Windows Weekly 386 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It’s time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here. We have a great episode; lots of stuff to talk about. Including Windows 10. Mary Jo is in Barcelona for Tech Ed Europe. She’s got all the details. And a little bit of a history lesson. We’re going to talk about Cairo and Longhorn and how it led to what Paul Thurrott is calling the biggest innovation in Windows history. It’s all coming up next on Windows Weekly.

Net casts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cache Fly, at cachefly.com.

Leo: This is Windows Weekly, episode 386. Recorded October 29, 2014.

Pom Pom Paul

Windows Weekly is brought to you by Citrix Share File. Enhance your workflow. Send files of almost any size easily and securely with Citrix Share File. Try Share File today for a 30-day free trial. Go to sharefile.com, click the microphone and enter WINDOWS. And by Zip Recruiter. Zip Recruiter makes hiring faster, easier, and cheaper. Post your job to 50+ job boards with one click. Try Zip Recruiter with a free four-day trial now at ziprecruiter.com/windows. That’s ziprecruiter.com/windows. And by Brain Tree. If you’re a developer or a manager of a mobile app and searching for the right payments API, you have to check out the new one-touch product by Brain Tree. The fastest, easiest, most secure way to pay in-app. To learn more and for your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go to braintreepayments.com/twit. Time for Windows Weekly, the show that covers Windows weekly. And there is as Paul Thurrott noted, many, many things to talk about today. Let’s start off first by saying hello to Paul Thurrott, birthday boy. He is 48?

Paul Thurrott: I’m officially at the point where I’m not necessarily celebrating this anymore.

Leo: Wait until you’re 57. 60 is knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. Happy birthday, Paul. You’re celebrating.

Paul: Thank you.

Leo: You know how Mary Jo celebrated? She went to Barcelona.

Mary Jo Foley: I toast you from Barcelona.

Paul: I appreciate that.

Leo: Not even with beer!

Mary Jo: No, with water.

Leo: With water. Mary Jo Foley is at Tech Ed – Barcelona and reporting there. It is a little bit later in the day there. I think it’s 7:15pm.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: Good to have you both. It was fun just doing Call of Duty Weekly with Paul. But you know what, he did enterprise. He did code name. And he even did…

Paul: I did. It was very respectful.

Leo: He did all the things. Not as well as Mary Jo Foley.

Paul: No. No one was claiming otherwise.

Leo: The chat room is at great pains to make sure that I let you know that they say happy birthday, Paul.

Paul: Thank you.

Leo: What are you doing? Anything for your birthday?

Paul: Me? Well you know oddly enough, actually Mary Jo will appreciate this. When we were out in D.C. Rodrigo E… just forgot her name, Gabriela opened one of the shows. And I told my wife about this. I thought they were fantastic.

Mary Jo: They were.

Paul: Downloaded a bunch of their music. And I said we should see if they ever come by Boston and buy tickets. So we did. And actually that’s tonight, which now that it’s happening tonight it’s like oh God I wish it wasn’t tonight. So we’re going to go out for sushi before that and then see those guys.

Leo: With Rodrigo?

Paul: No. Stephanie and I, my wife and I. Not with Rodrigo. Maybe they’ll be there.

Leo: They could be there. That’d be nice. Kind of double date. Well that’s nice. I think you should do something. It is painful as you get older; you don’t want to celebrate.

Paul: Don’t want to call attention to it.

Leo: No. I’m exactly the same way. And then I think it’s actually how you were brought up. Mary Jo, in your family are birthdays a big deal?

Mary Jo: Yes. They were a big deal.

Leo: Yes. So it’s always a big deal for you. And if someone doesn’t do something for your birthday, you’re let down. Paul and I obviously come from flinty New England stock.

Paul: By the way, I’m not joking when I say this. I got up this morning in my usual half-conscious state. Walked downstairs, walked into the kitchen and my family exploded into this happy birthday thing. It’s like what are you doing? I thought it was tomorrow.

Mary Jo: Aww.

Leo: So you’re family birthdays were not the big deal that they were in Mary Jo’s.

Paul: Oh they’re a big deal for some people I guess. I just don’t, I don’t know… whatever. You can’t buy me a present for my birthday. I buy everything I want.

Leo: Exactly, what are you going to get us?

Paul: You’re not going to surprise me with some hidden box of…

Leo: Honey, I got you an iPhone 5S. Oh, thank you. Here’s your Nokia 1520.

Paul: I got one of those, thanks.

Leo: Thanks that will make two.

Paul: Yea.

Leo: What are they going to do? Get you a bow and arrow or something. Something you don’t have. Daddy, we thought you should take up archery.

Paul: That’s a good idea. Alright, start running.

Leo: Exactly.

Mary Jo: Good thing you don’t have your own beer growler.

Leo: Oh that would have been good.

Paul: What’s that?

Leo: A beer growler.

Mary Jo: An engraved beer growler.

Leo: I was at, we were doing a web redesign and we were using a great little company out of Austin called Fort Kitchens. And we were in their kitchen; it’s 15 people, something like that. Web designers. They have a keg in their kitchen. Not just a keg in their kitchen. They have a refrigerator with two beautiful taps and up to two different beers in their kitchen.

Paul: So the taps are on the outside of the refrigerator?

Leo: Yea.

Paul: Yea, that’s nice.

Leo: And they have software; some sort of Nexus 7-Android software that not only monitors the beer as it flows and tells you when you’re out. It takes unflattering pictures of you as you’re drinking.

Paul: Alright, now I want to rescind my earlier statement. There is something you can get me that I haven’t already bought myself.

Leo: What’s that? The beer fridge?

Paul: The beer with the two kegs.

Leo: You should have a two-keg beer fridge.

Paul: At least a two-keg.

Leo: The funny thing is they said sometimes we get two kegs of beer. But sometimes we get a keg of Kombucha and a keg of beer.

Mary Jo: Oh, nice.

Leo: See, Mary Jo likes that.

Mary Jo: I do like Kombucha.

Paul: What is Kombucha?

Mary Jo: It’s a fermented beverage that’s very healthy but it has a tiny bit of alcohol in it. Maybe under 1%.

Leo: You don’t like it, Paul.

Mary Jo: And it comes in fruit flavors.

Paul: Are you playing a vuvuzela over there, Leo?

Leo: Diets in the world, their end! Game seven! No, it sounds like a vuvuzela being played in Barcelona.

Mary Jo: Yea, I’m still in the convention center and there’s a lot of people moving chairs around.

Paul: Oh, I thought that was a Leo-sound effect.

Leo: Vuvuzela and chair-moving sounds very similar.

Paul: You heard it, right?

Leo: I did. I thought it was an elephant.

Paul: I mean I know I’m old but… unless this was a poltergeist thing happening.

Leo: Enough small talk, let’s talk about Tech Ed.

Paul: Actually we have something before that.

Leo: Mary Jo…

Mary Jo: We have some late-breaking news that’s not in our show notes.

Leo: News? Okay, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: Well it’s not happy news. It’s bad news. We just found out Microsoft is doing a third-round of job cuts today. They announced back in July that they were going to cut 18,000 employees. The third cut is happening today. It’s 3,000 people worldwide, mostly people in support functions for Human Resources, Legal, Sales and Marketing. Those kinds of jobs.

Leo: Is it the Nokia people?

Mary Jo: No. They did most of the Nokia folks in round one. That was 12,500 people. Then they had a second round in September of about 2,000 people. That was across the board like this. And this is round three. They’re almost done. They still may do a few more cuts early next year I’m hearing. But they’re close to being done now.

Leo: They kind of said it would drag out like this, right?

Mary Jo: Yea, they did say that. It’s happening in waves. Which is tough, moral-wise. But they for whatever reason decided to do it that way.

Leo: So you say you think there’s one more round?

Mary Jo: I think the last, if there is a last round in early 2015, it won’t be very many people. Because I was adding up how many they’ve cut and they’re close to the 18,000 they said they were going to cut.

Leo: There’s nobody left.

Mary Jo: There’s a lot of people left. They have a very large workforce even after these cuts.

Leo: This is what you do if you’re a big company. And you change what you make and do. Some people are excess.

Mary Jo: Yep. So yea, that’s happening today. Right as we are podcasting in fact.

Leo: I’m sorry to hear that.

Mary Jo: So we wanted to get the bad news out of the way first.

Leo: But yea, this is it.

Mary Jo: Layoffs happen. I’m not just saying that casually.

Leo: Somebody in the chat room says you’ll know they’re done with the layoffs when they lay off the people who lay off the people.

Mary Jo: Yea, pretty much.

Leo: That’s black humor, folks. We’re not gloating. I hope everyone got good severance packages and finds another job quickly. So you’re in Barcelona for Tech Ed.

Mary Jo: I am.

Leo: Which on the one hand people might say that’s a long way to go for Tech Ed. On the other hand, one of the great cities in Europe.

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: Yep. I always wanted to go to Tech Ed Europe and so I did end up finally getting to come. And this is the rumored last Tech Ed Europe. They may be changing their format for doing this kind of event going forward. So it’s nice to get to come my first and last Tech Ed at the same time in Europe.

Leo: Neat. Do they do it in English?

Mary Jo: They do it in English. Most of the speakers are from Redmond or are partners of Microsoft who are from English-speaking countries. But the delegates are from everywhere. The people who are at the show. It’s very international. You hear every language being spoken pretty much in the halls. So it’s fun to get to meet all these people who… they’re Windows Weekly watchers also. But we don’t always get to meet them at Tech Ed U.S. because most of them wait and go to Tech Ed Europe instead. So we’re at the Barcelona Fira Europa which is the big convention center here in Barcelona.

Leo: How many people do you think are there?

Mary Jo: I think somewhere just under 10,000. So fairly big.

Leo: Wow. And what have you learned? It’s stuff you already know?

Paul: Try to condense everything you’ve learned down into about an hour and a half.

Leo: Just about that much.

Paul: What do you think?

Mary Jo: So I’ll tell you how they kicked off the show, which is interesting. They had a keynote, whose two main speakers were Joe Belfiore who is on the Windows team. And the other speaker was Jason Zander who is head of engineering for Azure. So that should tell you right there that there was Windows 10 talk at the show. And there was a lot of Azure talk at the show. Those were kind of the kick-off themes. They talked about some new services they were launching on Azure this week. They had a new batch service, so batch processing but in the cloud that a lot of people were interested in. It was funny; they were trying to make batch processing really exciting with demos. That’s kind of hard. Even I admit this.

Paul: Were there any paper cards? Just to give you the visual.

Mary Jo: No, no paper punch cards. And they also talked a lot about Office 365 as you might expect. They had some interesting announcements around things that they’re doing to add some of the Windows, no longer called Windows Intune. Just plain Intune device management capabilities to Office 365 directly, which is pretty interesting. So the theme is a lot of stuff about the cloud, a lot of stuff about Office 365. And then some of the sessions here are digging into the stuff that IT pros really care about which is the next version of Windows Server and the next version of System Center. There’s a lot of talk about Hyper-V and all those meaty enterprise topics that IT pros love. So that’s kind of the just of what’s going on this week here. How’s that?

Leo: Excellent. Nice.

Mary Jo: Yea, Windows 10 was interesting because Joe Belfiore got up there and admitted most of what I’m going to tell you guys isn’t brand new. If you’ve been following Windows 10, you’ve seen that we launched the first public preview. We had an update to that. But then he got up there and demoed a couple minor things that were new like the ability to snap apps side by side in multiple monitors, not just move the apps between the monitors. But actually snap them. He said that would be coming in an update at some point fairly soon. And he also said, he said this at the end of the keynote, the continuum, that new capability that if your keyboard is connect or disconnected the operating system just knows and it acts appropriately. That will be available to people who are in the insider program either by the end of this year or early next year. So earlier than a lot of people thought. And he talked about in-place upgrade that Microsoft is really working to make it easy. If you’re on Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1 to just upgrade in-place to Windows 10 when it’s done. And that you’re not going to have to reinstall your apps, they think. Even your 132 apps, your modern apps, they’ll just carry over. And that your settings and files, data, and everything will carry over. That’s their goal and what they think they can achieve by the time the operating system is done. So that’s good. So we learned a few little things like that about Windows 10. But nothing startling or huge that those of us who are following it very closely didn’t know.

Leo: Yea. Are you glad you went though?

Mary Jo: I am. I’m really glad I went. Not just because it’s Barcelona; that aside, yea it’s good to come here and hear what some of the other contingencies care about and what people are interested in and not. It feels like a much more skeptical audience at Tech Ed Europe. They only applauded once during the keynote. Do you know what they applauded for?

Leo: What?

Mary Jo: This is funny. Command prompt in Windows 10. That got a rousing applause. It did.

Leo: The presence of a command prompt in Windows 10?

Mary Jo: Yea, they were showing those new capabilities that we saw cut and paste inside the command prompt and all that. They really loved that. That was a crowd-pleaser.

Leo: We’ve got a really good terminal program this time around.

Paul: This has happened in the past. Remember when Microsoft did Server Core? The first time they shut off that, which is again just command prompt interface basically; the Tech Ed audience at the time-whatever year that was-just exploded into applause. I like things to be difficult so normal people don’t do them. You know?

Leo: Wow. Okay. Yea, that’s right because then it’s job security for the geeks.

Paul: Sure.

Mary Jo: They were trying to show the IT pro audience things they thought they would really like. So they focused on things like security, Azure, single sign-on for Windows 10. All the things that they would be more attune to than just the pure start menu or something about tiles. So yea, they were appealing to that kind of an audience so they really focused on that.

Paul: You know it may be notable because Tech Ed U.S. was the same. No major on-prem server announcements at the show. I mean I’m sure there were sessions or are sessions.

Mary Jo: There are.

Paul: But you know just with Tech Ed in the U.S… Azure, Office 365. Interesting.

Mary Jo: Yea. I get to talk to Mike Neil who’s one of the main guys on Windows Server here. And we talked a little bit about what they’re thinking around cadence for Windows Server. That was kind of interesting because they’re building the code-base right alongside the Windows 10 client folks. But they’re not going to update the Windows Server code-base as fast obviously because who wants a server updating every few weeks or days. He told me that the next preview of Windows Server for people who are in the test program should be sometime early next year. So that’s around when we think the consumer preview will come out. So that’s actually very fast for Windows Server. He said you know all the things we’ve already heard about it. A lot of new changes to Hyper-V, Power Shell. A lot of things around software to find networking and all the goodness that those kind of folks would love. Things that will make it cheaper to deploy server on commodity hardware. That’s the big focus with this release. They’re still not telling us a name of the next Windows Server. We’re still calling it Windows Server Next.

Leo: That’s a good name.

Mary Jo: Let’s hope that’s not the name. It won’t be. That was kind of where they were at with everything. I’m trying to think if there was any other really big things. They announced some new services around internet of things on Azure. A data factory service for people who want to combine different data sources like Sequel Server on prem and no Sequel. And be able to use those things in tandem and come up with business insights quicker. So all these things, not Call of Duty, not any of the fun stuff.

Leo: However I should point out that Paul did write an article that has his whole list of Tech Ed announcements.

Paul: And the important part of that article is I have my own photo of Barcelona at the top of it.

Leo: That’s his photo, ladies and gentlemen.

Mary Jo: Nice work. Oh one thing I forgot. Office 16: we found out what the release target dates are. That was actually kind of a big deal. That’s the next version of Windows client Office. And also Office for the desktop. I’m sorry, Office Servers. We found out that’s going to be in the second half of 2015 which is slightly later than we thought it was going to be coming. Although I’m betting even early second half; maybe even June or July. But that’s the official word now, is Office 16 is around that time.

Leo: June or July.

Mary Jo: My guess; June or July. If they’re saying second half of calendar 2015.

Leo: Second half could be December 31^st.

Mary Jo: It could be.

Leo: I don’t want to bring anybody down.

Mary Jo: No.

Paul: Leo, Office is so awesome right now. I don’t care.

Leo: It is! I mean okay that is true. It’s not like anybody’s going oh God they really need to update this.

Paul: If they just had that one thing in Word that would put it over the top, I could be the writer I always imagined.

Leo: It’s true. It’s more for them than it is for us. Just to keep them busy.

Paul: Yea.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Give them something to do.

Mary Jo: Yea, they need that.

Paul: Keep them busy.

Leo: Alright, okay. Well thank you, Mary Jo for the update.

Paul: On a serious note I will add as far as Office updates go; Microsoft is switching to this model where we subscribe to Office through Office 365. That one of the prime benefits of this is that you as an individual gets this as part of that subscription as a family gets it as part of this subscription. You as a worker and most business plans get this. The benefit there is that you really keep getting updates to new versions of the software as they come out. If they don’t ever put out a new version, it does kind of undercut the benefit of Office 365. I think they would argue that they’ve been updating the software as we go along. And that this notion of a new version isn’t necessarily so important. But I think the thing Microsoft needs to remember right now is that we still think this way. And so I think Mary Jo points out in her article about Office 16 that the current version Office 2013 came out two years ago this month. Or was finalized two years ago this month. That’s kind of the normal timeframe for a version of Office: two years. Late next year is kind of, that is kind of stretching it a bit.

Mary Jo: Yea, I’m betting mid-year because you know they’re having that ignite conference in May. And they’re going to have some of the people who are connected to Office speaking there. So it would be a good time to say hey we’re done with Office. It’s going to be out next month.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Let’s take a break. When we come back Azure, Azure, Azure.

Paul: The rest of this stuff. We have literally gotten to point one of 22. That’s where we’re at.

Leo: There’s a lot. Basically everything; Windows 10, Surface Pro, Office-we kind of did a little more. We’ll do some more.

Mary Jo: You got more Office, Mac Office.

Leo: Yea, I want to know what Mac Office is going to do. Windows Phone. Xbox. Paul and I before the break were talking about the new game Microsoft Studio game came out yesterday: Sunset Overdrive. Not Paul’s thing because it’s not Call of Duty. But I love it; it’s fun. It reminds me a lot of-and I can’t remember the name of it. There was a great Xbox game where you were riding on wires.

Paul: It’s going to be Crackdown. It’s not Crackdown?

Leo: It was kind of a cartoony game. Chat room will know. You’re riding on wires and jumping and stuff. It wasn’t quite a skateboarding game. It took place in Tokyo. It does look a little like Crackdown. That’s not unfair. Jet set Radio, that’s right. It’s kind of like that a little bit except you have guns and there’s mutants. It’s these mutants who have swallowed some energy drink that has turned normal people into mutants who want to eat your head.

Paul: At least there’s a plot. See I missed that part of that.

Leo: There’s quite a plot. You run around; you meet some guys. They’re tough. Before even the opening credits you have to get back to your apartment. It’s actually quite fun. Jet set Radio was a really great Xbox game way back when. And if you liked that, it’s this with guns and enemies. You’re not doing graffiti anymore; you’re shooting at people. But you can jump and bounce. You can skitch and ride stuff. It’s really kind of fun. I’m really liking it. A quick action game. Alright, our show today brought to you by Citrix Share File. A must-have tool in business because in business these days we’re all sending email attachments. Are we not? It’s a good way to work, I understand that. Although I have said for many years do not do that. Because attachments are how viruses are shared and there are other reasons why you might not want to. If you’re a physician obviously you’re not legally allowed to email patient records or private stuff. Similar regulations govern the financial services industry and so forth. So you’ve got to pay attention to privacy. You’ve got to pay attention to the fact that frequently attachments are targeted at businesses. They look like they came from somebody you work with. But they contain viruses; that’s a problem. And then there’s a simple problem of bounce back. We’re sending giant things: spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, rich media. I send audio to the radio stations every week. In fact I’ll be doing that today. I’ll be recording commercials and bumpers and stuff. And there are a couple of problems that come up for me. One is I don’t want to send email attachments especially after I’ve been saying don’t use email attachments. Two, they’re very large files. Hundreds of megabytes, often. Three, the people receiving them are not super-techy. So I can’t just say oh yea, I put it on a share on the cloud. It isn’t going to work. In fact I used to do that and they would get the file and then erase it. And I would go, but, but but! People need that! Oh, it’s taking up space; I don’t want it. So that’s when I switched to Share File and I’ve been loving it. Share File makes it very easy. First of all you’re not sending an attachment. If you’re using Outlook, it will look just like you are. They have some really cool tools that make Outlook look just like you’re sending attachments. But you’re not. You’re sending a secure link. When they click on that link, that HTTPS link, they’re going to go to a page that looks just like you’re… you own it. It’s got your logo on it, and a very simple big box that says download. They don’t have to have an account to do this. It’s easy for them. All they do is click the link and they get the file. You control it for instance, first of all it’s not going over the public internet. It’s encrypted so you don’t have to worry about privacy. It is HIPPA compliant. It is SEC regulation-compliant. You can control who can get it or how long they can download it, how many downloads they can download. I use that all the time because the ads I send them are good for one week. So I make sure they expire after a week so we don’t accidentally get the wrong one. That is slow slick. You can also request files if you’re an attorney ad you’re looking for images or paperwork from you clients, you can request files. And it makes it easier for them to send it. I want you to try Citrix Share File right now; you can securely share, sync, and store big files. By the way, with their mobile apps you can actually get to your Share File data. Send files from there, download them, email them. It’s very simply. Sign up today for a 30-day free trial. Visit sharefile.com. if you do me a favor, when you’re at the front page, there are a number of big green buttons that say start your free trial. There’s one we really want you to click and it’s right at the top. It says podcast listeners. See that? When you see the microphone click that link and use Paul and Mary Jo’s offer code which is WINDOWS. You’ll be showing your support for Windows Weekly and you’ll be getting 30 days free. You don’t need a credit card. And you do pick your industry so they can customize it and you’ll be very pleased that you did that. Sharefile.com; click the microphone at the top of the page. Use our offer code WINDOWS. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, Windows Weekly on the air. We continue on now with the cloud. To the cloud! They don’t do that ad anymore. I actually loved that. And then the computer would appear. To the cloud! Microsoft turns cloud storage into-this is interesting, I like this-into a feature not a service. What do you mean by that?

Paul: I don’t know.

Mary Jo: You wrote it.

Leo: If you don’t know Paul, I’m sure I know.

Paul: We’re in trouble then. Obviously services like Dropbox and Inbox, etcetera have made cloud storage a service and that’s a wonderful thing. Microsoft by making cloud storage free if you subscribe to Office 365 has made it a feature of another service. I like that for a number of reasons because that service that you’re paying for-Office essentially-is something we sort of understand. It’s this traditional software we used to buy.

Leo: Wait a minute. Unlimited?

Paul: Unlimited.

Leo: Whoa.

Paul: This is everybody by the way. It’s individuals, families, businesses, education institutions.

Leo: I have unlimited. Holy cow.

Paul: Yea, it’s crazy.

Leo: Not a terabyte. As much as you need.

Paul: Yea, so as an individual you can subscribe to Office 365 Personal for $65 a year. You can get it cheaper than that on sale. You can get it for free with a new computer. Unlimited storage.

Leo: So do I have to get anything to get this?

Paul: No, it’s rolling out over time. The consumer versions are going to get it first. They actually have a sign up page if you want to be really first or whatever. Some people are reporting that they’ve already seen their storage allotment go up to 10 terabytes from one which was the previous deal. I have not seen that personally. I’ve started testing the limits of this. I think the limits of this are going to be partially Comcast and partially the fact that there are in fact some sort of throttling things going on with OneDrive. Microsoft doesn’t really talk about this. I was surprised by this last weekend when I was testing another cloud service and trying to move data between different services. And the report that came back basically said due to OneDrive’s throttling or whatever, this might take a little while.

Leo: So I just logged out of my OneDrive. It says it just got a lot bigger; you’ve got 15 gigabytes.

Paul: So the 15 gig was something they did as a September promotion around the iPhone if I’m not mistaken. But it will be unlimited very soon.

Leo: Neato! That is really cool. I am happy now. I have more places to put pictures of our goofy staff. Things like that. Unlimited, wow!

Mary Jo: It’s crazy just remember they were doing all these games and contests so you could get more storage. And it was like oh I got another 10 gigs, woo! Now it’s like suddenly, everything’s free!

Leo: I have 1.12 terabytes available because of all of that. In fact I think it was you who told me to sign up for something and I got that extra terabyte.

Paul: If you add your camera roll to it on a device, you get three gigs right there.

Leo: A terabyte that seems like an awful lot.

Paul: Yea, the terabyte is from Office 365.

Leo: Yea. Wow. So I’m going to sign up and you just give them a list…

Paul: The interesting thing about what people say one terabyte unlimited, what’s the difference? Honestly for me and I would imagine for other people; one terabyte and unlimited is the difference between actually using it. Because I have a home server in this case, many people wouldn’t have a home server. But you may have a PC that has most of the data on it. I have many terabytes of data on there. One of the things I’m not interested in is doing that goofy thing; I have a hunk of data but I want to pick and choose what data goes into this cloud service. No I just want to put all of it there. And one gigabyte is a lot but it’s not enough for me. Unlimited obviously is not for everybody. And that is the difference. That’s me saying now I can in fact literally put everything in there. Obviously if your local version of something goes south and you need to get it out of OneDrive, you’re not going to be downloading terabytes of data anytime quickly. It’s not really designed for that. But I think the point of this is to have a place that’s safe from a company that you trust. It’s not Bob’s Storage dot-com or whatever. That can have this stuff. I think we all have pragmatic means to have duplicates and backups and things. And my stuff is already up in other cloud backup services as well. So no worries there. But I mean this is maybe me not needing to have a local goofy amount of storage. Which would be kind of advantageous.

Leo: It’s $60 or whatever a year. There’s nobody who’s offering anything like this. And you can do pretty much anything you can do with Dropbox or anything else with OneDrive.

Paul: By the way there are very specific things you can’t do. And I would say yet in parentheses. That you can do with say Dropbox. But definitely. The thing I would point out to people rather than focusing on very specific little things-because I really do think these little things go away anyway-is that this has really changed the game in cloud storage because there are only a handful of companies that offer similar deals that make any amount of sense. Google is obviously one. And I would say Amazon is probably the other one. And of course there are differences when you move between business and consumer. Companies like Dropbox, that’s the service they’re offering. For right now, a very limited amount of time, all they can really say is that it’s compatible with certain applications. We have Delta sync or we have this. We have the ability to show shared documents that maybe OneDrive doesn’t have with a client. Yep, there are very specific things but over time it goes away. Because Microsoft has made cloud storage a commodity. And really it’s relegated this to the big… by the way, trustworthy players when it comes to this sort of thing. I think there’s a natural consolidation there. And I think for people who need to create content, Microsoft is a trusted player. An understood entity. We’ve been dealing with them for years. We like and use Office. It becomes a no-brainer.

Leo: Yea, it’s worth it to me just for the storage. So it’s almost like you get Office for free. It’s great.

Paul: By the way as a tip. And I don’t have a tip this week this, so I’ll throw this out as a tip. This is something I’ve done. You can buy Office subscriptions on a little credit card-sized piece of cardboard at a store. It’s hanging on a hook. It’s $99 for a family version, $69 for the personal. If you buy two or three of those and you go into your little Office 365 dashboard for home or personal, you can apply those codes and it just pushes your subscription out. You can stack them up for a couple years if you want. So if there’s a sale and you get Office 365 for $49 or something, buy two and push it out two years.

Leo: And if you have a smartphone, you should have OneDrive on there because it will upload your pictures there.

Paul: Yep, everything in one place.

Leo: That’s the one thing Dropbox can keep Dropbox in business at this point. You’ve got to wonder. Is that a lot of apps, a lot of apps use Dropbox as their cloud.

Paul: But Leo, interestingly the thing that will fix that-and maybe fix isn’t the right term-change that, is going to be something like what Apple did in iOS 8. So for example, Dropbox has an API so businesses use that. So you as an app writer for some reason want to store something in the cloud and Dropbox has a free API, it’s easy. What would you rather target? Dropbox using Dropbox APIs or every single storage service on earth using Apple’s APIs in the OS?

Leo: Right.

Paul: At that point, OneDrive becomes an equal player. That’s only iOS, I know that. But obviously Android, I don’t know how Android works. I assume it’s something similar in Android. If not, Microsoft has OneDrive for Android, obviously.

Leo: I think it’s often hardwired into the app but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an OS-wide system.

Paul: I guess what I’m saying as an app developer, you have a choice.

Leo: As long as there is an operating system hook for it, I don’t know.

Paul: Yea, right I don’t know how it works elsewhere. Obviously OneDrive is part of the Microsoft system. Thanks to iOS 8, OneDrive isn’t part of the iOS 8 system. Presumably the Mac ecosystem, I’m not sure how that works. Android off the top of my head, I don’t know. But I imagine it’s just as easy as OneDrive as well. So I think this is again, it’s not going to happen overnight. But a lot of those apps are using Dropbox explicitly today. It would be smart if they’re not already doing it, looking at OneDrive and these more general ways of doing it as well.

Leo: That is really amazing. And in a way, first of all, it costs Microsoft nothing. Probably, right?

Paul: Well we’re going to find out soon, Leo. Because I’m going to pump 37 terabytes worth of stuff.

Leo: But you’re unusual. I think the truth is most people, it’s maybe 100 gigabytes. Remember this is online. So someone has to upload it. Uploading more than a terabyte takes month.

Paul: Uploading a terabyte is going to take forever. So I’m going to find out.

Leo: This is one of those things that sounds phenomenal. And there’s really no reason that Amazon and Google and Dropbox shouldn’t do the same. And I bet you they do. And this is rocket fuel for cloud.

Paul: Yea, I’m curious to see how… I would expect a Google announcement to be a minute. But to do the same thing.

Leo: Still tough to compete. You’ve seen this already. They’re very aware. Google dropped the price and everybody else dropped the price. Except Dropbox. The one that gets squeezed is Dropbox. There’s no other revenue source. This is what they do.

Paul: Well they have a mailbox app. I’m sure that’s going gangbusters. I shouldn’t make fun of Dropbox. Obviously they’re an innovative company and have done a lot of really good things. Unfortunately for a company like that, it’s the sleeping giant thing again. Dropbox, it’s not like they didn’t know Google or Amazon or Microsoft existed. They know what they were getting into.

Leo: They can never be cheaper than Amazon. They get their stuff from Amazon.

Paul: Maybe that’s how they do it.

Leo: Amazon will go unlimited and then they’ll say we did it!

Paul: Yea, we’ll see.

Leo: AWS will never be unlimited.

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: There’s the rub.

Paul: Right. Then the U.S. government will just sign up for the unlimited plan and start dumping everything into it.

Leo: Yea, wow. Very interesting. I like it. It’s good for consumers. That’s the bottom line.

Paul: So now we’re an hour into the show and we’ve gotten to the top two items.

Leo: Oh come on now!

Mary Jo: We are going to withdraw these next…

Leo: This next one is so small, there’s not much to talk about. Windows 10.

Mary Jo: No, we’re done.

Leo: Okay thank you very much. The most audacious release in the history of a platform, says some guys named Thurrott.

Paul: Says perennial Microsoft cheerleader, Paul Thurrott. Why would I say such a thing?

Leo: Why would you say such a thing?

Paul: Because I’ve been around for a while, Leo. I’ve kind of seen it all. And people will always point to things. Windows 95 was an obvious one. Windows NT, a huge one. Windows XP, where they combined consumer and business into one platform. Very big things. And then of course there will be the people who point at Longhorn which never happened. I would say the shuttle disaster of Windows; it was the worst thing that ever happened. The reason that Windows 10 is such a big deal is literally because of this thing they’ve been saying all along. And I’ve been shaking my head saying this isn’t a big deal. It actually really is. It’s that they’re bringing together essentially a single platform across such a wide range of devices. Imagine if Longhorn really happened; if Microsoft actually took that PowerPoint presentation that was complete baloney and turned it into an actual living, breathing, working operating system; compared to what they’re doing in Windows 10 that would have been nothing. Because that operating system only targeted old-fashioned traditional computers. The potential exposure to customers and device types was fairly minimal by the standards of today. Windows 10 targets everything. From internet of things like little sensor-type devices. Little nanobot-type things. Through all the small-screen devices: phones and fablets and small tablets, big tablets, two-in-ones, laptops, and Ultrabooks. All the way up to PPI-type things. It’s really like the full stack. And their universal apps thing isn’t complete baloney. I get that it’s a step down a road toward a developer being able to target all of these things in one whack. But we don’t know the full story there yet. And what I’m being told is that this is in fact a much bigger jump in that direction that maybe we’ve been lead to believe. This is clearly the biggest deal in the history of Windows. Clearly.

Mary Jo: Wow.

Paul: And it’s really not even a debate.

Leo: Wow is right. Do you agree Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: I’m not as convinced I don’t think.

Paul: I said it’s not even a debate.

Leo: It’s true!

Paul: It’s like you’re not paying attention.

Leo: I’m tweeting it right now so it’s got to be true.

Mary Jo: The part I think when I think about Windows 10 that I think is really big is two changes. The change in the way Microsoft is doing the rollout itself and releasing to customers these incremental updates on a regular basis. And they’re going to let people test different features at the same time through flighting. I think that’s really a big deal. And then the fact that they actually are taking user feedback into account in what seems to be a real way. So far we haven’t seen them change any features of Windows 10 because of user feedback. But I think if and when they do, that will be a big deal. And also the fact that they’re even in the forums talking to people instead of just writing 3,000-word blog posts and saying hey, this is the way it is. This is a big deal.

Paul: This isn’t just like a different team of people or a different company. It’s like a different species, you know? By the way, I write this thing and a lot of people are like oh Paul, put down the pom poms. No, it’s not like oh they put the start menu back and you’re doing a touchdown dance in the background. No, it’s not about a desktop-laptop version of Windows. On that note, Windows 10 is just another version of Windows. Any version of Windows is a big deal but my point is that it goes out; Microsoft has to address the market for these other things. And so you have Windows Phone which was not Windows. Not really. Not the first version. It’s like this other thing. If they can make these things all one thing and one platform, addressable by developers in a simple fashion, that is in fact a really big deal. It’s a really big deal.

Mary Jo: It is. And they are going to get quite a ways along that path with Windows 10. Like the common app store. We weren’t sure that was going to make it into Windows 10. But they actually are going to have one app store by the time this thing is out. Windows Phone, Windows, and probably Xbox as well will have a common store by the time Windows 10 comes out. That is a bigger deal than a lot of people give credit for. And we also do believe they’re going to let developers put Win-32 apps in the store. And not just links to the apps but the actual apps.

Paul: That is happening.

Mary Jo: It is for sure?

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: We knew it in that blog post but we haven’t seen that yet, right? We haven’t seen the new store yet. I think it’s the goal and hopefully the plan. So yea, there is a lot of stuff that they’re doing very differently under the covers. Not the stuff that’s so much UI-specific. But all those things like allowing people to log in through Azure active directory instead of having a Microsoft account. They confirmed this week by the way at Tech Ed that that is in fact happening. And those kinds of things make a big difference to a lot of folks who didn’t really want to go the Microsoft account route. Or wanted to do something through Azure active directory in a more centralized single-sign on fashion. There’s a lot of goodness under the covers.

Paul: It’s very amazing. I think the reason to use the word audacious is because it’s a moon shy. Taking Windows 8 and fixing it is great and the right thing to do. And it’s customer-centric and all that wonderful stuff. But it’s this other stuff in the background under the covers: the sort of broad support for all these different platforms is what makes it so much bigger than that. And such a big, big deal. And look, I write about this stuff for a living so I’m going to write an article about a start menu. I’m sorry, this is part of my life. But I think there are more profound things going on here than… the command line has got cut and paste with Ctrl+V. That’s neat, it’s fun, it’s a single little thing.

Leo: I can’t believe they didn’t have it, frankly.

Paul: This is a big thing happening.

Leo: Yea, we get distracted by the UI stuff. A couple of questions I have for you. This big thing, it’s primarily an interest to enterprise right?

Paul: Not necessarily.

Leo: The Microsoft stuff I use is Xbox. And then Office. And I guess OneDrive is going to be a bigger part of my life. But I don’t use Windows really. Is this for me too?

Paul: Yea, I mean the point is that Windows is underlying all of the platform work that Microsoft is doing. So even you as an Xbox user, will be running Windows 10. You’ll be running a metro 2.0-whatever you want to call it-type of experience. That OneDrive stuff, better integration into Xbox One, wouldn’t it? So now that you’ve put up all your photos and videos and whatever, you can access that stuff from your Xbox One. These underlying platform changes will benefit everybody. They ultimately benefit people that aren’t even using Windows because they’ll appear in Microsoft’s mobile apps and services on other platforms as well. As far as the who benefits from this one Windows thing, enterprise yes. But also developers. You give them a much larger target audience with one trajectory. In other words, they’re not just oh Xbox is over here. We have Windows over here, please write for Windows. We have Windows Server over here; please do that too. We have this Windows for the internet of things that we haven’t really named yet; and please, do target that as well. How about target it all at once? You know? That’s when the developers say oh yes, now that makes sense. So I think this is not the biggest tragedy well maybe the biggest tragedy of Longhorn; is that that’s when Microsoft lost developers. That’s when it all happened. And that was the whole chicken-egg problem there. They kept changing it and changing it. And by the time it came out it was too late and they moved on. And nobody was listening anymore. And this was a chance to get them back with a vision that I think actually makes sense. It isn’t just arbitrary whereas Windows 8 was kind of arbitrary. Look, it looks like managed code. It’s not, but don’t worry about it. What? You know? And that doesn’t go away unfortunately. But I mean a single developer environment, a single sort of single target-I don’t want to call it a single SDK. But a single SDK’s common platform; I think it’s a big deal.

Leo: I am intrigued by this. I think this is the kind of thing Microsoft needed and must do to survive or at least continue going forward and succeed. I think it’s the right direction. How did this happen?

Paul: That’s right.

Leo: Who had the vision? Is this from Satya Nadella? Or is this a Steve Ballmer? I mean it obviously must have begun years ago, right?

Paul: Mary Jo, did you watch the Charlie Rose interview with Steve Ballmer?

Mary Jo: No, I just read excerpts from it.

Paul: It was very interesting. There was not a lot of apologies there. He does agree that Longhorn distracted them but there was not much that they could have done about that. And that they lost on mobile as a result by the way. Another fallout from Longhorn.

Leo: And he was there at the Longhorn era?

Paul: He was CEO, yea. But what he blamed it on by the way was that Bill Gates had been number one and Steve Ballmer had been number two for the previous 20 years or whatever. They switched jobs essentially. They didn’t switch jobs, but they switched positions. So Ballmer became CEO and Bill Gates was essentially reporting to him. This didn’t go over very well. They lost a couple of years to this. They argued all the time. And that’s when Longhorn happened. And he said it’s not exactly why Longhorn and not the why; but it’s a big part of why this happened.

Leo: Ballmer said this? That we argued all the time?

Paul: Yep.

Leo: I’ve got to watch this.

Paul: Yea, you’ve got to watch this. And so basically, not to give any excuses for it, but this is what happened when they were both just too distracted. And obviously those things calmed down and they moved on. And they fixed Longhorn eventually or whatever. But the damage had been done.

Leo: Would you explain? There are some people in the chat room-younger people.

Paul: Who Charlie Rose is? Yea, so Charlie Rose is…

Leo: What Longhorn is. What was Longhorn? And it sounds like Longhorn was a similar moon shot?

Paul: Yea, and I think Mary Jo would agree with this assessment. There were two primary moon shot type things that didn’t happen at Microsoft. One was Cairo and the other one was Longhorn. And Cairo was object to run programming. It was kind of, I don’t want to say a response to Next, but it was a response to the same market for industry force that Next was dealing with at the time. Telligent was dealing with it at the time. Apple-IBM, whatever that thing was. Which was object orientation. We were going to have an object-oriented platform. There was going to be a database…

Leo: File system, too? Yea.

Paul: Object file system, yea. Database-backed, relational data based… complete car crash. It was horrific.

Leo: It was a brilliant and well-motivated idea. It was modeling the computer system on the way the real world works. And it was to solve a really big problem in the computer industry. Which was that code was all mushed together and interacted with other code. If you could just make everything discreet building blocks, the sky is the limit.

Paul: Right, the real-world result of that work was Microsoft did add componentization and component technology to Windows, right? The notion that you could build a software component into any programming language and then access its public interfaces from another component using any language. That is at a very basic level sort of what they were striving for. It was nothing like the elegance of what they wanted. But Com and Active-X controls, and De-Com and all this stuff came out of that, sort of. But the point is Cairo crashed and burned. Longhorn, a very…

Leo: As did, by the way, that whole movement that you talked about.

Paul: Ultimately yes. Because that kind of software tends to be bloated and slow. All the things you were trying to solve, you can solve through object orientation. But you also lose things on the other side. So it’s kind of a tradeoff.

Leo: It’s a little bit of a disappointment. I remember very well how exciting that time was.

Mary Jo: Yea, information at your fingertips and that whole thing; and Win FS.

Paul: Plug and play is this. There’s a lot of… it’s like a comet or an asteroid hitting the atmosphere and then it falls to earth in a million pieces. There are little things that come out of it but you don’t get that solid body.

Leo: So that was Windows 95 era that they were doing that?

Paul: Yea, so Windows 95 featured a basic version of what we thought might be the Cairo user interface. And there were attempts, we forget this stuff. Windows 95 was kind of a document-oriented UI. The idea was that you wouldn’t launch apps, you would launch documents. And the app would launch, but you would think of it that way. That’s why we have My Documents folders.

Leo: A document-centric computation.

Paul: It’s hard now to remember because this stuff has changed so much. The virtual folders that by the way are hidden in Windows 8 but are still there are in the forefront again in Windows 10. Were in the forefront in Windows 7; were in the forefront in a very different way in Windows Vista also came out of this stuff. That’s an artifact of the relational database file system that never happened with Win FS. A way to implement something that could’ve been elegant in a less-elegant way. We’re really getting off into the woods here, sorry.

Leo: Longhorn now. Longhorn was what, in the XP era?

Paul: Longhorn was an attempt to regenerate this ideal. And…

Paul: Windows Vista ended up being Longhorn.

Leo: So XP was out. They were going to do Longhorn and they were all excited and a new, again, an object-oriented file system.

Mary Jo: Yep, Win FS, managed code.

Paul: Hardware-accelerated graphics. Yea, all this stuff. By the way we’re still suffering from the after effects of Longhorn. Windows XP just went out of support this year because of Longhorn. That’s an operating system that should have been exercised from our consciousness five years previously. It wasn’t because Windows XP was the current OS when Longhorn was being developed. And they had to keep extending support because there was nowhere to go. Longhorn was not happening. The gap between Windows XP and Vista is the longest gap in the history of Windows. Even if you account for such things as Media Center Edition and Tablet PC Edition, and SP2, and all that stuff. Longhorn was more of a problem because they were more public about it. They faked it. All those awesome demos that we saw in 2003, not Longhorn. That was fake, it was all fake. Everyone got really excited about it and then they dumped this lump of crap in our lap that had nothing to do with what they had just shown us.

Leo: There’s people in the chat room saying no, that’s Vista. So what happened was they cut it off.

Paul: it’s not Vista. By the way, this stuff came together in one year. They literally, and you can read this story that Jim Allchin basically walked into Bill Gates’ office and said it’s not going to work. And by the way, speaking of componentization, the way this thing was being developed at the time, was they had hundreds of groups out doing little parts of Vista, or Longhorn at the time. Then they would bring it all in the build it. And hopefully it would compile and work. Guess what; it never compiled and never worked. These things did not work together at all. And so this whole componentization at least in this sense was a disaster. And he basically had to walk in and say we need to start over from scratch. So Vista is a separate thing. It came together in one year. There were little things that came out of Longhorn like the side bar which had nothing to do with Longhorn. And there were little vesicle pieces that literally came out of Longhorn like the virtual folder type stuff. Minus the database.

Leo: Yea, but once you abandon Win FS, a lot of the benefits accrued from Win FS.

Paul: Anyone can do this today. You can have files in your computer. You can hit the start button and you can start typing the name of a file. Maybe you know the name of a file, you know the content. That thing will come up pretty quickly. And the reason that thing comes up pretty quickly in a start search is because of indexing. They index the file system. It happens in the background. It’s why your hard drive sometimes runs when you’re not doing anything. And people are so suspicious of that. The original goal for that kind of thing was for that to be a database query. And that it would happen instantaneously because the database would be indexed. But it was going to be a more sophisticated technology. So we got what we were looking for in that one feature, but just not the elegant way we wanted it to be.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Does that make any sense?

Leo: Yea! No, I took you down this road but I think…

Paul: I’m just doing this off the top of my head.

Leo: Yea, but you were there and you remember it. And to my knowledge this is exactly what happened. But I don’t think people remember it. And I think people are frankly very interested. Because you said Longhorn… so this was a very ambitious re-architect.

Paul: Well listen, from my perspective as a Windows guy, Longhorn before I understood it was fake, was the high point. That day…

Leo: I agree.

Paul: That demo, it was like a cult experience. Everyone was walking outside high-fiving each other. This is the future, we win! And it was all a lie.

Leo: This was before…

Paul: This was really the beginning of the end.

Leo: It was before we learned as young tech journalists that it’s easy for a company to promise. It’s very hard to deliver.

Paul: It’s like the Seinfeld joke: anyone can take a reservation. The trick is keeping a reservation. But I guess what I would say is that I don’t think Microsoft had ever done that before. I think for their part, they were excited about the possibility of the future. They wanted to get people excited about it. They thought they were going to do it. Remember, they had never failed at anything. Not really. And they were literally on top of the world. And I think that they thought they were going to do it. I think the intention was not to deceit. The intention was to show off the excitement they had.

Leo: And as you pointed out, Apple did the same thing with Pink and with Telligent. We thought they were going to put ZFS in OS 10. This is nothing new. Every company sees this as a document-centric way of doing business. It makes sense. Apparently it’s harder to do than we realize or something. So fast forward, thank you for that detour. So who do we credit?

Paul: Who do we blame?

Leo: I was going to say blame. Who do we credit with this Windows 10 re-imagining? It's not Sinofsky, or is it?

Mary Jo: It depends. There are different theories about this. Some people actually think that this was the plan all along, even when Sinofsky was doing Windows 8 that the plan was to ultimately bring all of these things together and he was never there to realize it. Other people think, you know, he was kind of protecting his own fiefdom and he didn't really want to work with the Windows Phone team and the Xbox team, and it couldn't have happened while he was there. Once he left Terry Myerson and Steve Ballmer said, you know what, let's bring it all together, the whole One Microsoft thing. So it all depends who rendition of this that you believe.

Paul: Even before I sort of used the word audacious to describe Windows 10 I sort of came to the realization that Windows 10 just as the PC OS is kind of a big deal because Windows 08 was so divisive and everyone hated it so much that I didn't understand how you couldn't make a single thing that would satisfy everybody on the PC space. Desktop users, laptop users, Ultrabook users with touch, 2 in 1 users, tablet users; how can you make one system that works well for everybody? But then you see the preview and you realize, wow, this is going to work. They are going to do this. That itself is good just within the context of a Windows release. I think that we have to credit Terry Myerson, and Joe Belfiore, and those guys, don't we? They took something that was such a turd and they turned it into something that everybody wants regardless of what system you are using.

Leo: Well, we may never know.

Mary Jo: I know.

Leo: It's a silly question probably.

Paul: It's worth understanding.

Mary Jo: It's worth saying that the seeds had to be planted while Steve Ballmer was still there because this couldn't have just sprung up out of nowhere. I don't think Satya Nadella came in in February and said guys, everybody work as a team and let's make one operating system, right?

Leo: Maybe you credit the board with putting a man who supported this vision in place and could lead it? I don't know, maybe there is something there.

Paul: Steve Ballmer explicitly said, and it's something that I've always thought, we've talked about this, Devices and Services, then you make the leap to Mobile First Cloud First, those are two phrases describing exactly the same thing. That is what he said. He said everyone is talking Mobile First Cloud First, and he says guys, I was there with Devices and Services, but they have to rename it because you have this new team in town and they want to give all of the credit to the new guy, which is understandable and fine. I think he is right. A lot of this work does have to be credited back to him in the same way that some of the problems that Microsoft had in the previous decade had to also be credited back to him.

Mary Jo: That was a long and winding history.

Paul: So now we've gotten through 3 of the 22 things that we need to.

Leo: I'm sorry, I did distract you, but I think it is fascinating and I think it's important to understand where it came from and pitfalls too, right, because it's not an easy thing to do.

Paul: It's not all cream and strawberries Leo.

Leo: Oh, yes it is. Oh, yes it is. I'm going to take a little break. We will come back with the Surface Pro 3, Office, Windows Phone, and Xbox still on the agenda, and that's before we get to the back of the book. Our show today is brought to you today by our friends at ZipRecruiter, an awesome way to hire your next employee. If you are a small business person or if you are in HR you ought to know about ZipRecruiter because I think you already see the problem that ZipRecruiter solves. There are lots of job boards out there, but which job board is the right one for the position that you need to fill? Where are the candidates that you want hiding? Z+ job boards with a single click of the mouse. Your post gets there easily and quickly. That includes social networks like Facebook,and Twitter, and Craigslist. It is really amazing, you post once, distribute everywhere, post to all of the job boards so that you make sure that your posting is read by all of the best candidates. Social recruiting too, as I mentioned, LinkedIn and Google+ as well as Facebook and Twitter. Then the beautiful part of this is no longer are you going to get phone calls to your desk or emails flooding into your office. This all goes through ZipRecruiter. You will find candidates in any city or industry nationwide. You post once and watch the qualified candidates roll in to ZipRecruiter's easy to use interface. It makes it simple to quickly screen candidates, to rate them, and to hire the right person fast. You will even get pages that you can use on your website. There is a careers page, a jobs page, for informational purposes; it just really streamlines this whole process. That's probably why more than 250,000 businesses have used ZipRecruiter, including us. We have been very happy with ZipRecruiter. We have arranged a 4 day trial for you. Just use the website, I don't know if you have to use an offer code. Just go to ziprecruiter.com/windows, I think it is all there. Ziprecruiter.com/windows, and 4 days free for you. With the way this works that's probably enough to hire that person. You can certainly get a leg up on it. Ziprecruiter.com/windows, try it today. We used it, we were very happy with it, I know that you would be too.

Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, Windows Weekly on the air. Item number 4 as we creep through the agenda. It's always like this, it accelerates towards the end, especially as we see the beer at the finish line.

Paul: Like a comet hitting the earth's atmosphere.

Leo: Surface Pro 3, you guys both own them?

Mary Jo: I do not?

Leo: Oh, you didn't?

Mary Jo: I had to give mine back. I only took it as a loner.

Leo: So you are still with the Acer S7? Did you put Windows 10 on that?

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: No, somebody in the chat room was saying that he had problems on his with Windows 10.

Mary Jo: Yep, somebody said they bricked theirs putting the preview on.

Paul: You should try it just to see what happens.

Mary Jo: Yeah, let's see. Let's do it now.

Leo: What could possibly go wrong?

Paul: What could go wrong?

Leo: Did Microsoft fix the Wi-Fi problem? I'm curious.

Paul: I think we are all curious.

Mary Jo: Yeah, we are.

Leo: No one knows.

Paul: No, really, because they have said at least twice before that they had. I have not heard actually. I have installed it. Have you heard anything from anyone about this update?

Mary Jo: I heard people installed it and I haven't heard anybody say that it actually fixed it. This is going to be their third time, right?

Paul: I bet they fixed it.

Leo: We would have heard.

Paul: This is the typical reaction, right? Complaining all summer long and then they fix it and it's like crickets chirping. I hope they fixed it.

Leo: Wbhype in the chat room says, "I've had no firmware issues since the last update."

Mary Jo: There you go.

Paul: There you go.

Leo: There's one.

Mary Jo: That's great, there's one, yep.

Paul: It's fixed.

Leo: WBHype, did you have them before? Because not everybody had the Wi-Fi problem. I think that you are right, Paul. I think that absence of anything is probably an indicator.

Paul: Yeah, these people are not quiet, I can tell you that.

Leo: You talked last week about a $200 tablet running Windows 8, the Stream?

Paul: A 2 in 1, this was a 2 in 1.

Leo: A convertible.

Paul: Yeah, this is the one that goes back to the WPC, right, that Kevin Turnitt held up and said that this holiday season we are going to have a $200 laptop and you can buy it now.

Leo: Yikes. Yours comes tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, yeah.

Paul: The one that I'm actually more personally interested in is the 13 inch version. Obviously an 11 inch laptop is not much use to a guy my size, I could use this thing like a Kleenex or something. I'm curious to see how it performs, and if it works out I will give it to my daughter or whatever. It's cute, it's an attractive looking machine. I don't know what the build materials are like, I have not seen one in person. I'm very curious about that.

Leo: I think that it is actually made of tissue paper. 

Paul: By the way, this thing comes with two things that make it of even further interest, and that is a $69 value in a year of Office 365 Personal, and a $25 Windows Store gift card.

Leo: So really it's free?

Paul: It's like $110 after that.

Leo: Does this Office version come with unlimited storage?

Paul: Yes, it's crazy.

Leo: DropBox $200 gets you what, a Terabyte?

Paul: I think Microsoft is a pyramid scheme now, I don't know what is going on here. This is very strange.

Mary Jo: You know what, this is the way that they try to convince more people to use their platform. Hey, I can get Office for free, so why not use it? I'm only going to pay $200 for this tablet PC, I'm going to get Office, I'm going to get OneDrive, I'm going to get all of these things. Why not, it's free. It's basically free.

Paul: And the comparable machine is a Chromebook that has to be online to do a bunch of stuff. Not everything, but a bunch of stuff. It's fairly lackluster online Office apps compared to real Office. It's not a complete no brainer but it's getting as close to that territory as you can get.

Leo: A year of DropBox, a Terabyte of DropBox is $10 a month, $120. Unlimited plus Office...

Paul: So basically what you are doing here is paying $110 to get a free laptop.

Mary Jo: Exactly right.

Leo: It's a pretty good deal $90 for a laptop. So in fact if you were going to get Office it might be worth getting this laptop. I should say, and by the way, we have I think the big brother of this laptop, I think Patrick Delehanty bought it and is very unhappy with it.

Paul: Oh really?

Leo: So if it's a pain in the butt than it costs more than $200.

Paul: But you've got kids, right? My kids still like the monkey exhibit at the zoo. They are basically throwing feces at each other and jumping up on the cages and everything. So are you going to give them a $1,000 MacBook Air, are you going to give them a Chromebook, or are you going to give them a Windows laptop? If the Chromebook and the Windows laptop are the same price then we have an interesting conversation, because if the kid breaks this than who cares?

Leo: I think Patrick is listening. What is that red HP that you have so that we can warn people away from it?

Paul: It must be a 14.

Leo: No, it's not that small. He's taller than you are.

Paul: I don't think they are selling a 13, but they are selling a 14, which is $299. I think it is Chromebook specs but it's running Windows. I think they call it a Stream.

Leo: So Stream is a new name.

Paul: I think.

Leo: This is a Pavilion 360. So this is more like a real laptop. But you actively hate it? He says oh yeah.

Paul: How much was it?

Leo: How much was it? $200, so it was cheap. So the point is that you can spend a couple hundred bucks on something and that doesn't mean that you love it. It's all about expectations. He's pointing out that it does this.

Paul: Yeah, so this thing that I'm talking about doesn't even do that.

Leo: And it has Beats audio. Now how much would you pay?

Paul: What have I done?

Leo: It's not awful. The problem is that you are kind of duty bound to use something even when you only spend $200 on it. You kind of have $200 of shlupping out of it. Sometimes it is a false economy. Paul is getting one on Friday. We will watch.

Paul: I'm switching everything over to this machine, I don't care. We will see.

Mary Jo: You know, if you think about going back to the whole storage thing again. What makes someone loyal to a platform? If you buy a $200 platform you probably aren't going to keep it around or like it. But if all of your stuff is stored in Microsoft's Cloud you are going to get something else that accesses that whatever the device.

Paul: And by the way maybe next time you won't be such a cheapskate and you will spend $400.

Leo: That's what Microsoft is thinking.

Mary Jo: Right, they are thinking what makes it sticky? Their services make it more sticky than the operating system.

Paul: It's almost like locking in what makes it sticky. Your data is in their Cloud, that's pretty sticky. All it's going to take is that one upload for you to understand how painful it is.

Leo: That was when they had the Nokia X, wasn't it? It was like, I don't care if you use Android, just get them in the door.

Paul: Give them an offer they can't refuse.

Leo: Office, Office for the Mac. Am I getting that sometime? Updated some day?

Mary Jo: You are getting that sometime. We already talked about Office 16 and how that is coming in the second half of 2015. There have been leaks this week of screenshots for the next version of Office for the Mac. I asked here at the show when that might be coming and I heard that we are going to hear news on this soon. I'm betting there is a preview of the next Office for the Mac coming out very soon if not the product itself. I'm thinking that they probably would do a preview.

Leo: I think we are do because I'm looking at my Word which is up to date. While it says Office for Mac 2011 it's copyrighted for 2010. This is a 5 year old piece of software.

Mary Jo: I think there were Mac rumors that claimed it was a real timeline which showed the next Office for Mac coming out in very early 2015. If that is true I'm betting there will be a preview around now and the final code early 2015. So it's very close.

Paul: Leo, you are using the OneNote for Mac?

Leo: Yeah, and that was just updated.

Paul: Yeah, but if you look at that app what you will see is the more modern ribbon style UI. If you compare the ribbon in that app to the ribbon in Word 2011 it's night and day. That one looks just like a Windows ribbon. The leaked shots that Mary Jo is talking about, I think it was of Outlook, look like this. I think this is your preview of what the new Office will look like, this modern attractive thing not that broken thing you are using unfortunately.

Leo: It's not that broken.

Paul: It really is Leo, it's terrible.

Leo: It does everything that I want it to do.

Paul: Leo, there are like 14 different toolbars in that application. I don't know what they are doing. Look at it, there is a tool bar on the top, then tabs, then more tool bars. What's going on here?

Leo: It's overwhelming, you are right.

Paul: Plus it's got that kind of gel you want, this is what Aqua looked like 2002 or something.

Leo: I'm on Yosemite here, so these button are flat, that's the flat Yosemite look, then you come down here.

Paul: That's the gel look. It's like the scrollbars are full of liquid. It's really weird.

Leo: Oh well. Now you are making me unhappy.

Mary Jo: You are going to love it Leo. If you don't you can give them user feedback.

Leo: I can give them user feedback. So say again, it's coming out next year?

Mary Jo: We think early, the latest rumor is early 2015 and a preview or at least what to expect very soon. I'm thinking maybe even next week. It's eminent that we are going to find out more. The other one that is really close, and I bet this is going to be very early November, is the Office for Tablet release. That is very, very close, too. The rumor has been before the end of the year. I think that could be next week or right around then.

Leo: It's funny, because I started the show saying that I don't really use Windows, I use Xbox, I use my Mac Office, I use Office on the iPad, and I will use Office on Android. I just put OneDrive on everything because it's free and unlimited. Holy cow, I guess I do. That's the point, right. Microsoft is everywhere.

Mary Jo: Here's a quick update on the Surface 3 Wi-Fi thing. People who are using it with Hyper-V say that it isn't working even after the fix.

Paul: It's not working with Hyper-V?

Mary Jo: You can just disable the Hyper-V, right?

Paul: I believe the Hyper-V issue is going to be fixed in Windows 10. Remember there was that connect to standby problem, if you enabled Hyper-V it turned off.

Leo: Are there a lot of people using Hyper-V on Surface? There isn't a lot of storage on Surface.

Paul: Actually some of them 250 GB of storage or more maybe.

Mary Jo: A lot of developers do, right? You have to have a lot for that.

Paul: You know, Hyper-V is fairly common, and it's not unexpected that people expect a Windows laptop to work like a Windows laptop.

Mary Jo: It's supposed to be a laptop replacement they said.

Leo: So you would use Hyper-V to run other versions of Windows on the Surface?

Paul: Yeah, to test things or whatever. You need it for the emulators if you are a Windows Phone or Windows App developer.

Leo: You do? Oh, well there you go.

Paul: There you go.

Leo: Windows Phone, speaking of which.

Paul: Yeah, we still have Windows Phone, don't we?

Leo: Microsoft Office...

Paul: Yeah, if my computer would respond. Okay, so AdDuplex every month does their Windows Phone usage statistics study, and I kind of cover that every month. It's very interesting, especially over time, to track where things are going. When you look at this what you see is that at the top of ranks of Windows Phone worldwide and mostly in the United States as well are all low end phones. The exception being the Nokia Lumia 950, which was that high end phone from about 2 years ago that was kind of their big breakthrough at the time and maybe their last high end phone actually. The rest of this is just low end goodness. It's last year's low end phones, the 520, 521, 625, 620 actually too, and this year's low end phones, 630, 635, etc. I get it because I want one too. People complain, especially in the United States, why haven't they given us an I20 replacement, especially 2 years out, which makes sense from a contracts perspective, which is an issue we have here in the US. Why haven't we seen a flagship since the icon on any network? We haven't seen one on AT&T; it's been a year now since the 1520 came out. It's been a year plus since the 1020 came out, when are we going to get the new wonder phone, 40+ MP or something? 95% of all Windows Phones are Nokias, and the vast majority of popular Windows Phones, the vast majority, in fact the phones that are being sold now, the only phones that are successful are the ones that are not high end phones. That's why.

Mary Jo: I'm hearing almost definitely no more flagship phones this year.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: I wish they would just come out and say, just communicating it even it is bad news would be appreciated. People are waiting. People are literally going month to month wondering if there is one coming. 

Leo: That's why you say, you don't want to pre-announce if you are doing it, but if you aren't doing it you want people to buy something else.

Paul: Because they might go to an 830 or 735 or whatever.

Leo: Exactly.

Paul: Because right now they are thinking that they want to get the next high end phone.

Leo: But the 1520 is still good. It's completely up to date, right?

Paul: I would say as far as running Windows Phone that phone is top notch right now. As far as the platform and the hardware goes. Icon, by the way, same thing. Icon is exactly the same.

Mary Jo: Except that we still don't have Cyan on the Icon.

Paul: I just mean the hardware, not your wireless stuff. 

Mary Jo: But that's just worrisome, right? That's just worrisome. I can't even keep talking about it because I just don't know what to tell people. They are like when are we getting Cyan? We are we getting Denim on the Icon? I go to chat with Joe Belfiore, he said, we don't know either, it's up to Verizon. He said to keep on Verizon guys, just keep on them.

Leo: That's the problem with these carriers, they are really not. Did Joe say happy birthday to Paul? Did he say hi to my close personal friend Paul Thurrott and wish him a happy birthday?

Mary Jo: He did, he definitely said that.

Leo: See?

Paul: Joe Belfiore? I made fun of Joe's hair today on Twitter. Was it today?

Mary Jo: You did. So you are not his friend anymore.

Leo: Oh dude.

Paul: Someone needs to talk to that man. I can do it. I don't mind doing it.

Leo: What's the problem? Was it the haircut, what is it? What's the problem?

Paul: Anyone who spends that much time on his hair is...

Leo: It's a little odd.

Mary Jo: It's his signature. It's his trademark.

Leo: Some of us wear green socks, some of us have Beatle haircuts.

Paul: It's like wearing a blue shirt every time you are in a podcast. Who would do that?

Leo: I'm wearing red today, come on. By the way, it wasn't Joe that said happy birthday, it was Joe's hair. That one came from the chat room, just so you know.

Paul:  I love Joe just to be clear.

Leo: I love him. I want to run my fingers through it because I'm just curious, is it soft, is it bouncy, full of body, or is it kind of limp and lifeless? It's hard to tell.

Paul: I don't have that desire.

Leo: Can you ask him next time? 

Mary Jo: I did not do that when I saw him.

Leo: Mary Jo, I just want to know.

Paul: I have one question, can you just ruffle his head?

Leo: I just want to know what hair products he uses. Would you ask him that for me?

Mary Jo: I will ask him the next time I see him.

Leo: Inquiring minds want to know. So I, as you have probably gathered, I am a very happy Xbox One customer. The only thing that is making me unhappy now is that I signed up for the beta program and I get updates every 5 minutes it feels like. I rush home last night to watch the World Series...

Paul: I was on that and now I'm not.

Leo: Yeah, well you are lucky.

Paul: I almost feel like they figured out it was me or something because I got the first several and then it's just gone.

Leo: I came home last night to watch the World Series; I watch my TV through it. It said, well, okay, but first update.

Paul: Leo, okay, hang on a second. I just want to step back and focus on what you just said. You said earlier, and I'm quoting as close as I can, that you do not use Windows, but then you just said, and again, as close as I can get it...

Leo: I don't use Windows.

Paul: You watch your TV through your Xbox one?

Leo: Yes.

Paul: Leo. You run Windows.

Leo: I guess I do!

Paul: You rely on Windows. This is, in fact, a mission critical application of Windows.

Leo: Oh good.

Paul: Right?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Because if that doesn't work then you aren't watching the World Series.

Leo: I loves it. That's right. But, you know, I think that if you are not in the beta program once a month you will get an update. They are large updates, they are hundreds of megabytes usually.

Paul: But if your Xbox is used correctly, if you will, you won't notice that.

Leo: That's what bugs me. It doesn't do it automatically. Maybe it's because I'm in that beta program.

Paul: It's because of the beta program.

Leo: Yeah, I'm in the preview.

Paul: I'm not sure because I'm not on it anymore.

Leo: See, there is 2. So it can be like 15 minutes before I can watch the World Series.

Paul: That is not okay.

Leo: Not happy. But I have other TV's, I can go to the living room, but I wanted to watch it in my den. On the other hand, I used Smart Glass to download Sunset Overdrive yesterday when it came out. So when I got home it was there ready to go. I liked that. That was fun. I still can't get, I keep going to the store to buy the Halo Master Chief edition. They haven't put that out in the store yet. Am I right?

Paul: I'm not sure about that. You can preorder it digitally. I know you have an external hard drive, so you will be all set because you need something like 45GB.

Leo: I have like a 3TB hard drive on it.

Paul: A kajilobyte or whatever it is called of storage.

Leo: It's a lot of kijilobytes. I will look at Smart Glass. I love that. Anyway, I'm just saying that I love my Xbox One.

Paul: Wow, a lot of cheerleading on this episode. We are going to hear about this.

Leo: And now it is more affordable. But get it with Kinect. Every time Michael comes into the room it goes bloop, hi Michael. It knows his face.

Paul: So, my son walks into the room and says hi Mark, and then the Xbox slows down. I told him, here is what we are going to do, I'm going to put yellow tape on the floor over there. This is going to be as close to me as you can get. If you want to get my attention you can throw a paper airplane at me from there.

Leo: Why does it slow down?

Paul: My Xbox is slow. I don't know what it is. The other thing is, I don't know what the time out is, but I should because it happens every time he walks into the room, but 30 minutes later or whatever it says, goodbye Mark.

Leo: Oh, I didn't know it said goodbye.

Paul: Oh, every time.

Leo: The funniest thing is that Lisa looks just like her son apparently because the Xbox says hi Michael even when she walks in.

Paul: Yes, thank you, my wife walks in and says hi Mark, which frankly is a little creepy. 

Leo: It doesn't do that for my kids. Apparently they don't look that much like me. $50 off of all Xbox One bundles. This is really, I shouldn't say, I don't know what slowed it down. I'm not a gamer, I just play games, but I understand the difference.

Paul: No, you are right, you got it.

Leo: I play games I'm not a gamer. That the price differential between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, which was only $100, but...

Paul: Only $100? I know. They are both expensive.

Leo: It's 2 games, that's 2 games.

Paul: But it's still 2 games, you know?

Leo: Okay, so $50, is that going to do it?

Paul: So they did a course correction obviously mid-year with the Kinectless version, $100 less.

Leo: I think that is a mistake, don't do it.

Paul: At least they have it. Now $50 off of all of them. Starting price for an Xbox now is $350 and they have all of the bundles. So those are some really good deals if you want the games. Assassin’s Creed is one.

Leo: Do you have like the Call of Duty super-duper?

Paul: No, I have the Day One.

Leo: You have the Day One regular, plain one.

Paul: It's just like a car. I don't want racing stripes, I want stock.

Leo: That's because you are not a gamer, you play games.

Paul: Because I'm not a gamer, yes. I'm always told that. I think that I play about 80 hours a week of video games.

Leo: You are not a gamer, huh uh.

Paul: People delight in telling me that.

Leo: I get it too. What do you need to do to be a gamer?

Mary Jo: Mary Jo gets that a lot too.

Leo: Well she's not a gamer.

Mary Jo: We just talked about that.

Leo: In this case she is not a gamer.

Mary Jo: I am not. I am not.

Leo: So we had, I didn't even know this, a free streaming feature for Xbox Music.

Paul: Thank you, and you've now answered the question that is in the show notes, which is why this matters. Because nobody knew. When Windows 8 launched 2 years ago one of the things you got, and this included Windows RT, was free streaming through the Xbox Music App. It was free and the extended it to the web. I think last fall, probably about a year ago the web version of Xbox Music shipped. If you use it on the web it was free. Everyone could do this. By the way, you could get free streaming without even signing in to Xbox Music. If you didn't want to give Microsoft your information you could just stream free from the web. It was ad supported.

Leo: That's nice.

Paul: But free, it was great.

Leo: How often do the ads play? I'm sure it's not very often.

Paul: You know what the problem was? I don't know if anyone has ever done this, but if they have you will understand. Same fricking Macklamore ad over, and over, and over, and over. It was the same, oh my god, was it the same.

Leo: If I have to hear it again!

Paul: Yeah. Maybe that's why they didn't get rid of it, maybe they couldn't get ads.

Leo: That's a problem with Hulu and On Demand where they haven't sold enough ads but they have the avails so they just run the same ad every break.

Paul: That's right, that's awful. It's worse than ads.

Leo: It's worse than ads.

Paul: What's worse than ads? The same ad. It's a Steven Wright joke. I drove across the country and there was one cassette stuck in my player, it was all I could listen to. I can't remember what it was.

Leo: And finally, I'm sorry Mary Jo, one more.

Mary Jo: Okay, I'm hanging on guys.

Leo: We are almost done here.

Paul: And today, Leo, don't forget we have the Call of Duty strategy tip of the week coming up.

Leo: Coming up. She's passing out. She's passing out.

Paul: Mary Jo down.

Leo: That's cool, when you lean over we can see the reflection of what you see. That's kind of cool.

Mary Jo: Oh yeah, because I'm in a glass cage.

Leo: You are in a fish bowl.

Mary Jo: Pretty much I am.

Paul: I'm reading the notes. It says Xbox One Kinect, and Windows Kinect, and now an adapter, and what the hell?

Leo: You notice I read that and I thought that I don't know what he is going to talk about.

Paul: By the way, I guess that I intended for that to be the way that it reads.

Leo: What about the Kinect Paul? I thought he would take it from there.

Paul: I shouldn't make myself laugh, but that's pretty good.

Leo: So there is an adaptor kit for the Xbox One Kinect that allows it work for Windows. Is that right? Is that what we are talking here?

Paul: I think that it is the other way around isn't it?

Mary Jo: So it's an adaptor for the Xbox One Kinect that lets it work with Windows.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: That's not what I said?

Paul: Or as Microsoft described it just 2 months ago, an impossibility.

Mary Jo: Right, they said it wasn't going to be happening.

Leo: We don't know how to do it?

Paul: It can't work.

Leo: It couldn't possibly work.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: It works.

Mary Jo: But it did.

Leo: Wasn't the issue before that the Windows Kinect had a different field of view?

Paul: I don't think that is true anymore. The Xbox, the Windows Kinect V2, the one the is the Xbox One Kinect, I believe it is the Xbox One Kinect with different wires.

Leo: It's kind of the same.

Paul: Basically just USB. I don't even understand why this is needed. This allows you to take a Xbox One Kinect and add it to Windows rather than buy the Windows version of Kinect, which is the same Kinect.

Leo: It's the same version of Kinect.

Mary Jo: Is it the same Kinect? I didn't think that it was.

Paul: Do you think that is why?

Mary Jo: Yeah, I think the Windows Kinect looks the same but it was actually built so that you could use it at a shorter range. It has a shorter cable.

Leo: It's the ZX.

Mary Jo: I think, I think. What do I know about Kinect guys?

Paul: Well, you may know something that I don't. I've been busting on this for a couple of weeks, and now that maybe makes sense.

Mary Jo: I think it is slightly different product in terms of how it was designed. I think, I think.

Paul: Here's an idea.

Mary Jo: Look it up?

Paul: Just make one Kinect. No, I mean just make one.

Mary Jo: You know, I asked them if this means in the future that there will only be one Kinect that works with both. They said that they don't have any comment on that. Okay, I don't know. I would think that makes sense too.

Paul: What I want now is an adapter that lets me use my Windows Kinect with my Xbox One. We will let that one settle.

Leo: I have one more thing to mention on this and then we are going to move on. Apparently developers decide what is an achievement in a game, right? So Amazon streaming video gives me an achievement every time I watch something.

Paul: Are you serious?

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Well, no, but there are still limits?

Leo: Well yeah, they stopped after like 6 episodes, but I was watching Transparent, which is fabulous by the way, a great show.

Paul: Rewarding people for sitting on the couch and doing nothing is not necessarily in the spirit of the word achievement.

Leo: The fundamental concept here does seem odd, but Leo got an achievement...

Paul: Get busy living...

Leo: ...or get busy dying. That's one episode, and then I got another one Totally Bodacious for another.

Paul: This is just made up. This is crazy.

Leo: Yeah. Don't give me achievements for watching TV. It's not an achievement. It's kind of sad.

Mary Jo: I get achievements for drinking beer. I do. Untapped, you get badges.

Leo: With Amazon, somebody said, do they give you a bonus level?

Paul: Right, bonus episode.

Leo: Bonus episode. It would be worth it. In that case I wouldn't complain. Okay, let's take a break. We are going to come back and we have got the back of the book. Mary Jo has got beer, we've got picks, we've got Enterprise stuff, but first a word from Braintree. I know it's a town down the road, Paul.

Paul: The Braintree Mall, is that where they are?

Leo: They must be in Mass, right? They must be in Massachusetts, but Braintree provides code for easy online payments. This is for mobile app developers. If you want to add online payments to your app, you should do what GitHub did, in fact they were close partners with Braintree, what Uber does. Braintree is a payment API used by so many companies, AirBNB, Hotel Tonight, Living Social; they started with these companies from the beginning, which is really neat. They scaled with them with no problem, now there are huge. Can you imagine the number of transactions that they go through with just Uber alone? Braintree solves a huge problem in online commerce. I don't know if you know this, but this is a fascinating statistic. Of people who go through the whole eCommerce process and get to the shopping cart, what percentage do you guess abandon the shopping cart? 10%? 20%? 50%? 70% get to the shopping cart and go no. I bet you I know what the problem is. A lot of them go pay with what? No, I'm not giving you my credit card. That's why Braintree is a great solution. It's a full stack payment solution. Support for all types of payments that your customer might want, credit, debit, PayPal, Vinmo, Bitcoin. Do they do Apple Pay? You bet. 130 different currencies across all platforms. You get fraud protection, you get customer service, you get great support. One touch payments for your mobile app easy to implement. PayPal's Braintree One Touch Brain Code give you a simple solution for you and your customers. You know that your customers want one touch checkout now. It's easy. If they have the PayPal app installed on their phone they can go boom, just like that. Gone are the days of entering data fields and sharing credit card information; one and done. That completely transforms the abandonment rate on your cart. Simple, secure code that you can integrate literally in minutes. Give them a call and they will even handle integration for you or walk you through it. They support Android, IOS, JavaScript clients, STKs in 7 languages, .net, no.js, java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. You can literally do this with 10 lines of an app code. You can see it all if you go to braintreepayments.com/twit. Braintreepayments.com/twit, you can look at the STK, you can see how you would integrate it. You could look at the Apple Pay situation and how you would incorporate that. This is so slick. It's the most secure way to pay. Your customers want it, their customers want it. Never worry about fraud, if you get hacked Braintree will cover it. They use tokens for the secure payment info. This is what customers want. Credit card info is now a past emergent server. This is a great solution. So if you want to do Apple Pay, if you want to do one touch with a PayPal interface, if you want to do pretty much any kind of payment do what AirBNB, and Uber, and Hotel Tonight, and Living Social, and GitHub, and so many more do. You can review the documentation at braintreepayments.com/twit and there is a sandbox there which is awesome so that you can actually play with it and test your integration. Once you decide to implement one touch they have got a great deal for you, your first $50,000, $50,000 of transactions are fee free. You've got to go to braintreepayments.com/twit. Braintreepayments.com/twit and let us know what you think, tweet @braintree, they would like to hear from you. You can say, hey, I heard about you on Windows Weekly and I would like to know more. That would make me, Paul, and Mary Jo happy. They must be in Massachusetts, right? You've got to be in Braintree if you are going to call yourself Braintree, right?

Paul: It sounds like yeah.

Leo: It's got to be.

Mary Jo: There is a town in the UK called Braintree also. Yep, I saw it this week.

Leo: I don't think they are from the UK.

Mary Jo: Probably not.

Leo: I talked to the guys, they are really nice by the way. They are really smart. I love developers. I think that I'm a geek. I think that I missed my calling, I should have been a programmer because I love just hanging out and talking. You know what they love? Beer. So maybe you are a geek too. Let's start with our software pick of the week from Mr. Paul Thurrott.

Paul: By the way, Philippe Garcia tells me that what you are seeing from the Amazon Instant Video App is a challenge not an achievement. The difference between a challenge and an achievement is that you don't get gamer points.

Leo: Does it mean that they are challenging me to watch more TV?

Paul: Yeah, they are like time challenges, yeah.

Leo: You know why? Because I watched like 5 episodes in one evening.

Paul:  Right, that would be the challenge.

Leo: So I will just have to click on the link and see what I got for credit for doing that. I've got more important fish to fry like downloading OneDrive.

Paul: Yeah, so I don't have any tips this week, but I do have a bunch of software picks which I will burn through very quickly unlike my Longheart diatribe. OneDrive, the mobile app version of OneDrive was updated for both Windows Phone and for Android. The Windows Phone version got that thing that Android had previously which was the ability to add multiple OneDrive for Business accounts to the one app which is kind of a neat thing. The OneDrive for the Android App, I can't remember what the second improvement was, but the big one is widget support. So if you use Windows Phone App you can pin items inside of apps in your Start screen. For example, in OneDrive you would be able to pin a folder in OneDrive so that you can go right to that folder from the Start screen. They give you that capability now on Android and they do it through widgets. It's a little feature that is a little bit like a live tile, so that's kind of cool. Those are free updates, so obviously if you have the app you will get it automatically. Microsoft also updated OneNote for Mac and IOS. There are various features across those releases. The only one that I can remember off of the top of my head is that password protected sections are now possible to unlock and actually create passwords I think on IOS. Again, you will get those for free if you have them already. The biggest one for me in some ways was Fitbit for Windows Phone. I actually got access to this a couple of weeks back and have been using the new version of the app. There are two big things in this release, and then there is a Windows version coming soon, too, by the way, if you have a Windows device. Those are background sync, which you actually have to go in and enable in the app, it took me like 4 or 5 days to figure that out. This is a switch in the settings that you have to turn on then it will sync automatically with the device instead of having to manually sync by launching the app. The other is Cortana integration, which is interesting because most of the Cortana stuff is related to food entry. One of the things with Fitbit that you can do it monitor your diet, you know, say I had 2 eggs, I had a sausage, whatever. You can say that stuff with Cortana. I actually haven't had a lot of success doing the Cortana thing, but I think that it's Cortana's problem more than Fitbit. I don't use Cortana a lot anyway so that's not a big deal for me. The background sync is a big deal because previously that was something that I had to rely on an iPhone or Android device to do that and since I use Windows Phone the way that I will occasionally sync my device to the phone was to launch the app and wait until it syncs. It's kind of a goofy thing. Now in the new version on my Lumia 735 which I am using I just have it set up to automatically sync and not have to worry about it. The data goes up to the Cloud automatically.

Leo: Cool.

Paul: That's it.

Leo: Hello Cortana.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Well, I guess it's time for the Enterprise pick of the week then if that's it. Mary Jo Foley?

Mary Jo: Yes, so I'm going to remind people of an Enterprise pick that I've had before because this is a date that is happening this week. On October 31st Microsoft will no longer provide it's OEMs or System Builders with copies of Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium, or Ultimate to install on PCs. So this is one of the milestones along the phase-out of Windows 7. As I put in the show notes, don't panic because this does not change a lot of the things that people are worried about. It has no implication for the end of support, no implication for downgrade rights, and if you are a Window 7 Pro user there still is no end date for when OEMs can load that version of Windows 7. So it's not like Windows 7 end of support is imminent. Microsoft is still going to have extended support which means that you will get all of your security fixes for Windows 7 through January 2020. So you can keep running Windows 7, you just aren't going to be able to buy those other SKUs that I mentioned, the Home and the Ultimate SKUs preloaded on new PCs unless OEMs have them in stock and they have stockpiled them starting this Friday, October 31. I just wanted to explain that because I have gotten a lot of questions on it. The date is this week and people are worried, like oh no, is this the end of support for Windows 7? No, it's not. There you have it. That's what is going to happen this week.

Leo: They stopped selling it in the box a year ago.

Mary Jo: They did. A year ago, yeah.

Paul: Well you can still buy the OEM version if you really want it.

Leo: You can go to New Egg and buy it.

Paul: Yeah, even Amazon has it.

Leo: Alright.

Mary Jo: That's if you are a system builder, right?

Paul: Yeah, you need to be.

Leo: I'm a system builder, aren't I?

Paul: I am literally buying and building a PC, so yeah.

Mary Jo: Oh yeah, you are building a PC, I saw you say that.

Paul: I am a system builder.

Leo: Call me Bob the Builder cause I'm building a system. How about you? Alright, is that the Enterprise pick?

Mary Jo: That's the Enterprise pick. Since we had so many Enterprise things on the show I thought it was good. We don't need more.

Leo: But you wouldn't ashew a code name, would you?

Mary Jo: I would not. This is a code name that was shared here at TechED Barcelona at one of the sessions. The code name is Athens. It looks like from a slide I saw in this presentation that Athens is the code name for the next version of Windows Embedded. You know when Paul went on his whole I love Windows 10 thing? That whole rant that we had before the Longhorn rant? One of the things we didn't really dwell on a lot is that Windows 10 isn't just going to be on Xbox, and phones, and PCs, and tablets. It's also going to be inside of embedded devices too. So Microsoft is taking that core, that common core, and it's extending it to its next version of internet and things devices. This particular SKU, Athens, is going to be a really stripped down but still Windows 10 core version of the Windows Embedded Compact SKU I believe from the slide I saw. I don't know when it's coming, but that will at least be the code name so we can watch for it and see how that is evolving. The interesting part of this, I'm curious how small the amount of RAM will be that they can fit that Windows core. I've heard some people say 256, I've seen some people even say 128. It's going to be interesting to see what changes with Windows Embedded Compact now that they are calling that more of an internet of things platform than just pure old Windows Embedded. So that is your code name pick.

Leo: Finally, I want my beer.

Mary Jo: Yes, so before I came to Barcelona this week I had a couple of vacation days and I went to Bruges.

Leo: Good choice especially for a beer drinker. Is it as beautiful as it looks in the movies?

Mary Jo: It is. Have you ever seen that movie "In Bruges"?

Leo: I have, where the gangster goes to Bruges. It's so beautiful.

Mary Jo: It looks just like that.

Leo: It looks like that with the canals and everything, just like that? Oh, it's beautiful.

Mary Jo: Yeah, but there is only one brewery still active in the Bruges city limits. It's called Halve Maan like half-moon. I'm probably butchering the pronunciation of that. I went on the brewery tour there of course. My favorite was called Straffe Hendrik Quad. So a quad beer is very strong, this is 11%+. It's a dark Belgin strong beer and it was really fantastic. If you like quads, which are very fruity almost like a port, like a strong dark fruit, very sweet and delicious like a dessert beer, for me anyway; this is a good one if you can find it.

Leo: Straffe Hendrik Quadruple from the Halve Maan.

Mary Jo: In Bruges I bought a bunch of beer because I couldn't resist. My whole suitcase now is full of beer.

Leo: She clanks.

Mary Jo: I had to get another bag.

Leo: She clanks when she walks.

Mary Jo: I do. I had to get another bag just so I could bring my clothes home since my suitcase was full of beer.

Paul: Leave the clothes there just bring home the beer.

Leo: Who needs the clothes? You can get more clothes? Did you stay at like a little local pension there or did you stay at a big...

Mary Jo: I did.

Leo: You did?

Mary Jo: Yep, a little pension.

Leo: Do you recommend it?

Mary Jo: I would. You are going to ask me the name of it.

Leo: No, I will send you an email.

Mary Jo: I will have to find it. I would totally recommend it.

Leo: You know what I would like to do is Christmas in Bruges.

Mary Jo: Oh man, that would be so beautiful.

Leo: Wouldn't that be gorgeous? I'm sure it would be freezing.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: It feels like Santa Claus should live there.

Mary Jo: I know, it's really true. And all of the chocolates, and cobblestone streets, it's just so picturesque, it really is.

Leo: Honey, we are going to Bruges.

Mary Jo: I think you should.

Leo: It sounds wonderful, I'm very jealous. That is the end. The Flemish are in the chat room. Apparently there is more than one. They say that my pronunciation was god awful. I know that it was.

Paul: It's not a tumor. You sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Leo: I am Schwarzenegger. Halve Hendrik Brew Quadruple from the Halve Maan.

Paul: That's why I laughed because it was so awful.

Leo: Flemish Flemish.

Paul: It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger as the tour guide.

Leo: Flemish is hard. I can do it in French. Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to enter into the end of Daylight Savings Time in the Standard Time Zone.

Paul: By the way Leo.

Leo: Yes.

Paul: In the United States you mean. As someone has reminded me on Twitter, this happened in Europe already, and these guys have no idea what time the podcast is.

Leo: This is the second time change. This is why I always give you UTC because the UTC time is the time that matters. It will be now 1900 UTC. You are going to have to do your local calculations from that. For those of you in the US it's not going to change, it's the same time, 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern Time, but it is now 1900 UTC. It changed once when you changed and we didn't know it's going to change again when we change and you didn't. I just read that there is somewhere in the Easter Islands that decided to defer the end of Daylight Savings Time last week for another 2 weeks. So it's just a mess. 

Paul: Because they are not, you know, Iceland enough from the rest of the planet you know.

Leo: It's just a mess. Now you understand that's why I always give out the time that we record in UTC, Universal Coordinated Time.

Paul: Wait, Mary Jo what is the time difference there now? Is it 7 hours or 5 hours?

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's 9:05 right now here.

Paul: Okay, because it's normally 6, or 6 in the summer.

Leo: Yeah, because they've changed in Spain but they haven't changed here.

Paul: That's great, that means you will recover from this trip far more easily. It will be like you didn't even go to Europe.

Mary Jo: Exactly.

Paul: It's minor.

Leo: That's why I always put UTC at the end. We used to be at 1800 UTC and we will now be at 1900 UTC. But again, that's not enough, you will now have to calculate your time.

Paul: Please can we standardize them? This is silly.

Leo: That's why I do UTC.

Paul: All I know Leo is that when I get up in the morning Leo it is midnight. It's pitch black.

Leo: That's why we are glad it's going back. We are turning the clock back because it's crazy dark now. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, it's Daylight Saving Time, it's not plural, I know that we are just saving daylight. It's not like a savings and loan.

Paul: They really get upset about all of the right things, don't they?

Leo: Well, you know what, I also have somebody who works here who shall remain nameless who comes in roaring if I say savings. It's saving.

Paul: I used to always say excetera on the podcast in the old days.

Leo: I will come roaring in if you say that.

Paul: Yeah, I got a lot of comments about that.

Leo: Excetera. Et means an in Latin.

Paul: Who doesn't use the proper Latin? Jeez.

Leo: The study of Latin has been very valuable in almost everything in my life except for the pronunciation of Flemish. It was not helpful with that. We do this show, as I said, at 11:00 am Pacific and that will not change, 2:00 pm Eastern Time, and that will not change, and UTC will change to 1900. I hope I will see you here live next week, but should something go wrong in the math you can get a download of this, audio and video always available after the fact, on demand by your command at twit.tv/ww, on the podcast app on your Windows Phone, on any phone, on Stitcher, on iTunes, on Xbox Music, wherever you get your podcasts we are on there. This is one of the oldest shows ever. It's hosted now by someone even older then he used to be. Happy Birthday Paul Thurrott.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: Yay, we won't sing, I don't want to pay money to AOL Time Warner.

Paul: Thank you doubly.

Leo: I always feel like it's a real cheat when you go to a restaurant and they sing something made up just so they won't have to pay royalties.

Paul: You know the happy, happy, nappy.

Leo: Happy, happy, happy, birthday, birthday, birthday. It's your birthday, birthday, birthday, so happy, happy, happy.

Paul: How the heck does anyone own Happy Birthday? That's crazy.

Leo: Isn't it?

Paul: Crazy.

Leo: It's not a problem if you sing it at your kid's birthday party, but it is a problem if you sing it on this podcast. You will get a bill.

Paul: It's like hiding from the Nazis. You have to close all of the blinds. Make sure no one hears.

Leo: Hiding from ASCAB PMI is like hiding from the Nazis. Thanks Paul, Paul is at the Super Site for Windows, winsupersite.com. You can find his books at windows81book.com. I say books plural because he's got the Field Guide for Windows 8.1 Update 1, he's got all sorts of great stuff there, music. You are working on the music book still or that is done?

Paul: Yep, almost.

Leo: That's good.

Paul: Wipe out every reference to free streaming, that was horrific.

Leo: Global search and replace my friend. Mary Jo Foley is at allaboutmicrosoft.com. That's where she keeps her ZDNet Blog and it is a great thing to read. I am sincere when I say that we are very fortunate to have these two because there is nobody with their finger on the pulse of Microsoft, nobody who knows more about what is going on.

Paul: I think it's more like hands on the neck.

Leo: Thank you very much Mary Jo and Paul, we will see you next time on Windows Weekly! Bye, bye.