This is a weird area because, unless I´m completely missing something which is always possible, I believe that Windows mobile is restricted to devices up to 7.99 inches and that once you hit 8 inches you get desktop Windows.

Leo: Oh interesting.

Paul: I think, isn´t that the case?

Mary Jo: I believe so but couldn´t they make a device that ran Windows Mobile that was arm based that was a tablet?

Paul: Yes, that will happen, but only up to 7.99 inches so in other words if and when Microsoft releases a Surface mini, 7.99 inches.

Leo: Microsoft gets to do whatever they want. They don´t have to, they can do their own.

Mary Jo: They can, they can. I just think it´s interesting they won´t say it´s dead. They won´t say that they will never make an arm based tablet. I tried to pin them on that again this week and they won´t.

Paul: But that´s different from Windows RT is dead, I mean, Windows RT is dead as a product line, as a brand, yeah it´s gone I mean and we´ve known that for some time but I think officially I would go back to January when they said we´re not doing Windows 10 on RT.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: There´s not going to be a Windows RT 10.

Leo: And by the way if you buy this Surface 3, non pro, you will be able to upgrade it right, to Windows 10? It will be part of that.

Paul: Yes.

Leo: That dealio. I thought this was interesting they don´t use the  pogo plug connector they´re using USB a micro USB?

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: I think that´s great although as you point out they should do a type, why don´t they do a type C?

Paul: Well I mean actually I think this is pragmatic because we all have those cables, actually the nice thing about this is you go somewhere with one of these devices and you didn´t bring your cable or whatever, there´s one there, I mean everyone has them. On the Apple side, Apple tends to do things ahead of time and so we sort of love them for that, it´s cute and everything but honestly I think what they need to work on is they have 2 cables that look identical, like what do they call it, lightening cable and usb, I think they should pick one, and go with that and have 2 plugs, you know for starters. I think this was the right thing for this because it kind of stinks when you´re talking about a device and this is all about cost reduction, but really what it ´s about is bringing something that people like to more people and you do have to save money to do that. So you probably save money with this kind of plug but, everyone has the cable, I think that´s brilliant.

Leo: Yeah they should be praised for using a standard cable like that.

Paul: And here´s the, and the little secret about this plug is it works for data too.

Leo: Good.

Paul: So this is the first Surface device that has 2 USB ports on it.

Leo: It´s USB to go kind of thing.

Paul: Or you could just, not that everyone has this kind of cable but you could get a cable that would convert from that to USB3 or really be USB2 actually, but USB2 full sized.

Leo: Right. The next will be type C, I´m sure that that´s the future.

Paul: Well okay, so actually I stepped through this the other day, I was saying the exact same thing the other day, here´s the thing, Mary Jo will recall this I think it was last August, Microsoft made the promise next generation of Pro devices will be completely compatible with the current gen Surface Pro 3 so that the docking station still worked, type covers still worked.

Leo: Oh.

Paul: For those things to happen the next Surface pro is going to have to have the exact same kind of power connector because that´s how the dock connects. So they really can´t go USB C unless it´s another thing they add to it, they can´t replace the power connector right? Because otherwise it would´t work with the dock.

Mary Jo: Interesting, yeah, because with the Surface 3 they have a whole different dock, the Surface 3 cannot work in the Surface Pro 3 dock.

Paul: And it´s because of that exact thing, because the dock connects through that power connector on Surface Pro 3 and by the way another thing that I noticed this over 24 hours after I wrote about the thing, the Surface non pro 3 dock, the wings and the arms of it, they go all the way up the sides, they don´t give you access to the ports when it´s plugged in and it´s because the bus  on that is USB based, it would overpower, like you couldn´t drive a second mini display port off of USB, that would´t work, so they actually have to cover up those ports on the device and so it´s not as powerful as the Pro device and frankly that makes sense, it´s fine but it´s just something to know.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: What else should we say about this? $499 is the WiFi only version? I know there´s LTE available.

Mary Jo: $100 dollars more for the LTE.

Paul And $100 dollars more for more memory and more storage.

Lao: So it´s a little light on memory, what is the, it´s 2 gigs?

Mary Jo: Yeah 2 gigs for the entry level.

Leo: That seems a little light.

Paul: Yeah 64 storage and then you can get 4 gig in 128, you can get LTE on either one, so I guess you could spend $499 on this, I think realistically what we´re talking here is you know, $600 plus $129 for a cover and then you´re getting this thing why wouldn´t you get the pen? And now we´re in the $780 dollar range or whatever that works out to, you know which is not cheap but it´s important to know that $799 I think is the entry level price of a Surface Pro 3 with no cover no well that comes with a pen actually, with no cover so, there´s sort of a logical progression in pricing at least right, they don´t really overlap.

Mary Jo: Right. 2 cameras, we didn´t mention that, front and back.

Leo: And decent cameras too.

Paul: Yeah, looks like that.

Mary: Back is 8 megapixel, front is 3.5.

Leo: 8 is plenty, that´s,you know the iPhone is 8.

Paul: But you know, what we lost with Surface Pro 3 as well and I believe with this one, it used to, well actually I don´t know because the angle, the way that Surface Pro and Pro 2 worked the camera was actually angled inside of the device so when you had it back on the kickstand it was actually kind of straight. And one of the weird things about Surface pro 3 is because you can of course rotate it back to almost any angle, you could be looking up at the ceiling and down on your stomach or, it´s kind of hard to get inside the webcam depending on how you´re angling it. So we´ll have to see how they do it on the non Pro 3.

Mary Jo: Oh and one free year of Office 365 personal worth $70 dollars.

Paul: Which is a first right? For Surface.

Mary Jo: Yeah, thrown in as free so you get Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote and Outlook for a year for free.

Paul: And more, do you get access to Publisher as well? I´m not really sure but.

Mary Jo: I can´t remember if you do on those, sorry.

Paul: But I also don´t know how, I mean, some people are going to say, rightfully so, Surface RT, Surface 2 came with Office 2013 home essentially, for life.

Mary Jo: Yeah right, those preloaded.

Paul: And so now, now you´re getting a one year deal so in some ways it´s not quite as good, obviously with Office 365 the things going to get updated in fact this year Office 2016 will come out, you´ll get that and if you´re on Office 2013 home or whatever the RT version was called, you´re literally on that for the rest of your life.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: So it´s like the good news is you get it for life, the bad news is, you get this for life.

Leo: Cadman in our chatroom points out that the 8 megapixel camera in the back has a business function, you put it and point it at the conference room, that actually is true, that´s a good point.

Mary Jo: Yeah you can take pictures of business cards and do things like that.

Leo: Obviously I don´t want people to go around with their tablet taking pictures of concerts and sporting events but.

Paul: Oh geez, no, no, no. I think it´s more for education and work situations.

Mary Jo: Right, take a picture of a white board.

Leo: I have seen iPad selfie sticks I just want to warn you.

Mary Jo: Oh no! Are you kidding?

Leo: Such things exist.

Paul: It´s the new version of walking tall, instead of a baseball bat it´s an iPad on the end of a stick.

Mary Jo: No.

Paul: I filled my water. Okay what else? Are we missing anything with Surface 3?

Mary Jo: It´s going to be available in a number of countries which is a piece of good news and not just at Microsoft stores, it´ll be at Microsoft Store.com, Microsoft stores and then a variety of retailers in various countries. If you remember when they first came out with Surface, distribution of that was super limited and people wanted them but they could never find them, they could never see them, they could never buy them so they´re starting to get their distribution house in order, which is good.

Paul: And right up front too you know, I think it was 26 markets on day 1, which is great because Surface I think was 1 market or 2 whatever, maybe US and Canada I don´t remember exactly, not 26.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Um, I think that´s everything though, that we know so far. And we´ll know more once we get it.

Paul: Yeah battery life, it´s a 1080p display right? So it´s not an insanely high res display. Actually it´s not 1080p sorry, it´s a weigh display, it´s like 1920 x 1280 right? Because it´s 3x2. So actually that compares favorably to 2160 whatever the Surface Pro 3 is, still pretty high pixel count.

Mary Jo: Yeah, the LTE partners are, I don´t think we´ve said this, are T Mobile and Verizon and um, sounds like summer is when those versions will be out.

Paul: Those questions are on that too by the way, so could you buy an LTE version and not sign up with a carrier, kind of add it yourself later? We don´t now. What about other countries? they haven´t said yet.

Leo: Good, I´m excited. Tell me about the processor, is it a 14 nm?

Paul: Yeah it´s a 14 nm, Atom 7 yeah. Which they go to great pains to say it´s not like the Atom.

Leo: Yeah like grandfather´s atom.

Paul: We´ll see by the way that´s another thing we´re going to have to test because of course the first question here is why didn´t you use Core M and Core M is a courtship really, the battery life on those hasn´t been fantastic in the real world and even Apples succumbed to that apparently with the new Macbook. Fanless is tough with Core M because it is kind of a powerful processor. Fanless, this thing is fanless, there´s no issues there. But you know, you hear Atom and you know, it´s like hearing corvair you sort of naturally, uh really?

Leo: Well Celeron´s even worse right?

Paul: Yeah, well they´re both.

Leo: But they´re both not your father´s chips.

Paul: I guess so, so we´ll see. I´m surprised Intel hasn´t walked away from this brand frankly.

Leo: Yeah I am too, it´s not like there´s a lack of names in the world.

Paul: Sure, specially made up names like, like, well Atom´s not made up.

Leo: Right. I will never understand.

Paul: Celeron.

Leo: Right, it´s very odd. Oh well.

Paul: Lots of questions.

Leo: Lots of questions, very few answers.

Paul: But I should say just quickly, not to blabber, I do think one of the interesting things about this because I hear about this and I´m interested in it personally, but you can walk through the complaints people are going to have. The price, you know compared to just a basic tablet, the lack of USB C even though I actually don´t think that´s a big deal, you can kind of step through the things you know people are going to complain about. But the thing that has struck me the most honestly about the reaction to this is how positive it has been I mean not that the negative stuff hasn´t happened but there´s been a really positive reaction to this. Obviously there are people who wanted Surface pro 4, obviously there are people who want Surface mini, but this thing kind of comes out and I sort of wonder, you know, what´s the point? Why do this now you know, why bother? And yet the reaction I´ve seen is, I don´t know in your blog or your Twitter, but people have been like yeah, thank you this is exactly what I want. This is, I´ve been surprised by how many people have said that.

Mary Jo: Yep, I think one audience is meant to address is K through 12 and they're going to make it in time for back to school. with this, so that´s good.

Paul: When was the last time they did that with anything?

Mary Jo: A long time ago, yeah, so that´s actually really good.

Paul: That might explain the timing.

Mary Jo: It might explain the time, yeah. So that´s a good piece of news and I´ve seen people asking if they can see this device and starting yesterday, I think it´s today, starting today if you are near a Microsoft store you can make an appointment to go have a demo of this thing in your Microsoft store if you´re someone who´s pretty serious about buying one of these.

Paul: Yeah, that´s cool.

Leo: It now, it doesn´t come with a pen.

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: But it works with a pen.

Paul: You buy one, you can buy one, multiple colors if you want to mix and match.

Leo: And it doesn´t have a pen hole.

Paul: Not in the device but neither does Surface

Leo: You know the, the RT had a little thing but that´s not, Surface Pro 3 doesn´t either right?

Paul: No RT didn´t either, RT didn´t support a pen, in the early versions of Surface Pro did but it would magnet, attach to the side. Now they have a little loop that you can put on the keyboard.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Great.

Paul: Yeah it actually works, the loop on mine is never, it´s never tugged at all, it still works great.

Leo: Alright, good. I was Oh wait a minute, there´s a Surface Pro 3 firmware update, let´s not move on too quickly.

Paul: We´re only an hour in, let´s stay on topic one.

Leo: Surface news.

Mary Jo: So this was a kind of end of March squeak in the last firmware update kind of thing and if you´re a business user you´re going to care about this, if you´re a Surface Pro 3 customer because what this firmware update does is it lets IT administrators get a lot more granular about how they configure Surfaces, so if you happen to be in a company where there are multiple Surfaces you can do things like make modifications to the boot process, disable hardware ports on the devices, make it boot from the network, there´s a lot of mew settings in the firmware update that will of interest to business users, consumers not so much, business users yes.

Leo: Good, good, good. I was pleased when I got up this morning to see there was yet another reboot in store for my Windows 10 device, I´m on the fast track, is this only fast track people or are we all getting an update?

Paul: You´re taking about the new build that came out?

Leo: Yeah, actually it came out yesterday.

Paul: It´s fast track only right now.

Leo: This is the one with Spartan?

Paul: Yeah this is the one with Spartan, by the way, it´s pretty much just Spartan, I don´t think there´s anything new in there that´s major beyond project Spartan but you know, a lot of people have been clamoring for this since they talked about it in January and we finally got a peek at it.

Leo: And now that you´ve peaked are you happy?

Paul: By the way, here´s the shock ending not to ruin it, it´s a browser.

Mary Jo: Yeah, exactly.

Leo: But it´s project Spartan, we´ve been so excited about it.

Paul: No, it´s cool, I, there´s a weird thing on the Windows side when it comes to browsers because IEs built in, it has a lot of unique features including hardware acceleration and stuff that´s kind of tied to the OS which makes it kind of special. I have  a lot of reliability problems with it, I find that IE crashes all the time for me, and if you have something like Chrome and obviously other browsers like Firefox that have a much better add in situation where they have an actual store with add ins and it´s very popular. It´s much better with modern websites, modern web standards and modern web apps, that kind of stuff. But Chrome also has resource issues, if you load it too, especially if you put in too many add ins in there, it really eats up a lot of your ram, it will kill your battery life on a mobile computer. And so I think with Spartan they´re trying to cut the difference right? They want all the good stuff from Chrome, but they want to retain all the good stuff from IE with none of the legacy baggage, you know. Hopefully none of the performance or battery life concerns that you have with Chrome, and we´ll have to wait and see because right now it´s incomplete, the features aren´t all there, it has that kind of Spartan you know Chrome style user interface right? Which is, I think people like overall, I think the universal app UI thing is going a little too far in the minimalistic direction in some ways but you know they have a couple of unique features web annotations, Cortana integrations, which is actually pretty cool. You know the ability to right click, or select a word or a phrase, right click, ask Cortana and it comes up in a pane in the browser, you don´t have to switch between tabs, because you´re doing research today and you look up something, you open another tab, you go to Google or whatever, you paste it in maybe, then you kind of go back and forth, and with this it kind of appears you know right in the window you´re browsing in. It´s  pretty nice.

Leo: Neat.

Mary Jo: We should make sure to mention for our business listeners, IE is not going away, in spite of headlines you may have read  to the contrary, in various places, IE is there still, so in this desktop preview that came out this week, Spartan is kind of the highlight, the default, but if you´re an IE user, it´s still there, you can find it, you can pin it to the task bar, it´s not going away any time soon so don´t worry about that.

Leo: Good.

Mary Jo: Oh and the rendering engine changes, we should talk about too because originally Microsoft´s plan was that these 2 browsers would both have 2 different rendering engines in them so that Spartan would have the new one, which is called Edge or MSHTML it also would have the old one Trident, no sorry MSHTML is Trident. It would have Edge and Trident in it, and so would IE, IE was going to have both also. Microsoft made a change recently where they decided Spartan is only going to have the new Edge rendering engine and IE is only going to have the old one. So you still are going to be able to fall back in some way if you have a Legacy site or you need IE 11, but the focus of Spartan is on using this new rendering engine that´s going to be better standards wise, and work better with what they call the modern web. So that´s also in this new build, that the new rendering engine switched that they´ve made.

Leo: Good. Um, anything else to say about Spartan? It´s a new icon that´s replaced the IE icon in the task bar down there. Looks a lot like a little globe.

Paul: It looks like the Internet icon from Windows 95

Leo: Okay I ways´t going to say anything but it does. It´s totally generic.

Paul: Did you hear that?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: In the MS Dos mobile app if you type in a call in, it can´t find it so that´s the sound, that´s the sound of the disk.

Leo: I can´t wait, I got to download that.

Paul: it´s awesome.

Leo: And I love the internet sound when you go to the internet because you have a little modem.

Paul: Yeah, it´s cute.

Leo: Is the metro, this is a good question, the metro version of IE, is that going to be replaced by the metro version of Spartan?

Mary Jo: No, Spartan is the replacement.

Leo: So there´ll be no modern UI version of the browser?

Paul: Right.

Leo: Thank you! Another big fix. I mean not big, but that was always confusing that there were 2 different browsers depending on where you launched it you´d get a, the different UI, was like, so good. There should be one.

Paul: 2 browsers, one brain was always my favorite thing about Windows 8, are you kidding me? I was just so stupid.

Leo: I understand the desire for a modern version, you got the address bar on the top, I guess for a tablet having the address bar on the bottom makes sense. To me it was kind of everything that was wrong with Windows 8.

Paul: I would say it was one of the many things.

Leo: No, there were many things but it kind of said it all, which is exactly what you say, 2 browsers, 1 brain. Microsoft was of 2 minds. I only have 1. So I don´t know if we should judge from this because this is still very early technical preview but the music app in the new Windows 10 and the video app, those are kind of unchanged, less changed than we thought they´d be.

Paul: Again, they pick up the universal app style which isn´t just the look and feel although that´s part of it, it´s also a kind of a navigational model, obviously a lot of common UI elements between them, they don´t work in this build properly, these things don´t go full screen properly, there´s weirdness there but there was stuff that was in modern size metro apps that was kind of, I almost said universal, just to really screw up the conversation, that were common to the system you know through charms and things like that and obviously with the universal app platform they need to figure out a way to present that kind of stuff. So for example how do you display an Xbox video based movie from the video app on a Miracast display? And Windows 8 and Neward is pretty straight forward, in Windows 10 it´s like it´s not really there so we don´t know how that´re going to handle that kind of stuff. So there´s some weirdisms but if your familiar with the video app on Windows 8, 8.1 or the music app I mean it´s going to be a pretty simple transition in that case.

Mary Jo: I have to say I´m happy to see the Xbox branding going away on those.

Leo: Really?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Because you hate the Xbox with a passion.

Mary Jo: Not because I hate the Xbox, because I think it was really confusing to call Microsoft´s music app Xbox music.

Leo: I agree, I agree.

Mary Jo: And I think a lot of people wondered like do I have to have an Xbox to play that?

Paul: Well I guess my counter to that would just be in the OS it wasn´t called Xbox music , it was just called music.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: In that sense it´s not changing too much, and they got rid of the Xbox logo inside the app you know.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: But I think with that move to OneDrive, you know the ability to put your music in OneDrive and then access it in the app, it´s not really Xbox music, it will work with Xbox music pass, it´s really just .

Leo: It´s a music player. Now what about Windows Media Player, is that over?

Paul: Oh Leo, you always have that way of cutting right to the heart of the question we cannot answer.

Leo: I´m just sharing the chatroom that´s all.

Paul: Or what about Windows media Center?

Leo: What about that huh?

Mary Jo: We still don´t know officially, it´s one of those things that like of course they´re not going to do it but then they can´t tell us or won´t say.

Leo: You never know.

Mary Jo: I know!

Leo: You never know!

Paul: Eventually we´re going to have to know.

Mary Jo: We are, yeah.

Paul: What about silverlight flash? No support, I just like to rub salt in the wound.

Mary Jo: He´s going to throw WPF in there next.

Paul: Project Spartan natively supports flash.

Leo: Ah like Chrome does, that´s the way to do it.

Paul: You can disable it.

Leo: Yeah and then you can sandbox it, you don´t have to worry about updating it, Microsoft will update it I presume.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Well that´s what Chrome does, it really is the way to do it I think.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Good, good, good, good. Chatroom anything else you want to, any other wounds you want to reopen?

Paul: You want to upset us with.

Leo: Anything else you´d like to bring up?

Mary Jo: Oh we should talk about Windows 10 mobile preview too.

Leo: Oh yes, I put it on my 635, I´m waiting for something to happen.

Mary Jo: So, over the weekend or just before the weekend began last week, they published, Microsoft published a list and said you know what, when we come out with the next Windows 10 mobile preview it´s going to work on almost every Lumia phone that we have, there´s a list.

Leo: Oh, Hallelujah, 1520?

Paul: By the way, what an amazing idea for them to have, to do something like that.

Mary Jo: 1520 yes, that is on the list. The 930 is not on the list but they said.

Leo: That´s yours, that´s your phone.

Mary Jo: Well the 929 is. Icon is.

Leo: What?

Mary Jo: The Icon 929 is on the list but not the 930. Because they said there´s one bug they haven´t yet resolved, which they might by the time this thing comes out. So that´s good news and they said last friday that they have about a week’s worth of engineering and testing to go before they drop the next preview for Windows 10 mobile. So it´s nice we have a little more of an indication of where things are at. Good communication, bravo.

Paul: Yep. It´s all we´ve ever been asking.

Leo: Battlecam says they´re dropping the hamburger for the ellipsis, can it be true?

Mary Jo: Dropping the hamburger? No, is that an April Fools thing?

Paul: I don´t think it´s going anywhere.

Leo: And then um, somebody said is there an XPS viewer? I´ll just ignore that.

Paul: Actually I´m pretty sure the PDF reader app does XPS.

Leo: Oh I know, John G and others, and I, in fact want to know, we have compressed Windows on our WinBook tablets, is that going to ever have?

Paul: It will but they have not addressed how they´re going to do that. That´s the whole partition stitching thing I think that applies to tablets. I would´t be surprised that the outcome of that will come out like so that if you have a device that has under a certain amount of storage or under a certain amount of storage left you will have to have micro SD with free space on it otherwise this update will never work, I think that´s going to be the eventual outcome but they´ve not updated on that yet.

Leo: Okay. I just want to make sure we get all of the queries.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: I asked about Windows Media center right?

Mary Jo: Yes, you did.

Leo: Alright.

Mary Jo: And we said again, we don´t know.

Leo: Yes, I know. By the way you remember Microsoft bought Sunrise the calendar app, launch your sunrise if your using it because it offers Clippy, so they´re bringing back Clippy now that we´re a part of Microsoft. I see you´re trying to make an appointment, would you like me to help? Unfortunately they say it but they didn´t do it and I´m really bummed. I really wanted them to do that.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Oh well. Microsoft has bought another Office tool, this is a collaboration tool right? What are you laughing at Paul?

Paul: I just showed my daughter a photo, I can´t show you this device because I´m saving it for tomorrow.

Leo: Oh, what´s tomorrow?

Paul: It´s Thursday

Leo: You don´t do a show on this network on Thursdays. Are you saving this for Zarian?

Paul: No.

Leo: You are, aren´t you?

Paul: No, that was yesterday.

Leo: Oh okay, what show do you do on Thursday?

Paul: It´s not for a show. I´ve said too much.

Leo: Okay, he´s probably.

Mary Jo: I´m curious now.

Paul: I found a photo on it that was.

Leo: It´s cute but you can´t show us. This is called LiveLoop, tell me about it.

Mary Jo: LiveLoop makes a power, well they did, because they´re shutting them down, Microsoft bought them quietly last week, they made a Powerpoint plug in that lets a whole team collaborate on a document simultaneously.

Leo: All at the same time? Oh that´s interesting.

Mary Jo: All at the same time.

Leo: Kind of like Google wave.

Mary Jo: What was that?

Leo: Long ago and far away in a galaxy, uh, it was a Google app that let you all work on the stuff at the same time.

Mary Jo: Okay, so LiveLoop they were going to make a number of other similar Office collaboration tools, Microsoft ended up buying for some undisclosed amount, they´re shutting down LiveLoop April 24th and that team´s joining Microsoft we don´t really know where that technology´s going to show up, if it´ll be a separate product or integrated into future versions of Powerpoint or what they´re going to do with it, but they now own it.

Leo: Cool. We don´t know how much.

Mary Jo: We don´t know how much they paid for it. Nope, and I kind of think it might show up as part of Surface hub, you know that new kind of mega conferencing system that they built around the perceptive pixel displays. It makes sense if you had a giant display you could have a whole group of people in a meeting situation collaborating on a document right?

Paul: I mean I think that, sure, but I look at this and I think the main point of this is, they have a way for you to share Powerpoint with other people over the web, and they have a way for you to do different things, but they require plug ins or add ons or apps or whatever, I think the primary deal here is they just send you a URL and it works. And so it´s kind of we´ll take that.

Leo: That´s really neat, yeah.

Paul: Yeah. Because they really do make it simpler.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Good.

Paul: Or they did, because now we can´t see it.

Leo: They don´t do anything anymore.

Paul: It seemed like they do.

Mary Jo: It seems like they were going to make things simpler.

Leo: When they do that they should leave it up for one day so we can look and then take it down.

Paul: The past purchases they did, this is unique to this one which has to make you wonder, what´s different about this that would require it to come down? Maybe it´s just on their, maybe this is protecting the service because if people found out Microsoft was buying them it would´ve overwhelmed their capacity or something I don´t know. I don´t know.

Mary Jo: It´s a mystery.

Leo: We´re going to take a break when we come back we got lots more, more chatroom questions too but first a word from Prosper.com. If you´re not Microsoft and you maybe need to borrow money, you could go to friends and family, that´s a bad idea just want to say bad idea having done that. You could go to a bank, it´s kind of a pain, you got to get all dressed up kind of hat in hand, or you could go to Prosper.com. Prosper is a really clever idea, it´s a peer to peer lending marketplace is probably the best way to describe it, so Prosper brings together people with money to lend with people who are looking to borrow and that´s fantastic. You can borrow up to $35,000 dollars in as few as 5 days and use the money for you know, pretty much anything you want, pay off high rate credit cards, fix up the house, put it into your business, buy a small application company to integrate into your global ambitions, as long as it´s $35,000 dollars or less. Prosper´s online marketplace connects people who need money with those who need or want to invest in you. I like that idea. So don´t rack up more debt on your credit cards, pay them off with a low rate loan from Prosper.com. You can check your rate, you can find out exactly what it will cost you right now and this will not affect your good credit I like that. At Prosper.com/Twit, it´s very simple, easy to fill out form. And for a limited time Prosper is now offering Twit viewers a $50 Visa gift card with your low interest loan. You can get up to $35,000 dollars in your account in as few as 5 days and a $50 dollar Visa gift card, but you´ve got to go to Prosper.com/Twit for a special offer just for you, our Twit family. We thank them, Prosper, so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, we´re talking Windows Weekly. So tomorrow huh?

Paul: What´s that?

Leo: I don´t know.

Mary Jo: You´re dangling a little secret over here, we don´t know what it is.

Leo: But I would think Mary Jo would know right?

Mary Jo: I don´t know, I totally don´t know.

Leo: Interesting. Microsoft and Yahoo have got, this is interesting, and I wanted to ask you guys about it because I saw this story and I thought what is going on here? So Microsoft and Yahoo have a 10 year search deal, which still has 5 years to run they signed it in 2010. But I guess after 5 years they can renegotiate, that´s what they´re doing right now and they just announced that they´re going to extend the negotiations another 30 days. Does this maybe imply there´s trouble in paradise?

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: Indeed, I´m like paradise, hmm.

Leo: Maybe not the right word.

Mary Jo: Yeah, you know, um, this has always been something that Yahoo and specially Marissa Mayer was not that happy about was this Microsoft search agreement because under this agreement Yahoo is using Bing as their search engine and you know if you´re Yahoo you´re like wow I wish we could do our own search engine, that´s one of our core areas that we´ve had in the past and where we made money in, had a differentiator. So when they originally created this 10 year partnership they put a clause in there saying at the 5 year mark, if Yahoo can prove that they´re not getting the revenue per share guaranteed amount that we foresee that they should be getting, they are going to be able to exit the deal. We don´t know if they are getting that number or are not getting that number but there´s been a lot of unrest in recent years and Microsoft has had to make up the difference by giving them supplementary money.

Leo: Interesting.

Mary Jo: So now we, what we don´t know is did that number end up being met? And if it did, is there still a way Yahoo can get out of this deal and if it did not, yahoo can get out of this deal I would think.

Leo: So, I don´t think Yahoo wants to do its own search engine, they´d have to, I mean have they been keeping their old one up? They might want to go to Google though.

Mary Jo: They might want to go to Google, but they also did retain under the original terms of the deal the right to continue to work on search technology.

Leo: Oh so maybe they did.

Mary Jo: Maybe they did, right.

Leo: Now the other side of this equation though, is- At Yahoo, it gets Microsoft Search but doesn't Microsoft use Overture or whatever it is at Yahoo Ads?

Mary Jo: Yeah, so the deal was that Yahoo take Microsoft Search and in return Microsoft works with some of Yahoo's Ad technology so it was a partnership where there was an exchange of technologies.

Leo: It's possible that end is not working out either...

Mary Jo: Maybe.

Leo: Could Microsoft be unhappy with Yahoo? No, because they need Yahoo. Because Bing, otherwise..

Mary Jo: Well they needed them up to this point for sure because Microsoft said during their last earnings call that they believe that Bing is finally going to be profitable in the second calendar half of this year.

Paul: Geez.

Mary Jo: I know, after all of this time and after all the red ink they finally are going to be profitable with Bing but you know, things have changed a lot since they inked this partnership. Originally Bing was just a web search engine and these days, Bing is a lot more than that. It's a development platform, it's a technology that Microsoft built into other products, various pieces of it end up in other products. I mean, Cortana is basically Bing. So Microsoft has done a lot of things with Bing that may end up making it profitable and not just relying on Yahoo to make it profitable. So I think Microsoft would love for this partnership to continue, it would make things a lot easier for them and whenever they're asked about it they say, we worked at our differences with Yahoo and we think it's going well. But Yahoo has definitely hinted that they are not happy and do not think it's going well. So now the new deadline is this month I think.

Paul: I think Yahoo publicly complaining about it is what we need to know.

Leo: But they haven't, have they?

Paul: Yeah they have.

Leo: Oh they have...?

Paul: Yeah, I think Marissa Myer was the one who said that they have not been generating the revenues to the Microsoft Search Partnership that they were expecting.

Leo: Ah, was that in an Analyst Call sometime last quarter or...?

Paul: It was some time ago yeah.

Leo: So that's an interesting thing. I would imagine that the revenue- Well these things are complicated and since we don't have the deal in front of us but I would imagine there is revenue flowing in both directions.

Mary Jo: Yeah...

Leo: But maybe it's flowing faster to Microsoft than it is to Yahoo.

Paul: Yeah, much like the Nokia deal.

Mary Jo: I think it was maybe two years ago that Yahoo had to file something with the FCC that said 30% of their revenues were coming from Microsoft.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: So they're making money off of Microsoft too.

Leo: Right. And Microsoft, frankly, the market share that Yahoo adds to Bing is not insignificant.

Paul: It's quite significant I would say.

Leo: Yeah, I'm trying to remember the numbers...

Paul: You could almost imagine why Microsoft would want to pay to insure this doesn't go away because that would kill their search share.

Leo: Yeah, and also ask the question, why does Yahoo even need search? Yahoo is not a search company anymore it's a content company. It's like saying, TWiT needs a search engine. No we don't.

Paul: Wait, TWiT doesn't have it's own search engine, what are you people doing?

Leo: So it's one of those things where if it is a negative cash flow or it's not quite the positive cash flow that Yahoo needs- Because let's face it, Yahoo does need money. It's not a feature that Yahoo particularly needs, because they could just turn it on to Google, and Google plays affiliate fees.. But it's interesting because Mozilla was a Google search engine, right and they just switched to Yahoo. I don't even understand what that means yet.

Mary Jo: It's really Bing...

Leo: Oh we won't be using this portion. I'm telling you, I never understood.... So what happens to that deal?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: I mean it's a lot of money because the Mozilla foundation was literally fully funded hundreds of millions of dollars a year because Firefox used Google as it's default search engine, that was a very lucrative thing. So for them to move to Yahoo, that must mean that Yahoo made a similar deal. How much of that goes to Microsoft- You know what? I'm guessing that Yahoo doesn't want out of this deal with Microsoft, they just want to renegotiate the terms and sweeten the pot.

Paul: Maybe, yeah. Maybe they would take either one or better terms.

Leo: Yeah and they can say, hey we don't really need you guys.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Or maybe, all this time they've been working on the Yahoo Search Engine.

Paul: Please...

Mary Jo: I don't think they're working so much on like a web search engine- Like a new one. -But I think they're doing things around the periphery of search. Like local search related stuff.

Leo: Well surely they're doing that-

Paul: Maybe they're going to bring back a college student who is just going to show them cool links on the web and they will organize these links by topics of some type.

Leo: But of course, Yahoo doesn't use it but they could use Cortana. They lose a lot of Bing-ish Maps... Yahoo doesn't have Maps.

Paul: A lot of the Bing vertical stuff is very young and friendly. They're really good with like celebrity image searches, it's the type of stuff that a Yahoo audience would really care about. It would be disastrous though, for Microsoft to lose this deal so I'm pretty sure they're going to do everything they can to keep it so I guess we'll see.

Leo: Yeah, and that tells me that Yahoo knew this and said, let's see how much more we can squeeze out of these guys.

Paul: Oh yeah, desperate much?

Leo: Yeah. You know I'm excited about this, Visual Studio pricing goes down. I like Visual Studio.

Mary Jo: Yeah, this is one of those announcements Microsoft made, and you're like okay where's the catch? There's got to be a got ya' moment. On the surface it looks like they are actually dropping Visual Studio pricing, at least for this new enterprise skew that they've created. So right now, if you look at the bundles you can buy from Visual Studio, there is Professional with MSDN, Premium with MSDN, and Ultimate with MSDN. So Microsoft is taking Premium with MSDN and Ultimate with MSDN, and are making this new thing called Visual Studio Enterprise and it's going to be the new skew for enterprise developers when Visual Studio 2015 comes out this summer. But the pricing on this is really substantially lower than what you pay now if you're using Visual Studio Ultimate. If you're buying a brand new license of Visual Studio Ultimate, it costs you $13,300 for a year, for one developer.

Leo: Wow!

Paul: That's incredible.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's a lot of money. But you know, substantially cheaper if you're getting a renewal to that subscription. But the new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN will be $6,000, so instead of 13, 6.

Paul: By the way that's for new customers. It's cheaper-

Mary Jo: Renewal is much cheaper, right. The only 'got ya' I've been able to find in this so far is if you're somebody who is in a shop and just renewed their three year contract through your Enterprise Volume License and you bought at the really high price, it's going to be a little challenging for you to get out of it. Yeah, it's going to be tough to go back and Microsoft says you can go back if it's within 60 days and try to renegotiate and get your money back. But if you aren't within that 60 days, you probably will have a problem with getting it.

Paul: Here's what I don't get... Why do they charge for this?

Leo: Yeah give it away, this is good. It makes people develop for Windows.

Paul: I don't mean to be cynical about this but to me the takeaway was, look we had four big versions before. Now we have three, we're cutting down, except for one thing in addition to those three, they also final list: Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN, MSDN Platforms, Visual Studio Professional stand-alone licenses for those people who don't want subscriptions, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2015- Like the list goes on and on and on. Do you seriously want people to develop for your platform? Give it away. Just give it away.

Mary Jo: Yeah but they make a lot of money off of developer tools.

Leo: Everybody else gives it away.

Mary Jo: Yeah, but are everybody else's tools as good as-

Paul: I'm sorry, Apple makes one version of Mac OS 10 and they make one version X Code and it's free.

Mary Jo: I know, but their developer tools are utter crap, right?

Leo: No, not at all. That's not true.

Paul: You know what? I would say it doesn't matter because they give them away for free.

Mary Jo: There is a version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Community that is for smaller developers like single person shops and academics and those kind of people and that is free.

Paul: Yeah, but that's for enthusiasts. It's not really...

Mary Jo: You can use it even if you're a commercial shop now. They changed the terms on that but you have to be a "small." I'm not defending them but I'm just saying Microsoft spends a lot of money building developer tools.

Paul: I guess what I'm getting at is I think there are certain things you could justify charging for, like the team stuff makes some sense. But this kind of per user deal- To me, that license should be for the entire environment and I just don't understand this.

Mary Jo: Yeah and these bundles are a lot of the ones who have the online and a lot of other stuff right?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I just think if this is your enticement to developers, I just... I don't know.

Mary Jo: Yeah. You get deals on volume licensing too if you're a bigger developing shop and you're buying multiple copies. But again, I'm not defending the pricing on this, I'm just saying, expecting Microsoft to completely give them away would be like saying Windows will be free for everybody. Which it will not.

Paul: Well Windows will be free for everybody.

Mary Jo: No, Windows will only be free for consumers for a year, not for everybody.

Paul: Okay so it's a business thing. In other words-

Leo: It's a prophet deal.

Mary Jo: It is.

Paul: We raised this issue a few weeks ago I think but you're giving Windows away for free to device makers who are targeting small devices and expensive devices, you're giving Windows away for free to individuals essentially, Windows phone is free. And then you show up as a business and it's like, oh no you're paying for that. And it's like, why am I paying for that? Well, because you're a business. I mean at some point I think businesses are going to look at all of the stuff they give away for free like all of the office stuff you give away or receive for free, unless you're a business. You know at some point that dividing line is going to start rankling companies and they're going to start questioning it and are going to say, okay well maybe we do pay but why are we paying so much? I mean, the big difference between Visual Studio Community for free and $1,200 per customer for professional, or $6,000 for Enterprise... Per User? Oh my God. That's per year by the way, it's not $6,000 and then you're done. It's that much for the first year and then $2,600 per year after that. That's a lot of money, that's crazy.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: They give it to individuals free though, right? Like you can get Visual Studio-

Paul: Yeah, there's the Community Edition and they have the Express Edition.

Leo: And that's really- You want to foster young developers, individuals and businesses.... And by the way that is totally the attitude. Speaking as a business owner, that's totally the attitude of everybody. Your employees and everybody else. It's not really money because it's a business.

Paul: I just put it on my American Express business card.

Leo: Right, businesses- That's just life.

Paul: Alright, sure. Okay.

Leo: It hurts me just as much as if I took my wallet out and-

Paul: If you wanted to make enterprise happen on iPhone, how much money would you pay Apple for that privilege?

Leo: Zip-a-dee-doo-da. And Android, by the way. But Google, for a while was using an open source tool called Eclipse, a Java based tool. But they actually went out to Intella-J, which makes a commercial IDE and they made a new one and they give that away. Apple does charge $99 to be a developer.

Paul: Sure. Just to put something in the store it's $99.

Leo: Well you can download X Code but if you want the SDK's for various platforms, you need to pay $99. But still, that's not $13,000 a year.

Mary Jo: Which is now 6.

Leo: Well speaking as a business owner, hey we're made of money. $6,000 $13,000... I don't care. Who do I write the check out to?

Paul: I see lots of numbers and it makes me nervous.

Leo: It does me as well and I think this is a good time for Microsoft to promote development and give away all of the tools. But I guess Microsoft needs to figure out what their business is and what they make money on.

Mary Jo: Visual Studio is a billion dollar business for Microsoft.

Leo: Yeah, it's hard to turn your back on.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Alright, Mary Jo if you want to take a break and go make some beer or something.

Mary Jo: Right? Xbox!

Paul: I'll make this one quick.

Leo: I got the new April update.

Paul: You did?

Leo: Yeah or the March update... What month are we in?

Paul: Well the April one is not out publicly but it's out for preview.

Leo: It's coming out, yeah. I'm in the beta program.

Paul: I'm getting to the point now, these system updates are always pretty big. Some good stuff in there. Voice messages is coming.

Leo: And I can't watch TV. It bugs me.

Paul: Well I didn't mean it like that, there's a lot of stuff. Like they're useful updates. In fact one of them is hilarious, it's an achievement update where you get an achievement and that thing pops up saying achievement unlocked. It tells you how many gamer points, and the name of the achievement and then it disappears. Every time I see that I think to myself, I'd like to know a little more about that. But I don't want to leave the game because it's doing something.

Leo: Right. Well you can by pressing the Xbox button.

Paul: Yeah but that's what I mean, I don't want to leave the game. In other words, now it has an animation on it where it gives you the description as well as the nae of the achievement. So here we are, seriously it's 2015- And when did the first Xbox come out? I guess in 2001? Xbox Live achievements probably came with Halo 2 2002, 13 years into this they're still adding stuff that we should've had like forever ago and on that note it's a little weird that they can still improve it this much but on the other hand, especially on the Xbox One, you get like a pretty serious update like every month and so...

Leo: Yeah it's not like a 20 meg download, these are hundreds and hundreds of megs each time.

Paul: Yeah, they are literally big too. So that's interesting. The other thing is, I don't really talk about Halo all that much- Although, I would say the first 4-ish Halo games like Halo 1-3 and then the ODST game, I played through all of those single and multi-player for years and years. I think single player Halo 1 I probably played through like 5 or 7 times and Halo 2 something similar and Halo 3 I finished at least 2 or 3 times. And then I get to Halo 4 and it was like eh. It just wasn't as interesting to me anymore. Like the rise of games like Call of Duty and other shooters as well are kind of casting.

Leo: Halo's looking a little...

Mary Jo: Tired.

Leo: Tired.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: There's the nostalgia factor but that's about it.

Paul: There's a nostalgia factor so I think we'll see how this goes. But they're doing a viral marketing campaign for Halo 5, it's the first one that will be Xbox One only so-

Leo: Ah, interesting.

Paul: Yeah, the ads are interesting and it's coming out in October and I think that's notable because that's right before the next Call Of Duty, it's early in the season and Halo games have typically come out a little later, not always but we'll see how that goes. It's interesting to see. I find myself intrigued by it and I'm afraid what I'm going to do is spend $60 on it and then play it for 5 minutes and then realize I'm not really interested in this stuff anymore but I'll give it a chance before I completely dump on it.

Leo: Are there other big games coming up soon? I mean, when is the next Call of Duty? That's getting tiresome to me but I guess you're a fan so...

Paul: Whoah. There are now three studios working on Call of Duty games. So we used to have an every other year thing between Infinity Ward and Treyarch.

Leo: Jeez la-weez.

Paul: Now we have Sledgehammer and the next one is Treyarch which means it should be another Black Ops game if they're doing that or it could be something new, they haven't said. So my expectation for finding out what that game is will be in June I guess and that will come out in November as they usually do. I guess we'll see. The thing is though, this latest game, advanced warfare, I have played less than any Call of Duty game since the beginning of the 360 and I find myself going back and playing the older games instead. The Modern Warfare and Black Ops games in particular. They just came out with a big map pack yesterday, and of course I already paid for it because I'm good like that and I finally took the time to install it and all of the system updates that the update required and it's okay. I'm just not as interested in this one for whatever reason. So that's another one I guess we'll see what the Fall looks like but it's a different studio so if they do another Black Ops game that would be great for me but I guess we'll see.

Leo: It's amazing, they have three studios working and it has taken each one three years, I mean, they need them right?

Paul: Yeah, these games are so big. And I sort of questioned the need to come out with one every single year...

Leo: Well, it's a billion dollar business.

Paul: Yeah, they're very expensive to make but they also generate a lot of money. In the older days you'd be playing whatever has come out and then the next year there's a World War 2 game. And the next year it's like the next Modern Warfare so it was confusing sort of.

Leo: Yeah, that seems a little weird.

2:But now it's going to be worse because if you like Advanced Warfare, you've got two more years to wait until the next one. They're like Star Wars movies. It's every three years.

Leo: Battlefield just isn't-

Paul: Yeah, it's not the same game.

Leo: It's kind of cool looking.

Paul: It looks beautiful, yeah.

Leo: You know what I really enjoyed? Farcry 4 was actually pretty fun.

Paul: Yeah I like the Farcry games.

Leo: They're not as hairy and exciting as COD but it's interesting.

Paul: Yeah, I like Farcry.

Leo: I really enjoyed it. Okay, let's take a break and we'll get to the back of the book. Mary Jo wake up...

Mary Jo: I'm awake. I heard end of Xbox and I woke up.

Leo: We're going to take a break and come back with the back of the book. Tips, picks, beer. But first a word from Ziprecruiter. Everybody in business knows the pain of hiring. It's just a- If you're in HR or in a small business like mine and you have to do the hiring, you ought to know about Ziprecruiter. I mean, job boards are great really they have changed the world. But there are a lot of them and which one is the right one? This is a great thing. Ziprecruiter will post to 50+ job boards with one click of the mouse as well as Facebook and Twitter. So you post once and you get to 50 sites. That means you're going to get a lot of high-quality candidates. And then another thing I love is you don't get phone calls or emails because all of the applicants flow through Ziprecruiter's interface to where you can screen the applicants, rate them, and hire the right person fast. Because sometimes you'll say, well I don't want a lot of applicants. Well you do because given the right tools, that means you're going to get more good candidates. And then, with Ziprecruiter's premium traffic boost, you can triple the number of candidates you get. So easy to get through the candidates to screen them that you don't mind that, you want that. The chances of you finding the right person are much improved, I love Ziprecruiter. And then there are all sorts of additional features, like you can create a Careers page for your website and it's just really nice. 100% satisfaction guarantee, and right now, free for 4 days, when you go to ziprecruiter.com/windows, plus you'll get 30% off your first traffic boost. So now we're talking here. Go to ziprecruiter.com/windows. Find out why more than a 1/4 million businesses including TWiT use Ziprecruiter for hiring. Ziprecruiter.com/windows for 30% off your first traffic boost and a free trial. It really is amazing. Ziprecruiter.com/windows. Paul Thurrott kicking things off with the tip and tool and app of the week.

Paul: I just have three tips this week so it'll be pretty quick.

Leo: Three tips. The man with three tips.

Paul: Just the tips. There's a new feature in Windows 10 that has been available in virtually every other desktop operating system on earth for about twenty years now but it's actually a pretty cool one, and it's the ability to scroll inactive windows. What that means is if you have two windows side by side on the screen, one of them will have the focus in the foreground and one will be in the background or it will be inactive. If you move the mouse over the inactive window and scroll with the mouse wheel on the mouse or you can use the keys on the keyboard, but that thing will scroll. Even though it doesn't have the focus. And the way that I would think that would be useful is if I were writing in one window and scrolling through a document on another window, you don't have to keep switching back and forth. You can just mouse over there and scroll it. It's just a little on/off switch in settings for the mouse and trackpad. So just so you know about it.

Leo: Love it.

Paul: A couple of weeks ago I set out to-

Leo: Before you go on about that I wanted to ask you about scroll. So Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that we've been scrolling wrong all this time and a couple of OS 10's ago, they switched it. You can go back into Apple's interface and fix it but they-

Paul: I actually like reverse scroll.

Leo: I do too...

Paul: It's like once you use it you're like, wow this is amazing.

Leo: I'm wondering if there's a way to do that in Windows 10?

Paul: Yeah, Windows 10 supports reverse scroll.

Leo: So it's funny because I got the new Chromebook Pixel and in there they call it Australian scrolling.

Paul: That's hilarious.

Leo: At first I thought, what? And then I was like, oh you mean Apple style?

Paul: Yeah you can do that.

Leo: And since I'm constantly moving around I want it to all be the same. It's very disconcerting when you move the scroll wheel on the mouse and it goes the wrong way. So you do it the Apple way?

Paul: Yeah I do.

Leo: Interesting. And what do you do in Windows 8?

Paul: Well a lot of times you'll have like a synaptics drive or whatever that comes with the machine and they'll invariably offer reverse scroll.

Leo: And Windows 10 will. That's nice.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Another way Microsoft has made life better.

Paul: I know. Someone should make a hospital or something like that.

Leo: Tip 2.

Paul: So I've been wanting to install Windows 10 on a Surface Pro 3 but I'm writing a Surface Pro 3 book, so of course, I have to keep it in Windows 8.1 and if you try to dual boot this thing you run into all kinds of problems. So a bunch of times I started down the path but ran into a bunch of issues but a couple of weeks ago I sort of decided to figure this out. Surface Pro 3 has all of these technologies built-in to secure the device but they get in the way of dual booting. You know, UEFI bios, secure boot, bit locker, on by default.... All of the stuff to keep you from doing something that I think is pretty basic that I'd like to do. So I did figure it out but I had to reinstall Windows 10 on this my Surface Pro 3 that I bought 17 times to get it documented correctly and make sure it all worked, it is a serious time suck. But also, in doing so, I host my Surface Pro 3 a number of times. And so I wrote an article about how you can recover your Surface Pro 3 no matter what happens. And there are built in recovery tools obviously in Windows that work great until they don't. There are USB recovery tools that you can do that work great if the built in ones stop working. But Surface Pro 3, in particular, offers the ability to download the entire recovery partition that normally is on the device. So not only can you do a sort of basic recovery, but you can do a full recovery with all of the Surface drivers and stuff as well. But I separated it out from what was originally going to be a very long article about dual booting but I separated out the recovery stuff because if you have a Surface device, you need to know this stuff. Mary Jo will remember that time at a Build conference several years ago where I host my Surface RT device and I needed to get the recovery disk off of your Surface RT because I didn't have one.

Leo: At least you could do that, that's good.

Paul: Yeah. So this is just a guide to- If you follow this information, there's nothing you can do- Unless there's a hardware fail, obviously. -You'll be able to recover from any of this stuff, which is important because whenever you go to dual boot this thing, which I wrote up today, you could screw it up. So these things will help you get it back if that happens, which is important.

Leo: I actually have a collection of USB keys and they're actually on lanyards for every operating system.

Paul: Yeah, so this was part of my thing. I have keys that look like this. Or like this and you can't write on these things so it's useless. What I finally did was I bought white ones that have a flat surface for you to write on. They're like $7 a piece for like a 16 gig stick. Why not just buy a bunch of them?

Leo: They should just make like a little case that you can open up. Somebody kickstarter this.

Paul: Yeah like a Floppy Disk case but for this.

Leo: Yeah, my recovery case.

Paul: In my case what happens is I've got like 3,000 of these USB keys but I can never remember and I can't tell by looking at it which version of Windows it has because they all look the same. So I end up recreating them all the time.

Leo: Yep.

Paul: Anyway, that's part of the problem.

Leo: I've got some painters tape and write it on there and it's ugly but that's the way I can distinguish. And that's why they're on lanyards, because I'm hanging them from a hook, all of my operating systems.

Paul: Nice.

Leo: Finally this month's games with Gold, thank you for telling me about this! I now have so many games on my Xbox One that I never play but they were free.

Paul: Yeah, so this is a big month, especially on the 360. Normally, you get one free game on the Xbox One and two free games on the Xbox 360. This month for whatever reason, they're doubling up. So the two games that are on Xbox One are available all month. I'm not personally that interested in either one of them. And neither one of them is like a triple lay retail title but they look fine, but that's not the point. One the Xbox 360 there's a lot of triple lay games coming out this month for free. For the first half of the month if you have a 360 you can just get it, they're free. You don't have to download them because they're free, add them to your collection and you can play them later. The fourth Gears of War game called Terraria-

Leo: I have that and I bought that, unfortunately.

Paul: Yeah, I did too. But the second half of the month is Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. That's the pirate one- And Army of Two the Devli's Cartel. I've never played that game but I did play and finish the 1st Army of Two. It's kind of a cooperative shooter, but it's a first-person shooter and the first Army of Two was a fantastic game so what the heck, if it's going to be free I'll definitely check that one out. And so I've used this tip before but even if you don't have an Xbox like Mary Jo and think you might get one like Mary Jo, you can go to xbox.com-

Leo: I don't think so.

Paul: And just add these games to your account and they'll just be there for when you have your Xbox.

Mary Jo: So you're telling me I should get games for Gold even if I don't have an Xbox?

Paul: Well you would need an Xbox Live Gold subscription, that's true.

Leo: Well that's okay.

Paul: Mostly what this is for, I would say, if you have a 360 and you want to get an Xbox One but can't yet because it's kind of expensive. So every month you get the free games on Xbox 360, get the ones on Xbox One too so that when you do get that console you'll have a collection waiting for you.

Leo: So you don't have to download it you just say yeah, I'll take it.

Paul: Yep you go to buy it and it says it's free so you just do that and that's it. My 360 is now full because I've been auto-downloading stuff so the first several times I downloaded stuff it was like, you don't have enough space for this so I'll just remove it from the queue.

Leo: And I am signing into my smart glass right now so I can download all of these games and have them when I get home. And Evolve came out, right so I got to get that one too. Let's wake up Mary Jo Foley now. And talk a little bit about your enterprise pick of the week.

Mary Jo: So if you happen to be an Office 365 commercial customer, which means not home or personal. Like business, enterprise, education, or government you are going to get something free from Microsoft in the next 4-6 weeks. And what you're going to get freely added to your Office 365 subscription is mobile device management capabilities. Right now Microsoft sells this as part of InTune, a device management service. But they're taking some subset of those capabilities that they sell for money as a subscription and are giving them to you for free and building them into Office 365. So with these new free services they're adding in, you're going to be able to manage not just your Windows phones but also iOS and Android devices. It's going to let you do things like conditional access so you can set up security policies, insuring that corporate email and documents only get accessed by people on devices that they're allowed to access them on.You can do security policy management, you can do selective wipe so that when or if somebody leaves your company or gets fired, you can wipe your corporate data without wiping their personal data. So you're getting a whole bunch of these built in for free if you're a commercial subscriber. If you still need more capabilities beyond these things that are for free, you can still subscribe to In Tune and use System Center Configuration Manager to add even more capabilities but at least you're going to get this base set for free over the next 4-6 weeks. So that's the enterprise pick for the week.

Leo: Nice. And your codename pick for the week?

Mary Jo: The codename pick of the week is a codename Microsoft has used for a couple of other products before, the codename is Phoenix and they've used that codename for some work they did on compiler technology, as well as some work they did on their CRM products. But this new Phoenix is an app built by the Microsoft Garage, which is their new incubation unit. And it's a travel expense management app and what it does is- Well the first version they seem to be testing for iOS from what I can tell.

Leo: Oh God. That's an insult. All of us who travel on Microsoft expense gas like to bring our iPhones with us.

Mary Jo: Well there's a lot of Microsoft employees who use iPhones and other Microsoft fans-

Leo: Steve Balmer didn't step on them all?

Mary Jo: He did not step on all of them, there are still a few left. So what this does is, from what I've heard about it, it only backs up to concur as the application on the back end but the idea, ultimately, is to have this application on your phone or tablet that will automatically help you fill out expenses. So it'll be tied up to your corporate card and when you spend something on your corporate card, it'll fill out the expense report and put things in the correct categories like Hotel Meals. It will even take things out of your Outlook Contact application and say, oh you entered in that you had dinner with so and so, it must have been this person let me add that to your expense report for you. So it's bringing in a lot of services and almost like machine learning kinds of things.

Leo: Almost like Clippey.

Mary Jo: Even better than Clippey! A whole step beyond.

Leo: I see you've been drinking with Steven Sinofsky, let me add that to your account.

Mary Jo: Exactly. So yeah this thing right now is just in some early tests and Microsoft is just sending out some private invites to iOS users, trying to get some people to test it out. I asked if they are going to have a Windows phone version or an Android version and they didn't comment on that. All I could get was, hey this is an experimental app and we'll see where it goes. But if you do hear about Phoenix, it's probably this new expense reporting application under development at Microsoft.

Leo: You saw that Sinofsky's raised another $90 million for Tanium?

Mary Jo: An enterprise company, yeah.

Leo: Well it's actually a good idea, the product is.

Paul: Did he describe it in an 18,000 word blog post?

Leo: Probably. But now it's valued at like 1.75 billion so it's doing okay. And I am so excited, I've been waiting for this beer pick for a long, long time Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: It's over-due really. Today's beer pick of the week is Bud Light.

Leo: Bud Light! Do you like it with lime or plain?

Mary Jo: I like it with lime.

Paul: Yikes.

Leo: The lime is built-in ladies....

Mary Jo: No but I am picking a very nice beer for this week's pick from Boulevard Brewing in Kansas City, that is called Tank 7. It is a farmhouse ale/saison it's really good and all the things you'd want in a Saison... It kind of had like the traditional Belgium feel, grapefruit, pepper, and all of that fun stuff. The reason they call it Tank 7 is one of their fermenters, that they call the black sheep of their seller family, is tank number 7 and that's where they ended up brewing this really good beer. And Boulevard beer wasn't ever in New York and as of a couple of weeks ago they finally got it here and if you reside in this area you can get it.

Paul: I just had a saison myself in Boston.

Mary Jo: Really, it's good right?

Leo: Is a saison the same as a farmhouse or what?

Mary Jo: It's pretty much the same. I mean, I know there are very technical differences between the two but when people say saison/farmhouse, they're thinking that category together.

Leo: Yeah. And Dr. Mom has a beer pick for Passover. Apparently, there is in fact, Passover beer from Romapo Valley Brewery in Hillburn, NY.

Paul: This has got to be ghastly.

Leo: Well there are actually decent Kosher wines that are not so sweet. This is a Kosher beer and it's from the only Kosher brewery in the United States. It could be good. So farmhouse and saison are similar styles but not exactly the same thing.

Mary Jo: Not exactly the same but yeah.

Leo: I like the saisons...

Mary Jo: Yes, you would like this beer.

Leo: Okay, I shall try it.

Paul: I usually do like saisons too.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: So I have a couple of events things we should throw in at the end of this show, can we-

Paul: Oh, yes. That's for sure.

Leo: Yes, let's. Calendar.

Mary Jo: So we already mentioned that we're moving Windows Weekly on the last day of April, I want to say?

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: We're moving it because we're going to be out there for Build, and we'll be in California-

Paul: It's actually the first day of May.

Mary Jo: Oh, May 1st on Friday we're doing the show live in Petaluma and-

Leo: Oh yeah, please come by.

Mary Jo: People who are out throughout the Build conference, if you're still around Friday you should come out to Petaluma and come to the show.

Leo: There will be beer, I can promise you. And if there will be beer we will have to serve some food too.

Paul: Less spastic than when we came up for that Windows event last year.

Mary Jo: Oh I know. That was crazy.

Paul: Yeah, it was such a crazy in and out thing but I think this will be better.

Leo: And I wanted to mention that if you want to come visit, we would love that. We do have an open studio, we love having you come but we are requiring that you apply for tickets now. Especially for events like this, the fire marshal would be mad at us. So if you're thinking of coming, tickets@twit.tv. Please email us, tickets@twit.tv. And if you have large packages or bags just leave them in your car, that would also be helpful to us.

Mary Jo: Yeah, and that same week, we're going to have a meet-up. We're nailing down the final date right now but it's going to be at the early part of Build, and it will be an evening event where we will meet up at a bar. So stay tuned for that so we can tell you when and where exactly probably by the next show.

Paul: Yes, somewhere in San Francisco.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: It better be in San Francisco, that's where I'm flying to.

Mary Jo: It is, yes it is.

Paul: Mary Jo's like, what are you talking about? Build is in Redmond this year. Dammit!

Mary Jo: One more little teaser that I can tell you more about soon but if you're going to Ignite, which is Microsoft's IT Pro show, the first week of May in Chicago there is going to be a really cool meet-up that involves beer also where I'm going to give away twenty tickets to Windows Weekly listeners and you are definitely going to want to come to this if you're going to Ignite and will be there in the early part of the week. I'll tell you more about that one soon when it's finalized.

Paul: This is separate from the...

Mary Jo: Separate. This is right before the Ignite conference begins.

Paul: Okay, unfortunately I'll be missing that one. I just can't be gone for that long.

Mary Jo: I know... But we'll tell you more about that one too and give some tickets away through Windows Weekly.

Leo: Nice, great.

Paul: But there's also a meet-up at Ignite. Can we talk about that?

Leo: Holy cow, you guys really love your fans.

Mary Jo: We don't have anything yet on that one.

Paul: Okay, we'll have one during this next week.

Mary Jo: Yep. Enjoy a beer with Paul and Mary Jo and if you'll send a beer shopping list Mary Jo, we'll stock up. But until May 1st, we will be here every Wednesday, 11am Pacific 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. That's when we do Windows Weekly. If you'd like to tune in live, we'd love it if you would. If not though, on-demand audio and video always available after the fact at twit.tv/ww or at youtube.com/windowsweekly, and of course wherever podcasts are aggregated, including the Xbox Music store and the podcast app on your Windows Phone and all of the other devices. Thank you guys for joining us and we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly!