Windows Weekly 398 (Transcript)

Leo -Laporte:  It's time for Windows Weekly.  Paul and Mary Jo are here.  We are going to talk about Windows 10 one week in, we may have a little rant from Paul on the crapware on the PC, and the dude has got a Dell.  It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly.

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Leo: This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Joe Foley, Episode 398, recorded January 28, 2015.

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Leo:  It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news.  From Redmond, back from their jaunt to the Pacific Northwest, Paul Thurrott of thurrott.com, his hot new site.  All of the kids are doing it.  

Paul -Thurrott:  Yes they are Leo.  

Leo:  All of the kids are doing it, doing the T.

Paul:  Doing the T.  

Leo:   Also, Mary Jo Foley from AllAboutMicrosoft.com.  Both back in their native habitats where the snow has come down.  You survived snowmageddon, huh?

Mary -Jo Foley:  Yeah.

Paul:  I had to look this up, my wife had said that this was the most snow that my kids had seen at one time, but actually in 2005 we got 27.5 inches of snow.

Leo:  So up your way in New England you got a couple of feet?

Paul:  We got 2 feet, yeah.  

Leo:  But in Manhattan it was less than a foot, right?

Mary Jo:  Like 8 inches, 12 inches.

Leo:  That's not too bad, good.

Paul:  At least they didn't shut down the subway or anything.

Mary Jo:  Yeah they did.

Leo:  They shut down the subway?   Why did they shut down the subway?

Mary Jo:  They thought it was going to be much worse than it was.

Paul:  You know what is much worse?  When you need that thing to be open.

Mary Jo:  I know.

Paul:  Don't you think?

Mary Jo:  Yeah, they shut down the subway the night before the storm and they also banned any cars that aren't emergency cars, including cabs, from the streets after 11.

Leo:  Oh my god.  I saw pictures of empty streets in Manhattan.  I never see that, it's kind of cool.

Mary Jo:  It was, but people panicked because if you are in Manhattan, and the last train has gone home, and you can't get a cab, then what?

Paul:  Then you are screwed.

Leo:  Uber.

Paul:  There is nothing that we can't overreact to Mary Jo.

Mary Jo:  I know.  It was crazy. 

Paul:   It has never snowed before.  What do we do?

Mary Jo:  I should have rented out a little space on my floor or something.

Leo:  The irony is that at least when I was a kid this wasn't unusual at all.  

Paul:  This isn't unusual now.  We get these storms every year.

Leo:  It's CNN.

Paul:  Every winter we have 3 feet of snow on the ground.

Leo:  I blame CNN for the whole thing.  They need ratings, so they make it a big apocalypse, and the public service sector believes it, and then the whole thing snowballs.

Paul:  The last time that we reacted to snow like this was when we were caveman wondering if the gods were raining terror on us.  What is this?  

Leo:  So we had a little bit of apocalypse last week with this Windows 10 announcement.  That was something else.  It was very exciting.  We've had a week now to digest.  Any thoughts?

Paul:  It's not that good.

Leo:  Ah.

Paul:   Actually, before we get to that what we need to do, and I think that Mary Jo would agree, is thank everybody who came to our meet up last week.

Leo:  Oh yeah, how did that go?

Paul:  It was amazing.  Terry Myerson came, and Joe Bellifori from Microsoft.

Leo:   You are kidding!

Paul:  But honestly, more important than that, there were people who drove more than 2 hours to meet us.  People came from very far away.  There was a guy from Columbia who was joking, yeah, I flew in to come to your meet up.  I was like please tell me that isn't true.  He said, no, no, I'm here for training, but I heard that you were doing this.

Leo:  Oh, people do that?  That's awesome.

Paul:  Yeah, it was really nice.  I can't thank everyone personally, but we recognize the effort that these people went to.  It was very nice.

Mary Jo:  They even brought us a couple of gifts.  The couple who drove 2 hours, I forget their name, they make their own wine and they brought us each a bottle.  Someone else who makes silk screen posters, he made us posters and hand carried them there.  I was like, wow.  It was really great.  Everybody came, and we drank a lot of good beer at Bellevue Brewing.  It was really good, really good meet up.  

Paul:  Yeah, it was great.

Mary Jo:  Yeah.

Leo:  That's awesome.

Paul:  I hadn't been to Redmond in a while, so this whole trip was an alcohol fueled family reunion.  It was nice.

Mary Jo:  It was.

Paul:  Okay, let's talk about Windows 10.

Mary Jo:  The funny thing was that we didn't know when they were going to drop the next build of Windows 10 Desktop, and it ended up happening on Friday.

Paul:  I had heard Friday.

Mary Jo:  You had heard Friday, but they had told some of us next week.

Leo:  I was saying next week on the radio show and somebody said no, it's Friday.

Paul:   They were very cagey, they said within the next week, right?  Two days later was in the next week.  

Leo:  So they still call it the Technical Preview?  It doesn't say the Consumer Preview?

Paul:  Leo, Leo, you know Windows is like the anti-Christ.  Its names are legion, and internally this is actually called Windows Technical Preview 2.  It's trying not to get out there in the public.  The Xbox post actually made that suggestion of that term, and the Windows Server team has used this term.  That is in fact kind of what it is called.  I think of it is sort of what they called the Consumer Preview before where the original Technical Preview was that set of builds that came out in the fall and Technical Preview 2 is this next phase where they are putting in tablet mode and all of that kind of consumer stuff.

Leo:  So you've had a chance to play with it now, and tell me a little bit about it.  It is much different?  Is it similar?

Paul:  I would say honestly it isn't much different.  It's refined and there are additional things.  We made a short list of some of that stuff in the notes.  Visually it has been upgraded, the icons are kind of new, and bright, and different, new backgrounds and new lock screens.  There is an actually a hidden lock screen that I hadn't written about yet as well.  Then there are some new features.  If you have a Surface Pro 3 you can detach the tablet part from the keyboard and Continuum will kick in.  It will say, "Would you like to go into tablet mode?", and back and forth.  If you don't have a Surface Pro 3 you can enable it manually through the Action Center, which is also new actually, or improved anyway.  Lots of Windows Phone looking things in here, which I really like, because these things are going to be the same OS now, so it makes sense that the UI's would converge, and a bunch of new universal apps, which are those apps that will also run on Windows Phone, Window Preview whatever in the notes, Maps, Cortana, store Beta Photos in Xbox.  So they are kind of moving us toward the future of Windows 10 where all of these things will be universal apps as well.  What am I missing here?  That's most of it, right?

Leo:  Would it be safe to say that most of what Microsoft does they will make universal?  If it can be.  I think that Xbox is.

Paul:  So the point is obviously there are going to be versions of Windows 10 that run on phones, fablets, and very small tablets.  There are going to be versions that run on big tablets, PC's of all sizes, and etc.  It makes sense that the universal apps would work on both.  It may look different on a smaller device because of the whole screen size and orientation, but it's the same app and you can go back and forth and obviously the OneDrive sync of apps, data, and settings between the platforms as well.  

Leo:  Okay.

Mary Jo:  I think that the thing that I have seen people talking about is something that is a little bit contentious is the change to the Start menu in this build.  People really don't like what they are doing with the Start menu.

Leo:  Did it change from the previous Technical Preview?

Paul:  Well, why though?  I'm actually confused by this complaint.  

Mary Jo:  I like it from what I've seen.  I should say that I'm not running the Technical Preview right now because it's still too buggy for me.

Paul:  Think about we would have to go back 6 or 8 months and I'd written at some point, I would have to look it up, but at some point I wrote that the Start menu in Windows 10 will be expandable to the full screen.  Then they finally got the actual, right.  In the original Technical Preview builds there was actually a switch in the properties for this where you could switch between full screen part screen and a menu, right?  The menu would the default on the computer and the Start screen would be on the tablet.  I thought that is interesting because that is not what I had heard.  I had heard that this was one UI and you could stretch it out to full screen.  Now in Technical Preview 2 you see that is in fact what they are doing.  They are not going to have 2 UI's, its 1 UI.  In using tablet mode it will automatically go full screen, as will all of the other universal and modern apps, and that to me is consistent.  Honestly, if you are running this thing on a tablet, you are in tablet mode, or you are just on a smaller device then everything is full screen.  It works a lot like it did in Windows 8.  What is not to like?  I don't understand it.

Mary Jo:  I like it.  I think that it makes sense.  It looks very sensible to me.  I've seen people saying that they don't like the list combined with the tiles.  Everyone has their preferences.  

Leo:  This is not what it looked like in the previous release?

Paul:  It's different.  Functionally it is the same thing.  We are not seeing the version of the Start menu that we were promised back in October or the last day of September where it does have that list of apps on the side, all apps and recent apps, which wasn't available previously.  It's like you said, it's still a Start menu, you just can go full screen.  You can't resize it in this build, but that's a one build problem.  They are going to let you resize it.  If you are running on a tablet to me it's better than the version on Windows 8.  I think this is better.  I find it odd, you know, all of the complaining that occurred during Windows 8, the incessant complaining, and now they are walking away from that and now we are hearing complaining from people who like Windows 8.  

Mary Jo:  Right, I know.

Leo:  So I'm looking for a picture of the new Start menu.  Can I see that on thurrott.com?

Paul:  Yeah.

Leo:  You have a lot of posts but nothing specifically about menu.

Paul:   Sorry.  Where would that be?  Actually go the Enable Tablet Mode tip.  

Leo:  Alright.

Paul:  So yeah, if you scroll down the second screenshot shows the Start menu and the third screenshot shows the full screen version of the Start menu.  You can enable that 2 ways, you can hit the full screen button that is on the Start menu or you can go into tablet mode in which case this becomes automatic.  The difference between the full screen Start menu and the Start screen from Windows 8 is that instead of having a separate apps screen that is kind of on the fold.

Leo:  There is this list?

Paul:  There is this list.  But the list duplicates the Start menu, so it's the places menu, it is the most recently used apps, and then you can also get to all apps.  

Leo:  Okay, right.

Mary Jo:  I guess some people do not like that they are having redundancy.

Leo:  They want the tablet mode to be different somehow?  Really, all the tablet does is explode the desktop mode menu.

Paul:  The complaints that I hear about this are all of the specious variety.  If you swipe in from the left edge of the screen on a touch a device, on Windows 8 that would bring up the switcher user interface, or depending on how you do it you could switch between apps.  In Windows 10 it brings up Oplus Tab, Windows Flip, or whatever they are calling it these days.  It's perfectly logical, the same thing, fine.  In Windows 8 if you swiped in from the right side of the screen you would bring up the Charms which nobody liked until they removed it, and then suddenly they did like it.  

Leo:  Where are my charms?

Paul:  So in Windows 10 it brings up the Action Center.  In Windows Phone you will appreciate the fact that Action Center has these quick action tiles, which that big arrow is pointing to, and that could be expanded in there.  This gives you access to a lot of those quick setting type things that you would get to from the Settings Charm.  

Leo:  It's customizable, you can put the stuff that you want there.

Paul:  Yep, this is way better than the previous build.  I just don't get it.  The other thing that I will add just because we are on the topic of touch devices is that on Windows 8 if you swiped in from the top of the screen or the bottom of the screen it would bring up the app bar or the app bars for the current application.  That's where you would see all of the commands, big buttons, and big Fischer Pricey type buttons.  In universal apps which are a special kind of modern app that runs across platforms they are not going to have app bars anymore so you can have your own UI.  A lot of these systems, Xbox Music is a good example today, but any of the universal apps that are available in the Windows 10 Technical Preview 2, they use that kind of hamburger menu on the side to bring in a navigational slider that has the commands there, or you can kind of roll it on, so most of this applications will have ribbons, which are basically tool bars with tabs.  It looks a lot like Office Apps for iPad.  So again, perfectly consistent with the way that it worked before.  You still swipe from the top or bottom to get to app commands, they are just displayed in a more professional manner.

Leo:  It would seem to be prudent also to say...

Paul:  I'm sorry, what I just said was a mistake.  Actually if you swipe up from the bottom you will actually see the task bar.  It's not actually exactly the same.  

Leo:  What we see now is still just a technical preview and not a final UI.

Paul:  Yeah, so your complaining could change it again.  Keep bitching and moaning people, because that is how you get things done.

Leo:  Even in the chat room some people are saying that it's a disaster.

Paul:  It's not a disaster.  This is better.  I feel comfortable that I use Windows as much as anyone on earth.  This is better, absolutely better.

Leo:  I think that this is continued splash back from Windows 8 and the people from Windows 8 are now saying well crap.  

Paul:  It's moving forward nicely.

Leo:  Except the charms bar.

Paul:  Because yes, the charms bar is not there, but the most important reasons that you would go there are there.  

Leo:  So all of the same things can be there?

Paul:  Yeah, these are not major issues.  The bigger deal to me is that the important part of Windows 8, just the general touchness of it is still there.  The app platform, which is huge, is still there, and in full screen mode.  That modern app platform was kind of powerful and full featured under the covers, but the apps themselves were kind of childish looking with big buttons and stupid UIs.  They fixed that too.  To me this is a giant win win.

Leo:  Some concern about the apps menu getting awfully long if you install a lot of stuff.

Paul:  Well yeah, sure.  It works like the Start menu in Windows 7, Windows Vista, whatever, you don't see all of it, and you can scroll it.  It was like a tile area, you can actually pan it up and down if there are more tiles.  Same thing on the left side.  You see the most recently used or the most used, you don't see all of the apps.

Leo:  There is a see all apps button there now.

Paul:  Just like there has been by the way in every single version of Windows dating back to Windows 95.  

Leo:  What I kind of like, it was not explicit that if you start typing it will start searching, but now they have a ask me anything box that really kind of invites typing.

Paul:  And if you are a power user you can turn it off and it still works.  

Leo:  Okay, you can type anything.

Paul:  You can say I don't want 6 inches of my tablet taken up by that box.

Leo:  You can turn it off.

Paul:  Guess what?  When you hit the Start button and start typing it works just like Start search has all the way back to Windows Vista.  

Leo:  I kind of think that this is a good direction for Microsoft to take which is to get the option to turn it off.  I can't see how anybody could be unhappy about that because you get control.  And for novice users, people who are new to the UI, or the version, or to Windows in general, there are some hints there for you.  That was one of the problems that I had with Windows 8 was that so much was hidden and obscure.  

Mary Jo:   I don't know.  I guess that I use Windows 8.1 on my laptop.  I still have my Surface RT, but I don't use it anymore.  I hated the Charms bar, I never could remember to use it, and I think that the changes that they are making now are meant to make Windows more intuitive for people who are used to Windows.  

Leo:  I agree.

Mary Jo:  I guess that people who ended up liking Windows 8 after all are now sad.  I guess I think about it as in the end it's going to make Windows so much more easy to use for all of the people who didn't upgrade, or downgrade, if you want to say to Windows 8.

Leo:  And, if you love Windows 8, it's not going to take you a long time to accommodate this.  

Paul:  By the way, all of the Windows 8 UIs that people are apparently all attached to are not at all discoverable.  You will recall that one of the big controversies when Windows 8 was coming out was whether Microsoft would implement some sort of how to video.  The only way that you could figure this stuff out was by mistake.  You would click on something and say, oh look, what just happened?  So in Windows 8.1 remember that they added that little did you know that you could swipe in to do this?   This stuff is not discoverable.  If you as a power user have figured out how to use Windows 8.1 then Windows 10 will be very logical to you.  We are not just changing the paradigm again.  It's an evolution. 

Mary Jo:  My whole Twitter stream right now is full of people saying "I hate Windows 10 on touch tablets."  

Paul:  To which I would say why would anyone use Windows on a tablet anyway?  There is nothing there.  But if you are into it for some reason, again I feel that it is a very logical step up.

Mary Jo:  People are saying that it's harder to use if you are just using it with touch now.

Paul:  I disagree.

Mary Jo:  I can't say from firsthand experience because even when I had my Surface I never used it as a touch tablet because it never really worked well that way.  I know that a million people are going to disagree with me on that but I used it with the keyboard only, almost 99% of the time.

Paul:  Yep, I think that a lot of the time that you go into a metro app, like a news app or something, and you launch it with a keyboard and mouse, but then you might pan to read a story.  That would be about the extent of it.  Again, I can't stress this enough, people are stressing over a single build like Microsoft has locked something in stone or whatever.  

Mary Jo:  It's going to change.  It's going to change.

Paul:  It will continue to evolve.

Mary Jo:  Yep, and we haven't yet seen Windows 10 on these really small tablets because the Windows 10 SKU is going to work on phones and tablets under 8 inches in size.  It will be interesting to see what they do there and how that evolves.

Leo:  You know, Twitter is made for hate, so.  

Mary Jo:  It is.  Twitter is made for hate.

Paul: I just want to make sure that I understand what you are saying.  Are you suggesting, I'm spitballing on what you just said, that people take things out of context and personally attack you over something that Microsoft did?  Is that what you are saying?

Leo:  Twitter appeals to the monkey mind.  I think not actually even that.  It appeals to the baby in us.  A lot of what I see on Twitter is kind of babyish knee jerk reaction to things.  

Paul:  It's a mind without filter.

Leo:  It's mind without filter. 

Paul:  I wrote this of the internet today, but I described it as the misguided being misled by the misinformed.

Leo:  I think that there is a place for it, but you have to take it in that context when you read stuff on Twitter.  It's just very much people's like top of mind not considered opinion in most cases.  It's just like bleh.

Paul:  90% of the time my reaction to something that somebody says to me on Twitter is are you f'ing kidding me?  Like and then you sort of realize that it's the medium.  I know that Mary Jo knows that as a writer a lot of times it's really hard to convey real meaning, especially in something very short.  People will often misunderstand each other.  Something might come across as especially brutal when it wasn't meant to be.  That happens a lot.

Leo:  It's also the case that people sometime post stuff on Twitter, and then they think about it for 5 seconds, and then go, but that's okay.

Paul:  Sometimes I will respond to someone just trying to feel out where they are coming from and they will respond with something funny and you realize that they didn't mean anything by that.

Leo:  No they don't.  In fact that's probably why it's not good to take too seriously.  It's all id.  Not that that is 100% true.  There are lots of people who use Twitter for thoughtful and considered opinion, but honestly why are you doing it in a space that allows you 140 characters?

Paul:  I was going to say that there is not a lot of thought when you have 140 characters.  

Leo: I look at what I see on Twitter as id and probably to gauge what the kneejerk reaction will be to anything, but I wouldn't, if I were Microsoft I certainly wouldn't, use it as guidance for future builds.

Paul:  My favorite part of Twitter is when I make something that patently intended to be humor, should be obvious to anyone, and then you get these serious responses.  Well, Paul, have you considered the...nope.  I was just making a joke.

Leo: There is no, it's text, so it's very difficult and subtle to express things like humorous sarcasm.

Paul:  I know, oh I know.

Mary Jo:  It is.

Leo:  Actually I think that Twitter is great.  I'm not knocking it, I'm just saying...

Paul:  Oh, I'm on Twitter all day long.  That's why I am an insane person Leo.

Leo:  It will make you crazy if you pay too much attention to it.

Paul:  Mary Jo serves as sort of a psychiatrist for me.  I will react to people publicly on Twitter and then privately with Mary Jo.  I say you need to get me down from the cliff here.

Leo:  That happens to me all of the time.  People in my life will call and say stop posting.  Stop talking now.

Paul: I actually also joke with Mary Jo that I'm going to give her access to my Twitter account. 

Leo:  It's not just their id Paul, it's your id too.

Paul:  If people are like you are done for the day Paul, why don't you just go outside?

Mary Jo:  Yeah, but you know that the bottom line is that it is going to keep changing.  Windows 10 is far from done. 

Leo:  That was part of my point, that you shouldn't make any conclusions now.  

Mary Jo:  I know, yeah.  That's why they have user voice, and the forums, and they are telling you to up those things.  They are, unlike previous regimes, listening to what people are saying, and taking that into account when developing the operating system.  

Paul:  That's true, and by the way, I don't think that something as specific as Charms is coming back, or placeholders in OneDrive, but it doesn't mean that enough complaining or constructive feedback in those things won't bring some form of functionality back in a way that is more acceptable to you than the current system.  So the feedback part of it is crucial.  I don't know that they are paying attention to what people are saying on Twitter.  I think that it is important to go into the app and use the built in feedback form to ensure that it hits the right people.  And not me.  I love discussing this stuff sometimes.

Mary Jo:  All I can tell you guys is remember when we first started talking about Windows 8, and I saw it, and I said wow, everyone is going to hate that.  Do you remember that?

Paul:   Yeah.

Mary Jo:  When I see this I feel like, and I am just judging it from my own perspective and probably thinking like more of the average user and the IT user, but this to me is like wow, I can figure this out without having to spend hours being like where do I go?  How do I do this again?  It looks very intuitive to me.

Paul:  Windows 8 was like the 7 stages of grief to me.  

Leo:  I became comfortable with Windows 8 and I liked 8.1, I thought it was a good improvement.  But Windows 10 is a big, big improvement.

Paul:  Oh huge.  I mean, I'm not going to embarrass people at Microsoft, but I remember having conversations over the course of development and when they announce certain things, but I will never forget the conversation that we had about the Charms.  It's very important to me.  I write books about the stuff.  I went through this with the Windows Phone guys very early on.  I was like, I need names for everything.  We don't have names for everything.  You have to refer to it.  You have to, I have to, and I’m not the first person to think of this; except that I apparently was.  You know, but I remember with Windows 8 in particular, I said this Charms thing that is on the side, the toolbar system?  The toolbar?  Nope, just Charms.  

Leo:  Just charms.

Paul:  Right, so is it like The Charms?  Or the Charms Bar?  Nope, just Charms.

Leo: They are magically delicious.

Paul:  Right, like a bowl of cereal.  Charms.

Leo:  Lucky Charms.

Mary Jo:  I'm glad that Charms bar is gone.  That's all that I'm saying.

Paul:  You can almost imagine that some engineer was sitting there with his bowl of Lucky Charms in the morning and he was like eureka!

Leo:  It's magically delicious!  Raspberry red, lemon yellow...orange...

Paul:  We are seriously talking about a technology topic here people.  It's amazing.

Leo:  I think that there are of course people with muscle memory now that program their brain.

Paul:  Absolutely yes, muscle memory, that is one of the big complaints.

Leo:  That's sad, but your muscle needs new memory now.

Paul:  Windows 8 itself was a destruction of muscle memory.  Remember, going all the way back to Windows 95 you would go to the left side of the screen by default, click on the Start menu, and you would shut down your computer.  Windows 8, they moved it over to the right off of a Charm, you would go to settings and then it was there.  It's back on the left again folks.  This should be good news, but it's not.  It's not good news, people are not happy, some people.

Leo:  Ah Leo, the raspberry red, lemon yellow, and orange orange is Twix, it's not Lucky Charms.  I think that you may want to correct yourself on that.  You've got the wrong cereal my friend.

Paul:  Yes, and I want you to correct yourself like the New York Times does and have a disclaimer on the bottom of every single post that explains exactly what was wrong. 

Leo:  No, I love it.  I'm not complaining, I love you internet.

Paul:  Do you?

Leo:  Yeah.

Paul:  I think that we put up with you internet as the breeding ground of indifference.

Leo:  Okay, by the way, should I install on my brand new, spanking new, Dell XPS that is arriving next week, should I put this on there?

Paul:  I have not installed it on this machine.  

Leo:  I'm not saying specific to this machine.  Is it time to use Windows 10 or should I really wait?

Paul:  Honestly, I've heard from people that this is unstable, that they have had problems, that they have went back to Windows 8.1 in some cases.  I have installed this thing on virtually everything in my office and I haven't really had any problems.  

Leo:  I was actually thinking of putting it on the S7 since that is getting replaced by the XPS 13.  

Paul:  So one thing that I haven't done, and this is actually new to Technical Preview 2, is there is a rollback functionality now, so when you boot the computer you actually have the choice between Windows 10 and the old system.  I think that if you choose the old one it will actually roll it back.  I think that you can go to the recovery tools in settings and in addition to the refresh, reset, and whatever else is there, backup or whatever, there is an option for rolling back to the previous version.  So that's what I would say to you is to make sure that you have all of your recovery stuff set up.  If you have something with ASUS, or Acer, or whatever it is, make sure that that is ready to go just in case.  You should always be prepared.  You should always be ready to scoot back to where you were if you have to.  I have had good luck so far.

Leo:   Of course this is in the knowledge that Mary Jo has not done it for completely sensible reasons.

Paul:  Well Mary Jo being a sensible and normal person has not installed this and you and I are trying to figure out ways that we can destroy our expensive pieces of equipment.  

Mary Jo:  If I had a bunch of PCs lying around I probably would, but I do not.

Leo:  Yeah, so maybe I will put it on the S7.  To be honest, I just hate Windows 8.  I feel like I would like Windows 10 a whole lot better.

Paul:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  So in the week or 2 before this event I rolled a lot of my machines back, including my desktop, to whatever version of Windows.  So my desktop I had been using Windows 8.1, on my Ultrabook we went back to Windows 7, some other machines went back to Windows 8.1, and then I upgraded them to varying degrees of success.  But in that time that I was using the old system the thing that I realized was that all of these things work fine.  I can go into Windows 7, access Word, and OneDrive, and Chrome, and everything works great.  I can go into Windows 8.1 and access the same applications and everything works great.  I have the modern apps in Windows 8.1, but they are full screen so I tend not to use them as much unless I install like Modern Mix.  If you go to Windows 10 everything works great.  Honestly, for day to day stuff everything pretty much works I think.

Leo:  I know that I will eventually.  I'm just trying to resist.  I never warmed up to Windows 8 and even Windows 8.1.  I just never warmed up to it.

Mary Jo:  Yeah, I know.

Paul:  You are not unique in that regard Leo.  

Leo:  It's not that I hate it.

Paul:   You are like a lot of people.

Mary Jo:  It's just, I don't know, I have it on my Acer laptop and I still feel like when I use it that I am less productive than I am with Windows 7.  

Leo:  Wow.

Paul:  I don't have an issue with it but I do get the complaint.

Leo:  One of our esteemed members of the chatroom says that he has to go pee, so this would be a good time to take a break.  We can give everybody a chance.

Paul: Why don't we all go do that?

Leo:  Let's all go the lobby. 

Paul:  Nice.  We are going to go to the lobby.

Leo:  I understand your biological urges, but you know, one of the most important biological urges in life is sleep.  We spend a third of our lives or more for some of us in bed.  Your bed ought to be a haven, a place you go for comfort and relaxation.  If you don't love, I mean love, your bed, well that's not good.  I want to recommend something that is really wonderful, something that has really changed my relationship to my bed, and that's Casper; an online retailer of premium mattresses, and by the way, for a fraction of the cost.  I would pay almost anything for a good night's sleep.  So for me even the cost is secondary to the fact that these are great mattresses.  They are just the right amount of sink and bounce.  They combine latex with memory foam so it's firm, but the mattress conforms to your hips, your head, your shoulders.  It is so comfy.  Now, if money is tight you are going to love the fact that Casper mattresses are a fraction of the cost of mattresses in the store in the showrooms; $500 for a twin and the biggest they sell, the king, $950.  I have got to tell you that the best part of this is that you get to try it for 100 days before you are committed.  Free delivery, there is no showroom, although if you went to CES I know a lot of people in our group were on Casper mattresses for the first time at CES and they say wow, these are great.  You can return it within a 100 day period and it is very easy to do that.  They put it in a box, which is amazing.  I don't know how they get it in there.  Here is actually video of them putting it in the box.  If you live somewhere, I talked to someone who lived in a place that he couldn't get his king sized mattress in so he had 2 twins.  That's not good.  You get a big lump in the middle.  You have got to try this.  You have got to go to casper, c-a-s-p-e-r.com/windows, casper.com/windows, it's completely risk free, it's made in the USA.  I will tell you, one of the concerns that I had was maybe when it comes out of the box that you have a latexy smell or something.  No, no, they really do this right.  They are giving you an amazing experience.  Really nice.  I don't know how to describe it any other way other than just to say try it, you will love it.  I got one for my son.  He is in college and he is on like a 3rd floor walkup.  I said, look, I got it for you, and they deliver this box to your door.  He wanted a king size I think.   I can't remember, maybe a king or queen.  I said that you will never get a king or queen in there but you will get a Casper in there.  He loves it.  They do sell a California King if you want the extra height and width.  The queens, the twins, the twin XL, this is a great mattress at a great price, you will love it.  Casper.com/windows, just go to casper.com/windows so that they know you heard it on Windows Weekly and use the offer code WINDOWS.  You will love it.

Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, they are getting a good night's sleep right now as we do Windows Weekly in the snowbound Atlantic Northeast.  Let me look at the notes.  Let me see what is next.  There is a new calendar clock widget.

Paul:  Yeah, but people hate that too Leo.

Mary Jo:  Do they?  They don't hate it.

Leo:  Come on.  What?  What do they hate?  What?

Paul:  This is all that I deal with now is hate.

Leo:  How could Microsoft do this to us?  What do they not like?

Paul:  Well look at the comments on this article.  It's awful.  It's so terrible, what is wrong with you people?

Leo:  Look at that?  You know how much people paid 10 years ago for a Geoclock?  You've got one built in.

Paul:  Sure.

Leo: I will try it out, but I think that I preferred the old one.  This looks like too many clicks.  Too many clicks.  It looks like a step backward.  The analog clock was much nicer.  

Paul:  Someone in there, I don't know if someone posted a picture of this, but if you remember back in Windows Vista you could add clocks.  So like Mary Jo if you have Windows 8 or Windows 7, and you click on the time in the taskbar it comes up and there is a calendar and like an analog clock.  In Windows Vista you could add clocks, so you could see the clock with current time, the clock for Paris, the clock for Redmond.  I always thought that was kind of a cool feature. 

Leo:  Actually somebody is commenting.  He is in Brazil.  I miss the world clocks.  Can you still do this?

Paul:  No.  

Leo:  But again, maybe they will put that back in.  It's not over.

Paul:  Yeah.

Leo:  I actually use this feature because we are always talking about time zones here.  So I actually use it.  I always have UTC as one of my clocks.  But you know what, I bet you, just a crazy thing, somebody might write an app that would do this.

Paul:  Leo, if only Windows were an extensible platform for somebody.

Leo:  I can't get too upset about the build in accessory apps because it's just an app.

Paul:  I just thought it was pretty.

Leo: Yeah, I think that it is fine.  I don't know, I think that it is fine.  Paul, you obviously have very low standards.  You probably hate yourself.

Paul:  I do, look at my hair.

Leo:  Yeah, no one would do that to their head unless they hated themselves.

Paul:  By the way, I've already told a couple of people this story, but I saw a documentary about the Vietnam War, and part of it, and of course they are shaving everyone's heads so that they could go off to war.  Here is my question.  Why can you shave a man's head in like 30 seconds flat, but it takes 45 minutes to butcher my head?

Leo:  Those are trained military barbers.  They are using militarized clippers.  Those are weaponized.  I know, I know, you look at that movie and they go zip, zip, zip in 4 stripes and your hair is gone.  It's kind of funny.  Anyway, I like our new look Paul.

Paul:  I do too.

Leo:  I've almost caught up to you.  

Paul:  My hair is growing very fast and this is the second morning in a row where a portion of it was a little mussed.  

Leo:  Oh my god I dream of that day.  Mussed hair.  

Mary Jo:  Oh boy.

Leo:  To this day I get out of the shower and go, oh I wish I had something.

Paul:  You do the Fonzi thing?  Like ehh.

Leo:  Ehh.  Ehh.  By the way, there is somebody in the chat room saying that you can have up to 3 clocks in Windows 8.1.  I know, that's what we are saying.  It's gone.  

Paul:  Oh, was that still on the Windows 3 clocks thing?

Leo:  On 8.1.  

Paul:  Actually Mr. Thurrott.

Leo:  It wasn't Lucky Charms, it was, I can't remember the cereal, Trix.  Trix are for kids.  The Windows, are there really 10 Windows 10 SKUs?  No.  How many SKUs are there?

Mary Jo:  We don't know yet.

Leo:  They are still going to have Pro, and Enterprise, and Home?

Mary Jo:  We think when they come out with the editions, we don't know for a fact, but we think there will be Home, Pro, Enterprise, there will probably be a Mobile of some kind, there will probably be a Windows 10 for China specifically; but we don't know.

Leo:  Will there be Windows 10 with Bing?

Mary Jo:  I would be there will be Windows 10 with Bing.

Paul:  Sure.

Leo:  How about this?  Will there be Windows 10 without Bing?

Mary Jo:  I bet there will.

Leo:  Actually Cortana is pretty Bingy, so if you have the Cortana you are going to need the Bing.  

Mary Jo:  The thing that I saw a lot of people getting very confused about this week on Twitter again was which version are you going to put on your PC if it is a certain screen size?  Again, we haven't really heard this yet from Microsoft.  What we have heard is about under 8 inches.  Under 8 inches is where you get the Mobile.

Leo:  It's the cut off that's the key.

Mary Jo:  But then this week Joe Bellifori tweeted that if you have an existing Intel based 7 inch Windows tablet you can put the desktop SKU on that.  So now people are kind of like wait, what?  From what I've been hearing from my contacts Microsoft is thinking again about Windows in terms of profiles.  So they are talking to OEMs and they are saying what are the most common types of devices that you guys are building?  They will say, you know, a high end flagship phone, or a touch tablet, or they give them like categories like that.  Microsoft said okay, here is the version that you are going to put on this type of device.  People are getting all upset and they are like am I getting the desktop?  Am I going to be able to run Win 32 apps if I have the mobile SKU?  The answer is no to that.  But, you know, what if I want to run the desktop and I have a 7 inch tablet?  Could I put the desktop SKU on it?  That depends on how Microsoft allows OEMs to do this and how they allow customers ultimately to do it.  Right now I think the way to think about it is under 8 inches you are probably going to prefer the mobile SKU because that's going to be optimized for touch and it's not going to have desktop. If you have a device of any kind 8 inches or over you might want the whole Desktop SKU, especially if you care about running your Win 32 apps.  People are just getting very twisted about this right now and worrying about it.  The Mobile SKU is not even out, it's going to be out in February for the first time for people to try.  Again, I feel like saying just be patient everybody, you are going to see this plan evolve.  It's still early days for Windows 10 and we are trying to figure it out along with you.  I'm not sure how much Microsoft itself have figured out but we are telling you bits and pieces that we get as we learn them.  Keep asking us questions, but don't panic yet.  It's not time to panic yet.  

Leo:  Well also if I parch Joe's comments, he's not saying this is what will ship with that device, he's saying that you could put it on that device.

Mary Jo:  Right, yep.

Leo:  There will probably be rules about what goes with what size, right?  

Mary Jo:  New devices, yeah.  On new devices I think that there will be rules.

Leo:  But there is no rule saying that you can't put full Windows 10 on a 7 inch device.  It's just that no new 7 inch devices will be sold that way.  

Mary Jo:  Do you want to?

Paul:  You may, right?  For that kind of docking situation.  

Leo:  Right.

Paul:  There are people who sort of dream about that sort of thing.  On Windows Phone today for example, it doesn't support the Bluetooth keyboard capability.  Windows obviously does, so it's conceivable that the phone, the version that would be on phone, would, but as Mary Jo and I were discussing yesterday I don't think that they are going to do that.  But could you put a Pro version on a phone type device and get that functionality?  Or do like an anytime upgrade?  I don't know, maybe.   And who knows, there might be a PC maker or hardware maker that comes along and says hey, I want' interested in Windows Phone before, but now that it's Windows we would like to make this new type of device where you could dock it onto the back of a laptop screen and use it like a computer, but then you could carry the thing around in your pocket like a phone.  Obviously there have been devices like that, but maybe it becomes a thing.  Anything is possible.  

Mary Jo:  Right, right now though we don't know.  People are asking us a lot if it is going to be possible for us to do that.  Can I just dock my phone and use it with a keyboard or a monitor?  We don't know for sure.  I don't think that Microsoft has said that yet.  So we don't know, we don't know, there are so many we don't knows.

Leo:   We are 9 months away from the release of this program.  Come on kids, there are lots of things that are going to change I would guess between now and the fall.  

Paul:  There is nothing that can't be over analyzed Leo.

Leo:  That's right, I forgot.  That's my job.  Sometimes I forget that this is what we do.  How about my Windows RT device?

Paul:  That's screwed.

Leo:  Dead end is what you are saying.   Cul-de-sac.  

Paul:  I don't know how I could have so completely misheard what he said, but...

Mary Jo:  You didn't.  He didn't say enough to actually...

Paul:  He would appreciate that my ears are tuned to Microsoft speak, but that one went right over my head.

Leo:  So you assumed that there would be an upgrade through RT?

Paul:  Assumed is a strong word, but I thought I heard it.  I was mishearing.

Mary Jo:  They said there will be an update.  You assumed an update to 10.

Paul:  You mean you as an English speaker?

Leo:  I must be learning from you guys, because I was sitting through the keynote and I was like I noticed that he didn't say update to Windows 10, he merely said we are not done, we may update this.  For all we know those could be security updates.  We don't know.

Paul:  Right, to clarify, Microsoft issued a statement later saying that we will not, as Mary Jo said, get the Windows 10 upgrade, but there will be some upgrades that will bring some features of Windows 10. Not to get off on this topic again, but oh my god is my email insane over this topic?  People are saying will I be able to run a no desktop mode on Windows RT then?  It's like guys, seriously.

Leo:  You must have heard from every single person who owns an RT Pro.  I just don't feel like that is a big, big number.

Paul:  Somewhere there are these sad hulking guys who have an RT device, a Zune, a Media Center PC, and they are just wondering where their life went wrong.  

Leo:  I have had all of those by the way.

Paul:  I do too actually.

Mary Jo:  So Surface 2, I don't know how many people bought those, also ARM based, they are also going to get this mysterious update.

Paul:  The non-Windows 10 update, yeah.  

Mary Jo:  Right, we don't know how many features are going to be in that update, we don't know when it's coming, and people have asked me does that mean that I'm going to be able to run the Touch First Office on that device?  Who knows.

Paul:  Who knows?

Mary Jo:  Nobody knows the answers to any of those.  Somebody does.

Paul:  I would just say don't assume anything if you are running Windows RT.  If only someone had warned against using Windows RT years ago it would have all been okay.  It's too bad no one thought to.  Oh, right.

Mary Jo:  I think they are going to try to make it work because a lot of people who bought Windows RT and Surface 2 were early adopters who are very loyal to Microsoft.  It would be like Windows Phone 7.8 all over again if they don't.

Paul:  I think it is literally going to be like that.  On the one hand you want to do right by your early adopters.  It's the right thing to do.  On the other hand that crowd is small enough that the engineering and support costs that would go into making that happen may be prohibitively high.

Mary Jo:  May I read the show note that goes with this item?  Because I think that it is rather entertaining.

Leo:  Okay, should I just focus really tight on Paul while you are reading it?

Mary Jo:  In our show notes on this item it says, "Paul must humbly admit that Mary Jo was right about this.  I will do 20 pushups sir, might I have another.  I said, luckily you have the proper military haircut for this type of thing."

Paul:  Yep, not positive that I could do 20 pushups right now, but I could work towards 20 pushups.  

Mary Jo:  Remember that Leo planked on the show one time.

Leo:  I forgot about that.  I'm sorry that you brought that back up.

Mary Jo:  Sorry, actually you did a great job planking.  It's not easy.

Leo:  No, planking is one of my real strengths actually.  I'm very good at planking.

Paul:  We all need something to hang our hats on.

Leo:  I can plank for hours.

Paul:  During commercials I plank while I am watching TV.

Leo:  I have a core that just won't quit.  Looking for strategy in Satya's words.  I don't know how I became a Windows fanboy in the period of a 2 hour keynote, but somehow I did.  I liked Satya's closing statements.  I will be the first to recognize that as with any keynote these are forward looking statements.  The devil is in the details, we will have to see how everything is implemented, but I felt like we saw a cohesive strategy from Microsoft, a positive way forward, and I also feel like, I asked you last week, is this the old factionalized Microsoft or is this a new Microsoft that can row in the same direction?  Because, you know, you can announce the HoloLens, Microsoft has announced a lot of great products, but if you can't deliver then it's meaningless.  I felt like Satya showed that he got it.  

Paul:  Right, look, Satya Nadella is surprisingly controversial within Microsoft.  Depending on who you talk to they either love him or they are like, meh, not so sure.  

Leo:  Factionalists don't like him, right?  

Paul:  That could be.  But there is also an element of people who have been involved in layoffs, and they are not too sure that they layoffs were done in a logical or correct fashion.  I think externally Satya Nadella has been a big win for Microsoft overall. Obviously there have been the hiccups, the what should a woman do when she wants to ask for a raise kind of thing was a kind of a glitch.  The fact that the way that they make money is changing dramatically during his tenure, and will go down in many ways through no fault of his, just through the normal evolution of the business is something that he will have to deal with.  I went back and rewatched that part of the keynote later, and there were those 3 things that he talked about with Windows that were really important.  Windows is a service about my theory that I increasingly believe to be correct, that if you agree to this free upgrade and install Windows 10 then you are going to have to let Microsoft upgrade that system and treat it like we do with Office 365.  It's going to be something that is always being serviced and kept up to date.   

Leo:  Who wouldn't want that?  I guess except for some IT professionals.

Paul:  Businesses, yes, absolutely.  So they are going to have the exceptions for those businesses.  But over time the system changes where a lot of the businesses will come on board too.  I don't see that happening anytime soon, but...

Leo:  Why do you think that they want to do it that way?

Paul:  They don't trust Microsoft.

Leo:  No, I understand businesses.  Why does Microsoft want to do that?

Paul:  Because right now what we have out in the world and what we have had out in the world for decades is multiple versions of Windows, multiple versions of Internet Explorer, multiple versions of DLLs, and ServaLite, and Java, and all of this stuff.  It's a support nightmare.  When you talk about this kind of interconnected world, we need all of these things to be on a common platform that can be easily serviced where we don't have to do, I say we like I have anything to do with it, where someone, whoever it is, Microsoft or anyone else, doesn't have to make 100 different versions of things to make sure that everyone is up to date or up to date as possible.  It's just a more secure and reliable way to do it.  Assuming that they can deliver Windows updates that actually don't screw up your computer, which they have done too.  That's a bit of a challenge.

Leo:  We should just take any conclusion from the Microsoft stock price plummeting. 

Paul:  We will get to that in a minute because that is related to their earnings.

Leo:  That's more earnings than anything else?

Paul:  Yeah, honestly the big thing to me is what we talked about last week where he finally did say Mobile First, Cloud First, Windows Best.  He used the word best.

Leo:  Love that.

Paul:  Love that.  I think this is maybe the most important thing that came out of it.  He also reiterated something that Mary Jo and I have been saying over the course of the last year when we talk about Microsoft putting their apps on IOS or putting their apps on Android which is, you know, this is not a subtle strategy, it's practical.  It's customer first, you have to go where the customers are.  Now that they have sauced that out I think that you can see them put an emphasis on Windows again.  I mean, you know, Mary Jo and I basically have careers where we parse what Microsoft says.  I find his comments to be very interesting on a number of levels.  I do think that he has kind of struck the right note there.  

Mary Jo:  You know, I was reading what you wrote about this Paul, and I agree with you that when I heard him give this talk about all of the positive things about Windows last week at the Windows 10 thing I didn't really hear it.  So when I read the transcript I realized that he actually didn't say much specifically.

Paul:  That's why you have to parse it out.

Mary Jo:  So his point was the proof that we love Windows more than the other platforms is that we are building into the operating system things like Cortana, and OneDrive, and Xbox Live, but the part that we didn't hear and that I still don't really know is why is it better building that into the OS than as having those as free apps like you do on IOS and Android?  What is better about it?  That's the part that we don't know.

Paul:  You have to go service by service, and in some cases it's a little more obvious than others.  I think that the big thing right of the top is discoverability, and the fact that it is just there, and it's integrated into the system, it's not just a bolt on app.  Depending on the operating system and where we are at in time the extensibility and capabilities are more limited on those platforms then they are in Windows.  For example, in IOS in the very latest version they finally added this way for those Cloud service engines to kind of be built into the OS and to share things more simply.  That capability did not exist until September, or October, or whenever it was.  So there is going to be stuff like that.  You are right, ultimately for an end user is it any easier or better to use OneDrive with Word on Windows then it is to use DropBox or OneDrive with Word with what's the Apple thing, whatever it is called.

Mary Jo:  Pages.

Leo:  Pages.

Paul:  Pages.  If it isn't then we have a problem.  That's the question.

Mary Jo:  Just because it's integrated.  Because the part that's mysterious is that we have OneDrive for free.  It's free, the app is free also for Android.  So why is it better that it's bundled with Windows for free also?

Paul:  Yeah, on the Microsoft solution I think that being cross platform they offer an interesting thing that is not always available elsewhere.  For example, if you are an Apple guy there are probably advantages to using Safari on the Mac and on IOS in that you can maybe save articles and they appear on your phone and that's really neat.  But with Microsoft system the idea is that this stuff should work cross platform.  That you could run around with your Lumia handset that has some kind of Sensicore technology or maybe use a FitBit and maybe that information is going into Health Service that Microsoft owns and controls and it appears in the MSN Health App on IOS because you have an iPhone instead of an iPad let's say.  I mean, it's that kind of cross platform capability that I think is a big part of it as well.  

Mary Jo:  Yeah, right.

Paul:  The other ecosystems semi rely on you staying within their hardware and software.  Not 100% obviously, Google has a lot of stuff on iPhone too.  It's hard to say.  That's the big question.  I didn't want to get too far into the Satya Nadella criticism thing, but the one other thing that I have heard, and this is externally to Microsoft, not internally, about him, and I think that you kind of eluded to this, is that he says a lot, you know.  But he really doesn't say a lot. 

Leo:  That's a good CEO.

Paul:  He takes a lot of words.  It could be.  That's why you have to kind of go through the transcript to listen to him speak where you are kind of in front of a keyboard and can pause it, and go back, and kind of distill it down to what is essentially just a few basic points.  It's kind of the opposite.

Leo:  He's CEO talk, but I feel like I heard things.

Paul:  For example, the next item on the list.  One of the other comments that he made during the same event was we want to get people from needing Windows to wanting Windows and loving Windows.  This is one of those moments where the Windows community was like thank you, this is a big deal, this is so great.  You don't really think about it, you kind of walk away feeling great because he said the right thing and it's great.  You know what?  That can't happen.  It can never happen. And there are a bunch of reasons, but I think that, no. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with windows, the OS. But because before you get it, as a consumer, they give it to HP, and to Dell, to Lenovo, Acer and Asus and all the other goon squad, hitler's henchmen  companies out there and they´ve ruined it. And they´ve ruined it with crapwear, , and they´ve ruined it by loading up double drivers, or out dated drivers,  and deliver to consumers in a way where there´s like 57 Windows updates that have to be installed. There is crapwear, putting up advertisements in the corner. There´s a useless antivirus thing, that by the way is going to expire in 15 days, oh my God you better get updated right away. They completely ruined it, and until they fix that problem, you can talk all you want about people loving Windows. I think people do love Windows, they just don´t get Windows. They get Windows with all this crap on top of it. And that´s a huge problem.

Leo: Yeah, it´s really true, the consumer edition of Windows, is very much skewed by.

Paul: And you get this little device, that´s got 16 gigs of storage, 32 gigs of storage, and you install Office on there, you have 0 gigs of storage, you know. And, because there´s crap on there, it´s just, the stuff that you do not need. And you don´t know. Some of this stuff might be useful, there´s no way to tell. This is , you know, it´s like the good side, bad side of the distribution model that has  worked so well for them in the past. But, you know PC makers aren´t in many ways the best thing that´s ever happened to Windows. They are absolutely the worst.

Leo: Well now you know why Microsoft is making hardware, I guess.

Paul: By the way, there´s a reason that everyone´s making a Chrome book. It´s not because Chrome books sell well, although they have. It´s because screw you Microsoft, you didn´t  serve us. That´s exactly why that happened.

Leo: Although, some of the chatters pointed this out. This is very similar to the experience Android phone users have when they get an Android phone crapped up by HTC or Samsung or LG. It´s not Android it´s something else.

Paul: But, to the user it is Android, it is Windows. They won´t think, screw you Samsung or maybe they do actually.

Leo: A lot of people think that. Let me retract that statement. But, I think a lot of people blame Microsoft, for what´s wrong with Windows, when in fact it´s Dell or Lenovo or some other company.

Mary Jo: Well you know a lot of the reasons when you heard people justify why put crapwear on PCs it  was because Windows is so expensive for them and they have to offer  the costs.

Paul: Is Windows expensive though?

Mary Jo: Now it´s not.

Leo: Not anymore. Holy cow, it´s 35 bucks.

Mary Jo: Well, it´s actually, if you get the Windows with Bing SKU it´s 15 dollars, and 0 if it´s under 9 inches. So that argument is kind of out the window. I just wish, I wish Microsoft could just say, You know what the rule is everyone does signature PCs from now on, if you want to get the free SKU.

Paul: That´s exactly what I´m asking, and, right. That´s a big step though, isn´t it? You know in the past, that would´ve been an antitrust issue. I think we´ve reached the point where we can argue, you know what,  all of our competition is doing just this. This is the only way we can compete in this world which is very different than it was in the year 2000. It´s time to grow up and move on.

Leo: Has Microsoft abandoned the signature PC?

Paul: They are like crack addicts addicted to it. These guys are saying, oh no, I can stop. I can stop any time I want. The next version we´re not going to do this, So it comes out and it´s got 23 pieces of crap on it, the boot times are astronomical.

Leo: Look at download.com or any of the shared download sites now which do the same thing. They crap up your download with that ware. And that´s just horrible greed.

Paul: I get it, times are tough.I understand needing to make money. I write books, I understand what it´s like to make no money. But, of the 7 or 8 things that I install on my PC every single time I start from scratch, at least 2 of them, you have to, God, you have to pay attention during set up. Cause you click next and you´ve just installed some insane toolbar or the adword thing.

Leo: I think that´s the big issue for Microsoft. It´s too easy to screw up Windows, almost everybody does.

Paul: It´s almost like the should´ve created a new modern app platform where you could´t do that anymore, oh wait.

Leo: Is the signature PC dead? Or are we going to see signature PCs?

Paul: Oh no, signature PC is going strong and we´re going to see more of it. The only problem with signature PCs is they can´t reach everybody. Microsoft´s retail stores are basically in the United States and maybe I think Canada.

Leo: They need to roll out more of those.

Paul: Even the Microsoft stores, need to be available everywhere. I just wish some PC maker , but i wish some major PC maker Dell, HP,  somebody, would offer these 2 things side by side, and say, hey we´ll charge you extra for it. $15 dollars extra, $25, $100 dollars.

Leo: Dell used to do that, you´d say if you pay another  $50 bucks you don´t get crapware,  didn´t they? Do they still do that?

Paul: That sounds familiar actually. I just wish it was more available. They´re doing lots of work over there.It´s good stuff.

Leo: I will let you know on this new XPX cause I didn´t see that option, there were´t that many customization options.

Paul: These HP streams are a good example, Any Lenovo product.

Leo: HP used to be the worst culprit.

Paul: They still are. That´s what I´m saying, They´re still terrible. As good as these machines are, you still have to spend 30 or 45 minutes right off the top, just, what is this junk? It´s awful. It´s really, it´s a big problem.

Leo: Big way to solve this, just , I somewhat blame Microsoft because OEM stopped long ago shipping Windows install disks, and if you shipped a Windows install disk, then you would just wipe the drive and install Windows and you´d say bye bye.

Paul: That´s what i want. I want Windows and drivers you know. And the drivers thing it should just be an application  that checks on line and grabs the latest.

Leo: Yeah, let me decide what crapware I want to install.

Paul:: It´s too bad.

Leo: I have to say, that´s something that Apple does well. They uh, you just don´t, they cost a lot more

Paul: If you really want people to love it, you have to control the widget from the beginning to the end. If you don´t, if they were middle men, it becomes like the situation with liquor stores in Massachusetts, I  can´t just get any alcohol I want from anywhere in the country. I have to go through this like seudo mafia organization. And you kind of ,you know,  you either don´t get it at all or you pay a lot for it.

Leo: I might  also point out , though, when you get to these Dell XPXs, you kind of, I´m paying $1150 bucks not a cheap laptop

Paul: But you know what, it´s a problem at every end of the spectrum. Let´s say you´re buying a $99 dollar  HP stream tablet or a $200 HP stream laptop, nothing drives home the fact that you have no money to spend on anything more than having to waist your precious time trying to figure out which of this crap is crap and then trying to figure out how to uninstall it, by the way, none of it uninstalls. Or your case.

Leo: Here´s the great option on the Dell buy the XPX, the option is:  Operating system recovering options,  Operating system recovery media not included, and there´s no other, Help me choose, choose what?

Paul: What happens when you click help me choose?

Leo: There´s no option! Worried about possible OS recovery? They don´t give me 2 options.

Paul Thurrott :  That´s amazing. Really is amazing. How do PCs ship without recovery media on the box?

Leo: It drives me crazy. People call the radio show all the time and the first thing I ask them is, um, tell me you have a Windows install disk, nobody does.

Paul: It´s like, making people buy peanuts

Leo: But that´s, I have to say, Is Microsofts fault, thats that, going way back to Bill Gates paranoia about piracy. No, they don´t want people to do that. Don´t you think? They incentivize OEMs not to include disks

Paul: This is an unholy and unhealthy relationship Leo, that´s what I´m saying.

Leo: They say that you can purchase separately an OS recovery DVD, but it´s not an option as far as I can tell.

Paul: So that must cost about, what? $.50 cents? That´s how much a DVD costs.

Leo: And I know that in modern Windows 8, you have a part recovery partition but that doesn´t restore it to pure Windows, that restores it

Paul: Actually it could, PC makers can and do obviously change that to have their own stuff in it. You could use the built in Windows tools and still get back to crapper central, through no fault of your own.

Leo: This is the option on my Dell, it’s called additional software. I guess I opted in for the additional software option.

Paul: Yeah it´s called , you know, we do all the stuff that you just fixed

Leo: I don´t want additional software.

Paul: The system needs to be fixed. I  realize I´ve kind of beaten this to death.

Leo: And I´ve got to tell you, if Microsoft didn´t incentivize OEMs to do this, and partly it´s our fault, Ok, I´ll take both, there are 2 parties to blame, Microsoft but it´s also us because we´re demanding $250 PCs. We´ve killed the margin for the PC industry demanding really low cost PCs, by being poor. You know what, I blame the Koch brothers. They´re rich and we´re poor so we have to live with crapware. I bet you, they don´t have crapware on their PCs

Paul: Economic disparity in this country could actually be at the causet of this. Yeah they just hire people to remove the crapware. Get Bill Gates on the phone, I want a clean version of this computer. Except Bill Gates left Microsoft like 8 years ago buddy.

Leo: Can I actually go and download a pure Windows disk now that I have a computer Windows license?

Paul: Actually yes, yes  you can.

Leo: See there you go.

Paul: Here´s the thing, so a retail Windows key would work on that, Windows 8 key, would a OEM key work? Probably not.

Leo: You have to get the OEM version for that to work.

Paul: I´ll test that though. That´s interesting. I don´t think so though, this are different

Leo: I would love it on Thurrott.com wow we even got an echo on that, that´s good. I need an echo, Thurrott.com, com, com, for, you know, just to make, how to get a clean install on them, on modern versions.

Paul: It´s ugly Leo, there´s no pleasant way to do it.

Leo: Well I´ll be doing it next week I can tell you right now. Thank goodness for nite nite. That makes it easy.

Paul: The decrapifier as well.

Leo: See what I want, I don´t want to uninstall, I feel that there´s still stuff lying around, I want the clean version.

Paul: I haven´t seen this in a while, I mean I don´t have access to a million PC, actually yes I do, what am I talking about, but anyways hahaha, I haven´t seen this in a while, but there used to be some, Dell used to do this where there would be a multipart set up when you restore the system and so you would install the OS and then it would install the drivers, and then it would say would you like to install any of the Dell accesories? No, I don´t, thank you. And then you would just kind of move on from there, you know, that would be perfectly acceptable.

Leo: Like I said, they used to have an option, $50 bucks more and you won´t have to have any of this stuff. And I noticed it´s not there anymore. Like I said I´m buying an $1150 laptop, there´s plenty of margin for them.

Paul: The margins are razor thin on the $99 laptop, but on the $1500 laptop, absolutely not.

Leo: Well I´m with you, I´m with you on your call to make signature mandatory.

Paul: I think we´re losing Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: Yeah, you´ve lost me. That´s ok.

Paul: I´m pretty sure she just wrote an entire post while we were

Mary Jo: Wait are we talking about Xboxes? No, no we´re not.

Leo: We were ranting, sorry.

Paul: We´ve got to move on and talk about Xboxes.

Mary Jo: I agree with all of what you were saying and you know, I´ve got  Richard B in the chat room saying the disks are not in the box because OEMs don´t want them, they don´t want it. I´m not sure who they is though.

Leo: I think it´s Microsoft that doesn´t want it because they´re afraid of piracy.

Mary Jo: No, he says no. He says Microsoft wants OEMs to use recovery partitions that´s what they´re encouraging. Ok I don´t want to talk about this anymore.

Leo: Yes maám, let´s talk about surface 2.

Mary Jo: Let´s talk about Spartan.

Leo: Alright, I love that. I was on the horn as I am every morning with our web developers, I just want to say, agile,  is about process more than anything I´ve ever experienced in my life. There´s a lot of process, but one of the bits of that is, you scrum every day, stand ups, lots of them. We had a stand up and a, a, oh there´s all these slangy terms, we had a stand up and we had a sit down, anyway, one of the things I asked about, because we´re using new technology to do this front end, is, I´m old school and in the old days different browsers had different implementations of java and you had a lot of code in your website, Well is it IE 5? IE 6? Is it IE 7?Is it Safari? And you would branch like crazy, depending on what browser you were using. Fortunately I think those days are kind of numbered. But anyways, the team was saying, we have tools that do a lot of this automatically. So I said, well what about Spartan? Like for instance, we design this now, but Spartan will be out this Fall. How hard is it going to be to accommodate any differences in Spartan? And they said, you know what, it´s a plug in system, there´s something called sas that works with CSS, it´s straight forward. But I think Spartan is going to be very standards compliant right?

Mary Jo: Yes, very standards compliant.

Leo: That´s key, for, I think for me.

Mary Jo: Yes, and this week we learned a couple of new things about Spartan, which is that new web browser, that Microsoft is going to make a part of Windows 10. So it´s meant to be a replacement for both modern IE, you know the one that was the version that ran in the entire world, and it is also meant to be a replacement ultimately for regular IE.

Leo: Wait a minute, You mean there will only be one browser on Windows 10?

Mary Jo: No, for the mobile version there will only be one browser, and also for the desk top version. If you´re an enterprise customer or somebody else who still needs IE for backward compatibility, you´ll be able to download that and put it on your system. So technically there´s still 2, but the way it´s going to ship, I think is just with Spartan.

Paul: Really?

Mary Jo: I think so. That´s my take away from what they were talking about yesterday, in the ask IE chat. Yeah, so, Spartan is the browser for Windows 10, but, if you´re an Enterprise customer, don´t painc, you can still get IE 11. The other interesting thing though is the rendering engine. It´s very interesting, some people in Microsoft call the rendering engine that´s in Spartan a new rendering engine.

Leo: Right, This has been unclear, because we´ve also said, it´s trident.

Mary Jo: Right, so what it is, it actually is a fork of trident, that um, it was like pulling teeth to get Microsoft to tell me this for some reason. It´s a fork of trident that is called EdgeHTMl.dll it bares very little resemblance anymore to trident because they´ve changed it so much since they forked it, but it still is trident. For all intents and purposes. It´s not webkit, it´s not gecko, it´s a fork of trident.  So, you know, it´s new , yes it is new and Microsoft´s going to call this a new browser, it´s going to work differently, but, it´s going to be able to, kind of act like other webkit browsers and I am not  technical enough to explain how that works, I know it has to do with user agent string.

Leo: So, they´re going to identify as webkit? Not as …

Mary Jo: I don´t know if they´ll actually go so far as to identify as webkit but I think they will identify in a way that it won´t make it look like there´s some different non-standards compliant browser.

Leo: Yeah I think that´s critical. I think currently don´t they identify as Mosaic? I´m trying to remember what the user agent string is right now.

Paul: It says Mozilla in there.

Leo: Mozilla, that´s it, yeah.

Mary Jo: Right. There was a really good, I´m going to refer anyone who cares a lot about this kind of under the hood stuff, to an article that was in Smashing Magazine this week that was written by an engineer who works on an IE named Jacob  Rossi. You should go read that article. It has everything you want to know about trident and the new rendering engine in Spartan in that article.

Leo: As you might imagine web designers are very, very intrigued and concerned and want to know as soon as possible.

Mary Jo: The other thing we found out this week about Spartan is they are going to support extensions. They said this also in the ask IE dev chat this week. Somebody, I think it was Brad Sams from Neowin who said : Are you guys going to do that? And they confirmed it. They said we are working on a plan for extensions for a  future updates projects. They would´t give  a time frame or explain what that meant. If it meant you could use Google Chrome extensions, they didn´t say that, but it is going to happen. They are going to support extensions.

Leo: And interestingly, I got this from the Smashing article, you can enable the new engine in your Windows 10 technical preview today, you could try HTML on your existing code and see what will happen. You have to change your bout flags and enable experimental web platform features. So that´s good though, that´s good.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it´s good, they´re doing the right thing I think with Spartan, Yep.

Leo: It´s so funny because this is kind of fundamental now to the ecosystem now.

Mary Jo: You´ve got to do this. Also they´re testing out new potential names for Spartan.

Leo: How about Vivaldi?  I like that, it´s kind of

Mary Jo: The ones they´re are testing are all Es, Elixa, Evo, Endeavor, Edge, but most of us just want them to call it Spartan, so I hope they end up calling it Spartan.

Leo, Nah, no they´re not going to call it Spartan.

Mary Jo: You don´t think so? Why not?

Leo: It conjures up the image of a naked man with a beard. i don´t, It´s not

Mary Jo. That´s not what I think of when I think of Spartan.

Leo: Maybe it´s just me.

Paul: No judging Leo.

Leo: How about something like Bingle?

Mary Jo: Bingle? no.

Leo: Something with Bing in it.

Mary Jo: No, I think the´re either going to do Spartan or. just plain old Spartan like they did Cortana, right? They kept Cortana.

Leo: Who was it that said they should call it the Covenant? Ha ha ha, with a little Halo reference there. It has to have something

Mary Jo: Spartan has to do with Halo.

Leo: Right. So it has to have something to do with Halo.

Mary Jo: They could, they could do it.

Leo: Bing Explorer (Registered Trademark) Microsoft Corporation, 2015.

Mary Jo: No oh

Leo: Yeah that´s a little old. Evolve? Evo? So, that´s what all these E things are.

Mary Jo: Yeah, all those E things.

Leo: Evo, Evolve, Elixa, Elixa?

Mary Jo: No, no.

Leo: Wasn´t Elixa the host of the Late Night Horror Movies on , she was the Queen of the night?

Paul: Elvira?

Leo: Oh Elvira! That´s it.

Mary Jo: That´s how paul pronounces Elixir

Paul: Elixa.

Leo: Would you like some Elixa to go with your lobster? Elixa. Ok, Ok, let´s see, let´s take a break, come back, we got more to talk about Office next, oh you know the earnings. We really didn´t talk about that yet. And we still got our back of the book, we got a ton of stuff still to talk about, we´re just getting on our way here folks. In fact, let´s uh, yeah, I´ll do ITProTV, we got to talk about them, they´re great guys, doing a wonderful product for anybody who wants to get good at IT. Maybe you´re already in IT or support and you just want to polish up, or maybe you´re looking for a job. And you know you need those certs, don´y you, to get that IT job. ITProTV is the way to go, I got to tell you. These guys are wonderful. And I say that because they unabashedly copy, or should I say it´s an homage, imitate what we do. ITProTV is very much like Twit,  in fact they were doing IT training for years. And Tim Broom and his partner, there´s Tim right there, and there´s Don Peasant. They said, we like what Leo´s doing with Twit, would´t it be cool if we could do like a Tech Tv, or a Twit Tv for IT training? And if you look at what they´re up to, that´s exactly what they´ve created. Live on the air, 30 hours a week, with a chat room going on, behind the scenes, you can watch it everywhere including on Roku, they got a Roku Channel which is fabulous. And if price is right, especially if you´re looking at the costs of, you know, a technical school or IT boot camp, or even some of the study material, we´re talking here $57 dollars a month, $570 dollars for an entire year, and I´m going to get you 30% off because I´m really, big believers in this. If you´re studying to get your A+ cert, or your MCSA, or any of the Comptia certs, any of the Microsoft certs, Cisco, they´ve got  these new ISC squared security certs, and a really great trainer on these, they´re wonderful. But that´s a skill. We´re about to talk about Office, yes they have great Office training, Excel, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint access, Project Management, if you´re studying for the PMI cert, they´ve got classes. VMWare, Citrix, Hyper V, WireShark,  that´s a great course by the way if you want to use WireShark, Google apps, lots of incredible material, more added every week. Hundreds of hours of content, I want you to go there right now, itpro.tv/ww , find out more about it. And then I said I was going to add a discount, 30% off right now when you use our offer code ww30, what you´ll do, is that you´ll be able to try it free for 7 days, and get 30% off, and I´m not talking about the first month, the first year forever. Forever. In fact, if you do get the year subscription, which i recommend , you can download everything, drm free. So listen on the airplane. They have video and MP3s. There is, by the way corporate and group pricing available. Clients include HP, UCSD, Penn State, Stanford. And, once you´ve reached a 13th month, they´re going to cut the subscription price even farther. That´ll get it down to $24.95 a month, $249 dollars for an entire year. That´s less than like 3 books. This is really a good deal. Itpro,tv/ww. They got Powershell courses now and Chromecast support so you can, not just the Roku, you can watch it on your Chromecast. Linux plus. Itpro.tv/ww. If you´ve been wanting to polish up your skills or get a better job, this is the way to do it. We thank Tim and Don at ItProTv, they´re great, we love them. You see I always have my ItProTv mug with me. Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, lets talk about Office. What do we know about, they´re calling it Office Next?

Mary Jo: No, the naming on this is going to get a little confusing. So last week Microsoft said that the new touch-first Office that they´re building for Windows was going to be available for free on Windows phones and on small under 8 inch tablets. So we knew that. Then a couple of days later, they put out a blog post and they started calling this touch-first Office, um, what are they calling it? They have a funny name for it. Office for Windows 10. Yeah that was one of the code names. Office for Windows 10, is what the Touch-first Office is called. But, there´s another version of Office, that´s called Office, It´s the full fledged Office, the full functional Office that runs on Windows, all versions of Windows, not just Windows 10. That is called Office 2016. Even though it´s going to ship this year, in 2015. Yeah, so we´ve got Office for Windows 10, thats the Touch-first Office that´s going to come out later this year, and we´ve got Office 2016 which is your full Word, Excel, PowerPoint that´s not just Touch-first. I know, it´s so confusing.

Leo: Does Office 2016 include Touch?

Mary Jo: Hmm, Does it support Touch? It´s not built for Touch.

Paul: It does.

Mary Jo: It does?

Leo: But that´s the super set.

Paul: if you have a Touch screen, it will go into Touch mode. Which makes the ribbon items bigger, it´s not a lot, but yeah. It´s on Windows RT right? And that´s how it´s, on those types of screens that´s what it´s set up to by default.

Mary Jo, So, Office, the one that´s Touch-first, it´s Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and I think Outlook. The one that is Office 2016 has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, outlook, Access, Publisher, bla, bla, bla, probably Sway, all the apps. are in that one. That also supports, the Office 2016 will support macros and other features that the Touch-first one won´t have. So there´s 2 Offices for Windows, the Touch-first Office, the other full fledged Office. They both, we think are coming out in this calendar year at the end of 2015,  maybe even at the same time. So that´s what we know now. And neither of them is in public preview yet. The Office 2016 is in private preview with some testers, outside of Microsoft. But so far it does´t have any major new features.

Leo: I don´t even want to start this conversation. Is this superseding Office 365?

Mary Jo, No, this is, no.

Paul: It´s not a hard differentiation, this is for touch-first devices. It´s a mobile version, it´s not the full thing. You know it´s equivalent to iPad versions of Office.

Mary Jo: Yes. Right. We think it´s going to work with the subscription, that you´ll have to have some kind of subscription to unlock the full set of features, maybe not the basic features.

Leo: You´re talking about touch-first Office? Not Office 2016.

Paul: The thing about it, in the context of Office 10, this will be bundle with the OS, you´ll get it on small devices for free with the OS, instead of an Office 365 subscription. Right, and so, that makes more sense than Microsoft than not giving away as much, but it gives people and those kinds of devices the basic functionality that they need.

Leo: And with my Office 365 subscription I´ll get, when it comes out, 2016.

Mary Jo: Yep, and you´ll also get, I think you´ll also be able to use that with touch-first Office.

Leo: I would hope so. I can now with the iPad, I would presume they would give you the same

Paul: The point is though with the 365 subscription you´ll get the full feature set of all of the mobile features of Office, iPad, android, iPhone and not Windows.

Mary Jo: Unless you have certain Office 365 subscriptions like small business doesn´t give you the actual apps. I don´t think. You know what I mean, Office 365 Small Business, I have that subscription, it doesn´t give me all the Office apps. it gives me access to the back end. I don´t have a home or consumer or a professional subscription.

Leo: They could really rationalize this system.

Mary Jo: But, it´s coming, so Office is coming and if you have Windows phone or the small tablet, you´re going to get it, the touch version for free. We don´t know if you´re going to get the Touch version free with all of the Windows 10 SKUs. That we don´t know.

Leo: Dare I ask about Office for the Mac?

Mary Jo: Second half of this year. That´s all we know.

Leo: Will it be now, feature complete with the Windows version? Will they match up?

Paul: I think it´s going to match up more with the 2016 than to a mobile version. I think Mac users aren´t going to get the, you know.

Leo: Yeah, we don´t need that, that´s alright.

Mary Jo: Paul gets the next topic. I can´t  even pass this blog post. I´ve read it like 5 times and I´m still not sure.

Leo: Major updates coming to photo experiences at Onedrive.

Paul: This is a Sinofskian blog post, but it kind of boils down to 3 things that are happening.

Leo: That´s a new word I like. It´s like Sinofskian.

Paul: Some of the stuff is happening immediately, some of it´s going to happen over the next few weeks or months or whatever. OneDrive as you know, you can back up your photos to it, you can do this from Windows phone, Windows devices, iPhone, iPad, Android, whatever. And  that´s neat, but, the problem is it all gets dumped into a,  like a camera role folder, and it´s just a raw dump ordered by date.  And so in my case, I´ve been doing this now since the middle of 2010. I have 11,300 and something photos, in my camera role folder. And that thing is useless, it´s I mean, you can go back and see photos that just happened, but once you get past a couple of screens, it´s impossible to find anything.  And so, they´re going to improve that stuff and so part of what they´re doing is up on the server if you will, up in the cloud. They´re going to add an albums feature which we´re also going to see in the on the client apps. which is the ability to automatically and then manually create albums of things inside your camera role, So for example, it will look at the date, location and time, and say Hey, you just did a bunch of stuff at the same time, in the same place. This is an event, it´s an album, you know, that kind of thing. You can share albums kind of a nice interface for that, you´re going to see that on the web, you´re going to see this on iOS, eventually you´re going to see this on Android, Windows phone and of course on Windows 10 as well. What else? There´s a, well the other big one is changes coming to the desktop phone and actually outlook.com when it comes to interacting with your photos and so I guess it´s Windows 7 or Windows 8.X there´s a Onedrive sync client. And it´s going to be updated in this coming month and that update is going to allow you to back up photos from a camera, a USB stick, an external hard drive or whatever is connected to your computer to the cloud. And there´ll be a new folder for that called camera imports. When you take a screenshot,  and these 2 systems as well, Windows 7 and Windows 8, meaning you hit the print screen button, not the Windows 8.1 special key code or Windows 10 special key code, but if you just hit print screen it usually goes to the clipboard, also will be saved automatically to One Drive, so you can take screenshots on one device and have them be on the PC you´re actually working on automatically, that´s something I can actually use every single day. And then in OneDrive, last week or a couple of weeks ago, they added the ability to save attachments to OneDrive if you´re using Outlook.com on the web, now they´re going to have a one click save for photo attachments same thing. If you get an email with photos you can save those right to OneDrive immediately. And so It happens up in the cloud, there´s no copying that you have to worry about down on the client. And then the third one, is, a new search functionality, it´s kind of a partnership between OneDrive, Bing and Microsoft research, that basically allows you to search for photos based  on the time, location or text that´s extracted from the images.  You can also search for tags, so tags are something that Microsoft used to support a lot. In photo clients, we haven´t seen a lot of work there, but now they´re adding it back to One Drive and so it will create tags for you, you can create your own tags, you can obviously change the ones that they create. And then there´s a non-photo aspect to it where you can also search office documents and PDFs by the text that´s included that´s inside of them. So, if you don´t, like, you know,  I have a document, I know I wrote about this topic, search for that topic those documents will come up as well.  And that´s going to happen on Web first and then iOS and will come to Android and Windows phone and then , well i don´t know, presumably Windows 10 as well.

Leo: They´re really playing catch up here though. This is, I mean Google´s already doing most of this stuff. Even drop box is doing a better job than one Drive.

Paul: So, right. I think the job with One Drive was just getting the raw dump going, you know, and getting all of your photos from everywhere. Obviously there was a big controversy last Fall around the place holder thing, one of the things around getting an integrated consistent sync engine across all of their clients, is they can start adding these kinds of features. they talked about photos right up front because this is the big one that people have been complaining about, it´s just,  it´s gotten better over time but, I guess at 11,00 photos  and I have zero way to organize them, to find things, and you know, if I want to look at photos from like a home spot from 2 years ago, it´s like, page by page, by page, by page, and then you have to Iook at the picture, like, where am I in time? Nope, page, page, page, it´s, it´s impossible to find anything. And so I think they´re finally going to start, I´m not saying this is going to fix all the problems, but, they´re finally making, they´re taking great steps to fix, you know, what is a huge problem.

Leo: Good.  Right now I just use it as a backup solution. You know, I´m, organizational stuff sold them by other stuff

Paul: I keep checking OneDrive today to see if any of the stuff has shown up.

Leo: But there´s an opportunity here, you know I don´t know why companies want to do it, I guess cause their users are demanding it. But everybody now is offering you know, this kind of photo backup.

Paul: Oh, it´s important on OneDrive because, well first of all you get a lot of free storage, I think it´s 30 gigs is free for everybody. If you’re an Office 365 guy, I mean, it´s unlimited. and so the appeal of this is strong. The problem is the actual experience isn´t great, and I think this is going to take a step in that direction making it great. Or 3 steps I guess.

Leo: Yeah you know they´ve, in some ways leapfrogged, yeah. Like desktop import, that´s , I don´t think anybody does that.

Paul: It´s just kind of a crazy, unique feature you can add to a PC. That´s a good idea. I think we´re about 50% in the show

Leo: I know, My God! There´s a lot to talk about this week.

Mary Jo: Let´s do earnings. Let´s do earnings. Yep, so this is weird. Microsoft announced their earnings on Monday. Usually it’s at the end of the week, it made me feel like this whole week was Friday.

Paul: By the way yes, absolutely.

Mary Jo: So they announce their Q2, physical 2015 earnings on Monday. They met the estimates for their operating earnings 71 cents a share. That was what Wall Street was predicting. But, their stock pretty much tanked this week. the reason it did was, their forecast for what they are going to make for the rest of the year was fairly conservative.

Paul: Was it zero dollars?

Mary Jo: No, it was more than zero dollars. But they also, I think we´re starting to see what we all knew was going to happen at some point, but, now it´s very visible what´s happening. Microsoft is making less money per copy of Windows because of the zero dollars thing, and because they´re dropping the prices for OEMs.  At the same time, they´re transitioning to this new cloud model, so, the Windows , sorry, Windows commercial revenues , which is their Windows business revenues were down, Office revenues were down for the commercial segment, because they´re selling more Office 365, not as many people are buying copies of Office anymore, physical copies. Windows Phone revenues were down a lot, even though they sold quite a few Windows Phones surprisingly for the quarter. They sold 10.5 million Lumias, but their revenues were down 61 % compared to the year ago quarter for Windows Phone. So yeah, it was kind of a mixed, rocky quarter. Cloud looked really good for them. Enterprise looked good except for Office and Windows. But they´re in the middle of this transition right now to the cloud and you can really see this happening. Also they are no longer getting benefits from people moving from XP to other versions of Windows, That’s kind of tapering off now.  And that also was something that came forth in this month´s earnings. They also said Japan and China were very weak, uncharacteristically weak. And they took a hit from an ongoing case they have with the IRS over how they´re reporting some of their revenue exchange, when they transfer revenue to offshore locals. And the IRS is trying to get them on that. Their tax rate went up, foreign exchange rates were bad, not working in their favor, so it was like a big, storm converging in one place, and, so, that´s what happened with the stock this week. It wasn´t like their best quarter.

Leo: Just sounds like a lot of excuses Microsoft.

Mary Jo: I don´t know if they were excuses, just a lot of factors kind of all converging.

Leo: My dog ate my revenue.

Paul: By the way, the one thing, I mean, because I always look on the bright side of things,  Windows revenues to PC makers were down 13% year over year. Microsoft gave away Windows for free last year basically, or charged almost next to nothing for it. And their revenues were only down 13% so that actually tells me that they sold a lot more Windows licenses than they did previously a lot more but that there were of course a lot less money per license in fact sometimes it was free. That is amazing, and I actually think that´s  pretty positive. I mean as Mary Jo said, they weren´t getting that bump from XP upgraders and business, they weren´t getting a price bump from education as well they lowered the price there. There´s some interesting, that counters some of the bad news in a way, I guess that´s what I´m saying. You know the Xbox site for example, Microsoft of the past few months has been promoting how amazing the holiday season has been for Xbox 1, number 1 selling console in the United States only in November and December, record sales of Xbox 1, you know better and better. Better, better, better. Xbox revenues were down 20% year over year. And again, same basic reason, price cuts, right? But you know, for Windows to only be down 13% you´re kind of seeing an amazing volume there I think and there´s the benefit they get. There are a lot of Windows licenses being sold and that´s, that´s not all bad news.

Leo: You forgive me, if I´m a little distracted, this box from Dell just arrived.

Mary Jo: Is that the SGS?

Leo: I think it is. It came a week early.

Paul: Well, let´s jump ahead to the pics Leo shall we?

Leo: I want to get out of here. Aren´t you guys done yet? Let me just show you. Look how little the box is, that´s not the laptop, that´s the box.

Paul: I desperately need for these people to make a 15 inch version of this, that´s in the 13 inch case.

Leo: Yeah, wouldn´t that be cool? Yeah, um. Very much an Appleish experience with the box. And in fact it really does look like a MacBook Air, a little square.

Paul: That´s the back.

Leo: Yeah, I figured that.

Paul: Leo, that big part, that´s not the front.

Leo: It´s not quite the wedge of the Air is. And you know how people were saying how light it is, I mean it is light, but it´s not that light, it´s not like floating out of my hand light. This is the thing that´s remarkable, is the almost bezel-less screen, let me turn it on.

Paul: Yeah, the screen is impressive.

Leo: And this is a nice, uh, you said you played with it, so I´m not touching it. I like the texture yeah. Like a rubberized thing.

Paul: Now you just have to wait while they install extra crapware.

Leo I don´t see any disks in this box.

Paul: By the way, you could´ve bought this at the Microsoft store, and they would´ve given you the signature version.

Leo: Really? Oh Damn!

Paul: I wonder if you could get it from them, you know, the restored disk.

Leo: Somebody´s saying that there is a place to go, Microsoft does offer a download restore that works with the OEM key.

Paul: I´d like to know where that is, I know of a, you can get the for ISOs for Windows but I´m not  positive about it working for OEM keys. If that were true, I need to know about that because I would definitely write that up.

Leo: Let me scroll back through chat and see if I can find the link because, whoever posted that, if you could post it again that would be great. Here it is, create, reset, refresh media.

Paul: Yeah, but how do they know it works with OEM? Does it say OEM keys?

Leo: Yeah, I´ve seen this before, this creates an ISO on a DVD or whatever.

Paul: I´ll try it.

Leo:  I´ll try it right now heck!

Paul: What could go wrong?

Leo: What could possibly go wrong and screw up my brand new Dell?

Paul: It said Windows could not be activated, that´s what could go wrong.

Leo: Oh, is that beautiful! I have to say, that is, Now I understand why everybody was raving about this. This is gorgeous. And I kind of like the high rise screen. Um , Wow. Ok sorry. That´s made the show even longer.

Mary Jo: There´s too much to talk about.

Paul: Here´s my vote, I say we skip right over power BI and go right into Xbox.

Mary Jo: No, we can´t. We can´t skip power BI you guys. Ok , so power BI, it´s Microsoft´s Business Intelligence service. Up until now it´s been fairly expensive, like close to $50 dollars per user per month to use this. This week Microsoft announced they´re going to come out with a free version, like completely free, they call it Freemium, but it´s free. And you´re going to get many of the capabilities that are currently part of Power BI for visualizing and interacting and managing your data for free. There are limits, like there´s 1 gigabyte per user data capacity limit and there´s going to be the new paid version, which is called Power BI Pro and that´s only going to cost $9.99 per user, compared to what we were just saying, $50 per user. Right now, it´s in test, it´s US only. They say it´s going to come to the International market sometime in the future, we don´t know when. But if you´re in the US and you want to try it out, you can just go to the Power BI site on the web and just sign up. All you need is an email address, you don´t even need a Microsoft account to try this out, so go check it out. There you go, Power BI in one minute. Boom.

Leo: Nice job. By the way, the very first feature that I have to enter is my email, it says to enable, enhance support and better protect you click next, to send information to Dell and share your email address with Dell and McAfee. Already a bad sign. And there´s no, I don´t want to do that.

Paul: Is McAfee located in Columbia now? Or is that just the

Leo: I don´t want to do that.

Mary Jo: You know what? I told Paul this, when I got my Acer, I bought it on Amazon, my Acer S7, and it came as a signature edition. I didn´t even buy it through the Microsoft store, for some reason it came as a  signature edition.

Paul: Actually some third parties are selling signature editions laptops through Amazon.com. You got lucky, because that´s really nice.

Mary Jo: It was fantastic.

Leo: Somebody said you could say no, I don´t see anything but next, so. I don´t see a say no

Paul: You can say no, but then you have to click next.

Mary Jo: Ok let´s talk about Xbox.

Paul: No, let´s skip Xbox this is not important.

Leo: Xbox 1control getting an update and don´t forget games with gold, I just downloaded 25 ducts, 2015 Super Bowl edition. Tip of the week, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paul Thurrott.

Paul: So a reader sent me this amazing tip, and this is amazing because so many people got these free versions of Office 365 personal last year when they bought all these cheap PCs, which is you can upgrade this thing to Office 365 home for just $10 dollars. And what´s particularly amazing is Office 365 personal and home actually can be stacked and so if you buy a bunch of key cards in the store or you get these free coupons in a PC, you apply them to your account it actually extends the subscription out, so if you have 3 of them, you get 3 years of the subscription. So for just $10 dollars, you can actually upgrade, which is what I did, you have 3 years of an Office 354 personal subscription, to 3 years now of Office home, Office 365 home. So, basically, I have an article on my website, you should read it. So, the difference between Office 365 personal and home is that personal is for one person, home is for 5 people, or 5 PCs right? You can share it with up to 5 people but also, 5 PCs each. So, I mean, for $10 dollars I mean it´s kind of a crazy upgrade so you should definitely check that. So for the software pick, I´m actually going to skip on the one I have here, because I think this is a bigger discussion that I don´t want to have right now, so I´ll just throw out 2 things. DropBox finally came out with their Windows phone and Windows tablet the modern app, last year, last week sorry. This is actually a very high quality app I compared it side by side with the iPad version they´re identical as far as functionality and so we did not have a DropBox app on these platforms for the duration, now we do, they´ve been kept up to date, so far at least with the other version. So that´s fantastic. Leave Dropbox if you don´t want to grab one or both of those, and Mary Jo pointed out today that there is an MPR app called MPR 1 that shipped just today also both for Windows phone and for Windows modern app. And it is made by, it is the official MPR app

Mary Jo: Yeah, it is.

Leo: Nice, finally.

Mary Jo: We should put out some bad news on apps so too, because we´re getting this on twitter. So, I think it was a week or 2 ago Chase bank decided they were no longer going to support  their app on Windows phone and they´re pulling it from the store. They´re citing lack of use because there are so few Windows Phone users, I would guess. I asked Microsoft about it and they said ask Chase and today we found out Bank of America is dropping their Windows Phone app I would assume same reasons.

Leo: That´s a deal breaker, ladies.

Mary Jo: So, you know what I would to see? Rudy Huyn, Is that how you pronounce his last name? You know Rudy Huyn?

Paul: He´s the guy that made the DropBox app by the way.

Mary Jo: Yeah, He made the DropBox app. Rudy, come on! Make a Chase app. I know, make a Chase app a make us a Bank of America app or somebody at Microsoft.

Leo: That´s not going to happen, yeah, security wise

Paul: I suspect, those apps require an internal key. Yeah the public API to Chase.

Mary Jo: I know, I wish, I´m hoping Microsoft is going to be able to somehow build an app with the banks cooperation because you can´t just be dropping these kind of apps. You just can´t.

Leo: Hey, should I set this up as an existing PC or a new PC? By the way this screen is gorgeous.

Mary Jo: Yeah the screen is amazing

Leo: I mean edge to edge is so nice. Yeah, I´ll set it as a new PC: I don´t what settings I have.

Mary Jo: Ok, Enterprise pick of the week.

Leo: Sorry.

Mary Jo: That´s alright. We´re going to let you keep setting up and we´re just going to keep going. Enterprise pick of the week is Cosmos, and I wrote about this last August. Cosmos is an internal system that Microsoft uses to process all the data that it collects through Bing, and Windows live and a lot of their external facing systems. Adcenter, MSN, Skype. They collect a lot of data that they use when they are developing apps and kind of honing apps. They are now going to take Cosmos their internal system and they´re going to make it available externally. It doesn´t mean they´re going to give users outside access to Microsoft’s own data, it doesn´t mean that. But they´re building a storage engine piece of Cosmos called Kona, that´s the code name. And they´re building an analytics piece. I´m sorry, the storage engine piece is code name Cabo, and the analytics engine piece is code name Kona. So they´re building out this system so they´re going to have this new language called sequel IP that´s going to let users with visual studio, plug into this data and it´s going to be, a kind of big data processing system or engine. They´re right now recruiting testers for this, and they have not discussed any of this publicly, I just heard this from different sources of mine. I don´t know when they´re going to turn it on, or when they´re going to make a public preview available, but it´s all about what they´re doing alongside their HDinsight service which is Hadoop on Azure and they´re coming out with this as another alternative for people who want to be able to harness the power of big data and use it to process their own data. And run queries against it. So keep your ears open for more about Cosmos as we go forward.

Leo And does Neil deGrasse Tyson host that too?

Mary Jo: Ha, ha. He does! Not really. Um, Code name pick of the week is Nebula. And yes I know, there are other products out there from open stack and other companies that are named Nebula, but this is an internal Microsoft code name, Nebula. So Nebula is a cloud inside of Microsoft. It´s their infrastructure and service cloud that they use inside the company, and it´s not available externally. But what´s most interesting to me about Nebula is, Microsoft is using their cloud platforms, wait a minute, cloud platform system, cps, which is that Azure in a box thing, where they built out racks of preconfigured Dell servers for customers. They´re using these preconfigured racks of servers inside to power their own iAAS cloud, which is code name, Nebula. So, it´s just kind of an interesting little fact. I was wondering what they were doing with that Azure in a box platform. They introduced it last Fall. It was for very big customers and hosting  providers. We haven´t heard a lot more about it since then,  but it sounds like Microsoft at least is using it pretty heavily inside to run their own private cloud.

Leo: There you go. We´ll get to beer in a second, I just want to show, this is what the Dell thing came with. There´s an Amazon button which I don´t

Paul: So by the way, be prepared for 2 versions of Mcafee, which is the modern version but also the desktop utility. That thing is an modern app. You can actually, you can tap and hold on that and uninstall it, but that´s not going to get rid that.

Leo: And then there´s Flipboard, the Dell shop, it does´t look like it´s too much stuff. There´s DropBox, So, it doesn´t look too bad. It could be worse.

Paul: That´s just the surface.

Leo: Oh, wait a minute, complete your software installation, Dell digital delivery. Can I say no?

Paul: Well depending on what that is, you´d have to read that to make sure. That might be your ability to get your restore media.

Leo: Software ordered with your system? I didn´t order any software.

Paul: Didn´t you?

Leo:  I beg to differ Mr. Laporte, You ordered McAfee.

Paul:  Implicitly, by clicking the Ok button.

Leo: I guess I´m going to have to allow that, Dell to transmit, service, tag and other hardware, configuration, provide updates. I guess I´m going to say Ok. i can always uninstall. Boy it´s  a nice screen though. Wow, it’s just beautiful. Look at that. I feel like I´m there.

Mary Jo: It is nice. Wow.

Leo: Alright, let´s get our beer of the week here.

Mary Jo: Beer of the week. Yes

Leo: And it´s from Bellevue brewing the home of your meet up.

Mary Jo: So, I´m going to give them a shout out because they were so awesome for us, with our Tweet update. They brew their own beers at Bellevue brewing Company in Bellevue Washington.

Paul: By the way, sorry to interrupt, they´re awesome but man, did they kick us out of there.

Leo: What?

Mary Jo: They had to.

Paul: When closing time came, the lights came on. We were like racoons caught in the trash.

Mary Jo: No, it was like 10 pm. You know it´s not New York where you have the 4a.m. last call. Yeah, they flicked the lights on us. Yeah, Rattle and Hum is open til 4, sometimes a little later.

Leo: California it´s 2, but apparently 10 p.m.in Washington state.

Mary Jo: But we did get to drink some of their beers, and one of them was a scotch ale, Bellevue brewing scotch ale. I gave Paul a glass of the bourbon barrel aged scotch ale because he looked like he needed a beer that night. So scotch ales, also known as wee heavies, are a style that we are, it’s very, the word of the beer is caramelized so it´s very dark brown in color, it´s really roasty, and malty, really nice. Just very full flavored, full bodied. Really good beer for kind of like sitting by a fire, watching the snow fall that kind of thing. yeah. But I also have a little bonus beer pick from one of our Windows Weekly fans, Pete LaSanty, he turned me on to this add on for untapped that is called D3 beer, and I put a link in to my account for D3 beer. So you hook up your untapped to this app and it runs Google analytics on the back ends, sorry.

Leo: Oh my God!

Paul: Finally a use for Google analytics.

Mary Jo: It breaks down for you, like how many beers you´ve had in each style, and which breweries are your favorite, and which country you like drinking beers from.

Paul: People will be shocked to discover that mary Jo´s profile and mine are very different.

Leo: Yeah, wow, 1,133 beers checked in. A thousand unique beers, 368 badges. A  thousand beer badge. Extraordinary.

Paul: I have 196 uniques.

Mary Jo: But you don´t check in all your beers. Did you guys see the link though that I have there? It´s to that D3beer.jo Yeah, it´s pretty cool. It shows you like all the styles you´re drinking. And surprisingly, or maybe not, IPAs are my biggest style, but it´s not my only style. I´m pretty well varied in my drinking.

Leo: Lot of others.

Paul: Yeah, but it´s a percentage.

Lao: That´s cool. That´s really cool.

Mary Jo: It´s a cool little visualization, just fun. So you could see what you like to drink, what breweries you like. My number one brewery is Stone Brewery  from California.

Paul: Mine is Blue Hills Brewery, go figure.

Leo: So this is a long URL

Paul: I got to say, I feel really good about my brewery list. I really do, this is a great list.

Leo: How can I share this with people? It´s JONOST.ME

Mary Jo: Yeah, and then when you go in there you plug in your own untapped and it´ll generate your own  thing for you.

Leo: I wonder if I go to the root page.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I think there is a root page.

Leo: Yeah, there´s Jonathan Ostrander, he´s at Sony, and studying Nanoscale science and engineering. Wow.

Paul: Well good he´s finally doing something usable.

Leo: And then if you click projects, Wow, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, and oh yeah we´ll look at what kind of beer you had.  Netopps tracker.

Paul: Also technically a fluid dynamic Leo.

Leo: It is. I don´t think, unfortunately there´s a link to D3 on here. We´re trying to send you some business.

Paul: It is a tough URL

Leo: D3-beer.jonost.me

Mary Jo: And we´ll have it on the show notes too for people who want to try it.

Leo: Yeah, yeah. I don´t know where those show notes end up on. On Twitter somewhere. Good. Hey you know what? You guys did a great job of hurrying up.

Mary Jo: Sorry, we were like, let´s go!

Leo: Hurry up at the back end. And I slowed you down with my new Dell.

Mary Jo: No, no. You know with the crapware our discussion is super important, but I´m like, Oh what can we do about it?

Paul: Yeah, just complain that´s all we ever do.

Mary Jo: Complain I guess.

Leo: And for some reason,. it says Windows can´t activate right now, which means, I can´t do much else.

Paul: Wow.

Mary Jo: That´s not good.

Leo: I´m online, I don´t know

Paul:  Not what we call a good experience.

Leo:  Alright, well, it´s still a lovely machine. And since I put OS 10 on it, I´m going to love it. What´s under here? There´s a little hole.

Paul: Don´t touch the hole!

Leo: Ahhhh!!

Paul: If you remove that tape, your warranty is void Leo.

Leo: Yeah, probably. Really is a gorgeous machine. Nicely done Dell. Alright ladies and gentlemen this concludes, , Oh good I just activated Windows, I’m happy now! This concludes this edition of Windows weekly.  Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley they join us each and every wednesday at  11 a.m.pacific,  2 p.m.eastern time 1900 UTC. for great fun and games . You can watch live if you wish, but if not, we also have on demand versions available for you each and every week at Twit.tv/ww, also youtube.com/windowsweekly, also, wherever you get your podcasts. I  think we have strayed so far from the podcasts, but, none the less, there´s no other word for what this is, so, go to your, you know, your Xbox, music, or whatever your podcast app on your phone or whatever you use. We do have Twit app, a couple of nice ones, on Windows phone, as well as iOS, Android, Roku, so get the app. and then you can uh, you can get it every week.  Paul, Mary Jo, thanks so much, we´ll see you next time, on Windows Weekly! Bye bye