Windows Weekly 364 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It’s time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley here one week in they’ll tell you about their experiences with Surface Pro III. They’ll also analyze deeply Satya Nadella interview at the Code conference and a whole lot more. Windows Weekly is next.

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This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. Episode 364, recorded May 28th, 2014.

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It’s time for Windows Weekly! The show that covers Windows and giant mugs. Yeah this is actually Paul’s size, I believe. If you’ve ever seen his Twitter avatar. He has his face buried in a mug like this. This is from the guys at IT Pro TV who are fans. They sent me this, this is actually a brand, the world’s largest coffee cup brand.

Paul Thurrott: That’s excellent.

Leo: They’ve got the TWIT logo and everything. Thank you Tim and Don I appreciate it. Paul Thurrott is here from the SuperSite for Windows, winsupersite.com. Mary Jo Foley from allaboutmicrosoft.com. They are the kings of Microsoft coverage. Each and every week we talk about what’s going on in Redmond. Yesterday Paul did his review of the Surface Pro III on Before you Buy. Thank you for that great review. You seem very happy with it.

Paul: Yeah, obviously with anything you can pick out little things here and there. But overall I really like it.

Leo: Yeah nothing is perfect.

Paul: Yeah that is for sure.

Leo: This is life, this is real life. This ain’t no disco. Well then let’s start with Satya Nadella because he gave an interview. Man that Kara and Walt they just keep getting the big interviews. It used to be all things D. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher went independant last year and they called it Recode.net. Now they have and event call Code. Which has nothing to do with coding.

Mary Jo Foley: Right, that got a few people confused.

Paul: They’re really on the ball there.

Leo: Well, yeah. I mean I understand the issue. Have you ever tried to come up with a new URL, trademark. It’s impossible now.

Paul: It is so hard, yes.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: Because you have to get not just the trademark in your country but it has to be global. LIke look at Microsoft’s problems with SkyDrive and One Note, whatever I don’t know. So Satya Nadella on stage just as Bill used to do with Walt and Kara. And you have parsed in great obsessive detail everything.

Paul: We don’t have a lot going on, Leo.

Leo: You watched with bated breath.

Paul: Pretty much.

Leo: Did you go to code?

Mary Jo: No, and it made it a little tricky to keep up with this because they didn’t stream it. I don’t know what Paul was doing. I had 3 or 4 live blogs open trying to watch what everybody was saying as he was talking. They didn’t all agree at all points.

Leo: Have they put out a video of it yet?

Paul: Live blogging is the worst.

Mary Jo: No, no video yet.

Leo: So really this is all second hand from the people who were there.

Paul: I didn’t write anything up until they published their explanation of what was said. Now I know from past All things D conferences that their version of what the guy said is probably also inaccurate. But I felt like they’re the source and maybe the best source at least for the moment.

Leo: You need something like mechanical turk where you just take 4 different descriptions of what Nadella said and then you average them out.

Paul: By that time you realize he didn’t say anything.

Leo: He didn’t say anything.

Paul: That’s amazing.

Leo: This is his baptism by fire. He has only been CEO for a few months.

Paul: He’s a cool customer though don’t you think he can just take it.

Leo: I think he is pretty impressive. So tell me what do you think?

Mary Jo: I thought so too. Although I saw some write ups today saying oh he did a terrible job, he was evasive. That’s your job as a CEO to be evasive on these kind of things.

Leo: Yeah, CEO interview are the worst interviews in the world. I don’t do them.

Paul: I am not even sure I agree that he was evasive, to be honest. We will get to this but at one point he said no comment, but that was a no comment that spoke volumes about the truth. I don’t think he was evasive, really at all.

Leo: The question was whether he was on board on the Nokia purchase?

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: First of all we don’t know the literal question.

Paul: The question was as it was happening were you on board with the Nokia purchase.

Leo: Were you consulted is that, what that means?

Paul: No, did you agree that Microsoft should buy Nokia?

Mary Jo: In favor of it.

Leo: And he said, No comment. Which you’re right that’s virtually no.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: An evasive CEO would say absolutely of course.

Paul: Of course and Steve Ballmer would have said that. It is the prototypical CEO statement.

Leo: No comment is like saying well you know. How do you like my new bride, well no comment.

Paul: Right, exactly. You don’t abstain. There were reports that he was not in favor of it. So there was some interest as he became CEO whether he would do something different or if things would fall apart and all that.

Leo: Well it’s done deal. But I guess he could starve them, take the oxygen out them.

Paul: I guess he has changed his tune. You go to war with the army you have, Leo.

Mary Jo: And Bloomberg who was the one who reported that he wasn’t on board with it initially, said he eventually did change his mind and then became in favor of it. I don’t think he wanted to get into it because that would bring up a lot of old dirty laundry.

Leo: Oh and there is nothing worse than old dirty laundry.

Paul: They’ve gone to great lengths to show Satya Nadella and Stephen Elop having a great relationship. That was the beautiful Christmas card mountain top photo that they did together.

Leo: That was the funniest. It was so strange.

Paul: Which we will be making fun of for years to come.

Leo: So weird.

Paul: It is just the weirdest romance. But there was the Surface Pro III event last week where they were both there. It seems to me that they are trying to cultivate a relationship.

Leo: Not wanting Nokia doesn’t mean you don’t want Elop.

Paul: They are staying together for the kids, Leo. You know we’ve all been there.

Leo: It may be, I think it is a reasonable thing to say. Hold on there, Paul. So let’s go through it bit by bit. He said at the end of the day we’re a software company. That’s really for sure what Microsoft always has been but the hardware is this new thing, the devices. In fact I believe it says we are a devices and services.

Paul: Right, Mary Jo, how did you put it in your post.

Mary Jo: I said, it’s the second time or maybe there have been even more times that he has said this. What’s interesting is he is the CEO of the devices and services company, saying hey we’re a software company at the end of the day. I think it is really telling and I also think it’s really smart on his part. Because his strategy is let’s play to our strengths. What’s their strength, being a software company. It’s not being a devices company.

Paul: Gosh it’s just like Acer strategy when you think about it. At the Acer event that we went to recently there was a guy who said if you have a kid who comes home and they have all A’s and then 2 C’s, what do you focus on. I think what he was trying to say is you focus on, that’s like the Tiger parent thing, you focus on the A’s. I was like oh no, no, no.

Leo: I think the tiger mom focuses on the C’s.

Paul: Oh yeah because as a parent I would focus on the C’s

Leo: Yeah how can we get better.

Paul: It seems like the A’s are taking care of themselves. But this is a business not a child. So it is a little different.

Leo: Well maybe in public you cheerlead for A’s but in private you might be kicking some but around the C division.

Mary Jo: Or you find ways to take the C and make it into something that looks like an A. Which is what I think he is trying to do. He is saying hey we’re a software company but we are going to sell hardware devices to help us sell more software. That’s kind of the spin on this.

Paul: Well you will recall from when he became CEO that the very first thing that he did was send out this letter where the word software suddenly appeared everywhere and this is a word we hadn’t heard at Microsoft in a year and half or so. So I remember at the time we thought that was quite notable.

Leo: If you could pick one light motif to his reign as CEO it would be software. This keeps coming up. His first all hands he said basically the same thing.

Paul: Bill Gates who is also part of this little chat is the author of the notion of magic of software. Bill Gates loved obviously. It is perhaps notable and not coincidental that Bill Gates is a close confidant of his and they’re working together and maybe that has something to do with the software focus? Maybe that was Gate’s influence?

Leo: Well for a software company I guess he has decided not to sell Xbox. So there is still some hardware in there.

Mary Jo: That was good.

Leo: Or Bing. That was the Elop plan.

Mary Jo: You know what the Xbox comment was good because we talked about it on one of our episodes where Gate’s kind of gave this comment, I think it was on CNBC or FOX, that made it sound like that maybe that was in play, it was a little iffy. So he just said outright, we have no intent to do anything different on Xbox than what we are doing today. Boom, that’s it.

Paul: Right, no questions.

Leo: Did he say anything about buying the Clippers, that’s what people want to know.

Paul: No that’s the other CEO, Leo.

Mary Jo: Wrong CEO.

Leo: That was a weird story by the way.

Paul: It would surprise me if they would go off on that tangent.

Leo: The Balmer would buy a team?

Paul: Right and bringing them to Seattle because Seattle doesn’t have a basketball team anymore and let’s face it L.A. doesn’t exactly need 2.

Leo: Well that’s the first thing Paul Allen did when he found out he wasn’t dying of Hodgkin's disease he bought the Trailblazers and the Seahawks. If you’ve got the money, owning a team is kind of the thing.

Paul: Sure.

Mary Jo: Plus he is really into basketball and he is retired now quote on quote.

Leo: He’s tall. So he can hang out with players.

Mary Jo: He is tall.

Paul: Well once you own your own island and a boat that is as big as an island. I think a sports team is probably right there.

Leo: Plus he won’t have a hard time memorizing what kinds of shoes they are wearing which is always handy. Simplifies that. No plans to sell Bing. That’s not surprising because Bing is like internet explorer it’s tightly woven into the fabric of everything that Microsoft is doing. You don’t get rid of Bing.

Mary Jo: I think the actual question bases on some of the Live blogs was, would you sell Bing to Yahoo? He said no to that.

Leo: He didn’t say Bing’s not for sale at any price but he said I am not giving it to Marissa.

Mary Jo: He kind of implied like you just said it is just said it is deep in the fabric.

Leo: Well that would be the natural.

Paul: I think he was trying to remind people that Bing is not bing.com the search engine, Bing is this set of technologies that is like you said is part of the fabric of Microsoft.

Leo: No one knows that better than he does, he ran that division.

Mary Jo: That’s right.

Paul: Sure.

Leo: Or at least no one feels that more strongly.

Paul: We don’t like to highlight that part of his resume but yes he was.

Leo: He was, Sir Bingle they called him when he came. Did he say anything about killing the Surface Mini? Did he talk about that at all. Because that’s the rumor, right that he at the last minute said we’re not doing it.

Mary Jo: I wanted that to be a question from the audience but no one asked that.

Leo: Or whence Windows RT because that maybe why he would kill the Mini. Nobody asked that, Walt, Kara, the audience, nobody? Maybe that was off limits.

Paul: I don’t think he would go into it like that. I just don’t think it was something that occurred to anybody.

Leo: That’s the inside baseball stuff that we pay a lot of attention too. Maybe they don’t. That’s why you listen to this show folks because you care.

Paul: You know he made some interesting comments with regards to Bing, he compared the marketing on Bing to the marketing of the IPhone. He said you know, it is the same marketing. He didn’t say this but no one is asking Apple to sell that business off. The other one he mentioned with regards to Surface he said you know Windows and Windows server both got off to slow starts too. I don’t think anyone believes that Surface will be a Windows size business for Microsoft per se nor that Bing is a s successful as the IPhone. But those are both interesting points.

Leo: Bing is the IPhone of search? I don’t know if that flies.

Paul: They should call it IBing.

Leo: Bing is the Enterprise Rent a Car of search. How about that?

Paul: It’s more like Thrifty or one of those that’s not

Mary Jo: Who has we try harder as their slogan.

Leo: Wasn’t it Avis who had We are number 2 so we try harder. It was like Avis. Office on IPad. He talked a little bit about the fact that IPad came first.

Paul: This one I thought he was a little evasive on. I think we have an understanding that the IPad version was in development earlier and we know that Microsoft has or had anyway far more people working on IOS than they did on Android, that their Android ramp up has been much slower. But at the end of the day I think you’re going to see some parody there. He basically said that the IPad had the most share and that is why they did that but I am actually not completely on board with that being the only reason. I just think they had many more people and much more time than they did on the other versions.

Leo: What he says or what he misrepresents tells you as much as what he said. What he pervarbates about.

Paul: Sure. He reiterated this defense where there is no reason to hold back on Office for IPad just because Touch First Office isn’t done.

Leo: He should just say it’s done.

Paul: Yeah it’s done. You can look at it and you can realize it’s a really high quality set of apps. This is nice why would you not want to hold onto something like that.

Leo: Why didn’t he say that? Why did he kind pat Apple, I mean Microsoft makes a tablet too, why didn’t he pat Apple on the back. Maybe he is trying to get in good with those guys?

Paul: Well I guess we could bring it back to the original comment which is Microsoft makes software and the IPad is a popular platform that software is done in. This is software.

Mary Jo: He didn’t actually say the word cross platform software but more and more since he has been CEO for the past 100 days you can see the word cross platform is kind of just there. Everything they are doing, Android, IPhone, IPad. A lot of times Windows and Windows phone comes after these platforms. So it is a very different kind of feel about what the priorities are.

Paul: Yeah because 5 years ago and then dating back 20 years you could have said Microsoft equals Windows. Those 2 things were very much tied together. But I think it is a more agnostic view or at least heterogeneous view of the world these days.

Leo: All right how about Bill Gates? What about that Bill Gates?

Mary Jo: Kara kept asking him, I think she asked 2 or 3 times, based on the live blogs, how many times do you have lunch with Bill Gates?

Paul: She really just cuts to the heart of the matter. In a way that we all respect.

Mary Jo: He just avoided it completely.

Paul: When you have lunch what do you eat?

Mary Jo: Yeah. Are you a vegan?

Leo: If you were a tree, if you were a sandwich.

Paul: Gate’s is kind of like a vegetable sandwich kind of guy.

Leo: What kind of sandwich would you be?

Mary Jo: The one thing he did say though which I thought was great was, again very direct, I run this company and Bill is an advisor and a founder and I have a lot of respect for him but I am in charge.

Leo: The buck stops here.

Mary Jo: That’s it, yeah. That was good that he said that because a lot of people have been writing stories and planting rumors that Bill Gates is really back to run the company because they didn’t have confidence in Nadella. I think there is nothing further from the truth on that.

Paul: Yeah that’s crazy and by the way Mark Penn was at the event the other day, Bill Gate’s wasn’t at the event. There’s been no public indication that, that is anywhere close to the truth at all, ever.

Leo: His answer was that Bill is working on Office.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: He is probably back to his old tablet PC thing, he is going to make this work.

Mary Jo: I heard from a couple people I know that he had been, Gates this is, he is very involved in what Microsoft is doing around Oslo. Which is kind of the next generation social client which is going to be integrated with Office 365. I think he has actually sat in on design meetings on that and I am sure on other things with Office as well.

Leo: Really?! Is it based on Yammer? What is Oslo?

Mary Jo: Well we will talk about Oslo later in the show.

Leo: Let’s save that, okay.

Mary Jo: We’ll save it. So he is definitely involved. Is he spending 30% of his time back at Microsoft as he said he would make available. I have no idea. But I think it is kind of disingenuous for people to say Gates is running the show and telling Nadella what to do. I don’t think that’s happening.

Leo: Do you count the amount of time eating lunch as part of the 30%?

Mary Jo: Exactly. That is key!

Leo: Now we know. He used the word reinvent when it comes to Office. What does that mean? Reinvent Office.

Paul: We don’t really know. Oslo might be part of it right. This notion of Office Services things that work across all of Office. It is fair to say on both the Client where you have an Office 365 subscription and you get all apps. You don’t have a lot of Office Suite versions, necessarily. On the Service side as well we have Office 365 and where businesses will get all of the servers or what used to be servers. Meeting exchange, Sharepoint, Lync, and not just some subset of them. That they could start to think about Office internally a little differently than they did before. Not as separate little solutions where they build features on top of one thing but as a set of things that they can build on top of because now they know everyone has everything.

Leo: Office as a service.

Paul: That is a different world view.

Leo: That is intriguing.

Paul: I don’t know if that is Office Reinvented per se but that might be part of it.

Leo: That is kind of intriguing.

Mary Jo: Then there are some new apps coming into the Office Suite we think. Things like the Office Reader and that app that we just talked about recently called Remix. Which is now called Office Mix which is the digital storytelling app. That lets you record video presentations and annotate them. So I think they are really rethinking what people want to do from a productivity standpoint with Office and not just say it is only Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote.

Leo: What do people want to do?

Paul: Well in the old days you would go to an Office Launch event and Microsoft would have a very convoluted invented story about some Office scenario where Bob need to make a flyer. As you kind of step through the whole process he would in turn use every single application in the Suite. At the time they were just trying to show you how these things all worked together and it was all very nice and everything. Again I think how things have changed is now everyone does get everything. So in the past you might have said I am not getting publisher because I don’t pay for the really expensive version of Suite I’ve got the home version or whatever. Now things have changed. We will see, when you think about stand-alone applications the last successful it’s really only been semi successful, new Office applications probably is Onenote. The apps they’ve introduced since like Infopath have not really gone anywhere. That may be the era of the stand-alone Office app is coming to a close and we need to start integrating these things in a fashion that is more sophisticated than olay or dde or whatever we used to in the past. Now we can start thinking of these things in a more combined sense. I don’t know I am just kind of babbling, speculating.

Leo: But I can see Bill Gates wanting this. He might say I am going to work on this because I am interested in this.

Paul: This is a Gates thing. That makes sense.

Leo: Yeah that does make sense. Skype, they did show a new feature in Skype which is kind of cool. Translation.

Mary Jo: Yeah that was cool. They are calling it the Skype Translator app. They say it is going to be available in limited beta form before the end of the year. So they did a demo of it, they showed someone who was speaking in English talking to someone who was talking back in German in real time and it had the video. They were translating on the fly. This is something they have been working on for a long time. I would say years literally. I think they said in their own blog post we have been working on this over a decade. They’ve had bits and pieces, like Bing Translator that they had before. Then they had something called Skype Translate which let you do I.M. translation on the fly. I think it was 2 years ago they showed a video of Rick Rashad who was running Microsoft research speaking through a simultaneous translation capability that was in research at the time. Where he was being translated in real time into Chinese. They have been kind of getting there bit by bit.

Leo: Wow. That is amazing actually. So it is audio?

Mary Jo: It is pretty cool. Audio, Video.

Paul: Yeah you just speak and it happens. They should call this Skype Babble.

Leo: It’s simultaneous translation. Wow!

Paul: Yeah like real time.

Leo: Are there videos out of this?

Mary Jo: There is a video clip of that on the Recode site.

Leo: That is pretty impressive.

Mary Jo: It is. It’s cool. I wonder how limited the limited beta will be and how many languages will be supported. They tried to get Nadella to tell a few more details and he said I don’t even know how we are going to price it or package it. We’re going to figure it out.

Leo: That is kind of a Microsoft research project, right?

Paul: They may have figured out a way to get people to pay for Skype.

Mary Jo: Skype Premium, right?

Leo: I want to watch a little bit of this here.

Video Playing

Leo: Oh we’ve got an ad.

Paul: Hopefully it is for Captain Obvious. It’s a Microsoft ad at least.

Leo: Well I am on the technet site, so that kind of makes sense.

Video Playing

Leo: He seems very personable.

Mary Jo: Yeah. I would say he is.

Leo: He seems friendly and nice. Smart. I like his presentation, I think he is engaging and smart.

Paul: He seems like the real deal.

Leo: Genuine. He’s a geek which I like. Huh, what how can that be?

Paul: That’s the magic of software, Leo, don’t question it.

Leo: Did he just say we don’t know why this works.

Paul: We are a little freaked by it.

Leo: Do you think now in watching this, one thing Nadella brings to Microsoft a feeling that’s a global company. He is obviously East Indian. Now a days if you’re not you’re missing the boat. You need to be a global company.

Paul: This may not be obvious to people who don’t live near Microsoft and I don’t know about Silicon Valley I assume it is the same down there but when you go to that area of that country there are all kinds of Indian people, Oriental people. It is a very diverse area because they’re all the smart people from around the world come there to work.

Leo: Right, come there.

Paul: Microsoft is a very diverse company. The problem is the leadership has always been what I always describe as the middle age white guy club. A lot of people that Mary Jo and I have dealt with over the years have been that kind of crowd. A lot of the engineers, researchers and the really smart people coming up with new stuff are necessarily the Microsoft from 1985.

Leo: So he’s brought on a research engineer. There is a lot of talking. I thought they might jump to this a lot quicker. So he is going to talk to a German colleague. I know what words Kara knows. Poor Sayta is being pushed out by the arms folded guys. So this is a Skype call on a Dell, I might add. The voice is good. It is obviously kindergarten English.

Paul: Gee that is quite a remoting there.

Leo: Ah he is talking at a pretty rapid clip here. It got one of the words wrong in the English transcription. That is impressive. This isn’t canned, this is real.

Paul: Yeah this is real.

Mary Jo: Supposedly.

Leo: I am looking at the bottom of the screen they show the English translation and then the German. I don’t speak German.

Paul: The only German I know is from Castle Wolfenstein.

Mary Jo: By the way we should point out the person doing the demo Gurdip Singh Paul who runs Skype. He’s the corporate VP of Skype.

Leo: I like him because we need him. Gurdip I am on your team, dude. That was actually really cool. Imagine us using that to have international guests on our shows who don’t speak English. That might be remarkable.

Mary Jo: Yeah, that would be cool

Paul: The hope is with people in Europe we can communicate with them in real time which is amazing.

Leo: Some in the Chatroom speak German and some say there are grammar errors and stuff. But you know what you would expect that if you do translation of any kind. But the point is, can it be understood, not is it perfect.

Paul: Well you’ve had a conversation with someone who has English as a second language. If they are from Europe they will often tell you they don’t speak very good English. Then they proceed to speak very good English. They’ll get those things wrong but you understand exactly what they are saying it’s fine.

Leo: I think this is kind of miraculous, don’t you?

Mary Jo: It is a cool demo, I mean the question is going to be how does it work when it’s actually in production.

Leo: Did they say anything about that? Did they say when we are going to see it?

Mary Jo:They said before the end of the year it will be in limited beta, that’s all.

Leo: That is pretty cool. Of course that means Google is going to rush them out too. Because Google translater already does that right? I wouldn’t be surprised to see exactly the same demo. Come to think of it.

Chatroom says some of the word order is mixed up. That’s not unusual. German has a different word order, adjectives and nouns in different positions and so forth. That’s cool. That’s mighty impressive. Now there is one thing I saw and this is I think the biggest headline from this. I kind of glommed onto this because I’ve been saying this for a few weeks now. He said we are in a post PC world.

Paul: If you have been saying that then please explain it.

Leo: Well a post PC world implies that people are moving to tablets and mobile devices and using the PC only for heavy lifting. The truck, which Steve Jobs said at the All things D conference some years ago. I have to think that, you see this in sales figures, we’re kind of in a world now where the mobile phone does 80 or 90% of all the computing people do. I think that number is going to increase. It’s not that people won’t have tablets or computers but I think it is one of the reasons that the sales of the IPad for instance were poor this quarter. I think maybe the mobile is turning out to be so powerful and so effective in the larger screens like the 1520. Meaning that it is your computer of choice. Is that what you think that he meant? No probably not, that’s what I meant.

Mary Jo: I do.

Paul: I find myself a little confused by this.

Leo: Well it’s a weird thing for Microsoft to say. Given that they are selling PC’s and a PC operating system.

Paul: Well if you buy into the notion of a post PC world you are by definition buying to a world in which Microsoft has just failed. I think Microsoft at the time tried to call this the PC plus era. Because it wasn’t that other devices were taking over for PC’s but there were other devices in addition to PC’s. The post post PC era is don’t worry we’ve gotten by the recession. We’re back to another world where Microsoft can be successful again or something. I am not positive what it means.

Mary Jo: Last night after he gave his remarks at the conference, he then went on to do what Mark Anderson does. He did a whole series of numbered tweets.

Leo: Really, wow.

Mary Jo: He did. He did 1-7.

Paul: Wait who did this?

Mary Jo: Satya did.

Paul: Really?!

Mary Jo: He did, go back and look at Twitter. It was late our time, it was like 2 a.m. Eastern.

Paul: This is cool.

Mary Jo: He kind of explained what he meant there. Because he talked about personal computing being more personal. I think if he had explained it that way, that the definition of personal computing is being expanded upon. That people might have understood what he meant better. Instead of saying post post PC. Which people were kind of like, what? What is that?

Paul: It’s like is he stuttering? What does this mean?

Mary Jo: He talked about people centered data fueled balanced monetization. Meaning one way of getting revenue doesn’t fit all. The whole idea of data fueling personal experiences. Making the personal computing experience more human. I think that’s what he was trying to get at but never really got to explain.

Leo: People centered, data fueled balanced monetization more human.

Paul: It seems like those last 2 are mutually exclusive.

Leo: He said one business model doesn’t fit all this is balanced monetization. Balance is achieved by putting people at the center. Then he explains apps, powers experience across devices. This sounds like the Office strategy. Will not be bound to one app on one device in one place. More human, technology is at a point where it starts to understand us becomes more personable, see Skype translator. All great achievements require time. These are coming in out of order for me for some reason. Data is our most precious natural resource, really?

Paul: It’s not the children?

Leo: I thought it was the children. But anyway. Our task is to refine data into fuel for more personal experiences. See if you say our task is to refine children into fuel for more personal experiences it doesn’t make sense.

Paul: The problem is they are fracking it.

Leo: Yeah so I got this kind of out of order. I agree with Satya’s highlight of the day was the Skype translator demo. He liked it too. I hope he Tweets more, this is great.

Mary Jo: Yeah he has been tweeting more which is really great to see.

Leo: Yeah I followed him as soon as he created that account. Which was right after he was named CEO.

Mary Jo: Ballmer didn’t tweet very much, the real Steve Ballmer.

Leo: He has 72 tweets, he is followed by 200,000. Don’t be depressed Satya, you’ll catch up.

Paul: It’s possible some people don’t know who you are.

Leo: It’s possible. He is following 33 people. Including Clippy and Tim Cook. Look who he is following, this is kind of interesting. Tim Cook, Julia White who did that wonderful demo of IPad Office. Clippy, he follows Build, Azure, Arus Debru, Chris Dixon, Bill Gates, Matt Crotz that’s Google. Marissa Meyer he follows.

Paul: It’s like a virtual country club over here.

Leo: He likes MIA that must be his music. Mike Errington for the laughs. Chris Saka the angel not a literal angel he is an investor. Danny Sullivan stocktwits. I am not crazy about that but Howard Linz is happy. I just don’t like the name. Search engine land, Bing, Mark Cuban, Peior Armedor, Chris Anderson of Ted. Henry Blodget, Tim O'reilly. This is a good list. Malcolm Gladwell Omalick, Walt Mossberg he just added him. Kara is not on this list by the way.

Paul: She probably doesn’t know what Twitter is.

Leo: Yeah I don’t know. I love it that he is following Clippy. Do you think he got a memo?

Paul: You never know what you’re going to find out.

Leo: Hey Satya, hey would you mind.

Paul: I hear you’re working on Office again big guy.

Leo: Actually I think Clippy is Satya. Satya has been Clippy since the beginning and he thought well I will just keep doing it. This is kind of telling, Clippy only has 1,000 followers. I am going to follow you Clippy. You know what Clippy’s tag line is, It looks like you’re writing a tweet would you like some help?

Paul: That’s awesome.

Leo: I am sorry I didn’t mean to derail you on that one. Let’s take a break, we are going to move on but that was our look at what Satya Nadella said. We should have a new feature Satya says. Today on Satya Says.

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Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley is it fair to say I feel it is, that Office 365 is a hit.

Mary Jo: Yes it is.

Paul: What is it 2.5 billion dollar business or something like that.

Leo: Wow!

Mary Jo: Plus 3.5 home and consumer subscribers. That’s not even for the business version. Fastest growing product of Microsoft ever.

Leo: What?! Really, wow I didn’t realize it was that big. It is a hit no question about it. So that means Microsoft.

Paul: It turns out that people have to work.

Leo: Well its not just that, they like the stuff. In acceptance of the subscription model is the key I think from Microsoft’s point of view. Because you know they’ve always wanted to do this. Does this mean now Windows 365?

Paul: Obviously it should be yes.

Mary Jo: Surprisingly Leo, no.

Leo: No?!

Mary Jo: You know what Paul and I have speculated this on Windows Weekly so many times. We’ve been like they must be going to do this, this must be happening.

Leo: They made no secret that they wanted to do this and certainly they do it in enterprise, right? They have subscription models.

Mary Jo: They do. In the enterprise they have volume licensing agreements like the Enterprise agreement and that’s how people quote subscribe to Windows. But we were speculating they might do something similar like a Windows 365 where if you bought a version of Windows you would automatically be subscribed to updates. I’ve been asking my sources because recently there was a list put out by somebody whose name is Fakie on Twitter.

Paul: Fakey Mcfakster.

Mary Jo: Fakey Mcfakster yeah. But he actually supposedly is a microsoft employee or somehow in with Microsoft and he put out this thing saying there is this thing called Windows 365 in the works and it was being built. So I started asking around and my sources say nope not true.

Leo: Hmmm interesting.

Mary Jo: So why aren’t they doing it? First off, Paul and I were talking about this today. First off how do consumers get new versions of Windows? They get them preloaded on PC’s.

Leo: That’s always been the thing that made Windows the thing.

Mary Jo: That’s always been the thing.

Leo: You don’t upgrade Windows you buy a new computer.

Mary Jo: Yeah. If you have a Windows update, going from Windows 8 to 8.1 to Windows 8.1 update. Microsoft can push it to you through Windows update or the store or whatever. It might not be the smoothest path but there’s a path. So what would Microsoft get if they tried to force consumers to subscribe to Windows. I think they would not have a success. I think they’d have a failure. I think they also believe this is not viable. Well you don’t have to make it either or. Can’t you say that’s an option?

Mary Jo: Maybe?

Leo: We’re going to give the volume licensing kind of thing to individuals too.

Paul: You know what there’s a lot that goes into this. In addition obviously there is a small subset of the community that would like this. Enthusiasts and people who want to have multiple copies of Windows.

Leo: People bought Technet for that reason and SBN.

Paul: I was just going to say that, exactly right. The people who bought Technet personal, the individual subscription would love this. They are a very small tiny audience comparatively speaking to the big Windows group 1 to 1.5 billion users. You’ve got to remember though that Microsoft has significantly changed the way it licenses Windows. Windows is now available to PC makers for free if the device is inexpensive under 250 dollars and has a smaller screen size. And it’s available for less, we don’t know how much less but for less for PC makers on other devices. In that sense the value of Windows as the stand alone thing has declined greatly. The actual value of Windows to an individual has thus gone down as well. You’re going to buy a device and you’re going to get Windows on it. They want to move Windows to more of a device scheme, it’s not like a PC where you are going to be upgrading and upgrading and upgrading and you keep using the same hardware. They want you to buy a device. When that device is done or you want to go to the next version. What they want you to do is to buy the next device.

Leo: And they’ll make plenty of money that way.

Paul: I think they world has changed. So it’s not just one thing it’s a bunch of things.

Mary Jo: Not only that, it’s that trying to encourage people to buy more devices and retire their devices earlier. But also the way they think they can offset this revenue loss from licensing Windows is through all the other services they have. So Xbox Live, Office 365, Xbox Music, Pass, they’re thinking you know what maybe people won’t pay us X amount for a new version of Windows but what if we can get them to subscribe to these services One Drive. Everything that is connected to the Cloud. I think that’s the new way they’re thinking about monetization instead of trying to turn something that’s actually a platform like Windows into a service. I think they are thinking that’s not the right model in this case.

Paul: Hopefully.

Mary Jo: It’s back to one of Nadella’s tweets, he said the same business model doesn’t work everywhere. I wonder if he wasn’t thinking about this when he said that.

Paul: The free versions of Windows are the very inexpensive versions of Windows which we’ll talk about this somewhere in here. I think? Don’t we have this in here? They are going to come with some stipulations. Hopefully it won’t be as ugly as here our banner ads on the desktop or the start screen or whatever. But it’s fair to say they are looking at everything. You know in monetizing Windows. It may get to the point where you owning a Windows license doesn’t make any sense. This is just something that you get. You just have it, you have the device. You don’t think about an IOS license when you have an IPhone or an IPad. You know it just comes with it and you get so many upgrades or whatever. They’re free. There is no value to the OS, no one ever thinks I am selling my IPhone I want to put that OS on a different IPhone or something. That’s not that world. Microsoft wants the PC world to be like that. I think this is playing into that as well.

Mary Jo: A couple people have mentioned Windows Intune saying that is a Windows subscription service. It is but that is really a subscription service for businesses again. It’s not something your average home user is going to say hey I need a Windows Intune subscription to download Windows Professional.

Paul: Although I do think about doing that.

Mary Jo: Do you?

Paul: But it’s too expensive.

Mary Jo: You’re a special case though.

Paul: I am special, yeah.

Leo: I just bought Windows 8.1 full for 200 bucks so I could install it on my Mac. I probably should have gotten the upgrade version but I thought I just want a full version. So it’s expensive.

Paul: It’s expensive, yeah.

Leo: But that’s why nobody buys it.

Paul: There is a fairly a specialized usage scenario.

Leo: Oh yeah, very much so.

Paul: For it to be expensive on something like that is.

Leo: It’s okay.

Paul: It is okay.

Mary Jo: The other thing we should say is, Paul and I said this to each other on I.M. today. Everything is in flux right now at Microsoft. Right now this is not the plan but maybe sometime this will be the plan. But for now it’s not the plan, it’s not something that’s going to show up next year when we threshold. It’s not instant. But it is still worth remembering, things can change.

Leo: I think people should look really to Satya Nadella’s Twitter background to understand what might be the long term plan is. As you can see.

Paul: If you just separate your brain.

Leo: I think that those tweets are background or something worth parsing. Here’s the devices.

Paul: If you look to the top right, to the left of the box it says developers. I believe that is the drop box symbol upside down, suggesting Microsoft intends to destroy drop box.

Leo: It’s dumping out the contents of the drop box. I believe you’re accurate there.

Paul: I think they’ve hacked into drop box.

Leo: What exactly is this?

Paul: That’s the virus.

Leo: This is a whimsical drawing Satya. I wonder if he did it? Or is this something he found on the conference room table after Bill left.

Paul: This is how he got his CEO job.

Leo: He said I have a plan.

Paul: He drew this picture and they were like I have no idea what he means he must be real smart.

Leo: Seriously I want this on my wall.

Paul: It’s good. I like the bug on the wire there.

Leo: There’s a bug and a little sign that says things people care about most and then a brain. Where did this come from I wonder.

Paul: I don’t know it’s funny.

Mary Jo: Probably an infographic somebody made somewhere.

Leo: This looks like one of those design thinking things, maybe somebody drew. That’s weird.

Paul: That’s good. I don’t know.

Leo: I think those tweets if not that drawing the tweets are the road map isn’t it? Kind of?

Mary Jo: Kind of, yep. In a very fluffy cloud like way.

Leo: It is fluffy. He calls it the more personal computing era. More personal computing.

Paul: They have names for everything now, don’t they? We are really busy labeling things.

Leo: Maybe this is his way of saying I didn’t mean post post PC I am sorry I said that.

Mary Jo: I think it is.

Leo: The most powerful OS in the world is still the human being. That’s what drives us to the most personal computer.

Paul: Oh, I should patent it.

Leo: That is the Dalai Lama talking there baby. That’s profound. I don’t know if it’s on your list, I don’t think it is. But I was curious, the story came out last week that Youtube was going to buy Twitch.tv for a billion dollars. I have to think this is something Microsoft.

Paul: I heard Microsoft was also interested in Twitch.

Leo: You’ve got to think that Microsoft must want Twitch. Now the deal hasn’t consummated, maybe because there is a bidding war going on. It makes perfect sense for Youtube too. To gain Twitch.tv, Mary Jo wouldn’t know this.

Mary Jo: I actually do surprisingly.

Leo: Twitch is a streaming video service kind of like ustream or justin.tv. In fact it is owned by justin.tv. But it’s streams primarily gameplay. People will sit in the corner and talk about their gameplay. This is the hottest category on youtube. It’s a surprisingly hot category.

Paul: See I think if you were going to record a game that I was playing the interesting part wouldn’t be the game it would be my reactions during the game.

Leo: That’s what Twitch is all about is you see the little guys sitting there going arrgghioohad, or joking around.

Paul: I have moments in this game where I would have paid big bucks to have heard the reaction of the guy on the other side of an interaction. You know he is going there, beep how did that happen.

Leo: So I just thought, you agree Paul this might interest.

Paul: This is going to be a natural consolidation of this kind of stuff. Something like Twitch is going to become part of something bigger. I have to be honest, it makes sense for Twitch not to be part of Microsoft. It would make more sense with Youtube.

Leo: Because they want to be cross platform.

Paul: Because Microsoft makes one of the gaming platforms and youtube, well Google sort of does I guess Android. But I don’t think a lot of people are recording Android games right now.

Leo: No but Twitch has integrated into both Xbox and Playstation.

Paul: I would rather see it be outside of those systems rather than be inside one of them.

Leo: Let’s take a break and come back because I want to get your reviews. As I said Paul reviewed the Surface Pro III on Before you Buy, highly recommend it. But we can kind of get both you and Mary Jo have now been using it for a week. Find out how you like it and what you think of it. Our show today brought to you by, we will do that in a second. Squarespace.com the great place to go to create your next website. Squarespace is the best damn hosting in the world tied with an amazing software platform on top of it. That’s what you use, your interface, to your blog, your portfolio, your ecommerce site, your business site. I am a big fan of squarespace. We used it for our inside TWIT blog. You know one of the things we’ve learned. The TWIT army can bring down any site except a Squarespace site. We’ve tried and tried and tried and we have never had any success in bringing a Squarespace site to its knees. That’s kind of great because it is the best hosting. Go to squarespace.com click the get started button. You choose from 25 gorgeous designs. You might say well 25, does that mean there are only 25 ways a site can look? No, in fact when you pick a design, as I have done here, you’ll see all the different sites, real user sites that use this template. As you can see they all look very different. That’s the beauty of Squarespace. Once you pick a template now you can get going and customize like crazy. You don’t have to be a geek, you don’t have to know CSS or HTML or Javascript. If you do they have a developer platform that’s second to none. But you also can just point and click your way to an incredible site. That’s what most of these people have done. They add their social media integration as widget. This guy I guess is a painter. Painters love Squarespace, because look at this, this is basically a portfolio for this guy. Oh he does type too, look at that. This is awesome, oh he is a sign painter. I love this, what a great site. You can see how Squarespace has done right by him. Now the beauty of this, I am looking at this on a big screen but if you put this on a IPhone or a Windows phone it’s going to look great. Because all Squarespace sites are mobile responsive. The price is right. 8 bucks a month when you buy the annual plan. That’s the basic price, 8 bucks a month. That includes a domain name absolutely free with the annual purchase. If you want ecommerce, 24 bucks will give you everything. Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited pages, galleries, blogs, unlimited contributors, fully integrated e commerce including real time shipping information, label printing. An integrated inventory accounting from zero. This is fabulous. squarespace.com try it. It costs you nothing for 2 weeks you don’t even give them a credit card just click the get started button. You can import all your content, they have importers for all the basic API’s. Once you try it, if you decide to buy all I ask is you use the offer code windows. You’ll want to you’ll get 10% your subscription. That’s why going on for a year or two it really pays off. 10% off at squarespace.com. Congratulations to our friends at Squarespace, 4 Webby awards, I think for their apps. They have incredible IOS apps.

Paul: If you don’t mind me pointing this out, I can’t stand when you do Squarespace ads.

Leo: I know because you have to suffer.

Paul: It’s always like some gorgeous website, interactive, colorful.

Leo: I know, Paul think of it this way the Supersite for Windows is about content. Content forward that’s it. It’s all about the content. I could talk to Fenton Media, we could set them up, we could set you up and get you a deal at Squarespace.

Paul: I would like change.

Leo: You suffered with bad CMS but didn’t they improve it. Didn’t you get a new one?

Paul: Yeah well this is like almost 2 years ago. It’s still kind of stale.

Leo: I tell you we looked at it. Our site is based on Drupal which is I think is a great CMS.

Paul: Ours is too.

Leo: But we got a quote 450,000 dollars to redo the site.

Paul: Yikes.

Leo: I don’t have, sure let me get my checkbook. Almost a half a million dollars. I feel for people, because the problem is, look our site is only 2 years old. But the web moves faster than anybody can afford to keep up.

Paul: It does.

Leo: That’s why Squarespace is a good deal for a lot of people.

Paul: I might say Rend is fantastic and that’s game 3.

Leo: But you and I probably can’t use Squarespace. So the Drupal, I don’t know about you guys but it’s our whole workflow back end. So it is more than just the public presentation. The software is doing a whole bunch of other stuff as well.

Paul: I am not sure it’s doing anything for us but I don’t know.

Leo: Someday we’ve got to do a show about this because what’s happening is web standards are moving much much and people’s expectations are moving much much faster than anybody than the largest media company can keep up with.

Paul: Yeah right, that is an issue. It gets more and more professional, more and more high end. More and more video related.

Leo: See that’s what we want. Obviously we want a site that highlights the video and it’s expensive to do it that way. Alright, Surface Pro III. Who wants to start? Let’s start with Mary Jo, ladies first.

Paul: Mary Jo should go.

Leo: So how has it been for you?

Mary Jo: I’ve been liking the device quite a bit. People have asked me very often on Twitter, so you just bought an Acer Aspire S7, you paid a lot money for an Ultrabook. Are you sad or mad that you didn’t wait for this? My answer is no. I still prefer the Acer because of how I work. I am sure people who aren’t journalist are sick of hearing this but I put my PC on my lap a lot and this Surface does not work that way for me. It falls off the edge of my knees.

Leo: It is supposed to, that’s the irony of it. Acer never made that claim but Panos Panay did.

Mary Jo: I think this keyboard on the new Surface Pro III is excellent. I think they made a lot of great improvements to it. Stabilized it made it easier to type on but there is nothing like a dedicated keyboard attached in a clamshell device. I type all day so the keyboard matters a lot to me. I know not everybody has that requirement. In fact most information workers don’t. They don’t set there and type for 10 hours a day. But if you do it’s a lot easier to type on the real keyboard than on this keyboard.

Leo: Now the S7 keyboard is not the greatest keyboard in the world.

Mary Jo: I switch out back and forth. When I’m doing the show here I’m my Dell OptiPlex Windows 7 big screen device but sometimes when I just want to switch out and go to a different part of my little mini office here I’ll set up my Ultrabook on the counter and work there just for a change of scenery. A few feel can make a big difference.

Leo: And by the way that’s all you have room for in your office.

Mary Jo: It is, I’m not kidding when I say that. The thing that I’ve been surprised that I like the most about this device and I haven’t told Paul this yet but I love the pen.

Leo: Usually with OneNote is that the chief way you use it or?

Mary Jo: I’m trying to learn OneNote and I know I’m going to be ridiculed by all the OneNote fanatics out there saying you don’t need to learn it, you just start typing.

Leo: It’s intuitive.

Mary Jo: It’s not. It’s not intuitive at all.

Leo: It’s not, I’m completely with you.

Mary Jo: They need a really good tutorial and I’ve been looking for one on how to use OneNote and learn it in like an hour. I haven’t found one yet and it anybody knows of one let me know.

Leo: Chat room come up with something, we’re looking... I feel like the Service Pro 3 is an OneNote machine.

Mary Jo: It is and that’s why I want to learn it and I think if I ever can master OneNote I’m going to maybe trade Note Pad in one day for it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The reason I like the pen is I’m using it like a mouse. I’m using it as a pointing device and selecting with it and tapping with it to open things. This actually might make me give up attaching a mouse to everything because I’m using the pen in the way that I use a mouse currently. So that’s kind of a revelation for me because I wasn’t expecting to use it that way.

Leo: Alex Gumble says and we will set you up with this if you want that Lynda.com has courses on OneNote.

Mary Jo: I don’t want to spend a lot of time learning it but I just want to be able to use it because I think it has a lot of features I would benefit from.

Leo: I think the OneNote 2013 essential training. By the way I will set you up with this if you want because they are our sponsor. There are a lot of chapters, I don’t know what the total length is but it looks like it’s maybe no more than a couple hours for the whole thing.

Mary Jo: I would invest a couple hours because I’ve tried to just mess around with OneNote and I’m very unhappy with my results. I would like to learn it.

Leo: I want to take it with you because I want to take it too and in fact I think I would buy a Surface Pro 3 if I felt like – this is my power tool. It’s kind of meant for that.

Paul: It’s not an device that you can hammer a nail with Leo.

Leo: Oh.

Mary Jo: You can drop it though.

Leo: Is yours thinner or thicker?

Mary Jo: It is somewhat thicker because it has gorilla glass applied to the outside. It’s not a ton heavier.

Leo: It seems like it’s almost the same size as your other…

Mary Jo: Yes, It’s a 13 inch screen instead of a 12. Microsoft talks about the screen on this and says the things they’ve done to make it feel like it’s bigger than 12 – I actually think I can see more information in some apps with this.

Leo: I think the 32 is really a good aspect ratio.

Mary Jo: Yes it’s weird.

Paul: There’s definitely something about the scaling where there is more information and because the resolution is high the text is very crisp though normally I might be bothered by the smallness of it but actually it’s very readable.

Mary Jo: It is. One weird problem I’ve had and I think Paul said this too – although Microsoft knows about this problem and they say they’re going to issue an update to fix it is: even though the new power connecter connects really quick and much better and more securely than the other one there is something happening with power on these early devices where it looks like it’s charging but it’s not really charging and even if it does charge – I just looked at my device and I just charged it up and it has the wrong date and the wrong clock time on it now. So they know there’s some weird bug with that but they say they’re going to issue an update before they make these generally available on the market – they do know that. I like it but…

Leo: For you the Acer is a better choice.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: That makes sense. Paul…

Paul: Like I said I like it a lot but I need to travel with it because I don’t use this device at home as my primary work station although with the right…I’m going to test it with a pluggable unit that I have and when the Microsoft one comes in I’ll test it with those as well but I do use a desktop PC and big screen and all that kind of stuff. I’ll use the device around the house like Mary Jo sometimes I’ll move around a little bit and of course when I leave the house. This week I’m going to Colorado so I want to use it on a plane, I want to use it in the hotel room and in a remote place and see how it really works because I travel a lot for work and need something that I can type on that works accurately and reliably and that kind of stuff. So I can’t yet say whether or not I’m going to replace my current system but it’s certainly much more viable than the previous Surface Pro devices for me. I’ve always liked the bigger screen devices – 12 inches and stuff isn’t exactly a big screen in the context of a 15 inch ultra-book or whatever. As Mary Jo noted there’s something about the screen where the information is crisp and clear and a lot of it… I don’t know if laid out is the right term but it’s laid out nicely. There are apps I can look at side by side, I’ve got a 1080 screen here that’s really big and then a 2160 by 1440 which is relatively small and you can have the same app running on both of them and there is absolutely a difference in the presentation. It’s denser and crisper on the smaller screen which is kind of interesting. I do like that a lot. Overall I think this is a Surface Pro is the device that a lot of Pro customers – meaning IT pros, information workers, developers, creative professionals etcetera have been asking for. I think this is the device and it’s by definition some form of compromise, it’s not a perfect tablet, it’s not a perfect Ultrabook. It can’t be but I think they’ve struck the right balance for their kind of productivity oriented audience. I like it quite a bit.

Mary Jo: I’m just happy connected standby is working despite that power issue I mentioned because on my Surface…

Paul: Yes, it works every other time for me.

Mary Jo: It’s definitely holding a charge. I do not have to charge it every day like I did with my Surface RT even when I wasn’t using it. So it’s definitely holding a charge and letting me come back to it. The one thing they mentioned on the Reddit AMA about the Surface Pro 3 this week that I didn’t know was that it goes after 4 hours into hibernation mode and then it actually goes into sleep mode if you haven’t touched the device.

Paul: A deep sleep.

Mary Jo: I was wondering why I couldn’t wake the device up really quickly but it was after several hours and I was like wow why is it taking so long to start. That’s why. They are trying to conserve power. I’m willing to make that concession.

Paul: I love that it has any form of connected standby. The notion that you could be using it around the house like around an office and you have a meeting and 30 minutes goes by and then you just open the lid and it comes right on. Like an iPad would. It’s fantastic. It’s good behavior from a power vantage standpoint.

Leo: Alright so both of you love it but it’s not necessarily the right tool for every use.

Paul: I’m a little dismayed at how quickly people have pumped out reviews of these things.

Leo: You need to use it for a few weeks.

Paul: A few people have written reviews 2 days later and no offense to you youngsters but I mean no one can buy this thing until June 20^th so there’s no rush. I feel like I’m on kind of a learning experience with this thing because every day I write something about it and I just try to figure it out. I don’t have all the answers yet, I just got it but so far so good.

Leo: Did you learn anything from Panos Panay’s “ask me anything” on Reddit?

Paul: Yes. We both did. I don’t know, I feel like there are some communication things going on with these guys that I don’t quite understand. For example the big bad one from the Reddit AMA was someone asked about Thunderbolt connectivity. Apparently the chip set that’s in the device should have a Thunderbolt connector on it so if there isn’t one where is it. There was this bizarre comment – take a close look at the power connector. The power connector if I understand what they mean is the slot on the device where the power cable connects together. When you make that connection and are powering that device. It doesn’t look like the slot on the old Surface devices. What it looks like is a full side SD card slot and I guess if you look inside there what you can see is that there are additional pins there beyond the ones on the fin of the power supply. We know that the docking station that’s coming out for this device will connect through that slot.

Leo: That makes a lot of sense.

Paul: We also know that the docking station doesn’t have Thunderbolt on it so what do they mean? I suppose somehow Thunderbolt could occur through that slot. Does that mean an adapter, does it mean… Nobody knows, they were so vague about it.

Mary Jo: I’m all about teasing new stuff but I think this might set some false expectations for some people.

Leo: Yes, don’t expect a user accessible Thunderbolt cord.

Mary Jo: We don’t know if they’re going to compete with Thunderbolt because they have some new better way of doing this. We don’t know, they didn’t clarify at all.

Leo: This was ineptly handled but what he may be saying is that that Thunderbolt connectivity that is on the system on a chip we’re using in the power connector is a data port for the dock for instance.

Paul: But when people ask about Thunderbolt what they’re really asking is I want to use a Thunderbolt peripheral, how does that work because right now it doesn’t. I think they are sometimes a little too coy and maybe this is something they’re not prepared to announce because in the future there could be some accessory that we don’t know about yet. That’s fine. I think this is a way to answer that that isn’t so…

Mary Jo: What they could have done when they get asked about – right at the time the AMA was happening there was a leak about a Surface branded dongle from Americast which would be Microsoft’s alternative to chrome cast basically. They get asked by a couple people on the AMA about that and they just didn’t even take the question. So that’s what you do – you just don’t take the question if you don’t want to answer it yet.

Leo: Yes you don’t have to take any questions.

Paul: Just skip it, it’s your choice. So that’s too bad. There are things that people want to know about this device which are understandable. There are 5 different models, 3 different processors, people want to know if there’s a difference in the battery life. They’ve been a little vague about that – what they’re saying is that there isn’t too much difference but they have the stats, why don’t they just throw them up and let people use that as they make decisions. They did provide good information about what screens and how many screen each one can drive, external screens and I thought that was answered well. They’re going to improve OneNote integration so if you want to launch the desktop version of OneNote instead of the mobile version using the button on the pen they’re going to add that functionality.

Mary Jo: They talked quite a bit about battery. They said if you charge your Surface Pro 3 battery daily meaning 5 days a week it’ll last more than 4.5 years and still have 80% capacity. So they’ve been doing a lot of with the battery to make this device last a long time. They said you can charge from 0-80 % in 2 hours with the battery they have included.

Paul: That’s not right.

Mary Jo: Have you tried that?

Paul: Even just as recently as last night I left it on for an hour – I’m running it down for battery test. I charged it for a little while and then brought it to the couch and I thought I should bring the power supply but I was really surprised that it was up to 50% just after an hour.

Leo: Apparently Josh Topolsky loves using it in bed so you might want to try that too.

Paul: Yes I do try to emulate him in every way possible. Did he mention shower use, Leo?

Leo: I don’t believe he showers. He’s a bath guy, he’s a tub guy.

Paul: There is this accessory that’s a surface tray for the bath that goes across the tub and you can just put it right in front of you.

Leo: I am mightily relieved that Windows 9 or whatever it going to be called will work on the Surface Pro.

Mary Jo: You know what’s really crazy is I’m really glad they answered that because I’ve seen so many people speculating, “Will it work?” because they’re going to make API level changes with threshold and people have been wondering if it’s going to work. They’ve said on the record – yes, your Surface Pro 3 will work.

Leo: Microsoft is the legacy company, it would be a shocker if the next version of Windows wouldn’t work with existing Windows hardware.

Paul: If they do Windows 9 right it will work optimally only on new hardware.

Leo: Right, much like Windows 8. Windows 8 works best on a touch screen.

Paul: Windows 9 will be designed for the post post PC world.

Leo: Post post post… Let’s see, what else? Panos on communication; be genuine, have fun and have products you believe in. Thank you very much Panos Panay.

Paul: Somebody wrote in and said that he loved Panos’s style of communication.

Leo: I thought he did good presenting the Surface Pro.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: You were there!

Paul: He has an interesting style, I mean he’s certainly a showman.

Mary Jo: He's a showman.

Leo: Yea I like that

Paul: He's a showman, he's great, yea.

Leo: Windows 8.1 with Bing the head line is not only mention this, not only sub nine inch screens, and sub $250 devices, but didn't they also say that Windows phone will be free?

Paul: This so, Mary Jo can step through this cause this is so convoluted we, I think we spent thirty minutes...

Leo: Parsing it (laughter)

Mary Jo: We did, we did (Chuckles)

Paul: On Skype the day this was announced parsing the language of this announcement because it is so vague.

Mary Jo: Right so Microsof... Ya know We've known about windows 8.1 with Bing for months

Leo: How is it different from windows 8.1?

Paul: It has Bing Leo. (Laughter)

Mary Jo: Your right it does. (Laughter)

Leo: Excuse me, excuse me they all have Bing!

Paul: I don't understand your confusion (laughter)

Leo: I'm confused! Is there a Windows 8.1 without Bing?

Mary Jo: Yes there is.

Leo: What?

Mary Jo: Sub OEM's preload a different search engine, perhaps Google, when they ship these PCs. So if you agree to take Windows 8.1 with Bing, it means you ship the device with Bing set as the default search engine.

Leo: And it can't be changed?

Mary Jo: It can be changed, it can.

Leo: Oh.

Paul: Just not by the PC maker.

Mary Jo: Right, yea, but you know a lot of normals, like regular users, don't know that they are supposed to or even can change it.

Leo: Don't, don't put that in the public title, you can call it that internally, but it confuses people in the real world who don't understand what the hell you are talking about.

Mary Jo: (laughter)

Paul: But think about it this way, of the normals, who are gonna buy the $200 tablet piece of junk that runs this thing, um this sounds like something that has more stuff in it, doesn't it? (Laughter)

Leo: Yes, now with Bing! (Laughter)

Paul: It's got Bing!

Leo: And the ads should always whenever they say Bing should have a little white tooth that goes ding! Now with more Bing. Ding!

Paul: You know the woman could smile and the tooth kinda, ya.

Leo: Ding! Ding!

(Laughter)

Leo: It’s not even locked in. It's not even that you can't change it. It's Just...

Mary Jo: If they did that you know what would happen right? Anti-trust issues....

Leo: You can't do it

Paul: You can't. But it’s fair to say that the product you have just described sounds ludicrous and couldn't possibly exist.

Mary Jo: But it does

(Laughter)

Paul: Right ! It just sounds silly.

Leo: Ok, so all they are saying is if you want to use windows free, you can't change the default search engine.

Paul: But it is not always free and this is the thing...

Mary Jo: It’s not and this is the crazy part...

Leo: Oh crap

Mary Jo: If you read Microsoft's post where they officially acknowledge this they talk about windows being free now on smaller devices, but they never actually say that windows 8.1 with Bing is free. It never says that. So what we think is it might be free, or it might be low cost, or it might vary in price, the SKU, based on how big the device is or who the OEM is. We don't know. And Microsoft has not said that the free SKU is windows 8.1 with Bing. Even though that is how people have reported it. That's not what they have said.

Paul: This is a vile for of double speak and and in fact Mary Jo and I were just talking about another version of this that was in a surface blog post where you start a sentence where you talk about, where they are comparing two things and then you end up at the bottom with some measurement that only applies to one of the two and what it sounds, the whole totality of it makes it sounds like you have made some giant comparison but you have not. So in this case what she just said is accurate. They didnt, they never in their announcement say that it is always free, that is sometimes free, that it is never free. They they talk about a free version of windows that is on certain things and then they talk about windows with Bing and it’s going to be on low cost devices and they never made the connection.

Leo: Well they have confused the hell out of Journalists cause I've seen many articles that say Free Windows with Bing.

Paul: Yep, and the belief is that sometimes it will be free, but I want to be clear like she said it doesn't actually say that.

Leo: The audience, the crowd is going wild.

(Laughter)

Leo: They are just leaping to their feet with excitement

Paul: By the way, what is that picture of Leo?

Leo: Uh, it is, it is windows 8.1 actually.

Paul: Well ok, yea well actually that's true. Well its windows 8.1 with Bing.

Leo: It is?

Paul: See cause it's Chandler Bing?

Leo: Oh it's Chan, Ohhhhhhhhh! See it went over my head. I get it and he's sleeping.

Paul: This is why I make the big bucks

(Laughter)

Leo: Did you create that?

Paul: I did

Leo: Oh you’re so funny.

Paul: In the actual photo he's holding a Lionel Richie album.

(Laughter)

Leo: Well he might be listening to Easy on his windows 8.1 with Bing

Paul: Yep

Leo: He's easy like a Sunday morning.

(Chuckles)

Mary Jo: We should tell people it doesnt look any different. If you get a PC with this on it you wont even know. Right?

Paul: Not in the slightest. Yep.

Leo: So why use the name?

Mary Jo: It;s for OEMs. It's an OEM SKU.

Paul: Its crazy it really is crazy. It's not like windows 8.1 starter addition it's windows 8 core it's just windows 8 core.

Mary Jo: Yea

Leo: Ok, I'm happy

Mary Jo: Now you know what it is, so that's good.

Leo: This is windows weekly, now with Bing!

(Laughter)

Paul: Windows weekly with Bing. It sounds like we just gave you more.

Leo: By the way Toshiba has just announced the first windows 8.1 device with Bing

Paul: You are just going to jump right on that bandwagon

Leo: Now with Bing!

Paul: So and by the way....

Leo: I think they really think that people will say, " Oh this has more!"

Paul: But, but This is interesting right because there are, there are, these are tablets. They are, I don't know if they are both mini tablets or if ones a full size tablet. I guess one is full size and one is mini. The mini tablet starts at $199 meaning it qualifies for a free version of windows.

Leo: Ahhh

Paul: They are selling it with windows 8.1 with Bing so it must be free on that device.

(Laughter)

Leo: Well....

Paul: Well actually we don't know that

Leo: We don't know either

Paul: But why would they put it on there if it wasn't free. If you could get another version for free wouldn't you use that first.

Leo: So maybe the idea is that Microsoft is hoping that people will put on the box with Bing. Its free advertising for Bing. And it makes it a positive. Hey now with more Bing.

Paul: Here's the weird thing. The second tablet is $269. So they don't get it for free.

Leo: That one, Is that with Bing?

Paul: Does it cost, does it cost more than $19 to get this product? Cause if it does sell it for $249!

Leo: Yea

Paul: Cause you would get it for free!

Leo: Free. But you would have to say with Bing.

Paul: You would have to say with Bing (laughs)

Mary Jo: I wonder if they do have to say that cause we dont know, you know? We know that they have to ship it with Bing as the default but we dont know if there are any other conditions

Leo: Ahhh see? See? I think you have to say windows 8.1 with Bing. And thats a promotional, thats a promotional thing.

Paul: You say it three times and Bing market share goes up one percent.

Mary Jo: It does!

Leo: Beetlejuice shows up! (Laughter) I think it’s like saying Intel inside You know Intel pays good money for that Intel inside sticker.

Paul and Mary both agree.

Leo: Of course Intel is Inside but with Bing....

Paul: Maybe there is a sticker on it with the Bing logo.

Leo: Now with Bing! Bingo!

Mary Jo: Or you get, but you get a reduced price if you agree to do more things.

Paul: Right

Mary Jo: You get a set price if you add the sticker maybe you get the sticker, I don't know.

Leo: Anybody have the machine, this machine with 8.1 with Bing? In the chat room?

Paul: Oh it’s not out yet.

Mary Jo: Nothing is out yet.

Paul: I mean we all have it really cause it is just windows 8.1.

Leo and Mary Jo: Right

Leo: No no, but thats the cynical point of view

(Laughter)

Paul: Ok (sarcastically)

(Laughter)

Leo: Of course well have it! We all know that but uh but it comes with Bing

(Laughter)

Paul: This is like an awesome conversation, you know its not windows 8.1 this has Bing

Leo: Bing!

Paul: No but it's the same thing, No it is windows 8.1 with Bing!

Leo: With Bing!

Paul: It's free but it gives me more!

Leo: See I think instead of Chandler Bing you should have had Bing Crosby with a pipe holding the surface

Paul: Oh Leo that is, that is....

Mary Jo: I like that.

Leo: I would have gotten that.

Paul: Now Im going to do that at some point.

Leo: Yea now you've got it. Now with Derbingle!

(Laughter)

Mary Jo: Maybe they can make that a screensaver or something.

Leo: (Impersonating Bing Crosby) "Hey look over there Nathaniel, its windows 8.1 with Bing! By god that's beautiful."

Paul: Oh man!

(Laughter)

Leo: They should have Matthew Perry do the ads though.

Paul: I agree! I agree.

Leo: There is an opportunity Microsoft.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Ummmm moving along, Microsoft to tweak its Office 365 feature rollout and foreclosure (Chuckles) disclosure processes

(Laughter)

Mary Jo: Foreclosure (Laughs)

Leo: Foreclosure processes, what are you talking about here?

Mary Jo: Ok this is actually awesome news and we dinged sometimes, me and Paul, for being cynics and Eeyors and down on Microsoft, but this is an item where it’s like, "Yay Microsoft, So glad you’re doing this!". So what they are doing is with office 365 is, going forward, they are going to be more transparent about what you are going to get and when you are going to get it, in terms of features. Believe it or not this is really going to happen. So, they are going to change the way they disclose features that are coming and we don't know what level of detail this will be thirty to ninety day out they are going to tell you about features you are going to get if you are an Office 365 business customer. Especially around Sharepoint and Exchange online. Then, as if that wasn't good enough, they are doing one more thing which they are initiating this thing called first release. First release is going to allow people who are administrators, select a subset of their users to get these features earlier than everybody else. So a minimum of two weeks before, you are going to be able to pick and choose which users are going to dog food this for you, to make sure that you are ready for it and that you want it. And this is really good news because Microsoft, when they have been pushing out all these updates to Office 365 has been breaking some things for people, um, and this has meant to say, " Alright, we know this is happening and we want to prevent this from happening even though we want you to get all the latest features on a faster cadence, we want you also to be able to prepare for it to test and be ready. So we are going to have this first review program, we are also going to have an NDA preview program that will give you a slightly different set of options as to which users get the new features." And I think this is all goodness and we should applaud the team for doing this. Yay a positive story about Microsoft!

(Laughter)

Paul: That didn't seem very heartfelt but...

(Laughter)

Leo: (Impersonating Bing Crosby) Mary Jo you weren't very heartfelt in that.

Mary Jo: I mean it, I do mean it because a lot of the time we are beating them up for like "This broke! This isn't that great! This feature is not right! People aren't happy about this" but when they do positive things we need to give them positive reinforcement . Just like a dog.

(Laughter)

Paul: To be fair I think that the Office 365 stuff is routinely excellent. I dont think I have much, if anything, bad to say about that stuff.

Mary Jo: Yea. It's good. Glad to hear that.

Leo: And was there a gliling bitch, I mean a billing glitch.

(Laughter)

Paul: Yikes!

Mary Jo: Whoops!

(Incoherent talking and Laughing)

Leo: I just had a glitch!

Paul: No there wasn't

(Laughter)

Leo: I dont know what happened there.

Paul: A new kind of witch.

(Laughter)

Mary Jo: Yes there was a little bit of a billing glitch.

Leo: Say that carefully please.

Mary Jo: Yes I will, billing glitch, right before the Memorial day weekend where some people where seeing their Office 365 bills for their next year show up as double the price of the ones they have now and that was just a billing glitch.

(Laughter)

Mary Jo: I’m being very careful in saying that

(Laughter)

Leo: Glenda the billing glitch

(Laughter)

Mary Jo: And they have fixed it that's the good news so, yes, if you did see double the price that was just a temporary thing and it should be all fixed and if it’s not you should go back to Microsoft and say, "Hey you didn't fix my glitch!"

Leo: Good, Good. And uh, let's talk about this week in illegal data requests. Microsoft says, "We won! We held out against the FBI." Or did they?

Paul: Yea well they did and you know that they argued that this request was illegal and un-constitutional and uh I'm trying to think who said they were right. Who was it? Uh, I guess I don’t see it here but um oh yea, I’m sorry, they challenged it in federal court and federal court ruled that yes it was, in fact, illegal, so the FBI withdrew its request and Microsoft declared victory and it had a nice little blog post like, "Yay, we are saving your private data from the government and then the FBI went to the company they were trying to get information about and got the information anyway.

Leo: And they got it anyway!

Mary Jo: That is the best graphic ever, by the way. I agree with you Paul.

Leo: Everybody must go to the supersite for Windows and look for this story. It is in his May 23rd short takes and uh he's taken, he's taken, what is this? This is ....

Paul: So when I wrote the headline, I started to write: Microsoft fought the law and the and then I went wait. Microsoft won? And so i thought of the "I fought the law song"

Leo: (Singing) I fought the law and the law won!

Paul: This is like the album art from the original song.

Leo: Wow!

Paul: And I thought, "You know, this isnt like a colorized black and white thing, and the guys faces are black and white in the original album art and the faces of the Microsoft executives on Microsoft.com/news are in black and white." ....

Leo: Uh huh! Uh huh!

(Laughter)

Leo: Wow! How much time did you spend doing this for...

(Laughter)

Mary Jo: I know

(Laughter)

Paul: Honestly you know it wasn't that long. Only like fifteen minutes or so.

Leo: You are good at this Photoshop.

Mary Jo: He is. It's great! He's got Mark Penn in there and Kevin...

Leo: Tell us who these are from left to right.

Paul: Mary Jo might appreciate this a little more cause she saw it comment on Friday when I did this. My daughter came home from work, twelve years old, and I said, "Come here, I want to show you something, look at this thing I made". And she says...

Leo: Huh?

Paul: (Finishing previous sentence) "Is this really what you spend your time on?"

(Laughter)

Leo: "And are proud of and called me in to show me?" And you say look what I did! I made this (In an excited high pitched voice)

(Laughter)

Mary Jo: "Dad"

Leo: Poor Paul

Paul: She just shook her head and walked away.

Leo: You know Paul, print out a copy and put it on the refrigerator.

Paul: I should. She would find that to actually be really funny.

(Laughter)

Leo: Left to right, who are these people on here.

Paul: So we have Mark Penn, Kevin turner, Brad Smith, and Satya Nadella.

Leo: Kevin Turner, he's the chief of council?

Mary Jo: No He's the CO

Leo: Ok CO Kevin Turner and then Brad Smith Chief of council.

Mary Jo: Yes.

(Laughter)

Leo: What's the name of the original group? Bobby? Bobby Ridell? Who did the original "I fought the law"? In the chat room now...I’m still waiting for the ....Oh the Bobby Fuller Four. The Bobby Fuller Four. I am just going to play this song for a little bit here.

Paul: You should look up the original album art for the song.

(Youtube video of "I fought the Law")

Leo: (Laughing) A gogo dancer in a prison cell

(Laughter)

Leo: This music brought to you by ziprecruiter.com. We are going to take a break. When we come back the back of the book, Paul's picks and tips, Mary Jo's beer, and more. Ziprecruiter.com is the place you need to go if you are hiring, if you are in HR, or you have a small business and your job is to get the right person for the job. You know for a fact that means going to multiple different job boards and posting and how do you even know which job board is the right job board for that particular position? Well I can save you a lot of time just by visiting ziprecruiter.com/windows. There it is ziprecruiter.com/windows and with a click of the mouse you will post your job to 50 plus job boards. 100,000 companies use ziprecruiter.com. Not only will it post to job boards but Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google plus. Everybody will see your job posting. And then what is great is they help you organize the results. The qualified candidates will roll into ziprecruiter.com's easy to use interface and they will automatically highlight the most qualified candidates. so you can screen them quickly, rate them, and hire the right person for the job fast. Ziprecruiter.com also give you a page with your company's logo and color so that those job pages look like an extension of your business. You can even create a company career page so that you can use as a careers page and also unlimited users to your account so that you can get some help and screen all these great candidates. Try Ziprecruiter.com and find out why they are so popular. With over 100,000 business including Twit.tv, we've used and continue to use them actually. Right now you can try ziprecruiter for a free four day trial by going to ziprecruiter.com/windows. The best way to post jobs! Paul Thurrott is here with his pick. By the way, Mike B says, “Zip Recruiter is great. I lost my job 3 weeks ago”. Sorry, Mike. That is why Mike is in our chat room all of a sudden. But he says that he has found a lot of opportunities as a job seeker on Zip Recruiter. So that is great. Thank you for that unsolicited testimonial. Actually I have a couple of questions we didn’t get to and I wanted to ask you about. We talked about this yesterday on Security Now. Steve though this was a wonderful idea, I’m a little less sanguine. Apparently there is a hack you can do to Windows XP, it is a simple registry change that then says, “I’m not Windows XP I’m Windows XP for embedded systems” and you can continue to get updates. Good idea?

Paul: I don’t think it is going to matter.

Leo: I like Mary Jo’s nonverbal response.

Paul: Let’s just say we didn’t discuss it. Notably. I think it is going to go away.

Leo: Microsoft’s warning is that it could cause problems because you might get bits that don’t belong. But I think you nailed it and Steve said this too, how long before Microsoft turns this thing off?

Mary Jo: Right. Next year.

Paul: I guess the assumption here is that Microsoft is charing people for support and for those companies that pay they have turned the spigot on for the normal Windows Update process? I don’t think so. I don't know, but I don’t believe that is how it works. And so I don’t think this is actually a long lived real world solution to a problem.

Leo: And the truth is that most of the people that are using Windows XP are not exactly going to hack the registry.

Mary Jo: Exactly.

Leo: This is the wrong group of people. It is Grandma using XP for a reason and it isn’t so that she can hack the registry. Right? I’m just saying. And then the other one that the chat room wants to ask is this story that CNET is running about Microsoft getting into the home automation business in a partnership with Insteon. Now of course a lot of rumors about Apple perhaps announcing something on Monday at WWDC in the home automation. Microsoft announced a partnership with Insteon today to incorporate…

Paul: I have not seen this yet, so I don’t know.

Mary Jo: I think it was last week. Late last week actually. But what was interesting about this was that I know they are building Windows Phone Apps and Windows 8 Apps, Insteon is, for home automation. But the part that I was interested in is that they are also going to have some things like light bulbs and things that are connected to this available to Microsoft, supposedly.

Leo: Microsoft will begin selling devices in store in early July.

Mary Jo: I guess in Microsoft stores. I don’t know. I didn’t hear from Insteon or Microsoft about this at all. I saw this on CNET too and I thought, oh interesting. I didn’t know they were going to do that. But Microsoft already got a whole bunch of different things going on in home automation. Around Xbox and around some of the research projects they have like Home OS. So they have a lot of things in the works but they haven’t really commercialized a lot of these beyond what they are doing at the internet of things, Windows embedded and especially around Azure now as being the connector for that.

Leo: Alright. Just thought I’d pass those two because the chat room wanted to know. Now, we move on to our picks of the week starting with Pauls tip of the week.

Paul: I’m actually going to give some soliciting tips in a way. I’ve been writing at least one Surface Pro 3 article each day, sometimes two or three, kind of building up to a review. You’ll be delighted to hear that I am probably also going to write a book about Surface Pro.

Leo: Writing another book? Oh man. At least you’ll stop doing weird Photoshops.

Paul: So, I’m looking for questions that people want answered of course but also if people have any tips about Surface, I’m very interested. Check out the guide that I posted already and just contact me at the usual email address if you have questions and/or comments.

Leo: Or I’ll see you in the parking garage at midnight.

Paul: I got a Watergate related email from Fox News, which is fascinating because I don’t subscribe to any Fox News newsletters and I don’t write about politics.

Leo: Oh Lord, I’ve been going through email hell because I’ve moved off of gmail and I didn’t realize how much spam I was getting. I knew how much bacon I was getting. The stuff you kind of didn’t subscribe to buy maybe you did, and you didn’t really want it. But what Google does is that…

Paul: What have you switched to?

Leo: Well, I’ll explain in a second. But what Google does in Gmail is they have this promotions tab, if you use the tabs, and all that stuff goes there and I don’t have to look at it. Gmail’s iMap implementation is not standard and not very compatible and I want to have more control over my email. So I went to back to FastMail, which I’ve always used. It is a very good iMap provider out of Australia. Fastmail.fm. The problem is that I am now seeing all this crap that Google was hiding. And so somebody on the Twitter told me about something called unrolled.me. Do you know about that?

Paul: I think I had that as a pick one time.

Leo: You probably did. It sounded awfully familiar. But it only works with Gmail.

Paul: That’s not true.

Leo: It doesn’t work with standard mail. It only works with a few of the web based.

Paul: I use outlook.com obviously in Office 365 and those services do a great job catching all that spam. My work email, however is bad at it, in fact I’m reasonably sure they are actively seeking out things into my account.

Leo: That is the problem. As journalists they don’t have unsubscribes in the press releases that we get unfortunately. We get so much email every day from people pitching us stories on monster truck rallys that we would not do.

Paul: It is like I said it is communique.

Leo: It is nothing to do with our beat.

Paul: I consistently get real estate listings from Mongolia.

Leo: Yeah. I have a woman who for some reason thinks I want to rent a place in San Francisco keeps sending me listings. No thank you.

Paul: So if you want to stay in a Yurt…

Leo: Now see that, I’m interested in. And then of course there are trolls who just think it is historical to sign me up for every dating site.

Paul: Yeah. I’m actually reasonably sure that happens. But by personal email address that is easy enough to fix. The one at work they very clearly do not protect it at all. In fact when I’ve complained about it they’ve said, “Just use Outlook and it has built in spam filtering”. I said that’s not a solution. So, whatever.

Leo: By the way that Monster truck rally is August 2nd and 3rd in Santa Rosa. Very excited about that. I’m just going to pass that on.

Paul: Maybe I’ll head out there before I go to Mongolia! It is kind of on the way.

Leo: I love your software pick of the week this week, Paul.

Paul: I was going to do a novel pick. We had Mark Russinovich on last week, but I just wanted to mention that I finished Rogue Code which is his latest book, and it is very, very good. I think I mentioned on a recent show this notion of Author narrated pairings. He has a guy who is very good that does all his books. This is a great story and one of the things I would love to be able to recommend more often is Industry books. We don’t see a lot of Industry books these days for some reason. I would say though that if you want an insider look at how the industry really works, Mark Russinovich’s books are all amazing in that capacity. Because of course he has a deep, internal understanding about how things work. And all of his stories are about these things. They are actually really, really good. And so you have kind of like a Daniel Suarez books which are crazy and also based on real world things but they really take it a step beyond. Mark’s books are both excellent and troubling because they are based on real world technology and are incredibly possible. And I just thought I’d throw it out there. This is a great book and a great story but the technology behind it is all real and it is worth knowing about it.

Leo: I saw a story this morning somewhere where it said the guy who is redesigning Microsoft strategy… and it was Mark Russinovich.

Paul: It is nice to see people wake up about Mark Russinovich because that story mentioned a couple things I mentioned last week on the pod cast. The NT server, the work station registry flip and his work on the Lenux and all that kind of stuff.

Leo: This is written by Cade Metz who is actually a really smart writer at Wired. Microsoft’s most clever critic is now building its new empire and low and behold, it is Mark!

Paul: Mark is a great guy.

 Leo: I love it! He is a great guy.

Paul: Supersmart.

Leo: We should have him on more.

Paul: Yeah. So, my software pick of the week, I’m not sure I’m going to pronounce this right but I believe it is Machinarium? I discovered it because it was in a red stripe deal which is a money off deal that Microsoft has on the Windows store, which is for Windows 8. But looking into it I discovered it is actually also for sale on Windows phone 8. It works fine on Windows phone 8.1. I sort of compared it to that game limbo in the sense that it has a sideways scroll or and it gets really deep atmosphere and personality. It is a beautiful, beautiful game. It is on sale right now for a dollar 99. It is usually five dollars. It is kind of a puzzle, logic kind of game. It is not a fast motion thing at all. You are presented with these scenes and you have to figure out how to do things.

Leo: You are a little robot and you have to make your way around the world.

Paul: That is the second level.

Leo: This is a tough level.

Paul: Yeah, they are all really tough. Even the opening scene where you kind of learn how the play mechanics work you are missing an arm and a lead and you have to work with another creature that is there to get everything done. I found it to be a little difficult.

Leo: I did too.

Paul: It is beautiful and it sounds great. I have to say, as far as Windows goes, I really struggled to find games that I care about at all on the modern platform. The touch-based system. There are lot more really good games on Windows phone right now. This one is available on both and you don’t have that cross where if you buy one you get the other one free. Unfortunately.

Leo: this would be great on the 1520.

Paul: Yes. It is a fantastic game and it works better on the 1520 and it works better on the service pro three.

Leo: I don’t know five or played at on the iPad. But I have played it before.

Paul: It is on everything. You can buy it on services as a diverse as steam powered. It is everywhere. It is a beautiful, beautiful game.

Leo: Beautiful. I love it. Machinarium. And that is the deal because it is $10 on the Mac side. A $1.99 is great. It was developed over a period of three years by 7 Czech developers.

Paul: you can tell this is not a weekend throw together. It is gorgeous.

Leo: It is a neat story. I think it is time to throw it over to the distaff side. Mary Jo Foley! That is something Bing Crosby might’ve said. Mary Jo Foley with the enterprise pick of the week. Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: I have a good one that just happened today in fact. The enterprise pick of the week is a company called Capptain. A French company that does mobile analytics and push notifications. Microsoft bought them today. I remember right before Tech Ed we were saying there were all these rumors that Microsoft might buy a company, maybe this was one of them. We don’t know. But what they are going to do is take the service that this company does and lets you monitor users and employees behavior real time and push out targeted messages to them. And they are going to integrate that with Azure. They are going to make it available to mobile developers who are writing apps on Azure. I mean it is not something that a lot of people are all gung ho about because do you want to get those targeted mobile messages? Not everybody wants to get those on their mobile device.

Leo: But if you are running a server and you want analytics that is real life, right?

Mary Jo: It is. And you want that data about the customers that are getting them so you can push more targeted messages. A very interesting think to me about this acquisition is this company Capptain, they Actually build these analytics tools for not just Windows 8 and Windows phone that for blackberry, iOS, android, smart TVs. It is all another example of the whole Satya Nadella cross platform software and services thing. They are buying companies that don’t just deal with Windows but actually have offerings across the board in all different markets in the mobile space. A very interesting buy I think.

Leo: Our codename, a little hearken back to earlier in the show.

Mary Jo: yes, we mentioned that Bill Gates is being a little more involved in the office. And one of the things that he has supposedly taken a very big interest and is Oslo. Oslo is something that I have had as a codename pic before. It is a new application that Microsoft is building for Office 365. It is almost like a Flip Board. It presents you with a lot of particulars about things that are happening in your work world.

Leo: It is a dashboard.

Mary Jo: It is a dashboard or like a lot of cards arranged like, who is in a particular meeting? What were the trending discussions? What documents were people sharing? The reason I made it the code name picked today is because I think I know what the real name of what this product may be when Microsoft announces it. So it is almost like a reverse code name pick. I think the name of all slow may be Delve, when Microsoft finally announces it. The reason I think that is Neo had a little story back in early May saying Microsoft just applied for a trademark for Delve and we don’t know what this is. Is it a game, what is it? I have been asking around and people said, we think this might be the final name for Oslo, when Microsoft makes it available. It is a little flip code name of the week.

Leo: Oslo and Delve. And now, it is beer time.

Mary Jo: And Paul has some skepticism on this one, in fact my beer pick of the week is from Flying Dog in Maryland and they have a new beer out called Dead Rise.

Paul: I just want to note that I did contact her before we went live with this. Because…

Leo: You didn’t believe it. It is kind of disgusting, actually.

Mary Jo: Let me talk about this beer for a minute. It is called Dead Rise Old Bay, Summer End. And so Flying Dogs in Maryland is the company that makes the Old Bay Spice. Which is something you use for…

 Leo: Crab spice.

Mary Jo: Crab and seafood. So they found a way when they were brewing the beer to incorporate the old base spice. I was a big skeptic and I thought that is going to be horrible. But it actually is really delicious. It gives you just a little bit of that spice with the citrus. And I had it when I have some wasters recently and it was really a nice pairing. I have to say. And if you were wondering where the name Dead Rise comes from as I was. Flying Dog says Dead Rise gets its name from boats, specifically designed to navigate the unique waterways of the Chesapeake. And that is where they are both based. Flying Dog and Old Bay.

Leo: And Ralph Steadman does the illustrations on Old Bay’s labels.

Mary Jo: Their labels are really awesome if you ever get to see them.

Leo: Wow. That is beautiful. Old Bay, if you like the spice or just pour the beer on your crab.

Mary Jo: Or boil your crabs in the beer.

Leo: Now we’re cooking with natural, unfracked gasoline.

Mary Jo: I know this sounds like it isn’t good, but if you guys see it give it a try.

Leo: I don’t remember. What is the predominant flavor of Old Bay spice?

Paul: Salts.

Mary Jo: Not salt so much, it is more like a saffron kind of thing. Very savory.

Leo: I like it. Well, my friends, that concludes this edition of the new Windows weekly. Paul Thurrott us with SuperSite for Windows at supersite.com. I don’t know if you heard that but he snuck in that he’s going to do another book. The guy never stops.

Paul: It’ll be a short one.

Leo: I’ve heard you say that before.

Paul: It’ll be as thin as the Surface Pro 3.

Leo: His current book Windows 8.1 book .com is on the web there and there is also a Windows Music book and the SuperSite for Windows is the place where he really shines. Especially with is graphic illustrations. You can catch Mary Jo Foley at AllAboutMicrosoft.com. Her blog. And of course both of them are here each and every Wednesday at 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern and 1800 UTC for Windows Weekly. And if you missed the show live On-demand audio and video is always available after the fact @twit.tv/WW or I Tunes, the Xbox music store, your pod cast application, and of course there is Twit application for Windows phone and every other platform. So pick up a Twit app and get Windows Weekly delivered to your device weekly. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Mary Jo. We’ll see you next time!