Windows Weekly 389 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul is here, Mary Jo is in Sweden, and we are going to channel the outrage over OneDrive in Windows 10, and a whole lot more. Stay tuned, Windows Weekly is next.

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This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, Episode 389 recorded November 19, 2014.

One Drive Was My Ikea

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It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk about Windows, Microsoft, and all of that jazz with these two, our jazz performers, Paul Thurrott from the SuperSite for Windows, winsupersite.com, author of so many lovely books, in fact I see them all in a box behind him. Got the remainders, huh Paul?

Paul Thurrott: Those are HP tablets Leo.

Leo: Off they go to Gazelle. With us also, from Stockholm, Sweden, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet, allaboutmicrosoft.com. What a great image, thanks to the folks in Sweden who set this up, you look great.

Mary Jo Foley: Mike Anderberg gets all of the credit, from Microsoft, he did all of the work.

Leo: Are you using Skype?

Mary Jo: Yep, using Skype.

Leo: That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm going to have to be very careful with my lower thirds of my shots today because I can see that we are on a big screen behind you.

Mary Jo: We are, yes. 

Leo: Are there actually people there?

Mary Jo: Yes there are.

Leo: Big audience?

Mary Jo: Pretty good audience, yeah. Maybe we can do some live Q&A.

Leo: That would be great. I would love to do that, yeah.

Mary Jo: Alright, cool.

Leo: Well let's kick things off, find out what you are doing there in Sweden. I see the sign behind you, it says tech-days?

Mary Jo: Yes, tech-days is a conference here in Sweden for IT pros and developers. I was part of the keynote kick off today with Albert Shum from Microsoft who is the head of design for Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox, so he is one of the big wigs behind all of the Metro development, and Metro style language, and all. Then we had a great “Women in Tech” lunch here where we had all of the women attendees, or at least a lot of them, come in. Tonight we had an awesome panel where we had like 6 or 7 people answering audience questions about everything from Windows 10, to what the future of Windows Phone is, and people from Microsoft weighing in, and people from IT dev pro and other communities weighing in. So it's been really good, a really good show.

Leo: What fun. I'm thrilled that we can get you out there. They are saying if you have a moment to take a picture with your Icon and tweet it out so that we can see the audience.

Mary Jo: I should, alright, I will do that.

Leo: And then I could show that.

Paul: The other thing that we need to point out, unless I am misunderstanding your set up, I think that you can change the camera that Skype uses and then just change that camera on as well.

Leo: That's, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul.

Paul: Here, let me step you through Mary Jo.

Leo: Paul, Paul.

Mary Jo: Let's try that live, right?

Leo: Let's pretend you didn't hear that Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: I'm not going to try that.

Leo: No problem, just go into the Skype there...

Paul: What version of Skype are you using Mary Jo?

Leo: Paul!

Mary Jo: I stopped.

Leo: Why I ought to. It reminds me of the time that I updated Windows while we were on the show. That was a mistake.

Paul: So I've got to click here? No, don't click there! And then it rebooted the computer.

Leo: Boom!

Paul: It was awesome.

Mary Jo: I don't think that I'm going to try that.

Leo: How big is the audience? Is it a lot of people?

Mary Jo: How many people are in the audience? Maybe 30.

Leo: Okay, it's not a thousand.

Mary Jo: No, no, but it's still pretty great.

Leo: Okay, we will follow your Twitter stream.

Mary Jo: We are fighting against the party next door with 2 bands and free beer. Come on, these people are in here.

Leo: Get your free beer, listen to a song, and then come on in to the show.

Paul: That's right, it's night time there.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's 8:11 pm here.

Paul: Right, right, right.

Leo: It's 8:11 pm and it's also the second ice age I believe. Or is it the third?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Windows 10 tech preview and user feedback. Tell me all about that. Who wants to take that one?

Mary Jo: Where to begin?

Paul: I just want to say this is Mary Jo Foley's fault.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: Why's that?

Paul: She started this all last week, the complaining, and now...

Mary Jo: What? I did? I think that I'm the only person who wasn't complaining about what they did.

Leo: What did they do? What happened?

Mary Jo: Let Paul talk about OneDrive, because there is a new version open with the tech preview going out last week. They have made some changes that some of the more power user type people are not very happy with. I'm going to let Paul weigh in on that and then I'm going to weigh in.

Paul: Not that happy about it is an understatement.

Mary Jo: I know.

Leo: Can I just say remember this is a tech preview. This is not a released version of Windows by any means.

Paul: I know that. That's actually the problem. In other words, the first two preview builds of Windows 10 have been very high quality, very stable, very recommendable. To even normal people they work very well. This third one, okay, so it's kind of a regression from a stability standpoint, but they quietly, and by quietly I mean there was no warning that this was coming, they introduced a major change to OneDrive. If you were coming at Windows 10 from a Windows 8.1 perspective the first couple of builds of Windows 10 worked just like Windows 8.1 did and then the third one suddenly did not. The outrage is not that they made that change, although that certainly would generate a certain amount of grumbling. It's that they basically explained themselves and said, we are not fixing this, this is the way that it's going to work going forward. There will be improvements, but it's never going back to the way that it was. So that's the problem, it's not that it's a beta build and we are overreacting, it's that Microsoft is fundamentally changing the way that OneDrive works in Windows and not for the better. So we could go really far into the weeds, but the short version that I will try to make is that if you think about OneDrive sync clients you basically are talking about 3 different operating systems, Mac OS X, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1. Mac OS X and Windows 7 work the same way, you sign into OneDrive, it's says do you want to sync all of your OneDrive to the PC or do you want to pick which folders to sync? Obviously in these days of 1 TB, 10 TB, eventually unlimited storage, some people, power users who are actually uploading stuff to OneDrive, like I am, are going to have to pick select the folders to sync. The problem with that approach is that if you have 3 folders in OneDrive and they all have different things in them, I'm trying to simplify this, but you try to sync just one from File Explorer in Windows or from the finder in Mac OS X you will only see that folder; you will have no access to the other locations. In Windows 8.1 they had a more elegant, and also a more complex system for some people where they didn't ask you what you wanted to sync. What they did was you logged in with your Microsoft account into the computer and it automatically synced placeholders for everything. It looked like everything was there, but what you really seeing where little thumbnails and metadata files for files that were up in the Cloud. So if you double clicked on one it would open. It would have to download, so if it was a huge file it might take a long time to open, or you could arbitrarily mark files for offline use. The problem with this system, and I think this is an issue that Mary Jo has experienced, is that because these things appear in the file system you think they are there. So maybe you get on a plane or you are in some other offline situation, you double click on that word document and it's not there, it's in the Cloud and now you can't get to it because it's now offline, so people complained. The other issue here, and I think this is the important one, is that placeholder files aren't free. If you have a TB of files in the Cloud, depending on the makeup of those files, the amount of space that those placeholders could take up in your drive could be tens of GB. If you have 2 TB, 3 TB, 10 TB, it's going to be even more. We have this weird situation where Microsoft on one hand is offering unlimited storage in OneDrive for everyone who pays for Office 365 and on the other and they are selling really low end devices, or their partners are, that have 16 GB of storage or 32 GB of storage. It's conceivable that you as the happy and proud owner of a new HP Stream 7 tablet that has 32 GB or 16 GB of storage, you log into your account, you play with it for a little while, you load a couple of games on there, and then you go to bed. The next time you turn it on it says that you have run out of space because while you were using it it was downloading all of the placeholders. It's not downloading the files, just the placeholders, and it filled up all of the space on your drive. So those are the problems; the placeholders take up space, that's a problem with the low end devices, and normal people don't realize that the placeholder files weren't the files.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I'm the normal person who they built this feature for. I was telling Paul, and everyone was flipping out that that is the change that they made to OneDrive. I am one of those people who I get on the plane, I didn't realize the file was in the Cloud, I tried to use it, I wasn't online, and no. It looked like it was there but it wasn't there.

Leo: So you got bit.

Mary Jo: I got bit, and I'm not the only one. I always say this, and you guys laugh, but I'm the normal user in this case. I know, as normal as any of us are.

Paul: We recognize you as normal, believe me. We make no bones about that.

Mary Jo: So I am actually kind of happy that they are doing this change. I'm also not somebody who has a ton of OneDrive files, either. The ones that I have, a lot of them are documents that I want to work on when I am disconnected, and I'm always left kind of scratching my head; is that on my PC or is that not on my PC? I understand that there are ways that they could make that more visible and apparent by shading or some kind of visual queue, but I know also that Microsoft is trying to make the way that they support different services common across all of their platforms so that they can update the files for IOS at the same time as they do for Android at the same time that they do for Windows 7, and Windows 8, and Windows 10. I understand why they are doing this.

Paul: And, by the way, for OneDrive for Business.

Mary Jo: And for OneDrive for Business.

Paul: If you really wanted to go into the weeds on this we could easily spend 2 hours on this. Remember that Microsoft has 2 different services; OneDrive for Business and OneDrive are completely different. They are not always going to be, they are working to integrate them into a single engine that works between both, they work consistently, look consistently, and the mobile app form will be one app that does both. If you use OneDrive for Business today on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, whatever, I don't think it's on the Mac still, it's even dumber. If you choose to sync that to your PC it's all or nothing today. In other words, right now I think that you can only have a TB, at least in OneDrive for Business, I don't think that they have upgraded it yet. If you had a TB of files in there for some reason, if you sync that on your PC it is going to download a TB of files. If you don't have a TB of space it's not going to work. They are trying to serve a lot of masters in a way. Unfortunately it's going to be the power users like me who get burned by this.

Mary Jo: This is the interesting paradox of getting testers more involved again with Windows. The people who are going to get involved with something like a technical preview are power users. They are people like Paul, they are not people like me necessarily. They are doing the right thing for the people who are not testing the operating system and that is why you are seeing all of this angst right now around this feature in particular. There are probably going to be others as we go forward with more tech previews.

Paul: Yeah, this is kind of the central issue of the day over here in Microsoft land. You have got these people who are tech enthusiasts and they are Microsoft oriented. They are the guys who cannot stand when an app appears first in IOS or Android, or has features in IOS or Android that we don't have on the Windows side for some reason, maybe not yet anyways, real, or perceived, or not. There is this belief that Microsoft is pushing other platforms over Windows. You could make the case that Microsoft is literally dumbing down this really important feature that differentiated this newest version of Windows and they are making it as bad on Windows as it is everywhere else. It's a little aggravating. I do understand that.

Leo: So the issue isn't so much that the technical preview has this, it's a bell weather, a foretelling of something to come that you don't like?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: They could fix that easily by putting some kind of icon on there, something somehow on the file indicating that this file is not still available offline.

Paul: Oh, believe me, we've had every conversation we could have about the way. I've suggested at least 10 ways to fix this thing.

Leo: There is no reason to think that they won't, right?

Paul: No, there is, they are not going to do it.

Mary Jo: No, there is.

Leo: What, they say that they won't?

Paul: They literally said that, yes.

Leo: Why would they refuse?

Mary Jo: Because they want to make it the same across all of the platforms is my thinking.

Leo: On the other hand, they have refused to do a lot of things that they changed.

Paul: That's true.

Mary Jo: That's true.

Paul: What I've learned both as a child and as tech enthusiast is that if I kick and complain that I will eventually get my way.

Leo: It sounds like there is a fairly strong ground swell of unhappiness.

Paul: I think that what Mary Jo was eluding to is what is that audience? On the one hand you do want to listen to these guys, they are tech enthusiasts and your biggest champions. They don't necessarily represent the mainstream. Mary Jo and I write for a living, we write about technology, we have to sort of consider the audience. I have my own sort of perspective on tech, but I have to also take into account what the general population is doing. Mary Jo does that, and everyone does that. This is one of those issues that I sort of see the forest through the trees, but selfishly I think that this is something that I really rely on and I really like it. A couple of week ago if you asked me what the future is I would say clearly they are going to change the Mac client to make it like the one on Windows 8.1. It's going to be awesome. Windows 10 is obviously heading in that direction. Now clearly that is not happening.

Mary Jo: I think that the even bigger thing that we should think about, and Microsoft even warned us about this but I'm not sure that they have thought about it or thought it through, was that we are going to make changes to the tech previews as they come and some of them are going to look like we are taking steps back. Things are going to break that were working, and as a tester you have to be aware of this. You would get builds that were very polished that have been through a lot of internal testing. Right now we are getting the code, not as frequently as employees, but much more frequently. Things are going to be busted and then they are going to fix them. Things are going to work between builds, and then they won't work again. I think that we have to just be patient Paul.

Paul: I'm always patient Mary Jo. What do you mean?

Mary Jo: Are you?

Paul: I've been testing software for many years. I get it, I really do get it. I use this system with my live data, I'm doing exactly what they tell you not to do. I do that on purpose because I have brain damage. I think that it's important to live in this stuff. I reinstalled my computer over the weekend and did as close to a clean install as you can do with a consumer version of this. It still has a bunch of problems, stability and reliability related, and I'm just going to kind of suck it up and deal with it. It's just the way it is. It's okay, but I think that there is a difference between complaining about these regressions, which were normal and to be expected and explained to us ahead of time, and this OneDrive thing which is a bigger issue.

Mary Jo: I know, and as I recall last week, although it's all kind of a blur right now, you were also worried that we weren't going to get another tech preview until January. They didn't even say January, they said no more tech previews this calendar year. I'm pretty okay with that idea because I think the next big one we are going to get is the consumer preview in January. That is my understanding. I think that they are just like why give them another tech preview with some stuff that is going to break? Why not just give them the big one?

Paul: So if it weren't for OneDrive that would have been I actually think the big issue, and it wouldn't have been as big of an issue. The reason that that is an issue, and what I mean by that is no new builds until next year, possibly until the consumer preview, is that you have got these really...

Mary Jo: That's just January.

Paul: Right, let's assume it's January. Whatever it is, we've got these really enthusiastic people testing these things. They've plowed Microsoft under with feedback, there are massive amounts of feedback. People are voting topics up and down and they want to feel like they've been heard. The first two builds obviously, well not obviously, but the first build did not have any feedback related changes. The third build, the one that just came out, had a real smattering, it was some basic small things. There is kind of a growing sense of angst there, and I think part of it is that we were burned so badly in the past. You've asked us for feedback and you weren't integrating any of it into these builds we've been seeing. I think that is a problem. Now you are telling us that we are not going to see another build until next year. This is not a problem I have, I'm just saying from the perspective of the people from the community of people who are testing this, the Windows Insider Program, they are feeling like they are not being listened to. I think you are seeing that as well, as a related issue.

Mary Jo: Yep, yep. I'm just trying to say that it's still better than it was with Windows 8. They are still listening to feedback and it didn't really feel like almost of it got into the product. So I'm holding out hope. I'm back to being a non Debbie Downer.

Paul: I haven't lost faith or anything.

Mary Jo: Remember last week? I was Debbie Downer last week, so I'm back now, I'm back to myself.

Paul: I do remember that. That was crazy, it was like you and I swapped bodies. It was like one of those horror movies.

Leo: So you are saying Mary Jo that you are not a downer now?

Mary Jo: Now I'm saying, be patient and upbeat. Let's just say hey, at least they are listening more.

Paul: They are. And like I said, I have a lot more faith in this group then I did with the previous one. I do think overall what they are doing in Windows 10 is great. Speaking of just the PC parts of it, it's great. The OneDrive thing was like somebody throwing a banana peel in front of you; it was a little surprising.

Leo: But not the end of the world yet.

Paul: No Leo, it is the end of the world. That is the problem.

Leo: Mary Jo, Patrick is in your audience, he is also in the chatroom. He says you have been on stage for one hour here in Sweden for 1000+ and not once have you said haduke. He's very disappointed. He's very disappointed.

Mary Jo: I know. I think that I will have to do it tomorrow somehow.

Paul: It's going to be a jetlag thing.

Leo: Haduke will arrive tomorrow. We are going to take a break. When we come back there will be lots more to talk about with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. She's with us from Stockholm, Sweden, where she is at the Microsoft Tech Days event and we will have more about that in just a little bit. Our show today is brought to you by our good friends at lynda.com. If you need to learn how to use software, if you need to learn pretty much anything, then lynda.com is the place to go. You can see that I am learning arrays in Swift. That's an old one. Dreamweavers CS4 New Features, that's an old one, I can probably dump that, Excel training, and of course Burt Monroy's incredible pieces. If you want to learn Photoshop, if you want to learn photography, if you want to learn how to use Microsoft Office, Excel Data Mining Fundamentals, EPubs, creating them from a Word Document, Quickbooks Pro 2015 Essential Training, Quickbooks Advanced Bookkeeping Techniques; these are all classes at lynda.com. They work with the best in the industry to provide timely training, often they work with companies themselves to get same day versions, same day training on new versions or when new releases hit the market. That is awesome. As you can see, we aren't talking YouTube videos here. These are made in their studio, beautiful quality. This is so cool, I've been watching this, he's teaching us the techniques that he's using for his newest painting called Amsterdam Missed. You could see that he is using everything. Here is how he got the images from Street View so that he could now illustrate them in Photoshop. The thing that is amazing about Burt, he doesn't hold back, he will get you the information. He will give you the techniques that the best Photoshop master in the world knows. That is what is great about lynda.com, it's an incredible transaction, I want to say communication between experts and you the user, the learner. Tools include searchable transcripts and playlists. You can even get a certificate of course completion, which is fantastic and suitable for usage on LinkedIn. Look at the library, though. Here is what you can do, if you go to Lynda, l-y-n-d-a.com/windows you can take a look at all of these amazing things. Here is the Playlist Center, these are curated playlists. I think that I've got one in here, too, of incredible stuff. Explore Print Production Workflows, Get Started With Digital Publishing, Design a Website Using News, Create Illustrations, Design Games, Programmers in Unity, Explore Hands on Web Design, Develop Apps for Android, for iPads, for iPhones, yes for Windows Phone. Don't worry, it's all in here. Go to lynda.com/windows and you will get run of the place for a week. They also have general business courses, Project Management Simplified, Collaborative Design, Managing a Team, even Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking. Oh, look at this, Scan and Restore Old Photographs. That would be a great one to take. If you are a photographer, Master Your Lenses. These are taught by some of the best photographers, designers, programmers, people in the business, people who actually work in the business, and yet are great teachers as well. You've got to try it. At least try it for a week. Lynda.com, l-y-n-d-a.com/windows. Wait a minute, it says 10 days. They've upped it, I thought it was a week, but now it's 10 days that you have the run of the place. Thank you Lynda for doing that, that's awesome. Whether you are a beginner or advanced they have courses for all experience levels. Normally $25 a month to get access to over 100,000 tutorials. They also have a premium plan that allows you to get courses offline so that you can watch them on the plane. You can also get the instructor's materials so that you can work along with them. I'm just really impressed with lynda.com. New Lightroom just came out, and of course they will have, in fact they probably already do have tips on using the new Lightroom. L-y-n-d-a.com/windows, 10 days free, take advantage of this right now, lynda.com, you can learn it.

Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, we are talking Windows, we are talking Microsoft, we are in Sweden, we are talking, what is the food like in Sweden?

Mary Jo: I've been eating a lot of fish. Since I'm a pescetarian it's perfect for me. I know they do a lot of head to tail stuff here, so if I ate organ means like pigs and all of that there probably would be even more. Elk and all of that.

Paul: That's my kind of food.

Mary Jo: Paul would love it.

Paul: Organ meats, bring me home some organ meats.

Leo: Elk, I want some Elk liver please.

Paul: I prefer something in a pancreas.

Mary Jo: Good, the food has been good, the drinks have been delicious, so no complaints on the food.

Leo: Good, yeah, it's perfect for you. I forgot that their fish there is incredible.

Mary Jo: Yeah, good good.

Leo: Alright, let's move on. Are we done with bitching, I mean complaining about...

Paul:  Those are legitimate criticisms. Actually let me mention one more thing and it's not a criticism.

Leo: One more thing.

Paul: This is actually an aspect of this story that really isn't getting discussed. If you do use OneDrive in Windows 8.1, or had used in the earlier builds of Windows 10, or if you use OneDrive for Business for that matter, which again is a completely different sync engine; chances are you have seen some weird reliability stability issues of your own. I have to say, when you cut OneDrive back to the simpler Windows 7 style client those problems go away. One of the things that I had noticed on my computers, and I noticed because I use a lot of different computers. You might have 2 or 3 laptops and your desktop computer, and one of them had a different sync problem. You would open it up, it would check for changes, you would make a couple of downloads, it would have a little bang on it, and it would check and say that this file for some reason can't upload to the Cloud. I used to spend a lot of time manually fixing those things across all of my computers. They haven't really said it this way, but I actually think that if those problems weren't fixable that they would have in fact a huge problem. Having this one unique system while rest of the OneDrive clients worked differently was maybe part of the problem. I actually think that there are real reasons why they changed this. Not just to make life easier for them, but the system that they had in place, as good as it was, also had some issues.

Leo: Okay, enough said. Thank you Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: It's all good.

Leo: Alright, let's move on. Nokia is not out of the tablet business. People sang the praises of the 2520. They said Leo, you should have purchased the 2520. That was the RT tablet, right? Now they've got a new one, the N1. A lot of excitement around this, it's Android. Of course it's Android, right?

Paul: It's not even the same people or the same company.

Leo: It's not Nokia?

Paul: Well no, the people that made the 2520 had nothing to do with this.

Leo: Well yeah, they are probably at Microsoft, right?

Mary Jo: They are at Microsoft. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

Leo: So basically it's cheap.

Paul: Bullet point 1? It's fictional.

Leo: Oh, it doesn't exist?

Paul: They are not selling this until next year in China first and then they are looking at the rest of the world. They are not even doing it themselves, Foxconn is doing it. So this is really like a Polaroid /Zenith kind of thing where they are licensing their name and some industrial patents and things.

Leo: I've got to tell you, we had somebody come by on Sunday on TWiT, in fact it's on our TWiT Specialists Feed, Nicolas Charbonnier, he's a Charbacks, he does armdesigns.net blog. He goes to China regularly, every couple of months, and picks up these clones and so forth, and he said get ready because you are going to see an onslaught of very inexpensive tablets in China, and eventually leaking over here, that look just like an iPad. They are many of the same parts.

Paul: Maybe one of them will have the Polaroid name on it.

Leo: One of them had the same screen part as an iPad actually, it looked just like it.

Paul: By the way, this and one Android tablet have the same screen as an iPad Mini. It is literally the same.

Leo: It's the same company that makes the iPad Mini.

Paul: It's the same. I believe it's exactly the same screen. If you compare that device to an iPad Mini, seriously, this would not pass any bar. If Samsung is prevented from making their devices in the United States then they would have a hard time selling those here. It's such an obvious rip off.

Leo: He brought us iPhone clones that are almost indistinguishable. They are running Android and it's skinned in such a way that it looks just like IOS.

Paul: That's kind of interesting.

Leo: It is interesting. What's interesting about this is that it's not an ARM Processor, it's an Intel Atom Processor. Is there a possibility that you could see a Windows version of this? Isn't Microsoft giving away Windows? The reason that they use Android because it is free. They are giving away Windows for screen sizes.

Paul: The thought of a 4X3 Windows tablet that has no fan that looks exactly like an iPad Mini has certain people doing somersaults right now. That would be very interesting to a certain crowd, absolutely.

Leo:  Wow.

Paul: Actually I think that it's those kids who are sitting in your audience right now.

Leo: They are like I want one!

Paul: They are all high fiving each other.

Leo: What is the reasoning behind this? Is this Nokia saying see, we are not dead yet? Or did they literally just license the name?

Mary Jo: They said a week ago that they were going to be licensing their brand to other OEMs. They also said that they would license their patents and other technologies to other OEMs. The part of this that I'm not sure of, and maybe Paul knows, is who is actually going to sell this? Foxconn is making this, but they are not going to sell it are they?

Paul: Foxconn is going to sell it too. They are responsible for selling it.

Mary Jo: There is not another OEM that Foxconn is supplying?

Paul: Yeah, that's right. It's not Nokia though.

Mary Jo: People were saying there is an OEM who is going to be the one selling these, but it wasn't clear to me that that was Foxconn.

Paul: By the way, that's fair, because the Nokia press releases, that's how they word it. So the assumption is that, they never mentioned Foxconn, Foxconn did come out in some other report. Maybe they said it in the event that they were at, I didn't follow that, but I think that the assumption was that Foxconn was taking the step that so many other companies had taken in the past, Asus for example, going from a builder, to an OEM, to we are just going to sell these things ourselves. Maybe that isn't happening, I'm not sure.

Leo: We heard that Foxconn was doing this. Not just with this, but in general.

Paul: There will be more of these things, and maybe it won't all be Foxconn. I think that there is a real risk of destroying the brand with all of this stuff.

Leo: Microsoft, not Nokia, because you don't want the confusion. Obviously Microsoft knew about this.

Paul: You know, there is going to be a Nokia brand logo on the small phones, right? The dumb phones. The 100 series or whatever they are.

Leo: Because that's a valuable brand and in developing nations I would do that.

Mary Jo: You know, probably Microsoft was paying to license the brand.

Leo: I thought they had the rights to use the word Nokia, the word Nokia, for a set number of years.

Mary Jo: They do for a set number of times, yeah. Last week when I read what the Nokia CEO said what they would and wouldn't do I'm pretty sure that he said that they would not make their own smartphones. I don't know that that means he wouldn't license any of their technology to any other smartphone companies because their licensing here maps, right? Their licensing maps on a lot of different layers.

Paul: I think that a lot of the patent, whatever they refer to the IP licensing that went into this is obviously related to smartphones, and wireless devices, and I'm sure is some kind of indemnity against Microsoft suing them over Android infringing on their own patents and so forth.

Mary Jo: You can bet that Nokia, the company that is still called Nokia, is paying Microsoft patent licensing royalties. I would guarantee that they are.

Leo: You used the word Polaroid, Polaroid has been doing this.

Paul: I can't wait to get a Nokia DVD player.

Leo: I can't wait to get an Accurate Bell DVD player.

Mary Jo: There are hints that they are going to make a set top box, or they are going to license their technology to someone making one? I think I heard that.

Leo: So is Nokia out of the manufacturing business? Did all of their factories go to Microsoft? I think they did.

Mary Jo: I think that they did too.

Leo: So they have no hardware capability.

Paul: Right, so all of that stuff was related to the old business of Nokia, like making handsets and all of that. That was Nokia's differentiator. It turned out to be kind of an albatross, because Apple proved that you don't make the stuff yourself, you ship it out to the people who can do it the cheapest and still maintain the quality levels that you want. They were just big and top heavy, so now the new management of Nokia has clearly figured it out. They are not going to build up that infrastructure. It doesn't make any sense.

Leo: Well now I wouldn't want to be in the tablet business, the low end tablet business, because Foxconn can beat anybody in the world, including easily Apple.

Paul: Samsung from underneath.

Leo: Look at Samsung. You are right, their foundations are being eaten away, it's like termites. What is this LaJolla tablet you've got in the notes here? What is this?

Paul: So speaking of Nokia, right, if I'm not mistaken isn't this a group of former Nokians?

Leo: Sailfish, it's sailfish.

Mary Jo: Oh, is that them?

Paul: I think that's them, isn't it? They are in Finland.

Mary Jo: I couldn't remember their name. I can't remember the name of that company. I wrote about them. I should look them up.

Leo: Sailfish OS.

Paul: If you watch this video, I think that it's the one that you are showing now, the music playing sounds exactly like the music that Nokia always had playing in all of their videos.

Leo:  It looks like a Nokia phone. Look, factories, beat up old factories. Mark Dillion, do you know that name?

Paul: No.

Mary Jo: It is Sailfish OS, yeah, it is. Former Nokia employees.

Leo: Okay, Jolla they pronounce it.

Paul: This is like hipster Europe edition.

Leo: I like the origami swan on the cover, what's not to like about that? Look at this, this looks so much like a 1520. Jolla, Jolla. So that in California would be Jolla. 

Paul: Yeah, I was just sort of contemplating that. So it runs Android apps, it's Android based.

Leo: Okay, so it's an Android then. Designed in Finland. Look, it's running Clash of Clans. That's all that I care. There is Angry Birds, but it's a wallpaper, let's point that out. That's kind of clever symbiotics. Well we have Angry Birds wallpaper.

Paul: I'm sure they have the app.

Leo: So it's crowd funded?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Okay, they will show the big companies. 

Paul:  It's funny, this company and Nokia are essentially splinter groups from the original Nokia. It's really strange.

Leo: I think that is the Dread Pirate Roberts that is running it.

Paul: Yeah, it's like when your favorite band breaks up and then they all go solo.

Leo: It's not the same.

Paul: I recognize hints of the old stuff in this thing but it's not exactly the same?

Leo: Is it pronounced Jolla, you only live once? No, Jolla. You only live in Finland.

Paul: Twice. In Finland.

Leo: A crowd sourced tablet.

Paul: A crowd funded tablet.

Leo: It says crowd sourced here.

Paul: I may have misreferenced it.

Leo: No, on their page.

Paul: Oh, it says it on their page?

Leo: So you didn't miswrite it. You are towing the party line.

Paul: There you go.

Leo: It says it's the world’s first truly crowd funded tablet.

Paul: So I assume what they want people to do is to contribute money and if they get enough they will make it. 

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Yep. I had to resist my natural urge to buy everything.

Leo: Oh, I buy everything.

Paul: I'm like, oh cool, it's something shiny and new and it's shaped like a tablet.

Leo: When my JIBO comes in about 8 years you are going to be jealous. 

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Yeah, I buy everything. I gotta get out of that habit.

Paul: It's easy to fall into.

Leo: Moving on.

Paul: Mary Jo is like no it isn't.

Leo: Mary Jo doesn't even own a TV.

Mary Jo: I don't, I don't.

Leo: You are some sort of Quaker.

Mary Jo: I'm some sort of freak. I don't go out and buy a lot of gadgets. I don't have room for them, you know that.

Leo: That's beautiful.

Paul: That's the way to do it.

Leo: I was thinking today as I was showering that I just want a white room with a bed and maybe a window. That's it.

Paul:  Like THX 1138.

Leo: Or the asylum.

Paul: Right, right. Actually that room can be arranged Leo.

Leo: I didn't notice that the walls are padded, but now that I think about it.

Paul: Comfortable is always better than uncomfortable. We can all agree to that.

Leo:  I will wear the same clothes every day.

Paul:  Who would ever do that?

Leo: Office 365, we've got Mark here, that's his business, that's his job, his whole family is wearing Microsoft gear. Drake, their son has a Cortana shirt. Noah, their son has a Windows 8 shirt. Even Mai Ling, who, how old are you Mai Ling? 8 years old and she has a Microsoft shirt that says she uses Surface.

Paul: I have to say those kids are a little too enthusiastic; it's suspicious.

Leo: They do seem awfully happy, the whole bunch of them. Maybe they are just glad to be out of St. Louis in the winter. That might have something to do with it. Office 365 Video Service, this is an Enterprise thing, right? What is this?

Mary Jo: It's actually Paul's thing.

Leo: Paul? I'm looking at you and it's Paul?

Paul: Yeah, I only have a Small Business Premium account that will be upsized to whatever they call it now, Business Premium or whatever. I don't have access to this.

Leo: We had the first thing that came out and then they changed it all underneath us, right?

Paul: Right, well this is Enterprise SKU and I guess the educational SKUs that map to the Enterprise SKU. Basically it's a video service like a YouTube type thing for inside of your Enterprise. It works with all of the permissions and everything. It's got a nice little back end hook into Azure media services so if you upload video into the service it will transcode the videos in the background. When you hit the site with different types of devices it will serve the one that is appropriate for your bandwidth and for the type of machine that you have. Again, I don't have it so I can't really see what this looks like, but there is apparently a mobile app that also you could upload videos directly from your phone as well.

Leo: This is interesting.

Mary Jo: It is. The other interesting tie in is Office Mix, the other application they built that is kind of also a video inspired PowerPoint type application mainly for the educational audience. So that's tied in. The other cool thing is the Office Graph, which is the machine learning piece that is powering Delve, Microsoft's intracompany search app. That is also inside of this new video service. We've been wondering what else Microsoft is going to use this Graph for, and here is an example where it is going to show. If you have a bunch of videos it will surface the ones that are applicable to a meeting that you have or a certain group of people who all want to talk about the same set of videos. 

Leo:  That's an iPhone, get that off of the screen.

Mary Jo: Figure that out.

Paul: It's all good Leo, this is the new Microsoft.

Mary Jo: It's Microsoft.

Paul: This announcement was like Office 365 bingo. They hit on every buzz word imaginable. It's like Delve, Yammer, SharePoint, iPhone, Mix, yep.

Mary Jo: All in one post.

Paul: It was crazy, it was like bing, bing, bing, triple word score.

Leo: When you upload this great 30 second I blew everybody up in Call of Duty, that's Upload, right? Is that a Microsoft service?

Paul: Yeah, that's for the Xbox 360 and for the Xbox One.

Leo: It's probably using Azure as well. I wonder if they learned some stuff.

Paul: I'm sure it is actually. They talked it up a lot when the Xbox One launched. It really hasn't come up a lot since, but they've got this Azure thing sitting on the back end for the Xbox One.

Leo: I saw an ad, I think it was Monday Night Football, it was, for Azure.

Paul: For Azure, really?

Leo: And they talked about Titanfall and how it was the first game using the Azure back end. It was an ad for Microsoft Cloud Service.

Paul: I guess that Microsoft has made the Azure back end available for developers to use as they will for their games. I think that was the point. That came out back end in March or something, February or March.

Leo: Interesting. What they are really doing is filling out their services here.

Paul: I'm not sure the ad was like listen, I know that you are looking at AWS, but before you sign the check...

Leo: I find this very interesting, this video service, this YouTube like video service designed for Enterprise. This makes a lot of sense.

Paul: I guess this is going to be the first of a series of what they are calling next gen portals. If you are a SharePoint user you are familiar with the term portal. They take advantage of this new Office and Cloud services that they can mesh together in different ways. This is kind of a peek at how those things will evolve.

Leo: Do you think this will go beyond the Enterprise? This video service?

Paul: That's a good question. Microsoft tends to bring things down market.

Leo: We cover all of the time, Yahoo is working on a YouTube clone, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft, this would be a very interesting stealth way to do it.

Paul: Honestly I think that the dividing line is literally a small business to a mid-sized business. If you are a small business, like a real small business, 25 or fewer users, you are probably going to share videos on OneDrive or YouTube or something like that. The point of this service is that it lets your active directory based permissions come into play. You can determine who uploads video, you can determine who sees those videos based on user groups and so forth. There is a dividing line between smaller businesses which tend to be loosely managed at best or even unmanaged, and traditionally managed businesses, which we will call the Enterprise, which have this structure in place. I think maybe eventually, but you can understand why it makes sense to put it here first.

Leo: OneDrive for Business coming to Office Pro Plus. I don't even know what Pro Plus is. What is Office Pro Plus?

Paul: I'm going to spend another 2 hours on this topic.

Leo: What is Office Pro Plus? What is that?

Paul: I'm going to let Mary Jo do this one because I will go insane if I have to explain it.

Leo: So in the beginning...

Mary Jo: Office Pro Plus.

Leo: There was a thing, a Microsoft Office thing, you would buy a box and it would have in it 38 floppy disks.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: And you would install Office, and that would be it until the next version came out. Maybe you would get some updates. Then they started offering a web based Office that was free that they called, I think that I'm right on this, Office 365, right?

Paul: Huh uh.

Leo: No? Just Web Office, Office for the Web?

Paul: It was Office Apps, it was Office Online at one time. Actually it's Office Online today.

Mary Jo: It's still Office Online.

Leo: What was the first Office 365? Was that an actual Office version?

Paul: Office 365 was Business Productivity Online Suite, BPOS.

Leo: BPOS, that's it!

Paul: It was Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and eventually Link Online, whatever that used to be called.

Leo: And then they did a little sleight of hand and they started offering what I thought was great, a subscription for Office 365 which included Word, Excel, PowerPoint...

Paul: Actually that cuts to what this is. I was going to let Mary Jo do this, I'm sorry.

Mary Jo: I can explain what Office 365 Pro Plus is I think. It's a subscription SKU, it's $12.00 per user per month. You get in it downloadable versions of all of the Office apps. You get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, and Link Client I think, all of those. You can download those locally and you also can run Office, the free Office Apps from the Cloud on tablets, PCs, and phones. No, that's Office Online that you get. Office on PC, tablets, and phones, I'm not sure about that.

Paul: That's true, that's true.

Mary Jo: It's basically the high end SKU if you are looking at what on the client side you can subscribe to with Office 365. Is that a good description?

Paul: Yeah. Unfortunately they have really mucked things around with this. There are many different SKUs of Office 365, some of them are just the online services, some are the online service as opposed to the apps. This one was unique in that it was just the apps. You didn't get access to the online services part. That made sense for a little while. This year they changed all of the small and medium business SKUs, and now they have another SKU that is just like this. It's a very small difference, I think that it's just a difference of which apps were included. I want to say that the new version of this, even though they are selling them side by side, is Office 365 Business I think. I could be wrong about that.

Mary Jo: There are 3 new Office 365 SKUs that are for small business that they announced earlier this year. We need the guy in the audience who works for Office 365.

Leo: Could you explain this Mark? I think that Mai Ling can explain this.

Paul: No, I got this one. Pro Plus includes 2 applications, Access and Link, that are not found in Office 365 Business. The difference between the two is a couple of bucks per month, it's actually about $45 per year, though. I think with Office 365 Pro Plus there is an annual commitment, so you have to pay for the whole year where the other SKUs you can pay per month. I'm just confused that it is still there because they have this other thing that is very similar and there is a lot of overlap there.

Leo: The kids, Drake, and Mai Ling, and Noah have explained to me how this all works, and after the show...

Mary Jo: We will go over all of that.

Paul:  But here is the thing. So Leo, just to go back to the beginning of this, Office 365 Pro Plus dates back to the beginning of what we call Office 365. It was application based, like she said, a subscription service, so there is no online part of it. No online service part of it. This year when they bumped up OneDrive for Business to 1 TB of storage from 7 GB or 25 GB they said that Office 365 Pro Plus customers were going to get access to OneDrive for Business by the end of the year. So this week they announced that that is still happening, it might take until January for some customers, but now they are going to get unlimited storage as well. They were also on the unlimited storage bandwagon that is happening if that makes sense.

Leo: Mai Ling, did daddy have more hair before all of this happened?

Mary Jo: No, right?

Leo: She says no.

Paul: Nice, you are going to get a Jolla tablet next.

Leo: Alright, let's take a break. More to come, Surface update, we are going to talk about Surface, and speaking of updates, the big Windows IT 8.1 rollup.

Paul: It's like a tootsie roll up.

Leo: First a word from our good friends at Citrix. They make so many products for people who need to get business done. One of the things that happens in business, of course, is email attachments. Attachments happen, and not a good thing, because frankly as you have heard me say so many times, don't open attachments, don't send attachments. That's how malware gets sent. That's not all, attachments are problematic in other ways. Everything that you send through the email unless it's encrypted is public. Oh yeah, you are using PGP at the office, sure you are. No you are not. Everybody can see what you are sending, I don't care what disclosures you put at the bottom of the email. If this is not for you please don't read this, please don't, I beg you. Of course there is the larger issue of these files getting bigger and bigger, and bounce back is getting to be a real problem. Citrix Sharefile solves all of the above. It lets you share files in business, contracts, and spreadsheets, and presentations, all of those giant media files to collaborate with coworkers and clients to get the job done securely, reliably without spreading malware. State of the art encryption, you bet. It works beautifully with Microsoft Outlook. They've got a plug in that makes it look like an email attachment, but it's not. You are sending a secure link. Furthermore, you control who has access. They have permissions, you can say this can be downloaded once, twice, 100 times, never. That would be silly, once at least. You can say for how long. You can control who can access the file. You can access your Sharefile folders from anywhere, your laptop, your tablet, your smartphone. I use Sharefile to send audio messages to the radio station, like today is my Sharefile day. I record stuff and send it off to the radio stations. Some of the people receiving these are not the most sophisticated users, but that's good because Sharefile makes it really easy for them. They don't have to log in, they don't have to have a Sharefile account. There is a link in the email that they can click, a secure link. They will see my logo, it's branded with your branding, and they get a big button that tells them what it is. If it's multiple files it automatically zips them for you so that you don't have to. There are so many nice features. It's HIPAA compliant if you are in the medical business. It's compliant with regulations in many industries. In fact, when you sign up, I want you to go to sharefile.com and click the Podcast Listeners link at the top. Don't be afraid, what they will do is ask you for the offer code. Use the offer WINDOWS and you are going to get 30 days free. You can show your boss, your clients, you can try it yourself. The offer code is WINDOWS for 30 days free. They do give you the chance to customize it for your business, and I would because there are all sorts of nice things that they can offer. For instance, if you are in the legal business, this happened to me on the radio show, a lawyer called me and said that I want my clients to send me pictures of the auto accident because we are going after the insurance company. How can they easily share pictures with me? I said Sharefile, there is a request button in Sharefile that says I request some files from you. Again, even if your users are not sophisticated it makes it so easy for them to send you files. That is just one of the many good things about Sharefile. Automatic synchronization, so I have a Sharefile folder on my desktop, I save the audio files there, they are automatically sent to the Sharefile Cloud, and I can get to them anytime and send a message anytime with those files. It really is easy. Sharefile.com, I invite you to visit, click the Podcast Listeners, please click the Podcast Listeners button at the top of the page so that we get credit, Paul and Mary Jo get credit when you use the offer code Windows. You get 30 days free with sharefile.com.

We go back to Stockholm.

Paul: Leo, by the way, who is The Tri Caster on Twitter? Is that Alex?

Leo: I'm hoping, I don't know, that it is somebody on our team. Why, is he tweeting at you?

Paul: He tweeted a picture of Baghdad Bob in front of the OneDrive explanation.

Leo: That's got to be Alex.

Paul: Priceless.

Leo: Baghdad Bob?

Paul: Remember the guy from the Iraq government, he was standing in the bombed parts of the city and he was like everything is fine, we are beating back the Americans.

Leo: Here is a few pictures. Here is Mary Jo Foley. It's not you Alex? He swears it's not him.

Paul: Liar.

Mary Jo: I know who it is.

Leo: I don't know. They haven't told me. There is the vast audience. Room for more if anyone is watching and wants to head over to Stockholm.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: That's a good looking bunch though.

Mary Jo: It's 9:00 pm here too. It's been a long day.

Leo: And there is beer next door, so...

Paul: They look like they are ready to apply you with alcohol.

Leo: And lutefisk.

Mary Jo: I'm drinking one right now.

Leo: Alcohol and lutefisk, it's great. You are going to be so happy. Is this is, I'm looking for Baghdad Bob? I don't see that tweet.

Paul: I retweeted it so you can look at my Twitter Stream. Maybe it is an outside entity.

Leo: I was sure it was Alex. Who is it?

Paul: I still think that it is Alex much like Bruce Wayne is Batman.

Leo: Yeah, no, it's not me, it's not me. Here is a full link from our chatroom. It's to welovetheiraqiminister.com. What? Is he still around, Baghdad Bob?

Paul: I hope so, he was fantastic.

Leo: Anyway, I don't know what is going on. Jammer B says it's not Alex but it is someone from TWiT. They keep stuff from me you know.

Paul: Yep, I would.

Leo: I would if I were them. Moving along, Surface Pro 3 updates. Who wants to take this one? You both use the Surface.

Paul: I think Mary Jo needs to talk more, I'm sorry.

Mary Jo: I can. I can take it. So Microsoft this week issued some updates for the Surface Pro 3. They came out today in fact. There was a rumor that they might have come out yesterday, but it was today. There is a list of them. There are some firmware updates, some UEFI updates, there is a pen settings driver update, but the one that we are kind of focused on is Microsoft is still trying to fix connectivity on the Surface Pro 3. So they've got yet, another attempt this time that enables better through-put after waking from sleep and connecting to 802 11 AC networks. They haven't been completely able to lick the wireless problems on the Surface Pro 3 yet and I don't know that this one will. I know that there are people who've had problems with running Hyper-V on Surface Pro 3 with network connectivity, I don't think this does anything about that although Paul might know if he's tested that yet but-

Paul: I don't think that's going to come until Windows 10 but I-

Mary Jo: Me either, I don't think it is either. But what is interesting to me is they're still doing updates to the Surface Pro 3 on a regular basis- Although they didn't do one on Patch Tuesday, which was last Tuesday. -But they haven't done any updates to the other Surfaces, so we haven't seen Surface RT update, Surface Pro update, or a Surface 2 update in a while and I'm not sure if we will or won't continue to see those because right now the flagship device for Microsoft is the Surface Pro 3. So that seems to be where they're putting all of their eggs right now. That's the basket.

Paul: It's quite a basket.

Leo: It's quite a big basket, yes.

Mary Jo: Yes. But at least you know, they're still updating the next one. We don't know when the next Surface will come out from Microsoft. My bet is that when it does it will probably run Windows 10 and it will probably be an Intel-based device. I would be very surprised if they do another R&B Surface, though no one from the company has said they are discontinuing those, at least, as far as I know. They haven't said that publicly.

Leo: Hm.

Paul: Hm.

Mary Jo: Hm. Yeah, so that's your Surface update.

Leo: That's your Surface Pro Update. That's so funny because Apple is also having massive wi-fi issues with their Yosemite...

Paul: That is funny. I'm actually kind of glad they are. Not because I dislike Apple, but because it's been happening a little too much to the Surface.

Leo: It seems like there's just something in wi-fi that makes it hard to do right.

Paul: Oh there absolutely is. It's that situation when you go to a trade show and you can't just add more routers. That's not the solution, you have to deal with bandwidth contention and--Ii

Leo: RF is tricky. Radio Frequency.

Mary Jo: You know what's interesting, on my Windows 8.1 laptop that I have here, I don't really have those issues. I mostly have pretty excellent wi-fi connectivity and it doesn't drop so it makes me wonder, what is it in the Surface Pro 3 that is making that happen, because we're running the same operating system, obviously.

Paul: Sure. They pulled an iPhone 4 and they put the antenna in the outside ring or something.

Mary Jo: That's it, right.

Leo: I think this answers the question people ask, why didn't they test this? There are so many possible- RF is spooky.. It's analog. It's not digital and analog is tough I mean, it's radio waves.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Speaking of updates, the Mega Windows RT 8.1 Roll-Up. It's not a fruit roll up kids, don't get exciting.

Mary Jo: It's not. And there was a giant roll-up. Was it today or yesterday that this came out for Windows 8.1 and what's interesting- Which I wondered this when it hit my machine. -I wonder if this is Window 8.1 update 3. Microsoft's not calling it this, obviously. They don't call it Update, or Update 1. There are reasons that make me think this is something other than just an original update and I think Paul said something about it on Twitter. They do these giant cumulative updates periodically for Windows 8 and they don't call them service packs but that's actually what they are. I don't know.

Paul: Sometime, within like the past week, it may have been a tip or a pick last week or something but Microsoft had finally released downloadable iSO versions of Windows 8.1 and there were a lot of improvements with them being there- Well them just being there was an improvement. But you could use a Windows 8.0 key to install that, which was something you could not do in the past, very nice. But they also had integrated into it, up to date from the update that came out in August I believe. And I think that they were here basically, especially for businesses, where they want to deploy these releases right down to computers. What these cumulative updates, or update roll-ups were, is the ability to have a base-line installed and so if you were to plug this into it and so if you were to clean-install a computer today, it would basically be up-to-date. There would probably be a couple of defender updates and small things but it sort of serves the point of a service pack.

Mary Jo: Yeah it does.

Paul: I think that might be the rationale behind this kind of thing.

Mary Jo: Yeah, could be. Yep. But anyways, if you haven't downloaded it yet it's big and it'll take you some time. I forget how big this thing is, it's big.

Leo: How big is this big? Megabytes, gigabytes? Petabytes, terabytes?

Paul: The thing is, most people don't actually need it, right?

Mary Jo: Yeah, you don't have to have it.

Paul: Yeah, you don't have to have it. If you've been updating your system all along, on the fly you don't need to-

Leo: Yeah I get it. It's what we used to call a service pack.

Paul: This gives you the ability to update this thing offline. So you could get your computer up to date with this kind of roll-up.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: So why do people not like the Word service pack? Because this is a service pack, right?

Paul: No Leo, it's an update package.

Leo: It's a roll-up.

Paul: I don't understand why you don't get it Leo. It's so obviously not a service pack, it doesn't say service pack anywhere.

Leo: Anywhere.

Mary Jo: No, it doesn't.

Paul: I don't know.

Mary Jo: Nor does it call itself update, it just says cumulative update.

Leo: It doesn't even say the word update, interesting.

Mary Jo: Not like update 3, which I wonder if that's what this is? I can't prove that it is but I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.

Leo: It's just all nomenclature, right?

Mary Jo: It is but because they're trying to change the way they deliver Windows updates to people and how people think about staying up to date, they're being careful about calling something an update or a roll-up or a service pack of whatever, you know. The wording means something.

Leo: Right, that makes sense. It means something, we don't know what but it's something.

Paul: So I said it was basically or sort of was a service pack, it doesn't reset the support timeline for example, so I do agree... It's basically just semantics but there was a formal understanding of what a service pack meant to the life cycle of that OS or whatever and that's different for this and maybe that was part of the point as well.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So bottom line, if you install a new version of Windows 8.1, you could put all of the updates on it at once with the-

Paul: Offline, yep.

Leo: -With the fruit roll-up.

Mary Jo: With the fruit roll-up, yes.

Paul: Well yeah, you download the ISO that is up to date through August, you apply this to it and it's up to date through November and pretty much... Yeah, you'd probably have a handful of little things, you could get Zune in there or whatever you'd need and your good to go.

Leo: Speaking of updates, there's an update for the update for the IAS. So IAS had a serious bug in the security channel for the server. We talked to Gan about it yesterday.

Paul: Oh you did?

Leo: Yeah, the patch went out and they patched the patch like they did out of cycle patch earlier this week. So just so you know, but it's all good. If it were Apple, they'd call it a fruit roll-up but with Microsoft you can't call it that.

Paul: An iRoll-Up.

Leo: So we are going to ask our live audience- If you want to get them ready for questions Mary Jo in just a second. This is Windows Weekly a coverage of the second largest company in the world and.. That sounds like faint praise.

Paul: Yeah, it sounded like a little bit of a dig, Leo but I-

Leo: But yeah, Microsoft just passed Exxon as the second most valuable company in the world, stock-wise. That's good, the stock is-

Paul: It's difficult to see the day when Exxon isn't even in the top 10 but yeah, fine.

Leo: Exxon's going down or Microsoft is going up. Apple is number 1, and this is all based on stock price.

Paul: It's market cap isn't it?

Leo: Yeah market cap but based on stock price. As long as I've been covering Microsoft and as long as you've been covering Microsoft has been fairly stable, some would say.

Paul: We would call it a flat line if this were a patient. It would have been made into glue if it was a horse.

Leo: Yes, but I'm actually going to go look and see if it's going up because that would be good. No it hasn't, never mind.

Mary Jo: They were close to $50 the other day..

Leo: Well, it actually has. Look at that.

Mary Jo: That's been a while since they were near that.

Leo: That 'aint bad, not bad. That's the one year of growth. So started November 19, 2013 at $36.74, got as high as $49-

Paul: See that little dip at the end? That's probably when they announced the OneDrive thing.

Leo: That's what you get Microsoft, I knew it!

Mary Jo: Oh man...

Leo: No, but the last 12 months have been great.

Mary Jo: They have.

Leo: Alright one last ad, then we're going to get to the back of the book, and questions from Sweden.

Mary Jo: Okay.

Paul: Preferably in English.

Leo: No, they must be in Swedish. We will only accept Swedish questions and then we're going to ask the family to translate. Are you looking for a new employee? Our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We use this and are very, very happy. The issue of course, is it's not hard now to post a job listing, there are more than 50 job boards out there. But where is the one place to find the right candidate? One place isn't enough, if you want to find the perfect hire, you need to post your job on all top job websites. And now you can, ziprecruiter.com. You can post to 50+ job sites including social sites like Craigslist and LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook - all with one single click of the mouse. You can find candidates in any city or industry nation-wide. You post once and you will watch your qualified candidates roll into their easy to use interface. It's nice when you don't have to worry about jamming your email inbox or getting phone calls right to your office. Ziprecruiter handles it so you can quickly screen candidates, rate them, and hire the right person real fast. This is such a great solution, I want you to try it, we were very happy with our results and that's why we set up a four day free trial for you at ziprecruiter.com/windows. When you go there, they'll know that you saw this on Windows Weekly, it's a good way to show Paul and Mary Jo your support. Ziprecruiter.com/windows. This is the easiest, fastest, best way to get that right person in that job right away. Ziprecruiter.com/windows, you're going to love it! I know we did. Let us get back to Sweden, Mary Jo Foley is there for the big Tech-Days, shaping the future. I think it's techdays.se is the website. And there she is, shaping the future.

Mary Jo: Yes, shaping the future.

Paul: She's like a mime.

Mary Jo: I am.

Leo: The future, it's in wide-face.

Mary Jo: Yes, so we have some people who want to ask questions so I'll just read them to you guys and tell them what they want to know.

Leo: Okay, perfect.

Audience member: Yes, my question is how important is the Surface as a device that marks up sales compared to what kind of infuser it is for the rest of the industry for other companies to create tablet-like devices.

Mary Jo: How important is it to Microsoft or to the industry?

Audience member: Is it more important as a device that Microsoft sells?

Mary Jo: Okay, I see what you're asking.

Leo: We could kind of hear it actually.

Mary Jo: Oh okay good. So what he wants to know, is the Surface more important as a money-making device for Microsoft or is it more like an inspiration, like an innovation, right? Am I explaining that well?

Leo: Well it is close to a negative billion dollar business.

Mary Jo: Right, well Microsoft, we believe, has been losing money with the Surface but we don't know that for sure because they won't say how many Surfaces they've sold. We know they took a write-down of $900 million on the Surface RT, the one that-

Paul: That was like a year and a half ago.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Well, you're digging yourself out of a billion dollar hole.

Mary Jo: You are, you're digging yourself out of a hole. But are they going to keep making Surfaces? Do they think it's important enough to the company as an inspirational device, something that really showcases Windows? Good question, right? I mean, Nadella hasn't been that bullish about hardware.

Paul: Oh I thought he had explicitly addressed this today.

Mary Jo: He did but I feel like the fact they haven't rolled out any more Surfaces since the Surface Pro 3 may indicate something. I don't know, they can't-

Leo: They killed the Surface Micro.

Mary Jo: Right, the killed the Surface Mini, or at least postponed it. So I don't know.

Leo: We've been asking that question since the day that they came out with it. But it was a significant risk for Microsoft to go into the PC business, they had never done that before.

Mary Jo: Right, it was.

Leo: Against their OEM's, competing against their OEM's.

Paul: That worked out great, I don't think anyone got upset with them or anything so no worries there.

Leo: Well your being facetious, obviously. But here we are a couple years later, it's not like we lost a lot.

Paul: Actually Leo, on that topic... Here we are two years later, and Microsoft had to release $0 Windows Licensing to counter-act the Chromebooks that every single one of their partners has released since they made Surface. So I think that ultimately, we could credit Surface with $0 Windows Licensing.

Mary Jo: Interesting.

Paul: It's kind of an obvious cause-and-effect thing right there.

Mary Jo: Okay let's take another question. Okay, favorite feature so far in the Windows 10 preview that hasn't been in any other Windows version for Paul Thurrott.

Paul: Well I wouldn't call this a favorite feature because my favorite is in Windows Word and other Windows versions but in the newest build, one of the features they released that I think will be a big deal for typical users, which is most people, is that Snap Assist feature that is now enabled. So when you snap a window, it actually works and didn't in the previous build. And then it throws up thumbnails in the other side of the screen so you can pick whichever application you want or hit escape and it goes away, which takes you back to your normal view and then you can automatically snap two things side by side. And you may recall in Windows 8, when you snap something, you'd get a blank screen and it was unclear as to what you had to do. You had to go to Start, choose another app and it would snap after you did that. So that kind of thing isn't a major new feature but it's one of those things that will impact everybody that uses it so it's kind of a big deal.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I don't know if you remember, when you were away one time and Dr. Pizza, Peter Bright from Arstechnica was on the show and I said on the show, I think the snap on Windows 8 is so broken and so terrible and he just like flipped out. I'm like it's just so hard to use, it's difficult to figure out how to make is snap in an easy way. I know how to make the gestures snap but you have to think about it too much and Snap Assist does take that away, like the part that makes you go, what the heck am I doing again?

Paul: Right.

Leo: Now, I haven't used it yet but the feature that draws my eye is the multiple workspaces thing.

Paul: Multiple desktops, yep.

Leo: I have used that for years in Linux and I use it in OS 10 and I find that a really nice way- It's a little better than snapping, especially with full-screen apps, it kind of goes hand-in-hand with full-screen apps. -To have multiple full-screen apps open. I haven't used it yet and don't know how well it's implemented but I'm looking forward to that.

Mary Jo: Yep. Anyone else here in the audience?...

Paul: What about you, Mary Jo?

Leo: Yeah did she say a favorite?

Mary Jo: Well I'm not running tech preview because I for one, don't have a PC to put it on and I don't really have the time since hearing how unstable things are becoming.

Paul: Well let me walk you through the setup of a dual boot system while we sit here and you're in Sweden so first-

Mary Jo: No I don't want to do this. I know my place here, and my place is not to be a tester for the tech community. I'll be a tester on the consumer preview because I'm a consumer.

Leo: So you used a Surface Pro 3, were you ever tempted to buy one?

Mary Jo: I didn't really care for it that much..

Leo: Even with the lap ability?

Mary Jo: It wasn't lappable, no I tried to balance it on my lap but it kept falling off. Maybe I have short legs, I don't know how to explain it but I much prefer the clamshell laptop form factor still to the Surface. I just find the Surface a little too tippy and not lappable enough because I type on my lap a lot. I know that's unusual.

Leo: You actually have a really great Windows laptop, the same as I use, the Acer S7.

Mary Jo: It is great. So yeah, I don't have a favorite but I do like the idea of Snap Assist a lot because I always thought Snapping was too hard. So what else, another question, it can be anything.

Leo: When does the beer start? You're keeping me from the beer.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Guys, anything? I think they're just tired, it's been a long day.

Leo: Yeah, they don't have to ask anything if they don't want. Let's take a look at the audience one more time in beautiful Stockholm, they're celebrating a joyous day at the Microsoft Tech-Day event. Let's get to the back of the book, you ready to do that, guys?

Mary Jo: Let's do it.

Leo: And thanks to everybody in Sweden, and thanks to the fella who set this up. Because it really looks great, I think with the tech, all around.

Mary Jo: Michael Ardenberg.

Paul: Is he there? Let him say hi.

Mary Jo: Yes. Come on over.

Leo: I think we exchanged emails, right Michael?

Michael Ardenberg: Yes we did, nice to talk to you finally.

Leo: Nice to talk to you, and nice job! You did a great job setting this up, I can't believe how good it looks. 10x better than Paul.

Michael: Thank you, I was actually going to ask Paul if he would like to come over here himself sometime and visit the world's largest land party here twice a year.

Paul: Yeah, I would be happy to.

Leo: Oh what game do you play?

Michael: Oh we play everything, it's 16,000 people coming together twice a year playing games for four days.

Paul: Yeah I could do that. I do it with a slightly smaller crowd up the street and it's more like 6 or 10 guys, but yeah sure.

Leo: Thank you Michael I really appreciate your help.

Michael: Thank you.

Leo: Paul Thurrott, let's kick things off with your tip of the week.

Paul: What is my tip of the week? Oh yes, so a midst all of this OneDrive drama I have been writing a series of articles about how you might get a bunch of content into OneDrive and the best way to do that and I've tried to find ways that most people can use- I mean, there are some esoteric things you can do like map OneDrive as a network drive for example, you can meld it into your file system in different ways, I don't want to get into that right now. But this whole change has kind of thrown that through a loop and so I had written two articles and the third in the series was going to be about documents but then I thought, I need to step back from this a little bit and I moved forward to the fourth part which is about using your web browser to upload files to OneDrive. And that sounds like one of those super goofy things that sounds like it wouldn't possibly work very well but according to some people, this is actually quicker than doing the file system integration part. So the only trick is, you have to use Chrome unless you want to upload individual files. Like if you want to do a folder instructor worth of files, you can drag and drop in Chrome. And so basically, you just navigate to the folder in OneDrive where you want the files to go in Chrome and then drag from your computer onto the browser window and it actually uploads to that place. And so I did this with music and I wrote an article about that but I use Xbox Music for my collection but there was some music that was not in Xbox music, for example I got all of those remastered Beatles albums that came out a couple of years ago and ripped them to AAC format or whatever. Then I have other music that isn't in there for licensing reasons and so I have copied some of my music that I don't have in Xbox music into OneDrive, I used the browser for that. Then on my devices I can sync it but not from the Cloud yet. We're hoping the music locker feature shows up someday but I can sync that to my PC and then copy it over to my devices that way so it's a cool thing you can do that I don't think a lot of people know you can even do that.

Leo: I'm really excited about your software pick of the week, this is a great program.

Paul: This is a big one for me. So Dualingo is a language learning app that has been out for Android and iOS for some amount of time, I'm not sure how long. My wife has been using it since early summer but I started using it a couple of months ago but it has only been available on Android and iOS. As of today though, it's available on Windows phone 8.1, which is fantastic. This app is awesome, really good. It's free, there's no point where it's like, okay you've finished the first lesson and now you have to start paying. I don't know why they do that.

Leo: I do, it's a really interesting story.

Paul: Tell me.

Leo: Once you get proficient, they use you as part of a translation service. So it's one of those crowd source translation services and everybody gets a sentence. And as part of your training you get a sentence in Spanish or French or German, whatever you're learning. And you translate it, it's not just you by the way, they compare multiple translations and so forth. So it's an effective paid translation service and they use you.

Paul: Here's the kicker though, this system works I mean I've been trying to learn other languages for a long time. I've taken classes at the learning center, I've done Rosetta Stone, plopped down all of that money and go nowhere with it. I've done podcasts and this is kind of a game-based approach.

Leo: Yeah it really works, and is fun.

Paul: I've always felt- This is true for the stuff that I do for work as well like if I need to learn something about Office 365, Windows Server, whatever it might be, for me repetition is key. Sometimes I'll talk to somebody from Microsoft and they'll say hey Paul, we know you are aware of all of this stuff, we'll just jump right to here. And I'm like, hold on a second please start from the beginning. It does a really neat job with the repetition because it doesn't mean the same thing over and over again, it's the same type of information presented in different ways. So sometimes you say it, sometimes you translate it one direction or another and it's a really neat kind of approach. They support several languages, I'm unsure what the complete listing is, but certainly the main ones like Italian, French, Spanish, German, etc., there's a client on the web, a client on mobile devices now and now we have one on Windows Phone. It looks- I just did a couple of lessons with it and haven't spent longer than a week on this one but it looks to be basically identical.

Leo: I've learned already my first Swedish sentence while you were talking.

Paul: Nice.

Leo: So Mary Jo, this would've been great for you.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it would've been great.

Leo: I really agree with you Paul, I'm so glad that this has come to Windows Phone it's one of the greatest things in the world. And it's a limited number of languages but boy...

Paul: It really is great and after having spent so much time on other apps and other ways of trying to learn a language, this is the one for me that has stuck and it probably varies between individuals but I find this approach to be very effective.

Mary Jo: What's that?

Leo: Uh-oh they're complaining.

Paul: He said you tell him what?

Mary Jo: Your Swedish is better than mine I'm sure. I had to introduce a bunch of people today on a panel and I think I butchered every single name.

Leo: Mary Jo's enterprise pick of the week.

Mary Jo: Yeah my enterprise pick of the week is the product formerly known as Prince, no, Forefront Identity Manager, FIM, has been renamed Microsoft Identity Manager.

Leo: Thank God.

Mary Jo: Thank God. MIM. FIM is MIM now. Microsoft announced this week that they're making available a public preview of the next version on Identity Mananger, this MIM thing. And what it is, is an on-premises server that allows users to secure Cloud identities. That's the easiest way I can describe this. Customers can enable single sign-on to an application that supports Azure Active Directory, there's tighter integration with Active Directory... There's a whole list of other features and I think this is going to be coming out in the first half of 2015, although Microsoft did not give us an updated date this week. But a year ago they said that this would be out around the first half of next year. What's really noteworthy is this, I believe is the last product in the Forefront brand of products and enterprise security products that is being eliminated. So Forefront is a brand that doesn't exist anymore at Microsoft as far as I know-

Leo: Was that an acquisition or something? Or where did that name come from?

Mary Jo: No, that was what they used to distinguish their enterprise security products. So there used to be Forefront Protection for SharePoint, there was the Forefront Threat Management Gateway, there were all of these Forefront products and now this was the last one, I think, that was still called Forefront. Although it is no longer called Forefront, it still exists in the form of Identity Manager. So there you have it, that's the enterprise pick.

Leo: And your codename of the week?

Mary Jo: Yeah, this is super interesting to me since I love codenames. Office for iPad, we talked about it on a show a while ago. It was codenamed Miramar and that code was based on the Office for Mac code base. After Miramar was finished, the team that was working on bringing that iPad code base down to the iPhone decided to start from scratch and they rebuilt that. So they took the new product that Microsoft talked about last week, the Office for iPhone Suite that they're doing and the redone Office for iPhone Suite was codenamed Minimar. So we had Miramar, Office for iPad and Minimar, like Mini Me, for the Office for iPhone. Minimar, code name of the week!

Leo: Awesome, awesome. And I just want to show you, because I have been to Sweden I just wanted to show you some pictures of me in Sweden. Here I am with a Viking Rune.

Mary Jo: Wow.

Leo: Wow... And here we are on the island of Vizby. That's Henry bicycling in Vizby and that's where your beer pick of the week comes from.

Mary Jo: Aha, well I'm going to need help pronouncing the brewery I believe.

Leo: I'll tell you what, I'll put it on the screen and everybody in the audience can help you pronounce the- Gotlands Shogun Bulldog JIPA. What are you laughing at? JIPA. Everybody shout it out when you see it.

Mary Jo: How do you pronounce that?

Audience member: Very good!

Mary Jo: He's saying you did well.

Leo: Oh wow...

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: It's from Gotlands Brewery, in Spendrips. It's in Vizby, Sweden. Vizby's a beautiful island, just gorgeous.

Mary Jo: Yeah, so this beer was really good. It tasted like an American IPA, so nice and hoppy and malty. And the bar tender told me that it has Japanese hops, even though it's a Swedish beer. So that's why the Shogun, I guess. And JIPA is Japanese IPA I would guess. Maybe I don't know.

Leo: No, that makes sense.

Mary Jo: It was a very good and tasty beer, although I've had some nice beers while I've been here. Right now I'm drinking one that is not so nice, it's okay... Maristad's, is that right? Just a basic lager, not Heineken. When in Sweden drink Swedish beer.

Leo: Yeah, yeah I know Swedish beer is fabulous. And Mary Jo, I'm going to let you go to your Swedish beer party.

Mary Jo: Well thanks.

Leo: And prepare- Because it's late, it's almost 10 o' clock there. So we'll let you get on with it. But Mary Jo Foley, thank you again for your hosts at techdays.se and what a great picture from Stockholm, Sweden. We'll see you next week, will you be back home next week?

Mary Jo: I won't be back for Windows Weekly if you're doing it the day before Thanksgiving.

Leo: Oh, that's right you're going to Copenhagen.

Mary Jo: I am, yep.

Leo: Well have a great time and we'll just have to muddle along without you next Wednesday. Paul, you're going to be here, right?

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Paul Thurrott is at the supersite for Windows, winsupersite.com. Mary Jo is at allaboutmicrosoft.com and between the two of them, they cover the water front when it comes to Microsoft. They're awfully good. We do this show every Wednesday at 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern time, 1900 UTC. If you'd like to tune in live, we'd love it if you would. If not though, on-demand audio and video always available after the fact at twit.tv/ww for Windows Weekly, at youtube.com/windowsweekly, and of course wherever podcasts are aggregated, including the Xbox Music store and the podcast app on your Windows Phone and all of the other devices. I want to thank the Howton family for being here, Mark, and Tia, and Alice.

Paul: I want to demand that they're here every week.

Leo: They are the greatest. Drake, and Noah, and Mayling. They are the whole Microsoft family.

Paul: Yeah, it's what life is like in my dreams.

Leo: Thank you Paul, thank you Mary Jo! Thank you all for being here, we'll see you next week on Windows Weekly!