Windows Weekly 376 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It’s time for Windows Weekly; Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here.  We’ll talk about the latest release date for Windows 9 at least a preview.  Mary Jo Foley has the scoop.  She also has the new HTC 1 based on Windows Phone, she’ll give us a little tour.  It’s all coming up next on Windows Weekly. 

Netcasts you love from people you trust, this is TWIT! Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cachefly, at cachefly.com.

Leo Laporte: This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley.  Episode 376, recorded August 20th, 2014

Take back your Rubles

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It’s time for Windows Weekly the show where we talk about Windows Weekly.  With the return of prodigal son Paul Thurrott is back.  He’s still in Barcelona but he’s back from his walk about.  It’s good to have you back.  Thanks for Daniel Rubino for filling in.  But no one can fill your shoes Paul. 

Paul Thurrott: I am a big person. 

Leo: Great pictures of your family.  For people who follow Paul.  Do you allow public followers on Facebook?

Paul: No.

Leo: No, so I won’t talk about it then. 

Paul: No I don’t mind if you put them up on the show, that’s fine.  We’re all friends here, Leo. 

Leo: See I let people follow me.

Paul: I used to do that but it got out of control. 

Leo: It looks like you’re having a great time with the family.  I do have a question about one of these pictures. 
Paul: I think I might know which one it is.

Mary Jo Foley: I know which one it is.
Leo: Do you, you think you do?  Let me see if I can pull it up.  Mary Jo Foley is here from allaboutmicrosoft.com.  It was funny I was talking to Mike Elgin and he said you know the thing that’s great about Windows Weekly, there is a handful of journalists that get Windows scoops and you have 2 of them on the show.  The top journalists on the show and that’s what makes Windows Weekly so great.  I had to say I agree.

Mary Jo: Good to hear.

Paul: I’ve got to get back to Mike Elgin he recommended an absence place to me, we spent a lot of time trying to find it.  It doesn’t appear in web searches and I’ve got to ask him where this place is.  We struck out big time trying to find it.

Leo: Well he’s listening right now. 

Paul: Oh is he here?  I’ve been meaning to email him.

Leo: Oh yeah, Mike never leaves.  I will gather him up.

Paul: Is he chained to a desk?  Leo he’s got a family let him go. 

Leo: So this is the picture I was thinking of.  I don’t know if that’s the one.

Paul: I figured that was the one you were wondering about. 

Leo: So I see a lot of American moola and a small sub-machine gun and you’re all wearing Fedoras what’s going on?

Paul: This is a place called Rumen Escape.  It’s a live puzzle game.  You go into a house and there are clues and you go from room to room.

Leo: Oh how fun!

Paul: Yeah it was awesome.  It was really good.  I think they must tailor it too from where you are from within reason.  This was a 1930’s gangster style thing, obviously there is American money. 

Leo: Are you competing against people?

Paul: No you’re working together as a team. 

Leo: It sounds so fun.

Paul: It was really good.  It was a lot of fun.

Leo: Is that in Barcelona or where is that? 

Paul: Yeah.  I think there are a few around.  I think there are some in other cities too but this one was in Barcelona.

Leo: It’s such a cute picture.  You’re going to cherish that in years to come when your children have turned into ugly teenagers who hate you.

Paul: Plus I think I may have found a nice new look for myself.

Mary Jo: Yeah I like the hat.

Paul: Wearing a small hat.

Mary Jo: I think that should be your new profile.

Leo: And holding money.  Basically you look like a racetrack tout. 

Paul: Like a pigeon stoley. 

Leo: Yeah I got a tip for you.  Wow Paul Thurrott racetrack tout.  Well it looks like you’re having a good time.  I’m glad you’re having a good time.

Paul: Yeah it’s been good.

Leo: Would you ask Mike Elgin, what was the name of the absence place.

Paul: No I know the name of it, the problem is I can’t find it.

Leo: Paul couldn’t find it.  Could you get Mike to give us the address because he wants absence now.  Do they do the green fairy?  That would be fun.

Paul: Leo listen nothing is out of bounds in the city.  Nothing! 

Leo: He’s calling us from the Las Vegas of Spain. 

Paul: I am like George W. Bush over here. 

Leo: Let’s talk about Windows, what do you say.

Mary Jo: Why not.

Leo: Are you able to keep up pretty well there in Spain?  

Paul: Yeah actually one thing I notice every year when I come out here is that when you’re 5, 6 hours ahead of the East coast in the United States, you’re actually in a really good place from a new perspective.  Because a lot of time Microsoft will post stuff at Midnight or whatever.  You’re kind of ahead of the curve.  I like being in Europe for that reason.  The other thing is we have these weird half day schedules where I’ll get up early, I work a little bit.  Work for 2 or 3 hours and then we go out for half the day.  Then I come back and it’s 9 o'clock back home but it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon here.  Then I work for a few more hours.  It kind of splits up the day nicely it’s kind of a nice schedule. 

Leo: Good.

Paul: I’d rather be here than in Boston just from a scheduling perspective.  

Leo: Well just stay there.

Paul: Listen that won’t happen, Leo. 

Mary Jo: You can stay there until Techead. 

Leo: Yeah because Techead is in Barcelona?  But not until next year though?

Mary Jo: Not until October, late October.

Leo: Of next year or this year.

Mary Jo: This year.

Leo: Oh you should stay, that’s nothing.  Kids could go to Spanish school.  They could learn to do the Macarena or whatever it is they do.  Mary Jo scoop number 1 this week, you got the date for Threshold the next version of Windows.

Mary Jo: Yeah I can’t say we know for certain but sources are saying that there’s going to be a technical preview of Threshold at the very end of September or early October.  What this is, is it’s not like a developer preview from what I am hearing but it’s more meant to be a enterprise preview where Microsoft shows off some of the features it’s going to have and it’s going to focus a lot on business users.  Which is really interesting.  Because I think they feel like or at least some of the people on the team feel like they over corrected a little bit with Windows 8 and they made it too consumer focused and didn’t focus enough on business.  I think the idea behind the tech preview is going to show to businesses hey we didn’t forget about you and here’s what we are going to be doing with the next version of Windows that we think you’re going to really like.  One of the big things supposedly in this is they are going to have an agreement so if you take the tech preview bits that are going to be available you’re going to have to agree from that point on to take the mandatory updates as they come out.  This is part of their whole service thing, patching strategy where they are going to try and overhaul that and make it more hopefully more functional.  I’m looking for the right word. 

Paul: It’s important that you qualify that statement.

Mary Jo: More functional than it currently is which is nonfunctional pretty much.  Also get people on the latest version so that everybody is kind of on a common baseline.  Instead of people being on one version.  Some having patches, some not patching.  So they are trying to get everybody to agree to be on the same Threshold. 

Paul: I actually think what this is related to is kind of the second story.  Because we had a screw up this month with Windows 8 that we’ll get to.  When you think about rapid release, when you think about mobile first, cloud first and so forth, one of the big themes is Microsoft is updating, updating and updating.  Regardless if it’s an online service or something that’s locally installed on peoples computers.  We talk about Office 365 a lot and how they update Office 365 really regularly.  It’s interesting to watch a traditional software product to be updated on kind of a cloud service schedule.  But the truth is that’s really hard, it might even be impossible.  If Microsoft wants to update One Note up in the Cloud or One Drive up in the Cloud or whatever.  You’re changing it basically in one place but you’re not changing it on everyone's computers.  When you actually have to go out and touch millions and millions possibly billions of computers this is when problems crop up.  I think the reason they’re requiring this monthly update or you have to agree to the updates is literally just to test this.  Because I don’t think it’s really worked so far at this scale.

Mary Jo: The other challenge when we’re talking about updates is different kinds of users want updates at different paces.  Consumers or home users may want them as soon as they’re available.  Like wow I want that feature, I want it the minute it’s done.  Let me just throw that on my machine and see what happens.

Leo: After my experience with the 1520 I might caution a little more judiciousness.

Mary Jo: Yeah but enterprise’s do not want that. 

Leo: I should have known. 

Mary Jo: So they are going to have to figure that out too right.  They can’t just say everybody must take every update the minute it’s available.  I’m betting they’re going to have to have some kind of thing where you can delay the update if you’re a business customer.  Or maybe everybody gets the option to delay the updates.  I don’t know.

Paul: Well to a point.  This is what they do with the Office 365.  As a consumer you’re pretty much buying into you’re getting the updates.  If you go to a small business or a higher version, they have an option now, you can go into the UI and say I do want to get the releases as soon as they come out.  But businesses can schedule to delay those things but not forever because there is some sort of it’s all tied into that serviceability thing.  They can’t have all of their customers on slightly different versions of Office 365.  That doesn’t make sense.  But then this is going to be the problem area, I think for this whole scheme.  Again we’ll get to it but what happened this month is kind of confirming the worst fears of IT and the enterprise, when it comes to rapid release.  This is what everyone was saying, this is why we don’t do this.  We’ll see what happens. 

Mary Jo: As far as Threshold goes back to that story.  We are thinking preview bits, those technical preview bits come out late September early October.  I think they are going to be just for the Intel based clients that’s my guess.  I don’t think we’re going to get that version of Threshold yet that’s the combined one.  That’s going to work on Phones and tablets.  I think we’re going to just see what most enterprises would deploy which would be the Intel based Threshold early bits.  People have asked me about server too.  They’ve been saying will there also be a preview simultaneously of Windows Server Threshold or I don’t know what you would call it, Threshold Server.  I don’t know if that will be timed to coincide with that or if that will be something they hold back for maybe Teched Europe.  I don’t really know at this point.

Leo: Are they going to keep the Threshold name on this?

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: No so it will be Windows 9 or whatever?

Paul: They’re not that cagey Leo.

Mary Jo: It’s probably going to be Windows 9.

Leo: Why don’t we do a reboot and call it Windows 1? One drive, Xbox 1, Windows 1. 

Paul: I like it.

Leo: One Windows to rule them all.  Maybe that’s what Nadella meant? 

Mary Jo: Maybe?

Paul: One Windows.

Leo: One Windows it’s the name.

Mary Jo: We’re going back to one.

Leo: Will a business be able to look at this preview and vet it?  Part of the process as you say is to make sure it works with all their systems.  It’s not going to be complete enough to do that, is it?

Mary Jo: No.  It’s not going to be something they are going to say to you hey you can deploy this now and go live.

Leo: Well even to test with it?

Paul: That’s what it would be for is for testing. 

Leo: It is for that.  Okay good.  So complete enough to do that. 

Mary Jo: Hopefully complete enough to do that.  I haven’t heard that this qualifies as a dev preview.  Maybe there will be at least some of the API’s  that developers need to start taking a look at available at that time.  I’m not really clear from what I’ve heard about how complete this thing we see in September is going to be. 

Paul: People like Raphael Rivera will be ripping this thing to shreds even if there are no SDK’s.  We’ll know everything that’s in it.

Leo: He’s already been ripping it to shreds in his mind.  I don’t know why anyone would want a preview of a server except for testing, right?  It’s not like ooh look at the neat features. 

Paul: It’s hard to understand.

Mary Jo: There are a lot of features.  Remember when Microsoft had Windows December 2012.  There were a lot of new features in that.  They’re not UI kind of features necessarily.

Leo: Okay. 

Paul: But they’re since 81R2, server has taken a real back seat from a news perspective.

Mary Jo: It has. 

Paul: I know it’s not the right way to look at it.  But when you think about moving to the Cloud, their server products are the obvious things they can do quickly and first.  Azure is not Windows server in the cloud persay.  Azure has a new platform, Azure as a platform you can migrate to.  Azure as a platform you can integrate with what you have.  It seems like that’s where the action is.  I am kind of curious.  Obviously there will be a server version. 

Mary Jo: What did they do with Windows 8?  I can’t remember what they did with Windows 8 if they had the simultaneous update.

Paul: The server updates at the same time, I actually don’t remember but I bet there was. 

Mary Jo: I bet there was too.  They build them together.

Paul: Actually I’m positive there was.  In fact because they couldn’t show off the final UI, we went to Rivera’s workshop for that.  They couldn’t even show what the modern stuff looked like. 

Leo: Wait a minute, this just in.  I’m being handed a piece of paper that says, the place is not in Barcelona it’s in Valencia.  So that’s why.

Paul: Damn you Mike Elgin.

Leo: That’s why you couldn’t find it. 

Mary Jo: It all makes sense now. 

Paul: Well there’s like a famous place for Absinthe in Barcelona.

Leo: He said that, he can’t remember the name. 
Paul: We have that.

Leo: It’s on Via Della Court Catalano Us #287.  But if you ever get to Valencia go to Kia Cobreros 25 in Valencia. 

Paul: Okay.

Leo: This just in.  Breaking news.  Is Barcelona anywhere near Valencia?  No?

Paul: Ok thank you.  It’s in the same country.

Leo: Oh I am sorry it’s in Los Angeles not San Francisco.

Paul: Right, right.

Mary Jo: Sorry.

Leo: How long did you spend looking for it?  I think Mr. Elgin owes you.

Paul: That’s okay that night was great.

Leo: Hey any excuse to wonder Barcelona.

Paul: It’s not a bad place to walk around. 

Leo: What a great town.  I am so jealous.  Anything else to say before we move to the next item? 

Mary Jo: One question I’ve also gotten and I just got it here on Twitter from Ashley Quint.  Do you think there will be a Gemini preview at the same time as the Threshold preview? 

Leo: The touch version of Office. 

Mary Jo: Right, touch first version of Office.  I do not think those two things are tied together.  They supposedly last we heard from our sources are coming out at the same time, Spring 2015. First half of 2015.   But I don’t know that those 2 things will actually happen at the same time.  So I think there is going to be a preview of Gemini sometime probably this year but I don’t know that it will be tied to the tech preview of Threshold.  That’s all I can say on that for now. 

Leo: You are the scoop queen.  We’ll talk about that rapid release cycle and what happened last week.  But first a word from Sharefile.  If you have to share files in business you might be tempted to attach them to an email, don’t do it!  I’ve been telling people for years don’t open attachments, that’s the number one way people get bit with viruses.  It’s a real vector for viruses.  But I understand if you’re in business you need to send contracts, presentations.  Big files are part of the deal.  What are you going do, roll them up, put them in a tube and mail them.  No you’re going to use Sharefile.  sharefile.com it’s the best way to share files in business.  Citrix Sharefile makes it very easy.  Instead of sending a file which is a verboten for security.  It’s also not private, anything sent as an email attachment can be read everywhere along the way.  You have the big problem of bouncebacks, today files are so big you could swamp somebodies inbox.  With Sharefile you’re sending a secure link.  You’re not sending a file, you’re sending a secure link.  Sharefile makes it really easy to do.  They’ve got so many great features if you visit sharefile.com you can find out about it.  Among other things they’ve got these great tools to make it easy.  I use the sync widget on my Macintosh.  They have sync Widget for Windows obviously as well.  It means I could just save a file to a folder and it’s automatically shared with people who I’ve previously set it up.  So they get a notification in their email.  Leo added a new file.  I do that a lot of times with KFI in Los Angeles and some of our stations.  Because I send them a lot of files.  So I just sync and they get a notification, I don’t have to do anything.  There’s a desktop widget.  There’s a full API so your IT department can customize it completely.  It is compatible with FTP and more importantly secure FTPS and SFTP.  Even Webdav.  In fact it’s Webdav that they use for their interface at sharefile.com.  One of the nice things about it is when you’re customer gets that link they’re going to click it and they’re going to get sent to a page that is HTTPS.  It’s secure.  That has your company logo, your branding on it and a big button that says download.  They don’t have to sign up for anything, they just download it.  You can also use Sharefile to request files from people.  Lawyers do that all the time when they’re requesting documents.  This is a great solution.  I want you to try Citrix Sharefile right now for free for 30 days.  All I want to ask is that you visit the site, while you will see a bunch of start your free trial buttons.  Where is it, I have to go back to the front page.  There it is, at the very top in the smallest letters possible because they want to know that you really care.  See it says podcast listeners.  That’s the link you should click and when you do write in the word Windows.  Paul and Mary Jo will thank you, as the offer code.  Do select your industry too because Sharefile is compliant with regulations in financial services, in medicine, in many industries.  It provides that additional layer of security.  Type in Windows.  Try it free for 30 days Citrix Sharefile.  You can tell the boss I found a solution.  I did and I’ve been using it ever since.  sharefile.com click the listeners microphone at the top of the page and use the offer code Windows. 

Windows Weekly on the air with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley the most highly decorated Windows.

Paul: We sound like Veterans of war. 

Mary Jo: Decorated wow.

Leo: They’re highly decorated.

Mary Jo: I want a badge. 

Leo: Just real quickly, I think Nokia is going to send me a new 1520.

Mary Jo: I think they are. 

Leo: Everybody tells me.  We had a Nokia engineer in here yesterday from Finland his name was Juha.  Apparently a distinguished Finish name.  But Juha told me, I was unclear how to say it.  He said you can’t break this.  I said I broke this.  He said no give it to me.  He pressed volume down and he said oh you broke it.  So he verified that in fact.  I think it could be this is unlikely but a coincidence that something broke right when I was doing the firmware.  Because the firmware failed twice.  Then it says whatever you do don’t unplug it.  But it’s sitting there failed.  So I sat and I looked at it. 

Paul: So you unplugged it didn’t you!

Leo: I had to!  What am I supposed to do?

Paul: Leo it said literally do not unplug it.

Leo: I understand, Paul but it wasn’t going anywhere.  I take full responsibility.

Paul: Go to your room. 
Leo: It says whatever you do, do not unplug it.  So Juha said to me, it’s very unlikely but if you did it just at the right time you could not only clobber the main firmware.  The operating system of Windows 8.1 but you could actually clobber the little tiny bootcode that’s in there designed for recovery.  If you clobber that then indeed nothing will happen.  But see I should get some buzz or something and I’m getting nothing. 

Paul: So you’ve held down the volume down and power for 20 seconds plus.

Leo: He said sometimes it takes 10 minutes.  So I held it down for a half an hour.

Paul: Really!

Mary Jo: Wow!

Leo: Yes. 

Paul: Was it plugged in when you did that? 

Leo: I did.  Paul, you’re starting to sound like Twitter.  So I mentioned this on Twitter.  This is the litany.  I said can you just assume I’ve done everything I could Google.

Paul: Leo was this during the super moon? 

Leo: Yes it was!  I have done the freaking konami code, up, down, up, down, left, right, left right, abab.  They have one there’s a cunami code kind of thing.  I’ve done it all.  Nokia said what’s your IMEI number.  I said I don’t know can you tell?

Paul: Yeah right.

Leo: Black I think.  But all of this was so that I could get Cyan.  I had already done the developer preview.

Paul: I remember. 

Leo: Did they do an update with Cyan?  Have they released that yet?  Because it’s going to kill me if they do.  Or I still would be out of luck?

Paul: Well not in the developer preview. 

Leo: Right they are still holding that back.
Paul: It’s out publicly. If you would have reset it successfully you could have gotten.

Leo: So that would have done it.  That’s what Rubino said.  He said just roll it back to 8.0 and then do the updates as if you were a normal person and then you’d get Cyan, get the new firmware.

Paul: Yeah and then you could get back on the developer preview if you want.  It’s a sad fate for a beautiful phone.

Leo: I know that’s what kills me.  It’s a gorgeous phone.

Mary Jo: You’re going to get another one. 

Paul: You know what’s funny is I’ve always found that phone to be too big and I was semi forced to use it on this trip because AT&T wouldn’t unlock my 1020.  So now I’m just carrying this thing around.  Now up to 2 and half weeks I’m really used to it.  Now I bring up a really big phone like a Samsung Galaxy S5 and I am like man this screen is really small. 

Leo: Isn’t it funny. 

Paul: It’s weird when you get used to something like that.

Leo: I’ve gotten a little attached to the phone, to be honest with you.  So they are saying I can find the IMEI on the SIM card.  I don’t think that’s true.

Paul: No that’s not. 

Leo: Because an IMEI is a hardware identifier not the SEM identifier. 

Paul: Yeah that’s for the phone.  If you could just get into the setting’s I could tell you exactly where to go.

Leo: There are so many know it alls.   Everybody says you can’t brick this.  Press volume down.  I say no, no you don’t understand.  I’m not a complete idiot I’ve actually Googled every possible solution.  I’ve pressed every up and down, I’ve done it for lengthy amounts of time.

Paul: I’m sorry Leo.

Leo: But is it fully charged.  Yes it’s fully charged. 

Mary Jo: People are just trying to be helpful. 

Leo: I completely understand that.  Cortana even chimed in. 

Mary Jo: She tried to help?

Leo: There’s a Cortana Twitter account.  

Paul: Did she say maybe you should just use an Iphone?

Leo: My cousin Serie says.  It’s fine, I’ll get it fixed.  Now maybe I can get a mint green one?

Mary Jo: Oh yeah those nice.  Dani Rubino had one at the launch this week.  It looks nice.  Pretty cool.

Leo: I am sorry, again I have hijacked the show.  I’ve been taking lessons from John C. Dvorak and I have now completely put us off target.  Let’s talk about the Windows Update that went wrong last week.

Paul: Yeah we don’t complain enough.   

Leo: It seems like you’re blaming this on rapid release.  This is just a bad update, it happens. 

Paul: Mary Jo I don’t know if this is the case with you.  I’ve heard from some people at Microsoft about this, actually I should say I have heard from people who used to work at Microsoft about this and they have their own theories about why this went south.  Have you heard about any of this stuff? 

Mary Jo: Yeah I’ve heard some wrong theories about why this went wrong.

Leo: So apparently the update did something wrong with the fonts.  It put them in a bad place or something. 

Paul: My understanding is multiple updates, multiple problems.  Some of them are fairly benign, font rendering or whatever and some of them are really serious like your computer doesn’t boot, you get blue screens.

Leo: It’s all the same update right?

Paul: It’s different updates.

Mary Jo: There were a bunch of things in the update.  I wasn’t just one failure.  I think it was several failures and there were several things in the update so different parts seemed to have problems.  I was all Window 7 users who were affected or not?  Or was it also Windows 8?

Paul: It was also Windows 8. 

Mary Jo: It was both.  So things went bad.  Microsoft ended up pulling the update and they say they are going to rerelease it I believe. But we don’t know when.  It still is not re-released as of today which is Wednesday the 20th. 

Leo: Is it a critical update?

Paul: No it wasn’t.  It was optional wasn’t it?

Leo: Well then who cares.  I mean I care obviously roll it back.  It’s not like your security issue or something.  It would be funny if it affected those people who did that reg hack to turn their Windows XP into Windows Embedded.  I think it did crash their systems.  So congratulations.

Paul: I think those people are getting exactly what they paid for.  It’s okay. 

Mary Jo: I also read today that Microsoft has suggested some workarounds for the people who are getting Windows 7 blue screen of death.  But those aren’t helping some people and they’re still getting blue screen of death.

Leo: How do you fix it if you can’t reboot?

Paul: There are different ways to do it.  You can boot with a recovery disk and you can use system restore to go back to the point in time before you did they system updates.  Because every time you do Windows updates there is a system restore point is made.  So that would work.  Of course restore disks are like backups.  Everyone talks about them but nobody really does them.  So you find people scrambling.  I would say if you have a Windows 7 setup disk that is a restore or repair disk.  I forget how they changed the terminology.  A recovery or repair disk.

Leo: But so few people get disks these days.  Everybody will have that option to make the disk.  You have 5 DVD’s lying around because we are going to make them and they never do.

Paul: Somebody could use USB though.  Windows will do that.

Leo: Yeah you can.  That’s right and that was a huge improvement.  What do you need a 8GB drive, I think.  Or is it 4GB?

Paul: It’s not very big.  Whatever the size, it’s not very big.  So there are ways around it.

Leo: You can also BBC 16 is saying booting into safe mode if you had the blue screen might have helped. 
Paul: Maybe.  The goal is you want to roll back either uninstall that update or do a system restore.  Either one of those should temporarily solve the problem. 

Leo: So it’s funny a number of people in the chat room did get bit. 

Mary Jo: Oh really wow. 

Leo: So it wasn’t uncommon.

Paul: Are they all Windows 7?  Are they saying.
Leo: Chatroom was it Windows 7?  I think they are saying Windows 7 for the most part. 

Paul: I think that was the most serious stuff.  I think that was the blue screen stuff.  Because I install everything.

Mary Jo: Windows 7 home premium wasn’t it that was especially affected or in particular.  There were so many reports about what was going wrong and what was going wrong, it was hard to keep up with what was actually wrong. 

Leo: Most people didn’t have a problem. 

Mary Jo: I didn’t.

Leo: So it was some sort of weird interaction.

Paul: That’s probably true.  I did not have a problem.  But you’re on Windows 8 now Mary Jo, yes?  Of course you are on your new computer?

Mary Jo: No I am still using Windows 7 on my main machine.  I have no plans to switch. 

Paul: Yikes. 

Mary Jo: I mean it works, it’s not broken.

Leo: I have no plans.

Mary Jo: On my laptop I use Windows 8.  You’ve seen me do that. 

Leo: She’s waiting for Threshold, Paul.

Mary Jo: I am.  I am waiting for Threshold.

Paul: I’m really curious about the reaction of Threshold.  I really feel like Threshold is going to be something that is recognizably Windows 8. something. 

Leo: They can do that same ad thing that they did, remember with Vista.

Mary Jo: The Mojave project. 

Leo: Yeah Mohombi and it will be the same.

Paul: Enterprise in particular is going to look at this and say not enough. 

Leo: Oh I see.

Paul: So we will see how this thing goes.  I’m a little worried about this.

Mary Jo: No Paul remember how people reacted to Windows 7.  They acted like it was this huge amazing unbelievable thing when it was really just fixing Vista in most ways.

Paul: That’s true.

Mary Jo: So people may be just happy enough with hey they fixed a lot of the things that I thought were really annoying. 

Paul: By fixed you mean literally just remove them. 

Mary Jo: Yeah removed or returned it’s the start menu. 

Paul: I hope you’re right.

Mary Jo: I don’t know.  I think it’s hard to predict in advance what people are going to think of it.  I bet there are going to be new features too.  It’s not going to just back to the future kind of thing.  It’s probably going to be some new changes to the metro side.  I think there will be changes. 

Paul: With regards to this bauched update though.  This thing is problematic on many levels.  It has an enterprise aspect to it, which is why I thought of that.  If it is in fact true for example that Windows 7 Home premium was the one that was struck the hardest.  This is like the heartland of the Windows Community.  This is like normal people.  They have bought into Microsoft’s advice, upgrade every month, do all the updates.  They’re probably defragging their hard drive and running their antivirus.  Updating their signatures.  They’re doing the right thing.  When you get punished for doing the right thing it’s kind of tough.  This has been a bad thing.

Leo: What did the update promise, if it’s not a critical update then it was an optional update, yes? 

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: DId it say hey better font rendering?  I mean what did it say?

Paul: This is the thing I took exception too.  The update that used to be called Update 2.  When you look at that in Windows update what it says is a generic name.  This update fixed in Windows whatever.  It sounds like it’s a fix and that’s not what that is.  I’m sure there are some fixes in it.  It never said anywhere in there oh and it includes these several new features.  None of which were major but the presentation of it is just one update in a string of many many updates.  They all have very similar names, very similar descriptions, they’re not called out in any meaningful way.  I think someone was just being pragmatic.

Leo: We will just do it all. 

Paul: You could just look at the list and say obviously I want all of this.  Why would I have 12 of 13, I’ll take all 13. 

Mary Jo: You have to drill down into the KB articles to see.  Like one of the updates was support for the new currency symbol for the Russian Ruble.  That was one of the updates.

Paul: It’s just the way they describe.  In fact I am going to see if I can find it because I was struck by how poorly it was described.  I actually did find it.  This is for update 2.  This is what it says, remember this is Update 2 which we know has new features.  Install this update to resolve issues in Windows.

Leo: Okay I’ll take it.

Paul: For a complete listing of the issues that are included in this update, like features, see the associated Windows knowledge based article for more information.  After you install this item you may need to restart your computer.  It just say an update for Windows 8.1. 

Leo: Who wouldn’t want that?

Paul: I know.  It fixes issues.  I want this update.

Leo: I have issues it fixes issues.

Paul: Yeah right. 

Leo: It’s a perfect match. 

Mary Jo: Paul know Aidan Finn who goes by Joe Elway on Twitter. 

Leo: I am sorry I just made it rain. 

Mary Jo: Uh Oh we are having a cloud and some rain. 

Leo: I pushed a button I don’t know what I did. 

Mary Jo: It’s a black cloud because of the patch problem.

Leo: They’ve got things.

Paul: When lightning flashes it looks like the Windows are flag.

Leo: Please ignore the rain cloud.  I am going to push the special emergency button that get’s an engineer to fix it. 

Mary Jo: Paul I was going to say you know Aden Finn, the guy who goes by Joe Elway on Twitter.  He is a Microsoft MVP he does a lot of hyperV stuff.

Leo: Thank you Alex. 

Mary Jo: He did a blog post, he’s been recommending to people, you should delay deploying any patches from Microsoft for one month. 

Leo: What no!  But I’ve been telling people.

Mary Jo: Here’s why.  I know I am just saying what he is out there saying.

Leo: Because we don’t test them. 

Mary Jo: Microsoft is testing them.

Paul: This is what we need, somebody to make a graph that shows the number of Windows updates or any updates that have shipped on Patch Tuesday every month for the past couple of years.  3 to 5 years up and down, up and down.  Then show which ones that have problems, the number of ones that has some sort of problem and needed fix of some kind.  The number of time Microsoft has actually pulled a patch and said no do not install this and then had to release a new version.  I guess what I am curious about is, as we move forward in time whether the instances of problems have gone up over time.  Obviously they don’t go up in a linear fashion but maybe over time you see that trend.  If that’s true and I don’t know that it is by the way and I’m not actually suggesting that it is.  But if is then his advice is correct.  Because the old advice where we said trust Microsoft they know what they’re doing, it’s better to be updated.  Mistakes happen but it’s so infrequent.

Leo: It isn’t that frequent.  I mean maybe this happened a few times. 

Mary Jo: I’ve seen more but maybe we’re just seeing more reports of it?  I don’t know.  Exchange went through this period where they were just having horrible problems with patches.  So were all the Office servers, Office Client when they did service pack one.  It seems just anecdotally like it’s more frequent. 

Paul: It’s unfortunate you can’t as an individual schedule this in Windows Update.  Do you actually need most of these things right now, really?

Mary Jo: That’s what he said if you’re using system center configuration manager you can just do a rule and it will say hey delay this by one month.  If you are using Windows Server update services or Windows Update not so easy.  Yeah I don’t know but I think Microsoft really needs to talk publicly about what the solution is here to kind of get these patches back under control. 

Leo: Well tell me because I need to tell people on the radio show.  What I’ve been saying is because of zero day exploits that you need to do it right away. 

Paul: I think you just said something to the effect that this doesn’t happen all that often.  But if you’re a Windows 7 user in this case and you just blue screened and you can’t boot into your computer.

Leo: It doesn’t matter.

Paul: One time’s is too many.

Leo: Now this was not a critical update so I could still say always install the critical updates immediately.  Is that what Joe Elway is saying? 

Mary Jo: Aden just said he’s advising his customers and colleagues to delay by a month.

Leo: Even critical updates? 

Mary Jo: He’s just saying delay for a month.  He didn’t specify.

Leo: I think that’s bad advice because of zero day.  We’ve seen more zero day exploits than we’ve seen failed updates. 

Paul: Is that true though?  Are there fairly regular stories about Windows users.

Mary Jo: Being hit by zero day?

Leo: Yes. 

Paul: Hacked by zero day exploits, okay.  That’s a tough one.

Mary Jo:  I really think it would be great for Microsoft sometime soon to come out and just say you know what we know people have been having trouble with these patches.  Here’s our guidance, here’s our advice and here’s what we’re doing to get the patches back under control.  I’ll tell you one false rumor that’s going around about this.  Microsoft just had their latest round of layoffs.  A number of people who are laid off were testers on Windows.  A lot of people are saying see this is what happens when you lay of the testers.  But actually the people who were laid off as the testers they weren’t doing this kind of testing.  They weren’t testing patches.

Leo: Right they were testing Destiny.

Mary Jo: The reason Microsoft probably did that was because they now are changing the testing function and the testers who are remaining are going to be more like an engineer combined with a tester in their function.  So if you hear people saying oh they don’t have anybody testing Windows anymore and that’s why this is happening that is not correct. 

Leo: You know what it’s hard to do.  Windows runs on a very heterogeneous variety of hardware. 

Mary Jo: It does, yes.

Paul: Yeah they can have as many test matrices as they want but all it takes is that one guy with the goofy configuration and there are probably a lot of those guys.

Leo: Well and when you have 150 million user base.  If you have one tenth of 1% have problems, that’s still millions of people. It’s going to be significant event.

Paul: Yeah you don’t want to work the phone lines that day.  Like getting in an accident in a car and being killed by an airbag or that minority of people.

Leo: Yes I think so.  So do we say don’t wear seatbelts.

Paul: Just because it has happened doesn’t mean it’s safer to ignore those safety features. 

Mary Jo: It doesn’t, right.

Paul: I don’t know.  I want to be clear, I’m not taking a stand on this.  I don’t really know.  I’d love to see data about the reliability of the Windows update updates over some period of time.  Just to draw some understanding of what’s happening here, because I really don’t know. 

Leo: Ok Google how many Window update crashes have there been?
Mary Jo: Here’s somebody listening right now to the show, Chris G. he said I’m doing the thing where I delay the updates for a month but not the zero days.  I do those manually because those have to be applied immediately.

Paul: A lot of work though.

Mary Jo: Yep, he said a lot of work.

Paul: The thing that bugs me about this is I feel like one of the big sort of general themes that I spend a lot of time on is trying to convince people not to micromanage everything.

Leo: Yeah you can trust Microsoft. 

Paul: I try not to say it like that, Leo.

Leo: That’s what I say.  Because it goes back to people would change the size of their swap files, I would say no, no let Microsoft do it they know better than you. 

Paul: It’s hard not to be compulsive when you’ve grown up on Windows computers because you used to run check disk all the time, used to run all those automated tools all the time, used to run disk defrag all the time.   You would run first your antivirus and then eventually we had the antimalware stuff, spyware and all the stuff.  We’re used to kind of hovering over the computer and flipping switches and stuff.  I feel like we’ve gotten to the point where a lot of people are on board with not doing that anymore and then this blows up in their face.  It’s like well maybe I need to micromanage it.  

Leo: To be honest with you I think I’m going to still tell at least on the radio show listeners that you should install Windows updates as soon as they’re available.  It’s not even zero days it’s hackers that say let me see what that update fixes.  Oh good here’s a vector lets write a virus.

Paul: Maybe the advice is as simple as leave it on the default settings. 

Leo: Yes that’s my advice.

Paul: Because Windows will update those things in the background and then over some amount of time it will say hey by the way you’re going to have to reboot your computer.  Rather than oh it’s patch tuesday let me go install those updates.  You have to kind of let it sit because in some cases that might not happen immediately anyway and maybe if there is a huge problem right up front.  A lot of those people might be spared by that.  Maybe the real advice is leave it alone until it tells you to reboot.

Leo: I am thinking about this because I’m going to talk about this, this weekend obviously.  The other I am going to say is just as we have learned with XP relying on updates alone is not going to protect. More important don’t run as administrator, don’t accept candy from strangers.  That sort of thing.

Paul: Stay off the internet you would be in good shape. 

Leo: My chief advice, I’ve saw the numbers I think 94% of all internet explorer based exploits would be prohibited, banned, forbidden, wouldn’t work if you ran as a standard user.  But how hard is it to run as a standard user in Windows.

Paul: It’s pretty miserable.

Leo: 8.1 is not such a good experience.  7 wasn’t so bad.  It seems worse now.

Paul: Yeah I’ve ran into this.

Leo: Even that’s not a good advise. 

Paul: Yeah that’s a tough one.  If it was your computer and you were the only person on it you could set up your admin account and then the user account.  Then you would know the password for the admin account so you could hand check everything so to speak.

Leo: That’s the best thing to do I think.  But I have noticed there are some things in Windows. 

Paul: But if it’s a shared computer then you got a problem.

Leo: Right then it’s a different matter.

Paul: Or if you are a child.  In other words I am going to do the right thing so here’s the computer to the child it’s not an admin account go have fun with that.  They’re going to bothering you every 15 minutes.

Leo: Do you do that with your kids?  Are your kids that administrators of their computers? 

Paul: Yeah they are. 

Leo: Oh you’re nuts.  You’re insane.

Paul: My kids have a modicum of common sense.  But I check their computers from time to time. 

Leo: The kid I’m responsible for, Michael, who’s 11, plays Minecraft like crazy and all that stuff. He downloaded something that had a bunch of helpers and it screwed everything up and I was like oh crap.  I went through it and I uninstalled everything and he’s now using it as a limited user and he hasn’t bugged me.  Well when he wants to install something he’ll say can you come in and do the password.  Boy it’s so much better.  This is my issue, somebody in the chat room said which would you rather have a Windows BSOD or a Windows that’s hacked?  I would almost prefer a BSOD.  Fixing a Windows machine once it has Malware on it.

Paul: It’s actually almost impossible sometimes if it’s a rude kit type thing.

Leo: You might as well uninstall.   BSOD is preferable in that regard. 

Paul: Please don’t use that as a show title.  A BSOD is preferable. 

Leo: BSOD is a terrible thing to waste.  It’s a tough situation.  I feel for Microsoft.  Apparently this has to do with people using shortcuts for fonts instead of the actual fonts in their font folder.  That’s what one Microsoft engineer said.

Paul: Sorry but Microsoft needs to test for that kind of stuff.  This is their responsibility.  They screwed this up.  They need to not screw this up.  They need to communicate what happened and they need to communicate how they are going to make sure this isn’t going to happen again.  There is just no way to excuse this.

Leo: Blue screens after applying KB2982791 to Windows home.

Paul: Like the waiting room to hell in there. 

Leo: Bring up the control panel search for fonts, click on View installed fonts, look at the output to see if you have a file with a shortcut.  If you have a file with a shortcut bad user.  Fix it.  Now this is somebody from Microsoft.

Paul: This is like a conversation from the 1990’s.  When was the last time you looked at your font folder? 

Leo: I have a font folder? 

Paul: Like who cares?  This is so weird. 

Leo: Then the next thing is I wait to install updates.  It’s hard for me to reconcile. 

Paul: I’m compulsive myself.  It’s hard for me not to install.

Leo: What if you waited a week?  A month seems a long time.  Maybe a month in enterprise but what if you waited a week.

Paul: I wish there was a way in Windows to schedule that.  I wish you could say I do want you to download these things wait a week, wait 2 weeks whatever the time period you care for and then do it.  There is no way to do that.  Maybe we’ll get there.  I don’t know. 

Leo: So is it all fixed now? 

Mary Jo: No it’s not, right?

Paul: No it’s not all fixed. 
Mary Jo: They haven’t re-released the update I don’t think.

Paul: No they haven’t. 

Mary Jo: So not yet. 

Paul: It’s only Wednesday of the week after it happened. 

Mary Jo: I will say one thing, you know the guys who are in charge of testing the patches and rolling out the patches, they have not gone home probably.  There like sleeping in cots at Microsoft I bet.  Because they’re telling them you guys got to fix this, come on.  Let’s go.  It’s not like they are just sitting by going oh it’s summer vacation lets fix it some other time.  That’s not what’s happening. 

Leo: People wonder why I so frequently say, I’ll get callers on the radio show and I say why are you running Window you should get an Ipad you nitwit.  There are plenty of people who need to run Windows obviously.  But those people either know what they’re doing enough to solve this problem or have an IT department.  But I get 70 year old ladies saying My Windows machine isn’t working.  What am I supposed to tell them, yeah find the font folder. 

Paul: Yeah it’s crazy.  I didn’t need the Ruble symbol. 

Leo: I don’t want Rubles.  Take back your gosh darn Rubles. 

Paul: Even the Euro symbol I only type by mistake.  It’s some key combination. 

Leo: I know and I don’t want it. 

Paul: Control 3 or something.

Leo: Geekery in the chat room says you can delay updates it’s just another automated task.  So you can go into scheduler and delay it, is that the case?

Paul: I don’t know.

Mary Jo: I know with configuration manager you can do it somewhat easily. 

Leo: Yeah but that’s enterprise, you have to have an enterprise.

Mary Jo: Yeah I don’t know about otherwise. 

Leo: What about the Cloud?  Now you can take the rain cloud back. 

Mary Jo: Now we need the black cloud. 

Leo: What happened in the Cloud?

Mary Jo: It hasn’t been a good week for Azure in the Cloud. 

Leo: This is a depressing show. 

Mary Jo: No it’s not depressing it’s just the reality.

Leo: I am loving the Xbox 1 August update.  Can I just say that?

Mary Jo: Okay that’s good.

Leo: Okay go on.

Mary Jo: I should clarify there are some services that had problems this past week from Microsoft that do not run on Azure.  Visual Studio online went down for like a whole day on Friday but that was not because of Azure.  Microsoft CRM online went down for a number of people for a better part of a day or more last week also but again not because of Azure.  Because that’s not hosted on Azure yet.  The Azure problem which happened on August 18th started out around morning time Pacific and suddenly a bunch of their services started showing Full Service interruption.  In other words, down.  It started with Virtual Machine Service and then Azure Cloud services and then it kind of cascaded into HDN site going down.  That’s Hadoop.  You don’t want Hadoop to go down.  Azure Mobile services went down, back up services.  It was like a cascading effect.  It wasn’t down for everyone or everywhere but it was down for a lot of people.  Microsoft was providing updates on the status dashboard which was good.  Telling people yep we know it’s down, we’re trying to repair it.  After a number of hours I am not even sure in the end how long these were down and for how many people they were down.  They just said ok we’ve mitigated it, it’s up.  So far we don’t know what happened.  We do not know why that happened on the 18th.  There’s been no explanation.  I am assuming giving how they do things there at Azure there will be a lengthy blog post at some point telling people what happened but right now we don’t know why that went down.  There was no word about why.  Just hey we’re down and then hey we’re up.  So it wasn’t a great week for people using Cloud services.  I like that thunder. 

Leo: Is it raining in Barcelona, Paul. 

Paul: It actually did rain while we were here.  Which is unusual.

Leo: So I mentioned we might be delayed next week because the electric company is going to change out transformers and we’re losing power.  I guess they don’t like to work at night.  We’re losing power between 8 and 10 a.m.  next week at this time.  So maybe we will be a little delayed.  So we were thinking how do we do this because we want to keep our signal alive.  So we can do reruns, so we were thinking what we could create and instance on Azure or Amazon web services of a server and run it from there.  Then we’re debating Azure or web services and after this I was like can we use Amazon.  So this isn’t good.  This is just a small example.  We have an Azure account we could do it.

Paul: Just have a Azure fail over so if you go offline it automatically happens. 

Leo: That’s what you could do, Rackspace, Amazon and Azure then you’re guaranteed.  Unless level 3 goes down then we’re all screwed.  We talk about Cloud problems but the Cloud is still remarkably robust.  It seems to be getting more robust.

Mary Jo: It is. 

Leo: I think the direction is correct, yes? 

Paul: Oh yeah.

Leo: I trust the Cloud, I really like the Cloud.

Paul: I explicitly trust the Cloud.

Leo: You’re in Barcelona what better way for you to do work. 

Paul: Yep.  Actually one of the interesting things that happened on this trip is I usually maintain a connection to my home server, through a VPN.  Something failed over there, I don’t know what it is.  Last year when my buddy Steven Bank was over there he’s like a technical guy.  I could have pinged him and said hey reboot the server or something.  The people there now are not technical and I’m not going to bother them with that.  So you kind of just do without it.  Guess what life goes on it’s fine.  That’s been kind of interesting. 

Leo: Yeah Gmail goes down for a half an hour and people call 911 or Facebook.

Paul: Yeah you got to get your kitten video’s. 

Leo: It’s okay it will be back. 

Mary Jo: It comes back.

Leo Yeah it comes back and usually it comes back pretty quickly. 

Mary Jo: This past week like I said it’s been bad.  Azure had been doing pretty well up and until this past week.  Then this happened.  That’s what people remember of course because you go to try and use Virtual Machine or backup and you can’t.  That’s what you remember. 

Leo: Yeah that’s the truth.  It bugs me because then when we talk about Cloud, people go oh you can’t trust the Cloud, I’ll never use the Cloud.  Because they remember the failures.  But really uptime is like three 9’s.  It’s pretty good.

Mary Jo: Or more. 

Leo: Microsoft updates Windows what is that?

Mary Jo: IOT.

Paul: I am sorry Internet of Things.

Leo: Oh there is a Windows version of IOT?

Paul: Sort of they’re working on it. 

Leo: It’s not imbedded?

Paul: I don’t know if you wrote about this Mary Jo, and of course we haven’t talked about this.

Mary Jo: I didn't’.

Paul: Mary Jo and I haven’t talked as much this week.  Because she has been ignoring me on Skype.  No because I am here.

Mary Jo: I have you blocked.  I didn’t tell you that.

Paul: But Mary Jo and I have often talked in the past about how Microsoft will announce something and we spend all this time parsing it and trying to understand what it means.  This announcement was one of the densest things I’ve ever seen in my life.  The way I understand it and it’s possible someone out there could correct me on this one.  About a month ago Microsoft released the first preview version of the Windows for the Internet of Things.  SDK, you could use a version of Visual Studio, access a special development board that you could have gotten at Build.  It was not an off the shelf development board it was a special kind of a board.  It was C++, it was Winthro32 it was a little weird.  It was that kind of stuff going on.  The idea was here’s this Intel SOC chip set design target it, make fun devices.  Yesterday or 2 days ago maybe they came out what I take to be a second preview.  This one targets an off the shelf first gen Intel Galeo board.  There’s a second gen version out already.  So it’s kind of opening it to a broader audience because there are people out there who have that kind of stuff.  Its a we know type thing.  Obviously there are a lot of gadget type developers or what they call makers who are out there building things and making little gadgets and stuff.  So they understand this hardware and now they can use this.  But the thing that really struck me about this is they didn’t call it Windows for the Internet of Things.  I almost believe that my constant harping on this has hit some bone somewhere.  Because they’re just calling it a preview version of Windows and that’s where the name ends.  My understanding is it is literally the second preview of that Windows IOT.  Does that sound right?

Mary Jo: That’s my understanding too.  Supposedly this version is based on Windows 8.1 which makes me think it’s Windows embedded to some degree perhaps? 

Paul: My original description of this thing, I said this is basically a modern always connected version of Windows Embedded. 

Mary Jo: I guess the first version that they came out with was a custom version, just tailored for a small group of people who wanted to get on board early with the Galeao board post.

Paul: They had to approve you for the program.  You had to get the board from them.  But not it’s more open.

Mary Jo: It is.

Paul: You could buy these things off the shelf.  Of course what people are complaining about now is, well thanks for supporting Gen 1 but Gen 2 is out.

Leo: Yeah, but sometimes you don't want the faster thing. You want the cheaper slower thing.

Paul: Yeah, so I am not usually cynical as you know, and so on my site the way that I describe this to people was, in the past we wouldn't have seen these early previews. We would've gotten a Beta and it would've occurred in October and it would have supported Gen1 and Gen2 and some other things. But now it's rapid release, and so now they're kind of petering stuff out at an earlier phase than we would've seen before. It's kind of like the Windows phone developer program. Like, we're getting stuff earlier than we would have in the past. And so you can kind of complain like, oh they didn't support this or this but you know what? You're getting a really early peak at this and this is a chance to get in on a new platform in a much earlier time than they ever would've allowed in the past and I think, on that note it's kind of cool. Do you have a sunshine graphic, Leo, that you can put over me?

Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, we need the sunshine graphic. Sunny blue skies, maybe some window clouds. But I mean, it is cool, it's kind of like what Raspberry Pie is, but the Windows version, right?

Leo: Intel.

Paul: Well, the Intel version. And by the way, this is  as big of a deal for Intel as it is for Microsoft. Both of these-

Leo: Is it X86? It must be...

Paul: It is X86. This is straight Win32, this is old school stuff but it's in a tiny assoc package, right? Both of these companies are looking to get into these markets because, I don't know if anyone has been paying any attention, but when the mobile thing started they were not on board with that. And so today you see lots of SnapDragon processors and lots of Android and iOS and you don't see a lot of X86 anywhere in the real mobile space. I mean, obviously there are X86 tablets, but you don't see a lot of them and certainly you don't see a lot of Windows and now they're looking a little further ahead and saying, okay we need to get out there.

Leo: We're in a happy meadow now. Sun has come out.

Paul: It's like one of those Disney movies, like a bunch of animated birds will start flying around. Zip a dee doo da, zip a dee yay....

Leo: But despite the fact that the sun is shining in Barcelona, Paul is getting darker and darker.

Mary Jo: It's night time.

Leo: Let's take a break, when we come back we'll have more Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, Windows Weekly. I do want to talk about I had a really great experience with the August update for the Xbox One because I came to work yesterday and I realized, oh crap I forgot to download Diablo 3. And I launched my SmartGlass app, bought it, and it downloaded. By the time I got home, it was on my console and I was able to play for about five hours.

Paul: You're living in the future Leo.

Leo: I am and I loved it. So see, the sun is shining somewhere in Redmond. Our show today brought to you by our friends at ITProTV. These are Don and Tim over there were I think, kind of inspired by- Oh now what is...? I got it, there we go. Don and Tim were inspired by what we're doing here. I don't think they were inspired by the sun and the rain clouds, they were inspired by the idea that you could make geeky stuff entertaining. And since they had ten years under their belts as IT trainers for folks getting certs, they said, why don't we do what Leo's doing but for IT training? And that's when ITProTV was created and what a great idea. In fact, I see the blinking light at itpro.tv so if I click the 'on air' button, we can see what Don and Tim are up to right now. Because they're live, they do have thirty hours of new stuff every week. That means they've got a lot of new content but that also means that you can join and watch live on your Roku- Oh that's previously recorded but still you get a sense of what it looks like. -On your Roku, your laptop, your tablet and the chat room is there so people can participate with them and ask questions. They also do live Q&A's to specific study topics and it's really pretty sweet, I must say. The measure-up practice exams are included. If you're trying to polish up your skills, or maybe you want to get a job in IT, you've got to visit itpro.tv and sign up. They have monthly and yearly subscriptions, and one advantage of the yearly subscription is if you get the yearly subscription you also can download the audio and video for offline use and that's really nice. That's something people have been asking for and they listen, which is great. Let me show you this, you'll love it. If I go to the ITProTV Lab I can actually play with a sandbox. So if you're studying for your MCSA and you say I don't have Windows 8 or Windows server, how would I do that? Don't worry, any html 5 browser, even on a Mac- I'm on a Mac right now. -Will allow you to watch this. I'm going to create an instance of Windows server, I can create the clients as well. I can set it up so that I can practice along with the course work, this is phenomenal. I really love what they're doing and corporate accounts are available for departments and companies. So there, look at that... Windows server, running. I'll never understand why they have the tiles on Windows server, but I'm an administrator, and can do all of the things I'd want to do. This really gives you a chance to get in here and start messing with this stuff. I just think these guys are so smart. ITProTV- Now, here's our deal. If you go to itpro.tv/ww, we're going to get you 30% off not just for a month or a year but for forever when you use the offer code: WW30. That means it's less than $40/month for all of this. You could watch all day long if you wanted. You could learn and absorb all the time and for $40 that's less than one book and certainly a lot less than IT bootcamp - itpro.tv. Now Paul, you're going to have to help me shut this instance down because I don't know what...

Paul: Did you actually fire up a VM?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: That's awesome. I think you're managing my home server, so go to administrator and then sign out.

Leo: Okay and then how do I shut it down after I do that because I don't-

Paul: What are you running this in?

Leo: What are you asking me for, I'm not an IT Pro.

Paul: What is this in, like what-

Leo: I'm doing this on a Mac in Safari or something, any html browser.

Paul: Oh it's in a browser. Well hit escape first and see if you can get the browser to come back up.

Leo: Oh well I could just shut the browser but won't that leave the instance- Or maybe it will time out after a while.

Paul: It doesn't matter if the instance is...

Leo: Don and Tim I'm sorry.

Paul: Sorry I wasn't paying attention.

Leo: No I did this yesterday. I started an instance and then I couldn't figure out how to stop it.

Paul: So what's the cli- I'm just curious how you do it...

Leo: It's html 5 based-

Paul: So it's a desktop app.

Leo: Yeah, it's really awesome and plus you get the measure up exams for free, I love it. itpro.tv/ww use the promo code: WW30, I'm not kidding this is awesome. Moving along, Paul Thurrott Mary Jo Foley, we're talking Windows.

Paul: I'm sorry, but before we get to the next major topic area I wanted to ask Mary Jo a question. Have you been following this Windows store scam thing?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Have you heard stories about this?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: I haven't written about this yet but I think the one thing I just wanted to tell people about it was- Twogeek, I think Lifehacker has written something about it. But what they're saying is if you go the Windows store in Windows and search for a famous app like Facebook or VLC player or something, you get the real app but you also get a lot of garbage apps that steal the icon from the real app and look like the real app and all of this kind of stuff and the unfortunate truth here is that this has always been a problem. This is what the Windows phone store has been like for years and years. And Microsoft's policy is that they won't do anything about it unless someone complains and in many cases, they need the person who is basically the IP holder to complain. And Raphael is someone who has looked at this and Windows phone a lot in the past and has found a lot of Nintendo ROM type apps where you can play games on your phone using stolen ROM's and there's a lot of that crap in Windows phone store and now there's a lot in Windows store and I think this is what happens when you have a mad dash to stock a store you can say you have X number of apps and don't look silly next to the market leaders.

Leo: This is from the howtogeek website and there is no VLC for Windows-

Paul: Well actually there is, but the problem is there's a bunch that are not that app that use that icon.

Leo: And it looks exactly like it. The real one is free not $4.99 and so the scam in this case is simple. They're just charging you for something you could get for free.

Paul: It's literally a scam and so the question is, how did this get by Microsoft? Did any human being actually look at that thing?

Mary Jo: I've seen Joe Belfiore and some of the other people say, we know there's a problem with this and we're working on it and are going to clean up the store. I've seen people commit to this in public but I remember when I was looking for the Facebook app and I was looking for it in the store and the real Facebook app was like ten or twelve apps down when I was looking for it.

Leo: Look at this, here's the iTunes player app for $9. And what does it do? It helps users know how to use and download iTunes. $9!

Mary Jo: They definitely need to police it more for sure.

Paul: That stuff should not be in that store. It's ridiculous. The very point of that store is to provide a curated safe experience that users can trust, kind of like the point of Windows update when you think about it and it's crazy that they've allowed any app like that in there and I wouldn't be surprised if half the apps in there were like that. It's terrible.

Mary Jo: Definitely somebody needs to police it. On Windows and Windows phone stores, both, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: And of course, since now searches go to the store, you're going to find scams right there on the-

Paul: Just in case you were wondering what is worse than ads in Windows... That.

Leo: Holy cow.. I had no idea.

Paul: It's the dirty underbelly.

Leo: And it's been going on for a long time, apparently.

Mary Jo: It has.

Leo: Well Microsoft... You know what the problem is, they don't have enough people working there.

Paul: Yeah, well this has actually always been a problem,

Mary Jo: There are people there who are trying to fix this but could be doing more.

Leo: If Apple can do it....

Paul: I know, believe me. It's frustrating.

Mary Jo: And the developers hate it too. I mean, the honest developers, not the scam developers. You want your real apps to get top billing. That's why they redid the store is to give people better billing.

Paul: Maybe the point of the store is that there isn't anything else called VLC anything if it's not related to you, that has the same orange and white cone logo.

Leo: And by the way, Microsoft gets a cut of that $8.99 right?

Paul: Yes, they do. It's disgusting.

Mary Jo: I don't think that's why.

Leo: I'm not saying that's why but come on.

Paul: Yeah but that means they're culpable. I mean you know, they not only allowed it but they made a profit off of it as well. It's really sad.

Leo: I'm going to cheer everybody up. Mary Jo, show us your phone.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: It's pretty...

Mary Jo: It's pretty. It is.

Leo: So you speculated that in fact the HTC event yesterday was going to be showing an HTC One running Windows 8.1 and in fact, there it is.

Mary Jo: There it is guys.

Leo: You guys, went, I'm sure to the event. Well actually Paul didn't.

Paul: Yeah I would've, I was invited but...

Mary Jo: Yeah and one fun fact is they gave us, Press, who got loaner devices this case. Which is the Dot case and it's Xbox green and it even says 'Xbox.'

Leo: What, ohhh.... Oh..

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Leo: Now this is actually one of my favorite Android phones. It's just great hardware...

Paul: What about the camera? Is the camera any good?

Leo: It's 4- Well I'll tell you from the Android point of view and then Mary Jo, I'd love to hear what they've done on the Windows points.

Mary Jo: Go ahead.

Leo: So it's 4 megapixels and HTC's reasoning is, that way we can make them bigger and they'll have better low-light performance. That has not been my experience but the stuff you're posting on the web, 4 megapixels is actually enough for a computer, it's only if you're going to make a bigger print. What they do do at least on Android is they have the Zoe and a lot of really nice Gallery features. Is that on the Windows side as well, Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: Yeah, so this phone is the exact phone that is the Android One. The only difference between these phones is that the words Windows Phone are etched on the back.

Leo: Well and the fact that it's running Windows phone.

Mary Jo: Right. But hardware and spec-wise, it has all of the HTC apps that...

Leo: It has Blink Feed, I know, I saw that...

Paul: I don't think the smart cover support is as extensive on Windows phone as it is on Android. I think if you had that cover in an Android phone you could actually have more stuff on it.

Leo: They don't have Zoe either, do they have Zoe on it? Yeah, you would know if they had Zoe.

Mary Jo: What is Zoe?

Leo: On the Android phone, one of the modes is you shoot a video and it takes stills out of it and they have a really nice highlight feature that will automatically make a little movie for you of the days stills and movies. It's really nice, but I'm sure Nokia has something similar.

Mary Jo: I used the camera last night and tried it out in low light and you know what, I've been using the Icon which is a 15 megapixel camera, an amazing camera, but I got to tell you, my beer photo looked pretty good last night and still looks good.

Paul: My understanding is the big deal here is there is two lenses so you can do post-processing on a photo-

Leo: That's right.

Paul: So when you get that effect where the background is kind of blurred out, you can apply that to an existing photo, you don't have to take it that way.

Leo: Yeah, the Nokia Blur does that as well.

Mary Jo: They've got video highlights, you can view your photos or clips by automatically pulling them into one short video set to music. Yep, that's on here. And on the Dot case, one thing that Microsoft did that is obviously not a part of Android one is that they integrated Cortana so that you can use Cortana through the Dot case, which is pretty cool. So far, I really like it. I've only had it for a day, it's really thin and light and this is why I love the HTC 8X because it's a really thin, light phone.

Paul: Yeah, so it's thinner than the Icon?

Mary Jo: It is, much thinner. Even with the case on.

Leo: You know the truth is, I don't put a case on mine because it's such a beautiful aluminum body. It's just a gorgeous phone.

Mary Jo: It is a beautiful phone but I'm scared I would let it slide out of my hand without a case.

Leo: I haven't dropped mine. Front facing speakers, which give you a nice sound right?

Mary Jo: Yeah, and it's metal and feels substantial.

Leo: I always thought this was among the best hardware out there. I think Nokia still has better cameras and probably better software, but...

Paul: But you know, we talked about this in the past, this notion that someone should release the same phone, Windows and Android, and finally someone has done that. But the other benefit of this, which is not immediately obvious, is although you see with the case, is that HTC also has a hardware ecosystem built around this phone and now on Windows you can take advantage of that.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And that's actually kind of a huge thing and that's why for the past couple of years, I have recommended Nokia because you're not just buying a phone. You now have this choice of stuff that is styled to look like the phone, is designed to work with the phone, is designed specifically for those devices. You know, and HTC if you look at their website I know they don't have a lot but they have several accessories that were designed for this phone and now you can take advantage of that if you have the Windows phone version.

Leo: Paul, are you sitting in a bucket of ice?

Mary Jo: I know, I keep hearing ice, I'm like what is that?

Leo: Are you going to do the ice bucket challenge? Has that made it's way to Barcelona yet?

Paul: No, I'm just going to give money, Leo.

Mary Jo: Paul and I both did get challenged.

Leo: Who challenged you?

Paul: Oh we did? I didn't even see that where was this?

Mary Jo: Rick Klaus, he challenged us, a guy from Microsoft Canada.

Paul: Oh I didn't even know. Did he slap me with a leather glove, are we supposed to meet at dawn?

Mary Jo: No I think he put it on Facebook maybe.

Leo: Usually people Tweet you like crazy saying, Paul you've been challenged. Why haven't you done it..?

Mary Jo: He's in Redmond, not Canada. He's Canadian I think. Sorry, Rick if you're not.

Leo: I wasn't going to do it but I finally bowed to peer pressure. I had all of these reasons for not doing it but I bowed to peer pressure.

Mary Jo: But you did it right?

Leo: Yeah, I did it on TWiT on Sunday. So-

Mary Jo: Back to this phone...

Leo: The M8, a couple of interesting points. Better battery life on Windows phone, that's telling.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I haven't been able to verify that yet...

Paul: But you know, this claim has been out there for a while. That Windows phone is far more efficient than Android, it runs on the same hardware so that kind of makes sense that it might be the case.

Leo: This would be the real apples to apples comparison we've been waiting for.

Paul: Yeah, you don't really get that a lot so this is really interesting.

Leo: Yeah, the other negative is that it's Verizon only for now, although I think other carriers will get it.

Mary Jo: Yay! We need some good Windows phones on Verizon.

Paul: I guess it's also coming to AT&T.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's definitely coming to AT&T and we asked them at the launch yesterday was it going to go international and they wouldn't say. They wouldn't say when it was going to be on Sprint or if- It was a Verizon-Microsoft HTC event so they weren't going to talk about all of that.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: The pricing is pretty amazing though $99.

Leo: Yeah, that was the other point I was going to bring up.

Mary Jo: For a two year contract.

Leo: That's half the price of the Android version.

Mary Jo: Yeah, very aggressive pricing. And $29.99/month if you want to pay monthly and you're on the Verizon Edge program so that's pretty impressive. I haven't used the Android version of this phone, obviously, so I can't compare it to that but I have been an 8X user and I have been an Icon user for a while now and I just like the thinner design and the screen resolution is really great, 1080p. I don't know, I kind of like it. I'm not saying I'm going to dump my Icon yet but I'm going to keep using it and see how it goes.

Leo: It's a little smaller, isn't it, than your Icon? The screen says 5 in.

Paul: Yeah, screen is the same.

Mary Jo: They're both 5 in but it's taller because of the two bands at the top and the bottom.

Leo: That's the weird thing about that phone...

Paul: Can you show us the relative widths of those?

Mary Jo: Yeah, let me take them out of the cases.

Leo: When HTC announced this for the Android, they announced the case and I completely forgot about it.

Mary Jo: Okay, can you tell by that?

Leo: I can see the Icon is a little squarer too, which makes it feel thicker.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it feels blockier and heavier and maybe they are the same weight, I don't recall but this just feels more distributed than this, to me.

Paul: Yeah, it kind of fits in your hand because of the curved back.

Mary Jo: It does, yeah.

Leo: I love the M8, I'm a huge fan of that phone.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's nice to have a choice.

Leo: If I can't get this repaired, the 1520 then I'll probably just trade in my Android M8 for the Windows M8.

Mary Jo: So that was good. The launch was good-

Leo: But that was all they announced, right? There were rumors they might announce a tablet.

Mary Jo: No tablet, that was it. Short and sweet. And it's available right away, which is great. It went on sale on the internet yesterday, the day of the launch, and today in stores, which is great because for a while we used to have to wait for forever once a phone was announced and now they're just showing up.

Leo: Now here's the question, will Verizon employees let anybody know it's there.

Mary Jo: I know, right? Good question.

Leo: In fact, there's an article on how the Perception is killing Windows phone. Looks like Perception killed Vista, is killing Windows 8.

Paul: There are just these things that just kind of hang out there in the air. In the Vista days it was like those Apple ads, I'm a MAC I'm a PC and they would make these complete bologna claims. And no one would ever challenge it and we would all just kind of clap each other in the back and laugh saying, PC's suck. And those kind of things kind of bother me, and the interesting thing since writing this article I pointed out some of that kind of stuff around Windows phone and kind of talked about the basic bologna of the claims. Somebody from Forbes wrote an article saying, let's look into Windows phone and what we could actually do to fix this thing. And I thought, here we go again and he's going to write this complete bologna article, and actually no it was good. It was nicely done. So I guess you can be out in the world and not be participant about it and not be a jerk. A lot of this stuff we just sort of accept certain things you know? It's just like the Steve Jobs claim a while back when Bill Gates came on the giant stage and he said, you know between the two of us, we control 100% of the PC market and it's like, well yeah... Sure. But it's like 95.5, and this article that I complained about, the headline is, 'Apple and Android Control the World.' And it's like Android controls the world and Apple is a distant second. We live in like Perceptionville. A reporter from the major publications said, I walked into a major square in New York City and I didn't see anyone using Windows phones, obviously no one is using Windows phones. Don't take the time to go to one of those countries where we're in double digit market share and see if there are any iPhones. By the way, one of the things you don't see in Barcelona is iPhones. You don't see Windows phones either, but it's Samsung everywhere. It's all Android here. So these things obviously depend on where you are and listen, everyone who reads what I write and listens to me in the podcast knows I've always been very honest about Windows phones position in the market, how bad they have it, and how hard it's going to be to catch up and all that kind of stuff. I'm not ra-ra-ra cheerleader guy or anything like that but there's kind of a blind acceptance of Apple that I find disheartening and a blind acceptance that everything Microsoft does sucks and they're never going to catch up. It's like, it's not that clear cut.

Leo: Paul, were you listening to the first half of this show?

Paul: Well I was participating in the first half.

Leo: I mean, we just did a litany of problems Microsoft is having with Windows.

Paul: Yeah, but Leo this is just what's happening this week.

Leo: Right, it's not forever.

Paul: And Windows phone is not Windows. Well, it sort of is Windows but it has unique problems of it's own.

Leo: I agree but I think Windows phone rises and falls as Microsoft rises and falls.

Paul: Absolutely.

Leo: It could be a real benefit, it could be, hey this is the Microsoft phone!

Paul: If you look just at the broader world of computing, there's a reason that people are turning to simpler devices. There's a reason that Chromebooks are taking off, there's a reason that Android Tablets are taking off, you know? There's a reason for this stuff. Microsoft will or will not react correctly, whatever it is. My personal view is, certainly on the participant side when it comes to Windows phone because I really do feel like it's better but I also try to approach it from a realistic standpoint. The second big piece of BS that I pulled out of this article was, Google is like Coke and Apple is like Pepsi. And I thought that's interesting, I don't know anything about the soft drink market. Let's see what the relative market share of those two products are and you know what? Those two products are actually pretty damn close. And in the smart phone market, Apple is actually this little thing down here, compared to Android. They're not Coke and Pepsi, not even close. And those are the kinds of things like, 'I'm a Mac, I'm a PC.' You throw it a phrase, everyone kind of laughs. It's kind of like saying, businesses buy PCs and people buy Macs. And everyone goes, yes exactly. And it's like no. Not exactly. Way more people buy PCs than MACs, still. So I guess I just take exception to these things that they just throw out there and no one ever calls them on it, you know? So it's disheartening.

Mary Jo: Yeah, and we've said this before but, the tech press disproportionately uses Apple products, right? And we see it when we go to a press event. And Microsoft, at the Surface launch really wanted to change those people's minds. They made it a point to say, hey Surface Pro 3 could replace the Macs that you're all sitting out there using. The problem is that those are the people writing the reviews and so that's why it's hard because people trust them and a lot of them haven't used Windows products.

Paul: I have so many stories about this kind of stuff and I'm not going to call out individuals but Microsoft goes out on their product tour years ago for their wireless networking products, goes through New York City and tries to get a famous Tech Journalist to write about their stuff and he was like, yeah this stuff looks great but I'm not writing about it. No reason. And it's that kind of stuff, this happens again, and again, and again. This is the greatest phone you're never going to buy. What a great headline, thanks Walstreet Journal. It's just always kind of skewed against the Microsoft thing and always skewed for the Apple thing. And it's always like that.

Leo: Or skewed for the Android thing.

Paul: That, too.

Mary Jo: That's why this phone is going to be interesting in the Verizon store. It's going to be, hey this is the exact same hardware. And when somebody comes in, are they going to still try to sell them the Android version and say, you know what? Everybody's using the Android version. Or are they going to say, we have two versions, we have the Android version and the Windows phone version. Which do you like better, look at it.

Paul: Well you know, the sad reality of the phone market-

Leo: It's not going to benefit, it's going to lose to that comparison.

Paul: -Aside from the thing you're talking about - Well that's not the comparison. This is what is going to happen: Next week is going to happen and then some other phone is going to come out. They're going to push the Android flavor of the week.

Leo: There has been some great Windows phone hardware, it's not a lack of hardware. For me, it's the lack of Google. That's a pretty big lack.

Paul: Yeah, there's nothing Microsoft can do about that.

Leo: Oh, I understand.

Paul: Just over Youtube-

Leo: It's not their fault.

Paul: No. No, of course it's not their fault. And by the way, I don't like it as a Windows phone user, I would like to have Google apps and Windows on a Windows phone.

Leo: If I could do Google+ on this phone, I would buy it.

Paul: Well you can with a third party app.

Leo: It's horrible, it's a terrible app.

Paul: I know. My point is only, I understand why Google doesn't do it. I don't like it personally but it's obviously their right. I mean, they don't have to support Windows phone but it's too bad. Microsoft is, by nature of their position in the market- Because they certainly weren't doing this five years ago. -But they are broadly supporting all mobile platforms with their apps and so one of the nice things, if you're in the Microsoft ecosystem is, you now have much broader choice of hardware and platforms because Microsoft's stuff is everywhere. I fully expect by the end of this year or whenever that we're going to see offline capable versions of Office Web Apps or whatever they're called today, that work on Chromebook. Because you can do handwriting now in OneNote on Android. That's amazing. We're territory for that kind of stuff but there's no credit being paid back to Microsoft for doing this stuff. They support Amazon's phones now, very broadly in Tablets and Amazon is not doing anything meaningful on Windows and Google is not doing anything meaningful and you know, it's too bad.

Mary Jo: You know the market for these phones to me, has always been the enterprise because if you think about what Leo just said, which is right, if you think about Google's lack of support is a limiting factor for a lot of people but a lot of enterprises don't use Google. They still don't, they use Windows and they use Office. And for people like that, they should really be targeting those people with these, right? But they just recently added the enterprise feature to these phones that a lot of businesses needed.

Paul: I don't remember if we talked about this before I left two weeks ago but for some reason, I went back and looked at my original Windows phone stuff, when it was still called Windows phone 7 series and when they had just announced it. And I think people forget that when Microsoft launched Windows phone, it was a premium phone that was going to go head to head with the most expensive phones in the market, it was aimed exclusively at consumers, they did have Office in there, obviously. But there was no enterprise support at all. It was all about games and music and podcasts and that kind of thing. It was about delighting users and it was about integrated experiences, it was about panoramic user interfaces. It was all of this stuff and if you compare that- Obviously they look very similar but the direction has changed completely and now they're targeting the very lowest end of the market. They've opened it up so that the phones are not as consistent as they used to be. You can run Windows phone in Android hardware now that it has no front buttons, has no camera button. They've obviously killed the licensing, they've gotten rid of virtually all of the hubs, the panoramic experiences are basically gone, the integration with social networking is almost gone and now they're hitting the enterprise. It's like, they might as well call it Windows mobile. They've really changed Windows phone fairly dramatically in just four years.

Leo: Too little too late.

Paul: Well when you're constantly forced to react I mean-

Leo: It's pretty obvious, I mean, at this point I think. I don't want to kill the patient because it's good to have an ecosystem with choice. I love this 1520, it's a great phone.

Paul: This was always the question and Steven Elop finally voiced it in kind of a formal way, but we had been talking about it less formally before they came along, which was, will this market even bear a third ecosystem? Or does this thing shake up like the PC market, where there's one big player, one small player and then little bitty guys in the corner over there. Right now we're the little bitty guys, the Linux of the smartphone market... Is where Windows phone is in the sense that Android is Windows and iOS is MAC. And who knows? The car market supports hundreds and hundreds of models of cars, all from different companies. The computer market has lots of companies but most of them run the same system. The phone market does too but the same deal, same system. So I don't know, we'll see...

Leo: At least the M8 is a nice damn phone.

Paul: It is a nice phone. I'm so glad they did that.

Leo: I am too. I have to tell you, it's because HTC's dying, that they did it. They're absolutely dying. They can't sell the Android version either.

Paul: It was two years ago that HTC made the 8X and the 8S. Mary Jo and I went to that event and were blown away by the thinness and the elegance of those devices and they talked about how they designed them to look like the tiles and on and on and on and it was great. And then they did nothing for two years or whatever but I think that this approach, where you have a phone and then you put Windows on it is not just better for that company, because it's far less R&D, it's a known quantity, it's better for consumers for those people who do want to buy Windows phones. They look at those Android devices and say, I would like that but I want it running Windows if I could do that. And now you can do that, at least with one phone and I hope we see more of that.

Leo: But honestly, it's Samsung all the way. They are Coke and Pepsi. They're so dominant, I think to a great degree because they spend so much on marketing. They outspend everybody.

Paul: By the way, aside from their terrible live events, they do a very effective job of advertising.

Leo: Apparently, even in Barcelona.

Paul: Yeah, they're everywhere here. I did some tech support for my tour guide in Morocco, who had an S4 I think or an S5. It was in a completely different language, obviously and he couldn't get a chat app off of his phone that his kid put on there that was driving him insane, so I did sort of a cross-cultural tech support call and was able to get it off of his phone. It was interesting though because in Morocco, it was Samsung town. You didn't see a single iPhone in Morocco. Actually, I might move there for that reason.

Leo: Well and to be fair, unlike in the US, the Windows phone does quite well in some countries for whatever reason.

Mary Jo: Well Nokia's brand had a lot of cache in a lot of places, unlike here. Also, I think this is why Microsoft is targeting the lower end now with the Nokia hardware, is because that's where they're making end roads, is the mid-range, lower end and they're trying to go where the demand is and where they're selling more phones and that's smart. That's what you have to do if you're a distant third.

Leo: Let's see, Windows phone 8.1 update 1 is now done. I got it on the 1520 right before I broke it, so the developer preview folks have all been updated.

Paul: Well what that means is the developer preview folks who got update 1 now have an update to update 1.

Leo: And they're no longer developer preview, they're at the same version as everybody else.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. This is a lot like that Windows IOT thing where I was saying we are getting things much earlier in the stream than we used to. So when Windows phone 8.1 RTM backed in April, we were able to get it in developer preview and between the time that was released and it was sort of being made open to the general public, Microsoft updated it and we got those updates and that confuses people. Because they'll think, I thought I had the final version I must not have the final version... This must be Beta or something. No, it's the RTM version but they updated it. And a year ago, two years ago we never saw this stuff and so the update 1 release is on the phone that Mary Jo just got, the HTC One M8. But it's not shipping on any other phone yet, so presumably, those folks will get that update at some point as well I'm not really sure.

Leo: And how about the issue I was having where I wanted to get the Cyan firmware update but I couldn't because I had the developer is that now being pushed out?

Paul: No it's not. Have you heard anything about that, Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: No update on that, no update on the update.

Leo: That's good from my point of view because...

Paul: Yeah if you just would've waited a day, Leo.

Leo: Yeah, if it had pushed out the next day I would've been like ugh.

Paul: My glass half full view is that I sort of hope Microsoft does fix it like they said they would but my glass half empty view is that it's never going to happen.

Leo: Really?

Paul: Well what they're going to say is, look this was a bigger technical problem than we thought. If you were sophisticated enough to get into the developer preview and get the stuff on your phone you can roll it back and reinstall it and you know... By the way you can restore from your backups, it's actually not horrible. You just lose an hour or whatever.

Leo: Yeah, Daniel walked me through the process, it was very straight forward. There was a button that said 'backup now' and I did that, got it backed up and then you just download this Nokia software recovery tool. Somebody said you should try it on a different Windows machine. I was trying it on the Acer S7 and somebody said, I had a problem on the S7 so I'll try it out later in the day.

Paul: It's not a bad idea.

Leo: Yeah, why not? It's a free download, it's pretty quick.

Paul: What are you going to do, rebrick it?

Leo: Don't laugh, don't patronize me Paul. How bad could it get, Laporte? Surface Pro 3, yet even more patches.

Paul: I assume you guys talked about the firmware update last week, right?

Leo: I don't even remember, was that a topic?

Mary Jo: We did. Yeah.

Paul: So do you have any idea what this was or what- This was just a surprise.

Leo: Somebody Tweeted me, they keep updating it and they still haven't fixed some of my major issues. They fixed the battery issue.

Mary Jo: I think the Wi-Fi issue was still persisting for some people even after July.

Leo: Okay so that fixes the fix.

Mary Jo: Otherwise, they talked about UEFI and said it was part of this-

Leo: That's the boot?

Mary Jo: Yeah. The boot.

Leo: The extendable firmware interface. So did you have to do the firmware update?

Paul: It's just a restart.

Leo: Restart and then is buzzes, and that's when it bricks. Is that your only computer out there?

Paul: I brought a second one because I'm not an idiot but I've been using it a lot so...

Leo: Yeah, I've been recommending the Surface Pro 3 for people who- I had a young woman who said she was going to college and said she wanted to run OneNote and she asked, what about the Surface? I said, it's a great OneNote machine and it was made for OneNote. She's studying film and I said it may not be a great- I wouldn't edit movies on it but...

Paul: Well I don't know, maybe with the i7 version.

Leo: Yeah, that's what I said. I said, get the i7, get as much storage as you can but you're going to want an external drive if you're going to edit movies anyway. HP has revealed that it is possible-

Paul: Well, or HP's PC has been revealed, might be a way to say it.

Leo: Yeah, HP's PC has been revealed. It's a Chromebook that runs Windows.

Paul: It is literally a Chromebook. I don't know if anybody else made the comparison but I brought up the spec sheet for their Chromebook 14 and they are almost exactly the same. Different chip, Envy vs. Intel.

Leo: I've been saying that the Chromebooks are just Netbooks, really.

Paul: Yeah. This is interesting because I don't think people understand this, by the way. People look at Windows 8.1 and think, no this requires higher end hardware requires Touch hardware this and that but Windows 8.1 update 1, one of the big things that happened there- Which by the way, none of us have seen. -Is the ability for that thing to run on very low end hardware. 1 gig of RAM and 16 gigs of storage. And you can only get that on new hardware and I don't know that anything like that is shipped, other than maybe one of the new mini tablets or something. This is going to be one of the many, one of the first PC's from a major manufacturer that has that system on it. So a lot of people are saying, well wait a minute, this isn't going to work. You need all of this high end stuff to run Windows. And I actually think the point of all of this was, to do what they did to Netbooks. Make a system that can run well enough to work on that exact hardware and get rid of that thing as a competitor.

Leo: $200 is so cheap, wow!

Paul: That's another thing. So things can change, but the HP Chromebook is $300 and they're almost identical.

Leo: It's not small enough to have Windows for free, right? It's got to be under 9" so they're still paying the Windows license-

Mary Jo: Windows with Bing, right?

Paul: It's Windows with Bing so it's Windows for really cheap.

Leo: Oh it's subsidized, okay.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So that's one way they keep the price down.

Paul: $300 is nuts, like that's really cheap.

Leo: Yeah, I hate seeing that because I know people are going to buy it.

Paul: Well the hope is that this thing isn't a complete piece of garbage you know. So a Netbook would have a little 10" screen or 9" screen, really small screen...

Leo: I have the first Acer  EPC. It has a teeny little screen.

Paul: Teeny little thing. This is a 14" screen right? So it's not super high price and it's a decent size.

Leo: Here's my EPC.

Paul: You still have it? Look at how cute it is. I used to have one of those.

Leo: That was the first Netbook, it was like a revolution. I can't remember what they were selling it for. It wasn't $200, it was more than that but it was still a big deal.

Paul: If I had to say I'd guess it was like $300.

Leo: It was pretty inexpensive. And they fool you by putting a black bezel around the screen so you think the screen is actually bigger than it is. Yeah, there are speakers. I don't know if I can power this up, it probably has a proprietary cord. You know what it has that most Notebooks don't have anymore - Ethernet. And a modem jack, look at that! Wow...

Paul: USB 1.1.

Leo: Yeah, history in the making. And no, it's a 2.0. I can't recommend a $200 PC. I just have to think that they've made such sacrifices...

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: It's just going to bring it back to the network era.

Paul: I'm not saying I'm going to switch to this thing but I'm definitely going to test it and see what it's like.

Leo: I think a 2520- Oh wait a minute, that's RT....

Paul: Yeah but something of that class of hardware.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: It's almost like we need a Surface Mini or something.

Leo: Wouldn't that be a product?

Mary Jo: We're going to have to wait for the Threshold until there's a Surface Mini, I would think. I don't know that for a fact.

Leo: Oh we're never seeing a Surface Mini, come on...

Mary Jo: I bet we are, I bet we will.

Leo: Really?

Mary Jo: Yeah, why not? Not the one that was in the warehouse that they had to-

Leo: The one in Ala McGordo in the landfill?

Mary Jo: Right, not that one.

Paul: Can I run an ET ROM on it?

Leo: Is there a rumor going around- Somebody's been talking about the fact that Internet Explorer for Android and iOS is possible. Is that rumor going around? Is that possible?

Paul: I think Mary Jo wrote explicitly that it is not happening. Right?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: I think the headline says, Not On My Watch!

Mary Jo: Yeah and you know what? When I wrote the story it was based on a Reddit AMA that the IE team did last week. I had so many people saying, no one wants that! Tell them no, we don't even want IE on our platforms. And you know what? Three people asked in the Reddit for IE on iOS and Android-

Leo: And the IE team explicitly said no.

Mary Jo: They said, not in our current plans, right.

Paul: Here's the thing though, I get not porting IE to other platforms. What they could do that would be huge if it were possible would be the settings sync stuff through another browser. Like, one of the neatest things about using Chrome is if you have an Android device, your bookmarks are there, your passwords are there, and all that kind of stuff. On Windows phone, we get that with IE right? You know a lot of people who use Windows at work or at home have an iOS device or an Android device and you can't take advantage of that syncing anymore, unless of course, you switch browsers or whatever. I wish there was some way to make that happen because right now you have to stick to an explicit browser to make that work.

Mary Jo: The other tidbit from that Reddit that we should bring up because it made a few headlines too is the IE team acknowledged that they have been considering- And up until quite recently- And they didn't say the ideas off the table. -Rebranding IE because they feel like they've really changed IE and made it so much better by getting away from the old non-standards compliant IE and they don't believe most users know IE has changed. So they said, we've been kicking around the idea of rebranding. And jokingly, somebody said, we thought about Ultron but our lawyers said no.

Leo: I'm sure..

Mary Jo: But then I saw a couple people report it and I'm like, wait no! That was a joke..!

Paul: That's awesome. They should call it Navigator, I hear that name isn't taken at the moment.

Mary Jo: Hey that's a good name, I like that.

Leo: Quickly because we're running out of time here, OneNote mobile app updated for Windows 8 RT...

Paul: There we go. That's all we need to say about that.

Leo: Microsoft- And Android, I noticed a big update for Android.

Paul: The Android one is big, and it has handwriting support, which I tested very briefly on my wife's phone because she has a stylus and I have to say it's pretty good.

Leo: LiveScribe 3, what is that?

Paul: So this is the smart pen in reign. It's still not as sophisticated as I would like but the way it works now is the way Office Lens used to work, which was when you sync to OneNote, it only goes to the Quicknotes in your default notebook. So then you have to go in and find it in order to move it somewhere else. And so, with an update that is actually not out yet but it's coming this week, they're going to choose where you want those things to sync, which is obviously ideal so yeah.

Leo: And I see a note here that says, 'Holy Crud, did Microsoft just fix Skype?

Paul: This is the biggest news story of the day, Leo and I mean that. This just happened...

Mary Jo: And let's see if it really works.

Paul: I know that's a thing. So, you know and we've seen this happen. You guys call me when I'm home in my office.

Leo: We've been bitching about this for months.

Paul: It rings on my browser, it rings on my phone, it's like it's ringing everywhere in my office. And so they're claiming they're fixing this. If they do fix it, I'm not saying I will love Skype but I will tolerate Skype. I will stop being openly hostile.

Leo: Is it true that they said they're not going to continue the development of Skype for Windows phone 7.

Paul: Yeah and older versions of-

Mary Jo: Yeah but they said that a while ago.

Paul: But here's the thing- I wrote about this and I had a crazy number of responses to this. People were outraged by this and you can imagine the responses... If Microsoft's not going to support their own platform you know, yadda yadda yadda. Windows phone 7? Like did this impact any of you? I mean, everyone who's complaining about it- Could the one guy who's actually using this combination of solutions please raise their hand? I mean, what? Really? I don't know, it didn't seem like a huge deal to me.

Leo: I stand corrected.

Paul: It's not supported on iOS3 either, sorry.

Leo: That's right. Oh, I forgot and I think we buried the lead. Steve Ballmer has left the Board.

Mary Jo: Yep. How about that?

Leo: Some I guess had said this would happen because inevitably, this is going to be Satya's world but Ballmer and Gates were-

Paul: I didn't see it that way.

Leo: Yeah, I thought that would be a natural kind of transitional, at least.

Mary Jo: You know what I think? A lot of what Microsoft is doing right now is managing perception, you know? And if you have the guy who you kind of booted out as CEO still on your Board, you're like, okay is there really going to be a new Microsoft or not? I'm sure it was his decision like when he got to leave because you know what? He's still the biggest independent share holder of Microsoft.

Leo: Yep, bigger than Bill Gates.

Mary Jo: So you don't want to anger him, and yeah bigger than Bill Gates. So I think it was all timing. Steve bought the Clippers, it was all a big ra-ra thing. I don't know if you saw any of those videos of him yelling at the Clippers fans-

Leo: He said, call me Steve! Not Mr. Ballmer!

Mary Jo: It was funny to watch all of the sports reporters on Twitter going, who is this guy?

Leo: They're going to love him. He's going to be throwing chairs, he'll be on the floor there.

Mary Jo: It's going to be awesome, yeah. It was good timing-

Leo: Point guards, point guards,. point guards!

Mary Jo: Exactly. So yeah, I think it's just like, yeah we're going to have him announce now that he's stepping down because he's got a lot on his plate because he's got the Clippers, and by the way, he's going to be teaching a class at Stanford.

Leo: I thought it was funny that they mentioned that. That is so time-consuming that he cannot go to these monthly meetings anymore.

Mary Jo: Exactly. Very busy. I actually do think he's a busy guy but I've seen people say now there's an opening on the Board and that's not correct. Microsoft is always looking for Board candidates and so it's not like there's a hole in the board that they have to fill now. That's not right.

Leo: There's no fixed number that you have to have.

Mary Jo: No, there's no fixed number. So he's on his way and I'm sure we're still going to hear from him and still going to see him around at share holding meetings probably, I wouldn't be surprised.

Leo: Oh boy, here we go. Let me just play a little bit of this video. (Steve Ballmer: I can't hear you!!!!) It's clear somebody knows who he is, right?

Mary Jo: Or perhaps they're just fired up.

(Steve Ballmer: Are there any Clipper fans here?!!?!? I can't hear you!!)

Leo: Oh my God, he is so made for this job. This is Steve Ballmer leading his Microsoft sales meetings, this is his natural habitat.

Paul: It's nice to finally see that guy slowing down.

Leo: He's got to be happy. For so many reasons this makes sense, you don't need somebody from the old days hanging around diluting what Nadella's doing. In fact, a lot of what Nadella's doing is unwinding stuff Steve set up. I think it makes sense.

Mary Jo: Me too.

Leo: I didn't see it coming, I can't claim I thought this was going to happen, but-

Mary Jo: There were people on Walstreet who have been calling for this and I'm not saying that's the reason why but people were saying, it doesn't look good if you want to have a new Microsoft, yet you still have a guy who is the old Microsoft as a board member.

Leo: But you've got Bill Gates...

Paul: I was going to say, so Bill Gates is next right?

Leo: I know that Bill isn't really doing anything these days...

Paul: But he is. He is in fact-

Mary Jo: And he's doing product reviews again at Microsoft.

Leo: We're going to look back at the last year's developments and say Steve Ballmer was forced out. They gave him his marching orders and he's-

Mary Jo: A lot of people say that now.

Leo: -They said, don't let the door hit you on the way out. To make it look like it's not horrible we won't fire you from the Board yet but can you do your best to get out of here?

Paul: Pick your timing kind of thing.

Leo: Yeah, it's pretty much obvious right?

Mary Jo: But then again, when somebody is your largest independent share holder, you don't really want to get too-

Leo: Yeah that's right.

Mary Jo: He owns like 4% of Microsoft, that's big.

Leo: $17 billion, that's big...

Mary Jo: All I'll say is when he comes with the Clippers to New York, I hope I get to sit court side that's it. Just throwing that out there.

Leo: I'm telling you, he is totally a Mark Cuban isn't he? He even basically said, I'm going to micromanage this team! He basically said that, didn't he? He said, I'm going to be a very involved donor.

Mary Jo: Yep. He said he was going to be a very involved share holder too when he left as CEO. But he's going to make it fun.

Leo: Yeah, it'll be fun. It's sports so it's okay.

Paul: Those guys need this, they need this so bad.

Leo: Absolutely. After this Sterling guy, this is good.

Paul: Not just this last year but the entire 10 year, 20 year of basketball teams- They just really need this.

Leo: MiniAppleMan in our chatroom said he should have bought a WWE team.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: He would be great in wrestling- He's the Hulk Hogan of...

Paul: Yeah he could just be the manager with the hat and the cigar who would actually jump in the ring.

Leo: He should buy a roller derby team.

Mary Jo: That'd be great, that'd be funny.

Leo: The Ballmer Bombers.

Mary Jo: That would be great.

Leo: Let's take a break and when we get back, the back of the book. Tip of the week, pick of the week, beer of the week, all of that week stuff. The back of the book, but before we get to all of that how about a word from our sponsor legalzoom.com. LegalZoom, of course is not a law firm. Please do not mistake them for a law firm, you won't get any big bills. My lawyer charges me for 1/10 of an hour, that's 6 minutes. And it's expensive, an email to my lawyer is $40 just for him to read it. So in many cases you can do everything you need with a little help from LegalZoom. It's not a law firm, it provides self-help services at your specific direction. I know you guys, you want to do it yourself, especially if you're starting your own business and usually the whole reason people start their own business is so someone doesn't  tell them what to do. And so you can do it yourself and let me just say, I'm a perfect example of this. You can create an LLC or a chapter S or C-Corp right there at legalzoom.com for very little money. For less than it takes my lawyer one hour of his time. A lot less, actually. About three emails worth. You can start your own business, or do a will, a trademark. In fact, you can go to the LegalZoom website and look at all of the services they provide, there's so much you can do there under your direction. Isn't August National Make A Will Month? If it isn't, it ought to be. No it is actually, I didn't make it up. And I don't mean this in any way like you're going to kick off this month but lately we've been talking on the shows a lot about what happens to your social media presence when you pass away and the truth is, just like every other piece of property if you don't express your intentions, the government or the courts decide. And if you've got kids or personal property, you don't want that happen it's an easy thing to do and a very affordable thing to do at legalzoom.com it starts at $69. And if you need attorney support, they've got that too. They've got pre-negotiated flat rate pricing with attorneys all over the country. You can read their profiles and reviews from actual users, and get the right person for you. LegalZoom was developed by some of the best minds in the country and they make it painless to get the legal help you need. For 13 years now, special pricing on wills and living trusts at legalzoom.com make sure you use the offer code: WINDOWS in the referral box at checkout. LegalZoom, developed by top attorneys to provide self-help services at your specific direction. They're not a law firm, LegalZoom provides legal help through vetted independent attorneys. We thank them so much for their support for Windows Weekly. Make your will if you haven't done it. Sometimes I feel like I'm kind of a nag, make your will, back up your data, but these are things you've got to do. I don't mean to nag you, I feel the same way. We waiting until our kids where probably 8 or 9 before we made a will, it's a good thing nothing happened to us. LegalZoom.com.

Paul: Both of the people we put in our will for the kids have since been divorced, so we have some updating we need to do. We obviously chose great parents.

Leo: But on the bright side you're not dead yet.

Paul: Right, working on it.

Leo: Tip of the week, Paul Thurrott.

Paul: So I'll blow through these quickly because I know that we're behind. So I've written some about this and will write some more but this trip has inspired me to do something about my wireless carrier so I'll just leave it at that. I will be exploring options and looking at this kind of stuff. I will say if you travel internationally, possibly the best deal from the United States is just T-Mobile. You get free data and free texting when you come international. We've used a T-Mobile phone here for that purpose and it works fantastically well. And I think for most people it would be all that you would need. I'm kind of blown away that they offer that. But anyway, software pick of the week I've got a couple in addition to the new versions of OneNote that just came out for Windows 8 RT and Android. We have a Pro Shots for Windows 8 and 8.1 which I actually had as a pick like two or three weeks ago. It's an awesome photo app for Windows phone and is available for free temporarily right now. And so if you didn't grab it before, I want to say it was $2.00, just get it now and use it as a backup. It's a great app, particularly for low light photography. If you find, especially on the Lumia, where you just can't get it to not over compensate for the darkness, take the shots with Pro Shots instead, it's an amazing photo app-

Leo: I downloaded it and paid the $2 for it but I bricked the phone immediately afterwards.

Paul: Yeah, I'm sure that was completely unrelated. Mary Jo do you remember Tapped for Windows phone? Was that the app we were using for untap before the official app came out? Is that right?

Mary Jo: I think so.

Paul: Okay. So it's back I think it was gone for a little while. It's funny because I actually don't have time to do this but I've looked into getting- You have to sign up to do this on Tapped but you can get the API's from them and write your own apps and that's what these guys have done. I haven't spent a lot of time with it but I was just interested to see that it was back. What I've seen so far is that some things are actually better in this app than the official app but some things are a little more tedious like okaying friend requests. But some of the posting stuff is actually pretty nice in this version. So if you spend a lot of time on Tapped, it's something to look at.

Leo: Tapped.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Our enterprise pick of the week from Mary Jo Foley.

Mary Jo: Our enterprise pick is an enterprise integration server that Microsoft has called BizTalk Server. It only has 13,000 customers but many many of the fortune one hundred are customers of BizTalk, as are a number of big enterprise users. The reason I made it my pick this week was because there was a tiny bit of light shed on the future of BizTalk in a blog post this week. This is noteworthy because Microsoft's not talking that much about it's on premises server products lately, as Paul and I mentioned earlier in the podcast but on this blog called wikininjas, the official blog of the Technet wiki- And I'll have a link to that in the show notes. -They talked about what's next for BizTalk and they said there's going to be another major release of BizTalk coming, the server, and then there's going to be a minor release in conjunction with a release of the BizTalk service. The BizTalk service is BizTalk hosted on top of Azure. And it was first launched last November and Microsoft has been updating it every three months. So it's another one of those Cloud First services where if you want to be on the most current version, which not everybody does, you should be on the BizTalk service as opposed to the server. But they're saying over the next few years you're going to see a lot more integration between the Cloud, the mobile device, the internet of things and that's why you're going to hear about these next two versions coming out of BizTalk. That's going to fit in with the whole Cloud First, Mobile First push at Microsoft. So it's good to know because some people wonder if they're going to keep updating BizTalk, and the answer is yes. There are at least two more versions on the road map.

Leo: Steef-Jan Wiggers says it all. I want his name.

Mary Jo: Yes, I know. It's a great name.

Leo: I'm sure that in Holland or wherever he's from it's normal but Steef-Jan Wiggers. Now it's name, now this is not a rumor. Is this a codename or-

Mary Jo: No, I've modified it a little. Yeah, so instead of a codename pick of the week, this is a name pick of the week. This is about the next big show that's going to replace Tech Ed and the SharePoint Conference and a number of other other Microsoft shows. Microsoft is going around and privately asking some users and IT pros what they would like to see the name of this conference be. We've already said that this conference is happening next year the week of May 4th in Chicago. The names are rather curious that are on the short list and I'm not sure that I like any of them but they're asking people, do you like Microsoft Current, Microsoft Co:- I don't know why. -Microsoft Forsee, or Microsoft 4C...

Leo: It sounds like they're in a room in a hotel.

Mary Jo: I know right? Microsoft GO, Microsoft Tomorrow, Microsoft Spark- I don't know.

Leo: You can't call it Microsoft Tomorrow because then people will say, oh I'm going to the Microsoft Conference. What is it? Microsoft Tomorrow. Oh, is it tomorrow? No it's today. Wait a minute...

Mary Jo: And then there's Microsoft Unity as the last of the list, which I think is probably the least bad of the choices.

Leo: I think they should just keep Build or something-

Mary Jo: Tech Ed?

Leo: Not Tech Ed.

Mary Jo: Paul was the one who was like, why don't they keep Tech Ed? But I think they won't because-

Paul: Tech Ed is what this thing is called.

Mary Jo: You know what, I don't think it will though because they're trying to show it's something new.

Leo: Tech Ed+.

Mary Jo: Tech Ed+, yeah I like that.

Paul: Tech Ed Cloud, and then no one would come.

Leo: Call it the Clippers.

Mary Jo: I don't know but those are the names that are being weighed here and I think we should know the real name sometime fairly soon.

Leo: Wait a minute now, aren't all of the new names coming from Halo?

Mary Jo: No, those are only product things not shows.

Leo: The Covenant.

Paul: Yeah, Microsoft Covenant.

Leo: I like it.

Paul: It's a little too religious.

Leo: And finally a beer pick of the week.

Mary Jo: My beer pick of the week comes from Paso Robles, CA. Firestone Walker and they make a lot of really good beers like IPAs, double IPAs, black eye peas. But they make a Saison that's called the Firestone Walker Opal and it is really good. It kind of tastes like wine barrel influence, so I don't think it's aged in barrels or anything like that but I just had it last night because it was Firestone Walker night at Rattlin' Hum and it was really really good. They say sauvignon blanc tones, which are actually really good in a Saison, it sounds a little weird for beer instead of wine. Yeah.

Paul: I mean, that's serious wine country right there.

Leo: Paso Robles is, yeah.

Mary Jo: So yeah it's a really good beer if you see it anywhere- It's in bottles, on tap in various places but it's not as common as some of their other beers like Easy Jack and Wookie Jack but you can find it and if you do, I would say give it a try if you like Saisons. I think Paul Thurrott would enjoy it.

Paul: I do like Saisons.

Leo: I had one the other night and I was thinking of you two.

Mary Jo: Very good.

Leo: It was a Belgian Saison. Microsoft Under the Dome, how about that?

Mary Jo: Under the Dome, wow.

Leo: That's for Paul's benefit.

Mary Jo: I suggested Microsoft Tehe.

Leo: Tehe.

Paul: Aaahh...

Mary Jo: No, not catching on?

Leo: Channel 10?

Mary Jo: Like Channel 9.

Leo: Microsoft True Blood, alright enough of that enough of that. I'm sure they'll come up with a wonderful name and we'll all think, of course that's perfect!

Paul: I wish I had your certainty.

Leo: Ladies and gentlemen the show has now come to a grinding halt.

Paul: So unnatural.

Leo: We have reached the end of this road but that does not mean that we won't be back next week. We record this show every Wednesday at 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC on twit.tv and talk about Windows. I hope you will join us, just go to live.twit.tv, we love having you and if you can't watch live you can always get on demand versions after the fact at twit.tv/ww or anywhere they post podcasts like iTunes, Xbox music, the podcast app on your Windows phone that kind of thing. Paul Thurrott is at the super site for Windows winsupersite.com Mary Jo Foley is at allaboutmicrosoft.com and Paul has several books he is working on as always. His Windows Phone 8.1 Update book, it's a field guide. You can go to the supersite for Windows and find links or windows81book.com that has links to everything. This has been another successful recording of Windows Weekly thanks for joining us, we'll see you next time!