Windows Weekly 358 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here, and so is the Windows Phone 8.1 update. We'll take a tour. And you know what? I might even buy a Windows phone right here on the show. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly.

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Leo: Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cachefly at cachefly.com.

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, episode 358, recorded April 16, 2014

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It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk about Windows, weekly. Paul Thurrott is here ... (Laughs) He is celebrating Craft Beer today from beautiful, snowy Dedham, Massachusetts. (Laughs)

Paul Thurrott: Makes me want to drink.

Leo and Mary Jo Foley: (Laugh)

Leo: He is the editor-in-chief for the SuperSite for Windows, winsupersite.com; Windows IT Pro regular; analyst of Penton Media; and in the Twitter top 100. Also in the Twitter top 100, Mary Jo Foley of allaboutmicrosoft.com. I congratulate you both on your big victories.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Thanks.

Paul: Wow.

Leo: I just — I'm a little bitter; I'm not on the list. I'm not sure which bothers me more: that I'm not on the list, or that Robert Scoble is number five on the list.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: I don't even — what —

Paul: He's still a thing, huh?

Mary Jo: Okay. How did they do that list? That's my real question. (Laughs)

Leo: They used —

Paul: I believe it's ranked in order of pomposity.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Uh-oh. Then we shouldn't want to be on the list.

Leo: It's —

Paul: I never claimed to want to be on the list. You'll notice I've never promoted this anywhere.

Leo: No. And I don't normally say anything about lists, whether I'm on them or not because you're on it for the time being, and then —

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: — you're off it. But I — it's — they used a company called Peer Index —

Paul: Yep.

Leo: — to rank for the most influential people of Twitter. Peer Index it's like [unintelligible], right? Assigns each user a square of 0 to 100 by analyzing the speed and quantity with which users spot and reshare their tweets.

Mary Jo: Ah.

Paul: I see.

Leo: So there you go.

Paul: So if I understand my rating correctly, it's basically the same report card I used to get in school, which is, like, "He's got a good personality, but he could try a little harder."

Leo: (Laughs) Yeah.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: You know, everybody on this show, everybody listening to this show, has that report card, so —

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: — don't celebrate anything.

Paul: "Seems distracted." [unintelligible]

Leo: Yeah. You're number 28 on the list, by the way. Congratulations. You did beat out that Mary Jo Foley.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah. She's just a little farther down. Here, I'll just scroll down —

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: — just a little bit down here. There's Tom Merritt. YEP, yep. Rene Ritchie —

Mary Jo: I thought it was like an annoyance index, kind of.

Leo: — number 45.

Paul: Yep, yep.

Leo: You have a —

Mary Jo: "How annoying are these people?"

Leo: — a PI of 90, whatever that is.

Paul: Leo, I'm going to get in the top 10, and then I'm just going to quit Twitter.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Number 1 — it's kind of appropriate — the guy — whoops, a naked woman hanging onto Richard Branson.

Paul: (Laughs) Hello.

Mary Jo: Whoop.

Paul: Is that woman. (Laughs)

Leo: No. Number 1, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. Number 2 —

Paul: Yeah, I see him on Twitter all the time.

Leo: Yeah. No, he doesn't tweet.

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: Jeremiah Owyang.

Paul: Yep, that guy.

Leo: Yeah, that guy. Aaron Levie of Box —

Paul: Yep. No idea.

Leo: (Unintelligible], the Yoda of Tech.

Paul: I've heard his name only because he talks about it so much.

Leo: Yep. Number 5, Robert Scoble.

Paul: Yep, there he is. At least it's not a shower picture.

Leo: I like it that Scoble beat out Elon Musk and —

Paul: Elon Musk, as —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: — as he appears in the show Archer. (Laughs)

Leo: Isn't that interesting? Yeah, that's an Archer-style illustration. God, I want one of those.

Paul: Yeah, I do, too.

Leo: I'd give up my place in the list — there's a —

Paul: When we do the new avatar things, let's do Archer-style avatars.

Leo: Should we do — should we? I can ask [unintelligible] to do that.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: We could do, like — and call it TWIT-Vice.

Leo: Nitrozac, who does all of the portraits on our album art, could easily do that style, I bet you. What happened? I got Walt Mossberg in your place. Dave Weiner, Paul Graham. That's kind of interesting. Tim O'Reilly, way down at 19. And Chris Hatfield, the former astronaut. It helps to be a former astronaut.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Anyway, I don't —

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: — the list makes no sense at all. It's completely random.

Paul: It makes no sense at all. I agree with that.

Leo: But I congratulate you and Andy [unintelligible] and Rene Ritchie. The two of you — many of our hosts got on that list somehow.

Mary Jo: Yeah. (Laughs) Somehow.

Paul: Exactly.

Leo: Somehow.

Paul: There's some random — randomly generated number.

Leo: (Laughs) Let us talk about Windows. There are so many things to say today. I know the chat room's very excited because today's the day.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Windows 8.1 — Windows Phone 8.1 dev preview arrives.

Paul: So let's — I say we just hold that one off for last, then. (Laughs)

Leo: Okay. Bury the lead.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Just mess with these people.

Leo: Paul Bury-the-lead Thurrott.

Paul: (Laughs) I've got some Xbox stuff I want to talk about.

Mary Jo: You could do Hadoop first.

Leo: There is a new Xbox.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: I was greeted this morning by a 400-megabyte plus download —

Paul: Yes. Yep.

Leo: — for my Xbox.

Paul: Do you like the fact that the $500 super computer in your living room can't just do that in the background overnight while you're sleeping? I mean, what —

Leo: I'm wondering, why do I have to say "okay?" I guess —

Paul: Drives me nuts.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: I don't understand what's going on here. I mean —

Leo: Yeah. Think for yourself, Xbox 1.

Paul: Just do it!

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: You're smarter than I am.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Clean the dishes while you're doing that.

Leo: Hadoop showed up in another spot. I'm trying to remember ... Oh, I was reading about Hadoop.

Paul: It's, like, in a Dr. Seuss book, like —

Mary Jo: We're going to talk about it.

Paul: — Horton Hears a Who.

Mary Jo: Hadoop will be talked about later in this episode.

Leo: Okay. Okay.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: I just — I saw somebody who uses Hadoop —

Paul: No, you didn't. (Laughs)

Leo: — in a kind of un — in a surprising context.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: You were at a Starbucks, and somebody was using it.

Paul: Yeah, Leo, it was called a dream. (Laughs)

Leo: (Laughs) Oh, maybe it could have been. I do — I do wake up and go, "Hadoop! Oh!"

Paul: It's like, just blurt it out when you wake — "Hadoop!"

Leo: Aaaaaaaaahhh!

Paul: It's another — it's just another nightmare.

Mary Jo: Guys, a day without Hadoop is like a day without sunshine.

Leo: (Laughs) Lisa keeps saying, "Who is this Hadoop? Should I worry about her?"

Paul: Nice. "You keep whispering her name in your sleep."

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Hadooooop ... "Are you in love with a strange Armenian woman named Hadoop?"

So Windows Phone 8.1 dev preview. Is this — is this one that, if you're doing that little trick, that you can get on your phone now?

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Okay. No wonder the excitement.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Paul: You betcha. Actually, Monday was spent largely upgrading every single one of my 217 Windows Phone handsets.

Leo: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Oh, man.

Paul: Mostly very successfully, I would say.

Leo: Does this relieve you of any non-disclosure agreements you may or may not have had?

Paul: Yes, it does. Yep.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: Can I now say — can I now reveal what good boy and girl you were because you were sitting at the table with me —

Paul: Yep. Yep. I almost had to physically slap down Daniel Rubino which, I have to say, I kind of wanted to. (Laughs)

Leo: (Laughs) He was all — because all three of you received Windows 8.1 handsets at Build.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: And he was all about to talk about it; and you said, "Daniel!" (Makes a muffled noise.)

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: So that's cool.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: That's cool that you got them, but you weren't allowed to talk about them. But that's good because that means you've had a couple of weeks now to play with them.

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Impressions? How's Cortana?

Mary Jo: So —

Paul: I'll let Mary Jo take that one.

Mary Jo: I want to say something about Cortana because I — remember on the show that we did at the Brick House, I was saying —

Leo: Yep.

Mary Jo: — "Oh, I don't know about this Cortana thing. I think it's going to be kind of creepy"; and not thinking I'll turn that on? I've been liking it more. I've been —

Leo: She broke Alex's phone. She just smashed it in little pieces.

Mary Jo: Oh. What?

Leo: (Laughs) No.

Mary Jo: She had a fit and just, like, threw it on the ground?

Leo: No, something else. Did you give this to Liz again?

(A voice says something in the background.)

Paul: Yeah, I was — that's a Liz — that's a Liz damage.

Leo: That looks like Liz did that, huh?

Mary Jo: Uh-oh.

Leo: Oh, you haven't ever used Cortana because it's asking for your permission.

(The voice speaks again.)

Leo: Oh, this is a fresh phone for me to play with.

Mary Jo: Oh, nice.

Leo: Oh, neat. Okay. So go ahead, Mary Jo, and I'll —

Mary Jo: Yeah. So —

Leo: — I'll play along while you talk.

Mary Jo: You know what? Cortana, for me, it's not like some, "Wow, I can't live without it" kind of a feature; but it is useful for doing things that would take extra steps to do. Like, you can say to it, "Hey, I want to wake up in 20 minutes so I can be on Windows Weekly."

Leo: Yeah. I use that kind of — (Laughs) You nap before the show?

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: (Laughs) We're kind of hoping you don't have that exact reminder.

Leo: No. But no, I use that frequently on Android. That is — you're right. It's the kind of thing you could easily do —

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: — but it saves steps.

Mary Jo: It does.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: But it's still a beta. Cortana's still a beta, so there's some weird things that happen sometimes when you try to tell it to do things. Like, for some crazy reason, it thinks Rattle 'N Hum is my home. I don't know why.

Paul and Leo: (Laugh)

Paul: Well, actually —

Leo: It's not alone, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: I would say —

Leo: Wait a minute. This is funny. It says, when you start it, "I'm absorbing the entire Internet. Wait a minute."

Mary Jo: Right. Yep.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: "Type your name" ... Can I type my name?

(A voice says something in the background.)

Leo: He says, "Do whatever you want." He's moved on from this. This is an 8X, isn't it? Yeah. "Is this right? Hear how I'll say it." Here's how it's going to say my name. Let me turn it up here.

Cortana: Leo.

Leo: Yeah, that sounds right. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Not too hard.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Okay. So go ahead.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: I'm just messing around while you're talking.

Mary Jo: No — so yeah. It's — it's been somewhat helpful. It's not killer for me. It's funny because you can ask it funny questions.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: Like, "Who's your daddy?"

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: And — "Bill Gates." Right.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: So then — so at the beginning it says, here — "What are a couple of the most enjoyable parts of your everyday evenings? Pick two."

Paul: Right.

Leo: I do like cooking something. This is wrong! I like watching something. (Laughs)

Paul: Right.

Leo: I like — but wait, I — there's more.

Paul: Be more specific about your watching habits.

Leo: yeah, I don't know what I'm watching. I like being online.

Paul: No, you've got to do the top two.

Leo: Hanging out — I like — see —

Mary Jo: I know. Too many choices, right?

Leo: And all of them are good. I'm going to take cooking — well, but I — so I'm going to presume that this is going to, in some way — what is this going to do?

Paul: Well, it's for personalization purposes.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So — but if I —

Paul: "Interests," as they call it.

Leo: If I say — I'm going to pick the two things I do the most, I guess. "What do you think about food? What's most important to you these days?" What's healthiest; that's right.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: "I don't think about food. I'd rather think about wine." (Laughs)

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: There's not beer, though, right?

Mary Jo: I know. They need to add the beer option.

Leo: "That it matches my dietary preferences" ... "What's healthiest and most delicious," I'm going to say. "What are two of your main motivations for going out to an event or activity?" I enjoy quality entertainment. (Laughs)

Paul: Sure.

Mary Jo and Paul: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: You don't go to all those Madea movies?

Leo: Yeah, yeah. Gosh, I love those. "Being able to compete" ... "Impressing someone I care about."

Paul: I want to make someone cry.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: This seems — this feels like — more like the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory, actually.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Are they going to make some — I — this worries me a little bit.

Paul: Well, remember — all right.

Leo: This is awfully personal.

Paul: This is — she is built as a personal assistant, right?

Leo: Right.

Paul: And I think when you think of it in that context, it sort of makes sense.

Leo: I only get to one section of news?

Paul: First.

Mary Jo: You can add more later.

Paul: Which one do you go to first?

Leo: Which one do I go first? Something —

Paul: Except they don't have the comics in there.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: "There's no hope of catching up" is one of the sections.

Paul: Oh. Wow.

Leo: That's pretty —

Paul: You'll start getting ads for, like, funeral homes.

Leo: That's very despairing.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: And mental health facilities.

Leo: What — wait a minute. When you want to catch up on what's going on in the world, which section do you go to first? "There's no hope of catching up" is one of the choices. I've got to select that. (Laughs)

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: I don't know what I'm going to get.

Paul: Oh, man.

Leo: Wow.

Paul: Health headlines. Mental health headlines.

Leo: It gave me health headlines, yep.

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: "Tap the notebook icon on the top of your screen to see your interests, reminders, and everything else." Okay. So this would then do something. Okay. "Yay! It's Leo! How can I help?" Get me directions to Times Square.

Paul: "Leo, you seem depressed. How can I help?"

Mary Jo and Leo: (Laugh)

Leo:? There's no hope of catching up." Get me — where am I? Hello? (Laughs)

Paul: Geez. Wow. You're all over the map, as was suggested by your personality profile.

Leo: All she has to do is look at my screen. Oh, good; P Diddy, "Coming Home" lyrics. That's good. (Laughs)

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: (Laughs) That's good.

Paul: Well, so — now, this was not — in other words, when she can't answer the question, you get things —

Leo: She does a web search.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Yeah, just like every other —

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Okay.

Leo: Where am I?

Cortana: I can't say for sure, but you're likely at 170 Heller Street in Petaluma.

Leo: It's within 30.

Mary Jo: Close.

Leo: Close enough. You know, that's pretty typical; that's — I wouldn't expect more accuracy than that.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So that's neat. So you can then go back in here and refine your selections in Cortana's notebook: interests; remind me; quiet hours; inner circle; places; music searches; and settings.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: So that's nice. And you find — now that you've used it for a while, did it get — did it smarten?

Mary Jo: Um ... (Laughs)

Paul and Leo: (Laugh)

Paul: I was wondering how you were going to answer that.

Leo: "Um ..."

Mary Jo: Maybe. At first, when I was using it, it —

Paul: Have you ever read the story "Flowers for [unintelligible]?"

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Paul: "Um ..."

Mary Jo: You know the little suggestions that you get underneath? Like, "Try asking Cortana this or that."

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: At the beginning, it was saying to me, "Do you want to schedule surfing on your calendar?"

Leo: No. (Laughs) No.

Mary Jo: And I'm like, "Wow. Cortana does not know me."

Paul: Yep.

Leo: She doesn't ask you that anymore, though, right?

Mary Jo: No. Now she says, "Do you want local bars?" So I think there is some intelligence there.

Leo: (Laughs) She knows an alcoholic when she sees one.

Paul: (Laughs) Nice.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Wow.

Mary Jo: But I wanted her to say something like Craft Beer bars, but, you know, you can't —

Leo: Right. Well, hey, you can't have everything.

Mary Jo: No, you can't have everything.

Leo: Sing me —

Mary Jo: But yeah, I'm using it —

Paul: See, I don't — I don't personally like Cortana. And —

Mary Jo: You don't at all?

Paul: — it's not Cortana, per se. I just think this kind of thing is —

Mary Jo: It's gimmicky.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Right?

Paul: Yeah. There you go. That's a great word for it, yep.

Mary Jo: But you know what? This is what Windows Phone might need. They might need some gimmicks.

Leo: Gimmicks don't hurt, yeah.

Mary Jo: Like, normal people — not people like us, but people who just are in a phone store, and they're like, "Oh, there's this cool thing, Cortana." I mean, she's even been on Arsenio Hall and stuff. So I mean —

Leo: So —

Mary Jo: — people are starting to know about her.

Leo: — when you first tap it, doesn't it — I guess this is their equivalent of Google Now. It doesn't give you an immediate speech interface. It tells you the news based on what you talked about.

Paul: Right.

Leo: So global news, political — I guess I opted out by saying "I can't catch up."

Paul: So this is kind of hard to explain because most people never even saw this; but in Windows Phone 8, you would get to the Bing screen —

Leo: Right.

Paul: — when you press that Search button, not to this new screen.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And that interface in Windows Phone 8 — and that was a new feature in Windows Phone 8 — actually had multiple pages. You could kind of scroll through them.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And so that stuff you see there is sort of like those multiple pages. It's basically another way to display that information.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: Plus, you also get two different views of Cortana, depending on how you activate it. So if you hit the tile that's on the screen, you get that list like that.

Leo: That's the tile, yeah.

Mary Jo: But if you hit the Search button —

Leo: Ahh.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: — you get her talking to you and expecting you to talk.

Leo: Ahhhh. That's better, actually. Okay. I like having the choice; that's nice.

Paul: Well, I mean, that stuff is still there.

Mary Jo: You can type or talk.

Paul: So if you scroll up —

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: — if you scroll there, you'll see the —

Leo: It's still there; it's just —

Paul: It's still there. It's just —

Leo: — it goes right to the top.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: I like that. Okay. So the — that makes sense. So the tile is to bring you to that news interface; and then the Search button, which is obscured on this phone by the shattered glass ... (Laughs)

Paul: (Laughs) By the Liz —

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: — will bring you to that. That's nice.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: How can I get my Windows Phone repaired? Oh. Is it — am — is it listening?

Mary Jo: You have to hit the —

Paul: No, you've got to —

Mary Jo: — the microphone.

Paul: I think because you've been scrolling around. So if you tap the microphone button at the bottom —

Leo: So if I go — if I go from Search, it doesn't immediately —

(The voice speaks in the background.)

Paul: No, it does.

Leo: Press and hold and it does it. Okay.

How can I get my screen repaired on this Windows phone?

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Paul: I like that it added "question mark."

Leo: (Laughs) I'm used to saying things like "question mark." Okay. So — but this does — "here's how I fixed my cracked screen." It did give me some searches.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Sing me a song.

Cortana: I can sing this one.

Oh, Danny boy

The pipes, the pipes are calling ...

Leo: It's Irish! She actually has a nice voice. Lots better than Siri.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: Huh. All right. But after the gimmicks wear off and you've had —

Paul: Yeah, you stop using it. Or I do. I —

Leo: (Laughs) Okay. You've had it long enough to know. You don't use it anymore, huh? All right.

Paul: I kind of knew it was going to work out that way for me personally. I do agree that this kind of thing is important to have because everyone else has it. And people see that, and they think it's desirable. And certainly, Microsoft does a really good job with that kind of Bing integration and everything. And I'm sure it will work out for some people, but I always find with voice command of any kind that it always falls short at some point. At some point, you —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: — start typing again and touching the screen and — you know, you're not — it's not Star Trek. We're not going to have a conversation with it. It's not going to run off and go do stuff for you unless it's very simple and very easy to understand.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: And I think, ultimately, that's just frustrating.

Leo: How about you, Mary Jo? Do you —

Paul: It's not Cortana's fault.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: It's not like it's lacking. It's just the way things are.

Leo: No, it's just the nature of these things.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: I — and I also don't feel comfortable talking to my phone outside of my house.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Hey, you're in New York; everybody does that.

Mary Jo: I know. There's so many nuts walking around talking to themselves here.

Leo: Right. Right.

Mary Jo: But I still feel like I should try not to be one of them.

Leo: That's going to — I think that's going to change over time, as more and more people talk to their phones.

Mary Jo: Do you? Yeah?

Leo: Yeah. I do that a lot now.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: And I'm not nearly so self-conscious. You know, you just hold it like this. So many people are on their phone talking like this, which I don't understand.

Mary Jo: True.

Leo: I think that's the Kim Kardashian effect. We've talked about that before.

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Paul: Actually, you know what kind of — maybe you can explain this one to me. This is semi-related. Apple has popularized these white headphones that have a little microphone in the —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: — in the line.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: And I see everyone — as soon as I say this, you're going to say, "Yes, I see this all the time." Which is, someone will have their headphones in —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: — and they're talking on the phone —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: — and they're holding the little microphone up closer to their mouth.

Leo: Right. Right.

Paul: How do they know to do that?

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Like, what — how do you know that you're not loud enough on the other end?

Leo: You don't. And you just presume —

Paul: Well, why do you do that? Why would you do that?

Leo: Well, it just — it's hanging there.

Paul: Do you think they built it close enough to be next to your mouth?

Leo: It can't possibly work hanging there.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Paul: Really?

Leo: (Laughs)

Paul: I just think that's odd. I —

Leo: I do the same thing. I do that.

Paul: You do — so you know what I'm saying, right?

Leo: Yeah. And probably, it sounds — you know ... (Gets very close to the microphone) It sounds like this because you're holding it up close.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Right. Because — right. Because your finger's moving on it, and you're —

Leo: Right.

Paul: — bumping it up against stuff.

Leo: But who really talks on the phone anymore these days?

Mary Jo: (Laughs) It's so true.

Paul: That's true.

Leo: Really.

Paul: Actually, they're probably talking to Siri.

Leo: We're a bad example because we don't have any friends, but even —

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Leo: — even non-geeks. I —

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: I don't know. Do people still talk on the phone?

Mary Jo: Yeah, they do. You hear them in places in New York very loudly.

Leo: Yeah. But those are the people with a feature phone.

Mary Jo: Yeah. (Laughs)

Leo: Those are the people with the Nokia phones. They're using them as phones still.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Right.

Leo: They can't — yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: All right. So let's — okay. So there's the Cortana story.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: And I think that's not any different than anybody else's experience on any platform, that these speech things are a little gimmicky.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: But you've got to have it to have parity, and so —

Paul: Right.

Leo: — even if Microsoft thought they were gimmicky, they still kind of say, "Well, but we have to do it."

Mary Jo: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: I actually think it's somewhat notable that arguably, the top two features in Windows Phone 8.1 are features that have been on other platforms for years. (Laughs) And —

Leo: Right.

Paul: — and I say that with the understanding that — I actually think Windows Phone has been well ahead of the other platforms in many areas. But it's interesting that in these two — the other one being the notification center — this is — these are areas where Windows Phone has lagged behind. And I assume that the original plan for Windows Phone was that a notification center was not required because they had live tiles.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And apps could individually update you on this kind of more expansive face that they have. But the feeling of live tiles is that: (A) Live tiles can be off the screen; you might not see them because they could be down — somewhere near the bottom. So they could be updating you, but you'll never even see it.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And of course, in some cases you don't have that app pinned to the Start Screen anyway.

Leo: Right.

Paul: So it can't provide live updates. And as the Windows Phone ecosystem has grown — 245,000 apps and millions of users and everything — I mean, I think that initial system, while reasonable for the day, all of two years ago, four years ago, whatever — has kind of fallen under its own weight. And so this centralized notification center is, to me, easily the best feature in Windows Phone 8.1, and —

Leo: It's funny because this started in Android.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: It was an early feature in Android. Apple copied it.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: And now Microsoft has it.

Paul: Now Microsoft's copied it. (Laughs) So —

Leo: But you know what? It is —

Paul: You know what?

Leo: — it's got to be a standard. This works.

Paul: You need it, yep.

Leo: It's a good — it's — you need it. It's a good system.

Paul: It works great. And it's one of the —

Leo: So they have the quick settings up at the top here.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: I don't have any notifications; but if I did, they'd show up here.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: And I presume that's text messages and —

Paul: Segregated by apps and — yep.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: And it works great.

Mary Jo: Yeah, if your apps are updated, it tells you they were updated, which is useful.

Leo: They were updated. That's a good place to do that.

Paul: The other thing that's neat about it is it integrates with the live updating functionality of the tiles. And so if you bring down the notification center and it says, "Hey, you have three new text messages, and they're from these three people." If you dispense with the notification from the notification center, the live tile for the messaging app no longer has the number 3 on it. It also gets cleared out.

Leo: Interesting.

Paul: And so they're integrated in that way.

Leo: Interesting.

Paul: Yeah, it's smart.

Leo: What else is — what are some of — so we've got Cortana; we've got notifications.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: What else?

Mary Jo: You know what I like — and Paul made fun of me for liking this feature —

Paul: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: — but I like that you can have the photo as your background behind the Start Screen.

Leo: I love this.

Paul: I don't recall making fun —

Leo: So this is one of the stock photos. It's —

Mary Jo: You made fun of me! You said me and teenagers were going to like it. (Laughs)

Paul: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Leo: Yeah, he did. But you know what?

Paul: I did —

Leo: This is beautiful. Isn't that neat?

Paul: (Laughs)

Leo: So this is like wheat grass cut off the top, and it's just — it's —

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Of course, Microsoft chose this picture to really work.

Paul: Well, there's another problem, though; and that is that the screen you're looking at happens to be well formed for that kind of display.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And by that I mean the tiles that you've used and their positions —

Leo: That's right.

Paul: — are not opaque and you can see through them.

Leo: Right.

Paul: But when I look at my own Start Screen, a lot of the tiles that I see have custom displays that are opaque and hide that image.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And so I can scroll up and down on the screen, and you don't see anything because that stuff is not peeking through.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And so you really have to make an effort to use the right tile, tile sizes, tile layouts.

Leo: (Laughs) I totally screwed it up now. I have black holes here, which don't show the background, which is odd.

Paul: Right. It only comes through in the tiles, and only on those tiles that have that transparency.

Leo: So that isn't really ideal.

Paul: So for example, that music tile is one that has an opaque display.

Leo: Right.

Paul: It's not coming through.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And so if you have a bunch of those next to each other like I do —

Leo: you see — yeah.

Paul: — that effect is not as interesting.

Leo: So you're going to spend some time — maybe an excessive amount of time — messing with your display so that it looks good with the background.

Paul: I guarantee that my kids in particular will spend hours at this —

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: — and will be changing that image every thirty seconds to try to find — yeah.

Leo: I will. Mary Jo and I will.

Mary Jo: I know. I actually think that's kind of fun. (Laughs)

Paul: (Laughs) There's nothing wrong with it; I'm just —

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: It's fun.

Paul: Yeah, it's nice. No, it is nice.

Mary Jo: Yeah. And —

Leo: So I agree. Okay, there's three. What else?

Mary Jo: Yeah. There's a new — a brand new app in the store that I saw through WP Central. It's a clock hub tile. So if you have the HTC 8X, you've always been able to have this clock display tile.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: And I always miss that. Now I just put that on my screen. It's opaque and it's awesome.

Leo: Neat.

Mary Jo: I like having the clock in a big format on my screen.

Paul: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: I know; I'm easily amused. (Laughs)

Paul: I'm not sure that's technically a Windows Phone 8.1 feature, Mary Jo. I — (Laughs)

Mary Jo: Well, come on. Which —

Leo: Is it an app? I don't see it. Is it an app?

Mary Jo: Yeah. You guys, it's called the Clock Hub.

Paul: Clock Hub, yeah.

Leo: Clock Hub. I have an 8X —

Paul: It doesn't actually —

Mary Jo: Can you guys see my screen?

Paul: And it looks exactly like the HTC clock.

Leo: Oh, look at your pretty icon. Ooooh. And by that I mean the Nokia icon.

Paul: So the nice — okay. So actually, the nice thing about that app is that that tile is transparent.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: So your image does —

Mary Jo: I mean — I said "opaque"; I meant "transparent." Sorry. (Laughs)

Paul: yeah. Okay. That's fair.

Mary Jo: Yeah, that's cool. And so you put all your transparent tiles higher up so you can see your image, if you care.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: It's kind of — it's — yeah. It's whatever it is.

Paul: No, it's nice.

Mary Jo: But it makes it fun. It makes your screens more individual, and so not everybody's Windows phone looks the exact same.

Paul: Yeah. And speaking of which, the ability now to sync those settings between your Windows PCs and tablets and the phone is interesting. And so that image doesn't come through, although it should when you think about it. But if you change your — you have to enable this — but if you change your color scheme in Windows phone, it will change the color scheme that you have in Windows on your desktop PC or your tablet. Which I found out, to my chagrin — (Laughs) since all my PCs started changing.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) Uh-oh.

Paul: But that's kind of neat, if you want that. And some of the settings that they sync are far more valuable than that, like WiFi network settings, Internet Explorer passwords and favorites and tabs and things like that. And so they're starting to turn on that cross-platform sync stuff, which I think is pretty huge.

Leo: So Mary Jo, you have the Nokia Icon on Verizon.

Mary Jo: I do.

Leo: Paul, what do you like? What do you carry?

Paul: Well, I mean — you know, we all got the same test device. But as of Monday, we could install this on any device.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And so I put it on — not all my phones, but many of my phones. And the thing — actually, I have to say, for people with an existing non-1080P phone — which is every Windows phone except for the Lumia 1520; the Lumia Icon; that might be it. I mean, I think it's just maybe one or two others. You couldn't get this kind of high density of tiles on the screen. And now, on every other phone, including the lowliest phones — you know, like the Lumia 520 or the Lumia 620 — you can turn on more tiles. And you can get up to — I guess it's six of the smallest tiles across the top instead of — I think it was four before. And that is — it's — what was the Apple thing? It's like getting a new phone in your phone. I mean, it really transforms the device. It — my 1020 previously looked really low-res because the tiles were so huge. And now you can turn on this new thing where it just looks beautiful again. It's like it's brand new again. And so — I mean, I — who knows? Two days from now, I'll just switch phones again like I always do. But the 1020 I've been using as my primary phone since I got it last July.

Leo: Interesting.

Paul: I mean, I — this has given it a new lease on life.

Leo: Hmm. Okay.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Continuing on, new features.

Mary Jo: The calendar.

Leo: The calendar.

Mary Jo: We have to talk about the new calendar.

Leo: Yeah, I like the new calendar, actually.

Mary Jo: The new calendar is really, really nice.

Leo: Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo: And I like that you can integrate weather with it. Another little — like, oh, who really cares? But it's kind of useful.

Leo: Well, something that a lot of other calendars have had in the past, so —

Mary Jo: Yeah. Yeah.

Leo: I see my calendar tile; I'll tap that. There's the calendar. Little weather icon in it; those are nice. Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: What else do you like about the calendar?

Paul: Best thing about the calendar, though, is the — if you — like, tap on a day.

Leo: Okay.

Paul: And what it does now is it kind of expands in place.

Leo: Yeah. And scooches the —

Paul: You're not always going back and forth, back and forth.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: And I really — I like that kind of thing.

Leo: You know what? That's nice. You know what? I like that.

Paul: Yeah, that's really —

Leo: Elegant.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Okay. Can I add calendar appointments with Cortana? Can I say, "Cortana, I want to have lunch with Mary Jo on Friday"?

Paul: Yes.

Leo: And it will know?

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: That's good. I use that, actually, a lot, mostly at the hairdresser.

Paul and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Paul: [Unintelligible]

Leo: Yeah, I don't — that's the only appointment I have all month.

Mary Jo: There's a — if you want to do one more Cortana trick, there's an Easter egg in Cortana.

Leo: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Tell me, tell me, do.

Mary Jo: Say do you like Clippy?

Leo: Do you like Clippy?

Cortana: What’s not to like? That guy took a heck of a beating and he is still smiling.

Leo: Oh.

Mary Jo: And look at Kortana. She turns into Clippy.

Leo: Wait a minute. Do I go back to the desktop?

Mary Jo: What, do it again. Stay on your screen and ask it again and watch.

Leo: Do you like Clippy?

Cortana: What’s not to like? That guy took a heck of a beating and he is still smiling.

Leo: Oh! It is a little Clippy. Can I keep that? I want it.

Mary Jo: No. Sadly you can’t. I don’t think.

Leo: That’s cute.

Mary Jo: He is easily amused.

Paul: That screen you are looking at right there is the lo-res touchscreen. Hit the settings button at the top, and then tap start and theme. You will see show more tiles and scroll that. Now go back to start. And what you will see is that everything is jammed up on the left.

Leo: But I can add tiles to this new area. Nice. You know what? I like the small one. On the 1080 P screen do you get a lot more?

Paul: No on the 1080P you cannot customize that. It is to whatever it is. But even on the 520 which is a very small screen this kind of thing makes the screen more useful.

Leo: This is great. These tiles are big enough. I don’t need them to be much bigger. Especially because it’s pretty obvious what they are.

Paul: I just find the old style to be, it is like too big and weird looking.

Leo: The reason I asked you what phones you have is because I obviously now have to replace one of my phones with the Windows phone. I’m just trying to figure out.

Paul: Honestly I think the icon is good.

Mary Jo: Yeah the icon is a good phone.

Leo: But that is a Verizon only right? Is that the same as the 1520?

Mary Jo: No. The 930 which doesn’t exist yet.

Leo: Oh it would work on AT&T. I will have to decide. I was thinking T-Mobile but they only have the 925. Can I get it unlocked? You have the 1020 on T-Mobile right Paul?

Paul: No I use it on AT&T. Not right now they are not out yet. But the 930 will be out sometime in the next month and I’m sure you can get one unlocked. To use at work.

Leo: Is that what you would recommend? I’m thinking I like that 1020 camera. I don’t know.

Paul: Because you needed on T-Mobile?

Leo: No I can use it on AT&T. I have space on AT&T.

Paul: That is a tough one. I think the choice on AT&T would be between the 1020 and the 1520 which is the giant.

Leo: I don’t know if I want that. That is so freaking big.

Paul: I find it horrifically big. I’m amazed at how many people keep coming to me and say, “I know you’ll like this thing. It is so beautiful”.

Leo: But it is six inches.

Paul: It is so huge.

Mary Jo: I like that phone, actually. But I only use it with 2 hands. So…

Paul: You have to. You probably couldn’t even pick it up with one hand.

Mary Jo: It’s not that heavy though. It distributes the weight very well.

Paul: It’s too big.

Leo: It says the 20 megapixel camera.

Paul: That is the same exact camera that is on the Icon.

Leo: That is a pretty good camera.

Paul: The camera is great.

Leo: Maybe I’ll get one of these. It’s awfully big but then I’ll have more fun with my photos.

Mary Jo: You can watch movies more easily.

Leo: Post to Instagram and it will be great. I can’t wait!

Mary Jo: Yeah. How about the keyboard though, Paul? I’m curious what you think. It has this new capability called Shape Writing?

Leo: I love it. I use that on my Android phones.

Mary Jo: I’m not used to it yet so I’m very clumsy with it.

Paul: I’m so untrusting with this kind of thing. The truth is that it works great but the problem is that a lot of the typing I have to do on my phone is like me typing in a password or something like that. And you are not going to use it for that. So you still have to hit and peck on password entry. But that said I’ve tested it on email messages, on text messages and it is almost like magical in it’s ability to figure out what you are typing.

Leo: I use it all the time. It is the same as Swipe, actually all Android keyboards including Google Zone have it. But if you haven’t been using it….

Paul: If you use it you will swear by it and wonder why anyone would use anything else.

Leo: You don’t tap because these targets are small.

Mary Jo: I’ve got to get used to it. I’ve tried a couple things and I was like, Oh!

Paul: It takes some getting used to and I can’t say that I’m completely used to but I do think it is one of the big deals in this release. And actually you can swipe it in the action center and Kortana voice control are all features that…

Leo: Let’s face it. They are playing catch up. And still, which is unfortunate, at some point will they catch up?

Paul: I honestly think they were ahead of others and this absolutely introduces the sense of priority.

Mary Jo: I think the other ones we didn’t talk about but we have before are all the enterprise features that get added with this release. So you get VPN, S1 encryption, local device management. So that actually is really great because as I said before on the show, a lot of people said, “I’d love to have Windows Phone in the work place but it is missing basic things like VPN” and now they have it.

Paul: This has been a weird black mark on the Windows Phone in that they don’t fully support all the exchange active sync policies, that were supported previously on Android and iPhone. It just didn’t make any sense. Even in the last release when they added device encryption, they didn’t add it for storage devices. You know they just… with this one they’ve kind of caught up. It is so weird that Microsoft didn’t have the enterprise stuff from day one.

Mary Jo: They decided that they wanted to make a phone that appeals to consumers so they just said, “We’ll figure out the enterprise stuff later”. Which is crazy because that was the big success story with Windows Mobile. Right? It was the enterprise.

Leo: So, I’m thinking. Should I wait for a Windows 8.1 Native Phone? Or just get the existing one?

Paul: Here is the thing. On AT&T, the chances of getting a new 8.1 Windows Phone device especially from Nokia anytime in the next couple of months is pretty slim. I think because of the purchase and all the stuff going on there…

Leo: I’m just going to buy an unlocked. They are not that expensive. I’m looking gat 1520 and it is $529 unlocked for 32.

Paul: And that device supports Microsoft SD expansion which is great because some of them don’t, which I don’t understand.

Leo: By the way you can put Apps on the SD card with the 8.1 now right? I think that is a big deal. Do they work well?

Paul: I have not tested that,yet. So I can’t really say. I would imagine so. I can’t imagine that the internal storage on a Windows Phone is any faster than a good Micro SD card.

Leo: So the 1520 is the ginormous one? But it has the same camera which you have in your Icon which you like?

Paul: Yep. When I tested this camera on this phone I found that the pictures this thing took were better than the 1020.

Leo: This is 1080P and is an 800 Snapdragon. Alright, I’m buying that one. If you know of something coming but you can’t talk about it, tug your ear. But if you don’t know…

Paul: We don’t.

Mary Jo: We don’t.

Paul: We can be very open about this. There were phones that were rumored to be coming soon and all of them but one have just been announced. The one that hasn’t been announced is not going to ship until probably next year or very late this year. Because it relies on features that didn’t make it into Windows 8.1. The phones they just introduced obviously Verizon Icon and the 930…

Mary Jo: It is for international and we don’t even know when, or if, that is coming to a US carrier.

Paul: I think I heard never.

Leo: As soon as I press the buy button it will be announced right? Somebody in the Chat Room is saying that the 1520 does not support wireless charging? I guess I can live with that.

Paul: That might be true with AT&T but I believe it does actually…

Leo: Okay, well I’m getting an unlocked European one.

Paul: I would not get it because of that. It’s nice, but it’s not necessary.

Mary Jo: I don’t use the wireless charging on my Icon.

Leo: Wireless charging is probably overrated. On a big one like with the Note 3, I actually added wireless charging because I put it in the dock in front of me. I used it as a photo display in front of me!

Paul: I have at least five ways I can wirelessly charge things and I have to say the Nokia, sadly, are not great. And they, if you are not centered directly on the device it beeps a lot or you’ll get up in the morning and it’s not charged.

Leo: Is it a Qi? Is it Qi compatible? It is, isn’t it?

Paul: Yes.

Leo: So this is the one I’m going to recommend that you should get. I agree with you, I’ve never found anything that charges well except this.

Paul: Okay.

Leo: This is the Tilt. And it is really hard not to do it right. In fact it is great for a large thing because it’s an easel.

Paul: So oddly enough, Google sells one for the Nexus phones.

Leo: The new one.

Paul: The previous version…

Leo: It was flying off.

Paul: Well actually mine was sticking pretty well.

Leo: The one I had, the Nexus 4 would just slide off of it.

Paul: For me, it is the only one that worked. Consistently.

Leo: Maybe you keep yours stickier.

Paul: It probably slid off while we were talking. Anyway, I believe it works well.

Leo: What else is new?

Mary Jo: We should talk about the de-coupling of the hubs from the Apps.

Leo: I don’t know what that means.

Paul: Potentially a negative, although I think like everything else in life there are pros and cons.

Mary Jo: I’m happy they are doing this. I’m not sad.

Paul: I think overall it is the right decision.

Mary Jo: So, even now with Windows Phone there is integration in the people hub that lets you see Twitter and Facebook statuses. They are taking that away. And you are going to have to have a separate Facebook app.

Paul: It’s like your dog has to be put down.

Leo: They are taking it away…. alright, go on.

Mary Jo: I’m saying it quickly to minimize.

Paul: We’ll all be happier.

Mary Jo: So you are going to have Apps instead. Just like they are doing with Xbox music. It’s not going to be integrated part of the OS anymore. There is a separate app like we have now. I actually am happy because I didn’t use a lot of this integration myself and I think because I have a lot of Twitter buddies, I didn’t turn that on. And it was going to be too overwhelming for me. But I know other people that said that was an absolute differentiator in the Windows Phone compared to other models. It feels like now that Microsoft is undoing that now basically and saying we are going to an app model. You don’t have to wait for us to update the OS to get the latest Facebook or the latest Twitter features.

Paul: Right. So this is what happened. I’m going to give you some classic examples of problems. They added Facebook integration into the people hub in the very first version of the Windows Phone. It’s been there ever since. So you can do things like posting and putting a picture, checking into a location, but here is what you couldn’t do. Check in and check in other people. Like you can in the Facebook app. So there is a feature that Facebook added the day after Windows Phone came out and it never gets updated in Windows Phone because it is part of the OS. And so the problem with these built in OS features is that they can never updated. So if you take that stuff out And you put it into separate apps then it becomes a situation where you can update. There were a lot of things they just never did. Music and video that was on Windows phone, is now split into four separate acts. They had some kind of a hook in it for third-party apps but at best all you would do was launch another music From within that hub. It was kind of useless. There was no real integration. It was the same way with the photos app. From the photos hub, you can connect to Facebook but there was no other place to post your photos like Flickr or Twitter. Or some other photo service. There was no way to integrate that within the hub. I think they are adding that to this version. It’s one of those things that sounds like such a great idea but in practice a kind of broke down. But there are bad sites to it too. So remember like that messenger app. You could actually use for Facebook messaging, messenger messaging, Skype messaging, and instant messaging. And now, in the new version of Windows phone you can only use it for text messaging and that’s it. It doesn’t work with Skype, messenger, Facebook. It is just a messaging app.

Leo: The people hub seems to be pretty much the same isn’t it? I like the people hub. I’ve always liked the people up I thought it was the most useful of the hubs.

Paul: It still aggregates accounts obviously.

Leo: What are the other hubs? There is music.

Paul: No that is gone.

Mary Jo: There is games.

Paul: Games is still there. It went completely unchanged. And that is a weird one. When you look at that have it looks exactly the same, with the gray color scheme which is old-fashioned style. It is the same in Windows 8.1 in the desktop. All of those apps have been updated, all the Xbox apps, except for that one. And, by the way there is no Xbox in there at all now. If you play Xbox 1 games they are not in there. It hasn't been updated.

Mary Jo: That is going to be temporary right?

Paul: Right. So I am thinking the Xbox games app on phone and desktop is going to be completely revamped. It is just overdue.

Mary Jo: And then there is the office hub. That has been completely unchanged.

Paul: Completely unchanged. Except this is one drive now. I think the rationale there is that universal app version of office touch will be coming and will work on Windows. So why even bother at this point.

Leo: Names being removed from the new sports, finance and weather apps.

Mary Jo: Just the name.

Paul: Same thing with Xbox game two. So games, music, and video are just apps. I think that is good is how people think of them.

Mary Jo: Except Xbox is such a good brand for them.

Leo: Is just not in the app, but I see it here on the top.

Paul: By the way this is also how it works in Windows 8.1 but I think, I don’t think that anybody uses these things. Mary Jo and I represent 50% of the non-gaming Xbox user base. I just don’t think a lot of people use that stuff.

Leo: Well for those who are complaining that I’m using a beat up old 8X, Alex Gumples kind of beater secondary phone, I did order a 1520 in bright red. So I should have that next week. The reason I thought I need that 1520 is at the bigger display makes it easier for me to show on error. So for me that is a big plus. It makes sense.

Mary Jo: We should mention the podcast. We haven’t mentioned that.

Leo: Is that new?

Mary Jo: It actually works for people outside the US.

Paul: Remember podcasting was in that hub before? So the four components of the are all separate apps. There is music, videos, podcasts. They also had FM radio. So if your phone supports an FM radio chip you can get radio as well. The coolest thing about this is that if you upgrade, although some people told me differently, but on my phones when I upgrade it retains all the podcasts that I already subscribe to.

Leo: It should.

Paul: So if action brings them over. It is nice. It makes plenty of sense, but this is Microsoft so it doesn’t always make sense to them. But it did actually do that for me.

Leo: Just to prove that it does work. That’s great. That is nice. So it always works in the US but the international is new?

Paul: Right. That is actually pretty huge. It has never been explained to me why that didn’t work before.

Leo: Well now that Rob Greenlee is gone they can really get ahead.

Paul: They can finally get ahead.

Mary Jo: Today on twitter somebody had a question about the podcast app. And he said, “The old podcast app was developed by the Xbox team and the new one was developed by the Windows phone team.”

Leo: Oh! There are third-party apps you can use, right?

Paul: Oh yes. There are some good ones.

Leo: Do you prefer those?

Paul: Now that this is out, I’m just going to use the built-in ones. Because obviously I write a book about this I want to cover that. I find it adequate for my needs.

Leo: I’m excited about my new… You know, 8.1 really impressed me when they downloaded it at Build. It really impressed me. I've been waiting until now to order a phone. I was going to get one of the new 8.1 phones but I don’t know what those are.

Paul: Tell me if you know this. Because you, of all people on earth would know. Because I use so many devices, and I know you do too, I used to run into problems with certain apps. For example Audible would be a problem. I would go to sign into Audible on an app, and it would say, “you are done” and I would call. And there were always very nice about it. But I have easily signed into Audible 117 times lately and they have never…

Leo: You are exactly right. I think the nominal limit was five devices. Most people have a tablet and a phone and that is enough. They would always reset it for me. But I don’t think it matters anymore. We’ll see.

Paul: I think the same thing on Kindle as well. That may be related right? Since they are both on Amazon. I think you can just ask these things up now. Which is great for me because I go from device to device. In any given week I may just pick up a device and say I’m going to use this. It is always such a roadblock to have to think of stuff like that.

Leo: Microsoft has a limit do they not? On the number of phones you can activate with the same account?

Paul: Yes, five.

Leo: So you may run up against that then. Ironically you would think they would say, “Have as many as you want”.

Paul: I know. This is just kind of a weird problem. But when I flew out to San Francisco from Build, something about me being there with my phone sliding into my services and my devices back home sliding in the my services triggered some kind of a scare alert, “We think someone has broken into your account, you are going to have to change your password, oh and by the way you can’t use a password you are really used” and so it is all this complicated stuff. So I did that… and of course I’m only flying with two or three different devices. And what happens back home as my wife turns on the Xbox in the living room and tries to sign in with the wrong password and triggers it again. So it was this constant cascading series of failures. I recognize this is not a normal problem that most people will run into. So it’s not like I’m going to blast Microsoft for this.

Leo: In fact are doing the right thing. They are protecting you.

Paul: But it is such a pain. It is so awful.

Leo: I did the same thing because of heart bleed. You want trouble? Change your Google password. Holy moly!

Paul: You don’t realize how many things this is connected to.

Leo: Everything.

Paul: So you have to like sever the tie. Warnings that come from places you forgot existed.

Leo: I had the old one memorized, but now I have 20 random characters so it is going to take me awhile to memorize.

Paul: Actually, between that trip I went last night to play Xbox with the friends up the street, I have an Xbox 360 this in sitting in a bag since I use the Xbox one now, I brought it out, etc. and we were ready to go and my password was incorrect. Oh, and by the way the password you typed into the console is not your real password. You need an app password.

Leo: That is what I hate.

Paul: On a console, with a controller. While eight other 40-year-old guys are looking at you like you are the Microsoft genius. How come you haven’t figured this out? It’s so aggravating. The number of ways that this exposes itself.

Leo: New photo app? Is the photo app update it? I don’t mean to change the subject or anything.

Paul: Yes.

Leo: I don’t want you to have a stroke or anything. You just seem like you are turning red.

Paul: That is just the Irish. They are still kind of calling it a photo hub, but really just an app. The it is not a panoramic experience anymore. I think this is structured more along the way that a photo app should be on a phone. Which is, you’ve got your device folders, but you also have access to your online services. They have Facebook and one drive kind of built-in and I presume it is as extensible now as it should’ve always been. So that third parties can write into this and you can get Flickr or whatever service you may want in there as well.

Leo: Let me ask somebody said maybe you don’t want to update right away on the 1520 because this is, after all, a beta of the 8.1.

Paul: It’s not a beta. It’s the final bits.

 Mary Jo: Only Kortana. Kortana is the beta but the rest is final.

Leo: Kortana will always be beta right? Siri is still beta.

Mary Jo: We should talk about cautions about the developer preview. Most people watching this show are the people who could and should download the preview but somebody like me, on my regular Icon is not. And the reason I haven’t is because you don’t get all the firmware optimizations and you can’t go back to Windows phone 8 once you go to 8.1. In case for some reason you wanted or needed to do that. I’m not sure about this last phone but I have heard people say you can validate your warranty if you do this?

Paul: Potentially. Let’s just say if you went to AT&T with your Windows phone 8.1 they would be very confused to say the least.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

 Leo: Can you go backwards? Can you restore it?

Paul: No.

Mary Jo: No. Once AT&T pushes this update to you on your phone you won’t be out of warranty. But until they do you are not covered by the warranty. Technically.

Paul: The confusion here is that this is the final version of the OS. However, there are three additional things coming down the pike for most people. Not for all people. But for most. Those things are RTM fixes that Microsoft and their partners will roll into Microsoft. Firmware updates and other applications that come from the handset makers. For example Nokia has already announced, I think they call it Sian. Which is their firmware update and that is tied to this release. And of course Nokia has a bunch of apps, mapping apps and all that kind of stuff. And then there is the wireless carriers themselves. They like to add software to phones, as everybody knows. So for this thing to be rolled out officially by the carrier it would have to include the RTM version of Windows phone 8.1, the post RTM fixes, those firmware updates, and also the wireless carrier updates. And those things are rolled into what you get officially. So if you update today using that kind of a hack, even though it is officially from Microsoft, you know this method that we have of pretending we are a developer and getting the app, and getting the update rolling, you are just getting the RTM version of Windows phone 8.1. so in the future, in Mary Jo’s case, if Verizon starts rolling it out to the Icon, if she had updated today she would still get the update in the future. But it would be the other stuff. It would build on top of what she already has. So she would get the firmware updates and the post RTM fixes. The dangers are semi-minimal for most people.

Leo: Well I’m buying the unlocked, non-carrier version.

Paul: There is no warranty, I mean you have the warranty through the manufacturer.

Leo: And so is Nokia going to push all of this stuff just because I’m not on your carrier?

Paul: That is a good question, Leo. I’ve never heard that answer to my satisfaction.

Leo: Do you buy unlocked phones? Ever?

Paul: Yes. The theory is that if you have an unlocked phone you will get those updates as they come out, directly from Microsoft. In my experience I have never seen. Never seen. The way that I, I don’t know that I can explain it. I've done such things as, I have a luminous 720 which is a device that, to my knowledge is not sold to the United States. It is an absolutely fantastic mid-level phone from about a year ago. I use it on AT&T. I haven’t upgraded to the latest update. How or when, I can’t explain to you. It seems to be based more on how AT&T does things. I certainly didn’t get it the day came out. So I have never experienced that. It is kind of the theory, and the reality I’m not really sure.

Leo: When will the official 8.1 update be?

Mary Jo: Who knows?

Paul: This summer, they are saying. So, there are going to be new phones coming out first. The 930 and the 630, and 635. Mostly international. And those things kind of come out over a period of time. If you followed, I think update 2 was the one that came out last summer right? The 1020 shipped first with update 2 preinstalled. And then update 2 went out to phones throughout August and September, just a rough time frame off the top of my head. I've done such things as; I have a Lumia 720, which to my knowledge is a device that has not been sold in the United States and it's an absolutely fantastic mid-level phone from about a year ago. I use it on AT&T and I haven't upgraded to the latest update. How or when, I cannot explain to you, it seems to be based more on how AT&T does things. I certainly didn't get it the day it came out, so I've never experienced that. There's the theory and there's the reality so I'm really not sure.

Leo: When is the official 8.1 update?

Mary Jo: Who knows.

Paul: Yeah, it's this summer, they're saying.

Leo: Oh my god.

Paul: So there are going to be new phones coming out first, the 930 and the 630, 635 right? Mostly international and those things usually come out over some period of time. If you followed update 2 that came out last summer I think, the 1020 shipped first with update 2 already installed and then update 2 went out to phones from August to September I want to say. And so I would expect it to kind of mirror that.

Mary Jo: We don't really know.

Paul: But I think most people who read our stuff and listen to this podcast are technically sophisticated enough. We aren't like editing a registry or interrupting boot and injecting something into the code or whatever. It's a Microsoft process and is pretty seamless. These things have gone pretty well for people, we did this with update 3 and you'll recall there were no reports of brick phones or anything like that.

Leo: And if anybody puts the developer bits on, they will get updated with the final version or...

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Because sometimes, if you do that, you block updates.

Paul: No, that won't be a problem at all. There was one step Microsoft didn't tell us about, which was there was a prerequisite update, remember? In other words, on Monday when they turned the pipes on, you got an update. If you read the description, it actually said this is a prerequisite for Windows phone 8.1 and it took about twenty minutes or so to install... It took a while. And once that's installed, you go back to check for updates and it'll happen automatically, so you'll get prompted and then you'll get the 8.1 update. Depending on your phone and how much you've used it, that update could take an hour, hour and a half just depending on how clogged up your phone is.

Mary Jo: I'm tempted to put it on my real Icon because-

Leo: Oh you haven't done that yet, you're just using the one they gave you?

Mary Jo: I'm using the loaner.

Paul: You have the review unit and then you have yours right?

Mary Jo: Right, but I have to give back the review unit.

Paul: You do, but not yet. You could do this easily, but there is some advantage to having the exact same phone with two versions of the software for comparison and such. The Icon is the one phone I have not upgraded for that reason- My own Icon- Because I want to be able to do my own comparison and I find that to be helpful so that's something to think about.

Mary Jo: True, good point. I just like having the photo behind the tile thing, and as dumb as it sounds, I like that Clock Hub thing.

Paul: Yeah, well when you send that phone back I think at that point, I would say yeah maybe you should just upgrade. Do you still have your 8x or did you give it to somebody?

Mary Jo: I gave it away.

Leo: Yeah, I have it right here. It's smashed, from anger.

Mary Jo: Mine, unlike that one, was not destroyed.

Leo: Gave it to Liz and she smashed it for you.

Paul: She has the force of nature.

Leo: Yeah, I'll stop right there. I could get into a lot of trouble. Our show today brought to you by Sharfile and Citrix. Of course, if you're in business you send files all the time to your emails. You know, presentations, spreadsheets, contracts, and whatever... First of all, one problem is if you attach something to an email- Well there's a lot of problems. It may not get there due to the sheer size of these files now. You're going to get bounce backs a lot of the time. It's not secure, you know when you're sending something via email it's like sending a postcard and anybody along the way can see it, so that means it's not HIPAA compliant, not compliant with regulations in a lot of areas. FCC regulations if you're in finance and things like that, so that's problem 2. The 3rd problem is I don't want to encourage people to open attachments, we've said that so many times! It's dangerous, especially if they come from somebody you know. It's just kind of noob-ish to send attachments. You need a better way, you need Sharefile. Sharefile is designed by Citrix for use in business. It's secure, allowing you to send files of almost any size- Just massive files- If you need to. You can totally control who has access to the file and for how long, as well as receive email alerts when the files are open and being reviewed. Plus, it's easy for you to work more efficiently because your shared files are visible to you on the cloud, you can use the Sharefile app on your smartphone or tablet, and access the data anywhere. I use my Sharefile account to send audio to radio stations practically every day. I don't want to say this disparagingly, but I'm sending this to some guy at a radio station that may not be a complete geek and I'm unable to require him to personally link himself to something that would legitimize that exchange and make me, the sender, feel at ease. Sharefile is so much easier, I will send them the file- And by the way you can actually request files from non-Sharefile users. -That's handy, there's just so many features... I can't really demonstrate them all, but you can control when they get it, how long they can view it, all of that stuff and it's just so easy. I want you to try it, you've got 30 days free right now if you use our offer code: WINDOWS. So, go to sharefile.com at the very tippy top... You might even miss it, it says 'podcast listeners click here' and if you would do me a favor and click that link, then enter the offer code: WINDOWS. If you wish to customize it for your business/industry, do so. That way you'll know that if there are regulations and requirements like the following would include: bio-tech, graphic design, healthcare, HIPAA, non-profits, photography -- That way it'll customize it to fit what you need. Please try it today, 30 days free, sharefile.com and use the offer code: WINDOWS. It's how I share files and it has been so great for me, I love it. Sharefile.com offer code: WINDOWS. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. We've said everything that must be said... Oh, I should say one more thing; Paul has the deets on his super site for Windows, winsupersite.com, for how to get this developer preview. It's not hard, and it's free, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: So, we don't need to go into it here but if you just want me to send people to your page.

Paul: You may recall that last week, it was my Tip Of the Week, which was perhaps, curiously timed to some people, but now you know why.

Leo: Another thing that somebody in the chat room is pointing out is that, for Cortana to work in the developer preview, you have to have U.S. settings in your configuration.

Paul: Yeah, I've included that in last week's tip on my page.

Leo: Worth mentioning.

Paul: Well, since we brought it up, Microsoft has told me that there are some markets that may disable Store.

Leo: Store?

Paul: Yeah, so if you want to test Cortana, you can make your region U.S. if it works, but then you might not be able to use the Store. Although I've had a bunch of people tell me they can get into the store, so I guess it depends... Lots of mystery magic that we know nothing about.

Mary Jo: Yeah, we should also point out that there are things people are pointing out that aren't working for them and that Microsoft knows about. One of the things I've heard people say is, Cortana doesn't do chit chat on my phone and I see that it's doing it for other people.

Leo: Chit chat?

Mary Jo: You know, like you might ask her, who's you're daddy and so she might respond with, Bill Gates. But Microsoft does know this. I saw this from someone on Bing and it's something related to Bing that they're adjusting to fix this so just hang on, they're going to fix that.

Leo: It's not exactly a bug.

Paul: The chit chat is coming...

Leo: Chit chat on it's way.

Mary Jo: Chit chat coming soon...

Leo: Chit chat beta 2.

Paul: Now with more chit chat.

Leo: So, I'm not going to have any trouble being an idiot while doing this. I'm going to install it, I'm not going to brick my brand new bright red 1520?

Mary Jo: No, you're not.

Paul: I feel confident, Leo.

Leo: Should I do it on the air, how confident do you feel? Should I do it next week on the show, do you feel that confident?

Paul: I do.

Leo: How long does it take?

Paul: Well, from start to triggering the actual download of the update is probably 5-10 minutes, but then you've got the prerequisite download and the actual download finally...

Leo: I'll get it all ready.

Paul: It'll be less than an hour.

Leo: Alright, perfect. Since this show is four or five hours long.

Paul: Most of it will be the phone grinding gears and doing stuff.

Leo: Yeah, yeah. Well I'll do it before I put anything else on it.

Paul: Yeah, that'd be the way to do it.

Leo: How exciting. I was going to ask you guys for a case recommendation, but enough about me.

Paul: Mary Jo and I diverge as wildly on this as we do with our favorite kinds of beer, but I would say that-

Leo: Do you have a case with less hopps?

Paul: Lumia's are almost indestructible, I don't personally put anything on the Lumia.

Mary Jo: I like on the 1520, when I got the loaner devices it had that feather case that just folded over very nicely from Incipio, I think. That was awesome on that phone and you can get it in red.

Leo: Ah, well I was thinking a nice leather case.

Mary Jo: Nice. You might be able to find one...

Leo: Oh, I have found one.

Mary Jo: Good.

Leo: Oh, I found one.

Paul: Just don't buy the Nokia one, the Nokia case for the 1520 is terrible.

Mary Jo: Windows phone accessories are hard to find sometimes.

Leo: Yeah, Expansys. And Paul mentioned this, I have also used it before. They're a British company but they have a US site.

Paul: I bought a bunch of stuff from them, they're always great.

Leo: I always buy my unlocked phones from them, I don't know why, I just do. E-X-P-A-N-S-Y-S, I don't know that the prices are better or anything, but they just seem to always have everything, which is kind of a selling point for me. And you see all of these cases? These are all for the 1520.

Mary Jo: Nice.

Paul: Yeah, see the Nokia protective case? Don't get that, because that case is terrible.

Leo: Terrible, and it's $50!

Paul: You could buy that in the U.S. for like $20, but it's terrible.

Leo: I'll do without a case, but I don't know, these look kind of nice... The leather ones.

Paul: I think you're certified as like a weapon when you have that. Throw it at somebody.

Leo: It's got the- It's not like the Icon where it's squared off and has got that curve.

Paul: It's pointy.

Leo: It is pointy. I like the rolled polycarbonate edges.

Paul: It's just like that, it just tapers.

Leo: Because then the Icon is a little more square.

Paul: It's a solid color, it's not painted on or anything.

Leo: Tasty.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: I wish the 1520 had been on Verizon, I would have bought that instead of the Icon.

Paul: I wish the Icon was a 1520 shrunk down to a 5" screen.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: That device would be perfect, I would love to have that device.

Leo: You can sure spend a lot of money on phones if you have enough.

Paul: You could, good think I don't. Oh wait... I've probably spent more on phones than any other kind of technology.

Leo: You know, I bought the first Samsung Windows phone way back when.

Paul: Yeah, me too.

Leo: And I liked it and I've been playing with them all along but this is only the second Windows phone I've actually purchased, so I'm looking forward to it.

Paul: Leo, I can see 17 Windows phones from where I'm sitting. I have way too many Windows phones.

Leo: It makes sense though, because you're writing the book on it. Oh, and that's another thing, another accessory. I need to buy the book. Windows phone; The book.

Paul: The book is free, Leo.

Leo: Oh, good.

Paul: I'm not sure about 8.1, maybe I'll charge for the 8.1.

Leo: You've got to make money somewhere.

Paul: It's not going to be in books. That much I can tell you.

Leo: So Paul has an updated article on how to get the dev preview. It's probably on the front page... Actually this is on Windows IT Pro, so do you want to point people to that one?

Paul: No.

Mary Jo: Alright, I may have put the wrong link.

Leo: It's the same article, it's just-

Paul: That probably links to my article, I'm sure. That's just like a news article.

Leo: Oh, okay. Can't wait. Wait, here it is. "Check out my article, get Windows phone 8.1 as soon as possible. You know you want it," says Paul Thurrott. You know you want it.

Paul: My subheadings are always my real headlines.

Leo: You KNOW you want it. I love Paul's stuff. This is an uncommonly normal picture for you.

Mary Jo: It is.

Paul: Yeah. That's Joe Belfiore's hairy arms with the Lumia 630 or whatever.

Leo: Yeah, he's just holding it up. So I should just sign up now to be a Windows phone developer, just in case they stop doing that.

Paul: All you've got to do is log in to App Hub with your Microsoft account, it's that simple.

Leo: Oh, well that was easy. Who is Terry Myerson, and why is he saying those terrible things about me?

Mary Jo: Terry Myerson is the head of the the Unified Operating System Group at Microsoft these days. So, he's the guy who is in charge of Windows, Windows phone, the Xbox operating system, Xbox Live: He's kind of a big deal.

Leo: He's got it all.

Mary Jo: He's got it all. And I got to talk to him last week, which I know that not everyone will find this miraculous, but to somebody who hasn't been allowed to talk to pretty much anybody in Windows in 7 years, this was kind of unusual. So he came to New York and Microsoft called me and said, hey do you want to interview Terry Myerson? I just was stunned, and I'm like, yeah sure I do. We sat for an hour at Rattle N Hum, surprisingly and did a little interview while drinking some craft beers. He was very forthcoming I thought, and he didn't answer every question I asked him but he actually said when he would and wouldn't answer and did give me some clarity on a couple of things that Paul and I have gotten tips on that we weren't sure was true. For example, he indicated in our conversation that the desktop is not going to be in every Windows skew from now on, which we kind of thought, but still weren't sure.

Leo: Well, it hasn't been in phone, but it has been in RT and Pro.

Mary Jo: Right. So my question was, is every version of Windows on the desktop going to have this going forward. And he said, the desktop is key to us and we're going to keep supporting it, but not everywhere. It doesn't make sense, everywhere. So to me, that was conformation of what we had been reporting. And he also basically gave a clue like, yeah and the skew is probably something that is going to run on ARM and probably be the same skew for phone and smaller tablets. So again, another thing that we had heard from our sources, but hadn't confirmed, and he kind of gave it the nod and said yep that's going to happen. So, we had a really good conversation, and I asked him about Android because I was really curious about what he was going to say. You know is Microsoft actually going to support Android apps on Windows phone and Windows desktop, and he did not rule that out. He kind of left the door open for that, which was interesting. I also had a chance to talk to him about the Nokia X phone because I was wondering if he was one of the people at Microsoft that thinks this is a good idea- That Nokia is building an Android-based phone. And he again, indicated that he is not against the X and sees it as a gateway to more customers becoming Microsoft customers of some sort. If not, a gateway to getting them eventually onto Windows phone. So I was pretty happy with the interview all in all. It's a good sign to me that this is a new Microsoft and new Microsoft management that actually is going to engage with us, talk to us, listen to us, and let us ask questions. Something different.

Leo: Yeah, and interesting that he doesn't hate the X. That kind of confirms maybe Microsoft knew about it all along, or is it revisionist? Like, well since it's technically out, let's say okay.

Mary Jo: They had to know that this was in the plan when they bought Nokia's handset division, I would think.

Leo: Their due diligence would have revealed that.

Mary Jo: Yeah. But you know when I said to him, what about the X? Like, your Windows phone developers don't love this thing, right? And I can see why they don't. He just said, you know what, this is going to get more users on our applications and more users of our services and we think that someday we will win these people to Windows.

Leo: That's what we hypothesized, it gets you into the Microsoft cloud and once you're in the cloud you're in. You've got a foot in the door to the ecosystem.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: Yeah, that makes sense.

Paul: This is why I would be terrible in this job... I would be like, this thing dies now.

Leo: It's politics, Paul.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it is.

Leo: It's the art of compromise, which you obviously suck at.

Paul: Yeah, for sure. No, that's a fair statement.

Mary Jo: But Terry Myerson, you know he's somebody that we haven't gotten to talk to a lot as press so I'm encouraged that they're starting to let him get out there and talk to us and they're probably going to have him do more key notes. By the way, he talked a lot about listening to customers, and a lot of times you'd be like, yeah that's lip service. But he actually is the one championing the changes coming with Windows 8.1 update by doing what customers are asking them to do. I'm bullish, I'm probably more bullish about the operating systems at Microsoft right now than I'v been in years.

Paul: Me too, definitely.

Leo: Where was Terry before this? He's part of the new executive-

Mary Jo: He is, right. He's in the Senior Leadership Team, which is like the inner circle. But directly before he was running Windows phone engineering and before that he was working on exchange back in the day. He came to Microsoft when they bought his start-up in the 90's called InterSay. They bought his company, he joined, and then became part of an exchange. So yeah, he's been around a long time. It's all good news for us, hoping that there was going to be more transparency and kind of, a shift in the way that things are being handled.

Leo: Mary Jo Foley has a two-part extensive interview with him on allaboutmicrosoft.com, very interesting stuff. Terry Myerson, you asked him about wearables...

Mary Jo: I did, that one he didn't answer.

Leo: He dodged that one nicely.

Mary Jo: He did. I said, hey our sources have been saying you've got some cool stuff happening in wearables, and I said, you know whose sources. And he rolled his eyes and was like, yeah, I know them.

Leo: He said yeah right, you didn't you didn't say he rolled his eyes. That seems like a thing, yeah right.

Mary Jo: There were some fun gestures during our interview and these I left out.

Paul: They're hard to describe in transfer.

Leo: Fun, fun.

Mary Jo: So yeah, it was good. Hopefully we're going to hear more from him not in unnecessarily long blog posts, but actually in person. That'd be great.

Leo: No Sinofski style screens.

Mary Jo: I actually asked him if he was going to start writing lengthy blog posts to describe what was going on and he said, maybe I can delegate that.

Paul: Wow. Imagine that.

Leo: And yet, he's still competitive because of the last question. You say, with CEO Nadella talking up mobile first, cloud first, and strongly emphasizing cross platform, does Microsoft's value proposition remain, that these things will be first and best on Windows. And he virtually says, hell yes. He says, "It's the right thing, I think it's great customers would be using Office and understanding how productive Office is, that's great for Microsoft. The strategy is, we want to win those users wherever they are but Windows is best.

Paul: By the way, that is absolutely the right approach.

Leo: Yeah, it's competitive while understanding the realities of the world.

Paul: Keeping Office off of iPad dumb, making a good Office for iPad but then making a Windows version better- Smart, really smart.

Leo: Windows is the best- We're going to see the best version there. So isn't that such a soft and cuddly or passive Microsoft as we might have presumed.

Mary Jo: No, no. Even though they're doing a lot of things differently like doing a cross platform, etc., they still want to win. Of course they do.

Leo: So Mark Penn has moved into a strategy position. He was the creator of he Scroogled campaign, Mary Jo has got the story- And apparently, that's the end of Scroogled.

Mary Jo: I can't prove it definitively- The reason I say that is because the Scroogle campaign site is still on the web, their Twitter handles still exist, and there was an interview from a high level guy in the Bing team whom just casually mentioned, oh yeah and we're done with the Scroogle campaign by the way. So I asked Microsoft and said, okay, so are you guys done? It's over...? And they said, we're not saying it's over, and we're not saying it's not over. That's that.

Paul: I think they're reserving the right, so if Google does something silly, they can come out with a new Scroogle thing right then to respond to it.

Mary Jo: Exactly, and I think they will do away with this campaign. I really do, because at this point I think it's bringing them more negativity than positivity. But I know Paul doesn't agree with that.

Paul: I'm trying not to choke over here, but keep talking.

Mary Jo: I know your fan has the shirt, the hat, and the mug, all saying Scroogle, I'm sure. I think they still are definitely competitive with Google they're still going to go on the offensive against Google but I think it's going to take a different form. I think when they took the advertising budget away from Mark Penn, who is the one that masterminded the whole Scroogle campaign, it kind of sets things up to say, we're going to put our money in different places and different directions, but still be very competitive. That's my guess.

Leo: Makes sense.

Mary Jo: Paul, though- As soon as I Tweeted, 'Is the Scroogle campaign dead?' Paul's Tweet was a long, noooooooo!

Leo: He likes that campaign.

Mary Jo: He loves it.

Paul: Listen, we can find many examples of this throughout Microsoft history like Tom Rizzo when he used to go after Google from Office 365 standpoint or Exchange, previously. I'd like this kind of hard-nosed, in your face competitive stuff and it's not just from Microsoft. I like when other people do it too.

Leo: You always wanted Microsoft to respond to Apple's Switch campaign.

Paul: Yep, that drove me nuts.

Mary Jo: And the I'm a Mac campaign.

Paul: Yeah, that made me crazy because those ads were ridiculously wrong. And Microsoft just sat there and took it again and again. That contributed to the problems that we've had over the last decade, it was just the wrong thing to do, do nothing.

Leo: Do you think, actually I know you do because you said so in your article, that this is why Google is more explicit about what it does with email and it's new privacy policy?

Paul: It's provably true that's the case. The Scroogle ads lead to lawsuits against Google because of their invasions of privacy- Several of them, by the way. -And the way that Google kind of addresses... They said, look we've gotten feedback over the past year in the form of lawsuits and we decided and we decided let's not feedback and be more explicit about what we're doing with our email scanning. They said, we are scanning your email when it comes in, when it's sitting on our servers, and when it leaves. We scan it front, back, and sideways. You cannot opt out of it if you pay Google for Google apps and you don't see ads in Gmail, congratulations they're still scanning your email. You cannot stop that behavior, that's what they do. And again, not just for the purpose of security like malware and viruses. They're doing it to hone their ad creation capabilities and whatever. People hear that and some people go nuts because you've got the privacy crazies who can't stand this kind of thing on one side, and then you've got people on the far other end of the scale who say, I don't care I like Google products. That's fine, they can have it, it's anonymous, whatever. And then there are people who kind of sit in the middle. But they've just made it more explicit.

Leo: Yeah, I think they should. You don't have to use Gmail, you know. There's no opt out if you're using Gmail but you can opt out of Gmail. So I think Google's only real obligation is to be explicit about what they're doing.

Paul: I should say, this is not just Gmail. This is their Google services. But obviously, speaking specifically about email, there's no way to opt out. Just don't use it if you don't like it.

Leo: Yeah. Use Outlook. You've got a choice.

Paul: And Outlook works great, I'm told.

Mary Jo: I've heard that too, I don't know where, but somewhere.

Leo: Let's take a little break and then we're going back to talk a little bit more about Office, Nadella does Data-

Paul: Worst porn title of all time, by the way.

Mary Jo: Did I really write that?

Leo: And Xbox news, we'll talk about that update and what you get. Our show today brought to you by our buddies, shutterstock.com. Shutterstock is a great place to go to get royalty free stock photos, vector, illustrations, videos, footage- It's so much fun to use Shutterstock, even if you don't want any of these. If you just want to browse around, they've got a great iPad app. In fact, Webby Award winning iPad app. Or go to the site, shutterstock.com and take a look. They're always adding new stuff, which I love. Almost 36 million royalty free stock images and they added almost a quarter of a million stock images last week. Last week! A great search tool, just create a free account you don't need to give them a credit card, you can then use the search tool, 'search for stuff' start by nouns. So let's say 'smart phone' and obviously you'll find a lot of smart phones. But then you can refine your search in ways that really is quite interesting. Really, quite sophisticated. Of course you can say what kind of image, but you can also say things like- And Paul, as a graphic designer and a blogger, you'll appreciate this. -You can have a horizontal or vertical orientation. You can choose a category within the category, exclude key words, pick contributer if you like a photographer or an artist particularly you can tell it to only show you that stuff. You could say, I only want images with people, I don't any images with people, choose gender, age, ethnicity, the number of people, and on and on. They even have this great color picker to where you could say, I want cell phone images in dark blue to match my site or whatever. This is really a sophisticated thing and all of this is free to you. Now, when you decide you want to buy images, you can buy individual image packs or a monthly subscription. We have the 25 images a day subscription, which is fabulous. So if you like this model, you can see all of the stuff she has done. Similar images, customers also liked, this is so cool. I really enjoy playing with Shutterstock, this is so cool. Don't forget to click the footage tab because they have great royalty free videos too. 1.7 million strong and great crystal clear high def, really beautiful. Great for your Power Point or your video production. If you use the offer code: WINDOWS414 when you decide to buy, you'll get 20% off any package and if you get the subscription that means a long term savings of 20%. WINDOWS414 at shutterstock.com, the best royalty free images, photos, vectors, and of course footage. Shutterstock.com use the offer code: WINDOWS 414. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, we're talking Windows, Windows Weekly, Office. What's the latest with Office 365 Personal.

Mary Jo: Yeah, just a couple quick updates on Office. One is Office 365 Personal is now available for purchase. That's the one where if you only have one PC and one tablet, or one Mac and one tablet, you can subscribe now for $6.99/month or $69.99/year. There's one little weird thing that's still up in the air that I haven't been able to clarify with Microsoft because I've had people say to me, what does a Surface count as? Does it count as your one tablet or your one PC?

Paul: Oh, I can answer that.

Mary Jo: You might think you can.

Paul: Okay.

Mary Jo: I bet you're going to answer it the way I did. It's a tablet, right?

Paul: No, it's a desktop.

Leo: It's a desktop?

Paul: Because it's a desktop app. So eventually, when that Touch version of Office comes out, that will be the tablet.

Leo: So it's based on the app you're using.

Paul: Yeah, in the future, you could have the same PC be both the tablet and the PC in this scheme.

Mary Jo: Right. But right now if you get this, some people have asked me, could your Surface count as your tablet? Because the definition of a tablet in this case is, it has a removable keyboard.

Paul: Nice.

Mary Jo: So I just wanted to clarify that. I've asked them and they said they're working to get clarity on that. But I would say, defer to what Paul's saying right now that it's not a tablet until we find out otherwise.

Paul: One little tip I've got just to sort of comment on this thing, Office 365 Personal is a good deal, right? $70/year or $6.99/month, if you have even the smallest possibility of using Office on more than one computer, get Office 365 Home. It's $30 more per year but it dramatically expands-

Leo: Yeah, you get 5 PCs.

Paul: 5 PCs and/or Macs, 5 tablets-

Leo: That's the one I use.

Paul: But it's 20gb of extra OneDrive storage, per users, up to 5 users. Not just 20gb extra. It is a dramatically better deal. If there's any chance at all that you're going to use that on like 2 PCs, just get Home, even if it's just you by yourself. That would be a better deal.

Leo: That's the one I use. And also it's nice because I install versions of Office here, Office at home on Windows, and of course, the tablet version so it's nice. It's really useful.

Paul: It's weird I had installed this on my kid's computers over a year ago, and I only just recently did it in such a way, because now my kids are starting to use Office in school and I finally went through the thing with them where I was like, look you have your own Microsoft account, you have a OneDrive, you can login with this. I added them to the account, which I had never done before and it's actually kind of neat because everyone gets the initial storage, they get their own experience. My son has an iPad for school and I showed him how you can have OneDrive on the iPad and Office on the iPad and you can login to it with your account and it just works. And the thing you were working on last night on your laptop, is now available on your iPad when you get to school and his face lit up like he couldn't believe it. This is amazing.

Leo: It's how people want to use it frankly.

Paul: We get so jaded to this stuff sometimes, it's interesting to see someone react to it when they're new to the concept, like this is great. It really is great.

Leo: Imagine if you could do this with everything. No more backpack to and from school. Wouldn't it be cool if lunch just replicated in your locker.

Paul: My lunch does sort of replicate, what do you mean?

Mary Jo: That would be cool.

Leo: They've also added- I'm looking for this Chrome extension for Office online, that's cool too.

Paul: I just did that this morning because I'm a huge Chromebook fan.

Leo: You're joking.

Paul: No, but I do have a Chromebook, just for testing and it's Word Power Point and OneNote are available now, I don't know why Excel isn't there. You can add them to that Chrome launcher and pin it to the taskbar, although they call it something different.

Leo: But it gives it parody with Google apps, right?

Paul: Not quite, it doesn't work offline so it's still online only so you have to be connected to the internet to use it. No one has ever said this, clearly they have to add this it's such an Office thing to add.

Leo: I'm looking in my Chrome browser, is it the one that says, 'Word online?'

Paul: Yep. So go to the top where it says more app results, on the top right. Click that and then you'll see the full list.

Leo: Word, Power Point, oh you have to do it one by one got it. Oh, and I see the OneNote, that's nice.

Mary Jo: It's weird the publisher says, 'live.com,' doesn't it?

Paul: Yes, I thought that was weird too. It's almost like that's how they got it by Google. This is live.com

Leo: Now really, this is the web based version of Note in Office.

Paul: So if you know anything about Chromebook, and again I consider myself an expert, you can't arbitrarily pin anything you want to the Chrome launcher even though Word online is a full-featured html web app, you cannot with a Chromebook pin that to the taskbar, to the Chrome launcher. It has to be in the store and it has to be a special formulated thing and so they've done that little bit of work to make that possible.

Leo: Also, you can talk to your apps. I like this, TellMe is now in the Office apps.

Mary Jo: Not the same TellMe.

Leo: Oh, I thought I could talk to my apps.

Paul: No, it's not that.

Leo: I'm reading this blog post and I thought... What the what?

Mary Jo: You know, it's even a better TellMe in a way. It's to help you figure out where stuff is in these apps.

Leo: So you type it?

Mary Jo: Yeah it's like a pull-down toolbar thing. Like if you can't figure out where something is you can type in, I want to do...

Leo: See, I was just reading the blog post and I saw this popup box that says tell Excel what you want to do and it will pull up the perfect commands for you.

Paul: You have to tell it by typing.

Mary Jo: Yeah, tell it by typing.

Leo: Okay, so it's a help feature.

Mary Jo: It is.

Paul: You know, it's a goofy feature in a way because it was supposedly necessitated by the fact that- What's the matter?

Mary Jo: Goofy? I like it..

Paul: No I'm going to get to- It's not really goofy, what I was going to say is ostensibly, it's because people couldn't find anything anymore because they don't have toolbars, they have ribbons but that's bologna. Office has so many commands, how can you possibly walk into Excel and immediately know where everything is.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: This is actually a very necessary feature and would've been necessary in the old toolbar based version of Excel.

Leo: Apple has done this for years on the Macintosh with the help feature. If you start typing in the search a menu command, it'll actually drop the menu and show you the menu command.

Paul: Yeah. On the desktop versions of Office there's an add-in you can install that does this. It actually will walk you through how to find stuff and will actually move stuff around and show you where stuff is so you can do that kind of stuff too.

Leo: That's a nice feature because menus are bigger-

Paul: This is all about getting people to shut up about the ribbon. It really is- Just stop. Stop pretending that this is ruining your life.

Leo: Shut up about the ribbon already.

Paul: Right.

Leo: What else is new in Office, anything else?

Paul: A bunch of stuff. TellMe was a big one that I think was in Word and they've added it to Excel and Power Point, OneNote you can print- Actually I don't look at OneNote on line all that much but it looks like the Metro app now, which I think is awesome. It's got that same kind of UI, which I think is kind of neat. Footnotes and end notes in Word-

Mary Jo: VBA support.

Paul: Well...

Mary Jo: To some extent.

Paul: Yeah, it lets you open a VBA enabled document and not screw it up.

Mary Jo: It's still good. That's still a good thing.

Paul: Yeah, people are mourning VBA like they're are mourning Fox Pro and Visual Basic 6 and whatever else.

Leo: Well if you read a lot of code in it and used it for automation...

Paul: I don't know enough about this, but I believe the way this used to work is if you opened a VBA equipped or enabled document, that was from Word 2007 or earlier in Office online, there was a chance that it could have corrupted the code because it doesn't understand VBA. So it doesn't do that anymore.

Leo: Yeah, that would not be good. Anything that corrupts the code is a bad idea.

Paul: Is bad. Yeah. Well Microsoft was all about document fidelity and typically what they mean by that is the format and styling of the document so if you open it in Office Mobile, even though it maybe can't show you exactly what it looks like, you can play with things like edit, text, and you won't screw it up. It's one of the problems they try to highlight with things like Google Docs or other Office compatible solutions because those things often meet a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet and they just don't retain the formatting. So it's kind of an extension to that I guess.

Mary Jo: I didn't realize- I don't know why I didn't. -That OneNote was to where you couldn't print from it.

Paul: I know.

Mary Jo: I just never thought to try.

Paul: And some people have said to me, I'm not seeing this stuff. Like everything else Microsoft does these days it seems, these things are kind of rolling out so you may not see all of these changes immediately. In fact, I didn't write about this for a couple of days because I didn't initially see this changes. But I guess it's because they're rolling out over the course of the week so I guess there's still a chance that you may not see some of the new stuff yet.

Mary Jo: I don't have the printing yet, I don't think.

Paul: Yeah, that's what reminded me is the printing, like where is this thing.

Leo: It does seem like a missing feature.

Paul: Yeah. Well, Office for the iPad doesn't print either.

Leo: Oh I know.

Paul: I need to connect to my fax machine...

Leo: I just sent a fax Saturday so don't knock it.

Paul: That's funny.

Leo: Well, I used Ring Central and didn't have to use a machine but you know, some people still want faxes.

Paul: Yeah, sure.

Leo: Mostly back wood farmers, but they want the faxes. Nadellla is back in the city, he came back to San Francisco he loves it here. I think Microsoft is going to move to San Francisco.

Paul: If you love it so much, why don't you just marry it?

Mary Jo: That was a crazy rumor a while back. Yeah, he was there yesterday, in fact and they did a big customer press event in the city. It was focused all about data and talked about all these enterprise products that we all know and love like; Hadoop, and Power BI which is their business insight service. They also talked about SQL Server 2014 that has the built-in in memory online transaction processing technology and then they threw in a couple of new announcements. The one that was the most interesting was they announced a new Internet of Things service that's going to run on Microsoft Azure. It's this new service is called Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service, wow that's a mouth ball. What it does though is kind of cool, you know how there are sensors in all kinds of devices these days and it's sending people all of these constant feeds of data. So what can you do all of those data feeds? This service is supposed to collect that data from wherever these sensors are that you have out there. Whether they're in Windows embedded devices or non-Windows embedded devices, any operating system pretty much. It collects the data, processes it and uses Microsoft's tools like Power BI and like HDInsight, which is their Hadoop service to analyze the data for you. This service right now is just a limited customer preview that they're starting up. But this is the first step that we're seeing of Microsoft's Internet of Things strategy. Like how that's going to involve the cloud and also how it's going to be cross-platform, which is kind of exciting. Instead of just limited to Windows devices. So yeah, he talked about all of that but Kevin Turner was there, who is the COO of Microsoft and he talked about some customer stuff and they did a lot of demos of harnessing data, using Excel to process data, showing people what Power BI was and how you can do all of these new cool mapping visualizations. So it was very enterprise centric and you could tell it was like totally right in Satya Nadella's wheelhouse, because he came from the enterprise side of Microsoft. So it was a good event, it was long though. It was like two hours of enterprise goodness.

Leo: Enterprise stuff is long...

Paul: Enterprise goodness.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Enterprise goodness.

Paul: Like Military intelligence.

Leo: 15 minutes would seem long it's all long.

Mary Jo: If you're a customer, you'd want to see that, right?

Paul: I told this story a few years ago but the very first time I went to a Microsoft kind of business oriented program- I don't remember the context of the show was. But they did a demonstration of what they used to call Back Office, right? Which was Microsoft mail before they had Exchange, back when it was based on a side base single server, and I literally fell asleep. Like in the audience, fast asleep.

Mary Jo: That'd be me at an Xbox event, oh boy.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: How can you be bored with an Xbox event? It's all about fun and games.

Paul: But a lot of that stuff is so silly though. I actually have a disconnect with a lot of the Xbox stuff, to be honest.

Leo: Well that's because you only play Call of Duty, that's all you do.

Paul: The term, lonely is confusing.

Leo: Entirely Call of Duty. The Internet of Things service...

Mary Jo: Yeah, that's the Azure Internet of Things service, and we don't know a lot about that yet because it's a limited customer preview but I think this is the first of many Internet of Things pieces that we're going to see from Microsoft. Both connected with Azure and beyond that in terms of what they do with Bing and their other products. So this is like them sticking their toe in the Internet of Things water this week.

Paul: Oh geez. Don't get any Internet of Things on your feet, there. Just don't track that in the house.

Leo: Those things sting.

Paul: It's like those little burs that you get out in the woods that you can't get off of your jeans.

Mary Jo: Ow! Internet of Things... Ow. So I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot more of Nadella. He's not going to be somebody hiding behind the curtain. I heard next week on the Microsoft Ernie's Call, he's going to be on the call. Which is very interesting and new.

Leo: Rarely do you see a CEO do that, right?

Mary Jo: Yep, especially a Microsoft CEO.

Paul: We have to get him on the podcasts. He will apparently, go anywhere so...

Mary Jo: That'd be awesome.

Leo: It would be awesome to have him on. Should I pursue that or would you have better connections?

Mary Jo: We can take a crack at trying to get him on, although it'd be tough.

Leo: It's the premier Windows podcast.

Mary Jo: I'd like to get Terry Myerson, he would be great.

Paul: There are other Windows podcasts?

Leo: Yeah, you guys are on the top 100 Twitter users list.

Paul: You've got to get over that.

Mary Jo: Woo!

Leo: Alright, so we got a new Xbox UI. I downloaded it this morning, 400-something megabytes. What do I get with rubber biscuit?

Paul: It's all useless crap, Leo. But I think the important point behind this update honestly, is the Xbox team, like the rest of Microsoft all of a sudden, it's like they're starting to pay attention. And the way they're doing it is, they're letting people sign up and get into a beta program and test and provide feedback about these updates before they go public. And so this update is the first one that was under that program and includes some stuff that people provided feedback about.

Leo: Oh wow.

Paul: Yeah. And it's weird because when the Xbox One first came out, I think anyone who used this would admit and acknowledge that it was very incomplete and was lacking in all kinds of features that the Xbox 360 already had. People complained very vocally about that and they've been kind of fixing stuff. But I think doing this kind of program is smart and overdue or whatever. You'll just see little things, it's kind of like fit and finish type stuff. The big one for me was the system update improvement one which is basically like the update for the update. In the past, the people who used their Xbox One "correctly" would let their machine go to sleep and that way they could come in the room and say, Xbox on and it would wake up and there was no button pressing and all of that.

Leo: Yeah, I love that.

Paul: Yeah, excellent and that's the way I use my Xbox but if you install the system update and one comes out every month, it would reboot and on reboot it would go back into the normal way of doing things. It wouldn't go into connected standby so you'd have to turn that on again and so they've fixed that. So now, going forward- Because people complain, it's like, why would I have to reconfigure that, it's stupid.

Leo: It should remember my settings.

Paul: So, a lot of this stuff- There's no one thing I could point to and say this is an awesome new feature per se, other than what I just talked about maybe but just a bunch of little things I think really improved the situation across the board. But I just think the big deal is the listening and the Xbox, oddly, is suffering from an image problem right now. And I think them listening to their fans is absolutely the right thing to do.

Leo: Good, good going. Good man! Way to go.

Paul: So I'd like to spend the next 37 minutes on Call of Duty. So here's what I'm thinking...

Leo: So they have a lot of cheap download games like Rainman and stuff now, so they're adding stuff.

Paul: But still, it's kind of a wasteland isn't it?

Leo: It's still pretty much a wasteland.

Paul: It's amazing to me that all of these months later, there really isn't all that much going on in there. Except for TitanFall. It is apparently, the only game on earth.

Leo: Apparently, but I tire of it. I tire of all games, though. It's rare that a game will capture me and I'll play it all the way through. The last one I did was BioShock Infinite, but most of the time I'll just play for a while-

Paul: So this is not available on the Xbox One, but if you haven't played these games, you should and must. They're on iOS and the 360 but those Walking Dead games-

Leo: They're great, aren't they?

Paul: They are unbelievably good. The 2nd one has come out, I think it's 2 episodes in and there are 5 episodes each and the first one had like a special extra one or whatever but if you have not played those games, you should. It's like an extra tip.

Leo: Free, play them games.

Paul: Or a pick, it's kind of a pick.

Leo: We've got tips, picks, and beer coming up here in a bit. Our show today brought to you by Don, Tim, and the guys at ITPro TV, who were up here a couple of days ago, we had a blast. They showed me so many new features and if you go to the website, you'll see it does look different and there's a lot of new stuff. ITPro TV is a video network designed and dedicated exclusively to the world of information technology. Whether you're looking to jump-start your career in IT or you're already working in the field, ITPro TV. Hey, there's Don. Hey Don, what ya' doing? It looks like you're in the command line Don. What is he up to? Uh oh, he's configuring stuff. That's what I love about this. This is geekier than we are, and that's saying something. If you want to improve your skills or get a job in IT, ITPro TV is a great way to learn. On your big screen TV because they have a Roku app, on your tablet, or your laptop...

(Don: ...Well in theory it's up, right? We'll get a lot of messages about like your neighbor detected, active, standby... Whatever...)

Leo: So this is really for someone who wants to learn this. They cover everything; PC support, network security, you could prepare for the (ISC)² tests, V-lan, sub netting, A+, C cent, Net+, Security+, MCSA... Adam Gordon, who is a security guru teaches the (ISC)² stuff, the SSCP and CISSP prep classes. Let me get out of this show. Basically what happened, is they do everything we do here at TWiT, but with the idea of training you to get your cert. Shows are streamed live and on demand, worldwide, comparing just even to the cost of a study guide, it's very affordable. A lot less expensive than going to an IT boot camp. There's no hassle, they make it easy to cancel because they care. They really do. And now, they've got the new web interface, a learning management system that tracks your progress and I can't show you because I'm on a Mac right now but they're going to change that in a couple of weeks. But you can go to the website yourself and play with the virtual machine sandbox lab environment. It lets you run a server, clients, and do everything in virtualization. It's not some fake and phony thing, it's the real deal. You get measure up practice exams included with your subscription, that's worth $70, and if you're an annual subscriber you can download episode and audio only mp3s unprotected for off line consumption. Speaking of listening to your customers, this is something customers asked them for and they said, alright alright. We're going to trust you. It's very affordable, $57/month and $570/year but because you're listening to Windows Weekly, they're going to make you a deal. If you sign up now and use the code: WW30, you'll get 30% off of your subscription, not just for the first month or year but forever. For the lifetime of your account. That means we're talking less than $40/month and I'm telling you, you're going to get a better job, you're going to get a raise, you're going to get a promotion... This is the kind of stuff you want. Go to itpro.tv/ww take a look at the free stuff, the live streaming and all of that using the offer code: WW30, and you will save 30% forever. Start or advance your IT education today at ITPro TV. Itpro.tv/ww, don't forget the offer code: WW30, and you will save big. These guys are just doing such a great job and I like them. We went to lunch and had fun talking. I'm excited about what they're doing, they're really getting people up to speed and the success stories they have are just fabulous. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, time for a Tip of the Week Mr. T.

Paul: I have a couple of tips, I'll kind of race through this. But the first one is about the Windows phone 8.1 and I will say, I have published several tips already and I will publish many more and then I'll eventually collect them into a central article. But we've touched in some of the neat new things you can do around showing more tiles, using that start background image and so forth, there's a new way to take screenshots. There's some features from IE 11 that have made their way over from the tablet to the phone which is really cool. One thing I haven't written up, which I don't know if I will, like we mentioned earlier it's how to use Cortana outside of the US, which basically involves setting your regional settings to the US.

Leo: Okay, what does this picture have to do with pinning the Sense apps to the-

Paul: Absolutely nothing and thank you for noticing. That guy is really happy.

Leo: He's going to the donut shop.

Paul: He's saving on his wireless data thanks to...

Leo: Pin the Sense apps to the start and dance like a fool. At this point, you're punchy and you're just putting nonsensical imagery.

Paul: Listen, we could all look at another photo of something getting pinned on a start screen somewhere but...

Leo: But why... Why not having a mannequin doing kung fu on a deserted street? Why not? Okay, they're all at the super site for Windows, winsupersite.com. Of course. Of course.

Paul: Actually that particular tip, which is about pinning web pages to the start screen as live sites, specially formulated sites can have live tiles.

Leo: Oh, that's neat. So they would understand the tile metaphor and they would do it.

Paul: Right. This is true on Windows, too by the way. It's not unique to Windows phone but now it works in Windows phone too and that's cool.

Leo: So how do you know?

Paul: Yeah, you don't. So that's the unfortunate thing. Actually in the comments, some people have been listing out the sites that support this. CNN is one, WP Central is one...

Leo: That's cool, so you don't even have to have an app. We could do this for the TWiT site.

Paul: Yeah, I guess it's really easy to do. I say I guess because the people that run my site are incapable of making this happen but there is an app for Windows phone 8 and 8.1 called Web Apps, which you should check out if you have that phone. What they do is they curate html 5 websites or web apps and provide beautiful live tiles for them so you can pin them to your start screen. So for example, if you pin my site through this app, you get a beautiful live tile and that's kind of a neat thing, it's free and works great.

Leo: As someone who commented on one of your articles pointed out, Scott Hanselman has made a post on how to make the- And it's...

Paul: Yeah and see, this was written back when Windows 8.1 first came out but this is how you do it for Windows phone as well. Yeah, it's the same browser.

Leo: So it's basically literally meta tagging.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: I mean it's not a lot of code. Wow.

Paul: Like I said, it looks really easy.

Leo: No, Mr. Thurrott if you knew anything about development you'd know...

Paul: That response you just gave me is more of a response than I've ever gotten from anyone.

Leo: Silence is easier.

Paul: It's just right into a black hole. I'm still waiting for them to fix a commenting bug I first reported in November. Anyway, as far as tips go... This just happened or maybe was just announced, but it's pretty cool. You were stepping through a process of telling Cortana about your interests, right, which is how you personalize it. Microsoft has now added this capability to Bing on the web as well. And if you sign into Bing on the web, you can tell it what your interests are and if you've signed in to the same account on your phone, these things will actually go back and forth. What this will do on the web is customize the bing.com webpage experience. So if you're used to that homepage, obviously they have the beautiful image of the day, which is great. But at the bottom, there's this little strip of thumbnail pictures that are sort of like trending news stories that are happening now through Bing.

Leo: Well it knows I love Beyonce and Jay-Z... And Robin Thick's dad. This is good stuff.

Paul: So, if you customize Bing, those can change to things that you say are interesting to you. Weather where you are, information about a trip you're about to go on, whatever it may be. And so it's kind of a neat thing, but I ended up doing this. I should look at it again because when I first did it, I didn't see much in the way of customization. You have to log in...

Leo: I'm logged in. Click the gear, okay. Personalization?

Paul: I don't see it on yours. Hold on.

Leo: I don't either. Interests, oh here it is. All I can do is clear it.

Paul: Yeah, so I have an interest item on the left in my account.

Leo: Oh there it is, 'follow your interests on Bing.'

Paul: Yeah, I just brought this thing up and it's not working great, I think is the fair thing to say right now.

Leo: Let's get started. Daily Glance, Traffic, Weather Near me, turn that on, notify when there are weather incidences.

Paul: Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you can add and there's more coming, but...

Leo: That's good. So Daily Glance, I can say what's in it. Add interests here, okay. Here's those questions.

Paul: Not the same ones but some of the same ones.

Leo: I've added traffic, cool.

Paul: Now when you go back, you should see at the bottom, some of your interests instead of Robin Thick's dad.

Leo: I do, I see Petaluma weather. Isn't that nice.

Paul: Yeah, so you see what I see, which is only two things. Microsoft's examples showed a lot more stuff.

Leo: Maybe in time. Not to say I'm not interested in Wayne Gretsgy's girlfriend, I mean...

Paul: Yeah, she's absolutely gorgeous and maybe that is one of my interests. My point is, I didn't choose it now and it's just there. Maybe someday in the future that will change.

Leo: Not girlfriend, daughter. Oh my God, that's his daughter. Paul, I'm shocked that you would...

Paul: We're getting old, Leo.

Leo: Apparently she did a Gold Digest video and she's quite beautiful. I am getting old to assume that's his girlfriend, that's his daughter.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: She's like 28.

Mary Jo: That seems to be a US only thing too, right?

Leo: Customization?

Mary Jo: Like so many things with Bing, US only I think.

Paul: Mary Jo's video is frozen by the way.

Leo: But it's frozen in a lovely image of her. Seems like she's contemplating-

Mary Jo: Looking angry.

Paul: Contemplating another 17 minutes of Xbox.

Mary Jo: I am.

Leo: Frozen solid. Oh I heard that sound, that means you unplugged your camera or something. Stop and start says Alex Gumple. Here, you can have your HTC One back. I ordered a 1520.

Mary Jo: Stop and start, let's see.

Leo: Not the Icon, I thought I'd have fun.

Mary Jo: Fixed.

Leo: She's fixed, look at that. Boom.

Paul: Success.

Leo: Just in time for Paul's Software Pick of the Week.

Paul: No I'm pretty much done. I mentioned Web Apps for Window phone, which you should definitely check out and also Windows phone 8.1 which we talked about, I really do think people who are listening to this podcast and have a Windows phone 8 handset should really consider upgrading immediately. I kind of eluded to the notion that some phones may never get upgraded past this. There are apparently something like 95% of the Windows phone 8 handsets out in the world will absolutely be updated over time by carriers and so forth, supposedly. But I think there were some devices that didn't sell very well and are just kind of hanging out there and may or may not get updated in the future. Meaning that you should just grab this now because that's as good as it's going to get and those phones include, I forget the model number, but I want to say it was like a Lumia 821 on T-Mobile. Maybe that's Samsung Odyssey, those kind of phones. There may be no future for more updates, this may be it.

Leo: That would be sad. I'm sad.

Paul: He's in a better place, Leo. He can run around with the rabbits.

Leo: Our Enterprise Pick of the Week comes to us from our, now newly mobile, Mary Jo Foley.

Mary Jo: Yes, I'm going to do 2 Enterprise Picks and no Code name this week.

Leo: Okay.

Mary Jo: There's a lot of enterprise news. So the first one is, if you're somebody in the enterprise who has Windows 8.1 or has Windows server 2012 R2, Microsoft had said just before today even, you have until May 13th to update to the updates for those operating systems or you get no more patches. They have changed their policy as of today on that, so if you are a business, meaning if you actually upgrade using Windows server update services or Windows In Tune or system center configuration manager, you have a reprieve and you now don't have to apply the update until August 12th. So you have 120 days, instead of 30 days to get your users all moved to the new version of Windows. And then at the same time, Microsoft did fix a problem that some people are using WSUS were having, and it wasn't working correctly while they were trying to use that to apply the update to client and server and Windows Embedded. They fixed that today and it should all be working fine now so that everybody can start applying those patches. But again, you have until August if you're a business, though if you're a consumer you still only have until next month - May 13th.

Leo: Alright.

Mary Jo: So that's one Enterprise Pick. The other one is for those people who are still running Windows XP and we know that you're out there. But this is good news for the Enterprise customers who are still stuck on XP because they haven't finished their migrations. So Microsoft does this thing called Custom Service Agreements for those customers and typically they've paid millions of dollars to get Microsoft to continue to give them patches, even though as of April 8th, they weren't supporting Windows XP anymore. It turns out, Microsoft decided it was too expensive and too risky to do that and so they have cut the prices substantially of those Custom Service Agreements. So if you are a large customer and have been holding off because you couldn't afford to get one of those agreements, you should go back, look, and talk to your Microsoft rep because it may be much more affordable. I don't mean just a few hundred bucks, it's still probably going to be millions of dollars for you, but it could be substantially cheaper than it was before. So this is something only enterprise users should care about. So if you're just some guy at home with an XP machine and you haven't upgraded, this is not for you, this is for big enterprise customers. So go to your rep, ask about the CSA(Custom Service Agreement) and see if you can get a great deal if you're still stuck on Windows XP.

Leo: This frosts people because they say, wait a minute you mean Microsoft has the patches?

Mary Jo: They have them.

Leo: They're just not giving them to us, you have to pay millions for them.

Mary Jo: Yeah, the way the CSA works though is it's something that you have to prove to Microsoft that you actually plan to get off of XP. You have to show them your plan, you have to have milestones, and a date by which you are going to get off the operating system. It's not something like, we will forever give you the patches under the carpet. It's something that's very specific to enterprise customers, you have to be a Premier Support customer to get this so automatically you're probably like a Fortune level company or a really big organization like the British Health Service or something like that.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: It's still good to go-

Leo: They're paid like $11 million right?

Mary Jo: These are people who are paying multiple millions of dollars to get these patches and are actually trying to get off of the operating system. So it's a very specialized case but something worth pointing out if you're stuck in that scenario.

Leo: Alright. And now, the moment you've all been waiting for, the Beer of the Week.

Paul: It's like you're messing with me now.

Mary Jo: I am, it's an IPA my Beer Pick of the Week but it's got a little extra something. It's called the Dogfish Head ApriHopp. And it's a Dogfish Head brewery that makes a ton of really interesting and great beers. This one is seasonal beer that only comes out around this time of year and what they do is dump a whole bunch of apricots into when they were brewing it and it doesn't taste like a real fruity beer. There's just a hint of apricot and it's really refreshing. It's just a great spring beer, it's also very hoppy I have to admit. If you like an IPA and can find it anywhere, it's tasty and definitely worth seeking out.

Leo: Beer Advocate says that has an irresponsible amount of hopps in it.

Paul: Any amount, Leo, is...

Mary Jo: Oh well.

Leo: It's Aprihopp from Dogfish Head Brewery. My friends Mary Thurrot and Paul Jo Foley...

Mary Jo: Who are they?

Leo: I don't know who they are but they're on that damn Twitter list. Mary Jo Foley is at allaboutmicrosoft.com, that's a ZD Net blog that covers Microsoft constantly. She files all the time, if you want to keep up on Microsoft, that's the place to go for sure. And if you want the help, the how-to's, the tips, the reviews, and the occasional curmudgeonly grown, you want Paul Thurrott's super site for Windows, winsupersite.com. That's the place to go.`

Mary Jo: That's a new tagline. I like that.

Leo: Yeah, the occasional curmudgeonly grown, he also has his books and I'm going to get that Windows phone book. That's windowsphonebook.com, and that is free for right now anyway. Does it cover 8.1?

Paul: No, the 8.0 version is free and I'm going to update it for 8.1 this spring. I'm thinking it won't be too hard, meaning it will be horribly hard and I will hate myself by the end of it but we'll see how that goes.

Mary Jo: Maybe you could charge $0.81.

Paul: Yeah, $0.81 is about what I'll make from it.

Leo: He also has the Xbox music book at...

Paul: That one is just on the super site right now, eventually these things will all be available at like fieldguidebooks.com.

Leo: Good, I like it. Thank you Paul, thank you Mary Jo and thank you all for watching. We do this show every Wednesday 11am Pacific, that's 2pm Eastern time, 1800 UTC on twit.tv. Watch live if you can, if you cannot we make on demand versions available in audio and video, all you have to do is go to twit.tv/ww, press the button, and within seconds your very own copy will be produced in our highly specialized holideck like replicator.

Paul: It's like the Extruder from the Play-Dough days.

Leo: Right. Any flavor of dough, any shape you want. You can also get it in your pod catcher, you know that new podcast client they have on the Windows phone... Maybe just kind of experiment and play with it a little bit. Subscribe to that show, see what happens and you might just get one next week. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you two next time, on Windows Weekly!