Windows Weekly 383 (Transcript)
Leo LaPorte: It’s time for Windows Weekly. Paul
Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here. They both have been using, actually only
Paul, Paul’s been using Windows 10 for the past week. We’ll find out how he
likes it. And we’ll find out why Mary Jo has not been using Windows 10 for the
last week. Windows Weekly is coming up, next.
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This is
Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, episode 383 recorded
October 8th, 2014.
I Did it My Sway
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months with purchase. It’s time for Windows Weekly, the renovation.
Paul Thurrott: And who are you again, sir?
Leo: I would be Leo LaPorte. I’m back. You
thought you were rid of me, didn’t you? Lovely Windows Weekly in our own
studio. And I’ve managed -almost every time Paul and Mary Jo have been in-studio,
to get out of town. It’s weird.
Paul: Like I said two weeks ago, I’m not
positive you actually work there.
Leo: Have you ever seen the brick house of
Leo?
Paul: I do know that you exist. I did see
photos from London. So you’re somebody.
Leo: Oh, you bought my cover story. This was
very exciting because the briefing for… oh and we should mention, hi Mary Jo.
Mary Jo Foley: Hi. Hi from the construction zone,
guys.
Leo: No, come on we know the truth. You’ve
got a guy in a bag somewhere in your trunk and he’s trying to get out.
Paul: It’s like a poltergeist.
Mary Jo: They’re renovating this apartment, this
side of me here. And this wall is vibrating right now.
Paul: You should bang on the wall a few
times.
Mary Jo: I’m going to if it gets too bad.
Leo: This is the demo portion of the
renovation. Somebody with a sledge hammer is taking out the old. Well, it’s
fine. That’s life. This isn’t broadcast television, this is not the Colbert Report. It’s just a podcast!
Mary Jo: Paul said to me earlier, just bring a
pie over and beg them to be quiet for a few hours.
Paul: You’ve got to bribe people like this,
they’re union.
Leo: What are you going to do? It’s fine, I don’t mind. I’m just looking at your notes. As
a personal favor, I know you already did this on the show. But I’m curious. You
flew out; I saw Paul’s…
Paul: Let’s just go back and look at our
notes from last week and that will help us.
Leo: There aren’t any! I saw you last week,
very depressing pictures of hotel rooms.
Mary Jo: We were filing our stories from the
back of the car that you guys sent to pick us up right after the event. We were
sitting there filing and we were like wow we don’t have any show notes. Paul’s
like we’re just going to wing it.
Leo: So you went, you came out, how long was
the briefing?
Mary Jo: One hour.
Paul: Forty-five minutes.
Leo: They say an hour and it wasn’t longer.
Paul: But there were other miss-statements I
would say. They said there would be no Q and A and there was a Q and A. They
said there would be no sidebar meetings and there were sidebar meetings.
Leo: Did you guys get a sidebar meeting?
Paul: We got a quickie, so to speak. Because we had to get going. I’m still overtired from last
week. The point is it was very hectic. And because last week was Oracle World
or whatever that tradeshow was called, every hotel in the city was booked. And
so Microsoft was nice enough to tell us about this event last minute and sent
us to a city where there were no hotels. So I got to stay in a delightful bed and
breakfast kind of place. That I believe was staffed by homeless people. It was
so scary, I actually took everything with me when I
left the hotel room, which I’ve never done before.
Leo: Oh you mean you didn’t leave a laptop
in the hotel room?
Paul: I didn’t leave anything in there.
Leo: What was the name of it, the Chelsea?
Paul: No, it was called… I don’t remember. It
was awful.
Leo: You posted a picture I think on
Facebook.
Paul: I’m surprised my phone didn’t get
stolen while I was taking that photo. To give you an idea of how bad it was
there, at six o’clock in the morning on the day of the event, I woke up and
went outside to get breakfast. I asked the guy at the front desk who I think
English was his third language, where I could eat breakfast. And he had no
idea. So I figured I would walk out and maybe Bing maps Starbucks or something.
Leo: What part of town were you in?
Paul: The tenderloin.
Leo: Oh lord. Whenever I’m in the
tenderloin, I always go to Lambo’s Night Cap. That’s the place.
Paul: That’s the place people are leaving at
six o’clock in the morning. It was like that scene in Shaun of the Dead when
he’s wondering around the town and the zombie attack has already occurred and
he doesn’t realize it. And zombies are all around him. I walked out…
Leo: And here’s by the way where he had
breakfast.
Paul: This bad wasn’t actually bad.
Leo: I love the Olympic Flame.
Paul: I really liked that place.
Leo: The only thing wrong is you have a
ceramic mug instead of one of those Greek paper cups.
Paul: I was happy. Seriously,
me and 25 homeless people, all of whom were engaged in various activities. There was a woman spitting in the crosswalk in the middle of it with her gray
hoodie in a circle. Then she got dizzy and dropped it. Then she bent over to
pick it up and almost fell on her face. I had three people talk to me before I
found that restaurant. Two of them, I had no idea what they were saying because
it came out as, whatever. And I’m thinking to myself, you know I’m going to get
stabbed out here.
Leo: Beautiful hotel lane. In downtown San Francisco.
Paul: If you look at the reviews of this
hotel, there were words I had never seen in hotel reviews before. Like bed
bugs, you know. It was not good.
Leo: I’m sorry you had to do that. Mary Jo,
where did you stay? You had friends?
Mary Jo: No, I stayed in a hotel in the other
end of Market Street right across from that Travel Lodge that is known for drug
dealers and homeless. Yea, I was across the street from that. It was kind of
scary, but the hotel was very clean and nice. It was so scary walking down
Market. And I live in New York and I walk around here by myself really late.
And I have never been as scared as I was walking back to my hotel at 8pm on
Market Street.
Leo: I’m mad I wasn’t here. I could have been
your welcome wagon, steered you in, made sure you were
safe. Had gotten the mayor to come down and take care of you. I feel bad.
Paul: Life is probably a strong term. I think, I love San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city. But my
god is it being ruined by this kind of thing.
Leo: The tenderloin has always been that
way.
Paul: But it’s all over San Francisco. It
really is getting worse.
Leo: It’s just where you were.
Paul: It’s not the presence of homeless
people. I accept and understand that they exist. It’s the sheer aggressiveness
of them. You’re almost physically attacked every time you go to the city.
Leo: I’m sorry.
Paul: It’s too bad.
Mary Jo: I think it would have been a nice event
to have been in Seattle. Let’s just say. Although downtown Seattle is no prize
at night. It feels scary down there.
Leo: I have a deep affinity for San
Francisco. It is our hometown.
Paul: Oh, I do too.
Leo: I feel bad you had such a bad
experience.
Paul: I’ve had so many fantastic experiences
in San Francisco. But unfortunately, and
in sharp contrast of places like New York or London frankly, or Barcelona or
any other big city, Washington D.C. where there are a lot of homeless people,
I’ve never felt so threatened as I have in San
Francisco. And on repeated trips. This was one of the
worst ones.
Leo: Next time you’ve got to go to the
Google enclave. They’ve taken over a third of the city just for Google
employees. And that’s got a wall and a barb-wire fence.
Paul: Right it’s like a post-apocalyptic
area.
Leo: Anything anybody asks you for is for
some internet access. Hey buddy, can you spare some internet access? I’m so
sorry you had that experience.
Mary Jo: I blame Oracle open world. And Paul is
blaming…
Paul: I blame Microsoft. How about scheduling
it…
Leo: This week it’s Salesforce. The dream
force conferences are always big; it’s not unusual even in technically the
off-season that you can’t get a hotel.
Paul: Fair.
Leo: I’m sorry. I really am.
Paul: I’ve never had that experience at a
hotel, either. Not being able to find one. By the way, the Aria which I stayed
at two weeks previous in Las Vegas; on that Friday night, that was the most
expensive hotel in the entire city. It cost less than the place I stayed at in
San Francisco.
Leo: What?!
Paul: Yep.
Leo: Well I don’t understand that all.
Paul: Well you know they jack up the prices
because they know they can.
Leo: There’s no other place to stay. I’m
sorry. Anyway, how was the briefing? Was Joe Belfiore, I know he’s on video.
Was he there in person, too?
Paul: They put the brief in briefing, Leo.
Mary Jo: He was there.
Leo: Short? Quick?
Mary Jo: Yep. It was pretty…
Leo: Did you learn anything you didn’t
already know?
Paul: Yea, a couple of things.
Mary Jo: A couple of small things.
Leo: Like?
Paul: I don’t really want…
Mary Jo: We got to see the first official time
that they were demoing Windows 10.
Leo: Yea, bits are out. I don’t remember but
I don’t think we knew whether they would give out copies of the software.
Paul: We knew it would be in October. So the
joke is it was October 1st, which was the next day. By the way,
since I have an infinite capacity to complain, let me also complain about the
fact that we knew they weren’t going to be giving out this build at the event.
But they provided it starting at midnight the next day, which was 12 hours
later. And it was from ten days previous they could have given us the build.
Leo: A USB key, simple.
Paul: Something, anything. A gift for your
trouble kind of thing would have been nice. By the way, the other thing is,
think about this. Most people who go to this event, maybe not most, but many
people would have to fly home the next day which is the day they make the build
available. Which means it’s going to be next to impossible for any of those
people to get the build that day. So if you actually went to the event, it
would be more difficult to get the build on the first day, not less difficult. Which is kind of the opposite of the way it should be. I
could go on and on, Leo. I’m sorry.
Mary Jo: This was a learning experience for
everyone. That’s all I can say.
Paul: It’s possible there are other answers
to the command jump beyond how far or how high. You know that maybe another
answer would be I don’t think I’m going to jump this time.
Leo: How many people were there?
Mary Jo: There were about 50 total attendees.
Leo: So that’s a small group.
Mary Jo: Yea, it was very small.
Leo: That’s the elite, the crème de la
crème, a small group.
Paul: Not. But yea.
Leo: Was David Pogue there?
Paul: No but that’s not the point.
Leo: Ed Baig?
Paul: I don’t know. I think there were people
from each of the…
Leo: Walt Mossberg?
Paul: No, but…
Mary Jo: This wasn’t an Apple event.
Leo: Oh you’re right! What am I thinking?!
Mary Jo: We’re not at the Apple event, they’re not at our events.
Leo: This was an Ed Bott type of people.
Mary Jo: Yea, Ed was there. Tom was there.
Leo: Tom Warren of the Verge. The Windows folks.
Mary Jo: The people that cover Windows.
Leo: You, Paul Thurrott,
Mary Jo Foley. Is that a tight fraternity? Do you all know each other? I know
Paul doesn’t like anybody, but you get along.
Paul: That’s not true. In fact, I look
forward to these events. I think it’s like a family reunion.
Mary Jo: It is.
Paul: And I should call a few of them. Peter
Bright comes and we love hanging out with Peter. Tom Warren
as well. And Alex Wilhelm, I joke with him. He was going to get coffee
in the morning while we were in the line. And I joked with him about getting me
a coffee, and he did! And that was really nice. I tried to pay for it and he wouldn’t
let me. It was nice. There is that kind of element of comradery. I enjoy that
aspect of it quite a bit. And then Mary Jo was there. I saved Mary Jo and Ed a
seat down front.
Leo: Hello, Foley!
Mary Jo: We were in the front row. That was
pretty nice.
Paul: I was making faces at Mary Jo.
Leo: So Belfiore,
who else presented?
Paul: Terry Myerson.
Mary Jo: Who runs operating system grid.
Leo: What was their demeanor like? See I
want to ask the emotional questions. Did they feel good about what they were up
to?
Paul: Yea. I think Mary Jo would agree that
it got off to kind of a weird start. It was almost like they were trying to
adopt a kind of wistful, humble kind of, we understand the importance of
Windows to 1.5B people. It was kind of weird at the beginning. It was like you
sat down on the stool. Gather together children, I have a story to tell you. It
was good overall.
Mary Jo: I think they were proud of what they
had to show. And that they thought you know what, we’re fixing Windows. And
we’re going to make it a better experience especially for the business
customer, which was a target of this first preview. So that was good. I think
people have seen it since, have said hey it’s pretty far along for being an
early preview. And you can actually use it on a desktop or a laptop. It works.
Paul: Which kind of makes
sense. It’s not like this is a brand new thing. Although they keep
talking like it is. It’s the next version of Windows. So you start with this
stable base and you throw a couple of things onto it. In my experience so far
in day-to-day use, it’s been fine.
Leo: Surprisingly stable, really.
Paul: Yea, I think so.
Mary Jo: Yea.
Leo: It’s nine months before it’s out,
right?
Mary Jo: Right, there’s still time. They have a
lot of time. It wasn’t a consumer preview. They’re just saying, hey we told you
there was going to be a start menu. Here’s the start menu. We told you there
were going to be metro-style windows on the desktop. They’re there.
Leo: The fact that it works so well now
tells me it’s just really Windows 8.1 with some UI changes at this point.
Paul: Leo, we’re going to get to. Oh we are
going to get to that.
Leo: Oh, promises, promises.
Paul: Well actually we could address it now.
Go ahead, Mary Jo.
Mary Jo: I was going to say again we don’t know
what all the features are going to be of this. They had very certain things
they wanted to make sure we saw. To make us feel…
Leo: Mostly UI features, right?
Mary Jo: Mostly UI. And that’s Belfiore’s job,
it’s more focused on the UI. He was presenting the UI. They weren’t there to
talk about hey what’s new in hyper-v, here’s what’s new in security. Although we did…
Paul: Although frankly that would have been a
conversation for the enterprise oriented thing that it was supposedly doing
there.
Leo: Actually the new security model sounds
good. It’s exactly what it should be doing, right? Oh wow, that was a pregnant
pause!
Mary Jo: I’m not sure what I would call the new
security model at this point. Unless you mean as Azure active directory being
able to, people being able to authenticate to that and not necessarily their
Microsoft account. That was one security thing.
Leo: There was encryption, global encryption
and stuff like that. Am I wrong?
Paul: I don’t think that’s new to 10. I think
the way to think of it is they…
Leo: I mean I’m reading Mary Jo’s article
here.
Mary Jo: Did I type about global encryption?
Leo: More than under the cover security it
says.
Mary Jo: I talked a little bit about VPN and
Azure active directory. We talked about some of the things going on with
Windows Store.
Leo: This is what I interpreted encryption
as, threshold builds data protection into the natural flow and it integrates
data encryption at the platform level. I interpreted that as some sort of
global security model. Maybe I overstepped on that.
Paul: So it’s actually kind of hard to know
what he means by that, specifically. Microsoft has a variety of security
features that they’re currently adding across platforms. And
are managing through MDM solutions like In-Tune. So for example that
almost sounds like they’re file encryption
capabilities where a file has an understanding of who is authorized to open it
or edit it. And that if you mistakenly or purposely give it to someone who
doesn’t fall into that category, they can’t view it. Is that a feature of
Windows? Is that a feature of the file platform? Is that a feature of the
mobile device managing software; it’s kind of hard to say. The lines are
blurring here. Because one of the things we don’t see in this first preview is
the mobile aspect of it. The touch interface is the phone/tablet hybrid stuff
that possibly doesn’t have a desktop. There’s more coming.
And I think to fully understand what he’s saying, we have to see more.
Mary Jo: So those tidbits, Leo, came from a blog
post that someone from Microsoft wrote. Then they made him pull. And I’m
looking at the original one because I saved it. And he doesn’t really get into
that. When he’s talking about security, he’s talking more about Azure active
directory, single sign-on, MDM like Paul was describing.
Paul: I was going to say every one of those
things you just say, that’s all enterprise management functionality. So it’s
hard to place that on Windows.
Mary Jo: He doesn’t really talk about encryption
or the security model and the post that was pulled.
Paul: I guess the way I would think of it as
far as security model in Windows 10, is it’s obviously based on what came
before. For the mobile modern app platform, they have sandboxing. One of the,
frankly baloney excuses they gave for why those things had to run full-screen,
is they wanted to prevent screen-scraping and other forms of app-injection or
whatever that would supposedly occur if you ran those apps on the desktop. And of
course in Windows 10 it’s like hey we’re running them on the desktop! I don’t
see any reason why sandboxing wouldn’t work on the desktop. We already run…
runtimes don’t have to run in their own user experience. You run Adobe Air
apps, Java apps, dot-net apps, WPF apps, web apps,
whatever on the desktop. I think what they’re doing in Windows 10 with regards
to those modern apps makes sense. And can be done without usurping the security
model that is already in place. If that makes sense.
Mary Jo: Yea. I’m looking. He has a list of
features, too.
Leo: Why did that blog post get pulled?
Mary Jo: Because he was talking about things
that they didn’t want out yet.
Leo: Probably because they didn’t want to
make a promise or set an expectation, right?
Paul: It’s also an individual who’s very
excited about what they’re doing in Windows 10 and in other products. Knowing
enough about the other things that are going on with Microsoft right now, it’s
very clear that he co-mingled things that were not Windows 10-specific. In
fact, even his lists of new features they introduced in various versions of
Windows includes things that weren’t in fact features
of those versions of Windows. They were features of the Microsoft desktop
optimization pack. Or things that are sort of tertiary of Windows or on the
side of Windows. So he’s looking at it from sort of a holistic Microsoft stack
viewpoint, if that makes sense.
Mary Jo: Yea. Plus they want to trickle this
information out and keep the new cycle going. They just wanted to talk mostly
about the UI at last week’s event. But he was like hey, here is everything we
have got going on.
Leo: He was excited. I like that. I admire
that.
Paul: Right, it was done for the right
reasons. It was not screw my employer.
Mary Jo: No it wasn’t.
Leo: He said look at what we’re doing! I
agree, when you start talking about the features nine months before release,
you really do have to stretch out the releases.
Mary Jo: You do.
Leo: They could learn from Edward Snowden
and Glenn Greenwald.
Mary Jo: Exactly. He also talked about a new
Windows store model that’s going to be part of this. And they did say at the
event hey we are going to be able to pull off this one store thing. So there’s
going to be one store for phone, Xbox, and Windows. And it’s actually going to
show up with Windows 10. But he went deeper and he’s like we’re going to have
desktop apps in there and not just metro-style apps. So he was sharing a lot of
stuff that they have not gone public with yet at all. He was just excited.
Paul: There are a lot of feature requests for
Windows 10. And there were a lot of things that he mentions that are things
we’ve all been talking about for the last two years. When you look at something
like the Windows store, and especially when you look at something like Windows
RT in which you cannot download desktop applications from the web or from any
desktop applications; the first thought that comes to mind is surely there
could be a testing process for desktop applications where you could ensure that
they perform within some range for battery life and system performance and so
forth and are safe. And you could certify them and put them in the store.
Stepping even beyond that I would say who cares if they meet these
requirements. Allow them in there anyway but let there be a warning. We’re
going to let you download Chrome for Windows RT but you need to know it’s going
to impact your battery life and the performance of the system. I think a lot of
people would say I don’t care, let me just have it. It seems like they’re going
to be doing that. They haven’t announced it publicly, but this blog post that
she’s talking about, he says they’re doing it. And to me it’s like of course
you’re doing it. They have to do this.
Leo: What else have we… you’ve been playing
with it now, right? You’ve installed it.
Mary Jo: I have not installed it.
Leo: You’re a wise person. Paul, are you
using it right now for this Skype call?
Paul: I’m using it everywhere, Leo.
Leo: I’m surprised how many people have
installed it and are using it. And they say oh it’s fast. It’s reliable.
Paul: There are a list of firsts that we could go probably go through for this release. One of the
firsts and I think it is a big one, and you eluded to it earlier, first
preview, totally usable. This is not something they used to do before. They
would break everything before. There are a couple of little weird things in
here. You can’t activate the charms using a mouse anymore. The charms are still
there. If you know the keyboard combination, you can get to them that way. There’s little things like that. But honestly I find this
very usable. I will also say this; before there was a Windows 8 and before
there was a Start screen, my primary interface to the computer in Windows 7 was
just the desktop. With the taskbar. Because that was
one of the nice things they added in that release. A lot of the advances in the
Start menu over the years became superfluous to me in Windows 7 because I no
longer went there for my most recently used apps. I no longer pinned apps to the
Start screen. The Start menu became this thing I only used infrequently anyway.
So honestly from my perspective as a desktop user, as someone who’s been very
comfortably been using Windows 8; and of course that’s gotten better over the
course of 8.1 and the 8.1 updates. Moving forward to this Windows 10 preview,
it’s like yea, great. You know, it works exactly it had been working all along.
It’s fine. And this speaks to something I wrote some number of days after the
release when I finally tried to conceptualize what they had accomplished with
this release. We have to not so much guess, but we can’t experience it exactly.
But we know the basic plans on the touch side. And we also know the touch stuff
was fairly mature as a platform anyway. That they’ve kind of
done the impossible here. Everybody hated it. By everybody I don’t mean
pedantically everybody. But obviously a huge range of people hated Windows 8.
And they’ve made it into Windows 10, which is this great upgrade for both
Windows 8 and for Windows 7. That as a Windows 7 user, you can come to say
there you go, the Start menu evolved, desktop perfect. Windows 8, touch device,
yep, beautiful. Evolved touch device, perfect. How did they do this? I compared
it to like alchemy. It’s like making gold out of lead. How was this possible?
Seriously, that’s a big deal.
Leo: Houston we have no problem.
Paul: Yea and look, you’ve heard me use the
phrase making lemonade many times over the years. You’re presented with a
terrible thing, alright let’s make the best of this.
The best we can do is make lemonade out of it. This is not making lemonade.
They had this thing that again most people hated. Not just didn’t sort of like.
Most people actually hated it.
Leo: They’ve turned it into a turkey dinner.
Paul: Yea, nice! Seriously, that’s an
impressive feat all by itself. I don’t get to compliment Microsoft very often.
You need to take this in. This is a big deal.
Leo: You feel like people ought to look at
this and say wow, they listened, they responded, and they did it right.
Mary Jo: Do you think this is like… to me it
seems, even though I’m not running the biz, it seems like what Windows 7 was to
Vista, this is to Windows 8, right? It’s a fix.
Paul: You know what, it’s so much more impressive. With Windows Vista, it was obvious what they had
to do to fix it. I think a lot of people with Windows 8 said man I don’t see
how they’re going to fix this. I don’t see how they can make one thing that’s
going to please these guys over here that love the desktop, these guys over
here that frankly, only a couple hundred million of them but still a lot of
people, actually like Windows 8 on the tablet. Oh and by the way, we’ve got
these Windows Phone guys over here. And you know what, they like Windows Phone
but they didn’t like what they did to Windows metro in regular Windows. How do
you make this thing that pleases all of these guys? Again, it’s not 100% complete, we’ve got a ways to go. But I look at what they’ve
done here and I just didn’t think it would be possible. So I’m impressed.
Leo: And Mary Jo, I guess the question for
you is will the enterprise be as happy as Paul is?
Mary Jo: I think they will be. If you guys
remember when we first saw Windows 8 and I was representing the enterprise
point of view, I said wow, they’re going to hate this.
Remember? I was like whoa, retraining is going to be scary. People are going to
avoid this. And when I see this, I’m like you know what this is what they want
to see. Hey, a Start menu. Hey, a taskbar. And I can have windows and I can do
things that I already know how to do. And I don’t have to retrain to take
advantage of all the new stuff.
Paul: I don’t remember if you were there but
the original Windows 8 developer preview, they had a kind of half-day reviewers’
workshop. And in sharp contrast every other Microsoft Windows event I’ve ever
been at, the business portion of that was like a throwaway 15-minute thing at
the end. I remember sitting in the audience and it was actually in McDonnell. I
felt kind of bad for them because there wasn’t much to say. And he talked and
talked and the idea was like this is what’s new for business users in Windows
8. And I leaned into Raphael or whoever I was next to and said, so what’s new
for business here exactly? I was like what did he just say? Was there anything
in there?
Mary Jo: They told us when we were talking to
them after the event. They have been showing this to business customers since
February. I think they said. And under NDA, so they went to them and said what
do you think if we do this? How about this? So they actually went out and
showed it at a very early stage. And did what they asked them to do. Everyone’s
like yea, but that’s what beta testing is or that’s what early testing is. But
that isn’t what happened with Windows 8. Because it wouldn’t have come out the
way it came out if they would have done that.
Leo: Chat room is saying we don’t know this
happy Paul. Where’s the cranky Paul we know?
Paul: And this came in the wake of my
horrific San Francisco experience.
Leo: You were prepared to be cranky.
Paul: This thing, if there was anything wrong
with it, I would have went to town on it. But honestly
it’s great.
Leo: Well done. Terry and
Joe.
Mary Jo: There’s all this new feedback stuff
that’s part of Windows 10. If you sign up for the preview, you get into the
insiders thing. You get private newsgroups, you can
suggest features that you can actually interact with them about specific
features that you’re testing. That also is new, also something that didn’t
happen with Windows 8 either.
Paul: It’s so unbelievable. I feel like I’m
going to be physically shocked. You almost don’t trust it, right? They aren’t
seriously asking about what we think about this, are they?
Leo: Another thing that’s new, a keystroke
logger.
Paul: No.
Mary Jo: No.
Leo: No. Well, if that’s the case, I
responded on Twitter to somebody well yea, you don’t have to use this. This is
a technical preview. They’re instrumenting it as that’s what happens.
Paul: If you look at the terms of service
though, it’s, it’s really just based around the notion of you’re providing
feedback and we want to see what you’re talking about.
Leo: No one is making you use it. I would be
shocked if it were in the release version. This is what happens when you do a
technical preview. You get watched.
Mary Jo: Yea, they’re looking at what keystrokes
you make. They are looking at that. But you are letting them look at it. It’s
not like they have a key-logger on you.
Leo: What’s the deal?! People are so quick
to…
Paul: Well it’s still Microsoft. So you still
have to operate within this bubble where they’re not going to get anything
right. So we have to find something that we can complain about. You can tell things
are going well-I should look this up actually-you can tell things are looking
good because you can see what people are providing feedback about. You can see
what the most popular items of feedback are. And you get into these really
specific issues, like people are saying don’t you
think the power button in the Start menu should be a little lower in the menu.
It’s like you know what, we win. If this is the… I mean seriously like the
number two request, 453 votes, could you add a little animation to the Start
menu when it opens? You know, guys I’ve got a
newsflash for you. We’ve won. If this is the type of stuff that people are
worried about, there’s nothing seriously wrong.
Leo: It’s good news. Alright, let’s pause,
come back. More to come. Paul Thurrott, I didn’t
introduce you at the beginning. I was so excited to find out about Windows 10. The editor in chief for the supersite for Windows,
winsupersite.com. Author of many books including the
latest Windows 8.1 Field Guide. It’s all at windows8book.com. And many
of them are free for the download. Mary Jo Foley writes about Microsoft at ZD
Net, allaboutmicrosoft.com. Both of them have been sleeping well. Actually Paul
has not been sleeping well. But will be sleeping well on their Casper mattress.
I’m thrilled that you both, because we talk to all the hosts. And said, we’ve got this new advertiser, would you be interested in
getting one of these mattresses? In fact I have one. I did a video of me
opening up the box and letting it go. The mattress comes to you by mail, in a
box. I got a queen size that fits in a box that you couldn’t even put small
children in.
Paul: By the way, we know our UPS guy
personally. Thus we get treated like crap. But he arrived one day and he walked
up to the house without the box and he looked at me and said, seriously?
Leo: You’re getting mattresses in the mail
now? Seriously? Casper is a startup that you wouldn’t
think would be a startup. They said, look we want to make great mattresses,
premium mattresses for a fraction of the cost. They’re actually
revolutionizing; you can see I’m enjoying it. If you’re watching the video,
that really is comfortable. They’re cutting the cost of dealing with resellers.
There’s no showroom and they’re passing the savings right onto the consumer.
You may be saying I want to lie on my mattress before I buy it. But you know what, let me tell you from real experience, I’ve done that.
Got in a mattress in a showroom; you can’t in 30 seconds or a minute-even Ozzy
loves our Casper mattress-find out if that mattress is right for you. So what
Casper does is they’ll send it to you and you have 100 days. Free
delivery, painless returns. They actually send somebody to come collect
it and pack the box up. Within a 100-day period. So
you don’t have to test it for five minutes in a showroom. You can really test
your Casper mattress. They’re made right here in the USA. They’re a combination
of latex and memory foam. No springs. That’s why it can go in that box. But it
also means no lumps. It’s really smooth. Very comfortable. Just the right sink. Just the right
bounce. You saw me leap onto it just right. Long-lasting
comfort and support. You’re going to love it. Buy online risk-free.
That’s the thing I think they have to overcome is this notion of well wait a
minute I want to lie on it before I buy it. Well you can, for 100 days! And
that’s a good deal. $500 for a twin, $950 to go all the way
to the king size. And that is like a lot less than I paid for my king
size. And you can save an additional $50 because you’re listening right now. Go
to casper.com/windows. Make sure you use the promo code windows and save $50 at
checkout. Casper.com/windows. When you get your Casper
mattress you get your little Casper package with the booklet and all the
information. Mary Jo, have you slept on yours yet?
Mary Jo: Yep, I have.
Leo: Did you like it?
Mary Jo: I like it a lot. I like it a lot. It
replaced a futon, right? So it’s so much more comfortable.
Paul: That was kind of a low bar then.
Mary Jo: I had a really good futon, one with a
ton of springs in it. And it was a high-quality expensive futon, not a crappy
one. This one is great. And it was so easy to put in. I even did it myself.
Leo: Yea, it’s kind of fun. I had this
challenge because my son moved out of the dorms this year at CU-Boulder. Living in a house with other guys, no furniture. And I guess
we were going to go to Goodwill or something and get a mattress. Then I
remembered I could just order one from Casper. And it came in a box and they
had fun opening it. And he’s been sleeping on it ever since. I asked him Henry,
do you like your mattress? He says, I love it. More
importantly, so do the girls. Casper, no promises here. Capser.com/windows. Use the promo code windows and I
think you’re going to like it. And thanks especially to Phil and Luke and Gabe,
and Jeff and Neil the guys and founders of Casper. They’re really great guys.
And it’s a great company. Casper. I think Terry send me book. Yea, Terry. Thanks
for your support. I hope you enjoy the bedtime reading. They sent me Lytton
Strachey’s Eminent Victorians which is probably the most soporific book ever
written.
Paul: I think the middle part of the Bible is
possibly less…
Leo: This put me to sleep, I will tell you.
Paul: Whoever’s son of whoever.
Leo: But now I know everything there is to
know about cardinal manning. Alright, let’s continue on, Windows Weekly and
talk more about Windows here. Okay this is something that people have been
saying and I want to know is this true. Windows 7 users, are you getting a
via-Windows update to Windows 10? What is…? Tell me about that.
Paul: Not exactly. If you in Windows 7 have
signed into the Windows insider program which is how you get the preview and
have started the download, at that point yes it will be offered to you in
Windows Update. If you were to do it on a Windows 8 computer or something and
then went to Windows 7, you don’t see it there. There’s no secret connection
between the two. You are not getting this unexpectedly. This is just a nicety
for those people who have started to download but haven’t finished it yet.
Leo: And you can install it in place, right?
You don’t have to do a fresh install.
Paul: Right. You can do a clean install. I
spent literally all day long yesterday, literally all day long.
Leo: I don’t understand the picture but I
like it.
Paul: So I can explain the picture,
obviously. That is a seven hamburger sandwich for Windows 7. Obviously
some weird Japanese thing that they did around the launch of Windows 7.
Leo: They’re not going to do that for
Windows 10, I don’t think. I hope not.
Paul: You’d have to be like one of those
snakes that can open its jaw.
Leo: And you can run it on a VM. I know
there are people who are running it on VMWare, right?
Paul: Right. By the way, I’ve installed this
on everything. I’ve installed it on the cheap 8 Aspire that I have, on my
Surface Pro 3, and my desktop, in VMs. I’ve installed it on the MacBook Air.
For Windows 7, I went back to it; I have a Windows 7 VM. I have VMs of
virtually everything as you might imagine. I don’t know what I did but somehow
moving it to a different drive, I guess I lost the
restore points or something. And it’s like Windows 7, RTM version of Windows 7;
I spent all day yesterday updating this thing. So I could then put the Windows
10 update on it and see what it did. And my God does that take all day. That is
all day of updating. That is Windows telling you, you have no more updates to
install. Just kidding, here are 593 more of them. Like it’s crazy how long it takes.
Mary Jo: Oh man.
Leo: How many times did you have to reboot?
Paul: Oh, seven or eight easily. More than that. I have no idea. I sat here all day. I was
doing other things but all day long. Unbelievable.
Mary Jo: By the way, you can-which I have
done-be a Windows 7 user, get into the insider’s preview. As long as you don’t
download the tech-preview.exe file, it’s not going to give you a prompt at all
to move to the new version. So you can decouple that if you don’t want to be
moving to it, but you want to look at the forums or talk to Microsoft or see
what people are talking about.
Paul: And I’m sure I wrote a tip a thousand
years ago about how to hide updates from Windows Update; it’s not really that
hard to do. People are acting like oh my God, how do they know?!
Mary Jo: I did! I freaked out when I saw the
story.
Paul: Well you triggered the download, that’s
how they know.
Mary Jo: But I was like, what?!
Paul: Well if you don’t understand what
they’re doing, it sounds a little like Apple giving the U2 album to them
without telling them.
Leo: But you shouldn’t be signing up for a
technical preview if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Mary Jo: And they call it an important update
too. So some people might see it and say oh it’s important. I should install
it. And oh, there it is.
Leo: Let’s reiterate that. These things are
really early pre-betas. This is not for, oh I just
want a free copy of Windows.
Paul: This is super simple. If you are
thinking about writing me or anyone else an email and say, hey is this thing
stable enough that I should be able to run it? Then the answer is no. If you are actually wondering, then just don’t do it. Just
hold on. Although I have to say this one’s pretty good.
Leo: But you know what they’re could be the
weird showstopper that you don’t have happen for four days and then suddenly…
Paul: Leo, there are no showstoppers. I do
everything. No, obviously there are weird application combinations.
Leo: That one app that you need might not
work.
Mary Jo: And it’s also not really optimized for
touch as we’ve been saying. So if you put it on your Surface Pro 3, which we’ve
heard people doing, they’re saying hey it doesn’t work that well.
Leo: Paul did that. Didn’t you put it on
your Surface?
Paul: Yea, I use my Surface Pro 3 like an
Ultrabook. Honestly for that it’s fine. I mean I think the weird bits are if
obviously on a tablet where you’re holding it on the sides-those edge UIs are
really nice. They don’t work on the Windows 10 technical preview. Well, that’s
not fair. I’m sorry. The old switcher swipe which is when you swipe in from the
left now triggers the alt-tab screen where you can switch between apps. So
actually that does work. You know, it’s different. If you’re using a pure
tablet and don’t have a keyboard attached, this is not going to be a great
experience. But it’s not completely unusable. I mean it’s optimized for
traditional computers.
Leo: Okay. What else do we got here? Oh, a Windows 8.1 update 2. Never going to happen. We don’t call it a one
because there is no update.
Paul: So Mary Jo and I both have talked to
people at Microsoft who are very upset about this
weird naming convention thing. And that’s one thing, I
mean we can sort of disagree with how people brand things. And that’s really
just, kind of a marketing issue. It’s sort of like do we call it Windows RT 5.0
or Windows 2000? You can kind of make your case in either direction, whatever.
But frankly when there are people like Mary Jo especially, and I, who know
what’s really happening internally, the correct thing for that company to do at
that point is you don’t discuss it. It’s just, this is
what it’s called. It doesn’t’ matter what we used to call it. What you don’t do
is come out and say, oh you may have heard these stories that are completely
made up. Just rumors and speculation that there was going to
be an update 2. There’s never been anything called update 2. That’s all
completely baloney. Except for one thing. That we know that that’s not true. And now people have uncovered
evidence in code that actually speaks to update 2 for Windows 8.1, which was of
course that August update that they were originally going to call update 2. And
so I think I was still in Spain when this happened, but I remember being a
little animated about this at the time. And so I will take the high road now
and just say, screw you, Microsoft.
Mary Jo: Get that out of your system.
Paul: Well the point is we always knew what
the truth was. You know? It’s not like we get on the podcast or on our blogs and
say what can I make up today that sounds plausible? And hopefully no one will
ever call me on it if it doesn’t happen. That’s not how you do things. So I
just found that kind of a weird artifact of the old regime at Windows, that
they would go out of their way to write something like that in a
publicly-facing blog. When everyone at Microsoft who work
with these people and people like us outside of Microsoft know that that’s not
true.
Mary Jo: By the way, speaking of hidden code
references. We didn’t mention this. There’s Cortana all over Windows 10,
embedded in there.
Leo: Ooh, I like that.
Mary Jo: So it looks like Cortana is coming. It
was looking like maybe it will make it in, maybe it won’t. There’s already a
lot of Cortana in there.
Paul: Oh, that was notification center.
Mary Jo: Steven Chapman went in, and he used to
do Microsoft Kitchen where he dissected code. He went in there and found all
the references.
Leo: So what does that mean? That means
we’re going to be able to talk to Windows 10?
Paul: It means computer on, baby. That’s what
it means.
Mary Jo: Maybe it will mean, hey print my
boarding pass for my trip tomorrow.
Leo: Why not?!
Mary Jo: At some point. At the beginning at
least, it will be the same Cortana that we have on Windows Phone where you can
get little hints.
Leo: It’s not the kind of thing you want in
enterprise. Because you have an office often with many people
in the same room. And you don’t want all of them talking all at once.
Mary Jo: You can type into it too though.
Leo: Of course.
Mary Jo: Yea, you don’t want that.
Leo: As we have seen voice interfaces, you
know Google’s Chrome has it on the desktop. And certainly my phone, if I say
okay Google Now, it will wake up. Or not. That’s the
other fun thing. You never really know what it’s going to do.
Paul: Everybody who uses these things
understands the limitations.
Leo: It always wakes up at the wrong time.
That’s another thing.
Paul: Which is not as bad as waking you up at
the wrong time.
Leo: True, that’s really bad. Siri will do
that because I keep my iPhone plugged in at my bedside table. And there’s on
the one hand, you can say hey Siri, what time is it? And it will tell you and
you don’t have to open your eyes. On the other hand if you’re having a
conversation or you’re listening to an audiobook, she wakes up all the time.
Paul: I have the screen off but the Xbox is
on. I’ll be talking to Raphael on Skype or whatever and certain things it
triggers. Suddenly Xbox music is playing a song and it’s like what is this?
Leo: So these speech interfaces sound cool
and I think they’re coming to us mostly because we saw it in Star Trek. But I
don’t know, I thought for a long time that’s going to be the future of UI.
Paul: I actually don’t think it’s that bad. I
think that people get too excited about something. For example, when Microsoft
did Kinect, the first version, this is the future! We’re going to be standing
in front of our computers. That gets tiring. Multi-touch is kind of the same
way. A lot of people say I don’t want multi-touch. I use a keyboard and a
mouse, I won’t use multi-touch. Or multi-touch is it. Tablets are going to kill
laptops. Now it’s kind of like voice control. The truth is, these things will all kind of work together seamlessly. And it’s not so much
that we interact with a computer via voice in this case or whatever. It’s that
we’re going to have all these natural ways of interacting.
Mary Jo: And you can use multiple ones, right?
Leo: Yea. It’s not about using any one of them.
Mary Jo: On my phone, I’ll say to Cortana, set
my alarm for blah. But the rest of the time I’m not out there talking to my
phone. I’m typing things in there.
Leo: You said by the way, the most valuable
usage of voice is set a timer for, or set a reminder for. Because
those add a lot little fiddly things. And it’s much easier just to say
it. And by the way, that’s pretty accurate.
Paul: Mary Jo will recall in our manic ride
from San Francisco to Petaluma last week, the driver who by the way is
excellent…
Leo: Is it Uber?
Paul: No, it’s I guess your usual driver. He
was great.
Leo: Walter.
Paul: Yes, Walter. He was a great guy.
Leo: And Walter is our driver. We really
love Walter. He’s so good.
Paul: No, he was great. But he interacted
with his phone and he sent text messages virtually everything, all via voice.
And I thought that was really interesting because this was in a real-world kind
of example of a guy who is driving professionally and shouldn’t be texting
while he’s driving obviously. It’s probably illegal in California.
Leo: It is illegal and he runs his own
business so he needs to stay in touch and do that.
Paul: Right, so here he is actually using the
technology I thought fairly effectively, right?
Mary Jo: Yea.
Leo: We just saw a study, AAA is telling everybody that depending on the voice technology, Siri turns out
to be the worst. But using these voice activated things in your car is as bad
as…
Paul: Well it’s because it’s a distraction,
right?
Leo: It’s a pretty big distraction.
Paul: I was driving last night in my car. In
my car I can connect the phone to the car but I can’t do music over Bluetooth.
So I’ve got this tangle of wires connecting my humongous phone to my car. And
I’m not texting and I’m not using the phone, but what I am doing is playing
music through the phone. And of course that requires me to look at the screen
of my phone. I can’t use the car controls because it doesn’t work with
Bluetooth. And interact with the touch screen while I’m driving. And I had that
though while I was driving last night. This is as distracting as any texting,
anything else you would do.
Leo: Because you’re not looking.
Paul: It’s not illegal.
Leo: It’s illegal in California. You can’t
touch your phone. A friend got a $300 ticket just for flipping the phone, like
just playing with it.
Paul: My point is if the cop saw the glow of
the phone in the car and pulls me over, I could show him like look I wasn’t
text messaging but I was playing music. And you have to let me go. Even though
technically what I’m doing, you have a poltergeist activity, Mary Jo?
Mary Jo: Can you guys hear that?
Leo: They’ve been really quiet. I think the
pie worked.
Paul: There’s a guy on the other side going I
think she’s on a radio show. I thinks he’s talking to
somebody.
Leo: Talk loud, Mary Jo and say things like yes Conan!
Paul: So these jerks on the other side of the
wall…
Leo: Anyway, Cortana everywhere. I would
like that, I guess. It’s nice to have. Let’s just put it that way. And I think
it’s going to be a checkbox in every OS. What’s really interesting is what
happens in mobile starts to set the expectation for what you want on a desktop
computer. Who would have thought that, right?
Paul: It’s a virtuous circle, Leo. Who was it
that said that, it makes sense that these things all feed into each other. So
there are desktop windows platform functionality that’s heading into phone and
phone functionality that’s heading into the desktop. And this stuff all makes
sense. It’s weird when you see advance voice stuff on phone and on Xbox. But not on Windows. Here’s the thing that has the most
processing-power of all of it. Why would we miss that?
Leo: Finally a little footnote, the word
Windows seems to be disappearing rapidly all over Microsoft. The latest is
in-tune.
Paul: Every time a PC maker abandons Windows,
Microsoft has to take the name from another produce.
Leo: An angel gets its wings.
Mary Jo: This one makes sense though, right?
It’s weird that this was called Windows In-Tune because it manages iOS and
Android and Windows. So why was it Windows?
Paul: Because of the first version it was
actually PC Management. They didn’t add devices until the third or fourth
generation I remember. The beginning this was for managing PCs out of the
enterprise.
Mary Jo: So now no more Windows Azure or Windows
In-Tune. It’s Azure or In-Tune.
Leo: Try this, Mary Jo. Just go, they’re
here.
Paul: It’s like they’re building the set from
Saw next door, you know?
Mary Jo: And you know what? Here’s the worst
part. The guy who moved out of here had lived here 30 years. So he was under
rent control so they’re probably going to be gutting this for who knows how
long.
Leo: The cigarette smoke has soaked six
inches down.
Paul: If you only you had a nearby place to
go and drink beer.
Mary Jo: My office is calling me.
Leo: It’s rattling and humming. Surface Pen, out of band update. I just said five words I
have no idea what they mean.
Paul: I know. I’m going to let Mary Jo do
this one because she was the one who came up with the answer.
Leo: It’s her story, okay.
Mary Jo: It’s actually Paul’s but yesterday
Microsoft released and out of band update because usually when they update the
Surface firmware, they do it on patch-Tuesday. Which isn’t
until next week. But they did something yesterday. What they did was a
new driver for the Surface Pro 3 Pen. So everybody was like wow, what is this?
And they said it was for new configurations, I believe, of Surface Pro 3. Which
got everybody like, wow what does that mean? Is it the Surface Mini making a
comeback or what is this? Turns out, it seems that it’s just the code that’s
going to let people program the pen. So that if you have something you want the
pen to do instead of what it does by default, you’re going to actually have an
app in the store sometime soon that will let you program what you want your pen
to do on the Surface. That’s what it is, I think.
Paul: It’s the logical progression of user
feedback. So you release Surface Pen back in nature, and you press the button
on the top and it launches OneNote. But it launches the modern version of
OneNote. So of course people say well hold on a moment, I don’t use the modern
version of OneNote. I use the desktop version of OneNote. Can you change it so
I can have this choice? And they did, they changed it so you can choose which
one of those you wanted. And then people said okay, but maybe I want to use it
with some other application. Could you change it so that you can arbitrarily
determine which app to launch when you press the button? And that’s what this
is. So there’s no UI for this. It just enables that configuration and I think
Microsoft and/or third-parties will eventually release a modern app that will
enable that functionality.
Mary Jo: Yea.
Paul: What’s that?
Leo: Snacks!
Paul: Box-o-food?
Leo: Did the guy just…
Mary Jo: I think he’s like right here.
Leo: No, okay this is what you do. You go
next door with a little bit of Nature Box. And you say how would you like to
take an hour off and devour some premium pumpkin seeds? Or
some blueberry nom-noms. I’m having blueberry nom-noms.
Paul: Blueberry nom-noms?
Leo: Yea, this is Nature Box. These snacks
can be delivered. Usually with kids, this is a good idea. Because
these are all nutritionist-approved. They come every month. They have a
business plan too because our employees love the Nature Box. Never any
high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats, artificial
flavors or colors. You can choose gluten-free if you want or vegan or whatever
your dietary needs are. No nuts obviously. You can choose from savory, sweet,
and salty. Here’s what you do, go to naturebox.com right now.
Naturebox.com/twit and start your free trial of Nature Box. You can taste this
for free and see what you think. Drop the candy bar, throw away the potato
chips, start eating healthful, wholesome snacks from
naturebox.com. I’ll give you a few flavors just to give you, you can go to the
website to see, Sriracha-roasted cashews. Do I have any takers? I think the guy
next door wants some.
Paul: He’s like, I’m listening!
Leo: Knock three times if you want cranberry
macaroon granola. Or well I said blueberry nom-noms, that’s what I’m going to
have. These are mini, blueberry-flavored oat cookies. And they’re really… oh he
wants that one! He wants that one!
Paul: One knock for
yes.
Leo: Knock three times on the ceiling if you
want it. Praline pecans. Or lone star snack mix. So go
to naturebox.com/twit. We were doing a discount. Now we’re just saying we’re
going to send you a free sample. If you’re a business by the way, check out the
business plan because that’s a good thing. Stay full, stay strong, start
snacking smarter. Go to naturebox.com/twit. Adobe has updated Creative Cloud.
And apparently now supporting these high-res displays we’re all using, yes?
Paul: What happened? Oh, yes.
Leo: Paul’s thinking about the blueberry
nom-noms. I know what you’re thinking of.
Paul: So, I don’t know too much about Adobe
Max. But the Adobe Max event, in fact I’m surprised Microsoft didn’t schedule
something during it. It was yesterday or two days ago. And you may recall at
the Surface launch event back in May, June, whatever that was, I think the
brought out a guy from Adobe. If not, they showed off a future version at the
time of Adobe Photoshop CC that would enable high-DPI support. Because of
course, Surface Pro 3 is a high-DPI display, what Apple calls a retina display. It makes traditional
desktop applications look terrible because all of the little toolbars are tiny
and they are impossible to hit accurately unless you can see perfectly or are
very young. Sometime mid-year, I don't remember exactly when, Adobe did
update all of their creative Cloud programs. It's really hard to find,
but this kind of experimental feature in Photoshop that enables high DPI and on
the Surface Pro to my eyes it's terrible, it makes the screen look like
640x480. I was really disappointed in how poorly it worked. I
thought that this is kind of weird, these guys are working together on this
stuff, and how could it not be more impressive? But then at Adobe MAX
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came out and spoke with the Adobe CEO, got some
demos of some of the stuff that they are working on, showed off Photoshop and
Illustrator as well as some other stuff that was brand new including like a
face tracking application that looks at you, matches your face to an on screen
animation of a cartoon character or whatever, and as you move around and move
your mouth and talk the character does as well. It gives you that Andy
Serkis's Gollum kind of effect where you can...
Leo: Wow.
Paul: It's really impressive. But as far as the Adobe CC stuff goes,
yeah, Photoshop and these applications are so old, literally in some cases date
back decades. What they have done I guess with this new version is that
they have separated the user interface layer from the rest of the application.
So the user interface for Adobe and Illustrator at least, I'm not sure
about the other apps, can adapt based on the hardware you are on. So I
guess on the Surface optionally you can present these touch UIs. So if
you are familiar with Photoshop you know that they use like the toolbox and
windows for layers and that kind of thing. Now these things can slide in
from the side and not take up screen. The buttons are big enough that you
can hit them with your fingers and so forth. You can actually interact with
the layers in a Photoshop file or the animatic in whatever application that was
in and move things around, and animate them, and change them around with your
finger. It looks pretty good. I haven't looked at this yet, but it
looked like it was approximately a thousand times nicer than what they had two
months ago. It looks like Adobe is finally getting the message on the
high DPI stuff in particular.
Leo: Yeah, good.
Paul: Yeah, it's good.
Leo: And the Surface is high DPI. Even though it's a smallish
screen...
Paul: Yeah, it's 60 something. By default
Microsoft scales the screen to 150% so when you sit down in front of it on the
desktop it looks pretty normal, but what you may not realize is that it's
scaled. Microsoft applications like Word and Excel, Office Apps, scale
and so when you look at those they look normal and you don't think anything of
it. But when you run Photoshop you know you get that tiny little tool bar
on the top because it's just a bitmap display so it's just 1:1. It
doesn't scale intelligently like the OS does. They are finally fixing
that.
Leo: That's good. That's good. I subscribe. I have
got a CC license. I use it.
Paul: You have got to check this stuff out. You have got to
look at that animation thing. That looks awesome.
Leo: I forgot, you are a Photoshop guy.
You are a big Photoshop guy, yeah.
Paul: I don't know, I wouldn't claim to be an expert.
Leo: You have been trained as a graphic artist. Of course that
was in the days of Culmer Pens and Charcoal.
Paul: I sold a painting, so I am a professional artist Leo.
Leo: Really?
Paul: As a child, yeah.
Leo: Oh. As a child you sold a painting? So you are not
only a professional artist, you are a prodigy.
Paul: Wow. Yeah, prodigy.
Leo: Seriously, like what is the story behind that? Was it a
kitty cat, what was the painting?
Paul: I don't even remember. I've sold several paintings.
Leo: You have?
Paul: Oh, yeah, yeah, I used to paint.
Leo: Do you still paint?
Paul: No, no, no, no, no, no. I told you my art school story.
I went to art school after high school and I ended up flunking out
because this was like a path to never making money. This was just
stupidity. The other this was I felt like I was better than anyone I was
with, I was better than the instructor whose advice I was not particularly keen
to take, and I thought that this was just a tragedy. I just didn't get
it. That was the end of that.
Leo: So you like many others chose to make a living rather than to
follow your dreams.
Paul: It's a selfish thing.
Leo: Somebody said that there is a video. Is this is? Adobe applications on Surface. Is this a video?
Paul: I will recognize it.
Leo: Is it Jeff?
Paul: No, this is a video, none of this is real.
Mary Jo: That is a surface video that they put out.
Paul: Yeah, but this is stuff that we hope to do, not this is what we
have now.
Leo: But there is a video somewhere of...
Paul: Yeah, if you can find the video of Satya Nadella and the CEO of
Adobe getting the demo it's fascinating and the part about the animation bit I
was referring to was really, really interesting.
Mary Jo: And you know at Adobe MAX the giveaway that Microsoft allowed them
to have is they gave everybody who came to that show a Surface Pro 3 plus a
year of Office 365 and 1 Terabyte of storage. That was the giveaway.
Leo: Wow.
Paul: Right.
Mary Jo: Which is pretty huge.
Leo: Wow.
Paul: I mean between all of the Microsoft employees and the Adobe people
that was...
Leo: This is Project Animal. Project Animal is what you are
talking about.
Mary Jo: Yeah, they were excited. That was a standing ovation at the
end when they announced, hey that was your give away.
Paul: That's a pretty good give away.
Mary Jo: It is.
Paul: And I assume the graphic artist types at Adobe MAX got decent
Surface Pros. I don't know what version they got but I'm guessing that it
wasn't the el cheapo i3 version.
Leo: Well you would still be happy to get that.
Mary Jo: Yeah.
Paul: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo: I will move on. I can't find it. It's Project Animal?
Paul: Adobe had it on their site. It's the day 1 keynote.
It's about 3/4 of the way through the presentation. It used to be
on the Adobe homepage.
Mary Jo: Yeah, it's like a 20 minute video. There's some guys talking
and they showed a few things.
Leo: Did they have blueberry num nums? That's all I care about.
Mary Jo: You know what's funny to me? When I was watching the video
all I could think was, and Paul will laugh at me for this, and I'm not a
creative professional or a graphic designer, but I was like this looks so much
harder with touch than without touch.
Paul: By the way, back to what we were talking about earlier, it's not
to replace keyboard and mouse, it's to augment it. In other words, now
when someone comes over and says what are you working
on, you can be like here is my document, or whatever they call the file.
I'm not sure about these two things, you can
kind of move around your finger. I think it's more for that type of
thing.
Mary Jo: I agree. I was watching the guy trying to demo it trying to
touch the command and it was so small and like, you know what, I think it could
have been a mouse.
Leo: Small touch targets are always a problem.
Mary Jo: It's great. It's great. If you want to use touch it's
enabled now. I just think that we are using touch for touch's sake in
some of these demos.
Leo: I'm with you on that actually. Let's see, wait a
minute. PowerPoint is being replaced?
Mary Jo: No.
Paul: Huh?
Leo: What? What is Swayy?
Mary Jo: A lot of people would love that. They would. Swayy? Swayy is a very odd product name.
Paul: Obviously we make Swayys. You
didn't even have to ask.
Mary Jo: Swayy is a new presentation app
that Microsoft announced last week. It kind of got overshadowed a bit by
the Windows 10 stuff. It's the first fully brand new Office app that they
have had in quite a while actually. It came out of some of the work that
the OneNote Team had been doing and the Office Labs Team had been doing.
It's still somewhat different. It was a product that was code named
Remix, the thing we heard about a long time ago. If you are a real new
designer like me, someone who like PowerPoint design
is really challenging for...
Paul: By the way, any normal person, right?
Mary Jo: Yeah, you are really good at making PowerPoint presentations and I
am terrible at it.
Paul: No, I'm actually not, but okay.
Mary Jo: I think you are pretty good, but anyway. It's going to let
you flow in text and images. It will give you options for hey, do you
like this design or that design? Do you want to highlight this image?
It does the work for you with like a machine type service. So you
just say here is the images that I want, I want to
arrange them in some graphically appealing way, and I just want you to do the
work; and the app does it for you which is pretty cool. So they are going
to come out with it as both a web app that you can use through your different
browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Then they
are also going to create mobile applications. So starting with IOS there
is going to be a Swayy App for your phone that will
let you look at these things called Swayys when you
create them, which is kind of odd, on your phone. So you can share it
with people.
Paul: Well we call Word docs words.
Mary Jo: Yeah, exactly. You do call PowerPoints PowerPoints.
Paul: We shouldn't.
Mary Jo: It was weird. You can share Swayys and have something called My Swayys. The good
part to me is that you don't have to have the app to see these things if you
use the web apps.
Leo: Is it HTML 5?
Paul: It is HTML 5.
Mary Jo: It is HTML 5. So if someone sends you a link to a Swayy you can go see it without having to go get an app or
have an app.
Leo: Or a player even if you just have a modern browser.
Paul: Right.
Mary Jo: Yep, yep, yeah. So we haven't tried it yet because you have
to sign up for the preview and then you get invited into the preview and
neither of us have been invited into the preview yet.
Paul: We are expecting this any moment now.
Mary Jo: Yeah, it looked pretty interesting actually. At first I was
kind of like hmm, I don't know about this. But if you go on a trip and
you want to share your pictures with family or friends and you just don't want
to have to send everybody emails or send them links to your OneDrive and have
them try to figure out how to get into that. It's just hey, I can have my
words and my pictures arrange themselves in a graphically pleasing way and they
can just click on the link and see what I want to show them. I think that
it is okay.
Paul: There is a lot of actually interesting things about this, but the Swayy you create is not like this thing; it's not like a
file. You can't save it to your hard drive and then share it offline or
something. It's literally a dynamic thing that lives up in the Cloud,
it's an azure. It looks different depending on the type of device you
look at it on and you can recreate it at any time to have a different style.
So if you look at it on a tablet or a PC it’s got this kind of landscape
presentation as you would expect, but if you look at it on an iPhone, or a
Windows Phone, or any kind of smartphone it’s got a portrait orientation.
It's the same basic design but the creation of it is handled dynamically.
So it's not like a file or a container or whatever of any kind.
It's this dynamic...
Leo: It sounds very modern, it sounds like the way documents should be
really.
Paul: Well yeah, in other words some people said, well why don't they
just have this PowerPoint? The idea is they are trying to rethink this in
this mobile first Cloud first world.
Leo: It's completely across platforms.
Paul: Without any of this reverse compatibility stuff holding us back we
are going to start with this type of thing now. What might this look
like?
Leo: It's funny, on Triangulation the other day we had Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, and he said that we are going
to look back and say that the app era was like the CD ROM era, like an
aberration. He said that we are going to something beyond that and I said
what is it? It sounds like we are kind of getting back to web apps, but
even less apps. Not file centric or app centric, but just kind of task
centric. This sounds something like this, very modern.
Paul: It's new, like in other words when you look at Word online it is a
web based version of Word. It's in the web, it's in the Cloud, but
it's...
Leo: It's still Word.
Paul: It's very familiar as what this thing was back when they used to
ship on floppy disks.
Leo: Right. But Swayy is not just
rendering PowerPoint in HTML. This is more than that. It's thinking
differently about what you are trying to do with the data.
Paul: I had a briefing about this before it was released, and as Michael
Natalya was showing me I actually asked him not to show me the product for a
moment. I wanted to conceptualize what he was saying because to me what
it sounded like was Nokia Storyteller or the Google + Photos feature where you
can make a story, right?
Leo: They are pushing it as a mobile as much as anything else, right?
Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo: Here is a guy using Swayy at the
aquarium to make a presentation for his students with his phone.
Paul: It's not always about photos by the way. Although you know
visual is better obviously on the web, but it's a mixture of photos and text
into this, what you are seeing now on screen if you can see it is lots of text
and videos. It's so not a document, right? Even though you could
take a document and present it in a brand new way.
Leo: Some people would say, oh, it's a web page designer. It's
not that either.
Paul: No, it's not like the future of blogging. It's not the
future of PowerPoint. It's not a lot of things because it's hard to know
anything because you have to compare it to something that you understand and
it's hard because it's not exactly the same.
Leo: You know, it's great, they are showing it on Windows, they are
showing it on iPad, I think he was using an iPhone.
Really this is a Nadella thing. And it uses Azure, right?
There's Twitter.
Paul: It posts in Azure. It's free, I mean for now, we will see if
they change that.
Leo: I'm going to sign up. This looks really cool.
Mary Jo: Yeah, it looks interesting.
Leo: It's not document centric exactly, it's more like content centric.
I don't know how to describe it.
Mary Jo: It is hard to explain. It's hard to categorize it, right?
Is it a presentation app? The other thing is that they are mostly
showing consumer applications but it very much a business thing too. You
can use it for brochures, and website design, and...
Leo: Even information needs to be communicated in business.
Dashboards for the exec, reports, it seems like there is a lot of
applications for thing.
Paul: By the way, I think it was the way that it was sold internally, if
I remember the story correctly, they showed this to Bill Gates and what they
had done and taken the Gates Foundation's Annual Report and they turned it into
a Swayy.
Leo: There you go.
Paul: And he was like yep, I get it. This is a really neat
way to do this.
Leo: That was Ray Ozzie and now look what has happened to him
now. This does feel a little Ozzieish.
I'm going request an invite because I like this. Do you think that
if I do my Outlook address I'm more likely to get it?
Paul: Na.
Mary Jo: Na.
Leo: They don't care anymore.
Mary Jo: The first mobile version is going to be on iPhone, so.
Leo: That's cool. It's swayy.com, they
even have the domain name. I did it my Swayy.
As long as we are talking Office; Office 16 update?
Anything to say?
Mary Jo: We've been hearing some hints that Office 16 might finally be
ready to start going out to testers outside of Microsoft. I've talked to
a couple of people outside who say they have seen it, and one says he has it.
What interesting is we know that they are building the next version of
Office, or at least we think they are, as a universal app. So one would assume there is also going to be an Office Mobile. We
do know that there is a Gemini which is a touch-first Office. But
supposedly the Office 16 test version that people are starting to see is the
real desktop apps, it's not Gemini, and so far not Office Mobile either.
It's good, we are starting to hear some motion because we were wondering
where is the next Office, how far away is it? I
wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of announcement pretty soon of some sort
of public preview or public test out there. But again,
not for Gemini, not for the touch-first, not yet. That still
sounds like a spring / mid 2015 before it's going to hit in final form.
Paul: It is kind of odd how some of that stuff has fallen by the
wayside. Office for Mac in particular, which is
obviously a big product and very overdue. You were mentioning
today earlier about OneDrive for Business, which is curiously missing in
action.
Leo: Although they just updated OneDrive for IOS and it now uses TouchID, for IOS 8.
Paul: Nice.
Leo: Yeah, I like that.
Paul: I likey, that's the best thing about an
iPhone right there.
Leo: TouchID, the fingerprint thing?
Paul: Yeah, I love that.
Leo: That and the camera. Although you guys
have very good cameras.
Paul: TouchID is like in Windows 8 they added the ability to log in with a pin,
right? A pin is obviously beautiful because it's only 4 digits and it's
simple to enter, but the other thing that is awesome about it, and if you use a
Mac or an Android device you will appreciate this, you use the 4th digit and it
signs in. You don't have to hit enter, too. Like hitting enter
makes me crazy. Like having to hit that, to me it's just the pin.
Leo: It feels kind of old fashioned, doesn't it?
Paul: So the pin in Windows 8 and TouchID takes it to the next level, the ability to press your thumb and be able to log
in. It's so wonderful.
Leo: Yeah, and more and more banks are using it on their apps,
too which is great.
Paul: Yeah it is.
Leo: Let's see, Office we did, outlook.com, better OneDrive...
Paul: We can blow through these pretty quickly. Outlook.com, consumer
outlook.com now, has long supported the ability to share files through
OneDrive, right? So if you have a file that is too big to send as an
attachment share it through OneDrive. It works pretty well. Now it
works with files of any size that OneDrive supports. So a couple of weeks
back they added support for 10GB files. You can share a 10GB file via
email. I can't imagine what that would be. Some kind of a Torrent
video of a Star Wars Blue-ray or something, I don't know. It will support
that. Although don't do that because that's obviously illegal, I was just
trying to think of something big. One the business side they have updated
OWA, which is the Outlook client, it used to stand for Outlook Web Access, but
OWA is the client on the web but it is also the client on IOS, and Android in
mobile app form. You can send or share a file through the email in
Exchange online. That's one OneDrive for business, so it works the same
as on the consumer side. So like I said, outlook.com and OneDrive have had
this for years. Now it's available for OWA and OneDrive for Business.
I think that's everything right there, right?
Leo: Oh, hey, I love this story. We now know how much Microsoft
makes from Samsung. Samsung turns out to be that billion dollar business
we have been looking for.
Paul: Yes, we said long ago, Android licensing
is Microsoft's next billion dollar business.
Leo: It's huge. People have always speculated that they would
continue to maybe get $5 a handset. This is more than that.
Mary Jo: Yeah, so Microsoft and Samsung have been engaged in a suit that
Microsoft filed against Samsung in August. A lot of what was in that suit
was redacted, but on Friday night, late Friday night they unsealed the document
and one of the things that is in that document is how much Samsung is paying
Microsoft to license, to basically cover Android patent licenses. It's a billion dollars a year. One
billion. They agreed to do this for 8 years, so they are only
going into year 3 now. Microsoft is suing them because they said that
they paid them late and they owe them 6.9, how much
was it, 6.9 million in interest that they haven't paid yet. Now we are
already into the next year, and Samsung is trying to put the brakes on this and
say that due to our business agreement with Microsoft when they bought Nokia's
handset division that should throw this agreement out the window that we should
be able to renegotiate this.
Leo: Good point.
Paul: That's hilarious.
Mary Jo: I don't know why they think that because I'm not sure, I don't
know, supposedly there was some clause in the contract
that if one company bought other companies it would change it.
Leo: They are in the phone business so that changes things. They
are making handsets. Plus they are making defensive agreements between
Nokia and Samsung because all of this is cross-licensed like crazy.
Mary Jo: Exactly, yep. Samsung and Nokia do have their own patent
licensing deal separate from this agreement. So Microsoft is trying to
force Samsung to continue to pay these royalties for the 8 year period and
Samsung is saying, no, it should be renegotiated. Samsung is only one of
25 or 26 companies that is paying Microsoft patent
licensing royalties?
Leo: Although they are the biggest.
Mary Jo: They are the biggest obviously.
Paul: Well, you know, they are but they are not 80%, right? What
percent of the Android market is controlled by Samsung? Is it 30%?
I don't know.
Leo: I was just looking and trying to do the math. In one quarter
they sold like 80 million phones, so they are selling a lot of phones. In
fact, it is probably less than $5 a handset believe it or not.
Paul: They sell a lot.
Mary Jo: I think I read something that the fee per phone is based on how
much the phone costs and other factors. So it may not be a standard like
every phone is $5, but it's a lot of money.
Leo: They sold 89 million phones in the first quarter of 2014. 89
million phones in one quarter.
Paul: That's probably not a big quarter for them. You know, like
the first quarter.
Leo: The first quarter is probably the worst quarter. But let's
say that they are doing 30 million phones a month. That means more like
$2 or $3 a phone. Like back of the envelope.
Paul: It's reasonable when you do the math.
Leo: Yeah, it's not a lot.
Paul: They are not overpaying.
Leo: This is the question that many will argue, and that is if
Microsoft really has the patents. I think that the patent that they are
claiming it the patent on Unix right, or on Linux?
Mary Jo: Well yeah. There is a blog called FOSS Patents.
Leo: Right, a great blog.
Mary Jo: Florian Mueller, right. He is the guy that knows everything
about this. He is working for Microsoft we should point out. They
are paying him as a consultant. He is now. He said that Microsoft
only has one patent that is enforceable, at least so far, against Android.
A lot of these haven't gone to court yet, so that isn't to say that they
won't be enforceable, but he is kind of throwing into question Microsoft is
saying that they have hundreds of patents that they think Android infringes,
but he is saying that they haven't proven this yet. So whatever they are
telling these OEMs, we don't really know what they are telling them, but they
are saying you know what you guys, you might want to license our patents
because we think Android infringes on them. Whatever they are saying is
convincing.
Leo: It's just easier to do that probably then it is to figure it out.
Mary Jo: But a billion dollars, right? Samsung has warned that their
next quarter is going to be terrible.
Leo: It's not going to be good, a 60% drop in revenue.
Mary Jo: Yeah, so...
Leo: There goes your money Microsoft. You are going to have to go
get some real business. You are going to have to get some real products
to sell.
Paul: Brad Sam says that they earn about $3.21 on each Android device
that Samsung sells.
Leo: Based on knowledge or some quick math?
Paul: Based on their actual sales from 2013.
Leo: Yeah, so that seems reasonable.
Mary Jo: But it's still a guess.
Leo: It's a guess. No one knows for sure.
Paul: $3 a phone is okay. That sounds about right.
Mary Jo: People were guessing $5. It's probably around there.
Leo: It's in the ballpark.
Paul: It's not like Microsoft is squeezing them or anything.
Leo: Hey, the Hotel Lane called, they have got a room set aside for
you, Paul, for October 20th. So that's good news. The tenderloin
misses you.
Paul: Something tells me that if I were to book a room at, what was it
called, the Hane?
Leo: Lane.
Paul: Lane when there wasn't a show in town it would be about $39.
Leo: You are probably right. Did you want fresh sheets?
Towels would be $5.
Paul: Did you want a room right off of the fire escape so that someone
could easily steal your laptop while you were sleeping? Yeah, that would
be good, thanks.
Leo: Guests of TWiT stay at the fabulous Lane
Hotel in downtown San Francisco. The reason I mentioned that is that
Satya Nadella is coming back to San Francisco with Scott Guthrie and there is
going to be a one hour briefing for press and analysts October 28th in San
Francisco. Welcome back Paul and Mary Jo.
Mary Jo: Nope.
Paul: It's worse than that. They were also going to do a server
thing even sooner than that.
Leo: Somebody likes San Francisco because Satya has been here several
times. Maybe yeah.
Mary Jo: They give them a deal on event space. It's the exact same
event space as the Windows one, too.
Leo: What is that? What is the event space?
Paul: Oh, is it really? That's hilarious.
Mary Jo: Yeah, 969 Market or something like that.
Paul: Leo listen, you have to have a magnifying glass to even find the
doorway to this place. Hole in the wall doesn't even begin to describe
it.
Leo: Dance club by night.
Paul: It really does have that look. Every surface inside is black kinda thing. Like a dance club. It bet it
is.
Leo: It's not the DNA Lounge is it?
Paul: I can only imagine what a black light would do in that
place.
Mary Jo: 999, 969, something like that.
Paul: So you are going to it, right Mary Jo?
Mary Jo: No, luckily they are webcasting this. They are webcasting
this one which is good.
Leo: What will they talk about? What is it about?
Mary Jo: That's a good question. They are going to talk about how
they see themselves as being differentiated from other Cloud players. So
we are probably going to hear more hybrid Cloud, scale, blah, blah, the stuff
we already know. They are also going to have news of some sort. I
don't know what that will be at this point. They have got so many
services in preview on Azure right now like machine learning, and intelligent
system service which is their IOT, Internet Of Things
service. They could just be announcing hey, they are ready now for
general availability. It could just be a pricing thing. We don't
really know what the news part is going to be, but I can tell you if Nadella is
there that means it's a very high priority thing for them because whenever he
goes to an event it means pay attention everybody, right? He didn't come
to the Windows 10 thing because it was a preview, but he is going to this so
it's going to be a pretty big deal whatever it is. We don't know.
Paul: I was going to point out by the way that him not being at the Windows event was interesting because he didn't have to be at
the Windows event. It was still a huge deal.
Leo: What does that mean?
Paul: It was still huge.
Leo: Oh yeah.
Paul: They didn't need the star power.
Leo: They didn't have to invite Bono.
Paul: Right. I think of Satya as first year Obama before
everything went south.
Leo: The honeymoon is still on. 29% percent of Microsoft's
employees are women. That is a lot better than most Silicon Valley
companies.
Paul: I think that's fantastic.
Leo: That's amazing.
Mary Jo: Yeah, it's pretty close to what Google is when I was looking at
the Google numbers.
Leo: I thought Google was far lower.
Paul: Yeah, I did too.
Mary Jo: So the 29% is all employees worldwide. That includes
technical and non-technical employees, right? If you say technical only
then the percentage is around 17, which is still good.
Leo: That's still good.
Mary Jo: Not terrible, and they are making a big concerted effort to try
and up these numbers obviously.
Leo: As is everybody these days, and I think that is good.
Mary Jo: Yep, so you know, it's basically them saying we have some numbers,
we are not happy with them, we are going to keep instituting a number of
programs to get women involved at higher levels and at managerial levels.
They just recently added more women to the sr. leadership team at
Microsoft and also to the board. So they are really trying to make a
point of being more inclusive.
Leo: Good, and you think this is genuine? It's not just lip service?
Mary Jo: Yeah, I do. I think it is genuine. They also
published, I think that they have published these before, their percentage of
employees based on race. 60.6% white, 29% Asian, 5.1% Hispanic, 3.1%
American or African Black, and 1.2% multi-racial. So they are making a
point of saying, we've got an Indian CEO right now and we are going to try to
make it so that we have a more diverse workforce, a more representative
workforce. So it's all goodness I think.
Paul: It's hard to argue with that.
Leo: OneNote goes to school with class notebooks.
Paul: You notice that there is no link to that one. I was amazed
that neither one of us had read a story about this for some reason. Although I had it on my list to do. Since I have not
written a story about it I will give you my vague understanding of what is
happening here. They are allowing classrooms to have class notebooks that
they can share between students and teacher that use OneNote in school.
That's all I know.
Leo: HP, we should really talk about this. You buried the lead here.
This was Leó Apotheker's original idea was to spin off HP.
Paul: I missed that idea, man he was such a genius.
Leo: Meg Whitman, he gets sacked and Meg Whitman comes in.
Paul: He was like HP's Gil Amelio, he was kind of rambling one day on a conference call.
Leo: How would you like to be CEO?
Paul: It's just sad.
Leo: So they brought in Meg and Meg said no, not going to do it.
But the time is right now, we are going spin off 2 divisions of HP. One
will be the printer and computer business; that's a pretty big business.
Paul: That's H.
Leo: That's the H? No, it's HP, is one
going to be called H?
Paul: It's HP Inc.
Leo: That's HP Inc. Then the consulting, and services, and
servers will be HP Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This actually
makes a lot of sense.
Paul: This is fine. I think people look at this and say yep.
Both of these companies are bigger than Microsoft by the way, on their own. Both of these companies are in the
Fortune 50. They have vague ideas of how the PC / Printer business can
grow in the future, but we will see if that happens. Honestly, aside from
the stupidity around Apotheker's should we drop the
PC business baloney when I look at what HP has done the last couple of years
just PC wise it actually looks pretty good. The PCs they are making right
now look pretty solid.
Leo: They've gotten better.
Paul: Yeah.
Leo: Of course it's a big business, and their printer business is huge.
It's huge.
Mary Jo: I like thinking of it as Hadoop and printers. That's how I
see the split, H and P.
Paul: I think of the printer business as being more of an ink cartridge
replacement business.
Leo: That's the real business. Who gets Scientific Instruments?
Mary Jo: Yeah right, that's a good question.
Paul: That's a good question.
Leo: It's probably over with the PC business I would think. Hey,
we are going to take a break and come back with the back of the book, tips,
picks, and all of the above. But first a word from our
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Do it right with Carbonite. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, time for Paul's tippapalooza.
Paul: Yeah, right, I have kind of a number of picks and tips here this
week. I've been writing a bunch of Windows 10 tips so I would just say go
to the website to get that kind of stuff. But here is one, you know I've
never really written this up, I guess I could, but in case it's not immediately
obvious Microsoft is offering the Windows technical preview right now for free.
Anyone can get it. You can clean install it, you can upgrade an
existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC with it, and I believe it lasts until April
of next year. Although presumably future milestones will have later expiration
dates and for whatever it's worth you can use little tricks to extend
expiration as well. That's a free version of Windows that you can use.
Windows is actually fairly expensive to buy. If you have a Mac and
you want to set up a dual boot type of thing, if you have, sorry, I guess my
phone works again. My phone has been out for 2 days by the way.
Leo: Well good news, they are calling to tell you it's back online.
Paul: Yeah, if you are using an older version of Windows on whatever PC
and want something a little more modern these things are all available now.
Leo: You know what's funny? Your phone was out for 2 days and you
didn't even notice.
Paul: We had to move the phones around so they are actually plugged into
the router which is in my office which is not where they would normally be.
Leo: I see.
Paul: I will have to deal with that. It didn't occur to me that
they would actually ring because they have been broken.
Leo: Who calls? We have an unlisted number that we only put in
for the burglar alarm. No one has the number, no one should call, and
someone calls me every morning at 9 am.
Paul: It's just a wrong number type thing?
Leo: I don't answer but I think that it's probably a solicitor of some
kind, I don't know.
Paul: So the second tip is that various companies, Netgear and now Microsoft sell these, and they are Miracast Goggles. You plug them into your HD TV and you can go into the living
room with your Windows laptop, or tablet, or an Android device and you can
project to that screen. You can use that to do whatever you want to do;
browse the web, manage your emails, watch a movie, you
know that kind of thing. But you may already have a device in your living
room that can act as a Miracast device. Roku
just added this capability to Roku 3 and the Roku Streaming Stick, which are
the 2 newest device that they make via a software
update. So if you are already using a Roku device, which is a
multi-function device, it works with Netflix, and Hulu Plus, and all kinds of
other services. Now you can use it as a Miracast device as well. In fact, I would say, mine has not been updated with this
update yet, but why would you want multiple things plugged into your TV?
If you can just use one thing for everything why not just use this?
So that's actually a pretty cool capability. It's something that
you get for free if you already have a Roku.
Leo: Very nice. I know, you know it's so
funny, I kind of new that because whenever I launch some app, DLNA app or
something, I see all of my Rokus.
Paul: Yeah, I've been wondering about that. I do too. The
Rokus always show up on the network.
Leo: They always show up on the network, like Wi-Fi devices, or I don't
know what, but they are there.
Paul: You can't do anything with them, but now you can.
Leo: It seems like you should be able to.
Paul: Yeah.
Leo: I don't know what that is. You know when you do a lot of
tech you have got a lot of stuff in your life where you are like I don't know
what that is and I'm just going to ignore it.
Paul: It's a key logger, don't worry about it. It's not important.
Two software picks as well. Microsoft
research this week released an app called XIM for Windows Phone and Android.
It's spelled with an x so it's X-I-M. Basically what they are doing
is advertising that this is a new way to share photos, so if you are in a group
of people and you are taking photos and everything. If you want to show
people the photos then you have to show them your phone. Sometimes you
give them the phone, and sometimes they drop the phone, and sometimes they have
dirty hands, or sometimes you may have embarrassing photos on your phone that
you don't want them to see.
Leo: That's a big problem, yeah. I don't want to give them my
phone.
Paul: So now with this app you can share them. Only the person who
is sharing needs to have the app. So you have a bunch of photos in your
phone, you select them, share with XIM, you share them over an email message or
a text message. You will need their phone numbers which you would have.
Then they click on the link that was sent and then they can all view the
same slideshow literally simultaneously. What I mean by that is that you
can page through the photos and they will see the transitions on their phones.
So you can kind of dictate what is happening. In other words, this
is the photo of this, this is the photo of that.
As you swipe along they are seeing those changes as well.
Leo: I've got to do this.
Paul: It's pretty cool. I haven't looked at this yet, this just
happened, but my understanding is that if the other people have the app as well
they gain additional capabilities with what can happen with the photos.
They are temporary, after you share the photos they are not stored
somewhere, they go away. It's basically just an impromptu way to say hey,
I took some photos from tonight; as people often do. You can all look at
your own phone.
Mary Jo: After one hour they self-destruct.
Paul: They self-destruct.
Leo: It's obviously uploading somewhere and they browse to it.
Paul: To the NSA obviously. Oh, Azure.
Mary Jo: Azure aka the NSA.
Paul: Microsoft NSA. Microsoft, code name NSA. So the other pick I have, and this is from
Raphael. This one blows my mind because it has been possibly, not
including a couple of web browsings, it has probably been years since I had a Windows desktop
application as a pick. This is one and it is an awesome one. What
it is is a network traffic visualization tool.
It's called GlassWire; it's free. So you
run the app and what it does is it monitors your network traffic. You can
watch this thing occur in real time which is actually kind of amazing. So
it gives you this beautiful display and you can mouse over things, you can
click on it to see, what you can basically do is see what is doing what.
It's sort of a way to see that there is nothing screwy going on with your
computer. For example, when I look at today the alerts I've gotten today,
these will pop up as notifications at the bottom of your screen and will say in
my case "Windows problem reporting first network activity detected."
What that means is that some process has spun up and it has accessed the
network. This is something new because this thing wasn't running 5
seconds ago, so what is going on here. In this case we know Windows
problem reporting is something built into Windows and something you want
running so it is fine. Likewise Microsoft Excel I ran earlier actually
hit a one drive based document and that thing popped up a little notification
that here is an application that hasn't been running and now it's accessing the
network, what's going on? It's beautiful to look at but it's also just
incredibly useful. You can go back over time to see what the status of
your network access has been over a very wide range of time in a beautiful
visual way. If you can see pictures of the app on the site it's actually
beautiful to look at.
Leo: Neat. Lovely to look at, lovely
to hold.
Paul: Right, it's everything that
you've ever wanted an more. It's got kind of a, I don't
know how to describe this, the basic interface is almost like the Mozilla
Firefox App, it's got kind of...
Leo: Who is it for?
Paul: It's for anyone who is
security minded. You wouldn't use this in
lieu of a firewall, or in lieu of antivirus, or whatever. Maybe you have
been experiencing some kind of weird behavior where you are like is there some
kind of bot in my system, some errant process, whatever it is. If
something was, you know, calling home every second, it would be very obviously
identified in this display. Actually I can tell by looking at mine, I see
things like very normal, Skype, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer,
probably through OneDrive integration, MetroTwit, and
the Bonjour Service from Apple for some reason. That's irritating, I'm going to kill that thing.
Leo: That's annoying.
Paul: Apple!
Leo: I love the name.
Paul: Yeah, it's just the type of
tool I haven't been able to recommend in years.
Leo: GlassWire. Mary Jo has the Enterprise
pick of the week.
Mary Jo: I do. So the other thing that
Microsoft introduced on October 1st that we didn't get to talk about yet was
the next version of Windows Server preview, Windows Server Next; also Windows
Server 10 you could call it I guess. We don't know what the final name of
that product is going to be. It could be Windows Server 2015 or something
catchy like that. The preview bits came out on October 1. They are
on MSDN and TechNet if you have a subscription to either of those. I feel
like we don't know all of the features that are going to be on the next Server
yet, but they did call out a few in a TechNet article that accompanied the new
download. Some of the more interesting ones that I noticed were that they
were making some changes to remote desktop services. They are going to
add support for Open GL and Open CL apps, and then they took multi-point service which are something that some schools use. You
can hang a bunch of terminals off of a central computer and let everybody share
the session. That's going to be built into Windows Server as a new role.
So it's going to be multi-point services as a role in Windows Server.
That's pretty interesting. Parashell 5.0
is in there, there are some new hyper-v scale-out and cluster capabilities,
some new storage quality of service capabilities, and all of the kinds of
things that you would expect to be in an updated release of Windows Server.
So if you are interested in seeing a very early preview of what is coming
with Server then go grab those bits and go look on TechNet for the accompanying
article listing out some of those changes. I would say that we are going
to hear more about Windows Server Next in a couple of weeks at TechEd
Barcelona. It would make a lot of sense for Microsoft to talk about that.
They did also put out a very early preview on System Center Next as well,
at least parts of it. Again, I think that we are going to hear more about
that at TechEd Barcelona in two weeks as well.
Leo: Cool, and your code name pick of
the week?
Mary Jo: Code name pick of the week
comes from Microsoft Research. It is Haven. This is a really, really
interesting project that they are doing. If you followed the Microsoft Research Drawbridge Project before
you know that Microsoft has been working on a new way to virtualize
applications basically. That's what Drawbridge is, it's a library
operating system and it also has this thing called Picoprocesses.
Together those two elements are what Drawbridge is. We haven't
heard anything from that team in a while. This week they published a
paper that they presented at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems all
about this thing called Haven. So Haven builds on top of Drawbridge.
What it does, if Microsoft ever productizes, it lets you shield applications
from the Cloud. So right now if someone is your Cloud provider they
technically can see your data. That is what the whole Snowden thing is
about, right? Microsoft is coming up with a way that if you run
applications unmodified in this Haven, they call it an enclave, Haven Enclave, you will actually not be able to see the data that is there
in the applications if you are the provider. This has really, really big
implications for the public Cloud going forward. It will make a lot of
people very happy who are right now I don't trust Microsoft, I don't trust
Cloud providers, they really can get at my data and provide my data to people
that I really don't want having it. So if this someday does become a
productized technology, which a lot of technologies do these days from
Microsoft Research, you will be able to shield that. This paper is
publicly available, if you go on the Microsoft Research site you can check it
out. They have architectural diagrams in there and they have all kinds of
good details about how this works and what they are thinking about with taking
the prototype of this going forward. So definitely worth a check if you
are somebody into operating systems.
Leo: I will be reading about it
later today.
Mary Jo: Alright.
Leo: I could tell. It is Octoberfest time. Actually Octoberfest ended a couple of days ago I think, but we can
still celebrate at home.
Mary Jo: Yes. You know, I don't think
that I have done an Octoberfest beer pick, which is
kind of late and a little lame on my part. There was a really good one
that I had recently from Firestone Walker in California called Oaktoberfest. I don't typically like Octoberfest beers that much because they are very malty.
You know me, I'm a hop person.
Leo: What characterizes? They are malty, huh?
Mary Jo: They are more
malty, they usually have a little bit of sometimes spice, a little hop
spice that is noticeable in them. This one from Firestone
Walker, very much like a traditional Octoberfest type
beer, but I found it a little cleaner tasting and a little less traditionally
malty. They say that they don't make it in an oak barrel or anything even
though the name is Oaktoberfest. It's just
because of Oak trees I guess. They say Paso Robles where it is is past the oaks, so I'm sure it takes its name from that
as well.
Leo: I didn't know that.
Mary Jo: It's a stainless steel one,
not an oak barrel one, but very clean, very good. If you are someone who is
on the fence about Octoberfest beers then I would say
that you might like this one.
Leo: I have never even had an Octoberfest beer.
Mary Jo: Really?
Leo: Yeah, have you guys been to Octoberfest in Germany? The real one?
Mary Jo: In Germany, no.
Paul: No.
Leo: Maybe we should do Windows
Weekly in Germany next year.
Paul: I'm listening.
Leo: Yeah, I think we need to,
field trip, road trip.
Mary Jo: Okay.
Leo: Boy you guys are tough.
Paul: Nothing bad has ever
happened in a beer hall in Munich Leo.
Leo: Paul and I, we are the
history buffs. That concludes this
fabulous edition of Windows Weekly. You guys, yomanlike work. I see we all wore black
today to show some solidarity.
Mary Jo: Was that the plan?
Leo: I don't know, it's good
though. I like the look. Paul Thurrott is at the Super Site for Windows, winsupersite.com, Mary Jo Foley,
allaboutmicrosoft.com. They both are here every Wednesday 11 am Pacific,
2 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC for Windows Weekly. We are very glad they
are. Thanks guys, we will see you next time! Bye, bye.