Windows Weekly 395 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte:  It's time for Windows Weekly!  Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here with their first show of the New Year.  They will talk about what is coming up for Microsoft, what 2014 meant to Microsoft, lots of interesting rumors, and Paul is about to make a very big announcement or shave his head, no big deal; all coming up next on Windows Weekly.

Netcasts you love from people you trust.   This is TWiT! Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cachefly at c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com.

Leo: This is Windows Weekly, Episode 395, recorded January 7th, 2015.

The Clippening

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Leo:  Alright, we are ready to begin this fine program.  

Paul Thurrott:  Leo, a couple of notes.  

Leo:  Mr. Thurrott, you have the floor.

Paul:  I stupidly agreed to shave my head this week.

Leo:  Yes.

Paul:  We reached $60,000.

Leo:  Paul, I just wanted you to know that I wasn't going to bring it up.

Paul:  But here is the problem.

Leo:  Yes.

Paul:  My kids are very excited that this is going to happen.

Leo:  Oh I bet they are.

Paul:  So excited that they have decided to come on the show today and shave my head.

Leo:  What?

Paul:  When they get home from school.

Leo:  Oh, which is when?

Paul:  It's in an hour.

Leo:  So sometime in the middle of this show your hair is going to fall off?

Paul:  Yeah.

Leo:  And Mary Jo is enjoying this I might add.

Mary Jo Foley:  I am actually loving this.

Paul:  The sheer level of enjoyment that I am getting from everyone who knows about this is alarming.

Leo:  Paul, you have a nice head of hair.  Are you sure you want to?

Paul:  No, I really don't Leo.  That's the thing.  And it's cold here as we noted.  I don't know that I want to go that deep.

Leo:  You know what?  I am going to say this right now.  You do not have to get rid of it all.  You could get a nice, you would actually look pretty good, yeah, go with a 4.

Paul:  Go with a 4?

Leo:  You don't have to go...

Paul:  Do you think a 4 will be acceptable to my children?  Plus they are going to do a terrible job because they are going to be idiots about it.  By the way, let me ask you a question.  This is something that I actually do really need to know.  

Leo:  Yes, I am now an expert, so go right ahead.

Paul:  Looking in the mirror later, no.  Is it possible to cut with a razor?

Leo:  No, you need a clipper.

Paul:  Yeah, see, we don't have a clipper.  You mean a clipper with the blades and the sizes?

Leo:  Yeah, you need a hair clipper.

Paul:  We do have that.

Leo:  Perfect, that is all that you need.  And do you have the different sizes?

Paul:  Yeah.

Leo:  That's all you need.  Do not do what I did.  That's not required.  In fact, the chat room is ecstatic.  They are saying you are a man, a mensch.  They do say that if you don't go with a number 1 that you are not shaving, but don't listen to them.  I listened to them and look what happened to me.  

Paul:  I'm thinking 1 on the sides 2 on the top.

Leo:  Perfect.  

Paul:  I'm going to need wifely help on that one because my kids are incapable of doing this correctly.

Leo:   Why that's why they are gleeful.

Paul:  My daughter has been giggling like a Bond supervillain actually since she found out that this is happening.  

Leo:  This is exactly why they are gleeful, you understand?

Paul:  She's usually very quiet.

Leo:  They are so happy about this.

Paul:  She's cackling Leo.  You have got to witness it, you will see.

Leo:  My children were horrified, but I think that they are more horrified by the tattoo then the head shaving.  

Paul:  Oh, did you get the tattoo?

Leo:  Yeah.

Mary Jo:  I think that you looked good bald by the way.  I think that you look really good.

Paul:  Where is the tattoo?

Leo:  I don't think that good is the word.  Acceptable.

Mary Jo:  No, no.

Leo:  Thank you, you are so kind.

Mary Jo:  I think that it looks nice.

Paul:  You have a wide range of wig possibilities that are available to you now.

Leo:  I could be Pitbull.  There is a whole huge number of things that I can do.  I can be Slash.  I was Harpo on iPad Today.  By the way, just a brief explanation because there will be people coming into the chat room saying "what happened?"

Paul:  Right.

Leo:  Because not everybody knows.  We had a wonderful 24 hour marathon for New Years.  Really it was a telethon because we were raising money for UNICEF in the grand old Jerry Lewis tradition.  We raised $75,000, which is a mind boggler.  Remember, this is not NBC, this is a podcast my friends.  $75,000 from a very generous, very generous TWiT audience.  It was a lot of fun.  Paul was in studio with us.  Thank you for coming out.  You and Stephanie endured the worst meal I have ever had at our host dinner.

Paul:  I described it as eating dinner at the bar from Roadhouse.

Leo:  Yeah, only worse.

Mary Jo:  What happened at the dinner?

Leo:  It's my fault, because we could have gone to a nice...

Paul:  It's not Leo's fault.  Listen, everyone got together, it was great, and no one cared about the food.

Leo:  It was fun.

Paul:  And I did eat the steak and didn't get sick.

Leo:  The steak was actually okay.  It was poor Stephanie who got the shrimp, and I might point out, ate none of it.

Paul:  It was prawns.  Which is like the scrod of shrimp.

Leo:  It was not only prawns but it was deep fried prawns.  You know what was funny about the host dinner?  I'm sorry that you couldn't be there Mary Jo, although Mary Jo did a great beer segment on the broadcast, which we just all loved.

Mary Jo:  It was really fun.

Leo:  But I'm sorry that you missed the host dinner, because, A. you would have seen vegetables that had been around since the turn of the century, they were old Roadhouse vegetables.  There is Paul looking at his plate with some...

Paul:  Oh, I'm the only one eating.

Leo:  You are actually eating.  

Paul:  I ate the meal.

Leo:  Everybody is talking.  It looks like Mike Elgan's wife Amera has actually got her hands folded so that she won't eat the food.  Rene Ritchie too.  Look at your wife Stephanie.  That is horror.  That is a sheer look of horror.

Mary Jo:  Yeah. that is not a good face.

Paul:  She didn't know what she was getting into.

Leo:  I really apologize.  There is Jeff Jarvis.

Paul:  No, stop it.  It was good.

Mary Jo:  Everybody looks like they are having fun.

Leo:  It was so much fun, and to see everybody in the same room and we were at a classic Penta Luma location.  I thought it would be fun to do something a little different, which was our roadhouse.  In 1859 it was the stagecoach stop for Penta Luma, but apparently some of the vegetables had still been from 1859 preserved and put on a plate.  I don't know if we can really see what this was, but...

Paul:  I was waiting for Wyatt Earp to burst into the room at some time.

Leo:  How did you like the plastic glassware?  I think that they were afraid that we would steal their cups.  

Paul:  Yeah, look at me getting along with Jeff Jarvis.

Leo:  Yeah.  You were having fun.

Paul:  Yeah, that was a good time.

Leo:  Jeff brought his son Jake.  There is Steve Gibson and Lisa.

Paul:  By the way, Gibson is the riddler of our universe.  He is like the prankster.

Leo:  Well, you know that everybody loved the round table.  We you in on that Paul?  I don't think that you were in yet, but we had Reynold Shwartz, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Gibson, and Rene Ritchie did a round table that everybody loved.

Mary Jo:  It was really good.  I watched it.

Leo:  Oh, did you see it?  And then the beer segment with Mary Jo doing some sort of tea bagging thing...

Mary Jo:  Wait a second, hold on.

Leo:  Unbelievable.  So it was a lot of fun.

Mary Jo:  I made an Oatmeal Cookie Stout on the air. 

Leo:  She was making Stout.

Mary Jo:  It is in the carboy fermenting right now, so.

Leo:  Can't wait, can't wait.  

Paul:  I do not get Dick out there, though.  He comes in from New York, why doesn't he come to the place?

Leo:  Who?

Paul:  Dick Debartello.

Leo:  No, he didn't fly out from New York.  He stayed in New York.

Paul:  No, that's what I mean.  Why didn't he come here?

Leo:  Because he was going to CES right after.

Paul:  Oh, I see.  Because he would have been a big part of it I think.  He still works.

Leo:  We only missed a few hosts, Gina Tripani couldn't make it, Dick Debartello couldn't make it, and Mary Jo couldn't make it.  Almost everybody came. 

Paul:  I tried to convince Mary Jo to come.  I hope that she comes next year.  

Mary Jo:  I will come next year.  I was just so tired of travelling.  

Leo:  It was not an obligation.

Mary Jo:  No, no.  My mom watched the show live for the first time.

Leo:  What did she think?

Mary Jo:  She said, she kind of knew who was who, which was fun, and then she said that the beer segment was very educational.  My mom doesn't drink beer, so she was like too dense.  She knows I like beer, but she didn't understand anything about craft beer.

Leo:  I'm still blown away by that Belgian that you brought.  That was amazing.

Mary Jo:  Yeah, Anthony and Tonya bought that.

Paul:  The triple?  The Belgian Triple?

Leo:  Yeah.

Paul:  That was a good one.

Leo:  Anyway, in the process of raising the money we had set some stretch goals for ourselves.  We thought that we would only make about $20,000, so that was our initial goal for the entire 24 hours.

Paul:  I was counting on that Leo.  I've got to be honest.  You know?  Truth be told, I was hoping that you wouldn't make it.

Leo:  So Jeff Jarvis said, "I will shave my beard of 42 years" he hasn't shaved since'72, 42 years.  He said "I you make that I will shave it."  We did, he did.  This is when I got carried away, Sarah Lane said that for $30,000 I will sing my least favorite song in the world, One Week by the Barenaked Ladies.  She did.  So this is where I got carried away.  I said that if we make $40,000 I will shave my head.  We did.  

Paul:  I didn't know of the Sarah Lane thing, I might have chosen a slightly different goal.  

Leo:  There were more options, I should have been more clear.  Shaving wasn't the only option.

Paul:  I think that someone looked at my head and said you gotta go with this one.

Leo:  I feel bad.  Well anyway, so then at $50,000 I got a tattoo on my behind.  

Paul:  Oh, I see.  Was it the TWiT Lisa tattoo that we were discussing?

Leo:  Yeah it is.

Paul:  Is there a photo somewhere on the internet of this?

Leo:  Uh huh.  On Facebook.  She was talked out of the Lisa by many of the people, including the tattoo artist, who said that your first tattoo should never have your girlfriend's name on it.  It is like being on cover...

Paul:  If I was awake when this happened I would have also insisted that Paul be added to the tattoo.  

Leo:  I should have had all of the hosts.  I would have done that.

Paul:  Just let us all sign it with the tattoo pen or whatever that is called.

Leo:  So it's only a little one.  I've never wanted one in my life, but I have one now.  Then Paul really was game, he said, well, for $60,000 I will shave my head.  We made $75,000.

Paul:  I jumped right into it.

Mary Jo:  I'm so glad.  Somebody in the chat room was saying that if we get $70,000 Mary Jo should shave her head.  I was like, yeah, I should.  But then I was like, no, I'm not going to agree to that.  Thank goodness since you hit $75,000.

Paul:  Everyone is going to think that I have cancer now.

Leo:  By the way, Lisa says we are never to do...

Mary Jo:  No, you can sneak into things.

Leo:  You can sneak into things?

Mary Jo:  You can sneak into things, like Microsoft things.

Leo:  They won't recognize you.  Get a big bushy ZZ Top beard and they will think that you are some crazy mountain man.

Paul:  I will wear a bandanna.

Leo:  I understand suddenly the dew rag.  I understand all of the fashions that people are wearing these days.  I suddenly get it; they are all wearing hats because they are freezing.  It really makes sense.  So anyway, thank you Paul.  At some point your children will arrive?

Paul:  Yep.

Leo:  I will tell you why I ended up shaving.  

Paul:  I heard they botched it terribly.

Leo:  That's what happened.  Lisa did it on the air at midnight, and it looked so horrific that I went to the barber shop and said can you fix it?  They said yeah, but we are going to have to take it all off.  I thought when am I ever going to do this again, so I had her, with a straight razor.  

Paul:  No next year Leo?

Leo:  No, Lisa has already said no.  Mary Jo can shave her head next year.

Mary Jo:  Yeah, I might.

Leo:  No Mary Jo.

Mary Jo:  Or maybe get a hop tattoo or something.

Paul:  There you go.

Leo:  Yeah, there you go.  Get your favorite hoppy beer.  Just "I heart IPA".

Mary Jo:  There we go.

Leo:  So anyway, thank you so much for participating.  Thank you Paul for giving your all.  Thank you Mary Jo for that great beer segment.

Paul:  Thank you for giving your all hair.

Leo:  We should all be very happy.  We raised a ton of money for UNICEF.

Paul:  I wish I could be happy Leo, but that's great for you guys.

Leo:  Your kids are happy.

Paul:  You are going to see how happy they are.  It's so messed up.

Leo:  Oh, they are gleeful.

Paul:  Yeah, it's really not how I want my children.

Leo:  Is that why you call this Sampson and Deliliah?  Wait a minute, whoa, I just saw the notes.

Paul:  Yeah, there is more Leo.

Leo:  OMG!  We have got a big story, a big, big story coming up from Paul Thurrott.  I am shocked.  I'm going to do an ad before we do that, because this is something that you are going to want to stay tuned for kids.  Don't fast forward, that would be wrong.  That would be like eating your desert before you eat your vegetables.  As long as the vegetables do not come from the Washoe House they are probably okay.

Paul:  I asked them if they are seasonal vegetables.  They didn't seem to know what that meant.

Mary Jo:  They didn't know what seasonal was?

Leo:  We had eaten there a couple of years ago and it was actually quite good.  I thought that it would stay that way, but apparently they got out of the business of feeding people.  The best part is, and every host came to me, you go in and the bar is on the first floor and where we were was on the second floor.  You go in, the bar is such an old bar and everybody knows everybody.  They look at you.

Paul:  It's worth pointing out, the bar there is fairly spectacular.  

Leo:  Absolutely.

Paul:  You aren't going to get any crazy good beers there or whatever, but it's a cool place.

Leo:  If you like Coors Light you are in the right place.

Paul:  In fact, when we walked in the door the woman looked at us, immediately recognized that we didn't belong there, and said, oh, are you here with the party?

Leo:  Everybody had that experience.

Paul:  I really wanted to stay.

Leo:  We went to the bar afterwards.  Here is Lisa reaching for some of that money on the ceiling.

Paul:  Which I don't think that is why that is there.

Leo:  You said, if this bar were in Boston...

Paul:  That would all be gone.

Leo:  He would say, here is your tip.

Paul:  The money would never last.

Leo:  It was so much fun.  I apologize for the horrific food, but...

Paul:  Seriously, don't worry about it.  That was nothing.

Leo:  The event itself was great.  But next time I'm going to do...

Paul:  So I told Mary Jo the story briefly, but honestly the neatest thing about it was that it is kind of weird who you are with.  I sat next to Mike Elgan, which is not very strange, Mike and his wife who was really nice.  

Leo:  I love Amera.

Paul:  But then I'm talking to Jeff Jarvis, who I never talk to, Denise Howell, Tonya, who I've never met in person.  It was nice.  It was a nice little not the way that you would have assumed that we would break down into groups.  It was nice.  

Leo:  I agree, and that was part of the real fun.  Just seeing everybody all together, what a neat thing that was.  So, a big announcement coming up.  I never started the show, so welcome to those of you who just wandered in.

Paul:  We have actually been doing it for 35 minutes.

Leo:  We have been doing it for 35 years it feels like.  Welcome to Windows Weekly.  That is Paul Thurrott.  She is Mary Jo Foley.  Mary rights at AllAboutMicrosoft.com.  Paul currently is at the Super Site for Windows, winsupersite.com.  First, before we continue on, I want to take you on a little trip to a place that we call ITProTV.  We love those guys at ITProTV.  Tim and Don have created this, quite blatantly said that they have stolen everything I ever did.  They have stolen it from me.  They decided to copy what we did at TechTV and TWiT and make it available for people who are interested in learning IT, or getting better at their jobs, or perfecting their business.  They stream live 30 hours a week, just like TWiT.  They have got a live chat room during the conversation, just like TWiT.  But the focus is on the certs; Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, the A+ certs.  In fact that is what they are teaching right now.  Oh look, they are showing the iFix It Pro tool kit.  That's so funny.  It's kind of a weird sponsor combination here.  They also do Security+, the ISC².  They are showing how to fix a Netbook.  A+ is kind of like the IT fix it guy stuff.  MCSA, CISSP, Linux+, covering topics like network security, Linux, Windows, OSX support for desktops, servers, and more.  IT does not have to be boring.  It's fun, the hosts are telling engaging stories, sharing experiences, increasing your retention, this is so much better than a book or a technical degree program.  Even if you are doing that this is a great way to learn at your own pace.  By the way, anywhere; laptop, tablet, phone, even a Roku channel, which is awesome.  They have got the virtual machine sandbox environment for hands on practice.  You don't have to have a Windows machine, any HTML 5 browser, even a Chromebook, you can launch an instance of Windows Server and a couple of clients.  Mess things up?  No problem, just start over.  Measure up practice exams are also included for free, a $79 value.  So for normally $57 a month or $570 a year you learn.  Take a look at the course library at itpro.tv/ww.  There is a guided tour, sample episodes, you see how well produced these are, how fun they are to watch, you can see all of the courses that they have got, and new courses coming all of the time.  If you sign up for a year you can download full episodes DRM free for offline consumption.  Corporate and group pricing is also available, clients include Hewlitt Packard, the University of California San Diego, Penn State, Stanford, many state schools and colleges, as well as groups that support our military.  Tim and Don are great guys.  Check out itpro.tv/ww and upgrade your brain with the most popular IT certifications required by employers.  Now you are also going to get a free 7 day trial when you sign up using our offer code.  That allows you to check out their courses, live stream, and more.  Tim and Don have said to me, we make it easy to cancel.  Don't worry, you are not going to feel stuck if it's not working out for you or, better yet, pass the exams, got the great job, and you are ready to go.  Now with the WW30 code you are going to get 30% off of your subscription not just for the first month, or week, but for the life of your membership.  That's less than $40 a month, $400 for the entire year.  Once you reach your 13th month they are going to reduce your subscription ever further, bringing your cost down to $24.95 a month or $245 for the entire year.  ITProTV rocks!  We love it, you will too.  Go to itpro.tv/ww, don't forget the offer code WW30 to try it free for 7 days and receive 30% off; itpro.tv, we thank them for their support all of last year and this year too.  They are here for the duration on Windows Weekly.

Paul Thurrott, you have got a big announcement.  Go right ahead.

Paul:  I bought a Lumia 930 today.

Leo:  Holy camole, I can't believe it!  What a shock.  What did you bring with you?

Paul:  I have slightly bigger news than that.  As people who listen to this podcast probably know, for the past 15 or 16 years I have been writing for the Super Site for Windows and working at Penton, which is the company that bought the company that bought the company that originally bought that website from me.  

Leo:  Wow, so you started it yourself and then sold it, and then somebody else bought it?

Paul:  Yeah, someone bought the company that bought me, yes.  I was bought and sold like a piece of produce.  It was kind of a difficult decision, but I recently decided to leave the company, which means that I won't be writing for the Super Site for Windows anymore.

Leo:  What?

Paul:  I left of my own volition.  I wasn't laid off, or fired, or anything like that.  The site has been very successful and obviously has done very well for me, but I am moving on.

Leo:  Paul, I want to congratulate you, because it's the best thing that I ever did to say that I'm going to own it.  You are going to be owning it, right?

Paul:  Co-own it I think is the way to put it.

Leo:  Paul Thurrott, it will be thurrott.com?

Paul:  Yes, it is at thurrott.com, or will be at thurrott.com.  I don't want to give out too many details just yet.  My last day at my current employer is Friday the 16th, and then the new site will go live probably that weekend or the following Monday.

Leo:  Far out.

Paul:  It will coincide nicely with the Windows 10 stuff that is happening that week.  There is a lot going on here, and I don't want to take up too much of the show with this.  I will just say that it's always hard starting over, but it's kind of nice to start fresh and when you look at it from a fresh perspective suddenly there is so much to write about because you literally are starting over from scratch.  Anyway, nothing bad to say about Penton.  I had a great run there, and worked with a bunch of wonderful people, and that was great and everything.  So yeah, moving on.

Leo:  And congratulations.  So t-h-u-r-r-o-t-t.com, of course you are going to give that.

Paul:  There was quite a debate about the name, because it's not a very-easy-to-spell name.  At least there are no z's and c's next to each other.

Leo:  It's two r's and two t's; once you get that it's easy.

Paul:  Sure, it's also my Twitter.

Leo:  You are not leaving us, are you?

Paul:  Oh yeah, so I'm also...no, no.

Leo:  Shave his head and then leave the studio.  Drop the clipper and then go, I'm out of here.  That's great, because can I make a pitch?  We will continue to promote thurrott.com.  This is where you are going to be able to take all of those people from the Super Site for Windows and move them over to thurrott.com.

Paul:   Yes, yes, yes.

Leo:  I'm thrilled because I think that everyone should do this at some point.  I know how scary it is.  I look at Jason Snell and others who go from big media properties.  

Paul:  A lot of people have been forced under circumstances to kind of move along, and I didn't want it to go down like that.  I didn't see anything coming, but I saw a lot of people that I cared having to make changes against their will with no warning and with no preparation.  I thought maybe I could pull the trigger on this one instead of it being the reverse.  Not that I thought that was actually happening.  It was hard.

Leo:  I'm sure that it was.  I'm sure it was, but I think this is the right thing for everyone.  I'm very proud of you.  Aren't you proud Mary Jo?

Mary Jo:  Yes I am.  I am.

Paul:  That's important to me.

Mary Jo:  It's brave.  When I left MicrosoftWatch I thought about starting my site on my own, but I chickened out and went to ZDNet.

Leo:  It's hard to turn down the regular paycheck, but these days there is not sure thing in media.  You might as well take the risk.

Paul:  I kind of went with the middle ground.  I'm partnering with a company and working for a company.

Leo:  Never mind then, forget it.  

Paul:  I'm not doing it to be brave.  I was not very clear about that.  I am not a hero.

Leo:  I won't say any more until you actually make the move.

Paul:  I was as risk adverse as anyone.

Leo:  Well, yeah, you've got a family.  You've got kids.  I think that this is the time to go out for the personal brand I think.  

Paul:  I love to promote myself, so that's great.

Leo:  You are terrible at it, but we will work on it.  We will help you, we will help you.

Paul:  Just one last thing about this.  I contacted my PR contact at Microsoft just to make sure this wouldn't be an issue.  I didn't describe in the email what it was, and she called kind of freaking out and she said what is going on?  I said, well, I kind of explained the situation.  She said, thank god, I thought you were going to become a lifestyle reporter or something.  I said no, I'm still going to write about Microsoft.  

Leo:  Good.  Although the lifestyle reporter thing, that's fun.

Paul:  I'm still not going to get over the shaving thing.

Leo:  I thought you were going to be part of SB Nation and talk about sports all the time.

Paul:  We can do that too.

Leo:  You would love it.

Paul:   I would just make fun of the Jets.  That would be my primary function.

Leo:  Alright, so there is the big news.  Congratulations, all the best.  Paul will show up here every week, I pray, I count on that.  Thurrott.com, keep your eye peeled.  What's great is that you already have the giant coffee mug.  

Paul:  Yes, yes.

Leo:  It's grand, keep up with the good work.

Paul:  The shaving thing is good timing because I have to take pictures of myself for the new site.  This is good.

Leo:  Did you see my passport photo?  

Paul:  Yeah, I did.  That's actually one thing that I'm worried about.  Did you do that specifically because it needed to be renewed?

Leo:  No.  I needed it to be renewed because we are travelling in the summer and it's one of those things where it will expire before I come back.  So I had to get a new one.  I could have waited until it grew a little bit, but it's not going to be, you are allowed to update your passport with a new picture.

Paul:  You should get one of those little decal things that looks like a head of hair and just kind of stick it on there.

Leo:  I'm wondering what kind of reaction that I'm going to get at the border.

Paul:  You just do one of those, see, same person.

Leo:  My hair grows pretty far back, so I can make it pretty credible.  Anyway, so wow, you are going to do that a little later on.  Stick around folks.  The kids will shave Paul.  Boy is that great.

Paul:  I'm just worried.

Leo:  If it doesn't work out though, I'm telling you the straight edge razor from the barber, and they put towels on your head, and it's so nice.  I actually enjoyed it.

Paul:  I'm going to have to like turn the light off in the bathroom for the next month.

Leo:  Oh, I scare myself every time I come around a corner.  They say that I look like the hitman.

Paul:  You do look like the hitman, that is true.

Leo:  You guys didn't go to CES.  Well, Microsoft doesn't go to CES, so there is no point.

Paul:  We have experience Leo.  We know that CES is a mess.  Mary Jo hates consumers as you know.

Mary Jo:  No, I hate Las Vegas even more than I hate Call of Duty.

Paul:  Yikes.

Leo:  Wow.  

Paul:  That tipped the scale.

Mary Jo:  You know, Microsoft is there.  They have a suite there and they have private meetings probably with OEM's there and all of that.  They don't make announcements at CES anymore, they don't do the keynote there, so it's kind of like why go?

Paul:  Actually my excuse for not going is that a lot of stuff that they announce doesn't come out until much later in the year.  Actually, a bunch of stuff that is being announced is coming out this month, so whatever.  All of the important stuff, I will review all of these products, but it's just not a big deal.  I just don't like the crowds and the messiness of it.  I just can't deal with Vegas during CES.

Leo:  Yeah, I don't blame you.  Well, let's see.  Time for Mobile First, Cloud First, Windows Best.  I see that headline but I don't know what that means.  Paul?

Paul:  Yeah, so 2014 was the year of Mobile First, Cloud First for Microsoft.  One of the things that Mary Jo and I both weathered during this entire period was complaining from Microsoft enthusiasts that Microsoft was pushing other mobile platforms over their own.  They improved and released Office on iPad, on iPhone, and then on Android tablets to the detriment of Windows.  They never really improved Office on Windows.  In fact, the desktop client was never improved in any meaningful way for the entire year.  Of course Windows Phone and Windows 8 whatever has never been updated ever as it turns out.  So okay, I get it, it's not just Office, it's a lot of mobile apps and things like that.  I understand that Microsoft had to catch up on Android and IOS.  I completely understand that.  I sort of defended that practice during the course of the year, and I assume that Mary Jo did also just to be pragmatic about it.  It's logical and understandable about why they were doing those things.  Not to put words in Mary Jo's mouth or anything.  But it's 2015 now, and enough already.  Let's assume that all of these platforms are roughly comparable.  Obviously they will have slightly different features because of platform features that they can expose in the apps.  Maybe this feature over here is a little better than this feature over here, but I would ask that Microsoft stop screwing over their most loyal customers and start providing updates to their own platforms as well day in date with the ones that they are doing on the mobile platforms.  It doesn't make sense for them to continue doing what they've been doing.  It made sense for them to get caught up, but now it's 2015; let's get everyone caught up this year.  Stop screwing over people who have stuck with Windows, Windows Phone in particular, by over supporting these new things on other platforms.  So that's my manifesto or whatever you want to call it for 2015.

Leo:  Do you agree Mary Jo?

Mary Jo:  Do you guys remember, it was on Windows Weekly like 2 months ago and I was kind of being the Eeyore about it.   Why would anybody use Windows right now?  I was kind of at the point where Paul is now then.  I was saying why, if they are doing everything first and best on Android and IOS, which is what it feels like right now, why would you even use Windows.  What has happened to them is that they had a lot of catching up to do on those platforms and this is the big year, we believe, for Windows, and Windows Phone, and Office.  It was that gap between when they were doing all of that stuff on the other platforms and now that has gotten a lot of people really riled.  I have seen a lot of people who were Windows early adopters dumping the platform, and not just people who were journalists, but people who were really loyal users, some developers even saying I don't know why I use Windows Phone, they don't care.  I think that Microsoft really does care, and I think that we are going to hear a lot about what they are doing on January 21st at this big Windows event.  This waiting period, this lull between fall of last year and now has really been hard if you are a Windows user.  We are just like kind of the last in the order.  

Paul:  One of things that I think happened last week was that Joe Belfiore took to one of the most logical places that you can publish such a thing, a Chinese microblogging service, and talked about how don't worry, we haven't forgotten Windows Phone.  I love Joe and I'm sure that there was some reason that that had to happen there, but it's like seriously, guys, you need to speak to these people who are freaking out.  Microsoft has never done a good job of communicating.  That's why Mary Jo and I still have jobs.  Seriously, it's like so dysfunctional.

Leo:  So you don't think that it's over for Windows Phone?  We are seeing now shrinking market numbers.

Paul:  I'm not sure that that is actually the case.  Those numbers that you are probably looking at aren't necessarily from a source that you would trust.  I would think of it as more, it's not a percentage as much, we are still number 3.  There is not chance really of Blackberry bouncing back, there is no other platform coming up on the side.  They are melding Windows and Windows Phone together into a single cohesive platform.  I think that is going to be very important.  It will give developers a single target for apps that will work for PC's, tablets, hybrids, and phones, and even the XBox One over time, embedded devices and all of that kind of stuff.  I think that is great.  I don't mean to suggest that it's going to cause an explosion in phone sales this year, but I think that is important.  For now at least Windows, which we have to consider this thing, is too important for Microsoft to walk away from this market.  I still, for whatever it is worth, I did buy a new Windows Phone this week.  You know that I have access to every modern phone device imaginable here.  I could use anything that I want.  I use, and I choose, and I spend my money on Windows Phone.  I prefer it and I think that there are a lot of people like that.  Microsoft needs to give us a sign; something, hello.  Come January 21st, or whenever that Windows 10 event is, maybe that is the day.  Mobile World Conference is coming up, I think that is March this year instead of February, but whenever that happens soon as well.  There are things coming up, but I think that they have let too much time go by where they are kind of silent.  Even at events like back in late August when I found out about the Lumia 735, and the 830, and some of the accessories; those are kind of low to mid end devices.  I asked specifically about flagships and that sort of thing, but they are just not interested in talking about that.  I just don't think that they understand the impact that has on enthusiasts who are not interested in some low end phone that is aimed at China, or Malaysia, or whatever, some country that they don't really live in or care about.  They want a flagship phone.  They want something that they can show off to their friends.  They want to be ambassadors to the program.  Microsoft is making that really hard.

Mary Jo:  I think the thing that I am really going to be listening for, especially on the 21st, is that we expect we are going to see the operating system, the Windows Mobile operating system that runs on the low end tablets and on the phones.  We think, we think we are going to get the code very soon after that even.  But the thing that I am most interested in, because we keep hearing them tease this, they keep saying that what you are going to get as a Windows user is that stuff is going to be better integrated on our platform than it is on these competing platforms.  But we don't really know what that means.  We think that it means that Cortana gets embedded in a way that you can speak commands to the browser.  You can't do that on IOS or Android.  They really need to show you why Windows has an advantage over the other mobile platforms, because if it's just comparable then there really isn't a reason to go with it.  If it's better then there is a reason to go with it.  

Paul:  There are plenty of reasons not to go with it because the apps are all on IOS and Android.

Mary Jo:  Yep, right.

Paul:  That's never going to change.  That's something that they have to deal with.

Mary Jo:  They've got a mission this year for their developer evangelist team to really go out and recruit developers from the very early stages, from students at a fairly young age, all the way up to the biggest developers.  They are going to try to go out and do that.  

Paul:  You may recall, you may have to go back to get this date exact, but I think that it was three years ago this week roughly that Apollo documents leaked, which became Windows Phone 8, and part of that stuff was that the initiative that they were going to have that year to close the app gap that all of the major apps that were missing would either happen because Microsoft convinced them to make them themselves or commission third party companies to create alternatives.  Instagram was one of the ones that was explicitly called out.  We didn't get Instagram in beta until this past year.  I think they mean well.  I think that they always have a plan, they are smart people, etc., but it really hasn't closed.  I'm not blaming anybody, but yeah, I just hope for some changes here on the phone front I guess.

Leo:  I guess the 21st means that they are going full speed ahead.

Mary Jo:  I hear people say that they are giving up, but they are not.

Leo:  They are not.  

Mary Jo:  They are building another operating system.

Leo:  Are they giving up on the high end?

Paul:  That's the prognosis.  I have to say, you kind of find yourself defending them on logic.  I understand why Microsoft supported Android and IOS this year.  I get it, logically I can say that I understand that.  Microsoft turned the low end of the mark with Windows Phone.  I completely understand that, that's where the growth is, that's not just where the next 1 billion users come from, that's where the next 5 billion users comes from.  You could make a very credible argument that anyone who is alive today who can afford to buy a high end flagship smartphone has, and it's not Windows Phone.  They are getting the iPhone 6, they are buying the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, or whatever.  That's what they are buying.  Windows Phone is not part of the equation.  I completely understand this, I get it.  But again, sort of like the Mobile First, Cloud First, Windows First thing, you can't keep ignoring your most important customers, which are your biggest fans, the people who evangelize your platform.  You are giving them nothing to evangelize with.  I've been using a Lumia 735 for the past few months.  I actually just switched back to the 830 to give that one another chance.  These are low to mid-level kind of phones.  They are not Snapdragon 800+ processors, they do not have 2 GB of RAM, they don't have whatever, okay cameras, not spectacular cameras.  So it's tough, I tell people that I'm a Windows Phone guy, then I pull out the phone and people are like look at that cute green phone.  Did you borrow that from your daughter?

Leo:  So if you were Microsoft you would probably do exactly what you just described?  There is no...

Paul:  You have to do both.  You can't ignore it.  I feel like 2014, it's weird, Mobile First, Cloud First, Windows Best Phone; same thing.  They spent a year ignoring stuff that now they can afford to ignore no more.  They can't just ignore it.  Even if they release a 1020 or 1520 successor and it's a loss leader I feel like that is the investment that you have to make with this platform.  You can't ignore the high end of the market.  

Leo:  One thing that we like to do on these shows at the beginning of the year is look back at the year 2014.  We are looking a little bit ahead.  We've got some stuff coming up; Windows 10 on January 21st.  What a crazy year it was last year.  The CEO search, the new CEO, just a crazy year.  Can you kind of synopsize in 5 words 2014 for Microsoft?  What do you guys think?

Mary Jo:  Man, I think it was a year, we've said this on the show a few times too, where everything that you thought was going to happen, almost the exact opposite ended up happening.  

Leo:  Right.

Mary Jo:  Like Office for iPad coming out first, and then Office for Android, and no Office for Windows.  Nobody was really thinking that was going to happen, and then we started getting tips that that was going to happen, and people were like, no, that's not going to happen.  But it did, right?  Everything was kind of turned on its head.  They bought Nokia's handset division, then they laid off most of the organization.  They laid off half of the people that they acquired through that.  Nobody really thought that was going to happen.  It was just one thing after another like that.  Windows 10 even, I would say that a lot of people didn't think that Microsoft would go back and try to fix the things that were wrong with Windows 8 and make it more appealing to desktop users, but that is what they are doing.  I'm happy about 2014 even though it was a year of very much crazy changes and hard to predict.  I feel like they are getting back on a path and being more realistic about what their strengths and weaknesses are.  This year is the year that they have to execute on a lot of the things that they have promised, especially, like we just said, for Windows users.  Windows 10 has to be a really great operating system.  It has to be a great success.  Office has to be even better, especially the touch first Office, then Office on iPad and Office on Android, which are both seen as very good products.  They have some pretty big challenges this year.  Last year, I'm happy about 2014.  I think that it was very tumultuous, especially if you worked for Microsoft, but I think that they did some things that they really had to do that were very much overdue.  

Leo:  Agree?

Paul:  Yeah, everything that she said was right.  I agree with all of it.

Leo:  In hindsight it was oh, that all made sense.

Mary Jo:  Yeah, it was.  

Leo:  We wouldn't have thought so, but in hindsight even the strategy...

Paul:  Well, you know, Satya Nadella came on board and I think that he is still in a honeymoon period.  This has certainly been acknowledged in various quarters, that a lot of what he is doing was started by Steve Ballmer.  I think people are a little overly euphoric about this guy, that it's not all about him.  Like she said, basically to try to change the words around a little bit, you almost have to put action to words now.  2015 need to be more about making it happen.  In 2014 obviously Office for iPad, Windows 10 started and everything, but Windows 10 needs to be everything that it's supposed to be.  I think that we all have to acknowledge that it doesn't matter how great Windows 10 is, but Windows 10 comes into a world where IOS and Android dominate.  They are not going to take back 50% of the market.  It's not that world anymore.  It's almost about just retaining customers at this point.  You don't want to lose anybody.  I think they will succeed in that sense.  I think Windows 10 will be a great upgrade for Windows 7 users and it will be a great upgrade for Windows 8 users who have touch devices.  I think it's going to be kind of a win win there.

Leo:  Good.

Mary Jo:  The thing that I'm also most curious about this year is what happens with hardware at Microsoft.  We haven't heard anything about a new flagship Windows Phone, or almost any Windows Phones.  We think that they are going to continue to roll out some low to mid-range phones.  We don't know anything, for example, about Surface.  We think that there is going to be a Surface Pro 4 sometime this year, but I wonder if they have to wait for Windows 10 for that so that it's a more complete package and takes advantage of new processors and the operating system.  If it does, is Surface Pro 3 going to be able to continue to give them momentum on the hardware front?  The piece of hardware that I'm expecting that we are going to hear about this year, which isn't on a lot of radar screens, is the Perceptive Pixel big screen devices that they acquired from Perceptive Pixel a couple of years ago.  Late last year Steven Elop was quoted saying that we are ramping up production of Perceptive Pixel.  We haven't hear anything more about that since, but did that mean that they are going to have some smaller sized touch screen devices?  Still big screen, but not 54 inch or 72 inch, something smaller and more affordable.  That's kind of my guess where that might go.  Is that also tied to Windows 10 and is that also tied to Office 16 and the touch first Office?  That's going to be for me the piece of hardware that I think will be the sleeper hit if they come out with something like that.  

Leo:  I wonder how much Satya Nadella is committed to hardware. 

Mary Jo:  Me too, yeah.

Leo:  All of the hardware was Ballmer's doing.  He inherited it.

Mary Jo:  I wonder that too.

Leo:  His strategy so much feels like software and Cloud.  

Paul:  The problem is that by buying Nokia they have painted themselves in a box.  If they hadn't have bought Nokia you could have made a wonderful argument that Microsoft doesn't need to make first party hardware.  You could just look at the CES announcement to see the wonderful devices that are coming out.  Wonderful devices.  By the way, devices that reach every possible price point, from $99 tablets to gaming laptops that cost $2,400.  The whole range, it's all there.  They don't need to be there.  The problem is that if you do that on the phone side then you just took away 95% of the market.  They can't not make hardware unless they are just going to walk away from Windows Phone entirely, which would be a what, 7.2 billion dollar disaster, whatever it was that they bought Nokia for?  

Mary Jo:  They bought them for the patents too, right?  

Paul:  Sure.

Leo:  So there is not a complete write off really if you close the Windows Phone board?

Paul:  Well that's like saying only the garage burned down to the ground.  I don't know.

Mary Jo:  Even Xbox, I know they keep saying that they are committed to the Xbox and to that market, but you know that the fact that they unbundled the Kinect from it and they dropped the price...

Leo:  Well they had to do all of that.

Mary Jo:  They did.  They are kind of going back and they are saying that it's a gaming platform and it's not an entertainment platform.  My question is do they keep going that way and just make it a gaming platform that stays straight ahead?

Paul:  It's like a flip flopping politician.  It is whatever you want it to be, just please buy one.

Mary Jo:  It kind of is.  I know they keep saying that we are committed to it, but it feels halfhearted to me.  I don't know why, but it does.  I don't feel like they have been definitive enough in saying that we are sticking by the Xbox no matter what, and that is that.  I want to hear that more definitively.  

Leo:  Interesting.  

Mary Jo:  Or not since I don't care about the Xbox.  

Leo:  But with hardware in general.  Will they ever do any more RT devices?  No, this 21st announcement is going to merge those things.

Paul:  RT is another open question.  You could argue that Windows Phone will continue running on ARM and that is technically the future version.  

Leo:  But that's RT right there, that's it.

Mary Jo:  But it will probably be called Windows Mobile, or something that is not Windows RT.  It will have a new name.

Leo:  Has Surface been a success?

Paul:  Define success Leo.  

Leo:  Well that's because Microsoft doesn't tell us how it sells, right?

Paul:  Yeah.  I would say that obviously Surface Pro 3 has been very successful, especially under the confines of the Surface line of products.  The sad truth is that Microsoft doesn't need to make these products as good as they are.  With Surface Pro 3 they hit a very nice sweet spot with the form factor and functionality, the power and that kind of stuff.  But again, this week kind of proves it, just look at everything that is out there on the market.  Surface Pro 3, or Surface as I should say, if you think about it, was a reaction by Microsoft because for years and years they couldn't get what they wanted out of OEMs.  They said, you know what, we are just going to make it ourselves.  These things will be aspirational, they will get inspired, and they will make good devices of their own.  Now you can kind of look at the market and you can say, you know, we really don't need Surface anymore.  They are not necessarily necessary.  

Mary Jo:  I was just thinking about this this week too.  It felt like when they came out with Surface they had to because everything else was so bad.

Paul:  Yeah, it was terrible.

Mary Jo:  But now once they dropped the price of Windows to zero on the small devices suddenly you saw all of this kind of new creativity and these new form factors from OEMs that were like wow, where have all of these designed come from?

Paul:  Nice, like nice, inexpensive devices like the HP Stream, tablets and laptops, and all kinds of other devices.  I would say that across the line, $200, $300, $1,000+, this year right now in particular that there are wonderful choices in every segment of the market.  That was not the case when Windows 8 launched.  That was Surface.  I think that the first indication internally that Windows 8 wasn't going to take off when all of their OEM partners were like, I'm not going to do that, that's crazy.  They all basically rejected it.  That first year and a half, or year plus, there were not a lot of touch devices on the market.  That was one of the big issues.  We kept saying oh, you don't understand, Windows 8 comes alive when you have a touch device.  No one did understand because no one was making them or buying them.

Leo:  What a world, what a world.  It's fun because it's like a chess game.  What happened was that you had one guy playing the game right up until January of last year, then you had another guy come in and all of the strategies and all of the moves are now in question.  Is the other guy committed to this strategy?  I don't know.  He seems to be zigging when the other guy would have zagged.

Paul:  Imagine Leo if Steve Ballmer would have stayed at Microsoft and they did exactly the same thing that they have done this year.  The reaction would have been a lot more negative than it has been, and it has still been negative in many ways.  Hold on a sec.  She's very excited, he's very excited. 

Leo:  Uh oh, the children are here ladies and gentlemen.

Paul:  They are gesticulating out there.

Leo:  They are gesticulating.  Do you want them to try?  Get prepared, we will take a break, and you prepare emotionally, physically, and we will...

Paul:  I can't kiss my own hair goodbye.

Leo:  It's the worst.  I'm telling you Paul, if there was any way that you would weasel out of this I would do it.

Mary Jo:  Maybe just half of his head.

Paul:  Awe geez, really?

Leo:  No, I tried to weasel out of it and the chat room just held me to the flame, they held my feet to the fire.

Paul:  Good.  You did milk it for a while there.  I didn't think that it was going to happen.

Leo:  I was resisting was what I was doing, but I failed.  You see the result here on my noggin right now.  While Paul gets ready, while the children come in with all of the stuff, let's talk a little bit about a sponsor that we love, that we have kind of discovered here at the brick house, HipChat.  HipChat came to us from our web design team.  They use it in Lasa and Jera because they are an agile house and Jera is amazing.  They said, okay guys, we will download your HipChat now because that is how we communicate with the team.  It's more than just communication, HipChat is of course messaging, but it is also Video Chat, file code, and screen sharing, it's kind of everything that you want.  It ties in to 57 other services.  It's like, okay, is my website down, all of that stuff.  It's very easy to use on every platform.  We have become such fans of HipChat.  We started using it with Four Kitchens, now engineering team, sales team, everybody is on HipChat.  Plus it integrates will all of the big developer tools, not only Jera, but GitHub and ZenDesk.  HipChat is awesome, you can start chatting on the web, you can download clients for virtually every operating system.  I use it on Mac and PC, but they have a Linux client as well.  HipChat is everything.  You know, email isn't really the perfect solution for a lot of team communications.  HipChat is great.  I keep it on my phone of course, so when people have questions and need a solution it's there.  It's also secure so that you can bring clients, vendors, and other third parties into a HipChat room and they see just the room, only what you want them to see.  You have complete control.  All of the transactions are 250 SSL so if Sony had been using HipChat instead of email maybe they wouldn't be so embarrassed right now.  It's completely customizable.  I love this, you can go back in time.  One of the things that you use email for is this paper trail; HipChat has got that too.  HipChat is easy to set up, it's fun to use, it makes your team wildly productive, and it is what we use everywhere.  We are not alone, there are a lot of people.  I have to admit, I paste the occasional silly picture and thing into HipChat as well.  Expedia uses it, Dropcam uses it, Netflix uses it, INtuit, Fitbit, Sales Force, and yes, the entire TWiT Brickhouse.  Get your team on the same page in seconds.  We are going to let you try, you know you can use the free HipChat, but we are going to let you use HipChat Plus with everything for free, you don't even need a credit card, for 30 days.  Visit HipChat.com/windowsweekly, HipChat.com/windowsweekly, click on the "Start Chatting" to sign up, and invite a few team members, and you will have access to everything, the entire HipChat Plus for free for 30 days.  If you wish after the trial is over you can just downgrade to the free version and you can continue to use that.  But it's so cool, I really want you to try it.  It really is a better solution.  HipChat.com/windowsweekly, yes they have a client for every platform including all of the mobile platforms.  For the first 100 sign ups HipChat is going to extend the 30 day free trial to 90 days.  HipChat, your team, your project in sync instantly.  I could say this from my own experience, we love HipChat and you will too.  Free for 30 days, no credit card needed, HipChat.com/windowsweekly.

Paul Thurrott, there is something on your face.  

Mary Jo:  He said he got disconnected somehow.  I think you guys have got to call him back.

Leo:  The timing is terrible.  You think Joe Belfiore would ever shave his head?  

Mary Jo:  Oh goodness no.  Do you?

Leo:  He's too attached to that weave.  

Mary Jo:  He got a haircut recently but he is still a little...

Leo:  He's still a little mop head?  Mop top?

Mary Jo:  Yeah, a little.

Leo:  You know, it's an interesting experience.  I can't say that it's horrible.

Paul:  I don't want to look like that guy.  

Leo:  Who is in there with you?  Oh, your daughter and your son.  Who is going to wield the clippers?

Paul:  Wait, put this on.  Somebody has to hold this.

Leo:  Oh my god, I'm so glad that this is happened to somebody who is not me for a change.  

Paul:  Okay what?

Leo:  Wait, Stephanie is there too?

Paul:  You need adult supervision Leo.

Leo:  No you don't.  I had Lisa do mine.  Oh wait, she's a grown up.

Paul:  No one has any idea what they are doing Leo.

Leo:  Can I thank you Paul?  Paul Thurrott is shaving his head right now because we raised so much money for UNICEF.  He pledged that if we get to $60,000 he would shave his head like I did for $50,000.  I was cheap.  I sold out.  Actually, I was $40,000.  

Paul:  You know, people are going to listen to this on audio and describe this as the worst episode of Windows Weekly ever.

Leo:  No, their imagination is in full force right now.  Then what we are going to do, editors, we are going to stop the recording and take just the haircut and put that up on our TWiT specials feed.  I think that everybody...hey what about a Mohawk?  

Paul:  Yeah, Mark is planning on Mohawk.  

Leo:  Your daughter is nodding maniacally.  We are loving this.  It's not doing anything...

Paul:  What's going on here?

Leo:  Mine was much faster.

Paul:  Someone go sign for that thing.

Leo:  The doorbell is ringing.  What does she have that set on?  Is that a 1 there?

Paul:  What is this?  It's a 1.

Leo:  1, okay.

Paul:  I want to use a bigger one at first and work your way down there since you are kind of tearing.

Leo:  Oh, does it hurt a little?

Paul:  Yes.  Use a bigger number.

Leo:  You have got to go with the cutting part.  There is a bar, you have got to get the cutting bar in there.  

Paul:  This thing?

Leo:  Come here Lisa, explain this to them.  Lisa has done this, so she knows.  

Paul:  Lisa is now an expert.

Leo:  Lisa is an expert.

Lisa:  There is a cutting bar that needs to be forward on the clippers.

Paul:  Okay.  This little bar here that is on the side?

Leo:  That little bar on the side?  That needs to be forward.

Paul:  You've never done this before.

Leo:  Where did you get the clipper?

Paul:  From a friend. 

Leo:  Is it their dog clipper?  Mary Jo is just loving this.  Everybody is loving it.

Paul:  Is this correct?

Leo:  Is that correct guys?  Does that look right?  Does that look right Burke?  It does?  It's now armed.  You've taken the safety off.  How can you tell?  It moves the lower cutting bar up to the clippers.  

Paul:  I knew this wasn't going to go well.

Leo:  Is it coming off now?

Paul:  I don't know.  Is it coming off?

Leo:  Yeah.  The chat room is going crazy.

Paul:  Let's get this rolling.

Leo:  "There we go."  "Now we are clipping."  "Mary is next."  "Mary is next."  "Paul. don't do it."  "Those clippers work about as well as the Ballmer's Clippers."  Is there a safe word?

Paul: Maybe we should conclude this after the show?

Leo: No, we want to see it! We’ll edit it out of the show and put it as a special download.

Mary Jo: All to its own.

Leo: The show will do a little…

Paul: Why don’t you start from the bottom?

Leo: Let’s high-speed it. Editors, we will high-speed this for the show but make a special at the normal speed. The bar is backwards, is that right? No. Carve the Windows logo on the back of his head. Can you do that, Stephanie?

Paul: Is this working? It’s not working. Try that way.

Leo: Oh, I love that sound.

Mary Jo: Is there a plastic guard on the clipper?

Leo: Is the guard off the clipper?

Paul: Okay, supposedly it’s fixed.

Leo: She’s doing it right now. Upside down is the way to do it, right? That’s how Lisa did it. Oh look at it, there it goes.

Paul: Is my hair coming off?

Leo: Oh the humanity.

Paul: Try this side. Over here.

Leo: Yea, it did a little bit. Not a lot though. I don’t know. We’ll send you money for a barber if you want.

Paul: You’re like, tearing my hair up.

Leo: Hair was flying when you did it on me, right? Paul’s about as gray as I am, too, which is great. I think those are dog clippers.

Paul: How about if an adult does this for a few minutes?

Leo: You want the bar close to the cutting head.

Paul: I’m going to have to go to the barber with a disaster of a haircut.

Leo: Well that’s an idea. There are holes in my hair! She’s like I think we’re going to have to take it all the way down. You need grease! Grease the razor! This is really great. I am really enjoying this. I’m going to get some munch.

Paul: Why don’t you get some scissors to get us started?

Leo: Paul, you have hair of steel.

Paul: I have too much hair. Wow.

Leo: When the hair pops up after the trimmer has passed, that means something’s wrong. It’s not cutting. I don’t think it’s cutting. I think it really would cut better. Oh maybe that’s it. Maybe they’re already short. There’s no point in going shorter.

Paul: Yes.

[Distant Voice]: That worked better. Can we just leave it that way?

Leo: Take the guard off. Take the guard off, all the way off.

[Distant Voice]: It’s fine. We’re going to just do this because this is going to take forever. That hair is too short to start with. That’s the problem.

Leo: Mary Jo, are you making beer right now?

Mary Jo: Should be.

[Distant Voice]: I think we’re going to get 11 here as short as this is.

Paul: I got you.

[Distant Voice]: That’s why it’s not cutting much. We’re going to have to go down to number one.

Paul: This is not great.

Leo: Kids are loving it.

Mary Jo: They are.

[Distant Voice]: Kelly, we have to do it. Oh you don’t like that part.

Leo: Take the guard off. The guard is what’s getting in the way.

Paul: The guard off?

Leo: Yes, everyone in the chat room says no guard.

[Distant Voice]: Alright, where’s the number one?

Paul: Well you can do it on the side if you want.

Leo: There you go. Now just cut. But be careful.

Paul: Don’t listen to Leo.

Leo: Slowly. That will work. Oh yea! There it goes! Now we’re doing it.

[Distant Voice]: Is that too short?

Paul: No. Hey!

Mary Jo: The tweets are pretty good.

Leo: Mary Jo, read us a tweet as it goes?

Paul: No, not near that.

[Distant Voice]: Wait how do I do it on the side?

Mary Jo: Mike Bass says don’t forget, leave 1% of the hair so we can say update one will fix it later.

Paul: Nice. It’s fine. This is actually working?

[Distant Voice]: Yea.

Paul: It’s taking a long time. My barber would have done this in about five minutes.

Leo: Is there hair on the floor?

[Distant Voice]: No, it’s all on Kelly.

Mary Jo: It looks nice so far. Maybe you could die it when it comes back, too.

Paul: Yea, I was thinking about going blonde.

Mary Jo: Hot pink?

Leo: Mine actually as it’s growing back has completely turned, seems to be white.

Paul: I’ll talk to Chad.

Mary Jo: Oh yea, Chad. You could do it like Chad.

[Distant Voice]: We don’t have a razor. We just have this thing.

Mary Jo: People who are asking how this got started, this is all about TWiT’s New Year’s Eve special where Paul pledged to have his head shaved if they reached $60,000 in pledges for UNICEF. And they made it to $75,000. So he is graciously making good on his promise.

Paul: Foolishly.

Mary Jo: Foolishly but graciously.

Leo: Yea, very graciously.

Paul: Just the sides.

Mary Jo: You could do the Windows flag colors too. Little Windows red, green, blue thing. That’d be cool.

Leo: New hair. New site. It’s a wonderful thing.

Mary Jo: Some people are advising you to go against the grain of the hair.

[Distant Voice]: Who’s the teacher?

Paul: Yea, who’s saying that?

Mary Jo: Here’s a good suggestion from Stan on Twitter: dye your hair denim in honor of the denim upbeat. Nice.

Paul: I won’t be getting the Zune logo, I’ll tell you that.

Mary Jo: I know, I said maybe you could get a tattoo too, on the air. I said how about a brown Zune.

Leo: Yea!

Mary Jo: Remember we had the Zune guy on Windows Weekly in the studio that time.

Leo: Oh God!

Mary Jo: He was good.

Leo: He was a good sport. Yea, Zach.

Mary Jo: He was really good.

[Distant Voice]: You want to do the back or worry about the back later?

Paul: Let’s worry about the back later. This is already taking too long. I don’t know, we’ll just put one of these things on. Okay, Kelly, we’ll let the adults handle this. I don’t know what that is.

[Distant Voice]: I need the one, where’s the one?

Mary Jo: It’s still pretty long.

Paul: How’s it look in the back?

Leo: He’s starting to look mange.

[Distant Voice]: Yea, mange is good.

Paul: I think this is a good look. I could just leave it like this.

Leo: Is something, the clippers are not doing their job. That’s the general consensus. But we will figure it out. It takes some technique. You may want to go frankly to a barber for the rest.

Paul: It’s pretty clear to me.

[Distant Voice]: I don’t know if it’s like this.

Paul: I think it’s supposed to be like that.

Leo: Chat room agrees you should be bald by now.

Paul: Yea, I think we can all agree.

Mary Jo: Twitter is getting into this now. Some are advising Paul to wax it.

Leo: Paul, you’re a trending topic.

Mary Jo: Woohoo! He is a trending topic. Yikes.

Paul: Yea. Kelly, there’s not going to be any waxing. Don’t believe anything you hear on Twitter.

Mary Jo: No, don’t.

Paul: I hope you’re all happy.

Mary Jo: We’re all ecstatic.

Leo: At least you’re not cut. I don’t think I could take blood at this point.

Mary Jo: That would be horrible.

Paul: Blood’s coming.

Leo: There will be blood. It’s actually looking really great right now. I think I’m really peeved. I miffed.

Mary Jo: You miffed?

Paul: Well my kids are ecstatic.

Leo: I’m bald and he looks good.

Mary Jo: I think yours looks good, Leo. I do.

Leo: Oh thank you, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: I really do.

Leo: Lisa won’t even touch it.

Paul: Does she make you wear a wig?

Leo: I wear a night cap. Because it’s cold.

Paul: Could be like a long Sherman after this.

Mary Jo: You’re going to have to have a whole bunch of hats.

Leo: I understand now why people wear hats. I get it.

Mary Jo: You know those hats with dread locks in them. Paul needs one of those.

Leo: I don’t have my Rasta hat. I should have sent you off on New Year’s Day with hats.

Mary Jo: He could have gotten a fez at least, right?

Paul: It looks like my hair is falling out.

Leo: We got the undercoat, that’s why. You have super powers! You have hair of steel, says the chat room.

Paul: There’s no reason to photograph this.

Leo: His son’s tweeting it already.

Mary Jo: He’s not crying.

Paul: This is not a great look.

Mary Jo: You need a beer at the end of this.

Leo: I want to give Paul a really nice triple right now.

Paul: Yea, triple would be great.

Leo: Those are so great, those Belgian triples.

Mary Jo: Maybe he needs a bourbon barrel-aged after this. Something strong.

Paul: I could probably mix that into my hair.

Mary Jo: You could.

Leo: You look so bad now, Paul.

Paul: I thought the cat hair in my office was bad.

Mary Jo: This is going to be bad.

Leo: It’s working now. Oh lord!

Mary Jo: You’re going to need a Roomba.

Leo: Oh lord! Yea, I think you worked your way through the undercoat.

Paul: Don’t put that there.

Leo: It doesn’t go well with mice.

[Distant Voice]: Just get it all in the front so we can see him bald.

Leo: So-Cal guy says we can call this show Clippie’s Revenge.

Paul: Nice.

Mary Jo: Man, Twitter is posting up an industrial-grade sander and suggesting that might help.

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: Ouch.

Paul: It is kind of a rat’s nest up there. Or it was.

[Distant Voice]: Do you still want the scissors? I’m not asking you.

Paul: Not if it’s not necessary.

[Distant Voice]: I think now that we go the thick parts out, we can… well you can work on that side and I can work on this side.

Leo: You look homeless. It’s terrible!

[Distant Voice]: You got a nice bald spot up here.

Leo: You’re definitely going to the barber, Paul. You are.

Mary Jo: Windows 10 logo right on that bald spot.

Leo: You know they can sheer a sheep in 30 seconds.

Paul: Thank you.

[Distant Voice]: Should we take off the number one or just keep going with this thing?

Paul: I would just keep going with this.

Leo: They want me to tell everybody the brand name of the clippers so they never buy it.

[Distant Voice]: They’re probably 30 years old.

Leo: It’s a 30-year old clipper.

Paul: I should have known she was going to betray me when she let us borrow this.

Leo: it’s more modern than that. They’re cheap clippers? Good for one shave and this wasn’t it.

Paul: Why did she even have these things?

Leo: Is it pinching your hair?

Paul: Yea it is.

Leo: Needs to be oiled.

Paul: My hair or the…?

Leo: Well you could oil your hair but it would be more direct to oil the clippers. It would be more fun to watch you oil the hair though.

Paul: It seems like this should be coming off in big clumps.

Leo: It did on me. It was literally a couple of minutes.

Paul: This is taking a long time.

Leo: You got to get that blade close to the bar.

Mary Jo: Paul and I were joking before the show. Maybe we should joke about Spartan while you’re getting your haircut.

Leo: This is Spartan!

Mary Jo: Take your mind off it, you know.

Leo: See any good movies lately? Apparently the chat room has come to the conclusion this is not cutting the hair. It’s just pulling it out.

Paul: That could be true.

Mary Jo: Breaking it out of his head. When it grows back though isn’t it going to itch like crazy?

Leo: Uh, yes. It does itch a little bit. Not like crazy. And it’s also nice because you can kind of scratch it and it feels good. The funny thing is listen, it’s like sand paper. You can actually hear it. Let’s see, this is Wednesday. So it was one week ago, minus a few hours.

Paul: That’s grown back a lot.

Leo: Well I got shaved on Saturday.

Paul: I see.

Leo: So this is from Saturday. But no, they say just so you know, an eighth of an inch a week. That’s a half inch a month. And it would take about four or five months to get back to where you were.

Mary Jo: Here’s a good one. Clippie: it seems like you are trying to shave your head.

Paul: Making mistakes.

Leo: I think if it’s humiliation we’re going for, this has achieved its goal. Yea. He looks horrible. You look like a cat that just had a bath.

Paul: I know.

Leo: The bar’s in the wrong location; the metal blades need to be even. I don’t know what that means.

Paul: What does that mean, even?

Leo: It’s just what they’re saying. There’s a screw on the side that needs to be adjusted.

[Distant Voice]: It says see the instruction book but we don’t have the instruction book.

Paul: What could go wrong?

Leo: Take off the guard and just go for it. I wouldn’t do that. I think you’re good now. It’s getting there. It’s doing something. There’s definitely hair on that towel.

Paul: Is that working better?

Leo: Stephanie, I apologize for the prongs. You didn’t have to take it out on Paul, okay?

[Distant Voice]: They weren’t the best prongs ever.

Leo: Oh, they might be the worst prongs ever. Certainly strong candidates.

Mary Jo: He’s still alive and able to clip.

Leo: We also had, and I never had this before, it’s an interesting dish, deep-fat-fried ravioli.

[Distant Voice]: Fried ravioli can be good.

Leo: It apparently wasn’t.

Paul: I was going to… it’s can’t be.

Leo: They run out the door of the restaurant with big bags and you left all your deep-fried hors devours. And they gave it to us!

[Distant Voice]: Nice.

Leo: I was going to give them to a homeless guy but I didn’t want to kill him.

Paul: Wanted to be human.

Leo: It would have been inhumane. When I worked at McDonald’s we tried to give the old hamburgers to the local pound. And they refuse them. They said there’s not enough protein. We can’t give these to dogs.

Paul: Wow.

Leo: What about a Flow-be? What ever happened to the Flow-be? Do they still make those?

Paul: I think this is why the Flow-be never took off. Kelly, settle down.

[Distant Voice]: I don’t know what everyone’s complaining about.

Paul: Shiny is not…

[Distant Voice]: As a bowling ball.

Leo: I love how cruel kids are. Kids are just, they just love this. You know what, you could stop at this point if you wish. I don’t want to stop you prematurely. But I think you’ve done… it’s clear…

Paul: I’ve lived up to the…

Leo: Well you’ve so ruined your hair that you’ve got to go somewhere and get it done now. So I think there’s no question that the head-shaving…

Paul: It’s fair to say some professional work is going to be…

Leo: I can tell you right now when you walk in the door of the barber shop, they’re going to laugh.

Paul: They’re going to say this is why you pay us.

Leo: This is so much fun. I am now enjoying this. We will speed it up of course.

Paul: Alright, it’s okay. Thank you.

Leo: Thank you, Stephanie! Nice job, kids! I hope you tweet that, Instagram that, share it with your friends, put it on Facebook. My mom was so horrified when I showed her. I did a Skype call with her and started with just my head. Just the bottom of my head. And I said mom, I have something to tell you. Then I slowly… oh! She screamed.

Mary Jo: She did? Oh. You didn’t tell her about the tattoo, did you?

Leo: I did. And I showed her the tattoo. Paul Thurrott! Ladies and gentlemen, lets’ hear it for Pauly T! You know what, doesn’t that feel good? It looks so bad. It looks so horrible. It looks like the lobotomy didn’t take. It’s just terrible. Oh lord. One flew over the…

Mary Jo: You’re on the show or anything.

Leo: Oh man. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. And thanks to everybody who contributed so much to UNICEF. $75,000 with the auction and the cash. Incredible. We just by the way, I’ve got to tell you, now that you’ve done it and you can’t really get too mad. It was Dr. Mom who put us over the top at $60,000 with a fairly significant contribution. She really wanted to see this happen. So Dr. Mom, thank you.

Mary Jo: She was the one who put it over, wasn’t she?

Leo: Yep. She said I can’t let it sit. We went home and it was under $60,000.

Paul: I felt safe.

Leo: Uh-huh. And by the way, if you enjoy what you’ve just seen, you can still…

Paul: I can’t imagine why you would have.

Leo: You can still go to unicefusa.org to help the kids all around the world slash TWiT. Unicefusa.org/twit. We are now up to $62,741 and you can still contribute. So thanks to everybody who is keeping those contributions coming in. I don’t know when we’re going to close this out. But it was such a great event. And 91 cents on the dollar. UNICEF is such a good charity; 91 cents on the dollar goes to kids all around the world that die right now because of preventable causes, low-cost methods like mosquito nets and so forth. It’s a really great cause. Paul, thank you. You did that for the kids of the world, for UNICEF.

Paul: I did that for my kids. They enjoyed it.

Leo: But the good news is you didn’t pay them to do that. I hope…

Paul: But they’ll pay, Leo.

Leo: That’s great. That’s really great. I know that Paul will get the rest…

Paul: It’s not just going to keep sticking up like this, is it?

Leo: You actually need to go to the barber. And I think there’s enough left, the barber can salvage it without making you completely bald.

Paul: I hope this ends the debate over if my hair is real.

Leo: Yea, exactly.

Mary Jo: Exactly.

Paul: My part’s not working really right.

Leo: Forget your part.

Paul: Oh well.

Leo: Hey, thank you everybody for a great cause. And thank you, Paul Thurrott. You’re such a great sport.

Paul: Sorry it took so long.

Leo: We’ll cut it out of the big show and we’ll put it as a special with high-speed clipping. Thank you, Paul.

Paul: See what happens when you go to Petaluma, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: Yea, now I know.

Leo: Stay away from Petaluma. Sure we have great beer but the natives are restless. So you didn’t go to CES but there were quite a few announcements at CES relevant to this show. PC Makers, in fact last year, did PC Makers, it seemed like last year was a little bit of a time and flux. When Windows 8 had just come out a month or two before, people were not really sure what it should look like. Whether it would be a touchscreen.

Paul: All the good stuff that happened this year around licensing hadn’t happened yet. So remember in February I think they announced the Windows Phone licensed a bunch of new ones. We didn’t know why at the time. Then in April they announced zero-dollar licensing and it ended up being cents. This year, or this past holiday season at least, we’re benefiting from the machines that came out of that.

Leo: I also see a trend and maybe you’ll agree or disagree. But it seems like there’s a trend to compete with Chromebooks at the $200-thereabouts-pricepoint. I’m not just talking about the HP Stream, we just saw a Nex-book. A lot of these are between $150 and $250, Windows 8.1 computers. Very affordable. And people love the Stream. We’ve seen more stuff like that at CES? Or is it more i-stuff?

Paul: We saw an HP Stream desktop computer which is kind of interesting.

Leo: Again, it’s like a Chrome-box.

Paul: Yes, very much so. And I’m almost positive that that’s what that’s based on is the HP Chrome-box. But no, I would say we’ve seen similar machines. What we’re seeing is kind of a bump up. Last year, we’d seen low-end tablets. This year, low-end tablets to support truly good pens. Which was one of the big questions. Every time a tablet came out, I’d get an email from people that would say does it support an active digitizer, stylus. This year, we’re getting those. And so I think most of the machines we’ve seen at CES have actually been kind of higher-end devices. Just looking through the list. But there had been some of the lower-end too.

Leo: I love the ThinkPad. I think the ThinkPad X1 Carbon might be the best Windows laptop of 2014.

Paul: That’s almost certainly going to be my next laptop, yea.

Leo: Isn’t that gorgeous?

Mary Jo: They fixed the keyboard! Finally.

Paul: Yea, they fixed the keyboard.

Leo: So what was wrong with the keyboard?

Paul: Last year for some reason they introduced-I forget what they called it-but it was a strip that replaced the function key. It was a touchscreen kind of thing. And it was not good.

Leo: Now it’s a regular-functioning key strip.

Paul: The other thing they’re doing is they’re not just offering it in a crazy high-res display. They’re doing a regular 1080p. Windows, sorry, it’s five years into this, still doesn’t look great for desktop users on a high-DPI display. So you get a normal 1080p display in there. I think that’s important too.

Leo: What’s this ThinkPad stack?

Paul: That’s for expansion. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon supports a single cable for spanning out to desktop components. And these work with that.

Leo: So this could be a desktop with a monitor addition and a dock?

Paul: Yep. Yea, you can do that today. But the new version has this new modular components which are also portable so you can bring them with you.

Leo: You think you’ll get the 1080p one?

Paul: Yea, I do.

Leo: There’s no reason to put more pixels on the screen especially if Windows doesn’t take advantage of it.

Paul: Or take advantage of it well, as I would say it.

Leo: You don’t want tiny weeny Icons, that doesn’t solve anything.

Mary Jo: That new Dell XPS 13…

Paul: That one’s very interesting. I don’t know if you saw it, Leo. So it’s an XPS 13.

Mary Jo: It’s awesome.

Leo: I like the Dell XPSs, I think they’re good systems.

Paul: Alright, so brand new form factor. It’s an 11-inch device with a 13-inch screen so there’s almost no bezel.

Leo: Say that again. How could it be an 11-inch device with a 13-inch screen?

Paul: Think of a MacBook Air and the 1-inch bezel that goes around the screen. Now think about what you could fit in there. The only problem I have with this is I don’t want a device this small. So I thought, they have an XPS 15 which is really neat. Nope, the XPS 15 is just like last year’s. So I’m thinking…

Leo: Yea, 13 is just right.

Paul: Yea, well, but the device itself is maybe a little smaller. A 13-inch form factor with a 15-inch screen, perfect.

Mary Jo: The battery life thing they’re claiming on this is with a non-touchscreen 15 hours. If that is really true, finally there’s a real laptop.

Leo: This is exciting.

Paul: And that machine for an I5 is under $1000.

Leo: $799.

Mary Jo: In the I3.

Paul: Yea, the I3 is $799. If you get an I5, I want to say $999 or somewhere around there. 8 gigabytes of RAM, 128 gigabyte SSD.

Leo: Available when?

Paul: Now, right now. You can buy it right now.

Leo: That’s so unusual with a CES announcement.

Paul: That’s a big difference this year. A lot of these machines are available right now, later this month, or February. And that’s not historically been the case. I have hair all over me.

Leo: It’s itchy, isn’t it?! Very itchy!

Mary Jo: If you do get the touchscreen on that, it takes I think two hours off the battery life. And they also said it doesn’t matter, the battery life doesn’t depend if you have the I3, I5, or I7. It’s just touch versus non-touch. But I’m somebody who the battery life is a huge thing for me. And so when I bought the Acer S7 that I have now, I was like okay, it says they get seven or eight hours. And I get close to that. But I really wanted 15. I wanted something I knew I didn’t have to carry the cord with me all day.

Paul: There are some detachable computers, as we’re now calling them, a tablet that you plug onto a keyboard base. With a keyboard base, it has a battery in it. I think it was a Toshiba where the tablet itself gets seven or nine hours. And then you plug it into the base, and it gets 17 hours of battery life.

Leo: I think I see why you lose two hours with the touch display, because it looks like it’s only available in QHD. Which is a much higher resolution. Lots more pixels to push.

Paul: See there’s so many reasons to not go super-high-res with Windows. And so few advantages frankly. I mean some people might actually need it. Photoshop-type folks or whatever, but honestly this is one of those areas where bigger is not always better.

Leo: It’s a big price difference too. It goes from $1149 for the I5 with a 1080p display and 256 SSD.

Paul: Well a big chunk of that is the solid state drive, right?

Leo: Well they go to 512, it shouldn’t be a big chunk, not $800 worth. In fact I bet I can customize and put a 512 in the I5.

Paul: Well it’s also an I7 versus an I5.

Leo: Yea, that’s what you’re paying for. The I7. But I bet the screen is a big chunk.

Paul: On a device that’s 13 inches big, super-high-res display is pointless.

Leo: I agree with you. You can’t upgrade the hard drive on the littler one. You have to buy…

Paul: That might be a temporary condition because these things are brand new and they want to ship pre-built.

Leo: I like these. You’re right, there’s no BTO.

Paul: I look like a freak.

Leo: You look like a drill sergeant. You look like you’re going to say drop and give me 10, Laporte!

Paul: How would you like to have this guy show up at your door late at night? Can I borrow your phone? My car broke down.

Leo: Everybody says I look bad-ass. Oh no, I’m sorry, they say I look like an ass.

Paul: You look like that guy from the Shield.

Leo: Yea, Michael Chiklis. You and I Paul, we’re the tough guys in Windows. We’re the toughies. Don’t mess with us. Yea, alright so there’s some good new computers. I’m glad you brought my attention to this new XPS. So Dell’s selling it as the new XPS 13?

Paul: Yea, so the XPS 15 is the same design from last year. The XPS 13 is brand new. So I’m hoping there’s some change before a year from now on the bigger one. Because that’s actually very interesting. It’s a nice design.

Leo: Nice. Mary Jo, you going to replace your S7?

Mary Jo: If I were in the market for one, I would think about that. But I’m not.

Leo: I’m tempted.

Paul: You’re good for a few years on that one.

Leo: I have the non-Haswell, the third generation Intel on mine. So I’m thinking I might make the jump. Is this Broadwell?

Paul: It’s fifth gen.

Mary Jo: We should talk about the chip thing.

Leo: I was so surprised. CES doesn’t seem to be the place to announce new chips. But Intel really did.

Paul: It was delayed. I think that was why it worked out timing-wise.

Leo: So do you want to talk about those?

Mary Jo: I actually want people to help me understand this. So I’m trying to keep-you know me and code names, I love them-I’m trying to figure out all these new code names. So we know Intel announced Broadwell. Which is…

Leo: Well they announced it but shipping it.

Mary Jo: They’re shipping it, or starting to, right?

Leo: Yea. Thirty-three new SKUs.

Mary Jo: That’s the successor to Haswell, right? But then there’s another processor they have code named Skylake, right? Which is either late this year if it’s on time or next year. And I don’t really understand what…

Leo: Is that the desktop version of this, I wonder?

Mary Jo: That’s what I don’t know.

Leo: Because we only have the mobile.

Paul: Yea, so a lot of these fifth generation products are super-low wattage. And so obviously just aimed at mobile devices.

Leo: What is it? Fourteen nanometers? Holy cow!

Paul: Yea, super-low process.

Leo: This is the tick of the cycle which means you’re getting smaller process which more efficiency, less heat.

Paul: Better battery life.

Leo: But not faster.

Paul: Which is fine because I think from a performance perspective, we’ve hit a great spot. We don’t need that anymore.

Mary Jo: So Skylake then is what they call tock, which means that’s the one that’s faster? Isn’t it?

Leo: Chat room is saying it’s a new architecture. So that then would be the sixth generation, I guess.

Paul: Well the fifth generation processor desktop versions already happened. That happened this past year, didn’t it?

Leo: No, Haswell is fourth gen.

Paul: Haswell is fourth gen, okay.

Leo: So this is a shrunken Haswell, which is the fifth gen: Broadwell.

Paul: Okay.

Leo: And then next time I guess will be the tock… I can’t tell which one is which.

Paul: The other confusion here is of course they have Pentium M, I’m sorry Core M. And they also have Pentium, Celeron, and Atom processors. Which are not considered part of these various processor families, depending on what you’re talking about. I almost feel like they have too many. Especially in the low-end devices. This one has an Atom whatever, this one has a Pentium whatever. This one has a Celeron whatever. In the old days, Celeron was low-end and Pentium was high-end. But now these things are all low-end. And it’s kind of hard to figure out which is which and how they compare to each other.

Leo: And bringing back the name.

Mary Jo: They mentioned Cherry Trail came up at CES this week, which is I guess the successor to Bay Trail which is an Atom system on a chip processor. But then there’s something that comes after Cherry Trail which is called Willow Trail. I don’t know anything about that.

Paul: I’ve never even heard of that.

Mary Jo: There are all these code names.

Leo: So here we go, Laslo says Haswell is the tock. Broadwell is the tick, which is a shrink of the Haswell. Skylake is another tock, new architecture. Cannon-lake is a tick.

Paul: By the way, that’s a great… Mary Jo, tick tock. It’s like Windows Server when they had R2 releases. It’s a major release which I guess is the tock. And then the minor release which is the tick.

Leo: Tock is new architecture. Tick is reducing the old architecture.

Paul: Right, getting it into smaller packages with better efficiency. Yea, but still it still doesn’t help with all the names. In addition to the Core I3, 5, and 7, Pentium, Celeron, Atom. What the heck’s going on there? And M. And Core M. Another thing entirely.

Leo: But, the new computer is shown at CES for the most part are these-the new mobile computers for the most part-is new Broadwell.

Paul: So this Ars page you have up, or that we have linked in the show notes, says that quad-core versions of these chips, and desktop versions of these chips are expected in mid-2015.

Leo: I’ll show that slide.

Paul: So for high-end laptops and desktops, you’ll still see Haswell processors.

Mary Jo: I wasn’t clear if everybody is talking about Surface Pro 4 and what chip that might have. Or the next MacBooks. They’re saying is it going to be Broadwell or is it going to be something else? Are they going to wait?

Paul: Well if Apple comes out with that 12-inch MacBook Air as we have long-known that was going to happen, that probably would have happened in the fall if Intel could have made this happen in the fall. So that machine will certainly be their version of the Dell XPS 13, right? It will be the same type of machine. Twelve-inch screen, 12.5-inch screen, whatever. That version of the processor. Awesome battery life. That’s going to be that machine. I can’t keep this stuff straight.

Mary Jo: If you think Windows code names are hard to keep track of, try doing Intel code names. That’s a whole other thing.

Paul; And it’s products the chips themselves, but there are also graphics chipsets that vary from chip to chip. There’s all kinds of stuff.

Leo: This is a good article, Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham. They do a great job of the geekiest information. So highly recommend it. Intel staggered Broadwell roll-out continues with 17 new laptop chips.

Paul: I still think the dream here-and this is true of everyone-Dell XPS, MacBook Air 12.5, whatever they’re calling that, is as super-slim as you can get. Tapered so you can fit USB ports in the back but have it taper down to nothing in the front. Super-low weight, high-res screens because people seem to want that stuff. But killer battery life, but no fan. I think that’s the true leap, right? It’s not just battery life, performance, it’s having a device that never makes a fan sound. You know? I don’t know that we’re quite there but it seems like the Core M is the point, is a step down that path. And that’s going to be the huge… I’m sure the XPS 13 must have a fan. It must have a fan in it.

Mary Jo: I didn’t read about that. A couple people get hands-on there. But I don’t know if I read about fan or no fan.

Paul: Well the show floor it would be kind of hard to tell. But this is something I’m really sensitive to. The Surface Pro 3, I love it. But that fan runs. It just runs. Maybe I’m just sensitive to that frequency it’s at or whatever, but I sit here and the thing’s like hum. And it hits my ear at exactly the right spot somehow.

Leo: Boy now I’m thinking I should wait for a new MacBook that would be…

Paul: They’re probably going to announce it anytime.

Leo: It should be imminent, yea.

Paul: Apple doesn’t like to be behind everybody else. I’m surprised.

Leo: Typically they’re not. The fact that these Dells came out before Apple is…

Paul: Interesting, yea.

Leo: And here’s the-oh boy-here you go. So Skylake will be a 14 nanometer because it’s a tock. Westmere was the tick, Sandy Bridge the tock. Ivy Bridge the tick; Haswell the tock.

Paul: So Core M shipped last year, like late last year. And that is considered part of Broadwell. So that must be a particularly low-end for lack of a better term version of what has been for the past several years Core whatever-I3, I5, I7. So adding Core M, that thing must be lower clock, low-power, all that kind of stuff. Because those are aimed at fanless machines.

Leo: It’s like Jay-Z. Just brush it off, man. So this just in, according to our chat room, Verizon has pulled all… is this right? Nokia phones from… wait a minute. I got to look at that here.

Mary Jo: They did this before when people thought they were discontinuing.

Paul: They just had a major announcement with Microsoft. They’re not walking away from Windows Phones.

Mary Jo: I don’t know. All we know is we’re supposed to get Denim on the Icon in early 2015. Whatever that means. But this is a Windows-central story, they’re saying they pulled all references to everything. Even the HTC One, everything. Like they pulled all references. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know. Verizon doesn’t want to sell Windows Phone. That’s what I know.

Paul: They really are terrible.

Leo: They are awful.

Paul: For a Windows Phone user. If you love Windows Phone, and Mary Jo is on Verizon and she knows.

Leo: I’m just going to sign into my Verizon account.

Paul: Yea, I’m doing the same thing. If I want to buy a phone…

Mary Jo: See what happens.

Paul: How do you even buy a phone on this site?

Leo: I don’t understand why I always have to give them my zip code, as if that’s going to change anything.

Paul: I love how Verizon and Verizon Wireless are two different things. Anyway, filter by.

Leo: Update your security profile. Oh, crap. Now to select…

Paul: I want to filter by color.

Leo: I have to create a name.

Paul: Windows, no there’s two Windows phones in here. The HTC One, M8, and the Samsung A… but what’s not in here are any Nokia phones.

Mary Jo: the Lumia phones aren’t in there.

Paul: Okay, so I heard… we all know that the Lumia Icon disappeared from the site a few weeks back. I just saw it today and I didn’t think too much of it because it was an older phone, but the 928, which was a flagship on Verizon years ago, I think just disappeared from the Verizon website. And that’s not leaving Lumia. That’s that think probably getting rid of them all. I’m sure that was one of those cheap, you can get this thing for free, sign up for a two-year contract, toss-away phone. I think that’s my guess. That’s my guess.

Mary Jo: I have no idea. When it comes to Verizon and Windows Phone, I think we’re all just perpetually guessing and even Microsoft I don’t think really knows what’s going to come.

Leo: You can get a Blackberry.

Mary Jo: Yay.

Leo: There’s the One, HTC One Windows version. It’s pretty far down, the ETV.

Paul: Yep, it’s in there though.

Leo: So that’s a lie. You lie! You think they would just check the website. Come on!

Paul: I don’t think anyone’s lying. I think that Verizon is evil. And we need to point this out on a regular basis. It’s okay.

Leo: Yes, constantly. And you know they may buy AOL which would be interesting.

Paul: Which by the way, they deserve AOL.

Mary Jo: They denied that rumor, didn’t they?

Leo: No, they said we may be talking about something. It may be a joint partnership.

Mary Jo: That would be weird.

Leo: Not that these things haven’t happened before.

Mary Jo: True. Very true.

Leo: Okay, everybody texted me. And I’m sure you. You know where I’m going with this? They said Microsoft is taking Internet Explorer out.

Mary Jo: Oh.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Of…

Paul: That’s not true.

Leo: It’s gone! No, it’s true.

Paul: Nope.

Leo: I saw it on Twitter. It’s true.

Paul: Okay.

Mary Jo: I have so much to say about this one.

Leo: I saw it on Twitter.

Mary Jo: Yea, well here’s the reality.

Leo: What is this Spartan browser? What the heck is that?

Mary Jo: Okay, so right before Christmas on Twitter, a bunch of us were talking. And a couple of guys who do a podcast in France, Live Tile I think it’s called, said hey did you guys hear? Microsoft’s building a totally new browser. It’s not Internet Explorer. And we all went yea, okay, alright. Then they started asking some of my contacts who have been really accurate on Windows about this, and they said yep, it’s true. We’re building a browser at Microsoft that is not Internet Explorer. But when you dig a little deeper, what it is, I think, is still a variant of Internet Explorer but they’re not going to call it Internet Explorer. It’s still going to have the Chakra JavaScript engine in it. Which IE does. And it’s also still going to have the trident rendering engine, not web-kit.

Leo: That’s what makes it Internet Explorer. It’s the engine.

Mary Jo: It’s those two things.

Paul: It’s the GUI caramel center.

Leo: So you can change the name but that doesn’t change the browser.

Mary Jo: But there are going to be some different things apparently. Brad Sams at Neowin back in September said he heard that Microsoft was going to change Internet Explorer so it could handle extensions and it would be more like Google Chrome and more like Firefox. What we didn’t know at the time when he wrote that was Microsoft is going to call this a new browser. We thought that was just IE 12. But it doesn’t seem to be that. It seems like Microsoft is building a browser code named Spartan that they’re not going to call IE that is going to have features that are more like Google Chrome and Firefox. But here’s the part that 99% of the web got wrong, they’re not killing IE. They’re still going to have Internet Explorer because so many businesses are dependent on IE.

Leo: Wait a minute. You’re saying I’m going to have two browsers now on my…

Mary Jo: We already have two on Windows 8.

Leo: So now four, because I’ll have two versions of Sparta, two versions of IE, this is great news.

Paul: You can never have too many rendering engines, Leo.

Leo: Let’s get Sleep Out and put it on there too. What the hell?

Mary Jo: Here’s my guess what’s going to happen. And this is me just speculating at this point. I think Microsoft will take this thing called Spartan and make that the browser. The single browser on Windows Mobile. So that will be the browser on small tablets and on Windows Phone. Then on the desktop version of Windows 10, I think you’ll probably have a choice of the two browsers, IE and Spartan. That’s my guess what’s going to happen. But I keep hearing we’re going to see Spartan on January 21^st during their Windows 10 reveal. I don’t know if we’ll get it in the build. It may not be quite ready yet. But we’re going to see it I think. So then we’re going to have a better indication of what is this.

Paul: I would think…

Mary Jo: Is it really IE? I would think they’ll show it. I think they have to. It’s going to be a key piece of the mobile SKU, I would think. So I think they’ve got to show it to us.

Leo: Show me the browser!

Mary Jo: Yea, and this week there’s been first the Boy Genius report. And I think there’s also a rendering on Reddit and now Neowin has the story; Brad Sams has the story up where they’re all showing things where they say this is Spartan! Some have screenshots.

Paul: I would take Neowin’s report to be the correct one.

Mary Jo: There’s mockups, there’s screenshots. I have not seen Spartan. So I can’t tell you I know which one is Spartan. But I ran the Boy Genius report screenshots past a couple of my sources, and they sad that was fake.

Paul: And after the laughter commenced…

Mary Jo: Yea, they said no, that’s not it.

Paul: It looks like something that would be on my Fisher Price first PC.

Mary Jo: Yea, it didn’t look good. But the one thing that was very interesting to me in the Boy Genius report is they said Microsoft is going to integrate Cortana right in. So you could say to Spartan, go to Facebook, and it would open the Facebook page.

Leo: Yea!

Mary Jo: That doesn’t surprise me if that’s true. I don’t know if it’s true but I would think that’s the direction they’re going. And back to the very start of our show, we said Microsoft has to show Windows users what we’re going to get that the other people on iOS and Android are not. Maybe that’s an example of what it looks like to have a service that’s integrated on Windows and not going to be available in the same way on iOS and Android. Just a guess.

Leo: Okay.

Mary Jo: It would be kind of cool, I guess. I can’t see me sitting here in my apartment saying go to Facebook. I think I would still click.

Paul: I don’t like people to talk to things. You know, when people use their phones like a walkie talkie. Bob, I’m over at the…

Leo: It supports the notion that Spartan will be more like Chrome. Well you can at least talk to Chrome and Spartan. Hey by the way, just to be fair to Windows Central, they didn’t say all Windows phones were gone on the Verizon site. They said the Lumias. And that is the case.

Paul: That’s fair. That is the case. The distinction here is that the only Lumia that mattered was gone weeks ago. The only thing that’s changed is the older 928 is gone now. But like I said, that probably is just a factor of it selling out. It’s an old phone.

Leo: Friendly Oklahoma in our chat room said he talked to Edward at Verizon and he said we are waiting on the manufacturer to start manufacturing and restocking again. That would be…

Paul: That’s better than we’re waiting for Windows 10 to launch in September 2015.

Leo: I agree with that!

Paul: We would have made them but we closed that factory in India. Sorry about that.

Leo: Let me show the image. I should have while you were talking about it. Although, looking at an image of the…

Paul: The Neowin is the one to go with. Actually right there, that’s probably pretty…

Leo: It does look Chrome-ish.

Paul: Yea, it does look very Chrome-ish.

Mary Jo: Neowin built a mockup based on some things they say they’ve seen.

Leo: Oh I see. This is a mockup not an actual…

Mary Jo: The other one from Reddit is from some anonymous person who says he is on the test team at Microsoft. And we don’t know if that’s a real person or what that is that he’s showing us there, if it’s real, fake, we don’t know.

Paul: Maybe it’s Cortana, posting on Reddit.

Mary Jo: Yea.

Paul: She’s become sentient.

Leo: And good news, but not news, Windows 7 and 8 can do…

Paul: Oh actually before we get to it. I didn’t link to it for some reason but at CES they announced something called the Compute Stick. So if you’re familiar with Windows To Go, this is a way to install Windows Enterprise on a USB stick and then bring it from computer to computer so you can use it wherever. It sounds like a great idea but it’s actually pretty terrible. This is not that. So this is a $150 HDMI dongle that includes an Atom-based PC right on the dongle. So it’s an Atom processor, two gigs of RAM, 32 gigs of EMMC storage. USB and microUSB expandability. MicroUSB for power. And you plug it into any HDMI-compatible display and that thing’s the computer. So you can have a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse. And it’s Windows 8 with Bing, so it’s the consumer version.

Leo: And it’s zero-cost because it’s…

Paul: That’s not actually a terrible idea. If you compare this to the HP Stream desktops that are coming out or any small form factor PC home theater type thing, I mean yea it’s kind of cool. Now the problem with HDMI today is that it doesn’t provide power. And now given the rise of these dongles, Chromecast and other streaming sticks, I’m hoping there’s a future version of HDMI that adds the functionality.

Leo: Oh there is, it’s called MHL.

Paul: Oh good.

Leo: It’s been out for a while but most people don’t put it on their TVs. I noticed…

Paul: That will make a big difference.

Leo: I have an MHL/HDMI port on my On-Q receiver. But if you notice there is a microUSB connector on this. That’s how they power the Chromecast, same thing. You plug that into a USB port. And many TVs have USB ports. So powered USB.

Paul: Yea, and it’s usually right next to the HDMI. It’s not bad. But you understand it would be nice to have…

Leo: Yea. I have a Roku stick that is MHL-based so it doesn’t need power. You just plug it into an MHL. But the power with that is even though the standard exists, I don’t think a lot of people have implemented it.

Paul: I’m really looking forward to checking this thing out. Windows To Go never really took off in my mind. And the problem with Windows To Go is that Windows To Go is not a computer on a stick, it’s an OS disc on a stick. So you have to plug it in and boot it up. It looks at the hardware on the PC and it installs the right drivers. If you’re using the same PC every day, the second and third and fourth time you use it it’s great. The first time you use it, it takes forever because it has to find all the hardware. So if you’re moving back and forth between devices, it’s actually not all that great. But this shows you how cheap you can get Windows on a little. It’s basically everything except keyboard, mouse, and display.

Leo: You know the Raspberry Pi, $35 processor. That’s arm, but we’ve seen Android sticks like this too. This is really the benefit and I’m sure with a 14 nanometer processor, you could probably do this too with Intel. And this is just, this is where it’s all gone. Tiny. And if you think about that, form factor is just one of many-the internet of things-your dishwasher could be running Windows.

Paul: I can’t wait, Leo. Did you get a blue screen?!

Leo: Task manager! Yea, I don’t want a washer and dryer with a control-alt-delete buttons. Office for Android tablets: the preview has been extended again. We still don’t have Office touch, first Office for Windows. But boy we’ve got it on Android and iOS! If you have Kit Kat, you got to have Kit Kat.

Paul: Or better.

Mary: Or Lollypop now. Both you can have. And before if you signed up for Office on Android preview, you had to sign up for a waiting list and not everybody could get it. Now if you go to the Google Play store and look for Microsoft preview of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you can just automatically download it no strings attached.

Leo: Nice.

Mary Jo: And the final version is supposedly early 2015, another one of those early 2015 things.

Leo: Cool.

Paul: Two quick things on this. One is it’s arm only because Android runs on Intel too. So if you have an Intel tablet, it doesn’t work. The other big thing for me is I bought a Nexus 9, not specifically for this purpose but knowing that Microsoft would be putting out all these great tablet apps. Right after I got it, the Office preview came out and I thought I could run it on the Nexus 9 and it didn’t work. Now it does work on the Nexus 9. They’re supporting a lot more devices now too.

Leo: We better move along. It’s almost 1:00. That shaving took a long time. OneNote supports password protected regions. That’s good.

Paul: Easy enough. OneNote modern, I should say.

Leo: Here’s a riddle for you: which Windows Phone model saw the most app installs over Christmas?

Paul: This is a weird one because you have to really think about what the data is telling us. And this is the guys from that duplex who measure, roughly measure Windows Phone usage-which models have the most usage each month by looking at data they get from ads in apps. And it’s a pretty good way to measure it, right? But this is specifically looking at Christmas Day. And that giant jump you see in new app installs because people just got new phones for Christmas. And the funny thing is the number one phone is not a Lumia. It was the Blue Win HD. Which is kind of a mid-level phone. It competes with the Lumia 830. I believe it’s only sold unlocked. You can get it on Amazon probably under $200. It’s a great phone for the price. But the difference between app installs on this device and all the other ones is significant. Of course every single device was a Lumia. It was interesting that this one came in number one.

Leo: I don’t remember talking about the Blue Win HD.

Paul: Yea. It’s a nice phone.

Leo: By more than two to one!

Paul: I know, it’s crazy! Another thing I look at on this list, if you look at the devices, 630 and 635 were really the same phone. 735 and 730 are the same phone.

Leo: Okay so you can add some of these together.

Paul: Yea, so you know, obviously when you add up all the Lumias what you get is 95% of all app installs were in fact by Lumias.

Leo: Wait a minute, this is growth though, this is not totals.

Paul: Oh yea, it’s very hard to understand. This is day-over-day growth. So in other words, what we’re doing is comparing December 25^th to December 24^th. Because people get the new phones.

Leo: It was almost 110, more than 110% growth.

Paul: In other words, we’re not suggesting that…

Leo: It’s not the number one phone.

Paul: No, but a significant number of those things were sold for Christmas, I guess.

Leo: They were selling, oh this is part of the Microsoft Christmas thing, they were selling on the Microsoft Store unlocked for $120.

Paul: There you go.

Leo: There you go.

Paul: Sales work, who knew?

Leo: Sales. Nokia, oh first the Yezz Billy 50…

Paul: They really need to get better names.

Leo: The Yezz Billy 5S. You like it?

Paul: Well we haven’t seen it. But it’s just announced. It’s another 830, I’ll turn it into mid-market, five-inch screen which I think is important. 5S name, which is probably on purpose.

Leo: It’s kind of sad, really.

Paul: It looks okay.

Leo: It’s a nice little thing. Looks like a 5S.

Paul: I guess the other Billy models, I think it was 4 and 4.7, did not have LTE capabilities. Which I didn’t know. It’s a low-end snapdragon processor, kind of a mid-level device. 720p, not 1080p, which is fine.

Leo: But that size it’s fine, yea. Nokia 215, it’s Microsoft’s cheapest phone yet. Looks like it too. It looks like one of those little Nokia candy bars.

Paul: That’s exactly it.

Leo: Is it running Windows Phone? No.

Mary Jo: No.

Paul: No, it’s running Kin. It should be.

Leo: Yea it looks like it.

Mary Jo: It runs the S30.

Leo: Oh it’s S30, so Symbian. So Microsoft got Symbian too?

Paul: Well they got this line, yea.

Mary Jo: Yea, they got the line of feature phones. So this is $29, and it comes preloaded with Opera Mini browser.

Leo: What?!

Mary Jo: Bing search, what else? It has a bunch of things. It doesn’t have WhatsApp. No WhatsApp.

Paul: A Bing app is in there, Facebook. It has a camera. It has a flashlight app.

Leo: So this is the Kin 2, you’re right.

Paul: Well it’s the latest of the Nokia candy bar phones. I mean, they’re going to keep using that brand on those phones. And the market’s where it’s at.

Mary Jo: It’s for the developing world.

Leo: No dual-SIM.

Mary Jo: Right. You know like you can go one month between battery charges, I think.

Leo: What?!

Mary Jo: Yea, it’s crazy. It’s definitely a feature phone and it’s made for people who may not always have access to power.

Leo: Would this be a great kid phones?

Paul: I think this is a beautiful little phone. Look, the days of standalone phones, standalone MP3 players, they’re kind of over in developed nations, obviously. But it’s hard not to look at this thing and go this is kind of…

Leo: Put it in the glove compartment, you know. Emergency phone.

Mary Jo: We don’t know if we’re getting it here though right?

Paul: Yea, it’s never going to come here.

Leo: And finally as long as we’re on Windows Phone, what’s happening with Denim?

Paul: We haven’t had Windows Weekly in a while but at the end of December, we found out from Microsoft that they were rolling out Denim to more phones. The Lumia 520, the 720, the 1320 in China, they were all getting Denim. And then Joe Belfiore tweeted that we long-suffering Icon users on Verizon would be getting Denim. And also finally, Windows Phone 8.1 which we still don’t have by early 2015. So Denim is in a staggered roll out. Supposedly all of us will get it by early 2015, whatever that really means. But yea, it’s cumulative so we’ll get everything we haven’t gotten to-date. So we’ll get Windows Phone 8.1, the update, and the firmware, the Denim firmware. And what was the other firmware that we didn’t get? We’re way behind the times on the Icon sadly which is a flagship phone.

Leo: You must be happy though because you’re an Icon user.

Mary Jo: I am. But I still don’t have it yet. I’m not going to count my chickens yet.

Leo: Don’t count your Denim.

Paul: Your chickens?

Mary Jo: My Denim chickens.

Leo: If you’re going to count your chickens, you should put on some denims first. Because they’re messy birds. Finally before we get to the back of the book, Sony has sold 18.5 million PlayStation 4s. The Xbox One number is…

Paul: Do you have a cricket sound thing on that sound board of yours? A whistling wind kind of sound we can make?

Leo: I’m a tumbling tumble weed!

Paul: I think the big number for Sony is that they’re basically selling two million of these things a month and between the week before Thanksgiving and the end of the year or the beginning of January, they sold 4.1 million I think was the figure. Which is amazing! I don’t mean to be condescending about this per se, but I don’t understand the appeal of PlayStation 4 at all. I don’t kind of get it. And this thing is just gone gangbusters. And the weird thing about it from the Microsoft side is the Xbox One has outstripped the 360 and the original Xbox, it’s the fastest-selling Xbox of all time, no doubt about it. Even though we don’t have the exact figures yet. But it’s just that Sony is doing so much better. We don’t have the exact numbers but it’s pretty clear that they have basically just extended their lead over Microsoft the entire year. Which is amazing. It just doesn’t make sense to me. But it appears to be the case.

Leo: Wow. Okay.

Paul: It’s a lot of PS4s, Leo.

Leo: It’s a lot. Nothing wrong with that. We still have our Xbox One. Hey, let’s get to the back of the book, the stuff that we wait for. Beer, picks, software, code names, enterprise, the works. Before we do, let’s talk about the best way to hire in business today if you’re a small or medium business. If you’re in HR and you’re responsible for getting the new employees in, you’ve got to know in one way it’s easier than ever to hire because of online job boards. But in another way, it’s kind of challenging because which job board’s right? What if you could post to 50+ job boards with one click of the mouse, huh? Zip Recruiter my friends. It makes hiring faster, easier, and cheaper. Posting your job not just in one place but in all, everywhere. 50+ job boards and social sites, and Craigslist, and LinkedIn, and Twitter. All with one click, you’ll find candidates in any city, any industry, nationwide. You post once, you watch your qualified candidates roll into Zip Recruiters’ easy-to-use interface. That’s another thing; you’re not going to get calls and emails as you would if you put it in the newspaper. You don’t have to worry about that. Zip Recruiter takes all the applications, collates them, makes it easy for you to quickly screen candidates, rate them, and hire the right person fast. We’ve used Zip Recruiter and I couldn’t be happier with it. So easy. Find out why Zip Recruiter has been used by over a quarter million businesses including TWiT. Right now, try Zip Recruiter with a free four-day trial at ziprecruiter.com/windows. If you’re the one responsible for doing all this hiring, you really need to make it easier. Zip Recruiter, I don’t think I have to tell you… ziprecruiter.com/windows. Four-day free, waiting for you right now Look at all the big businesses, and small, that have used Zip Recruiter. Ziprecruiter.com/windows. Thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly, Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. Something happened to Paul in the show.

Paul: I think I have Jerry Seinfeld’s hair.

Leo: You look manly. What do you got for… should we start with the tip of the week?

Paul: Sure. Have you ever seen the first Friday the Thirteenth movie? I think the kids look like this.

Leo: Freddy got to him.

Paul: Kind of patchy. I’m going to come jumping out of a lake.

Leo: Yea.

Paul: So, I wrote an article today about my decision to buy a new Window Phone, even though we don’t have any new flagships in the market. And why I picked the one I picked.

Leo: Oh I want to hear about this.

Paul: The part I want to talk about was in the United States if you don’t buy smartphones by and large like people do in other parts of the world, we usually do the contract thing. And that’s starting to change. T-Mobile has been a big pusher of getting us off contracts and buying things outright. And we live in kind of the mortgage society or whatever. I think for myself going forward at least-and I recommend this to people when they can afford to do it-is get off that contract system. If you think about a traditional contract, you’re allegedly paying part of the fee for the phone with every month’s bill. The problem is if you got past two years, you’re still paying that fee even if you’ve paid off the phone. You have no way of knowing that; it’s not part of the bill. And obviously AT&T and other companies have programs like Next where you can add amounts of money to the bill every month. T-Mobile does that as well. I think it’s important that we understand what we’re paying. And if possible, to pay that thing up front and get these things unlocked so A, you can move carrier to carrier; B, if you travel to other parts of the country or world, you can buy one of those pay as you go SIMs and do your stuff that way. These are all things that are not possible if you’re on contract and locked into a wireless carrier. I feel like these contracts we have are contracts with the devil in a sense. Because wireless carriers literally are evil. But they’re obviously very much set up to disadvantage the consumer. And I think we are going to hit this; this is the way we’re going, finally. But it’s something I’ve just basically resolve for this year that I’m just going to buy these things. I’m not going to add this stuff to my bill, hidden or explicitly. I’m just going to buy these things outright.

Leo: That is one thing that has changed a little bit, is that they now, you pay the full price but they just advertise it into the bill, right? It used to be they would kind of hide the amount.

Paul: They literally would hide it. And that’s the problem. I don’t think people understand what it is they’re getting. And I think that when you buy something outright, it gives you the portability option. I could go to T-Mobile right now and say I have this phone and use it on your plan because you offer a better deal. If you have a GSM phone, it’s a little more viable depending on which bands it supports and so forth.

Leo: Now days, if you get an unlocked LTE phone, you can use it on any carrier which is nice.

Paul: The one I bought is not an LTE phone because it’s an international GSM phone and doesn’t support AT&T LTE anyway. I think it supports T-Mobile but I’m not sure. But honestly, I’ve been using these phones for a long time; I use a lot of international devices: the 735, the 830, the 535 that I have are all international versions. So it’s HSBA Plus, which is what we might call 3.5G. Honestly for data use, I don’t think it matters at all. Most of the time, I’m at home on Wi-Fi a lot of the time.

Leo: I agree.

Paul: I’m not downloading video files on the go, I mean who cares?

Leo: I get amazing T-Mobile speeds on HSBA Plus. Because no one uses T-Mobile.

Paul: Yes. So if I was a normal person and I’m not, in other words I have three phones, I have three lines. It’s expensive. And I have one of each platform. So I always have an Android on one, an iPhone on another, and Windows Phone. But if I was a normal person and had one phone, I would go to T-Mobile right now. That would be my choice.

Leo: Me too.

Paul: You save a lot of money. And depending on where you live and where you travel to… I think it could be an excellent experience. I don’t mean to say I’m stuck on AT&T. At least I’m not on Verizon. And AT&T does have great access around the country.

Leo: They actually may have better speeds overall. That’s usually what people say. It’s geographically dependent.

Paul: Exactly. Yea.

Leo: What did you get?

Paul: Well I got a Lumia 930.

Leo: Oh, that’s the Icon, right?

Paul: Yea, this is the international version of the Icon, a GSM version of the Icon is a way to think of it. When the Icon came out, in my review and I went back and re-read it, what I basically said is this is the greatest Windows Phone ever made. If I was on Verizon, I would use this in a heartbeat.

Leo: Better than the 1520? Or just not so huge?

Paul: I find the 1520 to be too big.

Leo: Yea. It’s more compact.

Paul: You can’t use it one-handed. You just kind of fumble in your hand because it’s tall, so it kind of flips over. It’s too much for me.

Leo: So the 930, good. And you got it Expanses. USA, that’s where I get my phone often, my unlocked phones.

Paul: Yea, I buy a bunch of phones from them.

Leo: We’re both really happy. Software pick of the week. I like the name.

Paul: I might have… I can’t remember if I’ve picked this one before. Tweetium for Windows and Windows Phone was just updated. This is a Twitter app. It’s a universal app, or at least has universal licensing. So if you buy it on Windows or Windows Phone, you get it on the other platform as well. So it’s not free; it’s only $2.99. It’s a great app. It does basically everything you ever want. In the past, I kind of didn’t really go toward Tweetium because it was a modern app on Windows. And I did it in full-screen or snap to me, it was not very interesting. But now with Windows 10, you can run these things on the desktop. You know Metro Twit, the desktop app I was using for years is no longer supported. And you know, it’s been hard trying to find a replacement for that. But having one that works consistently across different platforms. It takes advantage of the on-screen real estate if you want to use it and all that stuff. It’s a great app. A lot of people aren’t looking for a Twitter app per se, Twitter obviously makes an official app.

Leo: How’s the official app on Windows Phone? Is it pretty good?

Paul: It’s okay. On Windows Phone it’s acceptable. If you think about a phone screen, pivot from view to view, it makes a lot of sense. The Twitter app on Windows desktop, the metro app, doesn’t take good advantage of the on-screen real estate. See this hair? Seinfeld! Look at it, that’s my head right there.

Leo: This actually looks very similar to the Twitter app at least on the other platforms.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Tweetium, $2.99. Cross-platform.

Mary Jo: but you have to have Windows Phone 8.1 to run it, right?

Paul: Oh that’s a good question. That could be.

Leo: Let’s see what it says here.

Paul: It will say on the left there if that’s true. Yep, you do. You’re right.

Mary Jo: Because I want to try it.

Paul: But you’re on the Icon.

Leo: Aw. Don’t do the dev preview!

Paul: Listen, aside from Leo, it’s had mostly good results.

Leo: Aside from me… I have a 1520 somewhere that Microsoft sent me. I have to unlock it and put my stuff in it. Enterprise pick of the week from Mary Jo Foley!

Mary Jo: Yes, enterprise pick of the week is something called Delve Boards. So if you remember what Delve is, for one thing it’s Satya Nadella’s favorite app we heard. The way Microsoft describes it is flip board for Office 365. So it’s a search app that lets you aggregate your content and present your content in the form of cards for Office 365. Right now, Delve is in the midst of being rolled out to all Office 365 business customers. The roll out started at the end of last year and it’s continuing this year. People who are on the first release get it first. But then everybody else will be getting it fairly soon. Today Microsoft said they’re adding a feature called Boards. And I don’t use Pinterest but everybody that’s described it says it’s Boards on Pinterest. That’s what it is.

Paul: I’m sorry, you’re referring to a service called P-Interest?

Mary Jo: Pinterest. As Paul Thurrott has called it, P-Interest. Also known as Pinterest. And yea, Boards let you take collections of content and kind of group those together so it’s easier to find things and for people to come back and reference the boards. This is going to be added to all the Delve installations as well. And I think probably on the same schedule, or roughly thereafter. So yea, now Delve which is like flip board with Pinterest combined. But it’s a business app.

Leo: I like this actually.

Mary Jo: I think it makes sense. It’s hard to find this kind of information. Why not make it more fun and easier, a nicer presentation.

Leo: On a side note, I’m looking at the Office blog and they have a nice little video which they’ve posted on YouTube. It’s a little embarrassing for Microsoft to have to put videos on YouTube.

Mary Jo: Not the new Microsoft.

Leo: They don’t care.

Mary Jo: They go where people are.

Paul: Mobile first, Leo.

Mary Jo: Mobile first, Cloud first.

Leo: YouTube solved it, why not use YouTube.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Is MSN Videos still a thing?

Mary Jo: I think it is.

Leo: Everyone uses YouTube for their videos. And it’s just like wow, I guess Google won. I guess they won that won. Anyway, code name of the week?

Mary Jo: Maybe you guys can help me pronounce this: Rigel? I think it’s the code name. It’s a constellation.

Paul: The planet or whatever?

Leo: I’ve heard it pronounced both way with a hard and soft G. It’s the GIF of constellations.

Mary Jo: Depending on how you want to pronounce it.

Leo: I think in Star Trek they pronounce it Ri-Gel.

Mary Jo: Do they? Okay. It’s Orion’s brightest star, if you were wondering.

Leo: Ooh, it’s in the belt.

Mary Jo: Yes. And what it is in the Microsoft ecosystem is the new code name for parature. And parature is part of the Microsoft dynamics platform. It’s a company that they bought last year that was based in Harden, Virginia. And what they do is customer care. So as a very nice compliment to Microsoft CRM. Parature, the new release that came out today, is adding a lot more customer-self-service kinds of features. It has 30 new features or more in total. And it also is expanding availability to many more countries. And now is available as well in 10 languages. So Microsoft bought this company. They took it and integrated it deeply into their own CRM portfolio. It looks like Microsoft’s own CRM online in terms of how it works, the user interface, how it’s presented to you in your dashboard. And now it’s available in more countries and a true part of the family. So it used to be called code name Phoenix and then they changed the code name to Rigel. So that’s what rolled out today. January 7^th, is parature, AKA Rigel.

Leo: And the internet pronounces Rigel… ri-gull.

Paul: Ri-gull?

Leo: No, see, it’s also Rigel. I swear to God.

Paul: I know from watching classic Star Trek that it’s Rigel.

Leo: Rigel.

Mary Jo: I’m going with Rigel.

Paul: It’s not Nigel. It’s Rigel.

Leo: Nas-gull. Nigel. Kong and Kotos are from Rigel 7. That’s the Simpsons. Finally, Trois Dames La Fiancee!

Mary Jo: Oh you pronounced it so much better than I would.

Leo: This is a beer?

Mary Jo: It is a beer. Trois Dames is the name of the brewery from Switzerland.

Leo: Three ladies.

Mary Jo: Yep. They make a lot of interesting beers that combine wine barrels or even wine grapes. They took…

Paul: I’m sorry. Before we get too far into this, can I just ask you a question?

Mary Jo: Yes.

Paul: 1000 unique check-ins on Untapped. Seriously? Let me just give you an idea of how big of a blow-up this is. I have 181 unique check-ins.

Leo: And he checks in all the time. I know, I drank beer with him. He’s obsessive.

Mary Jo: He’s not as obsessive as me.

Paul: 1000!

Leo: This is Mary Jo’s 1000^th beer, ladies and gentlemen!

Paul: No, this is her 1000^th check-in.

Mary Jo: 1000^th unique…

Leo: Oh that’s true, she may have had more beers.

Mary Jo: I have. I have one or two mores.

Paul: That’s incredible!

Leo: You’ve tasted a lot of different beers.

Paul: Your face should be the silhouette that is the logo for Untapped.

Mary Jo: You know when I checked in my 1000^th unique, I got a special tweet-out from Untapped. They said congratulations!

Paul: I’m sure it was also an achievement.

Mary Jo: Yep, I got a bad. It says extraordinary.

Leo: You must be… there can’t be a lot of competition at that lofty level.

Mary Jo: Oh there are. A lot of my friends are Untapped are onto their 5000^th unique.

Leo: Oh that’s nothing to be proud of. At this point, it’s a problem.

Mary Jo: But it didn’t take me a year, guys. This took me a while. This took a few years.

Paul: We get that you’re dedicated. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.

Mary Jo: And you can check-in tastes. I don’t have to check in a whole beer. Like if I’m at a beer tasting, I’ll check in like 12. And then I get a badge saying slow down, take it easy.

Paul: Do you really? The dubious badges. I see you’ve checked in five beers in 15 minutes at the same place. You may want to stand up and go for a walk.

Leo: Slow down. That’s crazy.

Mary Jo: But yea, this is my 1000^th, it was a great one. I was at Rattle ‘N’ Hum of course and they had this on tap. And it’s a really nice beer because it’s a saves on that combines regular saison with white pinot grape juice. So it really gives it a really good flavor, like really freshens it up. So it’s a saison that has white grape flavoring in it. And it was really good. I have to say, everything I’ve had from Trois Dames has been really good. If you ever get a chance to try any of their beers.

Leo: Alright, there you go. Trois Dames La Fiancee.

Paul: Congratulations, Mary Jo. I’m shaking my fist at you from…

Leo: Paul has no hair. Mary Jo has a 1000 beers. Who wins the internet? I give you Mary Jo Foley. Wow. Fun show. Paul, thank you for being so upstanding.

Mary Jo: Such a great sport.

Leo: You shaved it for UNICEF.

Paul: My kids, they never do anything right.

Leo: No, it’s great.

Mary Jo: I loved it. They were laughing.

Leo: It was really fun.

Paul: I told you, they took on a really discomforting glee.

Leo: That’s normal. My kids do the same thing. You’ll find Paul currently at the Super Site for Windows, winsupersite.com. Soon to be thurrott.com. Thurrott.com. When is that going to open?

Paul: Last day of the Super Site is going to be a week from Friday.

Leo: Will Thurrott be immediately ready?

Paul: Yea, it will be probably the next day, yea.

Leo: Okay. Mary Jo Foley stays so far at Davis’s pages, that’s her All About Microsoft column, allaboutmicrosoft.com. And we get together every Wednesday at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern time, 1900 UTC. To talk Windows and it’s the show you must listen to if you’re a Windows fanatic of you want to learn more about Windows. It is the best and I do say so myself. You can get on-demand versions at twit.tv/ww. Paul’s marveling at the feeling.

Mary Jo: I know, he’s dusting his desk.

Paul: I’m thinking Lumia orange for my hair.

Leo: You can also subscribe on your pod catcher or in one of the TWiT apps. There’s lots of ways to get it; there’s at least one-I think two-TWiT apps for phone. Dimitri Liani has done a beautiful job. But I think there’s a couple on there too. Hey thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time on Windows Weekly! Congratulations, Paul!