Windows Weekly 352 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here. We're going to analyze, dissect and, perhaps, understand the latest moves at Microsoft, including the departure of some big names. It's coming up next on Windows Weekly.

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Leo: Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cachefly at cachefly.com.

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, episode 352, recorded March 5, 2014

Penn and Reller

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It's time for Windows Weekly, the show that covers Microsoft, Windows, and all that stuff — all that jazz — with Mary Jo Foley at allaboutmicrosoft.com. Who better to be on this show? I mean really, even the name says it all. And then there's that other guy, Paul Thurrott.

Paul Thurrott: Yeah. (Laughs)

Leo: He's of the Supersite for Windows, winsupersite.com, the author of a multitude of books, more books, really, than cats have lives. And he — his latest just came out because it's online, the Windows — what is it? The Windows Phone book? No, Windows 8 —

Paul: I gave it a name, Leo.

Leo: What's the name?

Paul: It's the Windows 8.1 Field Guide.

Leo: Ah! Good name! And I don't think there's a chance the Field Guide folks will sue you. The —

Paul: Screw those guys.

Leo: (Laughs) The Windows 8.1 —

Paul: Hey, listen, we did an extensive, seven-minute Google search for this name, and we feel confident that —

Leo: Oh, how could it go wrong? windows81book.com, and now it has a name, and that name is Legion.

Paul: (Laughs) Yes.

Leo: No, that name is Windows 8.1 Field Guide. Yay! Congratulations. Get your copy at windows81book.com.

So. So. Good Lord. It's been a busy weekend for Microsoft. News broke Sunday morning. Kara Swisher at Re/code seemed to have gotten the scoop, but it seems confirmed now that Tami Reller's been Scroogled.

Paul: (Laughs)

Mary Jo Foley: Aww.

Leo: Aww.

Paul: You missed an opportunity for Penn and Reller jokes. I feel —

Leo: Oh!

Mary Jo: I like that one.

Paul: — really bad about that.

Leo: Penn and Reller! Because she has been replaced by Mark Penn. Penn and Reller.

Mary Jo: No.

Paul: By the left hand of Satan.

Mary Jo: Actually, not by Mark Penn. (Laughs)

Leo: No. Oh, that's — his job is not her job?

Mary Jo: No.

Paul: Not exactly.

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: But they were both in marketing, right?

Mary Jo: Yeah, they were both —

Leo: So I am actually kind of a little peeved about Mark Penn getting — he's, like, big strategic position now. He's, like, responsible for strategy. This is the guy who came up with Scroogled, the guy Hillary Clinton fired because he was ruining her primary campaign —

Paul: He's as close as we get to swiftboating on the Democratic side of the fence.

Leo: Yeah, he's a dirty, dirty, dirty prank guy.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: And I guess — is this a reward for the success of the Scroogled campaign?

Paul: Well, he also did the "Honestly" campaign, right? And —

Leo: Which one was that?

Paul: It's the — this one no one noticed because it was kind of a feel-good campaign. It's actually ongoing right now.  If you go to the Microsoft — I guess it would be the Windows channel, or whatever, on Youtube, you can see some "Honestly" ads.

Leo: Honestly.

Paul: Honestly?

Mary Jo: I think they're really weird. Do you like them?

Paul: No, actually, I don't.

Mary Jo and Leo: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: I mean, whenever I see them — because they're all over the New York subways, too — every time I see it, it says, "Honestly, I really like my Surface," or whatever, and I'm like, what does that mean?

Leo: Oh, it's like — yeah.

Mary Jo: As opposed to dishonestly?

Paul: I feel like this is, like, "Wow, I'm having a really good time." And you're like, no, you're not.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: (Laughs) You know, but —

Leo: Honestly. Oh, I've —

Paul: That said, I mean, the —

Leo: Okay, I've seen the first one, which is the teacher who says —

Paul: Yeah. And actually, the Nokia guy — the one the second from the right — I see that one on TV a lot. That's for that Icon —

Leo: "I want a phone that shoots epic video, man."

Paul: The video in the ad looks great, for whatever that's worth. I mean —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Oh, maybe it's a separate video they have online, they show the video the guy takes with his phone; it's actually pretty sweet.

Leo: Here we go. Let's go full-screen on it.

(Video begins)

Man in video: Honestly, I wanted a smartphone that shoots great video, so I got the new Nokia Lumia Icon.

Paul: You can't really see it too well on this ad.

Leo: It says "actual video from" —

Paul: Yeah, but if you go to Youtube, there's a separate video just of what they shot, and it's actually really beautiful.

Man in video: ... capture incredible sound.

Leo: You know what I like about ads like this? It really focuses on the functionality. It's even — you know, half the screen is the person we don't care about, but the other half is actual footage of the Lumia Icon.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: I like that.

Paul: You know what I noticed about these ads just today? I wrote an article about Windows Snap, which is that feature in Windows 8 where you can have two apps side by side.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: The "Honestly" ads are in Snap mode.

Leo: Oh yes! You're right!

Paul: They divide the screen in half, right? I thought that was kind of interesting.

Leo: That is very interesting. Now, if I go — I wonder if I — I'm on that Youtube channel. I wonder if I —

Paul: So if you want to see the original footage, you actually have to go to the Nokia channel.

Leo: On Youtube?

Paul: Youtube, yeah. Let me see if I can find it.

Leo: Let me just — oh, yeah, this is Windows Phone channel.

Paul: Yeah, it's on Nokia. Nokia has it.

Leo: It's the Nokia channel. That's nice, that's confusing. Yes.

Paul: Well, yeah. Right, sure.

Mary Jo: They're still two companies.

Leo: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Wink, wink.

Leo: Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: You know, it'd be nice if Youtube said, "Related channels, the Nokia channel." But no, they say, "Related channels: Marques Brownlee; Google Chrome; Samsung Mobile; CNET; and Android authority." I think they're confused.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Even the featured channels are Windows Phone UK, Windows Phone India, and Canale de Windows Fono.

Paul: Actually, that — you see the "Day on the slopes" video that's in the middle there?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: That's probably it there.

Leo: Day on the slopes. Okay. Let's see. Oh, yes, 30 seconds. No, it's the same; it's an ad.

Paul: No, no. Watch — but this shows video. All of this was taken with the camera, with the phone.

Leo: Oh, all of this was taken with the camera?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Oh.

(Video begins)

Man on video: ... this was all shot with my new Nokia Lumia Icon.

Leo: Oh, oh.

Paul: It's actually — I mean, it's beautiful.

Leo: Yeah, it's gorgeous. Even at full-screen, it's pretty good. It's a little over-compressed, but it's a phone, remember.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Four mics — the sound is good. All right. You got me won.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: And that's the Mary Jo phone, by the way.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: Mary Jo phone, yep. So —

Paul: Mary Jo will sign your Icon if you go to New York City.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: When are you going snowboarding, MoJo?

Mary Jo: Yeah, I will not be on the slopes with my Icon.

Leo: (Laughs) And where will you be signing? Do you have a little booth in Times Square? What is that — what's that all about?

Mary Jo: No, I have a little booth at Rattle N Hum.

Paul: Nice.

Leo: Oh. Just come to the bar.

Mary Jo: Just come by.

Paul: It's a little sign that says, "The doctor is in."

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: Exactly.

Leo: Cool, cool. So that's — that is a good campaign, I think, the "Honestly" campaign. I don't like —

Mary Jo: It's a little — the still ads are a little weird because whenever I see them, like I said, I always think, What,, like, as opposed to dishonestly? The "honestly" word is what kind of throws me off.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: No, I'm with you.

Paul: Well, it's — I think it's because the perception of Windows 8 is so negative.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: These guys are saying, "You know, honestly, this is really good."

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: And it's — it kind of stinks they have to approach it from that standpoint.

Mary Jo: True, true.

Leo: This is why Hillary Clinton, by the way, is not the President of the United States.

Paul: That's why?

Leo: Because he did the same thing with her. "Honestly, she's not bad."

Paul: I think there were a few more reasons, but —

Leo: "Honestly, she's really almost as good as Barack Obama. Honestly —"

Paul: Hey, Leo?

Leo: What?

Paul: Honestly?

Leo: (Laughs)

Paul: I wish she had been elected. (Laughs)

Leo: At this point, it couldn't be a bad thing, wouldn't be a bad thing. But let's not get all political on you.

Mary Jo: No, let's not. (Laughs)

Leo: "Looking for a laptop" — so this is their "Honestly" page, microsoft.com/honestly, and it's a bunch of ads. And the only one — so I haven't seen the snowboarding one. I guess I don't watch the same sporty programs you watch.

Paul: (Laughs) Right, that's me.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: But I have seen the fat teacher saying —

Paul: I'm the Sporty Spice of the podcast world.

Leo: He says something like, "I hate that there's all these computers in school," or something. "I still think you need to write — read, write" —

(Video begins)

Man in video: Honestly, I'm a little old-fashioned. I love chalk and erasers, but change is coming.

Leo: So to me — I agree with Mary Jo. That's the wrong message to send. I guess, maybe it's to appeal to a certain group —

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: — who hate computers.

Mary Jo: Yeah. (Laughs)

Paul: I — well, listen, those people are going to love Surface because it's nothing like a computer.

Mary Jo and Leo: (Laugh)

Leo: So he's going to — his job is not strictly marketing, though. Mark Penn will be Chief Strategy Officer —

Paul: I think —

Leo: — or something, right?

Mary Jo: Right. So his new title is Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, and it's a little unclear what that really means. It says he's going to look into areas of future investment for the company, but no more — he's not going to do advertising anymore, it seems.

Leo: Is it biz dev, or is it vision thing?

Mary Jo: No, no. Biz —

Paul: You know what I think it's related to, Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: What?

Paul: They always talk about him and data, metrics and — Microsoft loves metrics, right? So this guy comes in and he's like, "I have all this data that shows that this worked and this didn't work." And those guys must swoon over him. And so I bet what they want him to do is apply that methodology to new market and product ideas. You know? I bet that's what it is.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Although a lot of people — I shouldn't say a lot. Some people say all the metrics he comes out with to show how successful Scroogled's been and how great his marketing campaigns have been is kind of cooked. So —

Paul: Yeah, self-serving, you mean.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: You can lie with statistics, Mary Jo? Are you sure?

Mary Jo: Surprise!

Leo: Well, he was — I mean, that was his background. He was a pollster with the Clinton campaign.

Mary Jo: Yeah, right.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: So that's all about metrics and data.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah. Hmm.

Mary Jo: Yeah. So he's going to still — I asked about the Scroogled campaign, and they said, "You know, we're not saying he's not going to be handling that anymore. He's still doing competitive intelligence, but he won't be the actual one coming up with the ads. That, now, is going to be under Chris Capossela, who, by the way, is a big fan of Windows Weekly.

Leo: Hey, Chris!

Paul: (Laughs) Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yep. He listens to the show a lot.

Paul: And since we're sucking up to him, I will say he's also a great guy.

Mary Jo: He is.

Leo: Nice guy. Love that Chris.

Paul: No, but he really is. I mean, he really is.

Mary Jo: Yeah. So he's the new single person in charge of advertising/marketing. So there is finally just one person now instead of two. Before it was Tami Reller and Mark Penn; now it's just Chris Capossela —

Leo: That was — that was probably an ugly thing. Wasn't — so —

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: So Tami Reller was, along with Julie Larson-Green, tapped to take over Windows after Sinofsky left.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Both — both Green —

Paul: And it felt so temporary, remember?

Leo: It was temporary. It was really temporary.

Paul: I know, but at the — even when it  happened, I remember the — well, I didn't remember, I assume the conversation we must have had was, "this can't be the long-term solution."

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Like, it just seemed like they were looking for some continuity, treading some water while they figured out what was going on. Maybe they knew the reorg was coming, whatever. But it never felt permanent.

Leo: Well, and in fact, it wasn't. Both moved on quickly.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So Reller is out. Now, I — the same story from Kara Swisher said that Tony Bates was out. I don't see that here. Is that true or not?

Mary Jo: Yep, he's out.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Tony Bates is out.

Leo: And you — you both said that's kind of inevitable. If you're on the shortlist for CEO and you don't get it, you've been a CEO —

Paul: Right. I think that's the key part, what you just said. He was a CEO before, wanted to be a CEO. I think he was a long shot for Microsoft, but he'll — I almost said "he'll crawl back." He'll go back to Silicon Valley, and, no doubt, find something in technology.

Leo: He'll do fine, I'm sure.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Sure.

Mary Jo: But, you know what I think's interesting? So Bates is out, but the person replacing Bates is a very familiar figure if you've covered Microsoft for a long time. It's Eric Rudder. And Eric Rudder, actually at one time in his career, was seen as Bill Gates' heir apparent.

Leo: Oh, interesting.

Mary Jo: So he has been doing a lot of kind of secret missions inside the company. He's been heading up advanced strategy, and now he's going to take over the evangelism and biz dev role at Microsoft, at least as an interim takeover. We don't know if that'll be permanent or not.

Leo: By the way, TechnoSquid found a picture of Mark Penn from his political era, back when he was in politics. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Oh, boy.

Leo: I — that's not a flattering image.

Mary Jo: That is not.

Leo: It's an illustration of him as a pig. (Snorts) So is this all —

Paul: Listen, there's going to be a burst of sulfur and he's going to appear next to you, so —

Leo: Aaaaaaaah! So this is all Satya Nadella's — chess pieces are starting to move on the board, as you would expect, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Right, right.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: You know —

Leo: So did he get rid of Tony, or did Tony walk out the door?

Mary Jo: Right. That —

Leo: Did he get rid of Tami, or did Tami walk out the door?

Mary Jo: So I'll tell you what I've heard about that. I've heard that, now that he's taking over and kind of adjusting his inner circle known as the Senior Leadership Team, it became apparent, like, "We don't need two people 1heading up marketing. One of you is going to win." And it ended up being Chris Capossela, actually.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: And so I think Tami probably — if I were her — just said, "Okay. Well, I'm out."

Leo: So she was — yeah, that would make sense. So she was told, "Hey, you're not going to be it."

Mary Jo: "You're not going to be it."

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: And —

Paul: If I could speculate real quick, before we move onto the next person.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: I just — I get the vibe from both her and Julie Larson-Green that both of them were basically given the same deal, which was, "You're not going to do the thing you're doing now. You're welcome to go wherever you'd like to go in Microsoft, you know, and try for a job. It's up to you." And Julie Larson-Green said yes to something somewhere else in Microsoft, and Tami Reller said, "Screw this," you know, and left. I — that's how I sort of perceive it.

Mary Jo: Yep, I bet you're right.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: And so yeah, Julie Larson-Green is now no longer heading up Devices and Studio. She now is going to work for Qi Lu in the Applications and Services group. She's off the senior —

Leo: But that's where she came from. She's Office, right? She's —

Mary Jo: Yeah. She's more like, yeah, design, Office, and — but an interesting thing is, she's off Senior Leadership Team now, which is the inner circle.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: So she's not in that group anymore.

Leo: Right.

Paul: She's not in the star chamber anymore.

Mary Jo: She is not.

Leo: That's too bad because I think she was only — the only woman there, right? Or were — are there other women there?

Paul: No, there were a few others.

Mary Jo: It was her, Tami Reller —

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: — who's gone, and now there's two women left on the SLT, as they call it, Senior Leadership Team. There's — (Laughs) just because we need more acronyms.

Paul: Amy Hoods, right?

Mary Jo: Yeah, Amy Hood, CFO.

Leo: Oh, yes. Okay.

Mary Jo: And Lisa Brummel, who heads up Human Resources at Microsoft.

Leo: Oh, okay. Okay. So — but still, that's two women gone.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: I — yeah. I realize this isn't, like, an Affirmative Thing —

Leo: (Laughs) No. Oh, no.

Paul: — but maybe they could have gotten rid of two guys. I mean, I — it's — it's still kind of middle-aged white guy heavy over there.

Leo: Yeah, yeah. Although John Thompson's been very kind of activist, hasn't he?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: He's the chairman of the board now, right?

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: And you've got — so on the Senior Leadership Team now, you've got Satya Nadella, Qi Lu, and Harry Shum. So not all middle-aged white guys, right? (Laughs)

Leo: And Qi Lu —

Paul: Not to mention —

Leo: — is widely acknowledged as brilliant. I mean, he came from Yahoo, where he was head of search over at Yahoo.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Worked at Search — Microsoft for a while, but is — I mean, I've met the guy. He's widely — and by the way, also a fan of TWIT. Well, at least he recognized me and said, "Oh, yeah, I listen all the time."

Mary Jo: Nice.

Leo: But widely recognized as a really smart guy. So that's good.

Paul: Right, right.

Leo: You want smart people.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Honestly.

Paul: Sure.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Honestly, they do.

Paul: There was some — there was some language in that — in the letter. You know, Satya Nadella wrote a letter to employees. And just like the previous one, it was just released publicly. There was some language in there that I thought was a little telling, right? He talked about — I informed the SLT they all had to be all in on the strategy, yadda yadda, and with that in mind, we're going to tell you about the people who are leaving." You know, in other words, some of these guys weren't all in with the strategy. (Laughs) You know?

Leo: Yeah. That is telling, isn't it? Yeah.

Paul: I thought that was kind of interesting.

Leo: Yeah. "The past month, I've had the opportunity to talk with many of you — in person, on Yammer" — nice plug, right in the first line there. ?— and in groups in Reddman as well as Boston and Northern California." Hey, Satya, next time you're in NorCal, come by. Say hi.

Paul: And Boston, by the way — I mean, really.

Leo: Yeah. You're in the — he's following us, Paul. So "Tony Bates has decided this is the right time for him to look for his next opportunity ..." (Laughs)

Paul: By the way, that, too, was telling.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Tony Bates has decided to leave.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Tami Reller did not decide to leave. I mean, we all believe she did, but —

Leo: I see that, yeah.

Paul: No. You know, her position is a little different..

Leo: Yeah. "And Mark Penn will play a new leadership role at the company: EVP's Chief Strategy Officer. Tami agrees with the 'go forward' approach of a single marketing leader and will support Chris through his transition into his new role. She will then take time off" — (Laughs) — "and pursue other interests."

Paul: Yeah. I mean, seriously. Could you find a more trite phrase to describe someone who just got bounced out of the company? I mean —

Leo: Yeah. But you're — you're absolutely right. You have to parce these phrases. There's no —

Paul: I just find that — yeah. Very strange.

Leo: Tami has not decided, she's — it's been decided for her. But he said very nice things about her.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: I'm sure she's getting a big golden —

Paul: There's some nice stuff in there about rowing a boat.

Leo: She's getting a good golden parachute, right? And she will have the money to take some time off, and "we do look forward to seeing what she does next," as Satya Nadella says. And then he quotes a book from the rowing team.

Paul: It's only a matter of time before we're going to get haikus at the end of these things.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: It — he says it's the team of rowers working together at the highest level, that's called "the swing of the boat."

Paul: Yeah. That's the oar coming around and hitting you in the back of the head.

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: It's when — when teams, kind of, are all rowing together. It just kind of magically starts to swing.

Paul: Yeah. "One of us is not rowing together, Tami."

Leo: Yes. Poetry, that's what a good swing looks like.

Paul: "The boat is turning; it's not going straight. Do you want to know why? Because of you. It's because of you."

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Aww, come on now. (Laughs)

Leo: Somebody's oar's not in the water.

Paul: I just — yeah, I just — I don't know. "Some of us have stronger arms than others, Tami."

Leo: Honestly. (Laughs)

Mary Jo:  (Laughs) Honestly — yeah.

Leo: I like this. Honestly.

Paul: "Honestly, Tami —"

Leo: "Honestly, Tami, time has come."

Paul: ?— you've been Scroogled." (Laughs)

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: No, I think, though, that makes sense. And you bring in a single person, and I think that all makes sense.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: And Chris Capossela is, you think, well-equipped to take over?

Mary Jo: He's a great guy. You remember —

Leo: I think they need — you guys complain about the marketing message a lot. I think they need —

Paul: Yeah. I have high hopes for this now. I wish they could bring back Tom Rizzo, but — because he was another kind of Mark Pennish kind of guy when you think about it. Chris Capossela used to be high up in the Office org and was an Office — he was in a bunch of parts of Microsoft. But I always thought he was kind of going to run Office of some kind. What was the guy — Jeff — somebody who looked like Bill Gates, who runs the —

Mary Jo: Raikes. Jeff Raikes.

Paul: Jeff Raikes also was a guy kind of like that. I thought he was going to move in that direction, and things — you know, obviously, I'm just looking at it from the outside, but I always kind of figured those guys would — one or the other would kind of run Office or whatever, but —

Leo: He — this letter emphasizes the role that Capossela played in the transition to devices and services, so that — I mean, it's — he's not — in fact, this whole paragraph doesn't talk about what a great marketer he is or what a great communicator he is —

Paul: Well, he worked with OEM's. Wasn't that the deal?

Leo: Yeah, he worked with OEM's on a global basis, gives them "visibility and insight into how customers are buying and using our products." I like this. This is less of a, "He knows how to put lipstick on a pig" —

Paul: It's — yeah.

Leo: — and more, "He understands the business really well."

Paul: Nuts and bolts.

Leo: "He understands our customers really well." I'm — that bodes well.

Mary Jo: Yeah. He also is the guy who was doing some of the "store within a store" stuff. You know, at BestBuy, how there's a Microsoft store.

Paul: I was just wondering about that, yeah. So he was the retail guy as well.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Okay, good. Yeah, I — one thing I'll miss about Reller — I'm sorry to keep interrupting.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: The one thing I'll miss about Reller is, for the last 18 months or so, she has kind of been the public face of Windows.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: Yes.

Paul: And every few months, like a groundhog or whatever, she pops out and she starts to talk about how things are going. And — in other words, it's going to be a long winter, Mary Jo, is what I'm saying. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: I could tell. (Laughs)

Paul: And I don't know who will fulfill that role now.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Whether it's Goldman Sachs or whatever — you know, wherever these events are.

Mary Jo: Well, the person it should be —

Paul: She kind of did that.

Mary Jo: — is —

Paul: Chris Capossela.

Mary Jo: It should be Terry Myerson.

Paul: Oh, Terry Myerson. Oh, because he runs the OS division.

Mary Jo: I would think. I don't know.

Paul: Okay.

Mary Jo: I mean, if you want the person who should be talking more publicly about what's going on with Office and — I mean, sorry — with Windows and Windows Phone and XBOX, it should be Terry Myerson.

Paul: Well, it should — yeah. I mean, I — right. So I mean, Tami was in kind of a marketing position —

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: — and that makes some sense, too, but hopefully we'll see Terry Myerson — I would expect we would — at Build soon.

Mary Jo: Build, yeah.

Paul: Anyway, I'm sorry. I interrupted you about 17 times.

Mary Jo: No, no. I think it's — I think all these moves are really interesting. It's setting up a Microsoft with a lot of people who have been around the company for a long time coming back, like Capossela and Rudder, right? They're kind of back in the center of Microsoft. They've been there; they're both long-time veterans, so that's pretty interesting that they're going deep and kind of taking people who've been around and bringing them back into positions of power there.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Well, good.

Paul: The next thing I want —

Leo: Well, and this is just the beginning, right? Presumably, there'll be more changes and more repositioning, I would guess.

Mary Jo: Yeah, you'd think. Yeah, I mean, there's still rumors about what's going to happen with Kevin Turner, who's the COO, because he also did not get the CEO job, and there's been talk — maybe he's going to leave as well. But that's just still, at this point, rumor. Yeah, so things can still change more. And then, you know, once the Nokia acquisition is signed off on, then Stephen Elop comes back, too, and joins —

Leo: Well, he's not — he's still running Nokia. He's not doing — he has a title at Microsoft.

Paul: He's not —

Mary Jo: He does.

Paul: He's not — so he actually moved out of the CEO position at Nokia.

Leo: That's confusing.

Paul: He's the executive chairman, or something like that.

Leo: So he's not running Nokia; he went right over to Microsoft, and no word —

Paul: No, no. He's not — he's still at Nokia.

Leo: Oh, he is.

Paul: It's kind of a strange thing. Like, he's — he did the Nokia stuff at Mobile World Congress.

Leo: Right.

Paul: He does a pretty good job of that, I think.

Leo: No, he did a great job. I gave him an A+. He was concise.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: He announced five phones in forty-five minutes.

Paul: I know.

Leo: He positioned it all, I thought, very well.

Paul: Yeah. I feel like he knows the stuff. You know, like, a lot of CEO's, they're a little detached from the day-to-day or from the products or whatever, and I really feel like this guy is in the trenches. And so that may speak well for him doing the devices stuff at Microsoft.

Leo: Well, and he's Canadian.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: And he's — okay.

Leo: So need we say more?

Paul: Look, Leo. No one is perfect.

Leo: He's very polite.

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Okay.

Paul: Hockey fans. You know, you've got to be careful.

Leo: So we wouldn't expect any announcements about his role until after the acquisition is finalized.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Well, I mean, we presume he will be in charge of devices.

Mary Jo: Oh, well, we know he's going to head up Devices and Studios. We already know that.

Leo: They have said that. Okay.

Mary Jo: Yeah, yeah. But we don't know what his order of business will be, or kind of what he's thinking, strategy-wise. We don't know that.

Paul: Hopefully, he'll write a burning platform speech or demo.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo:  About the Nokia X, you're hoping?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. (Laughs)

Leo: "Our platform" — who wrote that original one? What was that?

Paul: He did.

Leo: He did.

Mary Jo: He did, yeah.

Paul: It was — when he came to Nokia, he spent a few months or several months, whatever, and he finally said, "This is a burning platform. We need to switch."

Leo: Yeah, that's interesting. Did he mean — he meant switch to Windows Phone?

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: I think, at the time he wrote it, they hadn't picked Windows Phone. I could be wrong about that, but I thought — or maybe this was when they announced it internally. I can't remember how it went, the order.

Mary Jo: I think it was when they announced it, right? And they — he had to explain why they decided to — yeah.

Leo: Is there any chance he will get canned, or will leave because he's not CEO?

Mary Jo: I've seen speculation about that, too, saying because he didn't get the CEO, maybe he's not going to stick around, either. I don't know. Hard on that one.

Paul: Hmm. That's interesting, yeah.

Leo: I think it's a homecoming. And I tell you, he's one guy who — you know, coming from Finland, will appreciate Seattle weather more than many.

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Paul: Right.

Leo: "It's warm here. The sun shines! I love it!"

Mary Jo: Yeah, he still has a house in Seattle. He never let the house go when he moved, so he's all set.

Paul: That guy must have traveled so much.

Leo: He never let go of his hopes, his dreams to come back one day.

Paul: I don't think his family moved, right? Didn't his family stay?

Mary Jo: Yeah, they stayed.

Leo: Really? Wow.

Paul: Yeah, that's tough.

Leo: Wow. All right. Anything more to say about these transitions before we move on to another topic?

Paul: Yes.

Mary Jo: Well, I wanted to talk about that Bloomberg story from today, about — it's kind of like an "inside baseball" story about what happened around Steve Ballmer leaving Microsoft.

Leo: Oh.

Mary Jo: It's a story called "Microsoft's Nadella Manages a Legacy of the Ballmer and Board Split." And the part of the story — it goes into all kinds of detail about what happened and how — why did Steve Ballmer actually end up leaving earlier than planned. But the part of the story that I thought is worth bringing up here is Dina Bass at Bloomberg's sources told her that Microsoft's board was split over whether or not to buy Nokia.

Leo: Oh!

Mary Jo: And Gates did not want it and Ballmer did.

Leo: Huh.

Mary Jo: And it became a very hotly-contested topic, with Ballmer actually saying, "If you guys don't do what I want, I'm going to leave the job as CEO." Yeah. But they ended up doing it.

Leo: Credible?

Mary Jo: She's pretty credible.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: I think she's — her sources are good, and yeah, I think this probably is true. And it also — it kind of creates a lot of questions about, okay, so the board did come around and ended up making the deal happen. They're going to buy Nokia's handset and services business. But Gates wasn't in favor, and initially, Nadella also was not in favor according to the story, and then changed his mind in the end.

Paul: By the way, this is absolutely something that can be debated.

Mary Jo: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I don't think anyone would look at this and say, "Yep, this is clearly the right thing to do." I think there's a lot of questions here.

Mary Jo: Right. There are, there are. So yeah, it just creates a lot of questions, though, now. In that story, they say the fact that Nokia was talking about doing an Android phone may have led to Microsoft's decision to buy them, which we actually speculated on the show last week.

Leo: Yeah, yeah. And — yeah, and it's a little more credible with this phone —

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: — which must have been in development around that timeframe.

Mary Jo: Yeah. So yeah, this kind of opens a whole other can of worms. You know, you assume Gates is now on board with it since they ended up buying them. And Gates stays on the board and he's Nadella's advisor in his new role, so —

Leo: And Ballmer left.

Mary Jo: Ballmer left, even though they bought it, and —

Leo: Is it possible that they got the roles flipped, and Ballmer said, "If you buy Nokia, I'm out of here."

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Yeah, I don't think so.

Paul: He's like, "Wait, you're buying it?"

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Well, they — her story also says Bates was dead set against it, too, and Bates is out.

Leo: Yeah. We —

Mary Jo: Could be interesting.

Leo: We're still waiting — because Nokia will become part of Microsoft only when China says it's okay.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Well, then —

Leo: And you saw these —

Mary Jo: Maybe not just China, right? The Google Samsung thing is crazy.

Leo: You saw these stories, yeah. Google and Samsung both —

Paul: I could see why they're deathly afraid of Microsoft and Nokia.

Mary Jo: Well, you know, the crazy part, to me, of this — it's an alleged report, it's not a definite thing, but it says they're — that Google and Samsung are against the deal because they're afraid Microsoft's going to basically charge exorbitant patent fees —

Leo: Ah.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: — in the wireless space. Which — I don't know. I just think they're looking for an excuse to try to help derail or postpone this deal.

Leo: It wouldn't hurt.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: It's not like they're a big competitor, but any competition — you know, these guys play to win.

Mary Jo: Right. Yeah. So yeah, Microsoft has been saying all along, they expect the Nokia transition to be approved and signed off on by the end of March, but now I wonder if that actually may be postponed a bit, given all this going on there.

Leo: Well, especially since Vladimir Putin has announced he's annexing Nokia.

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: I think that's going to change things considerably.

Paul: Yep. He's a crazy man.

Leo: We've decided to —

Paul: I think we should appease him, by the way. I think that's the right way to go.

Leo: Sure. Any time a guy invades a country and says, "I'm done. That's all" —

Paul: Historically, that has always worked out.

Leo: Yeah, always worked out.

Paul: That's all I'm saying.

Leo: Just let him have it because you don't want war, or anything.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Just don't say anything.

Leo: And — yeah, Putin says, "I want" —

Paul: Let him host the Olympics. It will be — I mean, the parallels are just —

Leo: (Laughs) It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Paul and I are a little history-addled. You can ignore us.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: All right. Very interesting stuff. We will watch with interest. Now, we replace the top story with the — from "CEO Search" to "Who's Next?"

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Honestly.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: Honestly, who's out next?

Leo: I do like Reller — Penn and Reller. I do like that.

Mary Jo: I love that.

Paul: I know. I feel bad I wasn't able to come up with anything for that.

Leo: Oh, honey, this is the title of the show. You have — you've named the show.

Paul: (Laughs) "Penn and Reller"?

Leo: "Penn and Reller," yeah.

Paul: Okay. Well, you know — yeah.

Leo: (Laughs) I'm stealing it.

Mary Jo: "Honestly, Penn and Reller." (Laughs)

Leo: Honestly. Well, I love "Honestly, you've been Scroogled," which was Paul's subtitle for his story. Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah, that was good. Yeah.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: He brought it all together.

Paul: Right. I don't think anyone got that, by the way.

Leo: I did! Paul, I am your biggest fan. I get all your jokes, I love all your illustrations. I'm your biggest fan.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: I can't — I wake up in the morning — Lisa'll tell you — I wake up in the morning and say, "I've just got to go see the SuperSite for Windows. I've got to see what Paul Thurrott's done today."

Paul: "What have you done?"

Leo: "What have you done today, Thurrott?" (Laughs)

Paul: Just roll up the newspaper and start hitting me on the nose.

Leo: (Laughs) Thurrott! Stop it! I've told you so many times! No more illustrations from XBOX games!

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: Our show brought to you — can't wait for the Titanfall, you know, captions and so forth.

Paul: Less than a week.

Leo: Less than a week. He's counting it down.

Paul: It's — I'll preview it for you later. It's called "Titanfail."

Leo: (Laughs) Next week's show, ladies and gentlemen. You already know the title.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: You can hear the contents later.

Our show today brought to you by our friends at ITProTV. Tim and Don are great guys who stole everything from me, and I'm happy about it. How about — how about that? Actually, they've been teaching IT professionals what they need to know to get the certs they need, to get a better job, to get a promotion, just to be better at IT. Whether it's CompTIA, the A+, the Net+, Security+, the CASP, Microsoft's MCSA and MTA certs or the Cisco certs. They've added, now, these — what is it? ISC squared, is that how you say it? ISCC certs, they're working on those as well. If you go to ITProTV, you'll see what I mean because basically, after — they've been teaching this for a long time. They came to the NAB show, I guess it was last year. We did a panel, and they kind of got inspired. They said, "Wow. I think it'd be kind of cool to do what" — you know, they were Screensavers fans, and — "to do what Leo's doing at TWIT, but teach people IT." So they've got a Roku channel; they stream live. They've got a chatroom — I guess it's coming up. Server 2012. Paul, you're going to want to stay tuned for that. They're set looks familiar, doesn't it? Some gears there. Actually, I like their set an awful lot. It's got a mix of the screensavers and TWIT. They are really doing great work. They even bought, you know, the Tricaster. They use the same equipment we do, same lighting and everything. And this has become a great way to learn without even knowing it. IT. Get it, get it, get it? So Tim and Don and their team of instructors really do a wonderful job. If you're looking for hundreds of hours of content for the certs that you need — 20 hours are added every week. Topics like network security, laptop repair, VLAN subnetting. Every episode library is organized by exam objective, so it's very easy to say, "Oh, I need to work on this section and learn." It's fun, too. It's engaging. I really love how they do it. IT doesn't have to be boring. This is a fun, easy, entertaining way to learn. Now, they charge a single, low monthly fee, or yearly fee. Normally $57 a month for everything, full run of the place; $570 for the entire year. But we've got an offer for Windows weekly listeners. If you go to itpro.tv/ww, and use the code "WW50," — there we go — "WW50," you're going to get 50 percent off your subscription for the lifetime of your account. Not for the first month, the first year, but forever. That's $28.50 a month; that's less than one book, and you get it all. $285 a year. I — Tim and Don have done a great job. They're coming up to see us again. I'll introduce you when they come. I'm just really pleased to be partnering them. And I think, thanks to their relationship with TWIT, they've crossed the thousand subscriber mark, which is fabulous. But there are still a lot more people who want to learn IT. If that's you, watch on your computer, watch on your Roku, watch on your laptop or your tablet. itpro.tv/ww, don't forget "WW50." You can watch the sample materials. Probably a good idea. But if you decide to buy, use the offer code "WW50." Learn without even knowing ... IT. Get it?

Windows Weekly on the air. Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley. We're talking about, of course, Microsoft, Windows, the shakeup. We're talking about XBOX, we're talking about Hadoop, and — good news: update one has gone gold. RTM, they call it now, right?

Mary Jo: Yes. At least, we think so.

Leo: Yeah. So what does that mean? When are we going to get it? Why do we think — first of all, why do we think so?

Mary Jo: Okay. So Microsoft's barely even acknowledging that this thing that we've been calling "Windows 8.1, update 1" exists. (Laughs)

Paul: This thing.

Leo: They said it, didn't they, once?

Mary Jo: They said it, finally, in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: But — and they actually talked about a few of the features there. But up until that point, they wouldn't even say that it existed. So asking them, "Did it RTM?" a couple days ago, of course the answer is, "No comment."

Leo: "Did what? Did what RTM? What are you talking about?"

Mary Jo: Exactly. (Laughs) But I've talked to a few of my sources, and they said yes, it has HTM'D. And so now what happens is a little more testing takes place, and then Microsoft hands that code off to OEM's so that they can put this update on new PC's and tablets that are coming out staring after April. And the time when we will get it — the Windows 8 users — or 8.1 users, I should say — is, if you're an MSDN subscriber, April 2, says Paul Thurrott. That's what he said.

Leo: Ooooooh.

Paul: That disreputable fool.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: That guy — that guy. I don't know if I believe it.

Leo: What does he know? What does he know?

Mary Jo: Yeah. And then we've also both heard April 8 is when the everyday users will get it, and it will be pushed out through Windows Update on that date.

Leo: Everyday users. And you know who you are.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Yeah. So maybe we should revisit what's in it.

Paul: [unintelligible] through Windows Update.

Mary Jo and Leo: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: No. So what's in this thing? So this is the version of — the update to Windows that's going to make Windows 8.1 work better with the mouse. Yay. (Laughs)

Leo: Gee, you would think Microsoft would be kind of past the point where they're making Windows work better with a mouse. Just —

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: — just seems a funny thing to say.

Mary Jo: Well, it's — I think it's meant for people like me, who use — still use Windows on a desktop, and for us —

Leo: Old-timers, yeah.

Mary Jo: Right. Don't have a touchscreen. It's like, yeah, you already can use Windows 8.1 with a mouse, but they're just going to make it a lot easier with right-click menus, contextual menus, and things like that.

Leo: You'll be so much happier now, yeah.

Mary Jo: I think I'll —

Paul: By the way, tied to the expiration of XP, right?

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: Oh.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: That makes sense.

Mary Jo: Same thing. April 8.

Paul: No, they really want people using Windows 8.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: They do.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: They do. And what else are you going to get? You're going to get some changes to how apps, the — how do you describe that, Paul? You actually described it well — the bar that goes over the apps —

Paul: Yeah, it's a title bar. Like, a window title bar.

Mary Jo: Title bar.

Paul: Like you see in windows. You know, normal windows.

Mary Jo: Right. And a smaller footprint, so this is going to — this version will work with 1 gig of RAM, 16 gigs of storage. So it'll work better on those really low-end, cheap, small tablets that Microsoft wants people to build.

Paul: 250 bucks or less.

Mary Jo: Right. And then, it's going to have the new IE enterprise mode, which will let businesses who've had trouble because they standardized on IE 8 actually use IE 11, which is built into Windows. So it'll have this new enterprise compatibility mode. What else? On new PC's that do not have a touchscreen, supposedly it's going to boot to desktop by default.

Leo: Huh.

Mary Jo: Which is interesting. Only ones without the touchscreen.

Leo: Huh. So if they don't have a touchscreen.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Huh.

Mary Jo: But if you're a user who already has Windows 8.1 and you're going to move up to 8.1 update 1, and you don't have "boot to desktop" set as your default, nothing's going to happen. You're still going to have Metro as your default.

Leo: All right.

Mary Jo: So yeah. It's not a huge update, just some niceties.

Paul: It's funny because it isn't, but in many ways, it kind of is, right? Like, it really isn't a big update, but it's a — it's kind of interesting to me how much attention this thing has gotten and how interested people are in it.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Because ultimately, yeah, it's really not that big of an update.

Leo: It's a little bit of a — it's a capitulation, except it's not because now we know that it was only — what did he say? Only the — "We had to get the novice users in line, and now we can go back to the old way of doing things."

Paul: Right, right, right.

Leo: Who was it said that? I forgot.

Mary Jo: Some guy on Reddit, who —

Leo: Oh, that's right, yeah.

Mary Jo: — is a nobody, really.

Leo: Did we ever identify him?

Mary Jo: (Laughs) I think he — he works on Windows, oh has, but he's not somebody who probably — we don't believe he's somebody who actually had input or knowledge into the higher levels.

Paul: This — yeah, you know, it's funny. That came and went. So I must — this must have been the week I was off.

Mary Jo: It did.

Paul: But I wrote something rather scathing about that. And my problem with it is twofold. One is that it's not true that they planned this along. That's complete [sensor beep]. There's no other nice way to say it. I mean, that's completely made up. This notion that "We made Metro so we could later make the desktop a better place power users" is complete and utter nonsense. That's insane. That they may come back, now, and fix desktop because of the reaction to Windows 8 is fine, and I — and that's great, and I welcome that as a desktop user. But to claim otherwise is absolutely crazy. I just — I found that whole thing to be very disingenuous, and I just — I don't know. That really — that whole thing rubbed me the wrong way.

Leo: The notion that they planned this all along.

Paul: The whole — the whole premise of it, yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah. It would be a very elaborate plan if that had been the plan. (Laughs)

Paul: This guy is — yeah. It's like a Clouseau movie or something.

Leo, Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Like, it's just not — that's not what happened.

Leo: "No, really, we meant to do that." (Laughs)

Paul: "Yeah, if you guys had just shut up and sucked it in, we would have just revealed our master plan when Windows" — shut up. It's just — it's so made up.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it didn't feel real.

Leo: So if it is RTM, does that mean any minute? What does it mean?

Mary Jo: Any minute —

Leo: You know, it's — the idea of a Goldmaster's changed a lot.

Paul: I know.

Leo: You don't have to ship a disc to the OEM's —

Paul: There's no gold — yeah, yeah.

Leo: — who will then, integrate it into their build. I mean, it's digital.

Paul: You need just, like, a shipment plaque that's going on the wall at Dell.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: To celebrate the release —

Leo: Yeah, it's digital. What am I doing here? There we go.

Paul: — of Windows 8.1 for work groups, or whatever they're calling it.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Oh, well.

Mary Jo: Yeah, but it's interesting. It's not going to be instantaneous, from what we hear. I think there's still some testing to be done. But otherwise, originally, I had heard they were targeting to push this out with the March Patch Tuesday, which would be next week. And I guess they decided that was too soon, and they — so they push it to the next. Because they want to do it by Windows Update, and —

Leo: They want to do it —

Paul: Plus, you don't want to get in the way of Titanfall. You know what I'm saying?

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Exactly. I know, it was going to be in the same day, wasn't it?

Leo: It was.

Paul: Yeah, you don't want that.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: We noticed that. Yeah, and — okay. I — you know, I think this — is there — the reason — you're right, it's a minor update, but the reason people making a big deal is there is some — there is some meaning to be derived from the choices they've made. Is that a good way to put it?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Well, I — yeah, I — I think the primary takeaway needs to be that this really isn't about us or people using Windows today. I mean, it's really about new devices. It's about enabling these lo-cost, low-end devices. It's letting Windows compete in that 16 gigabyte storage space, which is where entry level is on all tablets except for Windows tablets. To run in only 1 gigabyte of RAM, where say, maybe 2 gigs is probably the realistic minimum today and, by the way, the realistic minimum on Windows RT as well. And that so PC makers can sell traditional computers — desktops, laptops, ultrabooks, whatever — and have the experience be what people expect.

Leo: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You turn on your computer, it boots to the desktop.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: You right-click on something, a context menu appears.

Leo: I think this is the right thing to do, I really do.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: I do, too.

Paul: It is a capitulation, like you said. I mean, absolutely. It's a reaction to the reaction that people had about Windows 8. It's not — this was not part of some measured plan. You know, like, "We knew this one was coming two years ago." No, it's nothing like that, but you know, it's necessary, in some ways.

Leo: We reviewed the Lenovo Miix 2 —

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: — yesterday on Before You Buy. Shannon Morse reviewed it. She liked it a lot, and we've seen prices as low as 199 bucks for an 8-inch Windows Pro tablet with Office and BestBuy.

Paul: Yeah, I saw they're best player of the weekend, yeah.

Leo: Wow.

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: Yeah. (Laughs)

Paul: Well, it's going to be more of that, and that's — I think that's the point.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: That's amazing.

Paul: Once we get there, then I'll have new things to complain about because one of the things I've been looking at is — if you think about mini tablets — and I won't go into this too deeply — but an Amazon Kindle HDX or a Nexus 7, an iPad Mini —

Leo: Well, you liked your Dell, right? I mean, you loved that.

Paul: Right. And then you move to Windows tablets. You know, depending on what it is you want to do with those things — if it's reading, for example, the Kindle experience is dramatically worse on Windows than it is on any of those other platforms, and that's a real problem. And you could look at anything specific. I mean, Kindle's something I happen to care about; you may care about whatever — Spotify, or whatever the things are that you want to do, but that's — this app issue is still —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: — a problem because even in cases where Windows has the app, it's often less functional on Windows than it is elsewhere.

Leo: Well, and Shannon did note that it's a 1280 by800 screen, so it's a little low. It's not a Retina, so reading's not great on —

Paul: Yeah, and you're not going to get that on —

Leo: Yeah, for 200 bucks.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: It's okay. I — honestly, it's okay.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Honestly.

Paul: Yeah, honest — right, I did — God, I said that.

Leo: Honestly? Honestly.

Paul: Honestly, Leo, I like low-res.

Leo: I was always told by my teachers, "Never say, 'to be honest' or 'to be frank'."

Paul: Right.

Leo: You know, sometimes people say that —

Paul: Because that means everything else you say is bologna.

Leo: Yeah. It's the wrong — it's the wrong thing to say.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Yeah.

Leo: Oh, now you're going to be honest. Oh, good. Okay. So that means —

Paul: (Laughs) Right.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Mark the time, folks.

Leo: Yeah. NOW he's going to be honest.

There is a migration tool for XP users, if you — you know, I was shocked yesterday on Security Now. Steve Gibson said, "You know, this XP thing's overblown. It's fine. If you know what you're doing, it's fine." And I said, "Steve, are you nuts?"

Mary Jo: I know.

Paul: (Laughs) He's really lightening up as he gets older.

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: You know — okay. I'll tell you a couple of things.

Paul: It's like, Security Maybe.

Leo: First of all — (Laughs) yeah, Security — first of all —

Paul: Security ... meh. (Laughs)

Leo: Eh. First of all, he uses XP, and so he doesn't want to stop, right?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Oh, so he's moved off of Windows 2000, finally?

Leo: Yeah. (Laughs) He has.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: And I think he's moving to 7 eventually, but right now he's using XP. But the other point I think he makes is good — if you know what you're doing, you can lock it down.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: But it's really important to understand that most people who are using Windows XP don't know what they're doing.

Paul: Well, right. And tied to that is the fact that if you know what you're doing, that suggests a little bit of — I don't know — advanced usage kind of stuff.

Leo: Yeah. Right.

Paul: And what you're going to discover is that a lot of the applications you want to run aren't going to work on XP anymore, and —

Leo: That's a good point.

Paul: — that may be for artificial reasons, but it's going to be — you know, that's going to be —

Leo: Yeah. I agree.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So you both believe — and I think I do, too — that it is time for 99 percent of you to get off XP and migrate. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: I think it's — Microsoft has got to just start handing out copies of Windows 8 and saying, "Seriously."

Leo: Why not? If you're still using XP — do it as a — do it as, like, as a charitable — (Laughs)

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: But the people who are using it are the ones who couldn't even use Windows 8, a lot of them. And not because they aren't able to; it's because they want to keep their old hardware, right?

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: Or they have a peripheral that won't work with Windows 7 or 8.

Leo: Or a program that won't — right. Yeah.

Mary Jo: Right. So even if they went out and gave away Windows 8 to people who are still on XP, it wouldn't help this situation for many of them. It wouldn't do a thing.

Paul: XP is so old, like, Amish people can use it now. Like, I don't understand what the sort of general purpose usage —

Leo: There's a whole marketing campaign. "XP, okay for Sabbath.)

Paul: (Laughs) Right, right.

Leo: There's a whole marketing campaign.

Paul: It's almost not electronic.

Leo: (Laughs) Yeah. It's, like, the button of operating systems.

Paul: You have to, like, rub two sticks together to get the PC to come on, and then —

Leo: (Laughs) It's — sorry. It's so sacrilegious of us. Here we are, Ash Wednesday, and we're acting like that. Terrible.

Mary Jo: I know. Bad day to make the joke. (Laughs)

Leo: I know. I'm going straight to hell.

Mary Jo: You are. (Laughs)

Leo: That's okay.

Paul: Mark Penn is going to be standing right next to you.

Leo: (Laughs) That's right. That's where all the interesting people and beer is, so —

Mary Jo: I heard that.

Paul: Right. Warm beer.

Leo: (Laughs) It's warm, so I'm sticking with Porters.

Paul: Right, right. English beers.

Leo: English beer's stout, yep. So tell me about this XP — and there's a nag that goes along with it, too, this XP migration tool. What's the story there? Mary Jo has this one.

Mary Jo: Yes, I can tell you guys about it. So I think this migration tool is a version of Laplink. Remember Laplink?

Leo: What? It's — (Laughs) Yes.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah. So this is something that Microsoft's going to give away for free to try to encourage people to move their files, and then they're also saying if you actually have to move applications, you can step up and use a paid version of Laplink that's going to be offered for a discount to try to help you guys get off.

Leo: They're not out of business?

Mary Jo: No, they're still around. (Laughs)

Leo: Wow.

Mary Jo: Yeah. And to make it extra annoying — although this isn't super annoying — starting March 8, which will be one month ahead of the deadline when support ends, your PC, if you're running XP, is going to start giving you a message on the 8th of every month saying, "Hey, you're running a dangerous operating system."

Leo: What?

Mary Jo: Yeah. Only once a month on the 8th —

Paul: That's kind of crazy, by the way.

Mary Jo: — and you can check a box and say, "I never want to see this little message again." But yeah. (Laughs)

Leo: It doesn't actually say "dangerous."

Mary Jo: No, but — yeah. It's trying to get people aware. You know, and we think everybody knows this is the end, and I can tell you —

Leo: No, no, no, no.

Mary Jo: — based on mail I got this week, there are still people out there who don't know. Yeah.

Leo: Yeah. No, they don't know. The people who aren't using XP know, but the reason people who are still using XP is because they're not wired into Windows Weekly.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Yes. They're not possibly as connected as the rest of us, yeah.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: But I do — you know, I say it — on the radio show, I spent a lot of time talking about it because I figure that's reaching a — the kind of broad mass of users.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: And I bet you more than half the people listening to the radio show are still using XP.

Paul: I went to the dentist last week, and they run — I mean, I don't know what it was written in, obviously — but what it looks like to me is a Windows 3X era VB type program.

Leo: Oh, yeah. Sure.

Paul: In Windows XP.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And that's their whole — it's everything, right?

Leo: They can't move.

Paul: When you see your dental X-rays, that's what it's on. It's got some kind of a billing and scheduling system, and whatever.

Leo: They spent a lot of money on that in 1989, and you can't expect them just to move.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: yeah. So I did think, briefly about asking about it, and then I decided I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole.

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: You don't want to know.

Paul: Let's face it: when you're at the dentist, you want to get out of there anyway, so —

Leo: No, and they'd say, "Well, you sound like you know what you're talking about. Can you tell me more?"

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: Uh oh. Watch out.

Paul: windowsxp.com.

Leo: "I don't — I don't know anything about that, no."

Mary Jo: Now, and one of the emails I got this week — I think people are still hoping against hope there's going to be a last-minute reprieve, right? They're like, "You know what? 29 percent of PC's out there, in terms of usage share, are still running XP. So Microsoft, at the last minute — it's going to be like a game of Chicken. They're going to come up against that, and they're going to say, 'All right, we're going to extend it'."

Leo: I think that's possible.

Mary Jo. But they're not.

Leo: Is that not possible? No?

Mary Jo: No, they're not going to. I really don't think they're going to.

Leo: I love the characterization. It is like a game of Chicken. They're standing on the railroad track, there is a train bearing down on them —

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: — and you're saying they're not going to —

Paul: It's like an episode of Davey and Goliath.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: It is. (Laughs)

Paul: Like, his foot's kind of caught in the track —

Leo: Oh, man. "Help me, Davey!"

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: "I can't! I'm going to go get — I'll go get the fireman." "No! The train's coming too fast! Help!" (Makes a squishing sound)

Paul: Yep, typical Windows XP user right there.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Yeah. Yeah, and that —

Leo: So really, how hard is this going to be? It's going to be hard.

Mary Jo: Oh, another — yeah. Another one that they think — another thing they think that we should bring up, which is also not true, is — well, okay. Microsoft's going to revoke support, but you know what? There's still going to be somebody out there who's going to sell me patches under the table or something.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah, sure. Sure.

Paul: Yes.

Mary Jo: It's like, no.

Leo: There'll be a brisk black market in Windows patches.

Paul: You're right.

Leo: A guy will call you from India, saying, "Microsoft says that you're using XP, and I have patches for you."

Paul: Actually, that would be a great scam.

Leo: Oh, it's going to happen.

Mary Jo: Somebody will do it.

Paul: "Yeah, we can protect your computer. Just give me your login, and" —

Leo: Yeah, no. They — it's already happening. You know, they call up saying, "I'm from Microsoft, and you've got problems. And just run the Event Viewer. See all those red Xs? Oh, well, we can — give me access to your computer and $300, and I'll fix it." And I guarantee you, the next step is, "I see you're running XP. I'm calling from Reddman, Washington, and I will fix it for you."

Paul: (Laughs) Actually, with that accent, you could be calling from Reddman, Washington.

Leo: Yes. I shouldn't use that accent. People get mad at me. But that's what the guy sounds like, so sorry. And I think, absolutely, you're going to see that.

Paul: Yeah, I think you're right.

Leo: Steve poo-poos the idea — the notion — which I have, that hackers are just waiting until April 9th to release a wide array of Windows network worms designed to infect your computer without your knowledge. I — he says no.

Paul: That would be kind of amazing.

Mary Jo: It would. (Laughs)

Paul: No.

Leo: He says, "No, that's not — hackers, they aren't going to do that."

Paul: I don't feel like something is going to fall apart on April — whatever the date is, 8th, the 14th, whatever.

Mary Jo: 8th, right.

Paul: If these people had these incredible XP hacks, I don't understand why you'd sit on them. I mean, just use them now. It's not like anything — it's not like the firewalls turn off on — you know, in April. I mean, whatever vulnerabilities XP has, it's going to have that day, too. I mean, it's not —

Leo: Well, no, that's — and that's what — exactly Steve's point, is that firewalls will protect you against most of this.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: By the way, the other thing — we really should underscore this. Everybody here knows this, but tell your friends. It is absolutely the case that the best way to mitigate this is to not run as an administrator.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: If you're running XP, please run as a standard user, limited user. Don't run as administrator.

Paul: You're asking for common sense from people that are running XP, Leo, so — I mean, I —

Leo: "Oh, it's too hard to install my updates if I do that."

Paul: You could save — you could prevent most electronic attacks just by exerting some common sense. I mean, I —

Leo: (Laughs) Well, that's his other point, is, "I'm not going to do anything stupid. I don't run as administrator." He has — I mean, these are all good points. It's just that the people who are running XP don't — aren't listening to Steve Gibson or Paul Thurrott or Mary Jo Foley.

Paul: No, they're — these are PC's sitting there with no password that are running as administrator that are connected to the internet all the time when people are gone overnight —

Leo: Right. Exactly.

Paul: — and yeah, I'm sure a big percentage of them are already zombies, or whatever, but —

Leo: We had this study — I can't remember who it was from, but — of the critical patches in 2013 that Microsoft shipped out on Patch Tuesday. 100 percent of the Internet Explorer exploits would be mitigated by running as a limited user. 92 percent would be — of the general exploits, the operating system exploits — 92 percent would be mitigated.

Paul: Wow. 92, yeah.

Leo: So you get rid of almost all the problems just running as a limited user.

Paul: But Leo, it's slightly inconvenient. I mean, I don't understand why you would advocate such a thing.

Leo: (Laughs) Yeah. So — do you — is this — Laplink. (Laughs)

Paul: Nice.

Leo: Who was the guy —

Paul: Listen, we're already going back in time, here. Why not?

Leo: Laplink.

Paul: We're going to make you put Word Perfect 5.1 on there for the safest word processing.

Leo: Do you remember who the PR — the PR guy at Laplink was so good. He had the best party tickets to Comdex.

Mary Jo: Oh, yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Tall, red-headed guy, right?

Leo: Yeah. What was — you guys remember him.

Paul: I remember that.

Leo: Was it Mark Eppley? Was that his name?

Mary Jo: It was Mark Eppley, yeah.

Leo: Mark Eppley. Boy, that's weird that still stuck in there.

Paul: I have a — I don't have it anymore. I've gotten a lot of Laplink stuff from these kind of, you know —

Leo: Oh, yeah. Mark was the best PR guy, practically, in the business for that kind of thing.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Was he a PR guy? No, he was the president, but —

Leo: Oh. Well, he was both.

Mary Jo: He did everything, though. He was very hands-on, and — yeah.

Paul: Well, they're back, baby.

Mary Jo: They're back, they're back. Yep.

Leo: Trying to see what Mark —

Paul: And they will sell you a pro version, if you want to buy it.

Leo: Is there a cable? Does it come with a — a parallel cable?

Paul: I would say — by the way, I normally advocate — is there a cable? No.

Leo: (Laughs) A parallel cable!

Paul: I do normally advocate most people, with common sense can get along with Microsoft Security Essentials, or whatever it's — they call it now in Windows 8. Windows Defender.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: And I don't really see any reason for most people to buy a security suite, typically. If you're going to be running XP, I would say, at the very least, you need to get some third-party antivirus, anti-malware thing going. Like, I — at the very least, do that. You know, whatever it is: Panda, Webroot, something. Like, get something. I'm not saying you have to pay for it, but —

Leo: The Security Essentials is going to be kept up to date, but it's not — not as good, you think, as a —

Paul: I think, at this point, I just wouldn't be looking at Microsoft for the support. I would — I think this is when I would start looking around. I mean, I wouldn't be running XP, but if I was ... Leo, I don't usually run XP, but when I do ...

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: I'm calling Mark Eppley.

Paul: I get Laplink.

Leo: Laplink! I want it to come with a parallel cable.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Remember, it would come in the box?

Paul: Sure.

Leo: The Laplink cable. Wow, that's a blast from the past.

Mary Jo: That is.

Leo: It's funny how you get that — I mean, I can't believe I dredged his name up.

Mary Jo: I know. That was crazy.

Paul: That's — no, that's —

Leo: Well, it's there, though. It's still — you know?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: And actually, I think as you get older, you do remember that stuff, and nothing that happened today.

Paul: Yes, breakfast? No good. But —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: But —

Leo: "Remember that guy?" (Laughs) "Remember Comdex?"

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: So any other advice for —

Paul: Okay. More porridge, Leo.

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: I like soup.

Paul: (Laughs) I like eggs.

Leo: I like eggs. They're soft. I can gum them.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: Any — it would be funny if I weren't right there. Any other advice for people, or people with friends, running XP?

Paul: Don't be so cheap? I don't know.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: It's not — again, it's not always cheap, right? Like, some people are stuck on —

Leo: It isn't that — your dentist's office — well, it's cheap in the sense —

Paul: You know what, though? Okay. So actually, I would say in their case, because I looked at the stuff pretty specifically, the chances of them installing the software successfully on Windows 8 or whatever and moving everything over is probably slim to none.

Leo: Nil. Nil.

Paul: They would need help with —

Leo: They need to buy a whole new dental office management system.

Paul: They need help.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: They need — and they — right. And frankly, if that stuff isn't connected to the outside world, which it might not be, who cares? As well, it backs up to a cloud service, which is also good for off-site stuff. It does all that but it is kind of heavy and the way that I work now is that my day to day stuff kind of goes through one drive now, and I do not really, I do not know it is kind of……At the point where I do not actually need it and it is kind of they’re more out of tradition right. Last year I put a Windows 8 PC that I kind of use in a very similar fashion with a lot less storage and this mostly for media and stuff like that, and it works fine but I am thinking this year I am going to be moving away from this stuff and that probably pains people probably say the move from the media center pains certain people, but I just think that it is a reflection of how the world has changed.  Holding this stuff on our hard disks in our house in this case or in our small business is not necessarily the right way to do things.

Leo: Yes, nobody is doing that anymore. By the way thanks to the Data Law the end of life on the Windows Home Server 2011 is April 12^th 2016.

Paul: Two years.

Leo: Got plenty of time.

Paul: I could be wrong but I think that it could be the 2008 version of the Windows Server so I think that the original version of the Windows Home Server I should look that up before I said I could be sure I do not think that is the original version of the Windows Home Server.

Leo: Oh Okay, oh okay. By the way just one more point about Steve Gibson, then we can move on. One of the reasons, this is one of the reasons what really blew my mind, one of the reasons why he is not moving on is because he was never able to install Service Pack 3. Remember that Service Pack 3 a lot time people installed that, so he said that is fine I have got Service Pack 2, Windows XP Pack 2.

Paul: That is incredible.

Leo: He is not running it, he is a brave man.

Paul: So I looked this up and the original version of Windows Home Server was just called Windows Home Server and it was based on this server 2003 or 2. It came out in 2007. So Windows Home Server 2011 was the second version and that was based on Windows Server 2008 possibly or R2 based on the timing. So that was obviously a more modern version and that was why it had no duplication.

Leo: So that it did not need to be updates for a few years.

Paul: So the original version of the Windows Home Server is possibly not supported anymore, already.

Leo: We are getting that popping on your line a lot.

MaryJo: Yes.

Paul: Yes I know. Want me to plug in and re-plug?

Leo: Yes let us try that, what the hell and while you are doing that I will do an ad for audible, that is a good way to pause and Paul will want to get it fixed because he loves talking about audible.com. Paul and I are major fanatics of audio books from audible.com. What is there to say about it? First of all it is 150,000 titles, the best stuff in the world, and not just the new books too, all the new books come out, Dick Francis’s newest and oh no Blood Sports is not a new one, that is an older one that is a great one all about horse racing. I love Dick Francis. Learn To Talk Like Ted, that is my buddy Carmine Galler that is brand new. Remember Carmine from the Money Machine from Tech TV, the newest Harlan Coben, there are classics, The Wizard Of Oz, it is the 75^th anniversary of the movie. Listen to Anne Hathaway performing the old Frank Baum Classic. A new one from Richard Dawkins I am a great fan of his, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence Of Evolution. But there is also classic science-fiction if you are a science fiction fanatic, I certainly am and a huge range of science fiction available on audible.com they have their own recording program called audible frontiers where they are recording some of the great classic science-fiction that has never been recorded, stuff from Isaac Asimov and Robert Hindlynd. If you have got a kid who is now getting into science fiction as I do, this is an opportunity to get them to listening to the great books like Isaac Asimov’s foundation series wouldn’t that be great. Read by and these are modern recordings, so they Scott Brick does one, so he is one of their best readers, and so this is really, really fantastic iRobot from Asimov. The Hindlynd stuff is all here.

Paul: Terrible movie of the same name.

Leo: Yes you know I just found out the story to that by the way. It was not called iRobot; it was not really based on iRobot.

Paul: There is nothing in it that has anything to do with Asimov.

Leo: No. They were not able to get it made until they changed name iRobot and then they got money. Even though it has nothing to do with Isaac Azimov. Isn’t that horrible? All I can say is that audible is the place to get great books; now we are going to arrange for you to get your first one free. The second thing that comes up is that people-----I do not know I like to read books, I do not know if I can listen, I do not know if it will be same will I incorporate it all. Those of us who love audio books yes you will. It is better than reading because it really becomes a movie in your mind but I understand that you might want to try it and so we are going to arrange your first book free. When you go to audible.com/windows and you will be signing up for the Gold Account, and that is a book a month, and the first month is free, your first book is free, you also get the daily digest of the New York and the Wall Street Journal, you can cancel in the first month paying nothing, keep those books, keep that book and the papers, but I think that you are not going to cancel. Paul always has a good recommendation, what are you listening to on audible these days?

Paul: I am actually, by the way you mentioned Carmine and what flashed through my head was Carmine Rogusso. Making ragu(Laughing and talking)

Leo: Oh my.

Paul: That is not what I am listening to.

Leo: Kenny Marshall does, and he has a pretty good book on audible by the way.

Paul: I am still listening to the Daniel Suarez book new one called, INFUX.

Leo: Isn’t that great?

Paul: If you have not, it is a thing that I would reiterate, if you have not listened or read any of Daniel Suarez please start with Daemon and then you can thank me later because it is literally one of the best books that I have ever read. It is amazing and the sequel is crazily enough even better so.

Leo: And you have read both?

Paul: Yes, you will be very happy.

Leo: No I agree. So you think that better than INFLUX?

Paul: Yes. INFLUX is great and I actually have to say, you know when I first started reading I got to thinking man this is not going anywhere what is happening, it was way better than I thought it was going to be originally, it is actually quite good. I like the twist and stuff I like the whole premise of it. It is great. There is something about Daemon it is just something; it is just something it is a Creighton style classic. It is just a classic.

Leo: Well there you go, I have got about 18 books that you can choose from but you only one free. I think that Daemon is a very good choice. DAEMON (spells it out). Jeff Gurner who reads it does a marvellous job, highly recommended. Somebody who is just mentioning the House of Cards the book is based on and the House of Cards is also on audible, Michael Dobbs House of Cards, it is about, it is about…………..

Paul: It is British.

Leo: Yes. It is the original House of Cards that Francis Urqhart, and, not Francis Underwood did, actually this is in Swedish.

Paul: This is funny. By the way I heard this TV series, is fantastic as well.

Leo: You got to watched it. It is fantastic as well.

Paul: I have not watched the British film but if you are familiar with the Games of Thrones books, you know that everyone was freaking out on the last season on the HP when they had the Red Wedding. This was in the book when like 8 years ago, like this is not a new development, you know but I guess that without giving away anything with people watching it there is a major development that occurs in the first episode of the new season of the book. That was in the original season one of the House of Cards, if you were paying attention. You would have known that.

Leo: The only thing with the original one is that people will get thrown by the accents. (Plays a little clip) It is a little hard to understand. It is just a little tough. (both presenter laughing about the Swedish accent) Let me see if I can find an English language version you know what I think that they only have the Swedish version.

Paul: That is incredible.

Leo: That is impossibly……..

Paul: I was having a stroke.

Leo: That cannot possibly, that can only happen, it is Swedish oh Danish I am sorry. They only have the Danish version so my apologies. Unless you speak Danish in which case what a boon audible has become for you. Audible.com/windows. Daemon, stick with Daemon may be that is in English. Audible.com/windows and enjoy your first book is free on us. You know the English accents on that House of Cards are so strong that (plays Danish clip again)

Paul: It is a little hard to understand.

Paul: What are the captions on?

Leo: I am just teasing, yes throw in the captions. What was the movie that was based not on the House of Cards but oh I do this every time to you.

Paul: You are talking about the British political thing that became a movie in the US Series Okay.

Leo: It was a great movie.

Paul: The American version had, the guy who was going to play Batman what was his name……………..that guy

Leo: Him, the guy that was going to play Batman, Google that? It will all come to me.

Paul: You know he I that famous, you know Ben Affleck.

Leo: Ben Affleck.

Paul: Ben Affleck was in the American movie version of the thing that you are talking about.

Leo: Oh really was he. In The Loop.

Paul: That is not what I am thinking about.

Leo: So we are all in completely different pages now, meanwhile Mary Jo Foley is listening to State of Play. Oh State of Play I have got to watch that State of Play.

Paul: Yes State of Play.

Leo: State of Play.

MaryJo: I am.

Paul: It is a great British thriller you know the political thriller that in this case turned into an American movie.

Leo: That is so funny, because I was thinking of  In The Loop which is based on this TV series that was called the The Thick Of It.

Paul: Oh, The Thick Of It.

Leo: In The Loop has Gandolphini in it which is a couple of weird degression in there and that is in The Loop. Okay, moving on.

Paul: This is like the recorded version of what it is like to get old.

Leo: I like soup. Where are my pants?

Paul: Poached eggs. Matlock.

Leo: Yes Matlock.

Paul: By episode 700 this is all we are going to be talking about.

Leo: Mary Jo will keep us on track.

MaryJo: I will.

Leo: She will say,” GrandPa, GrandPa time for your nap. Matlock, Matlock…………

MaryJo: I will say Adieu.

Paul: We will start twitching.

Leo: We do have a little Enterprise loser starting with Office, Office……

MaryJo: It was a big, big week for Enterprise News on the Microsoft front, yes there are two big conferences. One of them is the big SharePoint 2014 Conference and before your eyes begin to glaze over there is really a lot of cool news at this thing. They talked a lot about how, they mostly talked about Office 365 even though it was called The SharePoint Conference, and they described the way that they are evolving Office 365 to incorporate Yammer, which is their social enterprise network in technology more deeply into the suite. So right now Yammer is already in but in 365 it is something separate but kind of the long range, not even that long a range that later this year the plan is to take, kind of blurring the lines between Exchange, SharePoint and Yammer and combine all of those things. If you are a customer you going to kind of start feeling less like you are in Exchange or you are in SharePoint or that you are in Yammer and you are just going to feel like, hey I am in OfficePlus 365. One way that they are going to do that is that they have created this new app that is code named:OSLO. And the reason it is called OSLO is that the team that developed it is in OSLO. They are the fast search and transfer team that Microsoft bought back in 2008 and this OSLO app, if you know what a flip board looks like, it looks like flip board except it has business information in all the boxes.

Leo: I know what a flip board looks like, that is a nice UI.

MaryJo: I know right, yes, yes. I have some screen shots on the side of my site what this thing looks like. If you are in Oslo you can start to see things like your Q3 planning or topics that people were talking about inside your company or test results all different kind of things kind of like in card forms. (Showing stuff on the screen) Yes it shows you all the relationships between you and your documents and what people are sharing with you and things you are sharing with them and it just, it gets a lot more visual and a lot more intuitive in terms of how you are going to interact.

Leo: Does this make sense though when you look at it? Does it look useful?

MaryJo: You know I am like the last person who should judge this?

Leo: I know you use a notepad.

MaryJo: I use Notepad and I am an office of one person so to me …..

Leo: Right.

MaryJo: To me this does not have a lot of relevance, people in big companies saw this and said that it could have all the relevance to the different people they interact with, and you know people are becoming more accustomed to things like Yammer, FaceBook and the idea of a news feed and for them this makes a lot of sense as far as how you would start looking at your information from SharePoint, Exchange and Yammer.

Leo: So when do we get this?

MaryJo: Sounds like late summer things they are saying second half of this year you if you are on Office 365.

Paul: Yes, I heard that it was at the end of the year. I do not quite understand this stuff either because I have not experienced this hand on, but I wanted to say that they told me about it and I thought what was kind of compelling was that if you have like, the typical workflow for us and people who consider themselves information workers or whatever, you know you come in the morning to go to work and you open your email.  The way email works is that the most recent emails are at the top and you kind of deal with them first, even though there might be emails further down the list that are more important, you know, and they are not organized in any way that makes any sense, kind of last in first out kind of thing and the point behind OSLO in particular is to surface information that is meaningful to you based on way more than on email, on all of these interactions you would have both people inside of the company and outside of the company, and you know the presentation is nice and interesting and different but I think that the big point of it is to surface the stuff that is the most meaningful, visually not just bigger, bigger for the lack of a better word, you know you deal with that stuff first, and it is, you know they kind of talk about it like the future of Work or whatever. It is cute, but it seems pretty compelling actually. More compelling than say, info pass.

MaryJo: The way they are doing this is that they are using fast technology which is inter-company search plus things algorithm from Bing and so they are combining these things so it does get smarter and it does get to you know you more and knows what it important to you right?

Paul: The thing that is more interesting in a way right is kind of and I have not really understood it and I still don’t is that these three kind of features that they are kind of talking about apps kind of thing that is going to be exposed are all sorts of Yammer ideas, yes right. There are things that Yammer had just for Yammer but now they are blowing them out to whole of Office 365 and that is kind of a cool thing about having an Office 365 and that may not be immediately obvious to you people is that when you used to decide on a premise servers you would make features for exchange and you would make features for SharePoint, features for Link and you would have a couple cross-platform things you could not do a lot of that stuff because there was no way to know that these people had any two or three of the servers but now you get them all. And so now they can look at them a little more agnostically and say let us make Office 365 features. That you know grab from grab from here and grab from here and so this is the first stab at that kind of thing, it is a little vague to me because I do not have any experience at first hand but potentially it is very, very interesting.

MaryJo: It is.

Leo: It all in the details right?

Paul: I am not going to give them an award or anything yet but it looks interesting.

MaryJo: There are a lot of implications about this.  What do you do if somebody who uses Exchange or SharePoint on the premises because a lot of these capabilities cannot come to on premises servers because they are so deeply tied in with Bing, so if you are a customer who wants to have SharePoint or Exchange Microsoft did say this week that you are going to have to wait till 2015 for the next release of those servers and a lot of that social stuff is not going to be in there. So if you care about that you are probably best off trying to incorporate bits from the cloud like some of the one drive for business stuff and maybe also Yammer which you can know also get as a subscription and kind of add it in piecemeal because they are basically warning people that want to run on prem, you are going to start being left out and you are going to start leaving out more and more features as we come out with the unprem releases.

Paul: Yes. The other thing that I heard this week about the stuff that I thought was just kind of opened my eyes again a little bit to the possibility that was years for years people had been talking about email as kind of low hanging through the cloud right that if you are going to move the company to the cloud right, let us do email first. Email is obvious and you know do email first. As it turns out email is kind of a hair ball right, email has a lot of risk, you know email migration is very difficult and that is why this new one drive for business stand alone servers are offering is so interesting is now what they are saying is and actually as it turns out that moving people to individual cloud storage is way easier and maybe it should be the first thing that business do in this move to the cloud you know and you know instead of putting the hard drives new data center and provisioning more and more storage and handling all that stuff for users just put it in the cloud and let Microsoft handle it for you, and I guess one of the features in SharePoint 2013 Service Pack One is the ability to integrate with that system so from the same dashboard you are managing storage but it is in the clouds, but it is your storage and it is in the cloud. Kind of just a cloud first approach and I think it gives businesses that were on the fence about the cloud, sort of an incentive to move to the cloud and see what the advantages could be there.

Leo: We have seen Cortana and it is not a young lady, it is just a circle.

Mary Jo: It is a circle, just a bouncing circle (Presenters talking over each other)

Leo: I had been given high hopes as to how shapley-----I want to say this appropriately Cortana was a halo but no…..

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Microsoft wisely decided to make it look like Siri basically. Does it work like Siri I guess we want know.

Mary Jo: There is a video that leaked, you cannot hear the voice in this video because that just was not part of the video clip of Cortana, but yes it gave us a few indications of how this is going to work and they ask you a bunch questions you know around your preferences of things in terms of ----how do you like to interact with people or what kind of things would you do in this situation to basically to start to get to know you. It will ask you what nickname do you want to be known as and then it takes it from there. We do not know everything that it is going to let you ask it yet but what we do know is that it is going to be built into Windows phones 8.1 so we are going to see it pretty soon probably at bills.

Leo: And is this from some rumors site called unleashthephones.com.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Yes. I talked to someone about this and was told that this circle UI is correct. And so there is always the possibility that this obviously is a fake or whatever, but somebody told me that this is what it looks like.

Leo: You have to have a Microsoft account, sorry you need to sign into your Microsoft account before I can do anything for you of course he does not want to because then it would identify him. I am absorbing the entire network……..

Paul: See I would have seen that and signed in immediately.

Leo: Yes.

Paul: Hi I am Paul Thurrott how do you do? Nice to see you. Someone back in Redman would see and don’t!

Leo: I wish there was audio in this why can we not hear it I want to hear what Graham Thomas sounds like. Before we get started I would like to know……..

Paul: Would you like something to drink?

Leo: Do you like to cook? Literally asked you.

Paul: What about religion?

Leo: Yes, what is your favorite thing to do?

Paul: If you were a food what would you be.

Leo: It is the Babara Walters of voice recognition. It is very much like that for all voice recognitions. Thanks that helps a lot I will get a few suggestions ready to start things out try and find some recipes for Anson’s log that is literally a suggestion.

Paul: That is a crazy request, yes…..ummmm

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: What do I have to do this afternoon? Nothing,  baby you are perfect just the way you are.

Leo: So very Siri like is this based on Tell Me do we know or is it internal?

Mary Jo: We know it is going to use the voice technology that is already part of Windows Phone, and kind of take it up a step. Right, great it is also using, a second mention on this show Sartori which is a knowledge repository that is inside a Bing right, so this is all that machine learning technology how Cortana will be able to learn and adapt based on things it knows about and your schedule and your calender.

Leo: This is very Google now, this is not Siri this is more Google now more than anything else.

Mary Jo: Isn’t it like a combo almost like Siri Plus and Google Now at least in the concept.

Leo: In some steps if a Siri asks what you want to be called as Cortana does we will call you by name Google does not do that.

Paul: Microsoft does not get a lot of credit for this stuff the truth is that they had kind of all these pieces in place for a long time. It is just that they have not done a good job of bringing them together. You know do plain English things in say the Outlook  email application when you are making a schedule or something so if you think about interacting with some-one we say,” What am I doing today?” You are really asking about your calendar, your schedule and all that kind of stuff but I think that stuff has been around for a while though. I mean at Microsoft you know Google has now and Siri I think that it is close to the Google Now stuff in kind of plain English style and bringing it all together.

Leo: Yes I kind of want to know stuff about you so that I can you know………Siri does not like to interrupt and say,” Hey, you have an appointment at three o’clock it is going to take you an hour to get there, you better leave now. That is Google Now.

Paul: Yes Google Now is now going in a different direction. It is very or can be intrusive in a way and kind of scary impressions you know.

Mary Jo: With Siri can you say to it, “ Wake me up at 7.00am tomorrow.” So this has that too.

Paul: Yes. It is that kind of plain English thing right. I mean people seem to be amazed by this kind of stuff.

Leo: But it is not that hard really is it? By the way we forgot to show the Info path funeral, I apologize for that.

Mary Jo: Oh yes right!

Leo: There you go that it the end of Info Path.

Mary Jo: Yes that was at the Share Point conference when I said that these Enterprise guys know how to have fun.

Paul: Taken from Star Wars Episode One.

Leo: Well, there is nothing like a funeral to really…….

Mary Jo: That is right for Info Path

Paul: It is Episode One.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: There are monks in robes and that is Joel Oleson Twitter from March 3^rd.

Mary Jo: Yes, that is right.

Paul: That is literally every single person that have used Info Path. (Presenters laughing) and by the way twice as many people actually understand what it is for.

Leo: Oh Come on.

Mary Jo: A lot of people use it and care.

Leo: It is an Enterprise thing, you just would not understand Paul.

Mary Jo: We do not know how their goinmg replace it yet either, they said they were going to tell everybody at the conference, but instead they said you know what they are going to ask you guys to see what you think.

Leo: Oh! My God. Yes that will work.

Paul: Open Source it.

Leo: What could possibly go wrong? Skype for outlook.com are----I did not even know there was such a thing.

Paul: So I do not mean to go off on a rant here but,…………….

Leo: Oh! Good,

Mary Jo: Oh, oh

Paul: Last year Microsoft enabled this functionality so when you folks called me…

Leo: This is the place where everything rings, yes.

Paul: And one of the places it rings is in Outlook.com in the web browser in Windows because that is how I things in my email. If you are lucky enough to have a Sky driver or a one tab window, it will open it and it will also ring in that Window, that is hilarious, it is just replicates across everywhere.

Leo: It rings everywhere.

Paul: In any open window you have and it is really funny. The problem is that until two days ago whenever this feature went live and if you answered a call it is Skype for the Windows Desk Top what I use know or the Metro version on your phone or wherever else. That Outlook.com version never stopped ringing, never. In fact I tested it because it has got to stop sometime, and no, it just keeps going it just rings and until it makes you insane by how often it rings and the thing that I did not understand was, first of all they just enabled this feature without any kind of fan-fare at all and then there was no way to customize to say don’t answer and there was nothing you could do about it and so they fixed it finally. I had been complaining about this for months, months and months.

Leo: Years and years.

Paul: And I checked how long it has been. They enabled this feature in April 2013 in the UK and then sometime over the summer here, because I am the idiot that I am I installed it on day one, but I literally decoupled my Skype ID from my Microsoft account so I would not hear this anymore. Because it is so annoying.

Leo: Don’t ring.

Paul: And I spent weeks I mean would call me on Skype, and over here twenty-one devices of mine over here…..ssst ssst, so if Mary Jo were chatting on the text messaging part of it or Ravio sent me files, every time anyone sent me anything , there was something over here like……sssssssst……….sssst, everytime.

Leo: I would hate that.

Paul: Yes and this is how you make people crazy so I think that the final insult was something like this, I do not know why this guy did this and I will not call out his name, it was somebody who…………Skype actually jumped into a conversation that I was having on Twitter with Rafael and some other people and said that I do not know what you guys are complaining about but there is nothing wrong with Skype, could you give us a specific example and I was like are you kidding me, seriously, like I just kind of like the gall of that. This thing has been broken for months, so anyway they fixed it. So I guess it is fixed and I still have not connected my Microsoft Account back with Skype. I have been electrocuted you know so many times and I just do not trust it anymore.

Mary Jo: I told Paul, when I told Paul that this fixed he said,’’Allegedly.”

Leo: So sceptical, so sceptical.

Paul: I just do not trust those people. Good news for Skype though, I will say it is but I am not entirely clear on the organization. The organization, the group that makes Link is now the same group that makes Skype, these guys are all together, and I have asked them to punish those people from Skype, but at least I have a good influence on them. The Link stuff is so clean and so wonderful, it works so well and I really want them to have a positive influence on Skype and not the reverse.

Leo: Good.

Paul: But man, think about it, eleven months.

Leo: Yes.

Paul: Eleven months this thing has been broken. Am I seriously the only person on Earth that uses it?

Leo: But you have a lot of devices.

Paul: Yes I do, but all I am saying that if you use or have Outlook.com in your web browser and you have Skype it will never stop ringing it.

Leo: And now you are going to have a fan a ring syndrome, you think it is ringing, you are going to feel a vibration in your pocket.

Paul: I can feel it in my dreams Leo.

Leo: Oh, let us cheer him up. X-Box One update whoooooo!

Paul: You know what though the X-Box and by the way the Play Station has the same issue. It is in a weird place now from a functionality stand point because there is still a lot of stuff that we kind of took for granted in X-box 360 in this case and it is still not available in X-Box One, and that is a little weird but you know almost every month I think they skip one but they have had a system update, you know they have improved stuff and it is really you know it is very interesting when you look at the stuff that they added in this version of, a lot of this stuff is just you kind of did, yes on the 360 kind of just added it back and some of the other stuff like no branding, like if you start a party which is a group of guys who are typically going to do something, typically play a game or the other and of course you are going to want  to chat during the game, before the game, during the game, between the games. Before this update they did not enable party chat by default, you had to go in and enable it. Of course you want to talk to these people you want to party.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And so they did that. It does stuff like that, it is kind of crazy but you know TWITCH is in there although you have to download their app, Twitch, personally I think that it is ridiculous but I am over 18 years old so I guess I would think that.

Leo: I like Twitch. You can watch them beat Pokemon Red right there on your big screen TV. I have to say that one of the things that they added and I do not know which update, when I first set up the X-Box One back in December it did not know about MY TV which is a really, really new Samsung TV that does Now and I can control it now.

Paul: Right. It has actually got a driver update?

Leo: Yes I think that you are adding devices and stuff over time. Yes, yes so now it is nice so when I say X-Box turn off, oh I should not have said that. But when I say X-Box to you, it turns off my TV and my X-box which it did not used to do, and in fact you can have your receiver turned of too if you want and that is kind of nice. Yes, I like it your only friend, is Alex Gouple, that is nice, it is good.

Paul:  Oh Leo what the hell happened. Yes. It is Alex. Yes.

Leo: It is good if you have a friend. What is that, what is going on there are you playing South Wood Park?

Paul: Which video? It is a Twitch video.

Leo: Oh It is a Twitch video. Still waiting for new games, finally we have got Plans For Zombies player and,

Paul: And next week is Titan Fall.

Leo: Next week is Titan Fall.

Paul: Obviously time is going to stand still. At least your Internet connection will.

Leo: Sony says we have sold six million play stations and now we are in Japan, soon and that is going to be even more.

Paul: I am confused by this.

Leo: Why?

Paul: Because I do not think that Play Station Four is anything special, and no by the way I do not say that in a mean way or in some kind of partisan x stand by way. There is nothing wrong per se. There is nothing wrong with it personally I got it 100 bucks less than the X-Box One and that is absolutely not a problem.

Leo: There is no reason to run out and get it.

Paul: There are no amazing games that only run on the PS4 only, literally none….

Leo: Not that the X-Box One is in the same position, no both were rushed out and they and neither has any compelling reason to get them.

Paul: I do not follow this as closely but the Play Station Four has the exact same issues with stuff which is not on the console which is not on the PS3 and more like why does it not work with DNA, why it does not-----I do not know, it just you know, well I do know it is just they were rushed to market, they obviously had this network, yes both of them. (Both presenters talking over each other)

Leo: Yes. Both

Paul: And now they have sold six million of these things.

Leo: Spec wise on paper may be it looks better, I mean people are just looking at the specs how long do you think that is going to last?

Paul: I would say honestly, honestly I would say and not honestly I would just say that if you look at the last generation of consoles the runaway champion the best seller was joke technically. It was a generation behind, technically the other consoles so I am not sure if that is a big deal. Honestly, it just comes down to marketing you know Sony which I honestly feel is fairly inept company somehow did a masterful job at the same time that Microsoft was screwing everything up in 83 and they kind of rode this wave through the year. I think that combined with the price difference, the fact that they are in so many more markets, I do not know why Microsoft, Microsoft is approaching selling the X-Box like it did with  the Surface, we will just take two years and we will just roll it off around the world. Yes. Okay I guess you could do that or why don’t you just release it, why is this thing not for sale everywhere, right does not make any sense to me. But that is what they are doing so here we are.

Leo: Yes, yes music videos are back.

Paul: Yes, but not a big deal there, music videos are available in the X-Box music app for the X-box 360, it is the only platform that X-Box supports the music X-Box videos, sorry on, they have added them to X-Box One so if you want to watch music videos now they are there.

Leo: Enjoy, enjoy. Just a couple of more notes and then we are going to get back to our……….

Paul: I did not want to talk about car play but Mary Jo backed me, and you know,

Leo: It is funny I did not either in MacBreak Weekly which took place yesterday and I completely forgot.

Paul: Mary Jo’s video is frozen.

Leo: Is that right?

Mary Jo: Just because I slept.

Leo: No she is relaxing during the X-box conversations.

Mary Jo: I heard X-Box and I just kind of nodded.

Leo: This will wake her up, let me just play this for Paul ( Leo plays some music),This is the dub step version watch here comes the drop, exciting thanks to our chat-room.

Paul: What this sounds like in my head?

Leo: Why don’t we restart your video Mary Jo?

Paul: This song has words and those words are,” Screw you Paul”

Leo: Yes screw you Paul, screw you Paul so maybe you should restart it Mary Jo are you not having any luck? Here comes the drop? You have to get to the drop, I hope that it is the drop. It says dub step remix. I want some dub step man.

Paul: They just fixed this problem this week thinking about it.

Leo: Not much of a drop. Alright moving on…….

Paul: All I wanted to say about car play was I do not know if you folks have looked at the videos but this actually looks really nice.

Leo: I feel like I cannot get excited till I actually see it.

Paul: The problem with this is going to be that car makers do not actually move very quickly and it is going to roll out over the years kind of stuff but the thing that is interesting to me is that works with touch interface ofcourse but also there are luxury car makers like Mercedes, BMW that have kind of the knobs and buttons and things.

Leo: I hate the buttons and there are too many knobs.

Paul: No, no I do not mean the ones on the dash, I mean in the center console they actually is a better way to interface with the car.

Leo: With those knobs, and, controls yes.

Paul: So it does all that stuff and I actually think that this is going to be kind of a big deal, it probably should not have been surprising that Apple came out with something elegant looking, you know nice and whatever and it should not be surprising that it kind of starting in the luxury cars either but I think this thing, I think this thing is going to be really nice.

Leo: I do not trust Apple’s software that much. I really do not and I do not want it in my car until I……..

Paul: I tell what I do not trust third party app sports stuff and they have a few apps and they are the mostly kind of like radio type.

Leo: But it is kind of like already stuff that Ford Sync supports like Stitcher and Spotify.

Paul: Yes I do not think that you are going to have a wide range of third party apps you know on the, not it is going to be the Apple stuff. You know a lot of people have Apple devices and all that and I think that it is going to be a nice system.

Leo: But hey cannot be worse than the stuff out there already, unless it crashes a lot. I just think that Apple software lately is really crap!

Paul: Well at least you get Apple maps in there so………

Leo: So you get something.

Paul: You got that going for you.

Leo: Do you want to talk about this tablet tabloid?

Paul: Just briefly you know, the Android controls eighty percent of the market for handsets.

Leo: Wordwide, worldwide,

Paul: Yes that is right worldwide and now they, what was the figure on tablets let us say sixty-percent or something like that. And you know it is kind of an Android world, I think that one of things to watch this year is going to be Microsoft’s, at least from my perspective support of this platform because if you look at the mobile apps situation right now almost everything they do is already on IOS, about half of what they do is on Android and they actually have a lot of stuff on IOS than they do on Android. And there are some high profile examples like you know one drive for business is now available on Android, phones or tablets, and have kind of a nice handset or iPhone and I had that version already for those apps so I think we are going to see a bigger push from the Microsoft end in the Android space this year. Hopefully we will see a bigger push in the tablet end this year because as of last year they had, what is the figure it is a little number, some tiny percentage two or three percent or something like that. I am stuck again, stuck again.

Leo: But it is world-wide remember, and I think that those percentages are skewed by the fact that millions of 89 dollars gift AOSP Android tablets out there and stuff like that.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: These are not premium products by any means.

Paul: No.

Leo: No. Let us take a break and when we come back, we will get our Tip of the Week, Our Soft-ware of the Week, Enterprise, Code-Name and beer. All ahead. Cannot wait for the dough.

Paul: Does not really make sense when you break it down like that.

Leo: At the moment beer and Enterprise fits, it is coming up.

Paul: Of course it is.

Leo: Along with Code-Names but first ShareFile from Citrix, ShareFile is the way to share files in business, now I know that there are many, many choices for you if you are trying to share files. The worst choice ofcourse would be to attach those files to an email, we know that does not work because it is not secure you get bounce backs, it is not secure but there is you know it is hard to believe that almost every business send emails and a great many businesses including spreadsheets, PowerPoint, contracts, quotations, pictures of the grand kids, whatever. I send files to radio stations all the time in my ads and voice tracks to radio stations and I have learnt because I have tried all different ways of doing it.

ShareFile is how I do it 100% and it is the easiest way to do it. I have folders on my desk top and I put files in there and it automatically sinks them to the cloud, I can access them by the way anytime from the cloud and from any browser, but I can also, but I can also email them along to somebody. Let me show you my ShareFile account quickly, by the way if you notice it is branded, they customize it for every industry, Hippa compliant for the medical industry. When I want to a send a file to somebody I have permissions here, you know people have access, a variety of permissions and they can get into the folder if I want to give them that permission, but I can also send a folder, let me show what happens when I send a folder. This is really awesome I can send it as an email or I can send them a direct link and I have all sorts of control. I can say email me when the file has been downloaded and I can require recipients to give me their name and email before downloading. I could give it an expiration date anything from a never to a year, a day, six months three months. Downloads per user how many times can they download and then I just create this link and this I can paste in the email, this is safe, it is secure and what is great about it that they do not have to have a membership. Let me paste it into the browser and show you, they do not have to have any particular software, what they will get is a link that they can click on and they are going to get a branded web page, my logo there not ShareFile’s my logo and it is going to say download this folder, it is going to say how big it is. It zips the folder together and that makes it easy for them and there is a download button, login none of the extra hoops to jump through, this works so well even with unsophisticated users I send this stuff out to radio stations I never have problems, if I forget to I could fire up ShareFile on my phone or tablet and I can send the files from there. If you are working in business and sending files to people you have got to try ShareFile.com. Here is the deal, go to ShareFile.com try it free for 30 days, you do not need a credit card all you need to do is use our offer code, if you visit ShareFile.com, now there are three different places that you can enter this offer code, so I am going to make sure you get the right one. Go to ShareFile.com, there is a big green button in the middle, do not click that, there is a menu item at the top of the page do not click that, way at the top in the fine print, they have hidden this “podcast listeners click here” please do that if you will. Maybe not the most obvious place, but when you do you can enter in our offer code “Windows” you can select the industry that you are in so that you can customized for that industry, 30 days free you have got to try it. It really is the easiest and the best way and if you are not a decider tell your IT Pro, your CIO or whatever or whoever is there that makes those decisions about ShareFile because it is really easy and fast and secure, ShareFile.com and free for the first 30 days. Make sure you use our offer code WINDOWS.

Paul: I’ll start things off with our Tip Of The Week. Yes, last week I talked about being rewarded with rewards a little bit in the context of having a free one drive storage signed up, yes I signed up twice actually, I signed up for the deal twice I should say…..

Leo: Did you get twice as much storage?

Paul: I did, so Microsoft contacted me that night so they said thanks for publicizing this, actually it was a mistake and we have fixed it and so I guess if you moved quickly you got it….

Leo: How much is your one drive storage now thanks to my mistake, your mistake you must have terabytes of storage?

Paul: I could, actually the truth is I could have like a multiple cards that are like 200 gigs each or whatever and I have got a card right in front of me that is for 100 gigs and I never used this, I think it is 468 gigs or something like that.

Leo: Awesome, that is good.

Paul: I am going to downsize, I do not use most of it obviously and I do not know why I am doing this, it is an addiction, so anyway……

Leo: So having said that is there anymore?

Paul: Well no, somebody on Twitter, let us see, Francine reminded me that there is an X-Box One live rewards program, and this of course, rewards you for playing on the X-Box, doing things on the X-Box One not just games but you know doing any of the entertainment, type of stuff, so if you buy like a video on X-Box, video if you buy an X-Box subscription if you know achievement in multi-player whatever games, all of these things add up to rewards and you can……

Leo: And can you trade the rewards in for anything?

Paul: Yes so yes you can Leo.

Leo: Oh Good.

Paul: The funny thing is that like, like the Bing rewards program I had never done this before and I never looked at this so I have actually been, it is funny that I do get this email from them once a month and they tell you how you did that month and what you got and so forth and I am kind of like an X-Box Rewards VIP kind of thing because I have a lot of gamer points or whatever it is I guess the further you go up the more you earn on what you do so I guess if you are like a legend level or whatever it is from the next one up from there you earn double or triple the points for each of the things. I think this is just basically one of the ways for people who have kind of engaged in this too.

Leo: Can I get games or anything, I mean

Paul: Yes, what do you get?

Leo: Like a special skin for my Roman Centurion I want money?

Paul: Yes, yes. You want money, I do not think that you can get money.

Leo: But I could get a VIP treatment.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Get rewarded for gamers score and I mean if I could 50% off Titan Fall I would be thrilled. So why can’t you use those points for cash Mr Mike says?

Paul: I think you could things like apply them towards something like an X-Box Live Gold Subscription.

Leo: oh Alright, alright I will try to rack them up. Might as well it does not cost anything to sign up.

Paul: Yes, yes if you are going to do it then great. If you are just an X-Box guy, I mean why not,

Leo: Why not?

Paul: Why would you not do it? It is a bit funny. It is like I signed up for it but I do not use it all that much, after discussing it last week I and a bunch of guys told me what are you talking about I have got like 25 million points on this like I could buy a car with this. Like people really use it like heavily.

Leo: It is like S and H Green Stamps remember those.

Paul: Yes (laughing)

Leo: You know getting a toaster at the bank for checking the account.

Paul: Right, right I do not know how to help myself, Leo, right, that is the problem.

Leo: And your software pick of the week?

Paul: So I guess I could have gone in a lot of different directions for this one right

I chose the FaceBook Messenger app because it just came out today, this is the, if you are familiar with FaceBook Messenger so you know what is available on other platforms so stand-alone messaging, 2500 of them, you know that it is attractive and it is Windows phone looking and that kind of  good stuff and so if you are big on FaceBook and that is kind of good stuff. I do not think that we talked about this or did we, in the Service Pack One, did we talk about this last week this Service Pack One for the Office stuff or has that happened since last week, I really do not remember.

Leo: I turned off Mary Jo she couldn’t respond, sorry I turned you off, I did not want the snoring to come through.

Paul: I guess we did not really talk about….

Mary Jo: I think that we did.

Paul: The other thing that I wanted to mention in the context of software I picked Metro Twit  at least two or three times as a pick on this show and those folks including Langhaza a good friend of ours are now discontinuing the application of the desk top and the version for Windows 8.

Leo: They disconnected the Windows desk top I remember we talked about it so now this is also………..

Paul: Still works if you have it but they are not going to add any more features or anything it works fine I am going to go slow on this one before I figure out what I am going to do I really, really like Metro Twit a lot and I use it every single day, it is running every day for me but you know that they have Twitter third party API issue and they are just not giving out tokens just now or whatever.

Leo: Somebody has just pointed out the FaceBook is shutting down Messenger at the end of the month.

Paul: What is up?

Leo: FaceBook is shutting down Messenger at the end of the month.

Mary Jo: Oh Messenger app for desk top right?

Leo: So I wonder how it impacts the……..

Mary Jo; May be if we had the messenger app view for the Windows phone.

Paul: No this is not.

Leo: This is different. It would be funny if they released it and in a month time they said oh by the way……(Presenters talking over each other)

Paul: On the Windows phone you can actually do a FaceBook messenger from within.

Leo: You can do all of that on all the phones. (Paul and Mary Jo agree)

Paul: So people are obviously saying why would I want this when there is one already built into the Windows Phone. The answer is today you might not the problem with that integration on Windows Phone has always been that when new features are added to the service and this is something that has dogged FaceBook in particular on Windows Phone, they do not update the phone to match the new functionality, there are still many things that you cannot do, many things you cannot do, not so much with messaging but you know FaceBook check-in and you know on this phone unless you use the stand alone on that. So the FaceBook Messenger app, hopefully ensures that some releases are up to date, and certainly the app could sit there and get updates as well. That happened with Spotify, you know it happens obviously apps can be updated much more quickly than in OS integration so maybe today there is not a huge advantage to it down the road that will almost change. And who knows with the next version of the Windows Phone starts getting eked out of the OS and there some early indications that is a happening.

Leo: Mary Jo Foley, Enterprise Pick of the Week.

Mary Jo: Yes my Enterprise Pick of the Week is a new version of Dynamics ERP, which is Microsoft’s ERP one of four different ones they have Dynamics AX, GP,SL and AV, and the update that we heard about this week at the Convergents  Show at Atlanta was Dynamics AX 2012 R3. Here is a name for you, they said this new version is going to be out on May 1^st. The cool thing that they showed at the show was a Windows 8 app that is for shop floor operators so they can report on production job they actually showed this off during the conference and I do the delivery of this version and Dynamics AX, this is really kind of ironic  the Dynamics Team at Microsoft does CRP and ERM software they have been kind of out to prove that not every Windows App has to be a game or a consumer focus thing and they can really build a business line kind of apps that makes sense in Windows 8. So they really put a lot of effort at the show talking about that and also saying that they are going to have a frame-work for the customers and partners too who want to develop their own Windows 8 apps that tie into Dynamics AX, so this is very interesting I did not think this would be the group that came out as the Windows 8 champion at Microsoft for the line of business but they have turned out to be that. So that is why it is my pick of the week.

Leo: I think they were saying that Lou MM is on that Dynamics team I did not know that one of our regulars in chat.

Mary Jo: Yes , that is nice.

Leo: And for Code Name pick of the week, a little town in northern California or Virginia you pick.

Mary Jo: Yes this one is Virginia, code name is FairFax………

Leo: And I know why too.

Mary Jo: Fairfax is the code name for an implementation for a Windows Azure, Windows government azure cloud and we have talked about this before and Microsoft announced this last year but they never said when they were actually going to let people testing it or when they would roll it out. It turn out that this week they said they are beginning to do private tests with government customers here in the US who want to kick the tires and following those very close tests will have a limited public tests of the azure government cloud. So what this is a version of azure that is the physical and logical isolation in every layer of the cloud, it is only run by US personnel with government backgrounds so they have been investigated and it will follow a lot of the defence-in-depth multi-level security practices so they say. So if you are a US government customer and you want all those guarantees that you need to run secure government job in the cloud this will probably be your choice of cloud. No jokes please on NSA, this is what they are touting as a Windows secure version of azure government customers.

Leo: Very nice and finally, well may be not let us just check before we get to the Beer of the Week, did that near earth asteroid hit us?

Paul: No.

Leo: You can have a beer.

Mary Jo: No. Yes the Beer Pick Of The Week ---- I picked a brown this is a beer from SmuttyNoseBeer in New Hampton and it is called the Durty Mud Season hoppy Brown Ale. Why it is a little weird, it is a brown ale that is very hoppy so Paul probably would not love this one, but if you are somebody like me who likes

hops but you still also like a brown ale, it is a really nice mix of the two in one beer. And there seems to be a trend I noticed Luganitz right near Twit has some kind of a hoppy brown ale called, Couch Tripping, yes that is pretty good I tried that too. That was good as well.

Leo: Couch Tripping, Smutty Nose, Durty Mud Season, hoppy brown ale our pick of the week from SmuttyNose Brewing company. Mary Jo Foley is my pick from allaboutmicrosoft.com, you must follow her, Paul Thurrott is at winsupersite.com, his book is finished the Windows 8.1 at Windows8.1.com and now knows as the windows8.1.com the field guy or something and he is also working on a book on Windows music, X-Box Music and the Windows Phone he is the king, the expert. We do this show together every Wednesday we talk about

Microsoft 11.00 am Pacific. 2.00pm Eastern Time 1900 UTC time on Twit.tv do watch live if you can but if you cannot then on demand audio and video always available after the fact at twit.tv/w or whatever. Find a netcast aggregated and delivered to your system like iTunes, Stitcher, Windows Phone 8.1, the Podcast app, that kind of thing. Thank you Paul and Mary Jo have a great week and we will see you next time!