Windows Weekly 412 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It’s time
for Windows Weekly! Paul Thurrott is going to be
here, he’s on his way back from Ignite, Mary Jo Foley’s still there, and
they’ll be joined by Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management for
Microsoft Azure. We’ve got a lot of Enterprise news, but Windows news too. We’re
going to talk about Windows and Microsoft in just a bit. It’s next, on Windows
Weekly.
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Leo: This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. Episode 412, recorded Wednesday, May 6th, 2015
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It’s time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover Windows
every week, see that’s the name. Microsoft, actually, really
more than Windows, because Microsoft is so much more than Windows these days. Mary Jo Foley is here, Paul Thurrott is younger. Mary
Jo do you want to explain what happened? Did Paul get a new, get a plastic surgeon, what happened here?
Mary Joe Foley: He did, yea. So we travelled from Petaluma last week to
Chicago this week, and somehow Paul de-aged. He’s now Corey Sanders. So, yea,
we’re here in the convention center at Microsoft Ignite, which is the big show
that they do for IT pros and devs. And
since Paul is on his way home from Chicago. He’s going to magically
appear at some point in the show.
Leo: Oh, cool.
Mary Jo: We’ve got Corey Sanders who’s the director of program
management of Azure with us. He’s been at Microsoft for ten years. He’s the guy
who’s kind of in charge of IAAS, Infrastructures as a Service at Azure. And I
hear he really loves Linux. I don’t know if that’s a rumor, or a fact.
Leo: Wow, did you hide that for the first eight years of your
Microsoft career?
Corey Sanders: (laughing) Yea, I did. They didn’t let me out in public and
then finally I can talk to people now, so it’s a new job for me.
Leo: And you work side by side with Mark Resanovich,
I gather.
Corey: I do, yea, actually, more often than I’d like, I think.
Leo: Well, we love Mark. I’ve met him only in this context, you
know, on the shows, but loves CIS internals, was thrilled when Microsoft
incorporated it into their system, his novels are great. We’ve talked to him
about his novels. He’s a great writer. I think that under his, and I have to
guess your tenure, that Azure has really taken off. It’s great to have you,
Corey, thank you for joining us.
Corey: Thank you. So, you’ve not met Mark in person, then?
Leo: No, no.
Corey: So you don’t know that he’s freakishly tall? That’s one of
his trademarks.
Leo: I assumed that for some reason. I don’t know why, he just
seemed like a lanky, kind of bean pole type with great hair. I don’t know why,
just in my mind, that’s the picture I painted of him.
Corey: You’ve got the perfect picture.
Leo: So, Mary, I’m going to let you lead the way, and as you
mentioned, because Paul’s on his way home to Boston, he’s going to just
magically appear in a few minutes and we’ll put him into the mix.
Mary Jo: He is, he is, exactly.
Leo: So how is it, I guess I should ask, we talked about Build
last week, and by the way, if you missed Windows Weekly last week, what a
great, fun, show that was. It was jam-packed.
Mary Jo: We’re still recovering from that show.
Leo: Yea, and have you had your meet up, I didn’t ask how your meet up went with Build.
Mary Jo: We had a great meet up at Build, with lots of Windows Weekly
fans, and Gabe Aul showed up, and Steve Guggenheimer showed up, and John Chicha,
they all came in person.
Leo: Nice. That’s great.
Mary Jo: I know, it was awesome. Then we
had a meetup here, in Chicago at Pork Chop, which is a restaurant, and we had,
I’d say like seventy people show up from Ignite on a really busy party night. They
all came to our meetup here, so yea.
Leo: You are beloved.
Mary Jo: We are. We are.
Corey: That’s true, that’s true.
Leo: The beloved Mary Jo Foley. It’s great.
Mary Jo: This is how beloved we are. Today I was at Ignite and a guy
from Belgium tweeted to me, and he said, “I brought you some beers from
Belgium.” And so he came and found me. He brought one for me and something for
Corey.
Leo: Oh, nice.
Mary Jo: Just keeping the drinking show going, I guess.
Leo: Is it, tell us about it, is it good?
Mary Jo: Yea, I have the Westmalle Trappist
Double. Paul would have loved this beer. Too bad, he’s on a plane. But yea,
it’s really a really fantastic double, and one of the very few Trappist ales,
so it’s delicious.
Leo: I love Trappist ales. But you’ve convinced me triples are
the way to go.
Mary Jo: That’s what Core has.
Leo: You have a triple?
Corey: Let’s get it right there, see that?
Leo: A Trappist triple, wow.
Corey: Yea. It’s very good, a nice solid 8% alcohol, so by the end
of the show, you ask me anything you want, it’s coming out.
Mary Jo: It’s our strategy, give them some alcohol…
Corey: Yea, exactly, it’s very good.
Leo: (laughing) Very nice, very nice. Trappist Triple sounds like
some sort of golf thing. Like a bogey, an eagle, oh, you got a Trappist Triple.
Corey: I’ve got a Trappist Triple. Better luck next time.
Leo: Wow, that’s worse than a double bogey, I think.
Mary Jo: So we have to give the guy who brought it a shout out. Peter
Bowens from Belgium, thank you. That was awesome of you.
Leo: And Peter, we apologize for our Flemish pronunciation now
and forever more.
Mary Jo: Exactly, yes. So we’re here with twenty three thousand
people.
Leo: That’s big. Is that bigger than Build?
Mary Jo: Yes, a lot bigger. Like I think Build was close to five
thousand. So this is four times the number of people, and it’s been a madhouse.
Because everybody’s all over Chicago, there’s busses coming to this huge
convention center, they feed twenty three thousand people all at the same time
here.
Leo: Wow.
Mary Jo: Yea, and that’s, just watching that is insane. So yea,
they’ve got all these different sessions going on all kinds of enterprise
stuff, and also including Windows 10, too. So all of these things have been
really popular and the sessions are selling out, people can’t get it. I think
it’s a success, except for maybe some of the logistics. But, otherwise, it’s a big, you know it’s bringing together all the Microsoft
conferences that used to be separate. So it brings together the SharePoint
conference and the Exchange conference, and MMS, and then of course Tech Ed, so
all of that is converged now into this one big show called Ignite. That’s where
we are.
Leo: So Build’s for developers and Ignite is for everybody else.
Mary Jo: Exactly. Yep. So, we’ve heard a lot of Enterprise news. I
was just going to go through it super quick and then dig in with Corey on some
of the Azure stuff. Because I think the Azure stuff is really key here. So, we heard this week at the show about the next
version of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, and Microsoft made new
tech previews of both of those available as of this week, which is great. Also a new preview of Office 2016 for the desktop. SO if you’re
Windows desktop, Windows 7, 8 or 10, you can try out this new public preview of
the desktop version of Office that’s out. And Sway, which we’ve talked a lot
about on Window’s Weekly, is now going to be added to Office 365. I’m a big
Sway fan, I have to say. Done a few Sways.
Leo: Well, you’ve been the best Sway ambassador, those great
Sway’s you did. They were amazing.
Mary Jo: Yea, yep. So that’s coming to Office 365, we found out.
Leo: Oh, good.
Mary Jo: Yep, we learned a lot of people coming into the show were
afraid that SharePoint and Exchange on premises where dead, but at the show
here we heard about SharePoint Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2016. Neither of
which is dead, they’re both coming this year. Well actually, SharePoint this
year, Exchange later this year. SQL Server, we’ve heard there’s a new version
coming this year called SQL server 2016 that adds in some of the hard analytics
capabilities that Microsoft has now because they bought Revolution Analytics. And so all of that, all of that was in this giant day one keynote
and more. Then we’re going to talk about the Azure news. Because Corey is really good at explaining Azure in ways that are
understandable to mortals. I’m setting the bar for you here.
Corey: (Laughing) I know, I feel like I need to drink less now.
Leo: Too late! Too late!
Corey: I know, I’m going down a path now, there’s no going back.
Mary Jo: So I thought for the Windows Weekly audience it would be
good to talk about, like, first off, Microsoft’s goal with Azure. It’s to be
the back end for all mobile services. Like wherever you are, iOS, Android,
Windows Phone, Windows tablets. I mean, can you talk a little bit more about
that? I mean, what’s the thinking there?
Leo: Well, hold on. This may be a good time to take a break.
Mary Jo: Oh, ok.
Leo: And then, that’s exactly what we’ll talk about when we come
back. I had to say, I just noticed that Corey may have just jumped out of bed. You
haven’t shaved yet, today.
Corey: (Laughing) No, this is the look. I call it the open source
fear.
Leo: Open source fear.
Corey: Half of my team works on Linux and they’re required to grow
beards.
Leo: (Laughing) So, you’re halfway
there. Got it, I got it. See, I wanted to do an ad for our Harry’s shave kit
and send you one, I thought you’d love these, these are so great. But if you
don’t need it I could keep it.
Corey: I may need it for half because I still work the Window’s
side as well.
Leo: Ah, so when you’re hanging out with the Window’s team, before
you go in, you have to shave half your face. Go to Harry’s.com it’s a really
great place to get an amazing deal. Harry’s kind of did the whole thing right. They
said, “How do we make, if we were going to make a great razor and a great
blade, what would we do?” And they did some investigation before they started. And
in the data driven, start-up world, this is the kind of thing you do. You don’t
just launch a company, you crunch the numbers. And they found out that there
are two factories in the whole world that make the best razor blades. They’re
both in German, of course. I don’t know why I said of course, but … (laughing)
the best knives are from Solingen. I mean, so they bought the factory in
Germany, and they make the blades. And that means they can produce them and
sell them direct to you at a much lower cost. But they can also make sure that
the blades are designed, you know, to their specifications for performance, for
sharpness. These, you know, the steel they use is the very finest, it’s really kind of cool. They own the entire process. And it means they can
sell the blades to you at half the cost of the drugstore blades. But it all
starts with this right here, the Harry’s kit. Let me show you my Harry’s kit. And
this is a great deal. This is the Truman. $15, I’m going to tell you how you
can get it for less. It includes your great Harry’s Razor handle, three of the
Harry’s blades. The Truman is a way to try, I think, just to get a sense of
what Harry’s can be for you. So you get three blades, you get the handle, you get a choice of four colors for the handle. They
also have the Winston for a little bit more. I think its $25 and that’s a metal
handle engraved. I use the Winston, Steve Gibson says, he got the Winston first
and he went out and got a Truman because he just likes the way that the handle
feels. It also includes, this is more handy than you
and I think, this is a little, you put this on your razor when you travel. I
know a lot of you spend a lot of time on the road, and then you put this in
your Dopp kit, you’re not A, you’re not going to get
cut, am I doing it right? And B, it will let the razor, yea there it is, it
will let the razor dry out, but it protects the blade, and it protects your
fingers against the blade. But that’s not all. The kit also includes the
Harry’s Foaming Shave Gel. Now they also have you choose when you choose the
kit, the cream. Now I’m a cream fan, the shave gel, a lot of people prefer
that. You get to choose. Pick the one you want. But go to Harry’s, H-A-R-R-Y-S,
Harrys.com, and check the whole thing out. Because I think you’re just going to
really love the Harry’s blade. By the way, after you buy the kit, oh and I just
got, I’m really excited that Harry’s Razor’s Stand, it’s got my name engraved
on it, because, well, my wife keeps borrowing my blade. So now she knows, we’ve
got his and hers Harry’s. So I have the, I know it’s pretty funny, isn’t it? They
should, we keep telling them, you should do a
Harriet’s. But I’ve got, see it has my name on it, and it’s really a nice
little cast aluminum cube that … this would be great for Father’s Day. Put
Dad’s name on it, get him the kit. I just love Harry’s. I know you will, too. Now
here’s the deal. When you go to Harry’s.com, use our offer code “WINDOWS” and
you get five bucks off your first order. That means now you’ve got the Truman
set for ten bucks. Look, if you don’t do this you’re crazy. At least try it. You
can subscribe, of course, we do, and then you get Harry’s Blades regularly
delivered right to your door at a great price. H-A-R-R-Y-S,
harrys.com. Get five dollars off your first order when you use the offer
code “WINDOWS.” Back we go.
Corey: Nice.
Leo: You want it? I’ll send you one.
Corey: Yea, actually, I think I do need it, actually.
Leo: Mary Jo, get Corey’s address and we’ll send him a Harry’s
Kit.
Mary Jo: Ok.
Corey: All right, perfect.
Leo: Yea, you should have this. Even if you never use it, it’s
yours because you at least would have it (laughing).
Corey: Yes, that’s right. No, I’ll use it. I’ll use it.
Leo: It’s the best shave you’ve ever had. It’s amazing. All
right, now, I’m sorry to have interrupted. Let’s get to it. Back
to the question.
Mary Jo: So the question is, you know, you guys have been talking
about wanting to make Azure the best backend platform for everybody, not just
Windows, right? Like, iOS, Android, what are you doing to make that happen, and
why are you doing it?
Corey: Yea, great questions. I’ll start with the why and then I’ll
tell you the what. So, the why is really going to come down to, we really want
to go meet the needs of people who are going to run on the platform. And so, no
matter what customers are doing, what partners are deploying, we are going to
support everything that people want to deploy. And so, whether it be the Linux
platform that we offer on top of infrastructure as a service, whether it be
some of the partners that we offer on top of infrastructure as a service, or
our mobile platform, which offers Android, iOS and Window Phones support, we
want to make sure that no matter what you’re writing, how you’re writing, when
you’re writing, we’re going to be there to enable it with our backend. So, in
some ways it’s making sure that the Azure Platform is going to be used for
everything, and enabled for everything, whether it’s Windows or not.
Mary Jo: Yea, that’s interesting. You guys, so I should ask you an
IIAS question.
Corey: Yea, please.
Mary Jo: I saw this blog post you write recently about this thing
called Azure Resource Managers. And there’s this thing that involves templates.
I read it a few times; I have to admit, I couldn’t quite grasp it. Maybe you
should explain why we should care about this. Because the way you wrote it up
you said, “Hey, we’re going to make IIAS easier for people.” And for people on
the show who are listening who don’t know, IIAS is how Microsoft offers post-it
versions of Windows Server and Linux Server on top of Azure and Virtual
Machines. That’s what that means. So what are you doing with Resource Manager?
Corey: Yea. That’s a good question. And I’m sorry that my blog post
wasn’t very good, I feel bad now. I should go, I’m
going to go work on it. So, I’ll write another one, I’ll write another one. But,
yes, the overall idea with Resource Manager is, you know, when people are deploying Virtual Machine today in Azure, they come in and they
deploy and they install things on them, they want to deploy an app, you know,
let’s say you want to deploy something like Elastic Storage or SharePoint Farm.
And you deploy, you have to deploy multiple Virtual Machines, you have to
connect them to the network, you’ve got to lock down your network. And you want
to install things on the box using Power Shell, and get sort of everything
situated. And finally you have yourself an app. But then you want to re-do it,
right? So maybe the first time you did it you got Mary helping you out, you’ve
got, you know, Paul doing XYZ, and then they’re not there the next time you
want to do it and suddenly you can’t do it ever again. And so
one of the things that we’re trying to enable with this new Resource Manager
and this template language is to make that a very repeatable process. It’s
all sort of listed up in a single text file, a JSON text file,
that lists out all of the resources. So it will say, “Here is the VM and
it’s going to talk to this other VM, and the network’s going to connect them
this way, and there’ll be a load balancer over here. And so, it will connect it
all together and allow you to deploy it repeatedly, multiple times. And we have
a bunch of samples to get you started, we have a bunch
of documentation that’s integrated with Visual Studio. So it’s really easy to
get started and hopefully once you’re down this path, it’s easy to go repeat
things over and over again.
Mary Jo: So there’s like recipes, kinda?
Corey: Exactly. That’s exactly what I mean. You can think of it in
recipes.
Leo: Mary Jo gets that one, she’s a cook.
Corey: Yea, so like banana bread, yea, I’ve got it. So SharePoint
Farm is your banana bread, and AG is the nuts, the nuts going into it.
Leo: Now you’re making me hungry. Stop it (laughing)!
Corey: So exactly right. That’s a great way to put it.
Mary Jo: So, this is connected somehow to containers, right, in some
way, isn’t it?
Leo: Everything is connected to containers. It’s all about lakes
and bridges, baby.
Mary Jo: Yea, lakes, data lakes, yea we talked on Windows Weekly
before about containers, and I did not the best job at explaining why
containers are so key to you guys. Because you’re building containers support,
not just into Azure, but you’re building it now into Windows Server, you’re
working with Docker, you’re doing some interesting stuff around your own
containers, on top of Hyper-V, which is kind of an interesting, different take.
So can you explain for our viewers and listeners in kind of like a higher level
and better explanation than I did, why are containers hot? What’s the deal with
containers?
Corey: Yea absolutely. I can’t promise it will be better than how
you described it, but I’ll at least try.
Leo: I think we can promise that, actually. I’m still having a
hard time getting my mind wrapped around it.
Corey: I said I wouldn’t promise it.
Leo: And specifically how it’s different from Hyper-V or some
other, you know, virtual machines.
Corey: Well, so you know, what we’re seeing from containers, at
least right now, even in Azure, and what’s made them really exciting is the
agility. The additional agility that they offer. And
so, one of those things we see for the customers that are starting to use it,
in some cases they take the same app that they have. And it doesn’t take you
necessarily to rethink your application model, rethink the world. Take the same
app you’ve got, put it into a container, and suddenly you can deploy on your
local desktop, and sort of do some development there, make things work. You can
take that exact same container and within seconds, or even milliseconds, deploy
that into your test environment, deploy it into your production environment,
whether there’d be a public cloud, running in Azure, could be running in you
know, some other public cloud, could be running in part of your private data
center. And the container give you that consistency of
experience. You’ll deploy the same way, in the same amount of time everywhere
you go. And so, what it really offers, sort of the beginning point, is really just that agility to move those workloads in between those different
environments. Which I think is really exciting and I think one of the main
reasons why it’s picked up, and that’s sort of Docker has really fit in and really made a good strong case for their platform,
because they offer that consistency of deployment across all those different
environments. And so that’s kind of the first step of what’s making containers
so exciting, so hot if you will. It fits into our platform in a few ways. Like
you mentioned, it does fit in, you know we have a Windows Server container
which we demoed this week, which enables sort of a very similar sort of, very
fast deployment, very quick to get out of the box and go. And then we have the
Hyper-V container, which is something we haven’t yet shown. Which
will take advantage of some of the sort of the deeper virtualization stack. We won’t have the shared kernel, we won’t have shared memory when it comes to
the Hyper-V containers, and so we’ll give you a little bit more isolation when
deploying. But again, that promise of being able to deploy anywhere and
quickly, will still hold up. So you can deploy the same container as a Windows
Server Container or as a Hyper-V Container, it’s really a deploy time decision
that’s going to make that really exciting. And so that promise of agility will
always be there. Did that help a little bit or was it still a little bit
convoluted?
Mary Jo: I think we’re getting there.
Corey: (laughing) That’s the nice way of
saying it wasn’t good.
Leo: No, no, no, I totally get it. And that’s from the point of
view of why you’d want to use it.
Mary Jo: One of the biggest sessions here at Ignite was that
container session he was talking about, where it was Mark Resanovich on the stage with Jeffrey Snover, who’s a
distinguished engineer.
Leo: Yea, we’re not alone. Everybody wants to understand.
Mary Jo: That room… how many people, like five thousand people were
in that session?
Corey: Yea, it was ridiculous.
Mary Jo: It was insane. Everybody wanted to know about containers. And
everybody also wanted to know about Nano Server. Which is Jeffrey Snover’s thing, right?
Corey: That is Jeffrey’s thing, yea.
Mary Jo: So when Microsoft talks about containers and Windows Server,
they are also talking now about this new thing that you’re going to be having
in Windows Server 2016. It’s a new way of deploying. With Windows Server, with
the GUI-less, very stripped down environment that they call Nano Server, right?
Can you talk a bit more about that? Like why does that matter to people who are
trying to do Cloud and UNPREM stuff?
Corey: Yea, good question. Jeffrey actually doesn’t let us talk
about that. No, just kidding. When we look at Nano Server, actually the
original concept around Nano Server and the work that they did started in
Azure. It was some work that we had done with them on how do
we make the host much smaller, much thinner, much smaller surface area. So
I think it’s running at 1/20th the size of the server core. And so
it’s just really tiny, and so it will deploy faster, it, again, has a much
smaller surface area, like you said, GUI-less, and so it really is going to be
geared towards enabling cloud-like scenarios, and containers being a prime one,
where it’s entire goal is really just to boot-strap the system to make sure
that you can deploy those containers down on the box. It’s a great name, too.
Mary Jo: It is. Yea, we had the code name for that one, TUVA. We knew that one. Another really big
announcement here for you guys was this thing called Azure Stack. And what,
here’s my understanding. Azure Stack is a bunch of stuff that Microsoft,
basically the equivalent of what Microsoft does in its data center, but it’s
you guys giving this operating level system technology to customers and saying
to them, “You can put this in your data center.” It’s not actually Azure in
your data center, but it’s pretty close, right?
Corey: Yea, sorry go on.
Mary Jo: No, so I was going to say, who do you think is going to use
this thing? I mean is it only the biggest customers
and like hosting providers, or do you think smaller, mid-size businesses could
even use this thing?
Corey: Yea, absolutely. I mean the goal is to run the full spectrum
of sort of folks who would want to use this. And you know, you explained it
exactly right and I think as I mentioned the Azure Resource Manager before this
new API, this actually ties really tightly into the Azure stack because it’s
the same API that will be supported there to deploy, the same template
languages. And really what we’ve done, we’ve actually shared code between us
and the server team to go build that. Which was both really fun, there are
challenges to it of course, to be able to sort of share that code and ship in
different cycles. But, you know, we sort of built it together to be able to
support that same Azure functionality. But of course, built
on the sort of the promise of Windows Server and the promise of System Center
and management experiences that you’d sort of expect from those parts of the
platform. And so it’s sort of combines what you’d expect from the sort
of ability of System Center with the Azure components that are sort of the
runtime and deployment technology. And we do expect it to run sort of a nice
wide range of scenarios, whether it be small to large, really, trying to gear
it towards people who do have things they want to keep local, do have things
they want to keep private. And so we hope that we’ll enable that bridge and enable
that sort of simple deployment technology between both. So…
Mary Jo: Ok. I have two more things I want to ask you. I know you
have to run out pretty soon, but…
Corey: No problem, this is fun.
Mary Jo: Oh, good, good.
Leo: Give him more beer, I think we
could keep him all afternoon.
Mary Jo: I think we could. One of the really kind of, I think, not
well appreciated maybe, but I think some people understood this but not
everybody, was this, appreciated announcement, was this advance threat
analytics announcement that you guys made here. I know it’s not exactly an
Azure announcement, but I bet you know about this a little bit.
Corey: I know about everything. That’s the story.
Mary Jo: (laughing) Ok, good to know. So it’s Advanced Threat
Analytics. Why were the people that did understand this thing excited about it?
Corey: Yea, so you know, the way actually I’ve, because I’ve been
trying to sort of wrap my head around it and explain it as well, because it’s
sort of a science fiction sort of thing come to life. You know, the best way to
think about it is when you get that text message from your credit card company, that says, “Hey, you just spend some money in
Turkey, and you also spent some money in Seattle at the same time. That doesn’t
seem possible, are you sure you’re in both places?” And they’ll actually, they’ll go forward and check with you or even
cancel your credit card, right? That same sort of technology we’re now applying
to identity login technology, right. So it actually detects whether it was
possible for you to login in one country, and then login in another country,
with the flight times that it takes to get there. I don’t know if it takes into
account which flight and how much they’re typically delayed, but at least the
amount of time it would take you to get from one place to another, it will then
flag those as warnings. And so, a lot of that same sort of machine learning
technology that the credit card companies have really gotten good at, we’re now
applying those same types of solutions to be able to detect when your identity
may have been stolen in the Azure and Office 365 login technology. So, it’s
pretty exciting, it’s pretty cool actually.
Mary Jo: So do you have to be an Azure active directory customer to
take advantage of this right?
Corey: That’s right, so it’s tied into the Azure active directory
which is, you know, the login authentication for both Azure and Office 365,
yea, right, right.
Mary Jo: That’s, yea, I think that could be really interesting. People
who are kind of grocking out while you guys were
explaining it were like, “Wow. Can you imagine this, it’s like going to really help us thwart a lot of cyber-attacks in our
organizations.
Corey: That’s right. And it turns out, actually, and if you’ve read
Mark’s books which I assume both of you have, right? Most of these cyber-attacks
do come from social engineering, right? People being able to either guess my
passwords or steal passwords in some way or another and this is really an
attempt to thwart some of that, absolutely.
Leo: And of course, it’s the kind of thing that makes sense in
Enterprise because you could enforce that. I’m wondering how many people turn
on 2nd Factor, which is available now with Office 365, you know in
the real world. But IT can say, “No, I think we better do that.”
Corey: Yea, exactly, exactly.
Mary Jo: Ok, the other one is this, you guys brought this up in the
keynote, this whole idea of shadow IT. You know, this
idea that people in their organizations are running a lot of cloud apps that
maybe aren’t authorized for them to be running, right? And you guys talked
about this new capability coming in Azure called Azure AD Cloud App Discovery. What’s
that going to let you do, if you’re an admin? Like what’s the advantage to you
to run that?
Corey: A classic Microsoft name, right? A seven words, yea sorry about that.
Mary Jo: Azure AD Cloud App Discovery.
Corey: It’s not even an acronym, is it? You can’t even, I’m trying… well, anway…
Mary Jo: No you really can’t.
Corey: I’ll work on it. Project Tokyo, that’s what we’ll call it.
Leo: Eight cad, eight cad’s not bad. Azure Cloud App Discovery. Eight cad,
that ain’t bad.
Corey: Yea, eight cad. Anyway, sorry, back
to the question at hand here. Yea, so, one of the things you know, when we look
at this, we’re trying to offer solutions that are going to enable all of IT,
right? And especially with Azure, we want to enable both the departmental IT to
be able to go be agile, deploy quickly, you know with the Docker solutions and so on, but sometimes that departmental IT will start to deploying
things that maybe central IT didn’t quite know about, right? And shadow IT has
kind of been the phrase that’s come up for sort of any IT that is happening in
an organization that maybe central IT didn’t know about, whether it be departmental or individuals. And, you know, candidly it’s
not necessarily bad, but it’s also certainly not necessarily good. I think
enabling the sort of departmental IT’s to move quickly is great, but central IT
is going to be the one that’s responsible for all the security requirements and
all, sort of the compliance expectations that come through, and so they have a
responsibility in a lot of these situations to take care of that and make sure
that they’re watching those aspects. And so some of the solutions that we’re
offering sort of like E-CAD, which .. E-CAD? Is that what we called it?
Mary Jo: Yea, let’s start using that, yea.
Corey: See whether it picks up.
Leo: As soon as you start using an acronym it’s too late, there’s
no going back.
Corey: The gentleman next to me is texting like crazy. He’s like
“Tell them to stop using that, it’s not right! That’s not the brand!” Ok,
anyway, sorry, I’m in big trouble, this is what the
beer does to me.
Mary Jo: See, this is what triples do.
Corey: That’s right, that’s right. So what this enables you to do,
again back to the question…
Leo: Beats TUBA. I’m just saying. Ok, go ahead.
Corey: Indeed. So what this enables you to do, actually, it allows
you to keep track, right, it allows you to give you sort of eyeballs on what
the entire organization’s doing, whether they’re the departmental IT, whether
it’s coming from Central IT, and all of the cloud services that they’re using
across the entire eco-system. And so, what in enables you to do, and actually
for free you can take this tool and do a quick analysis, it tells you what’s
running, right? It tells you who’s using what and how
they’re using it. And again, coming back to sort of the security and trust
aspects, you know, central IT is responsible for protecting against information
leakage, and these sorts of threats that are actually, you know, quite serious
and concerning, especially some of the things that are going on in the world
these days. And so, giving them an opportunity to at least be able to track and
monitor how people are using the cloud, and be able to say, “That’s ok, no
problem here, but maybe this one’s not ok.” And give them the power to be able
to do that, since they are the ones responsible for that level of, again, that
high level of security. And so that’s what I think is cool about it.
Mary Jo: Yea, I heard somebody, maybe it was Mark, I don’t know who it was, saying, “There are two kinds of IT orgs. There are ones
that have shadow IT, and there’s ones that don’t know they have shadow IT.”
Corey: That’s right, that is what Mark
says.
Mary Jo: And so everybody’s doing this. Everybody’s got their IT
department, like going around the IT department running cloud apps in there,
and this is just kind of helping them, kind of taking inventory I think, right?
Corey: That’s right. That’s right. Without
necessarily damaging the agility that, of course, those IT departments are
getting. So, yea.
Mary Jo: Yea, yea it’s pretty cool. Anything else you want to mention
from here that you think people might want to know about? We touched on a lot
of the big announcements, I think.
Corey: Yea, the only other thing that maybe, that was pretty
exciting at least for me, again, and being sort of the Azure guy, ExpressRoute.
Which is something that we’ve had for a while, to be able to connect, you know,
a big MPLS base line into Azure, we actually just announced support for that
same connectivity to be done using Office 365. And so you can now use
ExpressRoute to be able to connect straight to Office 365, take advantage of
that dedicated fat pipe from those service providers that you’re already using,
and be able to connect straight into your e-mail Exchange, Solution and
SharePoint as well. And so, it’s a really exciting sort of combination of Microsoft
services, giving you, again, a pipe to Microsoft. And
so it really allows you to sort of take advantage of all those services being
in the same data centers right next to each other. And so that’s been really
exciting, at least for me on the Azure side.
Mary Jo: Cool, very cool. Well, thanks, Corey. That was awesome.
Corey: Of course, of course.
Mary Jo: It really helps to have somebody from Azure explain the
stuff. I do my best as the Enterprise rep here…
Leo: You do a great job.
Mary Jo: It’s hard sometimes.
Corey: You do a great job, Mary Jo.
Leo: Somebody asked, could you run, and I suppose this is true,
but could you run Exchange, or SEQUAL Docker container? Or a container?
Corey: Oh, good question. I mean, technically, you can…
Leo: You wouldn’t want to probably, right?
Corey: Yea, you know the only thing…
Leo: Because that’s a persistent process you want to keep
running.
Corey: That’s right, that’s right. Having said
that, I’ve seen people use containers just because they start fast. And
so, you know, you could conceivably set up a container that’s running SEQUAL
server that then you plan to run forever. But you’re using it because you built
it on your machine, your local box, and you’re deploying it in the cloud. But
once you’ve deployed, it’s there. So I’ve seen it. It’s not necessarily a
completely foreign concept. It won’t be the most efficient usage of containers.
But it’s still, there’s still a lot of benefit of it, absolutely.
Leo: Yea, I mean, we use that kind of idea, and I think we’ll
probably use containers because, for instance if you need more bandwidth, we
have more audio listeners all of a sudden, to be able to spin up a container
temporarily, that can then serve that out, and it’s no big deal when you shut
it down, it’s just kind of like on demand compute power.
Coery: That’s right.
Leo: But a server’s probably not ideal, because that’s the kind
of thing you’d, you know, you can’t sync them, you know, it’s just kind of a
tricky…
Corey: There’s less of the fast scaling that is required,
absolutely.
Leo: Corey, it’s great
to have you, thank you.
Corey: Yea, this has been a lot of fun. And I realize that I talk a
lot with my hands, I hope it hasn’t been distracting.
Leo: No, and it’s good because they left room above your head so
you could, you’d have room…
Corey: I keep looking at the screen, and I’m like, I feel like I’m
using one of those commercialization platforms.
Leo: No, yea, right. We like it.
Corey: Exactly.
Leo: We like that. We like that a lot. Come back soon, and give
my regards to Mark.
Corey: I will, yea, definitely, I’ll pat his hair for you.
Leo: Yea. I feel like… pat his hair, that’s nice. Pat the bunny. So
we’re going to take a break. I think Paul’s here, I feel like he might be here.
I see something that looks oddly like his lap.
Corey: Well, that’s pleasant, that’s a pleasant view.
Leo: There he is! Oh, yay!
Mary Jo: Luckily, he had pants.
Paul Thurrott: Crotch-cam.
Leo: Anyway, we’re going to take a break. Thank you, we’ll let
Corey go. Take the beer with you please.
Mary Jo: Bye, Corey.
Corey: Bye, guys. Definitely, by all means.
Leo: And we’ll get to Paul and Mary Jo and continue on with
Windows Weekly in just a little bit. Thanks, Corey, take care.
Corey: Thanks, guys. Bye-bye.
Leo: Our show today, as is often the case, is brought to you by
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Paul: Thank you. Did I miss anything fun?
Leo: Nope.
Mary Jo: You did, you missed containers and Nano Server, shadow IT.
Leo: My God, did you not miss anything fun. Corey’s great, love
Corey.
Mary Jo: Guys, come on, come one. You guys have done almost whole
shows on Xbox…
Leo: I know, it’s only fair. I’ll
tell you, people were interested in this stuff, we’re
giving great material, so. And did you go home early, Paul? How come your home
already?
Paul: Because I need to go to Vegas tomorrow so I can drive my car
there.
Leo: Oh my God, jiminy Christmas!
Paul: It’s all good, Leo.
Leo: I don’t know how you do it.
Mary Jo: I don’t either.
Leo: This is going to be a bad month. This is going to be the
month from hell, Paul.
Paul: Yep.
Mary Jo: Yep.
Leo: So, welcome back, Paul. Mary Jo, how long are you going to
stay in Chicago?
Mary Jo: I’m leaving tonight, yea.
Leo: Chicago’s a great city though. You guys had fun there. I
mean isn’t that, I just love it.
Mary Jo: Yea, it’s been really fun, it’s just when you have twenty
three thousand people here for a conference, it just, you have to factor in a
lot of time to get around.
Paul: Chicago’s fantastic. I would have loved to have seen
Chicago, but, you know, mostly it was, well we did some fun stuff. We had some
meet-ups, and…
Leo: It is frustrating though to get to a city like Chicago,
where there’s great music, and great food.
Paul: Yea, I heard a lot of great stories about food and drink and
sights.
Leo: Yea, that can kind of be frustrating.
Mary Jo: I hear we might be here again next year for this.
Leo: Oh, there going to do Ignite in
Chicago twice?
Mary Jo: They haven’t announced that but I think we might be back
next year.
Leo: You know, we had Jason Calacanis this Sunday, kind of had a little reunion. And I love Jason, and I was really
glad to get him on. And he’s, and because he is an investor and runs a launch conference,
so he’s in touch with start-ups and stuff, he had an interesting insight. He
said, actually now that we’ve heard the news since, it all makes sense. loves San Francisco, it’s one of the reasons they kept doing
things in San Francisco. And he says there’s another reason. He’s taking a lot
of meetings in the area.
Paul: Listen, I think it’s important to make 5,000 people move
around according to his… it’s ok.
Leo: But you have to think that this, now this sales force news
maybe now, what Jason said on Sunday, because that hadn’t come out yet.
Paul: Is this any more real than it was before, because I had
heard that there was nothing real on here.
Mary Jo: No, we’re going to talk about that.
Leo: Hey while we’re just funfering around, can you plug and re-plug Paul, because we’re getting that popping
thing. You know that electronic, you know “PLEW,” on your end. I don’t know if its your interface or…
Mary Jo: It’s not me, right?
Leo: NO, it’s Paul. Isn’t that funny, Paul’s at home, you’re on
the road. I think Paul just went and dropped the microphone.
Paul: Do I need to do something?
Leo: Yea, you need to plug and re-plug your interface or
something, because it’s…
Paul: Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were
talking to someone else. So you want me to do it?
Leo: You, you, you my friend. You, can you unplug and…
Paul: I’m not sure what you mean.
Leo: Your headset or whatever it is that you’re using. No, not your… you’re using a microphone, right? The microphone is
connected to the head bone. The head bone’s connected to the thigh bone. The
thigh bone’s connected to a USB audio interface. If you
could… holy cow, if you could undo it and redo it.
Paul: How’s that?
Leo: Better.
Paul: Is it really?
Leo: Yea, it’s a known thing.
Paul: I thought you meant Alex or something.
Leo: No, no, no.
Paul: Usually when you say jump, I say how high? I’m a little
tired.
Leo: I know, I bet you are, holy cow. So
where should we pick this up, Mary Jo? You know where we left off.
Mary Jo: I think we should talk
about, the next thing on the agenda is the Windows as a service strategy, we’re
going to talk about Windows Update for Business, which was announced here.
Leo: Sorry, Paul, she’s taken over the show.
Paul: Yea, that’s fine.
Mary Jo: Yea, so another big announcement. Well, this was kind of a
surprise. We didn’t think that Terry Myerson was going to be at Build. We knew
Joe Belfiore was going to be here, and he was showing
off Windows 10, we knew that he was going to do that. But then, in the middle
of the first day key-note they announced, “And here is Terry Myerson, and he’s
going to announce something.” And what he announced was this thing called Windows
Update for Business. So you know how Microsoft has Windows Update now? And they
have a lot of other updating tools like WSUS and Windows Intune, now just
called plain old Intune, Config Man, which is
Configuration Manager. Now they’ve got this thing called Windows Update for
Business. This is a way to let the IT pros and the admins have a little more
control over how Microsoft is going to update Windows 10. So if you’re in the
free consumer preview, you’re just going to get all the updates. Whenever
Microsoft pushes an update, you’re going to get the update. But, you know,
businesses don’t want that, right? They’re freaking out about that and they’re
like, “Wait, you’re going to be pushing all these updates to our users? We
don’t want that. We want to have some level of test, and some level of ability
to kind of control who gets what in which ring.” And this is what this program
is. And it’s also going to be free, so if you have Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10
Enterprise, and you want to have some more level of control on how to help your
users get the Windows 10 update, you’re going to be able to do that through
this mechanism. So, I think that was pretty well received by this crowd,
because this was the crowd who, yes, we’re kind of kicking the tires now in
Windows 10, yes we’re somewhat interested, but we don’t want this, everybody
getting all these updates, security fixes and new features whenever they want. We
want to be able to say, we only want the security features, or we only want
certain fixes at set time. We only want our machines to update in evenings or
mornings, and this is what, and this mechanism is where you, as the IT manager,
get that control. That’s kind of how I view that. So that was Windows Update
for Business. We knew Microsoft was going to have these different levels of
control, but we just didn’t know the specifics. And now that we’re starting to
get close to what we think is a late July launch of Windows 10 on PCs and
laptops, it’s time for Microsoft to start explaining some of these things, so
that they can get IT to start really looking at this, and not just consumers.
Leo: Is this going to replace WSUS?
Mary Jo: No. It’s going to be a complement to that. So you can still
use the mechanisms of your choice, but this just gives you, as the IT person,
the right to say, “I want to stagger the updates.” Because we know with Windows
10, they’re going to be pushing not just security updates and fixes, but
they’re going to also be pushing features through the pipe. And say they have a
new feature, and they want you to have it, but your IT department says, “Not
yet, we need to test that before you give us that feature,” this is how you’re
going to do that. So yea, that’s Windows Update for Business in a nutshell. And
kind of the funny part of the keynote was, Terry Myerson went up onstage and he
said, “You know, Google can’t really guarantee to you that as customers you’re
going to get updates delivered to all your devices. They can push updates out,
but they’re not there saying, I’m going to make sure these will get onto the
devices.” And so he’s trying to differentiate from what Microsoft’s doing there
and making the case that we’re doing what the IT users especially really want,
which is guarantee the updates come, also sort of fix our patching process by
getting you to have updates applied in a cumulative way, in a regular way. Because
right now, as we’ve talked about it on the show, the patching process that Microsoft is kind of a mess. So they believe
that by doing this with the more regular updates and by flighting things, getting them tested in the early rings and then applying them to
business, that they’re going to fix some of these bad patching incidents that
they’ve been having out there recently with Windows. We’ll see, we’ll see.
Leo: Awesome. Yea, I think it will make sense, I mean I hate to
see a kind of Tower of Babel of different services doing similar things, but I
think it makes sense to update features separately.
Mary Jo: I think so too. Yea, because not everybody wants new
features and fixes, right? Like we might as consumers, but IT
departments, not so much.
Leo: And you assume that an IT professional is smart enough to
handle, you know, the variety. Somebody in the chat room said, “My God, it
sounds like a technical person is in charge at Microsoft!” What??? Oh, my God!
Mary Jo: Right, it’s like somebody who actually has…
Leo: Who uses this stuff.
Mary Jo: Who uses this stuff, but also, you know, Microsoft Windows
10, they’re out there talking to business customers this time. It’s not, hey
surprise, here’s the operating system. They’re asking them, “What do you guys
want? What’s going to get you to upgrade? What can we do to make you guys
upgrade?”
Leo: Lesson learned. Isn’t that great.
Mary Jo: Yep, lesson learned. And that’s that.
Leo: Wow. Did we cover, it looks like we
covered all of this stuff, right? No wait a minute, we didn’t do… Yikes, shmikes, double Mike’s pikes, and this came up on the radio show. Guy
who had a home theater PC and was just struggling. And I said, “You know
what, it doesn’t seem like the writing… the writing does seem like it’s on the
wall at Microsoft does not want you to do this.” They kill Windows Home Server, they make it harder and harder to get Windows Media
Center. And then someone sent me a link saying well, look what they just did. Now
this was, it wasn’t confirmed, it was, Microsoft executives talking to Ed Bott. That’s the question. Well, so.
Paul: Well, it’s been confirmed.
Leo: It has been confirmed. And Ed’s sharp enough to know if the
person talking to him is just gassing or if it’s somebody. So what happened?
Paul: Well, I mean they, what happened was about five years ago,
they stopped working on Media Center.
Leo: 2009, I didn’t realize that.
Paul: Well, actually it might have been longer than that. It’s
been a long time. So unfortunately, they know how this is with a certain,
minority part of the user base, but also a vocal part.
Leo: A very vocal.
Paul: And when Steven Sinofsky was still around he talked about
the metrics of Media Center, and boiled it down to some tiny percentage of
people ever used it. And most of the people that launched Media Center had done
so by mistake, and never did it again.
Leo: That’s right, we talked about that,
the telemetry on that, yea. “It took over my screen.”
Paul: Yea, look, Media Center was fantastic in its day. And it’s
been updated in some meaningful ways over the years’ to support Cable Card, it was integrated into mainstream versions of Windows,
which is important. But, you know, I think the fact remains for most people,
controlling a TV with a computer is complex and unnecessary. And even though
there is a small contingent of people who really love it, you know, most people
don’t even know about it or use it all. And even Gabe Aul stuff about this, it had sort of an implicit kind of put down to Media Center
users because what he said was similar to the Sinofsky thing was, the most
common usage of Media Center is to play DVD movies. And of course, the people
that really love it and advocate for it use it to record live TV, not DVD
movies. Anyway, it’s gone, so what that means is that it won’t be included in
Windows 10, it won’t be available as an add-on for Windows 10, if you want to
run Media Center you need to have Windows 8 or earlier.
Mary Jo: And I’ve been hearing, you probably have to, all these
people saying, “Well, that’s it, I’m staying on Windows 7, and that’s… not
moving!” You know.
Paul: There’s always a reason to do that.
Leo: But tell them, this program hasn’t been updated in six
years.
Mary Jo: They don’t even care. It works.
Paul: It does work. Interestingly I just connected it again, and I
have a TV card in my computer, I bought a crazy looking, shark looking thing as
an antenna, and I just re-ran, I used Media Center
again for the first time in a while. And it was kind of nostalgic. It’s the
beginning of the full screen interface that we later see on Windows 8 in some
ways, you know. It does have an interface that would very naturally work with
touch. It was designed for a remote control, but you can kind of see the beginnings
of some of those ideas that later appear in things like Zune, or Windows Phone,
or of course, Windows 8. Yea, I think the future of this stuff is Xbox 1, so.
Leo: From Microsoft. And that’s the important point to make. There
are options from other companies, right?
Paul: Yea, of course. Every TV Tuner card comes with something. I
mean, it’s not great, but there’s software there.
Mary Jo: No, I’m just answering the Tweets of people who are
revisiting this again now that we’re talking about it.
Leo: Well, and that’s the point that the people who use it, want
it.
Mary Jo: I know, they do. And I
guess because Microsoft did carry on allowing it to work with Windows 8, even
though they didn’t update it, people were kind of hoping that’s what they were
going to do.
Paul: It should have sent a message, right. They make this add-on
package, you know, it was just the way they positioned it, it was sort of like
a glorified DVD pack. You had to pay for it, right? You couldn’t just get it
for free. You had to have Windows 8.1 Pro or Windows 8 Pro or whatever. So if
you didn’t have that, you upgraded that first and it costs a hundred bucks,
they really made it, I don’t think, you know…
Mary Jo: They made it not attractive, but people kept using it.
Leo: Not unattractive enough.
Paul: Honestly, I’ve got to say, the problem is it’s probably just
going to disappear. Just letting it kind of tag along with Windows is kind of a
little bit of a mistake. And I understand why they don’t want to do that, right?
It’s a support nightmare, supporting really dated code and so forth.
Leo: You’re a support nightmare.
Paul: And I’m also really dated code. But what I’d like to see
them do is, put it out there in the world. You know, put it on some open source
repository and let people have at it, let them improve it.
Leo: That’s a great idea.
Paul: It’s too bad they don’t do that. What you would probably
find is that it’s a disaster of… you know, you’ve got to remember, this thing
dates back to 2002. So, the original version was based on Windows XP. It
probably has all kinds of problems.
Leo: Xbox One is not a feature for
feature replacement either. You can’t DVR…
Paul: No, literally today it is not, but, you know, TV watching
capabilities are there, TV recording capabilities are coming. And I think at
that point, that’s when it happens. I mean, we have in the United States a real
ad hoc solution essentially at Microsoft, provided we get Hauppauge, or however
you pronounce it, TV card that’s based on USB, itself looks like something
that’s fifteen years old. And with that, and your Xbox here in the United
States you can watch live TV. And obviously in Europe they have a Microsoft or
an Xbox branded solution. But they’re going to bring a Microsoft solution here
in the United States as well, presumably, or hopefully, at that time we get the
full experience of TV recording and all that stuff. I think that kind of
satisfies the need, I mean, the Xbox One is certainly a powerful PC type
device. And so it should be able to handle that. Also, I helps justify the difference in price between say an Xbox One and a Roku or an Apple
TV or whatever you might use otherwise to just access on-line services. There’s
a mosquito in my office.
Leo: That’s all right, there’s smoke in mine, so,
I’ve got like eighteen engineers going, “I don’t know, it smells like it’s
burning, but…”
Paul: Keep talking, Leo, you’ll be fine.
Leo: You know what, somebody lit a match
on the roof, that’s all. Sure, that’s all. There’s just something burning on
the roof, nothing to worry about.
Paul: Heat goes up, right?
Leo: Yea, exactly. Dynamite goes down, so I checked for dynamite,
but heat goes up. That’s what we told our neighbor. Our neighbor came over and
said, “Would you mind clearing those dead trees and branches that are on the
top of your property?” I said, “I believe that fire goes uphill, so we’re
fine.”
Paul: Neighbors are the best, Leo.
Leo: I love them. Love them. All right, so there you go, goodbye
Window Media Center, we hardly knew ye. And I know there’s going to be, you
know people are going to be peeved about that, but. And then I see an item here
on OneDrive. Is this yours, Mary Jo?
Mary Jo: No, it’s Paul’s.
Paul: Believe it or not, this is me.
Leo: Paully, Mr. OneDrive.
Paul: No, I’m following this one very carefully, because obviously
last fall in the wake of the Windows 10 stuff in October, Microsoft announced
that they were going to get rid of the sync clamp for OneDrive, that’s in
Windows 8.1. This was the most awesome piece of software they’ve ever made in
my opinion. And it’s really disappointing, because if you go to Windows 10 from
Windows 8.1, you go back to a Windows 7 style sync client. And that’s also what
they have on the Mac by the way for OneDrive. The only thing worse than a
Windows 7 style sync client on Windows is the OneDrive for Business Sync
Client, which is the dumbest piece of software ever created. And basically what
this thing does, is let you sync all of your OneDrive
for Business storage to your PC or none of it. There’s no selective sync at
all. And so you can either have dumb or dumber. You know, these are the two
choices. So going forward what they’re going to do is create a unified client
that handles both. They’re already doing this on the mobile side, so if you get
OneDrive for iOS or I think for Windows Phone as well now, or Android, you get
an OneDrive app, you don’t get two apps, and you can access both of your
accounts form the same place, personal and business. And the intention is to do
that on the Windows Desktop, and also, by the way, on the Mac desktop, as well.
And so they’re going to base it on the OneDrive consumer experience. You’ll
have two entries, if you have both accounts, you do access both from file
explorer. You’ll have the same type of, unfortunately,
it is the selective sync like for Windows 7, where you have to pick the folders
and that kind of stuff. But the thing that they did at the show is really lay
out what they’re going to do and when. And there’s more to this announcement
than what I’m talking about, because I’m really focused specifically on the
desktop sync client, but in tandem with this, there’s also going to be a
Windows Universal App for Windows 10, there’s going to be a big update to the
web interface for OneDrive for Business, which is huge. It will make it look
more like the OneDrive interface, you know, no shocker there. So there’s a
bunch of other stuff going on, but, over time we’re going to get some of that
stuff that they took out of the 8.1 sync client. And we’re going to gain other
things. For example, the ability to see files that are shared with you, which
is a big complaint in both sync clients today, that you can’t see that kind of
stuff. And so this stuff is all happening over the year, and Windows 10 will
ship kind of as we see it now, with OneDrive for consumers. But I think in the
3rd quarter of this year, excuse me, they’re going to ship a preview
version that will support OneDrive for Business and OneDrive for Consumers, Mac
and PC Desktop, and then in the 4th quarter they’re going to ship
the final version. And that will be the unified client. They actually had a
couple sessions, but the one I was able to watch on video laid out the
schedule, all of the features they are going to put out, not just the stuff I’m
talking about, and then some stuff that’s going to come out after that as well.
And they have a plan for what they call off-line files, which is essentially
the ability to view in a read-only view the files that are only in the cloud. So
if you don’t sync them to the desktop you can still kind of see them. Is there
fire in your office now?
Mary Jo: No, I don’t know about you, but I am so hoarse from talking
so much over the past two weeks, I just, yea, I’m losing my voice.
Leo: Throat Coat, not beer. Throat Coat.
Mary Jo: Beer is helping, beer is helping.
Leo: The alcohol dries your tissues out.
Paul: No, you need whiskey, Mary Jo. That burns everything right
off your throat.
Mary Jo: Yea. No, I’m having water, a lot of water.
Leo: Yea, water, that’s a good idea. Warm water is good. No, I’m fine, we found out that the source of the flame was a bagel
that someone had burned in the kitchen.
Paul: I need to destroy this insect, it’s really bothering me. Anyway,
it’s just kind of slowly bobbing around in my vision.
Leo: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Paul: Anyway, that’s most of it. So I know that there are a lot of
complaints from people that use OneDrive on the Windows desktop in particular. I
think the mobile clients are pretty good already, but this unified engine is a
big deal, the sync engine I should say, because, honestly, the back end
services are never going to be the same. But from the users perspective it will
look and work the same, and I think that’s the important bit. And you’ll be
able to see both personal and work files at the same time or side by side
anyway.
Mary Jo: And the replacement for the place holder thing is, you
think, is the offline, right?
Paul: Yea, so there is a little bit of conjecture here because
they specifically mention off-line files with mobile clients, meaning iOS and
Android at first, and then with the universal app with Windows 10, which is
everything, you know, phone, tablet, PC. They never say it for the desktop sync
client, but I have to think that’s the next logical step, and that would be
past the end of the year. At the very least, if you are on Windows 10, you’ll
have the desktop sync, like we have it now, sort of, but for both services. And
then you can run the universal app if you want to see files that are available offline. You’ll have to be online to see them,
right, because they’re in the cloud.
Mary Jo: Right, yep. That makes sense though.
Paul: It makes sense. The system I’d like to see is something I’d
like to think of as placeholders, where you see the files when you’re off or
online. It was so good. It still is so good if you have Windows 8.1.
Mary Jo. Ok.
Leo: Ok, Surface 3, I’m getting questions, a lot of questions,
like somebody said should I get a Surface 3 or a Surface 3 Pro, it goes on sale
this…
Paul: Yes.
Leo: Yes, get both. Microsoft’s doing a trade in, not a lot,
though, for the Surface RT, what they said up to $300, something like that.
Paul: No, it’s not even, it’s up to $150.
Leo: Oh, not a lot of money for that.
Paul: You’re almost better off, honestly at this point in time,
those tablets don’t go for much more on Gazelle or whatever, but I would look,
I’d go to Amazon and look at Gazelle, sell it on E-bay. Look, try it around,
because the difference between these other services and just going to Microsoft
is that you get money or a gift card from that service. With this one it’s
literally only applied to the, you know, the upgrade. And so, if you get a
little bit more at Gazelle, it might be worth it.
Leo: Yea. Or keep it. Is there any compelling reason to keep an
RT tablet?
Paul: I can’t think of one, Leo. How about you?
Mary Jo: I still have mine, I still have mine. You know, the problem
with the RT tablet, like we brought up before is, you’re not going to get
Windows 10 on that thing, you’re going to get some subset of features at some
time, and we don’t know when and we don’t know what features. So if you’re
waiting for the big update to it, you’re not going to get a big update.
Paul: Speaking of big updates, you know, couple of questions about
the RT update, did Microsoft say anything about the RT update that sort of is
going to be like Windows 10? The answer to that question is no. And I don’t
mean this in a mean way, but I think from Microsoft’s perspective, these
people, these RT customers are sort of the new Media Center people. And they
just kind of want you to get the hint. You know, like they’re trying to be
nice, but you know, I don’t expect anything earth shattering. And so, no,
they’ve not discussed this at all since that January. Can you imagine being
that poor guy at Microsoft that actually has to make that happen? You know, I
just don’t think that’s a big priority right now, because, by the way, they’re
trying to ship a major new operating system. And that’s kind of a big deal.
Mary Jo: I still have mine with me when I went on vacation, and it’s fine for certain things. Like it’s fine if you want to
do very basic tasks, if you don’t need to run 132 apps, it’s fine, the
performance isn’t fantastic, but if you’re just using it for, you know, looking
at e-mail or you know, opening some basic web pages. I don’t
know, I’m still…
Paul: How’s Notepad? Notepad’s good? A Notepad work station?
Mary Jo: Notepad works really well, yep, works well. So I don’t know,
I think I mentioned this on the show before. My niece, who is at University of
Rhode Island, bought one of these, because she saw I had one, and you know,
couple of years ago. She’s used it all through college. And found it was fine
for what she needed it for. So I guess, you know, a lot of people who still
have their Surface RTs and their like, you know what, it’s still working, I’m
not going to dump it. And I’m not going to upgrade because it works ok for what
I need. Yea, I did my Surface 3 review this week, my many non-reviewers review,
and I said, “If somebody gave me about $700, and said, which is how much
Surface 3 costs, and that’s how much it costs, right, if you add the pen, which
is $50, you add the keyboard, another $140.
Leo: You don’t need to buy a loop though, that’s nice.
Paul: Honestly, I would take this a step further, depending on
your needs. I really think that a 2G tablet you’re going to use as a computer
is sort of a non-starter. Having said that I don’t have one, I haven’t tested
it, but I really think you need to go for the upper level one. And at that
point you’re actually talking about more money.
Mary Jo: You mean Surface Pro, right?
Paul: Or Surface 3 with the 4G of RAM and the 20G of storage which
is $600, so $730, so $780, so it’s $800
Mary Jo: This one that we had as a loaner,
it worked fine. It actually opened web pages quickly enough to not be annoying,
right, it plays video fine, it opens apps respectably, but for me, still, if
you gave me $700 and said, “You want to buy a clamshell laptop or do you want
to buy this laptop?” The laptop’s a little heavier, but you get your keyboard
included, it’s already, you know, you don’t have to worry about, you know, can
I put it on my lap? You can.
Paul: By the way, and I’m sorry to interrupt, but this actually,
this literally just happened today. When I was going through security at the
airport in Chicago, the guy is yelling out what you have to take out of the
bag.
Leo: “Everybody that has a Surface Pro 3, take it out!”
Paul: Yea, if you have a laptop, take it out. And he said, if you
have a tablet, like an iPad, you don’t have to take it out, because an iPad is
not a laptop.
Leo: Whoa!
Paul: And I said, “That’s for sure.” And the woman in front of me,
who was a normal human being, not like a tech person, like from what I could
see, turned around and look at me and laughed and was like, “Exactly.” Why
would this be a moment of bonding with someone in line? But, yes, I think the
Surface 3 kind of falls into that category, like it’s a great tablet within the
confines of the fact that Windows isn’t great on tablets, per se, it’s a good,
it’s sort of a good laptop, it’s a better laptop then say an iPad would be. But
if you’re going to spend $700 and you like really need a laptop … you know, why don’t you get a laptop? Well, it’s a legitimate
question.
Leo: It’s just a word, though.
Paul: No, no it’s not. I mean a laptop being a physical thing
that’s connected that is a machine. What she’s talking about with lapability, any size laptop she could put on her lap, and I
could, and you could type, and it’s not going to fall over. The Surface 3 and
the Surface 3 Pro are wonderful devices, but most people, many people can’t use
it that way, it will just topple right over. It doesn’t work as a lap, literally
as a laptop.
Mary Jo: Right, and you know, not everybody needs to type on their
lap, but I feel like because they are gearing this towards college students
very heavily and high school students, I’m thinking they might type in their
laps more like we do, then maybe mobile professionals.
Paul: Or in situations where you’re in a big, you know, like a,
what do you call those, bean chairs? Or on a couch watching TV or whatever it
is, I do this a lot where you can kind of balance a laptop on a pillow or
something in awkward situations because it’s one L-shaped thing. You know, and
the weight of your hands keeps the back of it from going over because it’s one
thing. Whereas this thing, you know, just kind of disconnects. And I think
Microsoft is trying to sell it’s version for the
future of computeing, which is cool. It’s a wonderful
little outlet…
Leo: I think they should say something about bean chairs in
there.
Paul: It’s a check box item.
Mary Jo: Bean chairs.
Leo: Bean chair compatible.
Mary Jo: Yea, so I like the Surface 3 fine, but I feel, I still feel
like if Microsoft ever does make a clamshell laptop that’s of the quality of a
Surface, I would buy that.
Paul: Yea, right.
Mary Jo: I like the quality. I like the quality a lot.
Leo: The quality of the screen, or of
that…
Mary Jo: The whole thing, the build itself, the device. I love the
kickstand, I really like…
Leo: But you prefer a laptop, you like the keyboard attached.
Mary Jo: I do.
Leo: It would be a better keyboard. I mean, let’s face it, the
type keyboard can’t have, I mean I’ve never tried it, but it should have much
travel…
Mary Jo: It’s not a bad keyboard, but when you kind of, I forget what
they call it when you push it up against the screen, so that it’s at a slight
angle with the magnets, it bounces when you type. It’s a little bouncy.
Paul: It’s also a little, it’s kind of in here, it’s small.
Mary Jo: If you don’t type a lot, like we do, it’s probably great. It’s
like answer a couple of e-mails, type in a couple URLs, but when you’re sitting
there typing, typing, typing you start feeling it bounce, bounce bounce.
Leo: For a writer, it probably isn’t the perfect experience.
Paul: It’s like the experience of using a Bluetooth keyboard with
my Surface Pro for this reason.
Mary Jo: How was that?
Paul: It still has some weird compromises, plus now it’s this
thing where it has two parts, so. It’s not the same.
Leo: It’s not the same.
Paul: I want it to be the same. Is this the same? No? I don’t want
it.
Leo: Anything else to say? I mean…
Paul: No, Surface 3 is great.
Mary Jo: It’s a nice machine. It is a nice machine, I’m not saying it’s bad.
Paul: And I do think …
Mary Jo: If the keyboard and the pen were included or the keyboard at
least was included, I’d be more interested in recommending it than I am now.
Leo: The price is too high for what you get.
Mary Jo: The price is high.
Paul: I’m normally the one that complains about the price, I mean
I sort of remember the value of rating this against other machines, where do
these other capabilities come in to play, and if you really want a pen that
works as fluidly as this one does, there aren’t too many other options, you
know, it’s pretty good for that kind of thing. Yea, I mean my own needs personally
I would go for the laptop. But I do wonder, I sort of feel like this would be a
great solution for people who prize mobility above all else, and for students
especially. I think this is going to be, I’m not saying this is going to be
replacing the iPads in colleges across America or anything, but I think this
will be pretty successful in education. So Leo, on Monday, I got the weird
experience of sitting here in my home office where I am now, watching the
keynote, and then getting up and going to the airport and then going to that
place.
Leo: That is weird. That is really weird.
Paul: Yea it is, I remember I sort of didn’t feel like I was in
Chicago, well, except for those two hours I spent sitting in traffic. But, and
it was a weird little quick trip.
Leo: Yea, but you’re back now and that’s nice. Hey, did you see
my new watch? This is not an Apple Watch, this is the LG Urbane.
Paul: So that’s a big watch, right? Some of the Android watches
I’ve seen that are kind of more elegant or smaller that have a round face.
Leo: I love the round faces.
Paul: I think that’s really cool. I’m actually really surprised
Apple didn’t go round.
Leo: This is a gorgeous watch. To dim the screen press… so this
is like swipe right to install system update found.
Paul: It’s Android. System update time.
Leo: Well, I just got it out of the box. All right, sorry about
that. Let us continue. I should probably…
Paul: So what is Ignite?
Mary Jo: I think we did that already. We did that part.
Leo: Yes, more than enough.
Paul: What is Ignite?
Leo: So, let’s do the Salesforce thing. So, do you feel like this
is credible, or? Now Microsoft says, “Yea we’re interested but we haven’t
talked to them. We’re just researching, we’re doing
our due diligence.”
Mary Jo: Ok, let’s talk about this story. This is a Bloomberg story,
Bloomberg Business Week story. The headline on the story is, “Microsoft is said
to evaluate a possible bid for Salesforce.” You start reading the story…
Paul: By the way, I’m sorry to interrupt. How many qualifiers are
in that headline?
Leo: There are two. You don’t see that a lot in headlines.
Paul: There are two qualifiers in that headline. That’s amazing.
Mary Jo: This is even better. In the middle of the story, “Microsoft
is not in talks with sales force, and no deal is imminent.” Ok…
Leo: So it’s a non-story story.
Paul: That’s awesome.
Mary Jo: I mean, the thing the story is
trying to say is if somebody else bids on Salesforce, which is known to be for
sale…
Leo: It is in play, right?
Mary Jo: It is in play. And Microsoft decides the company that is
about to buy them is not a friend, maybe Microsoft would look into buying them.
I mean, you know, every time something is for sale, Microsoft does due diligence
and looks at it.
Leo: They have enough staff, they could probably say, “Hey, could
you just check into this?”
Mary Jo: Exactly. So I would say, based on what that Bloomberg story
says, Microsoft’s not right now even bidding, or in the bidding, and there’s
nothing imminent. So this story just went crazy. Everybody’s like “Microsoft’s
about to buy Salesforce.” That’s not what that story says.
Leo: It says, you wouldn’t even need a
source to write that story, frankly.
Mary Jo: You wouldn’t. You could say, “Microsoft, of course, is
looking into this because Salesforce is in play.”
Leo: Do you think, though, that there is a little fire from the
smoke?
Mary Jo: Ok, so here’s, there’s a couple things to think about here,
right? So, would it make sense for Microsoft to buy Salesforce? It would be a
very expensive buy for them.
Leo: They do CRM already.
Mary Jo: They have CRM already.
Leo: Do they have a CRM that is as full featured and poplar as
Salesforce?
Mary Jo: Not as popular.
Leo: Ok. Salesforce is dominant.
Mary Jo: Right, and Microsoft lately, in the
past years since Nadella’s been there, has been doing a lot of deals with
Salesforce. They’re doing all kinds of connecters for the Salesforce cloud to
Excel, and Office 365 with Salesforce, so there’s a lot of synergies between
them and they’re working together much closer than they used to when Steve
Ballmer was the CEO. So there’s stuff there, but I don’t know, I guess I’m
wondering what value would Microsoft get from buying them? They don’t run on
Azure, so you’d have to, I guess, somehow undo all the stuff in their data
centers and bring them over to Azure, I would think. Or somehow combine the
data centers of Salesforce with Microsoft’s data centers. I have no idea how
hard that would be, but I would think that it’s not trivial. So you‘d get the
customer base, you’d have a company with very, very different culture from
Microsoft, who you’re trying to combine in with Microsoft. I don’t know, I
think it’s a big set of things to overcome. But, if Google’s bidding on them,
or Oracle’s bidding on them, maybe Microsoft will be like, “You know what? It’s
going to hurt us more if either of those companies get it, so let’s get it.”
Leo: It might be as a defense, a true defensive play.
Mary Jo: I don’t know. It’s so hard to think of Mark Benioff at Microsoft. Maybe he’ll just retire then.
Leo: Well, he’d just stick around.
Paul: He could work with Mark Penn.
Mary Jo: He could (laughing). You’re funny.
Paul: Two people that have nothing… should never be at Microsoft. It’s perfect.
Mary Jo: Yea, I don’t know. I don’t know if it will come to pass. Wow,
it would be such a weird buy in my view in many ways, but if Google was about
to buy them, or Oracle, maybe Microsoft would say, “Let’s just do it.” I don’t
know.
Paul: Where you with me, I could have sworn someone at Ignite said
that Salesforce has a show that is something like four times the size of
Ignite. Some enormous…
Mary Jo: Yea, Dreamforce.
Leo: Yea, Dreamforce is huge, in fact
it’s in San Francisco. We have friends who work there, since they have Pixel Corps, do a lot of the back end video. It’s huge.
Mary Jo: It is. It’s even bigger than Ignite, I’m pretty sure.
Leo: Oh, much bigger. Oh no…
Paul: I heard it’s something like 100,000.
Leo: Yes, I mean, it’s massive.
Mary Jo: They take over all of San Francisco downtown, right?
Leo: Yea, it’s how Macworld used to be.
Mary Jo: Yea, so I don’t know, people are asking do you think it’s
going to happen. I don’t know, you know, Benioff was
at Build, he was in row one at Build, sitting there watching the keynotes. Let’s
see.
Leo: Interesting.
Paul: That bug just came by again.
Mary Jo: Oh no, not another bug!
Leo: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Paul: No, it’s the same one.
Mary Jo: Is it summer there now?
Paul: Yes, spring is… it’s like eighty degrees out here.
Mary Jo: Is it really? Wow.
Paul: Yea.
Mary Jo: Oh yea, and we should talk about the other crazy story, the
Skype vs. Sky thing.
Paul: Seriously, Sky? Enough.
Leo: Sky already sued over SkyDrive.
Paul: It’s not Sky, it’s Skype.
Leo: That’s why SkyDrive is now OneDrive. Sky is a British
television network, I think Rupert Murdoch owns it. BSkyB
Satellite, they have SkyTV. Skyppppp. It doesn’t seem
confusing at all.
Paul: No it doesn’t.
Leo: But the EC thinks it is.
Mary Jo: Yea. And so, what BBC said is, “Microsoft probably is not
going to have to change the name if this decision stands, but they could have
to pay Sky rights on the name.” Which is just insane. I
don’t know, I think it’s just crazy.
Paul: I think it’s insane. On the good news front, the SkyTV did not try to prevent Skype from using the name
Skype, which is something they did with SkyDrive. But, when they went for the
trademark they said no, and they used a reason, the fact that Skype was talking
about getting into these businesses that were similar to what Sky is doing.
Leo: Could Microsoft reasonably go to Lync?
Mary Jo: They just went away from Lync.
Paul: They just rebranded everything.
Leo: Well, that’s the timing, right.
Paul: You know, Skype has hundreds of millions of active users, I mean, this is one of their very few great consumer brands. I’m
going to murder this insect, I swear to God it’s like ….
Leo: Well, what? Go get it.
Paul: I can’t catch it.
Mary Jo: Get the fly swatter out.
Leo: Get ‘em, Paul. He knows you want to.
Paul: He knows I’m weak; he’s playing with me.
Leo: All right. There’s nothing more to say about either Salesforce
or Sky. So you know what that tells me? Time to take a break,
and come back with a book. Paul will gladly welcome this moment of
respite.
Mary Jo: He can kill that bug.
Leo: Kill that bug, Paul! Kill that bug! Our show today brought
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Paul: I disagree, Leo.
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Paul: That’s why I’m sitting here in my underwear and you look
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whole thing. It’s wide open for you. I think that it’s a good way to do it. Because
you know what happens, your brain says “Oh, and I want
to do this, but now, ok, that inspired me to do that.” You don’t have to
choose. Ten days free, see what’s there. Lynda.com/windows. Please, try it today. I love it. We love it. Lynda’s the best. Lynda.com/windows. Windows weekly on the
air, Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley. Mary Jo
still in Chicago, Paul Thurrott came home and he’s
about to give us his tip of the week. Paul?
Paul: I guess I have two tips, they’re reminders, they’re things
I’ve talked about in the past, but, one is just the Games with Gold promotion.
Leo: Thanks to you I check that every month.
Paul: On Xbox Live. I kind of zoned on it, it’s already March 6,
I’m sorry, May 6. But, you know, of course, because it’s the beginning of the
month the new games are available. So this one new one for Xbox One and Two,
for Xbox 360, one of the games from last month has been carried over. So, be sure to check on that stuff.
Leo: You bet.
Paul: And I do have an article. We haven’t done an Audible pick in
a while, but I wanted to just discuss some general text books that are really
good on Audible.
Leo: Good!
Paul: I just re-listened to “Masters of Doom.”
Leo: Yea, isn’t that great?
Paul: Yea, it’s about the early history now, I guess, of its
software. You know, the creation of Wolfenstein and Doom and Quake, and the
follow up between John Carmack and John Romero and
all that stuff. It’s read by Wesley Crusher, whose real name is, what, Wil Wheaton?
Leo: (Laughing) Yea, Wesley Crusher. I’m sure Wil will love hearing that.
Paul: Never liked him on Star Trek.
Leo: No, he was terrible, but he’s a great guy, he’s a grown up.
Paul: He does a great job on audio books. He also did “Ready
Player One”, it’s fantastic.
Leo: Yea, and he’s just a nice guy.
Paul: Ok, I don’t know him.
Leo: He’s not Wesley Crusher, that’s just a character.
Paul: Yea, yea he’ll always be Wesley Crusher.
Leo: I know, poor kid.
Paul: But, whatever, one of the best kind of tech industry type books that’s on Audible. Someone had talked to me
recently about that book “Showstopper!” and it’s a crime against humanity that
it’s not on Audible. Would love to have that on Audible.
Leo: It is so good. Z Paul, Paul Zachary
Pascal, whatever his name is, yea.
Paul: Yea, P. Zachary Pascal.
Leo: Yea, it’s just great.
Paul: J Pascal. J Zachary Pascal, I think.
Leo: J Zachary Pascal, thank you.
Paul: “Open”, which is a book written by one of the Compaq
co-founders is fantastic. The Steve Jobs biography, the official one, I happen
to like better than the newer one, because it talks a lot about the products. And
so if you just want to, what I do with that book, is I
just go back and listen to the chapter, or the chapter about iPad, or the
chapter about whatever product, I love it for that reason. And if you’re
interested in how those things came together, which I think a lot of people
would be. It’s just a great one, and it’s one I’ve listened to parts of again,
many, many times. So, you know, I listen to a lot of Stephen King stuff, but
I’m really hoping to see going forward are some good books about what’s
happening now, the recent Apple stuff, I guess we do have a little bit of that. The recent Google stuff, some Microsoft stuff. I’d
love to see somebody write a, you know, rise and fall and possible rise again
of Microsoft, so that type of thing. But, we don’t have as many options, you
know.
Leo: No?
Mary Jo: I’m not doing that.
Paul: Mary Jo, I’ll just, let me just say this. You will do this
(laughing).
Mary Jo: No, I will not (laughing). You’re the book guy, you do it.
Paul: I had a conversation with someone who shall remain nameless
at Build, and your name came up. And all I’m saying is … you have to do this.
Mary Jo: Nope, nope.
Leo: Have you ever written a book, Mary Jo?
Mary Jo: Yep, I did. I wrote a book called “Microsoft 2.0” about six
years ago. And a lot of people are like “Will you do 3.0?” No. I hated writing
books. Unlike Paul, I’m not a masochist.
Leo: It’s the worst. It’s the worst.
Paul: All right, all right, all right. But I think between the two
of us… I’ll write it, I just, I mean…
Mary Jo: I’ll just put my name on it if you write it.
Paul: No, you have to contribute to it, but…
Mary Jo: No. I’m not doing another book. I hate writing books.
Leo: It is, it’s so much work, and you make so little money.
Mary Jo: Yep. It’s not very fun.
Leo: It’s just frustrating.
Paul: Then Leo can read the audiobook.
Leo: I did actually just get approached by an agent who says, “We
could make a lot of money if you could write kind of a memoir, or how to.” And
he says, “I know I could shop this around.” And Lisa’s going, “Uh, yea, maybe
we should think about this!” My reaction, it’s just like Mary Jo, nope. Nope. Paul
for some reason, Mary Jo, he’s, there’s something lacking in his make-up.
Mary Jo: I know, he loves books. And
every time he does…
Paul: There’s a gap in my DNA.
Mary Jo: He says this to me every time, “Don’t let me agree to do
another book.” I try to stop him each time.
Leo: Me too!
Mary Jo: Never works.
Leo: Me too!
Mary Jo: Sorry.
Leo: Isn’t it weird?
Paul: This is the one, Mary Jo. This is the one.
Mary Jo: Sorry. The answer is no. N-O. I
sound like my mom. The answer is no.
Leo: I’ll change the subject. Did you notice, Paul, this new
thing, I saw it on my Xbox One yesterday, there’s a new dashboard. Oh, you’re
not in the Beta test?
Paul: Actually I supposedly have an e-mail invitation I’ve never
seen, but. I was in, then I was out, and I’m supposedly back in.
Leo: I’ve been in for all along, and it’s great except you get a
lot more downloads than you already get. But this new dashboard looks great. And
Larry Hagman, Major Nelson, introduces it with a nice video, and it looks like
it has some nice features. And most importantly it makes it very easy to see
what’s new and navigate around and stuff, so I think that was smart.
Paul: Last night, Mary Jo, I know you’ve saw this because I saw
you re-tweeted it, but did you see the Active X and VBScript is dead thing?
Mary Jo: We knew that, though, didn’t we?
Paul: Yea. I just never saw it stated so plainly.
Mary Jo: Yea, now it’s plain. Microsoft’s now saying, just like with
Media Center, they’re saying finally, definitively, Xbox … not Xbox… ActiveX is
not supported in the new Edge browser, which was formerly known as Spartan. We
didn’t think it was.
Paul: I’ve been wrong about so many things in my life, but I
distinctly remember thinking that ActiveX was the single greatest thing I’d
ever heard of.
Leo: I remember, me too. And then…
Paul: Lightweight com objects that run on the web.
Leo: But if you think about it, it was a terrible idea.
Mary Jo: Not now, though. Not now.
Leo: No, it’s too risky
Mary Jo: Yep.
Paul: Oh well. All right, so anyway, after Mary Jo and I write our
book, what I’m going to move on to is the software pick. I mentioned this last
week, in fact I should mention both games. There are two really cool games
available now for Windows Phone that were on other platforms first, I believe. Certainly
one of them was. But they’re both cool because they’re both so visually
different than basically everything else that’s out there. One is Monument
Valley which is the one I know was available elsewhere first. The other one is
called Hitman GO. I’m not particularly interested in either type of game per se
personally, but I recognize how, kind of artistic and excellent they look, you
know? Hitman Go looks like it is made out of little 3D dioramas, essentially. It’s
a turn based, you know, strategy game, it’s kind of amazing looking. And then
Monument Valley is a MC Escher looking, you know, pastel puzzle game that’s
sort of ilomilo-esqe. Just gorgeous
looking. And it’s you know, for all the doom and gloom that’s out about
this phone, and apps kind of disappearing from Marketplace in some cases, this
has been a pretty good year for games, especially. We’ve seen some good stuff
this year. So you should drown your sorrows in Monument Valley.
Leo: And we’re going to see more because of this new policy,
right?
Paul: Universal Apps. I hope so.
Leo: Mary Jo Foley has an Enterprise pick of the week.
Mary Jo: I do. I stole Paul’s pick, I think. One of
them. My Enterprise pick of the week is Skype for Business, which is the
new name for Lync. Microsoft talked a lot about this.
Leo: Skyyyyyyyyyype.
Mary Jo: Skyyyyyyype for Business. No, not
that. Skype. They talked a lot about this at Ignite
this week, because they actually managed to release and make commercially
available Skype for Business Server, the on premises version of the new server.
They had already been in the midst of rolling out Office 365 Skype for Business Service, and the new client for Skype for Business for
Windows. And so now they’re actually getting the server piece out there. They
did tell us at the show that by this summer, if you’re waiting for the Skype
for Business Client for iOS and Android, it should be out. And
the Mac client for Skype for Business before the end of this year. Because
I’ve had a lot of questions about that, a lot of people are using Skype for
Business on their Macs, and very curious as to when they can get the client. And
the answer: before end of year. They’re also going to be rolling out what they
call Enterprise Voice, which is the telephony piece of Skype for Business, so
that you can use Skype for Business to replace a PBX basically, call regular
phone numbers through the service, before the end of this year. So if you’re in
the US, you’re going to be able to start using that functionality in 2015 and
as 2016 kicks off they’ll be rolling it out into other countries. So Skype for
Business is definitely on a pretty fast paced roll right now, and they’re going
all out to make sure they replace not just the brand, but are bringing some of
the new features to the service that have been missing. So yea, that’s the
Enterprise pick.
Leo: And your code name. By the way, Mary Jo did a great tip on
how she does her code names. You’ll see it on Saturday’s the new screen saver.
Mary Jo: Oh nice. I didn’t know if you guys cared about finding code
names.
Leo: No, we have that and we have one from Paul too, I think
we’re going to use both of them.
Mary Jo: Nice. So the code name pick of the week is something called
Carina. C-A-R-I-N-A. And this is one of the many
constellation themed code names from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team. Carina is
what officially is called Dynamic CRM 2015 update 1. So Carina’s a way better
name. It’s the new version, the updated version of Microsoft’s CRM product,
came out this week also at Ignite. Although it was so
overshadowed by much other news. But it’s out there now, available for
customers, and the catch is, this is an online only update to Dynamic CRM 2015.
So if you want some of the functionality of this version, which has some new
mobile apps, and a lot of things about embedding, One Note, some new immersive
Excel capabilities. They’ve got a lot of new features here. You have to wait
until the end of this year if you want it on prem. But if you’re using CRM
online in the cloud, you can get this update now. So that’s the code name pick
of the week.
Leo: All right. And we’ve got to have some beer.
Mary Jo: We do. We do. So one of the things I also did here at Ignite
this week is, it was on another podcast that Microsoft does, it’s called Patch
and Switch on Channel 9.
Leo: That’s a great name.
Mary Jo: It is. And we did the beer show Sunday. A
live beer show. All we talked about was beer. We didn’t talk about tech,
just beer. And we had some brewers come in from Chicago. We had Lagunitas, because their second new brewery is based in
Chicago. That family who runs Lagunitas is from
Chicago, which I didn’t know. So yep, they opened a big brewery here in
Chicago. And then the other brewer who came was Revolution Brewing. They’re
based in Chicago as well. And they brought with them a beer that’s very common
around here in Chicago called Anti-Hero. And it’s a really, really, really nice
IPA. I don’t know if Paul would like this one. Pretty hoppy,
70 IBUs, so pretty hoppy. It was good, it was good. It wasn’t like so over
the top hoppy, but if you’re in Chicago and you’re looking for something where
you can taste the hops, and you really want a hoppier leaning IPA, I would recommend the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero. The other
related piece I have here is for all you Untappd fans
on Windows Phone, finally we go the new version of Untappd for Windows Phone. And there’s some really good
additions to the update. We can now rate beers with quarter stars. You guys
might not think that’s a big deal, but…
Paul: That’s very discerning.
Leo: Yea, because there’s a huge difference between 3 and a
quarter and…
Mary Jo: 3.5 and a 4? You want the 3.75, now you have that. Yes, I
want that a lot. I even sometimes write that in my own comments. I have nothing
else to do. And you also can do some editing. So you know when you post
comments about your beer, and the word hoppy becomes hippy as it often does…
Paul: That drives me crazy. It happens to me all the time.
Mary Jo: See? I knew it! You can go back and edit it. You can go back
and edit your comments.
Paul: Too hoppy!
Leo: You hoppy hippy! He’s a hoppy hippy!
Mary Jo: Yea, so you should go get the updated version for Windows
Phone now, and it’s finally up to the level feature-wise of what they’ve had
for iOS and Android. So now we’re all on a level playing field on Untappd which is great.
Leo: And I think there is, did you mention the beer, I don’t
think you did. Or did you? Yes you did!
Mary Jo: Yep, I did.
Leo: I just didn’t show the Anti-Hero. Of course you did. I think
that’s it.
Paul: Too hoppy.
Leo: It’s too hoppy. How do you say hoppy in Boston? Happy?
Paul: It’s hoppy.
Leo: That makes me happy.
Paul: You say it’s crappy.
Leo: Crappy happy. Happy means crappy. Paul Thurrott is at the, he’s at Thurrott.com. Don’t be confused. Look for the rainbow
colored T in every box.
Paul: It’s good drinking. You have the
signature edition so it’s less crappy.
Leo: Look at that, Paul Thurrott’s signature.
Mary Jo: What about the beer stein, though.
Leo: I want the stein. Is there going to be one?
Paul: The beer stein is awesome. Yea, I think we’re going to stock
those. We can’t sell that exact one because it’s kind of commemorative but, did
you see the pictures? I put pictures of the stein on Facebook.
Leo: Oh you did? Oh, all right. Thurrott.com
Paul: Yes, it is beautiful.
Leo: It is beautiful, Thurrott.com. It is the place, my friends,
to go if you want to keep up on using Windows, what’s going on at Microsoft and
all of that. Of course Mary Jo Foley’s allaboutmicrosoft.com is where all the
hot news gets broken. Allaboutmicrosoft.com, Thurrott.com,
and Windows Weekly. It’s all you need. Visit Windows Weekly at the TWIT
website. TWIT.TV/ww. You can
watch us live every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC at
live.twit.tv on demand, and shows are always available after the fact at
TWIT.tv/ww. Or wherever you get
your podcasts. iTunes or Xbox Music or the
great apps. Dimitri Lee Allen was here, we mentioned this last week on the
show. He came to our live event, he wrote the amazing, one of the amazing
Windows Phone recaps.
Paul: I can’t believe you had never met him before.
Mary Jo: I know, that was weird.
Leo: Anyway, I was glad to meet him now because he did a great
job, and he announced… well he works at Microsoft, I wasn’t sure. So he’s on
the Tools team, he works on the Visual Studio which is… So he said, and this
blew me away, he’s going to do his Zamal version,
he’s going to use our API, we’re giving him the keys to the Apiary log-in and
all that, so he’s going to use our API, which should make an amazing app. He, I
didn’t know this, but he wrote the Windows Phone version, actually he created a
SQL Server Database, and created his own API. So it is API driven from his own…
Paul: SQL Azure or something, isn’t it?
Leo: Yea, SQL Azure, he scraped our RSS feed, maybe the web,
anyway, this will be easier for him now. We’ve got a nice, restful interface
that he can query, and he’s going to make it open source, so it will be a great
example application. I think, you know, we’re going to get Craig Melany to do
an iOS version, maybe we’ll get that to be open source as well, so, people can
see implementation so they can use it themselves. And then it will, so that
means it will work when Windows 10 comes out, on Windows 10, on Windows Phone
10, and when they finally apply it to Xbox and Xbox One. And I’ve been dying to
have an Xbox interface so I can watch on the big screen at home.
Paul: That’s really cool.
Leo: I can’t wait until I can say, “Xbox, play Windows Weekly.”
Paul: You know, Leo, Leo, I don’t want to get you too excited, but
I’m going to throw this out there. There’s a guide in Xbox that potentially
your shows could show up in the guide as they are live, alongside TV shows and
such. It’s just a possibility.
Leo: Dimitri! Oh, that would be, we would then, you know that’s
all I ever asked.
Paul: I don’t want to jump the gun or whatever.
Leo: All I ever wanted was parity with quote, “real TV.”
Paul: That’s all I ever wanted too.
Leo: Just want to be in the guide, you know, the Johnny Carson
Show, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C., Magnum P.I., Windows Weekly. We just want to be in there.
Mary Jo: That would be awesome.
Leo: Then I can retire. Then I will take off the suit, and stop…
Paul: Hang it up, put your sweater on, change your shoes.
Leo: Hang it up, put my sweater back on. It’s a beautiful day in
the Windows-hood. A beautiful day… So, Pauly, Mary
Jo, it’s been great working with you. Have wonderful day, and we’ll see you
next time.
Paul: You’ve been a great neighbor, Leo.
Leo: You’ve been a great neighbor on Windows Weekly! Bye,
neighbor.
