Windows Weekly 397 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are in Redmond. They have just come out of briefings on the latest from Microsoft Windows 10, the new browser, HoloLens, they even tried it. We will find out what they think 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.

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, episode 397, recorded January 21, 2015.

The Perfect 10

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Leo: It's time for Windows Weekly, the show that covers the latest news from Microsoft. Today, is perhaps, I'm going to venture out on a limb here, the biggest day for Microsoft since Windows XP maybe.

Paul Thurrott: Wow.

Leo: I'm going to give it some credit. Paul Thurrott is here, Mary Jo Foley is here, they are in Redmond where they just finished getting briefed on the announcements from Microsoft that began this morning at 9:00 at a super-secret location.

Paul: Leo, we have seen things we can never forget. You know?

Leo: It wasn't a very big room. It looked like there were maybe 50 people in there. You were sitting in comfy chairs and stuff.

Paul: Yeah, they were throwing paper balls at Alex from the back row. It was nice.

Leo: It was like this was the crem de la crem of Windows journalists. It's a shrinking cadre too, I might add, fewer and fewer each year. But boy, I have to say, I didn't come in for the announcement, we did cover it live with Megan Marooney and Mike Elgan. I thought well, I could skip this one because I'm going to be here with Paul and Mary Jo. I regret that because I feel like this was a massive announcement.

Paul: Yeah, I feel like it really was a big deal.

Leo: You don't disagree?

Mary Jo Foley: There were tons of parts. We were just sitting there and trying to write everything up, and it was like really, there was so much. Where do you even dig in here now?

Paul: The point being that we are never happy. In October there was not enough and we were complaining, and this time there was too much. There was lots of complaining. We are like children.

Mary Jo: It was good ice cream, though.

Leo: You got ice cream?

Mary Jo: Yeah, we got ice cream.

Leo: So the very first thing that they say that I think was significant was that Terry Myerson starts. What is he, the SVP for Operating Systems? He comes out and he says, well, we are going to give it away. 

Paul: Well, with a little asterisk.

Leo: That's the first thing that I am thinking as well. I have got to know what this means from Paul and Mary Jo. So they said that for users of Windows 7 and 8.1 that Microsoft Windows 10, the next version of Microsoft, will be free for the first year. What the hell does that mean?

Paul: And also for Windows Phone 8.

Leo: Oh, and that was big too.

Mary Jo: It was 8.1.

Leo: He held up a 1520. It warmed the cockles of my little heart here because this is the phone that I use. I feel like it is an orphan.

Paul: There have been a lot of 1520 today. There really has. I'm not just talking about Danny Rebino's incredible green 1520. These things were like everywhere.

Leo: That's good news. I love this phone. This, of all the phones they made, is I think the best example of Windows Phone.

Paul: So, with regards to this pricing thing, you want to take a stab at this? This is a little complex.

Mary Jo: We will both take a stab at it.

Leo: Did they fill you in? Did they give you more detail?

Paul: Yeah, they did.

Mary Jo: Yep, they did. So what they are going to do, this is for consumers we should say, first, not for business customers. If you are on the latest versions of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, or Windows Phone 8.1, once Windows 10 becomes commercially available, which we think is going to be this fall 2015, you will have one year to decide to upgrade for free. If you do that it means that you are going to allow Microsoft to update your software going forward on a regular basis. We don't know what that exactly means, how quickly, or what, but they are going to do that for free too. We've seen some people erroneously saying that this is the equivalent of Office 365, but it is not. Even though they said today that Windows is now considered a service.

Paul: Actually, I would say from an updating perspective it is like Office 365. From a licensing perspective it is not because you don't keep paying for it.

Leo: I'm going to be the normal human because I am sitting here watching and thinking, okay, they say for one year, does that mean that after one year I have to pay a yearly subscription fee?

Paul: That's an amazing question. No, that doesn't mean that.

Mary Jo: That does not mean that.

Leo: That's the first thing that leaps to mind because you know what, I don't trust companies. Free, I'm thinking okay, free for a year. That means that I have a year to upgrade.

Paul: That's interesting, it's not free for a year. You can upgrade to this version for free the first year.

Mary Jo: Within a year's period...

Paul: But it's not an ongoing payment subscription thing.

Mary Jo: No, it is not.

Leo: So once I upgrade to Windows 10 I will have the latest version of Windows 10 on my system at all times for no cost forever? 

Paul: That's correct. For the lifetime of the device.

Mary Jo: For the lifetime of the device or for the lifetime of what Microsoft says is the period that they support Windows 10.

Leo: Okay, so that makes sense. I don't know what the lifetime of the device means. I know that there is a lifetime for Windows 10 as there was for 7 and 8 that they go out of...

Paul: Honestly it's nothing that we have to parch too much because people who were going to upgrade their computers, meaning buy another computer, are going to get Windows 10 at that point anyway. We don't really need to worry about it.

Leo: You know why I'm interested? Because I just bought that new Dell XPS 13, and I knew when I was buying it that I might be buying it with the old OS, and in 8 months got to I don't know what. So this is great news. This means that I have a Windows 10 machine.

Mary Jo: Yep, you do. For free.

Leo: For free. Even more importantly, I can't underscore how important this is, if you have Windows Phone 8 or 8.1 you have a Windows 10 phone.

Paul: You highlighted what I guess was the most important question or the most obvious question. Let's throw out two more questions that actually weren't answered per say. I guess one of them was, Windows RT. What about the Windows RT devices? I actually asked during the the Q & A what the plan was. They said that they don't have specifics right now, but they do plan to invest to upgrade existing Windows RT devices to Windows 10.

Mary Jo: No, they didn't say that. They didn't say that.

Paul: What? I thought he very specifically said that.

Leo: Now, you are across the table from one another, so if you want to leap across the table and grab Paul by the throat you have my permission.

Mary Jo: I think what he said was we are going to upgrade Windows RT devices, ARM based Windows RT devices, but he didn't say to Windows 10. He just said that we are going to have an update to those devices. So we don't actually know what that means. Does it mean to Windows 10?

Paul: You are really parceling that sentence.

Leo: Well, she's covered Microsoft for a while Paul. I think that she...

Mary Jo: Yeah, I thought the wording was very curious. Like I think if it was we are going to upgrade you to Windows 10 he would have said that, but what he said was we are going to update Windows RT devices, and we have a plan, but we don't have the details yet. We don't know exactly how that is going to work, but we are going to update them. So he didn't actually say to 10.

Leo: Think of what it would mean. It would mean not Windows. I know this distinction is starting to go away...

Paul: They should call it Windows ARM Leo. 

Leo: The distinction between Intel Windows and ARM Windows goes away a little bit, but for RT devices or ARM devices it seems like it is going to be the Windows Phone version of Windows 10 that they would upgrade.

Paul: I would think so. I would be shocked if that isn't what they meant.

Leo: There is really going to be 2 Windows, an ARM Windows 10 and an Intel Windows 10. I know there is a unified app, and we will get to that, but it sounds like if you are going to upgrade RT you have to upgrade it to Windows Phone 10.

Paul: Yeah, except that that OS, which we will just think of as Windows Mobile, I think is for devices that are under 8 inch screen size. I guess we will see. That's interesting.

Leo: This is a small group of people. Not that many people on RT devices. Just you, me, and Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: Me.

Paul: Okay, but it is very boring to those people, I can tell you that. Early adopters, you know, they are going to want to be part of that. The other one is Windows Phone. You will recall from right up front we were talking about if you have Windows Phone 8.1 on your device you will get a free upgrade to Windows 10, which is interesting because not unique to Microsoft because Microsoft has trouble shipping updates today on Windows Phone.

Leo: I'm still not on Denim on my 1520.

Paul: So the story there is that we need to wait until Build I think in April to hear more about this. They have a plan, they are not talking about it today. So that's not a big part of the story today, but it's something to think about so. They have said that they will make it available. They haven't said how. So I guess we will see.

Leo: Okay.

Mary Jo: Yeah, so they did say today that, I guess I'm kind of jumping ahead here, so I won't say that yet.

Leo: What I thought we would do, and I thought you agreed, that the structure of this should be to use the keynote as the backbone of what we do. So Terry Myerson came out, he gave a lot of facts and figures, 1.5 billion users and you know blah, blah, blah, the traditional keynote kind of warm them up thing. How great we are doing, how great you are doing.

Paul: You are a great crowd.

Leo: We love you. And then Joe comes out, Joe Bellifori comes out...

Mary Jo: With a haircut by the way. He got his hair cut.

Leo: Yeah, it still looks kind of long, but it looks good. I like Joe.

Mary Jo: Joe is great.

Paul: I don't know anyone who doesn't like Joe.

Leo: He's a nice guy. I will tell you what, he's a great demonstrator. He really is a good speaker at these events. He's going to show the user interface. So by the way, he starts out on desktop, and low and behold a Start menu pops up.

Paul: Yeah, by the way, if you pause it there for a second just to sort of focus on that start screen and just the desktop in general, this UI has evolved since the version that we had in the Technical Preview from last year.

Leo: Ah, interesting.

Paul: The Start menu has a new look and feel to it. I didn't really go and look at the machines too much, I looked a little bit at Windows 10, I looked at that continuum mode and so forth. If you notice in some of the screens there is kind of a lighter thing going on, and then there is kind of a darker thing going on. I know that we talked about dark and light themes, and I think that may be part of it. But there is a button up there in the corner where you can stretch the Start screen to the whole screen if you want to.

Leo: Ah.

Paul: And when that thing is full screen it looks almost like a Start screen.

Leo: So you have the option, but it looks like the default is not to be full screen.

Paul: Right, not on the desktop computer, right.

Leo: So we see tiles, but it also is kind of a menu thing too, right?

Paul: It's evolved from the version that we had before, but it is very familiar.

Leo: The on / off switch is now here instead of hidden in the Charms bar. On the tiled menu that is up at the top of the screen now on Windows 8.1. It's very familiar looking to anyone who used Windows 7. You've got the icons in the Task menu, you've got the Task bar in the lower right, and you’ve got Joe and his family from Guatemala, even a recycle bin in the upper right hand corner. This is Windows like Windows 7 Windows.

Mary Jo: Yep, this is Windows for Windows 7 users not to scare them away.

Leo: Is this default? This is how it is going to start, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: So they did say, right now you are looking at the desktop version of Windows 10, and we did learn today that next week there is going to be the next Technical Preview Build release for the people who have Windows 10 Preview now. So those people are going to get a refresh next week. We don't know which day, but sometime next week.

Leo: Wow, so the Technical Preview people will be up to what is it, 9499, or whatever Build they are up to.

Paul: I saw it and I forgot it. It was 9927 or something like that.

Leo: Now this is interesting. I guess when he goes full screen I will stop it on this. No more Charms bar, but there is something on the right.

Mary Jo: Yay.

Paul: Yeah, yay. So what you see there, it's kind of hard in that long shot, but Notification Center, it's called Action Center. It's the same on Windows Phone, so you get all of the app specific and system specific notifications brought out. You can deal with them one at a time or whatever. On the bottom there is those Quick Action boxes, and again, same as on Windows Phone. Just quick things that you may want to get to very quickly. If you swipe in on a touch screen you will get to this. There is a little icon down there if you are on a keyboarded system as well.

Leo: I like this. You know, what is interesting is that is what the Mac does. It's exactly like what the Mac does. I do like the addition of these quick actions. Can you customize these Quick Action buttons?

Paul: Yeah, just like on Windows Phone.

Leo: I really like this. I have to say that this is much better than a Charm Bar.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Paul: I don't think anyone is shedding a tear for charms.

Mary Jo: I think that I know one person.

Leo: Charms was one of the, you know there were like 5 things that horrible on Windows 8 and that was 1 of them.

Paul: That might be number 1.

Leo: It might have been number 1. But more than that, more than taking away Charms, this looks very useful.

Paul: Actually, nice shot right there. You can see down at the bottom, see how many tiles there are down there, he has kind of expanded the Quick Actions area.

Leo:  I see Collapse, the Collapse button.

Paul: You don't see that in Windows Phone today, but in 10 that will be there as well.

Leo: You know, I didn't know that this feature wasn't in Windows Phone. Is this the Notification?

Paul: Yeah, you can drag it down from the top of the screen.

Leo: Okay, okay.

Paul: So on the 1520...

Leo: Oh, I see. There are these tiles, but they are at the top on a Windows Phone. They are up here on the top. So, okay, that's actually a really great feature. But it's very phone like, isn't it?

Paul: Yeah, yeah it is. In fact it is really the same thing potentially at this point.

Leo: So this is really the conundrum that Microsoft faced when they went from 7 to 8. How do we make an OS that works on mobile, on tablet, and on desktop? The first generation wasn't great, but this looks pretty darn good.

Paul: Yeah, and so obviously there are these concessions to the original form factors. The metro stuff isn't as big and kind of cartoony or Fisher Pricy as it used to be. I think that is a concession for people on desktop or traditional computers.

Leo: He detached his Surface from the keyboard, so he is showing...

Paul: Pause it right there for a second so that we can talk about that. So do you want to talk about Continuum? 

Mary Jo: Continuum, yep. So in the September event they promised that we were going to have this thing called Continuum which was going to be a way that they operating system recognized if you had a keyboard attached and when you didn't. So when you didn't the appropriate UI would show up, and when you did a different UI would show up. It would be very seamless instead of having this thing like oh, do I have the keyboard attached? Now I'm doing things in a different way, and why doesn't the system automatically recognize that? So they showed us Continuum today. I think that they said, they didn't say that it would be in the next Technical Preview...

Paul: It will. My understanding that it will be there. It will only be there for Surfaces. That is how I took it.

Mary Jo: Oh really? Really?

Paul: When I was in the demo room somebody told me that the PC makers would need to explicitly support this. So if you don't have a supported detachable you can trigger this manually. It's Tablet Mode, I think it's a Quick Action or whatever.

Leo: It looked like when he detached it that there was a popup. He had to physically say yes, go into tablet mode now. And vice versa when he reattached.

Paul: You don't want to have the context shifting all of the time.

Leo: No, I agree. This is very nicely done I think.

Mary Jo: We forgot to talk about settings too. They showed us the new Settings menu in this and it looks so much better. It looks organized. 

Paul: By the way, I love Windows Phone, but if there is a tragedy in Windows Phone it's settings, which is in no order of any kind whatsoever and cannot be modified or changed. So this new settings interface is also being applied over the phone. In other words, if you are familiar with Android or anything else, obviously these things are segregated to logical groups, wireless, and networking, and things like that. That is how Settings will be on Windows 10 on phones or Windows 10 on tablets and computers.

Leo: This is so great. I was watching, and he briefly held up this device, and I was trying to figure out what it was. It looks like another Surface Pro.

Paul: Yeah, it's an 8 inch tablet. It's probably like a new 8 Pro or something like that.

Leo: Not a Microsoft product?

Mary Jo: No.

Paul: That is correct. The point is here a little subtle because 8 inches is this dividing line between whether you get the full blown experience or the phone and small tablet experience. So if you are on a device that has a screen that is smaller than 8 inches, not this device but something smaller, the UI will look more like Windows Phone, which they will get to. But for 8 inches and up you get Continuum, right, if you use this thing as a tablet what you get is something much like Windows 8.

Leo: It would be this look, which is a very tabletly thing.

Paul:  Yeah.

Leo: He's showing how you snap and swipe things away, and all of that is the same.

Paul: Basically, basically yeah.

Leo: Shortly after this he is going to start talking with a young lady named Cortana.

Paul: Yeah, we can skip through that a little bit. That was a bit long.

Leo: A lot of Cortana. It's not particularly new stuff, or is it, with Cortana?

Paul: Well, I think that the new bit is that thanks to Windows 10 Cortana comes to tablets.

Leo: Well that is huge actually.

Paul: And I guess that it comes to Xbox One, although they never actually said that.

Leo: That is something that we should mention. Windows 10 is everywhere, including XBox.

Mary Jo: It will be. It's not yet.

Leo: Remember when we talked about Satya Nadella, what looked like a gaffe, One Windows, it's not just a kernel, he really wants there to be One Windows across all of these different UIs.

Paul: The magic kind of unknown here is, of course this was not a developer event, there was no developer info as you would expect, but how easy will it be for someone to start up a project in Visual Studio and write up a universal app where you have a version that goes out to a phone, small tablets, big tablets, PCs, Xbox One?

Leo: Even this notion of universal app is new, isn't it?

Mary Jo: No, not really.

Paul: It's evolving. I guess it is. You know, but it's fair to say with this version, for the first time Windows developers can target the screen in your living room. I don't know who said this, but someone said that they didn't expect Excel to be running on a Xbox One.

Leo: Or PowerPoint. They used PowerPoint on a phone as an example.

Paul: Actually PowerPoint would be a good idea.

Leo: This is mind boggling. I feel like this is, and key to developers, let's face it, Windows developers are still going to develop for the desktop, but they weren't developing for the mobile devices. They weren't doing phones. Now they can.

Paul: This gives them a much bigger area to target, right? In other words, before you would said that Windows Phone and Windows were different API's and so what is the...

Leo: Right, too much work.

Paul: They bring those things closer together and then they add in, they have kind of a more seamless experience across a wider range of devices including XBox One.

Leo: I do feel like this will help Windows Phone. This announcement in many ways is the best news that you could possibly have for Windows Phone. And for Xbox in a way because it means, Nadella was rumored to be planning to sell off the XBox Division; clearly he isn't. In fact, it's part of his Devices and Services strategy. Windows Phone, this is a big, big story for Windows Phone. They are not dumping Windows Phone.

Mary Jo: No, they definitely are not dumping Windows Phone. That was a big part of this keynote, which is hey, we've got a version of Windows that is going to run on Windows Phone, Windows 10.

Leo: If you can get developers, I don't know what a universal app means if you write an app for the desktop I don't know what it means to put it on the phone. Not all apps size well to the phone.

Mary Jo: The things that are common are that the kernel is common now, the runtime is common across the different platforms, and many of the APIs are common. So the thinking with the universal app is that you as a developer take your core code and you only have to modify the part that kind of adjusts the UIPs.

Leo: I think that developers are used to that. They know that.

Paul: They do it on iPad vs. iPhone already. The piece that's being added, well a couple of pieces on this system desktop compatibility meets mouse and pen and then on a game system it means a controller.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: The only thing that was a little weird with Cortana, and they have been doing this, there was a canned recorded human voice that sounds great, and that's where all of the snark comes from. Oh, Joe...then it was like how much does it cost to go to the University of Washington it's back to a robotic voice. Not super robotic, but it's clearly different.

Paul: It's not the voice quality, it's the unnatural like talking to this inanimate object like it was a person.

Leo: They are the only ones who do that. Neither Google nor Apple does that.

Paul: Nor do users.

Leo: And humans don't talk in human voices and mechanical voices. Here is a little...you hear it right there. So she starts out in a nice normal voice and then starts to sound like a robot. I don't know.

Paul: It's like when Skype breaks down.

Leo: Maybe it's just me.

Mary Jo: I think also it's going to take them time to record all of these different pieces. Some of the answers they haven't recorded in the voice probably.

Leo: Well some they will never be able to record because they are actual answers. How much does the University of Washington cost?

Mary Jo: I will tell you, the thing on the Cortana demo that I loved the most, we are used to Cortana giving you answers like who won the game, or what is the weather today? But then they showed this thing where somebody could say on the PC, "Hey Cortana, could you get me the PowerPoint presentation that I need for blah, blah, blah?" I was like oh, finally, it's not just a party trick. It's something that you might actually use on your PC. That means Cortana can search your OneDrive, right?

Leo: That's critical. Cortana searches everywhere.

Paul: Hard drive, OneDrive, and OneDrive for Business.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Plus, of course, the web. That's pretty great.

Paul: I'm sorry, searching for files.

Mary Jo: So that, to me, was like, okay, I don't really want Cortana on my PC.

Leo: This was kind of critical, this notion of privacy and trust. Early on they had a little dig at Google saying you are not the product of Microsoft. 

Paul: It's an important distinction to make.

Leo: Yeah, and we have talked about this before, Apple cannot do this because they don't own all of your interactions. Google can because they have got all of this information. Microsoft will have all of this information, so what you are going to do is compare this Microsoft vs. Google. Who do I trust with all of this information. Microsoft makes a very strong case, trust us. I think that is good. It gives consumers a choice. Apple does the same thing, they say trust us, but they don't know as much. Microsoft, because this explains the hundreds of millions of dollars that is pumped into the black hole that is Bing, right? This is the payoff.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Okay, you said no more Cortana.

Paul: The Cortana stuff is a little much.

Mary Jo: It went on a little long.

Leo: It went on, and on, and on, and on. Let's move on.

Paul:  They are very taken with Cortana.

Leo: Well.

Paul: No, I get it.

Leo: You know what I would say? There was certainly a big portion of what they announced today was about new user interfaces, right? New ways to interact. So Cortana is one of them. Multi touch change computing; that was a new way to interact. We will get to the HoloLens glasses. Let's see, I'm just going to skip around. What do you want to talk about next? I can just fire it up. Let's take a break. Let's take a break because we have time to do that. I will pose Joe Bellifori in a particularly compromising part of his presentation and we will continue.

Paul: Flattering.

Leo: Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, they are in Redmond. They have just come off of an entire day of hearing what Microsoft has to say about the new Windows 10. I don't know if they would say it, but I will say it; I think that it is one of the biggest events that Microsoft has made in years. It's really exciting. It feels like a revitalized, reenergized Microsoft. I think that is a very good thing for consumers even if you are not a Windows user because competition makes a big difference. You don't want it to just be Apple, and Facebook, and Google. You want some other people. Our show today is brought to you by our friends at ZipRecruiter, a great solution for people who have to do some hiring. Anytime you have to do hiring ZipRecruiter is there to help you. You realize that it is much easier in these days of the internet to hire new employees. There are a lot of job boards, but where do you post? Posting your job in one place probably isn't enough to find all of the quality candidates who are out there. If you want to find the perfect hire the ideal would be to post to all of the job sites with one click, and you can. This is such a cool idea, it's a Meta job site. With ziprecruiter.com you post your job to more than 50 job sites including Craigslist, the social sites Craigslist, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and Facebook all with one click of the mouse. You will find candidates in any city, any industry, all over the country. You post once and you watch your qualified candidates roll in. What is nice is you are not going to get the emails and the phone calls, ZipRecruiter does. They help you organize the candidates, screen them, rate them, and hire the right person fast. I love that. No wonder ZipRecruiter is so popular with many of the biggest businesses in the country. Over 250,000 businesses, including at TWiT, we use ZipRecruiter and we are so happy with it. I want you to try it right now. All you have to do is go to ziprecruiter.com/windows and we've got a 4 day free trial for you. Believe it or not 4 days, that is probably all you need. You will find that person fast. Ziprecruiter.com/windows, join these big companies; AT&T, Volkswagen, and Marriott, and Netflix, and Target, and Starbucks, and Macy's, and PayPal, and Dell, and all of these companies who use ZipRecruiter for hiring. Ziprecruiter.com/windows, we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly.

Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, they are in Redmond in an undisclosed location. Did they give you a nice room there?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Yeah, a little conference room? I have to note that that big display, I guess it's on the left of this shot, say's Microsoft. That's a Perceptive Pixel display I would guess.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: They showed it a little later on. They were drawing on it and stuff. They are going to sell this as the, what do they call it, the Surface Hub?

Mary Jo: Surface Hub. But Surface Hub is more than just the Perceptive Pixel display. It is a computer. Perceptive Pixel displays, up to this point, have been displays. They haven't been computers.

Leo: An 84 inch display. A giant display.

Mary Jo: There is actually going to be 2 different sizes, 55 and 84 inch in this new Surface Hub. What it is is a conferencing system. It's a whole conferencing system. They built optimized versions of Skype for Business, which is Link. They have a new app called Connect. What else do they have on there?

Leo: Connect, c-o-n-n-e-c-t, or k-i-n-e-c-t?

Mary Jo: C-o-n-n-e-c-t.

Leo: Oh come on.

Mary Jo: Yep. It has 2 cameras. See what looks like wings on the sides there? There are cameras there and there are speakers built in. There are multi touch and multi pen capabilities on that thing. We don't know pricing. We think availability is going to be around the time that Windows 10 is available, so maybe towards the end of this year again. It's this whole different thing. It's a complete system meant to make meetings better. It's not just a big screen, it's something more now.

Leo: I think that it is kind of cool, but like anything cool it probably costs a lot of money.

Mary Jo: Well, you know, I talked to Jeff Han, who is the guy who owned Perceptive Pixel before Microsoft bought his company, and he said, you know what, it's not going to be super cheap obviously, but we are definitely targeting to make it so affordable that anybody could have one in their office. Not just Bill and Steve, like anybody.

Leo: So that's like what, $8,000? $7,000?

Mary Jo: We have no idea. It's not going to be like for everyday consumers to have in home.

Leo: I would love to have this in my conference room, though, are you kidding?

Mary Jo: I bet at TWiT you could afford to have one of these for sure, yeah.

Leo: At school maybe?

Mary Jo: Yeah, yep.

Leo: You wouldn't buy more than one at a school, but it would sure be great to have somewhere. It's big.

Mary Jo: It's big at 84, and it's also 4k, a 4k display as well.

Leo: Can you watch TV on it?

Paul: No Leo! It does computer stuff.

Leo: Come on, I want to watch TV on it. Really, seriously, you can't?

Mary Jo: I don't think that you can. I don't know. They have a build in Wi-Fi.

Leo: Well, it's got a browser, doesn't it have a browser? You could watch Netflix on it.

Paul: It's a Windows 10 computer, so there are a couple of apps that have been refined for this computer, but I assume that it comes with whatever comes with Windows 10, I don't know.

Leo: Somebody is saying for the 55 inch that it is about $8,500.

Mary Jo: Right now.

Leo: Oh, right now.

Mary Jo: We don't know the price of this at all.

Leo:  This is not the current Perceptive Pixel product they are selling?

Mary Jo: Nope, no, no.

Leo: Does it have HDMI in?

Paul: We don't know, but it must. They said one cable, but I don't know if that meant power. I don't know.

Mary Jo: I don't know either.

Paul: It has Wi-Fi___33, and Bluetooth, and NFC. All kinds of stuff.

Leo: I want it.

Mary Jo: It's pretty cool, yea. It makes Perceptive Pixel usable and more interesting to a whole different category of people who probably just kind of wrote it off before. 

Leo: Yeah, that's an interesting product.

Mary Jo: Yeah, Jeff Han said that in his office he has it set up like a drafting table. So he has a giant screen, like an all glass screen drawing table and he uses it with the pen like to have his desktop instead of having a regular computer.

Leo: Isn't that how they use it on the Shepard Smith news show?

Paul: You mean isn't that how they used it on the deck of the Starship Enterprise?

Mary Jo: Exactly. We were joking about getting loaners. I couldn't even fit that in my apartment.

Leo: I know, I don't know what you would do with it.

Paul: Load bearing wall.

Leo: You know what you could do? You could fit an under 8 inch device in your apartment, couldn't you?

Mary Jo: I could.

Leo: That's about what Joe is about to talk about right now, Windows 10 on the under 8 inch devices. Does that mean phones?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Yeah phones and very small tablets.

Leo: It does include small tablets. 

Paul: They didn't use the term Windows Mobile at which I think we are all disappointed. I believe they just in the blogpost it says Windows 10 for Phones and Tablets. In the show they called it that, they also called it Windows for Phones and Small Tablets. I think the point of its name is that it's Windows 10, but it's a version or a SKU of how they are going to do it, then they will decide. So it's going to look a lot like Windows Phone does today.

Leo: He's holding up a 1520 right now, a nice red 1520. So this is the new Windows 10 interface?

Paul: Yeah, it looks like Windows Phone. One of the big differences, not a big difference, but the background image is actually in the background now for a change, which a lot of people wanted, and you can actually enable transparency and actually see it through the tiles, which is actually a cool feature for a phone.

Leo: That is nice. They rearranged the scrolling apps list?

Paul: He will show you the settings in a moment, I believe, which is huge, because that again has been broken in Windows Phone. Oh, first is Action Center.

Leo: Oh, Action Center.

Paul: It works just like the version in the desktop.

Leo: Little bit new color scheme, but not much has changed there.

Paul: But it's consistent now with the desktop version.

Leo: Oh, the desktop? In fact you can add tiles, nice.

Paul: Yeah, bunches and bunches.

Leo: I like that. The more I use kind of the junked up Samsung phones and such the more I appreciate the cleanliness and the unity around Windows Phone. It just looks like it's not a camel, it was designed by a person, not a committee. So he's showing the keyboard now, and they still have the flow or whatever they call it.

Paul: Wordflow. You will appreciate this bit coming up, because on a larger device of this type, like a very large phone or a very small tablet, a fablet, they use the term fablet explicitly as well, you can enable a one handed mode for that Wordflow keyboard, which I think he is about to show. You know that it's impossible to type on that thing one handed unless you are...

Leo: I kind of like it for two hands. It's kind of like a BlackBerry, I use 2 thumbs and I hold it side by side. Oh look, cool. So he shrunk it down like a window?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: That's nice, cool.

Mary Jo: Yeah, so the thing that we learned today, which I had a leak on, was that the preview for this isn't coming out until sometime in February. So this is the mobile SKU even though like Paul said, they didn't call it mobile. But the first technical preview for the phones and the small tablets will be sometime in February.

Leo: Can you, in the Action Center, can you in line respond to texts and things like that?

Paul: Yes, now you can. So that's kind of nice.

Leo: So he's doing it right here.

Paul: In fact he is doing it right now. That's new, that wasn't there before.

Leo: Love that.

Paul: For some reason during this demo what they were focusing on was the demo, and I was like the big news is right there at the top. For the same reason that it's good on iPhones, you are doing something and someone texts you, you want to respond without it causing you to leave the thing that you are doing. With this system you can do it on top of there and get back to what you are doing.

Leo: Nice.

Paul: I think that is a big deal.

Leo: Do we think that Windows Phone 10 or whatever they call it will come out at the same time as Windows 10 desktop?

Paul: I would think it would have to.

Mary Jo: I believe so, yeah.

Leo: So this is all due in the fall?

Mary Jo: We think, yeah.

Leo: If you are in the Windows Insider Program you will get it in the spring we think.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: They are showing the texting. This is kind of a tour of the new features. I want to say that its Windows Phone, but it isn't Windows Phone, it's for under 8 inch devices.

Paul: So, I don't know too much about this kind of thing, but I believe that on IOS they have a feature now where you can move text messages between different networks and go from iMessage to MMS, or SMS, etc. They are adding that to Windows Phone, and people who have been using Windows Phone from day 1 will tell you that is how it used to work back in Windows Phone 7 when they had messenger on there instead of Skype. Now they are going to support IP based messaging and IP based calling too. So I guess phone calls and text messages you will be able to move between network types and it will do it automatically and pick the best one based on what you've got.

Leo: I kind of got the impression that this was Microsoft's attempt to get everyone to use Skype for messaging period.

Paul: Even when they stopped that integrated approach in messenger, because it supported some other things too, I don't remember what else you could do in there, but yeah, that was clearly the feeling. They were moving towards Skype as the preferred messaging client.

Leo: This too, one of the reasons that you can move messages around is so that you can do what they would like you to do, which is to move it to Skype. It felt like Skype was kind of first among equals.

Mary Jo: Yep, that's for sure.

Leo: Which I don't mind. I don't mind, Skype does a good job. Windows 10 will have a version tuned for touch devices under 8 inches. The only phone designed to go with your Windows 10 PC. By the way, that was one of those things Satya Nadella said at the end and really wanted to emphasize that despite the fact that we are now a devices and services company, and we are cross platform, and you said this before, that the best experience...

Paul: They never explained this, and this is the thing that I have been saying, which is that devices and services are fine. Going where your customer's are is fine, it's pragmatic, it's logical. But you have got to have some kind of a system where it is Windows Best.

Leo: And that is what he says, right?

Paul: He finally said it, which is basically what I have been asking for for a while.

Leo: It sounded familiar. That was you!

Paul: Yep, yep. Yeah, I said that in 2014.

Leo: The best experience has to be in Windows 10. That's what you said.

Paul: For 2015 we have to add Windows Best to the end of that. That is what he said.

Leo: He said that. He literally said that. That is great. You must be very happy Paul.

Paul: I'm always very happy Leo, you know that.

Leo: Yeah, he says right there integrated messaging and calling across the largest global network of users. MO, I don't know what that is, that's Skype.

Paul: Mobile operator.

Leo: Oh, mobile operator. That's SMS. That's Skype. So you see that it's mobile operator and Skype, the two together. Then of course universal apps.

Paul: That's like saying between the Mac and the PC that's 100% of all PCs.

Leo: Right, almost. A few people have something else, a few. Okay, next moving along universal apps, a Universal App Store, which I thought was interesting. Is that the case?

Mary Jo: That's the common store across Windows 10, Windows Phone 10, and Xbox. That's basically what he is saying. The new way about talking about apps that we used to call metro style or Windows Store, they are calling them universal apps. That is pretty much the way of calling them.

Leo: That's a little confusing because you are also talking about the fact that apps can be written to be universal.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: But they are not guaranteed just because they are in the Universal Store to be universal apps are they? Or are they?

Paul: That's true. The developers can optionally choose which platform or platforms they support. They don't have to do all of them or whatever. But I think that the point of the universal app thing is that most of the built in apps in Windows now will be universal apps. So the people app, or the photos app, or whatever you get on a phone is actually the same app that you get on a tablet, or a desktop PC, or whatever.

Leo: I get it. I get it. So here he is, for instance, showing PowerPoint on a Nokia 1520. It's exactly the same, but it is sized for that screen.

Paul: This is fairly analogous to the Office for iPhone apps, right? Although, I will have to go and look, but as we was going through this demo I thought that there was a lot more stuff in there in the ribbon as they are calling it than I remember seeing on the iPhone. I didn't have it with me at the time, but I think that it is very possible and probable that this is an example of that Windows Best thing where these things will in fact be better.

Mary Jo: We guess that that will be the case, right? You want to give Windows users some incentive to be on Windows. If the apps were exactly the same, right?

Paul: I do.

Mary Jo: I think that you do.

Paul: Until today they never said anything explicitly about this.

Leo: The fact today that the only touch version of Office is on iPad. It isn't even available on Windows.

Paul: There is an Office Mobile thing.

Leo: It's not the same.

Paul: This is coming. It's coming.

Mary Jo: An interesting thing about what you are seeing right now is that this is touches first Office. Sometimes I call it Gemini when we talk about it on the show. It's the universal app so it is going to be the same on tablets and PCs. We don't know when we are going to see the first public preview of this, but one of my sources has said February, which would line up with what they were doing with Windows 10 on Phones and Small Tablets.

Leo: Will it come with Touch First Office?

Mary Jo: This is super interesting. It is. So if you have a Windows device you are going to get Touch First Office built in for free.

Leo: There you go, it's best in Windows 10. That's a way of saying that.

Mary Jo: Smaller tablets and phones, Paul, or also all? I can't remember which.

Paul: Smaller tablets and phones. It's the mobile SKU.

Mary Jo: It is, okay.

Paul: Under 8 inches.

Mary Jo: And over 8 inches you are going to probably subscribe like you do for Touch First Office.

Paul: To get full functionality. I would be shocked if these apps weren't in the store for everyone else for free with perhaps that same limited, semi limited, functionality that you see on iPad, Android, and iPhone.

Leo: He is showing Outlook on a phone. When I go to the Universal Store I presume each app will have icons under it showing which things that it will run on.

Paul: We actually see a little bit of that in the store today. There are apps, we don't really call them universal apps right now, but they are also available on Windows Phone. Often if you paid for it the license gives you the phone version for free if you paid for it.

Leo: That was my question. So I will buy it once and it will run on all Windows 10 compatible devices.

Paul: I believe that is a requirement. Maybe it isn't, but I believe that that is a requirement if you are going to charge for a universal app then it needs to work across the platforms. I'm not sure about that.

Mary Jo: I think that it is up to the developer actually if you want to charge people multiple times or you don't.

Paul: Sometimes I talk and it sounds untrue as I say it.

Mary Jo: It's good when we are across the table because we can look at each other like what?

Leo: What? You are crazy.

Paul: How dare you.

Mary Jo: Oh yeah, we saw Spartan briefly.

Leo: The new browser.

Mary Jo: The new browser, yeah. We didn't learn a whole lot about it. They just said, hey, we have this new browser, project Spartan, it is coming sometime to the Tech Previews for the Desktop and to the phone and tablets.

Paul: So it's not going to be in the 6th drop? 

Mary Jo: I do not believe that it is.

Paul: Yeah, on the machines.

Mary Jo: I think that he said in the coming months. I don't think that it is going to be in the first drop.

Leo: He just showed some Swype features on mail that are direct copies from IOS.

Paul: Oh, they are. Yes they are.

Leo: But that's okay because it works.

Paul: It's fine. I think that it's fine. I think that there are some universal mobile UI's that we just need to accept that are going to be everywhere. The pull down on a list to refresh, I think that it need to be everywhere.

Leo: No, exactly, I think that makes it easy.

Paul: As soon as they announced it half the room lit up just exactly like that.

Leo: I know that we have seen that before somewhere. You know what else is good, is that Google is doing it with inbox. Let's see, moving on, let's go to Xbox, what do you say?

Paul: Okay. Very cool.

Leo: Okay, before we do that, before we do that, universal calendar apps. So he is showing on the left a desktop and on the right a phone.

Paul: Oh, we didn't ask about Gmail support. Gosh darn it.

Mary Jo: No we didn't.

Leo: You know that Gmail is supported now on my Windows Phone.

Paul: Not on Windows, but actually you would think with unified platform that they would support it. I hope and assume that that is the case.

Leo: It's on my Windows Phone. I'm looking at it.

Paul: I didn't ask. We forgot that one.

Mary Jo: We will ask.

Paul: This is the photos app. So this is going to be Google because the photos app in Windows 8.1 is broken to be kind and is horrible. The point here really isn't so much that they are just updating this one app. These apps are all being updated and made into universal apps so they are going to work across the different devices. They have a kind of Spartan new UI if you will meaning less chrome and stuff though. They will, of course they will work on desktop computers. So Xbox? The big part of the day.

Mary Jo: So Xbox.

Leo: The most important announcement. But Mary Jo, Xbox is not a gaming machine anymore. It is the hub for your entire experience.

Paul: Yeah, that's a good way to put it Leo.

Leo: Isn't it?

Paul: Well we didn't learn too much about Xbox One per say, although there is a kind of confusing array of Xbox apps in Windows 8.1 today. The Xbox games app, which has not been updated since 8.0 and still has that old kind of panorama UI is going to be replaced by just a Xbox app. It's going to have all of the activity, friending, and all of that stuff that you expect from Xbox on it; look at your achievements, compare achievements, start games, whatever. It's nice looking, it's all of that kind of stuff. I think that the cool bit there is, there is a couple of things, but one of the big ones is that you are going to be able to stream games on a Xbox One on a local network to a Windows tablet or computer. What that means is that you can plug in a Xbox One controller and go continue playing a game on a different machine essentially, even though your Xbox is really running it in the background.

Leo: I'm so happy.

Paul: Yeah, so if you are taking up the big screen in the den and the other people want to watch TV, you can just leave it there, let them watch TV, and you can go play, you know, not virtually, but over the network. That looked good. We will have to see what this looks like in real life. I asked them kind of logical follow-ups to this stuff. What about going in reverse? What about playing PC games on a XBox One? After all, there are a lot of PC games that are not on a Xbox One and never will be. They might need to do that. They are absolutely looking into that. I said, what about Xbox 360? This would be a way to achieve the compatibility problems in Xbox One going too. He said that they are looking at that too. No promises, but that stuff is possibly coming. Then this Direct X 12, which is just the next version of Direct X, seems to be like 50% less power consumption which is a big deal for mobile devices obviously. What else with XBox? I feel like there is something else that I am forgetting.

Mary Jo: Why are you looking at me? That whole segment I just sat there and wrote my net blog.

Leo: Okay, finally, I can file. A break, a break in the action.

Paul: I'm forgetting something on the Xbox side. It's bothering me.

Leo: Game DVR. Any Windows 10 device I can play my Xbox games on streaming. Oh, that was one of the questions. It looked like it was on the homeland, but could you do that on the internet too, or no?

Paul: No, just on the homeland. Game is kind of interesting. They are going to support on all games the ability to record clips like you do on the XBox One today, including the go back in time thing, because if you are playing a game and something awesome happens, and you want to record it, but it just happened, so if you aren't recording then you won't get it. But they will go back in time 30 seconds I think it was, or 60 seconds, and let you grab that clip as you do now on Xbox One. It will work on non-Xbox games. If you have Steam and you play games it will work on those games.

Leo: Really?

Paul: Yeah, it will work on those games as well.

Leo: That's a big category.

Paul: Well game recording, and those networks where people watch other people game and stuff has got a big business. Oh, I forgot that there was another part. Actually there is another part, that the thing they are showing now is Fable, and Fable and Minecraft will be the first 2 games, not really, but the first 2 games from FXX1 anyway, that are cross platform. You are going to be able to jump into a game where people are playing on XBox One and you are on a PC and vice versa.

Leo: Oh hallelujah. So right now if you are playing a game on the PC you can't go over to the Xbox and play the same people. It's a different game.

Paul: So this is going to be up to the game developer, and I would say that many types of games like first person shooters where it doesn't make sense to have controller and keyboard / mouse mix because keyboard / mouse would be so much more precise and it wouldn't be fair; you probably aren't going to see this thing. You think about this massive online type of experience, you know, it's action oriented, but the preciseness of it is not such a big deal. 

Leo: Fable is Microsoft Studios game?

Paul: I think that it is, yeah, the Fable series. Mary Jo is just shrugging.

Mary Jo: I'm just shrugging.

Leo: I don't want to do that. She says I don't want to do that, it's nothing that I want to do.

Paul: I think that it is, yeah.

Leo: Alright, enough of gaming. Enough of gaming. No more. Let's talk about the thing that is going to transform computing as we know it.

Paul: I think that we just talked about that. What do you mean?

Leo: Xbox One. No. Holographic lens.

Paul: I was a little; how do we...

Leo: What is going on here?

Paul:  So Mary Jo and I actually got to use this thing?

Leo: Oh you did?

Mary Jo: We did.

Leo: Oh, this is the Surface Hub.

Paul: I will say that...

Leo: The HoloLens? You got to put on the HoloLens?

Paul: Yeah, a prototype, prototype version.

Leo: I'm jealous.

Paul: The demo that they did, you know, in the show, when you kind of watch it from afar it's not really clear what you are looking at, and you don't understand how real it is, and how awesome it is. I don't know that any time in the next year that this is going to become a big part of our life per say, but for reasons both educational, academic, gaming, scientific, business, whatever, there are actually some awesome implications to this thing. This is a much bigger deal than say Kinect. And using it, I have to say, was really impressive. It's hard to explain, because again, they wouldn't let us take pictures, or video, or anything.

Mary Jo: Yeah, we were going down to see this thing. You have to imagine this. You have to go up to a locker, take everything off, your PCs, your phones, your wallets, everything. They made you leave everything in a locker then they gave us a paper notebook and a pen. They said if you really want to take notes then you can. Then they bring us downstairs.

Paul: A list of all of your assets.

Mary Jo: Yeah, they let us go downstairs, and underneath the room that we were in in Building 92 there is this whole display area that is all secret. That's where they have the HoloLens Demo Showcase.

Paul: Yes, there were 4 demos, right? One was a Minecraft thing, which was unbelievable. Well, they were all unbelievable. Minecraft, right? There was one where you walk on the surface of Mars and you see the rover and stuff, crazy and excellent. What was the third one that you did?

Mary Jo: Skype.

Paul: A Skype one where somebody helps you through Skype video to install a new light switch or whatever.

Mary Jo: I installed a light switch. That was my biggest achievement of today.

Leo: Wow, so that's pretty cool. So you were able to understand and use the controls at your hands? It was fairly intuitive?

Paul: Yeah, it's seriously, I think that the hardest thing to convey here is just how amazing this effect is. For example, the Minecraft one, you are looking at a room. The room has a table, and some chairs, and a shelf, and some stuff. It scans the room and you get all of the kind of pixilation effects that you get from Minecraft. Then there is a Minecraft castle with a little sheep outside of it on the table, and as you are looking down on it they can cut out parts of the table through the hologram and you can see to it through the floor and underneath. You are moving around and it all looks real. On the shelf is another little castle with some zombies, and you make holes in the shelf so the zombies can't get to the castle, and you blow them up with TNT. At one point you blow a hole in the wall, and little Minecraft bats fly out of it like a 3D movie because they are actually in space flying towards you.

Leo: Wow, they are flying towards you?

Paul: As you are looking through the hole in the wall you can see all of the depths of the crags, and the pieces of lava, and as you move left, right, up, down, whatever, it's like it's really there. It really is incredible. There is the Mars thing. The Mars thing was my favorite.

Leo: They use the JPL thing that actually programmed the rover Curiosity. So you go here. This is mindboggling. It's eye candy, but it sounds like it is ready.

Mary Jo: You know, I have to say, when I saw it demoed in the keynote I said to Paul, ah, you know, it's for geeks, and yeah everyone is geeking out on it. But once I got to try it, and I was thinking of the applied situations, like say you are apartment hunting, and you can put these google, google, these goggles on. Whoops, faux paux. You can put these goggles on and you can feel like you are walking through rooms in an apartment if you are in Seattle and the apartment is in New York.

Paul: The Mars thing is awesome, but it's very specific. JPL and NASA are the only ones who are going to use this thing. That's nice, but that's about the end of the customer base. But, you know, some people are never going to make it to Paris, or they are never going to go to the Amazon, or they are never going to do whatever it is. This thing provides a way. You know how awesome just Google Street View can be. I mean, you can actually walk through this virtual environment and it's there. It's real, and it's holodeck stuff.

Leo:  I have got a lot of questions for you because you have used it.

Mary Jo: Okay.

Paul: It's amazing.

Leo: So first of all, for those who haven't seen the videos yet, basically they look like sunglasses. This is what we call augmented reality. It is not virtual reality, you know the Oculus Rift, you can't see to make it sneak up and hit you on the head.

Paul: Oh, through them. So you are seeing the rift projected over it.

Leo: So you are seeing the room. Is the room dark? It looks like sunglasses.

Mary Jo: No, it's not.

Leo: Optically it looks you can see clearly?

Paul: The Mars thing, seriously, you are standing in the middle of a room that is lit normally, and then they turn on the Mars view, and the room disappears and you are standing on Mars. You look up, down, and around, and the ground is finely detailed with rocks.

Leo: Was there a battery pack? Was it connected to anything or was it just a set of visors?

Paul: It has a battery pack and a backpack like thing because it's a prototype. The actual device is cordless. The battery is built in. It's designed to work free standing.

Leo: For how many hours?

Paul: A minute. No, I don't know.

Mary Jo: We don't know. We don't know yet.

Leo: With Google Glasses that was one of the issues. When something gets this small and you are wearing it on your head you can't put a huge battery on it.

Mary Jo: The way that you navigate is that you look. So if you want to put your cursor somewhere you look, and that is why they kept talking today about a gaze interface. You kept hearing them say that in the keynote. So if you want to put your cursor somewhere you just look at it, and you want to do this motion which is called what again?

Paul: It's the kid from The Shining. 

Leo: It's called redrum, redrum.

Paul: It's called an airtap.

Mary Jo: Airtap.

Leo: Airtap?

Mary Jo: Airtap. So you do that and then you are suddenly interacting with where your cursor is. On that Mars demo that we saw, this is going to sound dumb, but I thought the coolest thing was that you could use a mouse to interact also.

Paul: That was amazing.

Mary Jo: Wasn't that cool? So you were on the surface of Mars, and suddenly you just take a mouse at your hand, you are standing at a desk, and you move the mouse, and...

Paul: Hold on. So first of all, you are looking at a computer screen. The computer is really there, the mouse is really there.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: So you are moving the mouse cursor around on the screen exactly how it works all of the time, but when you move it off past the edge of the screen it goes out to Mars and then you can click on stuff out in Mars.

Mary Jo: I know.

Paul: It's insane. It really is amazing.

Mary Jo: So when I saw the demo in the keynote I was thinking yeah, okay, it's for gaming. When I saw these other uses...

Paul: And you just blew it off.

Mary Jo: Yeah, whatever, gaming. A gaming helmet head. But then when I saw you could use if for things like hey, what if you wanted to learn how to repair something or somebody wanted to show you a demo? It will be interesting to see how this iterates, right? Right now there are going to be these big glasses. But over time it’s going to get smaller and it’s going to get more attractive.

Paul: Yes, but the other thing is, though, it almost doesn’t matter, though. It’s not particularly big and bulky—the real one. The point of this, in many ways, is that you’re going to do some thing.

Mary Jo: Yeah

Paul: So if you’re at NASA you’re going to program the Rover to go someplace else…

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: It’s no big deal putting on a pair of glasses, you know? I mean, compared to how they do things today, this is incredibly sophisticated.

Mary Jo: One interesting little anecdote I heard when I was walking around today was this thing was what was known as “Project B”—that was the code name—and up until six months ago, this thing was supposed to be a gaming helmet. That is how it was…

Leo: This was Fortaleza—isn’t that what they called it?

Mary Jo: I don’t know if they took any technologies from Fortaleza and put it into this, but when Satya Nadella saw this demo six months ago he said, ‘Guys, you’re limiting yourselves. Why is this just for gaming? Make it for everything.’ And then they expanded to be something much more than a gaming helmet.

Leo: Yeah. That does make sense.

Paul: We didn’t get to do this ourselves, but there is a sort of Maker element to this where you can construct 3-D objects in space using a special Holo set, Or I don’t know what the name of it is.

Mary Jo: Holo Studio.

Paul: Holo Studio. Right. And it has all the real world, fake world interaction stuff, but you can then send it off to a 3-D printer and create all these objects. And they had all these toys in the room. Oh yeah—show Mary Jo. It’s a USB key holder. You know, the USB they glued into it. But it’s a little koala bear. Very detailed, very cute.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: A space koala bear. Like a koala bear astronaut or something. And it was 3-D printed, but this thing was made with Holo Studio.

Mary Jo: Yeah. It’s super cute. Yeah. So they made so many things.

Paul: They made trucks, that X-Wing from Star Wars, yeah…

Mary: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: It was really really impressive.

Leo: So how much, and when?

Paul: This year, I think, with Windows 10.

Leo: Really?!

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: At least, I wonder if that will be in Preview. I’m guessing Preview on Windows, because they said ‘around the time of Windows 10.’ Right.

Paul. Yeah, ok.

Leo: Ay! If this is a thousand bucks I would buy it.

Mary Jo: Price, we don’t know.

Paul: But, I mean, games and virtual environments will be alone…

Mary Jo: Yeah, the first thing.

Paul: will be enough for a lot of people. I mean, like I said and like we both talked about, this virtual city Tours type thing, or ArmaTours, is excellent. And that stuff alone is going to sell it. And to use your apartment thing, this is the type of thing that realtors might buy. There might be like a realtor thing where they can go around and film the place so they have all the information and then you could just go to the realtor and run different programs for different places and say, ‘Yeah, I want to look at this one and this one and then go out and actually see it.

Leo: You know what I find so interesting? Facebook spent billions of dollars to acquire Oculus Rift. Google’s been pushing Google Glass for almost two years now…

Paul: Yep.

Leo: And I have been saying, VR is not the solution now because you can’t see where you’re going…

Paul: Right.

Leo: You want augmented reality. We saw Jerry Allen, a friend of the TWIT family, who made these cast AR glasses that let you game. It’s amazing to me that nobody thought of this. And Microsoft has been working on it, and without any fanfare, this is almost ready to ship. Yes, this is Microsoft research, but…

Mary Jo: They said they had been building it for more than five years.

Paul: But when you think about it, there’s a couple of technology shifts that Microsoft kind of got in on the back end of—you know, multi-touch and stuff…

Leo: Quite a few.

Mary Jo: I think the thing to kind of watch is, is what happened to Connect going to happen to this? In other words, when connect first came out, everyone was like, ‘Connect, yeah! Everyone wants this and everyone’s going to develop for it, and then not many people did, and then they’re unbundling Connect from X Box so that it’s more price appealing. You know, the question is, can Microsoft take the lessons they learn with Connect and make this more interesting for developers and priced right for consumers, right? In fact, Alex Kipman, who was the guy demo-ing this on stage, he is the guy who also developed Connect.

Leo: Isn’t there some Connect technology in here?

Paul: I’m sure this is very related. I have the same concern that I think it’s valid. When you watch a demo during the keynote, there’s a very Connect-ish vibe to it, and it’s very natural to think that. Although in using it, it’s pretty good. It works.

Leo: That’s what excites me--that you guys have tried it and confirmed that it lives up… I’ll give you an example. Somebody in the chatroom mentioned this. You would never wear Oculus Rift glasses to drive.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: But you might wear these to drive. Imagine!

Paul: Instead of the crappy commute that you have, you could have the rolling hills of Germany on the side of the road.

Leo: Actually, we’re going to take a break. We’ll pause for a commercial. Then I want to play this promotional video that they make, which I thought was quite good. Apple quality. They even have a guy in a white room. Let’s take a break. I mean, this is so fascinating. Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott. They are in Redmond, where they have just been briefed by Microsoft, following a day of public video—which we watched--a half day of public video, which we watched at broadcast. In fact, it’s a TWIT live special if you want to watch Mike Algin and Megan Marooney comment on the first half of the keynote, which was fascinating. And that’s what we’re working our way through, showing you little clips and pieces here, but you got more information on the briefings and more is coming out, and you got to try some of this stuff.

And the more I talk to you, the more I have to say. I’m just going to have to have to feel like this is a big day for Microsoft. They should feel pretty darn good about what they announced today. It’s huge, and it feels like a revitalized Microsoft.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: It really does. We’ll talk more, in just a bit. But first, a word from HipChat Plus. We use Hip Chat Plus in the studio. We really love it. It is a great way… You know, it’s really hard for me to characterize HipChat. It looks like Instant Messenger, but it’s so much more than Instant Messenger. It’s how your team should communicate. It’s how our team has started communicating, and we love it. We first started using it with our web development team. It’s great. I keep it running at all times and on all my platforms. And by the way, HipChat Plus runs on almost everything.

There’s even a web interface, so there isn’t a Windows phone app, but you could run it in the Windows browser. It works great. And it’s more than just IM. It supplants e-mail. It has video chat. It has document sharing. It has screen sharing. You can push system updates, you can share code—all in one platform. Everything that’s on there gets saved, so it’s a record of work done and of conversations held. So it’s as good as e-mail in the respect. Plus it integrates your developer tool. So Get Hub and Jira and Zen Desk all go right in there. Fifty-seven different services the HipChat plays nice with. Hip Chat brings your entire project and communication together. It is really great. And yes, I see they have these animated gifts, instant notifications and Twitter. Okay, a little bit of fun. It’s nice because it’s SSL encrypted, 256 bit. All of your communications are private and secure. In fact, you even control—when you form a group chat for instance—what people can see. So you can invite a client into your group chat without him seeing your internal chat. I want you to try it. It’s free right now--<hipchat.com/windowsweekly>. This is HipChat Plus. By the way, there is a premium version, which is great, and you can use that for free forever, but for the next thirty days you’re going to get the new HipChat Plus. When you go to <hipchat.com/windowsweekly>. Click that ‘start chatting’ button. <hipchat.com/windowsweekly>. Thirty days. All the features absolutely free so you can really get a tour of it, and actually, for the first hundred people who sign up we’re going to get you ninety days. Find out why some of the biggest companies (Why, we’re using it!)… Once we started doing it with the web developers, we started doing it in engineering, sales; we’re going to do it… I’m going to set up a HipChat with our hosts and producers. Bring your team to life! <hipchat.com/windowsweekly>. I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Paul Thurrott. Mary Jo Foley. They are in Redmond, and are you still in Building…what is it…ninety-two?

Mary Jo: No, we’re now in Studio C next to Building 92.

Leo: [laughs]

Paul: Leo, do you know what’s in Studio C?

Leo: No. What’s in Studio C?

Paul: X-Box.

Mary Jo: [Makes a scrunched, distorted face]

Leo: [laughs] Mary Jo, are you having a little allergic reaction, or something?

Mary Jo: [laughs] There’s a giant X-Box…

Paul: She doesn’t even know what it is. I tried to get her… You have no idea what it is.

Mary Jo: There were creatures and stuff. And he wanted to take my picture in front of it, but I said no.

Leo: In “Halo,” man! Ok, let’s see. This is a little promotional video that they put together for the HoloLens, if you didn’t get to see it. I think it’s pretty well put together and it kind of highlights how they worked on it. This is from Microsoft research, and so I think they’ve done a nice job of taking a product from completely blue sky…

Paul: Right.

Leo: to something they’re going to be able to ship this year. It’s kind of mind-boggling. I’m going to jump to that promo here. Ch-ch-ch. Here we go.

Woman on presentation: The ability to draw with your hand, or to take an asset and move it or scale it is a very natural way of interacting with it. Here’s what you can do with holographic video. Here’s what you can do with using your world as a game level. Here’s what you can do with taking the power of 3D modeling and creation, and—guess what—pointing at a screen and turning into real 3D…

Leo: You know what? We can’t get a twelve year-old to stop playing Minecraft as it is. No, he’s probably never coming to dinner. And I’d probably join him in there.

Paul: By the way, if you’re living or look like Minecraft, maybe he would come to dinner.

Leo: [laughs] I love the Minecraft stuff because it kind of makes sense now that Microsoft bought Minecraft. This is a perfect application for Minecraft.

Paul: The Minecraft thing was amazing. It really was.

Leo: Because Minecraft, which normally is a little hard to build stuff, and it’s kind of dopey because you just click the different click, it looks so much more fun to do.

Paul: Yeah, well imagine in other words, in Minecraft maybe you built a castle or some structure or whatever it is…

Leo: Right, right.

Paul: Instead of building it in some empty plane, you build it in the room…

Leo: Geesh! [impressed]

Paul: And you can walk around it in 3D space

Leo: So cool!

Paul: It’s amazing! And it’s really seamless. Seriously, I was ready to dump all over this thing. Seriously, you know.

Mary Jo: [laughs]

Leo: I dumped on it! Today I’m watching it. You know, This is the requisite eye candy that they’re never going to release.

Paul: Right, right.

Leo: This will get all the press. But they said, at the beginning, this is a new UI. This is a new way to interact with your computer.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: And I think that’s really what it is, frankly, and it’s fascinating!

Mary Jo: And it’s also is running Windows 10.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: And it’s probably the IOT skew, or some custom Windows 10 skew, but it’s part of the whole package chip.

Leo: Pretty neat!

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: And of course they did the demo in the room. And it was kind of cool how they did they, because I guess they had a second camera wearing the lenses? I don’t understand quite how they did that, but…

Paul: Well, they can transmit the video that you’re seeing to a lens through a computer camera where…

Leo: Is it stereo? Is it 3D?

Paul: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Leo: And did you get seasick at all?

Mary Jo: No. I was worried about that, because I had seen people with Oculus Rift getting…

Paul: Yeah, Oculus Rift is weird like that. If you’re not used to 3D shooters in particular—even though the screen—people get queasy watching that stuff. It is nothing like that. Although, we didn’t play a racing game or maybe a shooter-type game. Maybe that would have made us queasy. I don’t know.  

Leo: I have to say, it is not holographic computing.

Paul: Yeah, it is augmented reality.

Leo: Can we stop calling it that?

Paul: [laughing] No, they really want to call it that.

Mary Jo: [laughing]

Leo: Is it because of the Holodeck in Star Trek? I just don’t--

Paul: I think so, because—by the way, the next, the logical conclusion of this is the Holodeck in Star Trek.

Leo: And by the way, that’s not that far away.

Mary Jo: I know.

Paul: I mean, it’s pretty damn close. I mean, obviously these things are not really there, so there’s probably some sort of tactile thing that would, you know, so that you would physically interact with stuff in 3D. But the effect is astonishing. And by the way, is much better than…Oh, there’s the table. It literally looks that good. It literally looks like there are Minecraft lego-type things on the table. The stuff is there.

Leo: I feel like we’re seeing what we’re all going to be doing in a few years. Like this is like the first glimpse of the mouse…

Paul: Yep. Mmm-hmmm.

Leo: or windowing interfaces. This is what computing is going to be like in a few years.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Is that crazy?

Paul: Like Mary Jo said, there’s a question. We’ll see if it takes off with developers, and all that sort of stuff, but I--

Leo: You’d be CRAZY not to develop for this!

Paul: [laughs]

Mary Jo: Well, look at Connect for Windows, right? That is something I thought would take off more than it did, too.

Leo: Yeah, but that didn’t change. That’s like Minority Report going woo-woo-woo.

Mary Jo: No, because there were some business applications, like health applications—some things like that—that people have built that are pretty interesting. It just, so far, is early days. And I don’t know. I don’t know--

Leo: This is Connect! This is Connect done the next generation of Connect, which is you’re still doing the same Connect stuff, but the display is in your world.

Paul: So to be fair, there is one big difference between this and Connect, technologically. In fact, when they first started talking about it, I started looking up around the room and I was thinking there were going to be little projectors all over this room making this happen, and we’re all going to see it there. And that’s going to be crazy.

Leo: Right. We saw the demo, right? What was it called—the—?

Paul: And then he put on glasses and then you realize, ‘Okay, this is a different thing.’ So, in other words, Connect is a camera or set of cameras, sitting on a wall somewhere, scanning you in 3D space. And so it only has certain capabilities because of the way it works. This thing—you bring it with you around the room—you’re looking through it. And what you see is reflected in the moves.

Leo: If you show any twelve year-old in the entire world--

Paul: Yes.

Leo: this image of a guy in Minecraft--

Paul: Right.

Leo: In Minecraft…

Paul: And so, by the way, here’s the kicker: It is WAY better than that image portrays, because what’s not portrayed in that image is the holes and the surfaces

Leo: Oh, wow!

Paul: where you can look into that hole and see what’s on the floor beneath it, and it’s insane! And you can sort of see above the fireplace is a hole in the wall, but what you’re not really getting from that image is the depth of it and how…

Leo: You can look into it!

Paul: Yeah, you can look into it and it’s there.

Leo: It’s another room on the other side!

Paul: Yeah, bats could fly out of that wall.

Leo: Oh, crap!

Paul: They fly toward you in 3D.

Mary Jo: What?! [laughs]

Leo: [in a child-like voice] I want it now, Mommy! I want it now!

Mary Jo: You know, another cool thing we learned is, part of the reason this didn’t leak was, very few people—even at Microsoft—have seen this thing. They said we’re among the first—maybe two-thousandth people ever—who’ve seen it.

Leo: Wow, wow.

Mary Jo: So that’s why it didn’t leak, if you’re wondering why nobody had a really good leak on it. Damn! [laughs]

Leo: Man, oh man!

Paul: I heard someone say to someone else there, ‘You know, this didn’t leak and that’s good. We’ve got to do more of that kind of thing.” Supposedly someone said, ‘You know, Microsoft Band didn’t leak’ and I was like, “Oooh…”

Leo: Naaaah!

Paul: I forgot about that one, but I heard nothing about this one.

Leo: Yeah, this is mind-boggling. And I think the first big breakthrough… And I mean, I’ve seen leak motion. Connect. I’ve played with a lot of new UIs, and in every respect, they leave me cold. They don’t get me excited.

Paul: I’ll give you an example. I love shooters, obviously, right? Call of Duty—whatever. I’ve played around with Oculus Rift, and it was a little queasy-inducing and I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever.”

Leo: Me too. I paid for it on Kick Starter.

Paul: This one, I was like, “Wow!” I’m not going to spend a lot of time walking around on the surface of Mars, per se. I’m sure that would get old, but it is stunningly beautiful and the real-world practical implications of it are amazing.

Leo: You guys have a place to go. You ‘ve got the Bellevue Brewing Company meet-up to go to. I want everyone to go to the Bellevue Brewing Company and buy Paul and Mary Jo a nice Golden Rock.

Mary Jo: And as a little tease, if you’re in Redmond right now, we may have some special guests. That’s all we’re going to say.

Paul: Yeah, some VIP-age.

Leo: That starts in half an hour?

Mary Jo: 6:30 till 9 or so.

Leo: Right. Before I let you go, though, at the end of all this, Satya Nadella comes out. And I thought, I was impressed. I thought he did a good job of explaining the kind of context for Windows 10.

Paul: He said the one thing I needed him to say, which was the thing we talked about earlier. You know, people have been confused about this mobile first/ cloud first strategy. And you know, he didn’t say it quite this way, but Windows best. And to me, I just wanted to stand up and clap and say thank you, because to me a lot of people have been questioning—and rightfully so—what’s the advantage to sticking with Windows if you’re just going to make these things as good on other platforms. I mean, at this point we might just use an iPad, or whatever.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And I think that’s an important message to communicate, especially when you’re talking about the next version of Windows.

Leo: I think he did a great job of kind of painting the picture of what his vision is and putting together the pieces we’ve seen but not really been able to put together because we didn’t quite see what this meant in context, and so forth. I feel like, coming this fall, Microsoft is going to have a very compelling story to tell. They’re going to have a platform that a lot of… You know he said something-he really said some things that I wanted to hear. He said ‘customer first,’ for instance. He said, ‘We want you to love Windows. We don’t want you to have to use it. Use it because you have to use it,’ which is frankly, I think, more than the one and a half billion use it because they have to use it.

Paul: That is the most hurtful thing I have heard you say.

Leo: [laughs]They didn’t choose it, they have to use it. But I think that’s exactly right. That’s what they should aim for. Customer first. We want you to love it. We want you to feel like people who love Apple—we want you to feel that way about our product. And I feel like they’re very well-positioned to do that, so I feel like that’s the right thing.

Paul: And ultimately, that’s what Windows 10 is. If you think about it, any customer type that it crosses, the point is to make those people happy, you know?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: There are people who like Windows 8 and use it on tablets, and those people can be really happy. You know, Windows 7 users on traditional PCs can be really happy. X-Box 1 users: really happy. There’s a lot of really good stuff going on there, so yeah, this is a good release. It’s different from some of the other things we’ve had to talk about over the past year or so.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Look, you know me. I’m no cheerleader for Microsoft or Windows…

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: but I feel like… Well, first of all, whether you use Windows or not, it’s really important that there’s only a handful of companies in the world that are changing technology, that this is one of them. You don’t want it to just go the way of IBM and just go, ‘Yeah, well we’re just going to ride our patents into the sunset.’ You want them to be a vital, exciting company, innovating and challenging Google, Facebook, Amazon, and I think this is a Microsoft that is newly revitalized.  It makes me really support getting rid of Sinofsky. Getting rid of Ballmer!

Jane: [laughing]

Leo: Right?

Mary Jo: Oh yeah.

Leo: You don’t agree.

Mary Jo: You know, if holo-lens really was started five years ago, it was started under Ballmer.

Leo: Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, but you know what? It wasn’t Ballmer’s vision. I’ve got to tell you.

Leo: Okay, yeah. I think that’s true. Even if everything that happened today was somehow something that was started earlier under Amnesty Bomber, there’s kind of a casual elegance to Satya Nadella that Ballmer doesn’t have. And he’s a great guy and I love him, but I don’t think he would have communicated this as effectively, nor do I think this strategy would have been this kind of fine-tuned. So, I mean, there’s something good happening here.

Mary Jo: Yeah. There’s definitely excitement. Even all the Mac-toting press who came to this event…

Leo: Were there a lot of Macs—a lot of Apples?

Mary Jo: Yes. It was all Macs and us. Okay. But they even actually admitted they were kind of impressed and excited.

Leo: Yeah. You know what? I’m excited.

Paul: And then they went back to their trendy pants and their…

Mary Jo and Leo: [laughing]

Leo: I’m sitting here with a 1520 and a Dell XPS 13 on the way, and I want those pieces of hardware to be as compelling and exciting and satisfying to use…

Paul: Sure.

Leo: as the other stuff that I use. And it hasn’t been that way for a while. And I think it could be that way again, and that by itself, is great.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: And you know, it does kind of mean that you have to look at Windows 8 as transitional thing, which you’ve always said. That was a transitional product.

Paul: Well, the problem is they transition people away from Windows [chuckles].  But, yes.

Leo: Well it was such an abrupt change. It really—it did do that.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Now Windows 10 is kind of the polishing and the maturing, and I think everything now starts to make sense.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it totally makes more sense now. The whole you can run Windows everywhere. They’ve been talking about that for years, right?  Write once, run on any Windows. I mean, how many years have we actually heard that?

Leo: Oh yeah.

Mary Jo: But this is the year that actually starts to happen.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Yeah. Of course, the question is always with Microsoft, can the corporate culture now go on to support this vision? Is Nadella enough of a leader to eliminate the factionalism that’s been…

Paul: Honestly, I have not caught whiff of any of that kind of thing for quite a while…

Leo: That’s great news.

Paul: And that was always a huge problem. You know, that whole Microsoft chart with the guns pointing at each other? Mary Jo, I don’t know if you have any exception to that, but I can’t think of anything like that.

Mary Jo: I think something that went a long way was unifying the Windows teams. That really helped a lot, bringing the Windows Phone together, and Windows. And that took away a lot of the tensions. They brought together the different office teams in ways they hadn’t been brought together, like all the e-mail teams sitting together, working together…

Paul: The other thing that was interesting about today was just kind of milling around in that building we were in. Guys from Office. Chris Caposella was there. Guys obviously from Phone. Guys from all over the company. The X-Box guys were there. Everyone is so jazzed by what’s happening. It’s a very different kind of positive…

Leo: That’s neat.

Paul: vibe and a non-arrogant, you know.

Leo: Yeah, that’s what I want to hear.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: The problem with all these keynotes is true.

Paul: We’re not used to good news, Leo.

Mary Jo: I know!

Paul: Both of us are so confused. We’re both going, “What?”

Mary Jo: What’s happening? We’re both being positive.

Paul: I’m walking into people. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s really easy to come out of a keynote with this glow and the reality distortion feel to it…

Mary Jo: Yeah, that’s true.

Paul: Oh, it’s going to be great. It’s going to be great.

Leo: Yeah. Yeah. And so the proof is really in implementation. I think they’re pointed in the right direction. I’m really encouraged by what you say about the feeling on the campus, because really, Microsoft was really its own worst enemy, frankly.

Paul: That’s for sure.

Mary Jo: I forget. Did we also mention the good news about new flagships, plural? Did we say that already?

Leo: I heard that. Did they mean high-end phones?

Mary Jo: High-end Lumia phones. Well, they didn’t say Lumia. They said, ‘We’re going to have more flagship Windows phones.’

Paul: That was a big question mark.  The context of that was with Windows 10.

Mary Jo: Yeah…

Paul: So, next fall.

Mary Jo: Though that’s ok. I was actually wondering whether they were going to do anymore flagships. I was wondering.

Leo: Right. I think we all were. I think we all were. Was it the end of the line? Was 1520 the last?

Mary Jo: So I was happy to hear that.

Leo: Right. I agree. I agree.

Mary Jo: I even said #yaay on my TWEET.

Leo and Mary Jo: [laughing]

Paul: Right, right.

Leo: It was fun watching you guys TWEET during it. Thank you for doing that. That was part of our information stream. A very exciting day for Microsoft, and we’re glad that we have two of the very best Microsoft watchers on our team: Paul Thurrott from the…(I’ve get to give you someprops on the brand-new Thurrott site. Nice! T-H-U-R… Somebody kept saying two r’s, two t’s. There are three t’s, you know.

Paul: I tried to buy up some domains that were close to this, so that if you misspelled it, you’d end up at the right place.

Leo: It looks really good. Your coverage is great.

Paul: They’d type in like throttle.com or frumpup.com…

Leo and Mary Jo: [laughing]

Leo: This is the new home for Paul Thurrott. I love it and I’m so happy for you, Paul.

Paul: The Halo statue in there, Leo, in the middle, right under the green tile.

Leo: Oh! Mary Jo had no idea what that was.

Mary Jo: I sure didn’t.

Leo: I saw the City 3 one year, I think. Yeah. That’s awesome. Studio C. Right out the door, there’s those guys, Mary Jo. Go give them a kiss for me.

Mary Jo: I will. I’ll go give them a hug on my way out [laughs].

Leo: It looks like somebody’s been polishing this guy’s head. Is that a polish this guy’s head for good luck sort of thing?

Paul: That’s awesome.

Leo: Paul, thanks and congratulations. <Thurrott.com>, as always. @thurrott on Twitter. You’ve got a great event to go to--the Bellevue Brewery waiting for you and thousands of Windows Weekly fans.

Paul: Well…

Leo: Hundreds.

Paul: We’ll see.

Leo: Dozens.

Paul: It could be. Mary Jo and I have like seventeen blogs.

Leo: No, no, no. There are like a ton of you. And I know Mary Jo Foley is at <allaboutmicrosoft.com>. That is her blog—a great place to catch up on this stuff. And you know, she was ahead of you, Paul, because she could file during that whole X-Box segment.

Paul: Yeah, I know.

Leo: She’s like eight stories ahead.

Paul: I caught up later.

Leo: Ah. You got her. Good. Really great job. Great information. We do Windows Weekly, and we’ll be back to our regular time. Normal Wednesdays at 11 am Pacific, 2 PM Eastern time. 1900 UTC. Please tune in then, next Wednesday and every Wednesday to cover the latest in Windows. It was an exciting year last year. I think it’s going to be an exciting year this year. I’m really thrilled by this news.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: You can also, if you can’t watch live, you can also get on-demand versions. All of our shows are available on our website, <twit.tv>. In this case, <twit.tv/ww> for Windows Weekly, but you can also get it wherever finer podcasts are aggregated, including Windows Phone. We have a great Windows Phone app. Dimitri Allen has done a great job on that.

Paul: Oh, we might see Dimitri tonight.

Leo: Say hi to Dimitri and thank him for me.

Paul: He’s in Redland now.

Leo: It’s a beautiful app. I use it all the time to show how good a TWIT app can look on Windows Phone. Also iOS and Android—some great apps. Thanks. We don’t do those. Those are thanks to independent developers, who just out of the goodness of their heart and their energy, make something for us. We appreciate it. Paul and Mary Jo, have a wonderful evening at Bellevue Brewery. I wish I could be there with you, and we’ll see you next week on Windows Weekly!