Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces on Windows
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4 episodes with win32
4 episodes with win32
3 episodes with win32
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3 episodes with win32
2 episodes with win32
3 episodes with win32
2 episodes with win32
Agentic AI is the theme of the show this year, and this time its multi-agent with orchestration! But first, we need to discuss the protestors. Paul and Richard have stories. So many stories! Build 2025 New Microsoft 365 Copilot features are rolling out now because it's a day that ends in y Tuning is the unexpected Build Bingo center square term - rolling out to agents GitHub Copilot is open source in VS Code, more Win32 app support improvements, no more fees in Microsoft Store A shift in making Windows 11 the best place for developers - some things said, some left unsaid Edge gets new AI features too of course New native app capabilities in Windows App SDK, React Native And, pre-Build, 50 million Visual Studio users Copilot for consumers does image generation now. Fun tip: You can Minecraft-ize photos OpenAI has a coding agent too, obviously And OpenAI is buying Jony Ive! Windows Administrator Protection is coming soon - And not just for businesses. This feels very much like the firewall in XP SP2, it's going to be disruptive New 24H2 features in Release Preview: New text actions in Click to Do, a lot more New 24H2 features in Dev and Beta: AI actions in File Explorer, Advanced Settings, Search improvements, more New 23H2 features, Windows 10 features in Release Preview Surface Laptop Studio RIP Calendar companion app for Windows 11/M365 Microsoft may finally put the Teams antitrust issue in the EU behind Xbox Fortnite returns to the Apple App Store Apple blocked it first, Epic complained to judge And Microsoft files a legal motion against Apple and for Epic Games Qualcomm job listing confirms Xbox plans to some degree What happens when you combine Qualcomm NPU with Nvidia GPU? Xbox May Update arrives and it's a big one Retro Classic Games for Xbox Game Pass Game Bar updates, Edge Game Assist, GeForce now etc. on PC Custom Xbox gift cards More streaming of your own games Hellblade II is coming from Xbox to PS5 Many more games coming to Xbox Game Pass across platforms Tips and Picks App pick of the week: You can try Microsoft's command line editor now Game pick of the week: Doom: The Dark Ages RunAs Radio this week: PowerShell 7.5 and DSC 3.0.0 with Jason Helmick Brown liquor pick of the week: Tamnavulin Sherry Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com
Agentic AI is the theme of the show this year, and this time its multi-agent with orchestration! But first, we need to discuss the protestors. Paul and Richard have stories. So many stories! Build 2025 New Microsoft 365 Copilot features are rolling out now because it's a day that ends in y Tuning is the unexpected Build Bingo center square term - rolling out to agents GitHub Copilot is open source in VS Code, more Win32 app support improvements, no more fees in Microsoft Store A shift in making Windows 11 the best place for developers - some things said, some left unsaid Edge gets new AI features too of course New native app capabilities in Windows App SDK, React Native And, pre-Build, 50 million Visual Studio users Copilot for consumers does image generation now. Fun tip: You can Minecraft-ize photos OpenAI has a coding agent too, obviously And OpenAI is buying Jony Ive! Windows Administrator Protection is coming soon - And not just for businesses. This feels very much like the firewall in XP SP2, it's going to be disruptive New 24H2 features in Release Preview: New text actions in Click to Do, a lot more New 24H2 features in Dev and Beta: AI actions in File Explorer, Advanced Settings, Search improvements, more New 23H2 features, Windows 10 features in Release Preview Surface Laptop Studio RIP Calendar companion app for Windows 11/M365 Microsoft may finally put the Teams antitrust issue in the EU behind Xbox Fortnite returns to the Apple App Store Apple blocked it first, Epic complained to judge And Microsoft files a legal motion against Apple and for Epic Games Qualcomm job listing confirms Xbox plans to some degree What happens when you combine Qualcomm NPU with Nvidia GPU? Xbox May Update arrives and it's a big one Retro Classic Games for Xbox Game Pass Game Bar updates, Edge Game Assist, GeForce now etc. on PC Custom Xbox gift cards More streaming of your own games Hellblade II is coming from Xbox to PS5 Many more games coming to Xbox Game Pass across platforms Tips and Picks App pick of the week: You can try Microsoft's command line editor now Game pick of the week: Doom: The Dark Ages RunAs Radio this week: PowerShell 7.5 and DSC 3.0.0 with Jason Helmick Brown liquor pick of the week: Tamnavulin Sherry Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com
Agentic AI is the theme of the show this year, and this time its multi-agent with orchestration! But first, we need to discuss the protestors. Paul and Richard have stories. So many stories! Build 2025 New Microsoft 365 Copilot features are rolling out now because it's a day that ends in y Tuning is the unexpected Build Bingo center square term - rolling out to agents GitHub Copilot is open source in VS Code, more Win32 app support improvements, no more fees in Microsoft Store A shift in making Windows 11 the best place for developers - some things said, some left unsaid Edge gets new AI features too of course New native app capabilities in Windows App SDK, React Native And, pre-Build, 50 million Visual Studio users Copilot for consumers does image generation now. Fun tip: You can Minecraft-ize photos OpenAI has a coding agent too, obviously And OpenAI is buying Jony Ive! Windows Administrator Protection is coming soon - And not just for businesses. This feels very much like the firewall in XP SP2, it's going to be disruptive New 24H2 features in Release Preview: New text actions in Click to Do, a lot more New 24H2 features in Dev and Beta: AI actions in File Explorer, Advanced Settings, Search improvements, more New 23H2 features, Windows 10 features in Release Preview Surface Laptop Studio RIP Calendar companion app for Windows 11/M365 Microsoft may finally put the Teams antitrust issue in the EU behind Xbox Fortnite returns to the Apple App Store Apple blocked it first, Epic complained to judge And Microsoft files a legal motion against Apple and for Epic Games Qualcomm job listing confirms Xbox plans to some degree What happens when you combine Qualcomm NPU with Nvidia GPU? Xbox May Update arrives and it's a big one Retro Classic Games for Xbox Game Pass Game Bar updates, Edge Game Assist, GeForce now etc. on PC Custom Xbox gift cards More streaming of your own games Hellblade II is coming from Xbox to PS5 Many more games coming to Xbox Game Pass across platforms Tips and Picks App pick of the week: You can try Microsoft's command line editor now Game pick of the week: Doom: The Dark Ages RunAs Radio this week: PowerShell 7.5 and DSC 3.0.0 with Jason Helmick Brown liquor pick of the week: Tamnavulin Sherry Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com
Agentic AI is the theme of the show this year, and this time its multi-agent with orchestration! But first, we need to discuss the protestors. Paul and Richard have stories. So many stories! Build 2025 New Microsoft 365 Copilot features are rolling out now because it's a day that ends in y Tuning is the unexpected Build Bingo center square term - rolling out to agents GitHub Copilot is open source in VS Code, more Win32 app support improvements, no more fees in Microsoft Store A shift in making Windows 11 the best place for developers - some things said, some left unsaid Edge gets new AI features too of course New native app capabilities in Windows App SDK, React Native And, pre-Build, 50 million Visual Studio users Copilot for consumers does image generation now. Fun tip: You can Minecraft-ize photos OpenAI has a coding agent too, obviously And OpenAI is buying Jony Ive! Windows Administrator Protection is coming soon - And not just for businesses. This feels very much like the firewall in XP SP2, it's going to be disruptive New 24H2 features in Release Preview: New text actions in Click to Do, a lot more New 24H2 features in Dev and Beta: AI actions in File Explorer, Advanced Settings, Search improvements, more New 23H2 features, Windows 10 features in Release Preview Surface Laptop Studio RIP Calendar companion app for Windows 11/M365 Microsoft may finally put the Teams antitrust issue in the EU behind Xbox Fortnite returns to the Apple App Store Apple blocked it first, Epic complained to judge And Microsoft files a legal motion against Apple and for Epic Games Qualcomm job listing confirms Xbox plans to some degree What happens when you combine Qualcomm NPU with Nvidia GPU? Xbox May Update arrives and it's a big one Retro Classic Games for Xbox Game Pass Game Bar updates, Edge Game Assist, GeForce now etc. on PC Custom Xbox gift cards More streaming of your own games Hellblade II is coming from Xbox to PS5 Many more games coming to Xbox Game Pass across platforms Tips and Picks App pick of the week: You can try Microsoft's command line editor now Game pick of the week: Doom: The Dark Ages RunAs Radio this week: PowerShell 7.5 and DSC 3.0.0 with Jason Helmick Brown liquor pick of the week: Tamnavulin Sherry Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com
Agentic AI is the theme of the show this year, and this time its multi-agent with orchestration! But first, we need to discuss the protestors. Paul and Richard have stories. So many stories! Build 2025 New Microsoft 365 Copilot features are rolling out now because it's a day that ends in y Tuning is the unexpected Build Bingo center square term - rolling out to agents GitHub Copilot is open source in VS Code, more Win32 app support improvements, no more fees in Microsoft Store A shift in making Windows 11 the best place for developers - some things said, some left unsaid Edge gets new AI features too of course New native app capabilities in Windows App SDK, React Native And, pre-Build, 50 million Visual Studio users Copilot for consumers does image generation now. Fun tip: You can Minecraft-ize photos OpenAI has a coding agent too, obviously And OpenAI is buying Jony Ive! Windows Administrator Protection is coming soon - And not just for businesses. This feels very much like the firewall in XP SP2, it's going to be disruptive New 24H2 features in Release Preview: New text actions in Click to Do, a lot more New 24H2 features in Dev and Beta: AI actions in File Explorer, Advanced Settings, Search improvements, more New 23H2 features, Windows 10 features in Release Preview Surface Laptop Studio RIP Calendar companion app for Windows 11/M365 Microsoft may finally put the Teams antitrust issue in the EU behind Xbox Fortnite returns to the Apple App Store Apple blocked it first, Epic complained to judge And Microsoft files a legal motion against Apple and for Epic Games Qualcomm job listing confirms Xbox plans to some degree What happens when you combine Qualcomm NPU with Nvidia GPU? Xbox May Update arrives and it's a big one Retro Classic Games for Xbox Game Pass Game Bar updates, Edge Game Assist, GeForce now etc. on PC Custom Xbox gift cards More streaming of your own games Hellblade II is coming from Xbox to PS5 Many more games coming to Xbox Game Pass across platforms Tips and Picks App pick of the week: You can try Microsoft's command line editor now Game pick of the week: Doom: The Dark Ages RunAs Radio this week: PowerShell 7.5 and DSC 3.0.0 with Jason Helmick Brown liquor pick of the week: Tamnavulin Sherry Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com
Agentic AI is the theme of the show this year, and this time its multi-agent with orchestration! But first, we need to discuss the protestors. Paul and Richard have stories. So many stories! Build 2025 New Microsoft 365 Copilot features are rolling out now because it's a day that ends in y Tuning is the unexpected Build Bingo center square term - rolling out to agents GitHub Copilot is open source in VS Code, more Win32 app support improvements, no more fees in Microsoft Store A shift in making Windows 11 the best place for developers - some things said, some left unsaid Edge gets new AI features too of course New native app capabilities in Windows App SDK, React Native And, pre-Build, 50 million Visual Studio users Copilot for consumers does image generation now. Fun tip: You can Minecraft-ize photos OpenAI has a coding agent too, obviously And OpenAI is buying Jony Ive! Windows Administrator Protection is coming soon - And not just for businesses. This feels very much like the firewall in XP SP2, it's going to be disruptive New 24H2 features in Release Preview: New text actions in Click to Do, a lot more New 24H2 features in Dev and Beta: AI actions in File Explorer, Advanced Settings, Search improvements, more New 23H2 features, Windows 10 features in Release Preview Surface Laptop Studio RIP Calendar companion app for Windows 11/M365 Microsoft may finally put the Teams antitrust issue in the EU behind Xbox Fortnite returns to the Apple App Store Apple blocked it first, Epic complained to judge And Microsoft files a legal motion against Apple and for Epic Games Qualcomm job listing confirms Xbox plans to some degree What happens when you combine Qualcomm NPU with Nvidia GPU? Xbox May Update arrives and it's a big one Retro Classic Games for Xbox Game Pass Game Bar updates, Edge Game Assist, GeForce now etc. on PC Custom Xbox gift cards More streaming of your own games Hellblade II is coming from Xbox to PS5 Many more games coming to Xbox Game Pass across platforms Tips and Picks App pick of the week: You can try Microsoft's command line editor now Game pick of the week: Doom: The Dark Ages RunAs Radio this week: PowerShell 7.5 and DSC 3.0.0 with Jason Helmick Brown liquor pick of the week: Tamnavulin Sherry Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com
Assassin's Creed Shadows launches successfully for Ubisoft, becoming the second biggest launch for the series ever, behind only Valhalla. Game Informer is returning with the full crew under new ownership with all its old content coming back as well. New Xbox consoles will apparently be using Win32. Lastly, CD Projekt Red confirms Witcher 4 won't be out until 2027. #assassinscreed #ubisoft #gameinformer #xbox #cdprojektred #witcher4 #podcast #aycg #allyoucangeek
EP 233.5 Key Cryptocurrency Threats & ScamsIn 2025, crypto remains a hotspot for scams like Ponzi schemes, fake ICOs, pump-and-dumps, phishing attacks, and malicious wallets or exchanges designed to steal funds. Social media is often used for deceptive giveaways, impersonations, and investment scams. Other risks include fake mining operations, rug pulls, fraudulent apps, SIM swapping, and impostor tech support.AI Skills Demand in the Tech Job MarketAI expertise is increasingly sought after, with about one in four U.S. tech job postings requiring AI-related skills. This trend cuts across industries like healthcare, finance, and professional services. Although overall tech job postings have dipped, AI job listings have surged since ChatGPT's launch, offering premium pay and higher job security.What Is Free95?Free95 is an open-source operating system on GitHub aiming for Windows compatibility without the bloat. It currently supports basic Win32 programs, with future plans for DirectX and gaming. Its creators prioritize security, simplicity, and independence from major corporate control, positioning it as a leaner alternative to systems like ReactOS.DOJ Push for Google to Sell ChromeThe U.S. Department of Justice still wants Google to divest Chrome, citing an illegal monopoly in search. The DOJ argues that selling Chrome would create room for genuine competition. While it continues to push for restrictions on Google's paid search placement deals, it has dropped calls for Google to shed AI start-up investments.Edge Computing on the ISSAxiom Space and Red Hat's AxDCU-1 data center on the ISS tests cloud, AI, and cybersecurity in orbit. Red Hat's Device Edge software enables real-time data processing in space, crucial due to limited satellite links with Earth. This development could boost AI training, imaging, cybersecurity, and overall autonomy in space operations.Undocumented ‘Backdoor' in a Chinese Bluetooth ChipResearchers found hidden commands in the ESP32 microcontroller, used in over a billion devices. Attackers could exploit these commands to impersonate devices, steal data, or infiltrate networks. The chip's widespread adoption in smartphones, locks, and medical equipment heightens the security risk, as attackers might gain long-term control.Security & Privacy Concerns of ‘Agentic AI'Signal President Meredith Whittaker warns that agentic AI requires broad system access, potentially gathering financial, scheduling, and messaging data with near-root permissions. This could break down privacy barriers between apps and introduce significant security risks, especially if sensitive data is processed in the cloud.Expanded Social Media Screening for Non-CitizensThe U.S. is considering extending social media checks beyond new arrivals to all non-citizens applying for benefits like permanent residency or citizenship. This raises privacy concerns, as individuals who entered before such screenings were routine may now face additional digital scrutiny when adjusting their immigration status.
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
Microsoft's Build event showcased several key announcements, including the introduction of AI-powered CoPilot Plus PCs, enhanced security measures, and new AI tools. The CoPilot Plus PCs featured AI-powered ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite and Plus processors, offering advanced capabilities for automation, collaboration, and productivity. These devices were designed to streamline IT tasks, boost collaboration, and enhance overall productivity for users.In terms of security, Microsoft unveiled a major push for Windows 11, introducing new features and updates to enhance user protections. This included the adoption of the Pluton security processor in the CoPilot Plus PCs, local security authority protection on all PCs, Windows Hello enhanced sign-in security, smart app control, and Windows Hello and Win32 app isolation updates. These security enhancements aimed to address cybersecurity challenges and provide users with a more secure computing environment.Additionally, Microsoft introduced new AI tools and capabilities, such as the Recall feature for logging and retrieving user actions, real-time video translation on Microsoft Edge, and the release of Azure AI Studio with various AI models optimized for different tasks. These tools aimed to improve user experience, accessibility, and efficiency by leveraging AI technology to enhance various aspects of computing and communication.Overall, Microsoft's focus on AI-powered CoPilot Plus PCs, enhanced security measures, and new AI tools at the Build event highlighted the company's commitment to innovation and improving the user experience in the digital landscape. Four things to know today from Microsoft Build 00:00 Surface Event Highlights: AI-Powered Copilot Plus PCs, Enhanced Security, and New AI Tools06:04 Microsoft Expands Copilot AI to Automate IT Tasks, Boost Collaboration, and Enhance Productivity09:15 End of an Era: Microsoft Deprecates NTLM and VBScript, Shifts to Modern Security Measures11:15 Windows 11 Recall Feature Sparks Privacy and Data Security Concerns Supported by: https://www.coreview.com/msp All our Sponsors: https://businessof.tech/sponsors/ Looking for a link from the stories? The entire script of the show, with links to articles, are posted in each story on https://www.businessof.tech/ Do you want the show on your podcast app or the written versions of the stories? Subscribe to the Business of Tech: https://www.businessof.tech/subscribe/ Support the show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/mspradio/ Want our stuff? Cool Merch? Wear “Why Do We Care?” - Visit https://mspradio.myspreadshop.com Follow us on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079/YouTube: https://youtube.com/mspradio/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessoftechBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/businessoftech.bsky.social
Let's not forget that it also sent Natalie's kids to collegeWe (your EPM Conversations hosts) owe a lot – a financial kind of debt as well as a professional one – to Shankar and Hyperion/Oracle on premises /PBCS/EPBCS/EPM Cloud Planning. Seriously, I first set eyes on what was then Hyperion Planning Desktop (which alas I cannot find a screenshot of but know it's out there somewhere), I thought, “Cameron, you idiot, this is the future” and so it has been through (gulp) decades of work. Never, our Performance Management audience, look askance at a sure thing. Part of that product's success has been Shankar Viswanathan's careful stewardship of a product that grew from an application wrapper around Essbase (and a horrific and quickly abandoned Win32 app that was supposed to be the workspace of users of All Things Hyperion and yes, Shankar, I really do hope you didn't create that) to a complete EPM cloud platform. At its core, planning and budgeting hasn't at it's core really changed all that much (ZBB came and went, driver based planning is still here, and yes AI/ML now has its turn in the Wheel of Planning Fortune) but what we still call Planning certainly has. Of course Shankar didn't write each line of code nor did he define and design every bit and bob of UI, but it's easy to see his steady hand in Planning's evolution through the lens of customer success.IntrospectionEach and every one of EPM Conversations' guests is a joy for they are enthusiastic, open, thoughtful, visionary, and just about everything one might hope for in a colleague and a friend. Shankar is all of things and yet he is different. By that I mean Shankar is quiet in the physical sense. We struggled with Shankar's voice until we (we = Celvin) realized that is simply how Shankar talks; he is well worth listening to and the volume button on your phone isn't that hard to use. Sometimes how we think is reflected in how we speak: introspection, consideration, reasoning, and sensitivity don't need to be shouted to be understood. Shankar is well worth a listen.Maybe the most interesting partAll of what I wrote about Shankar's professional interests hold true for his personal ones. There's a wide range in all three areas of historical men, literature, and movies: E.O. Wilson, , Gandhi, and Steve Jobs for the historical figures, in reading, Ayn Rand as a teenager, to E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, John Kenneth Galbraith's The Anatomy of Power, and Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, and finally a varied palette of movies in Shawshank Redemption, The Bang Bang Club, and Heat.This is, in case you've not been able to tell, one of my favorite episodes.Join us, won't you?
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast
Exploit Against Unnamed BYTEVALUE Router Vulnerablity Included in Mirai https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Exploit%20against%20Unnamed%20%22Bytevalue%22%20router%20vulnerability%20included%20in%20Mirai%20Bot/30642 Senior Executives Targeted in Ongoing Azure Account Takeover https://www.darkreading.com/cloud-security/senior-executives-targeted-ongoing-azure-account-takeover CISA Parners With OpenSSF To Secure Software Repositories https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2024/02/08/cisa-partners-openssf-securing-software-repositories-working-group-release-principles-package PostgreSQL Vulnerability https://www.postgresql.org/support/security/CVE-2024-0985/ Microsoft Defender Bypass via Comma https://hyp3rlinx.altervista.org/advisories/MICROSOFT_WINDOWS_DEFENDER_TROJAN.WIN32.POWESSERE.G_MITIGATION_BYPASS_PART2.txt
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast
Exploit Against Unnamed BYTEVALUE Router Vulnerablity Included in Mirai https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Exploit%20against%20Unnamed%20%22Bytevalue%22%20router%20vulnerability%20included%20in%20Mirai%20Bot/30642 Senior Executives Targeted in Ongoing Azure Account Takeover https://www.darkreading.com/cloud-security/senior-executives-targeted-ongoing-azure-account-takeover CISA Parners With OpenSSF To Secure Software Repositories https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2024/02/08/cisa-partners-openssf-securing-software-repositories-working-group-release-principles-package PostgreSQL Vulnerability https://www.postgresql.org/support/security/CVE-2024-0985/ Microsoft Defender Bypass via Comma https://hyp3rlinx.altervista.org/advisories/MICROSOFT_WINDOWS_DEFENDER_TROJAN.WIN32.POWESSERE.G_MITIGATION_BYPASS_PART2.txt
Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the various intricacies and pitfalls of Microsoft licensing. Wes and Corey discuss what it's like to work closely with a company like Microsoft in your day-to-day career, while also looking out for the best interest of your mutual customers. Wes explains his history of working both at and with Microsoft, and the changes he's seen to their business models and the impact that has on their customers. About WesWes Miller analyzes and writes about Microsoft security, identity, and systems management technologies, as well as Microsoft product licensing.Before joining Directions on Microsoft in 2010, Wes was a product manager and development manager for several Austin, TX, start-ups, including Winternals Software, acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Prior to that, Wes spent seven years at Microsoft working as a program manager in the Windows Core Operating System and MSN divisions.Wes received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.Links Referenced: Directions on Microsoft Website: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/getwired LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmiller/ Directions on Microsoft Training: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/training TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. So, I write a newsletter called Last Week in AWS, which has always felt like it's flying a little bit too close to the sun just because having AWSes name in the title of what I do feels like it's playing with copyright fire. It's nice periodically to talk to someone—again—who is in a similar boat. Wes Miller is a Research VP at Directions on Microsoft. To be clear, Directions on Microsoft is an analyst firm that talks primarily about Microsoft licensing and is not, in fact, part of Microsoft itself. Have I disclaimed that appropriately, Wes?Wes: You have. You have. And in fact, the company, when it was first born, was actually called Microsoft Directions. And they had a reasonably good relationship with Microsoft at the time and Microsoft cordially asked them, “Hey, could you at least reverse that so it corrects it in terms of trademark.” So yes, we're blessed in that regard. Something you probably would never get away with now, but that was 30 years ago.Corey: [laugh]. And now it sounds like it might as well be a product. So, I have to ask, just because the way I think of you is, you are the folks to talk to, full stop, when you have a question about anything that touches on Microsoft licensing. Is that an accurate depiction of what it is you folks do or is that just my particular corner of the world and strange equivalence that gets me there?Wes: That is our parts of the Venn diagram intersecting because that's what I spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about because I teach that with our company founder, Rob Horwitz. But we also spend an inordinate amount of time taking what Microsoft is talking about shipping, maybe servicing, and help customers understand really, as we say, the ‘So, what?' What does this mean to me as a customer? Should I be using this? Should I be waiting? Should I upgrade? Should I stay? Those sorts of things.So, there's a whole roadmapping side. And then we have a [laugh]—because licensing doesn't end with a license, we have a whole side of negotiation that we spend a lot of time, we have a dedicated team that focuses on helping enterprise agreement customers get the most successful deal for their organization, basically, every three years.Corey: We do exactly that with AWS ourselves. I have to ask before we dive into this. In the early days, I felt like I had a much better relationship with Microsoft. Scott Guthrie, the head of Azure, was on this show. A number of very highly placed Microsoft folks were here. And over the years, they more or less have stopped talking to me.And that leaves me in a position where all I can see is their actions and their broad public statements without getting any nuance or context around any of it. And I don't know if this is just a commentary on human nature or me in particular, but I tend to always assume the worst when things like that happen. So, my approach to Microsoft has grown increasingly cynical over the years as a result. That said, I don't actually have an axe to grind with them from any other perspective than as a customer, and occasionally that feels like ‘victim' for a variety of different things. What's your take on Microsoft as far as, I guess, your feelings toward the company?Wes: So, a lot of people—in fact, it used to be more so, but not as much anymore, people would assume I hate Microsoft or I want to demonize Microsoft. But the irony actually is, you know, I want people to remember I worked there for seven-and-a-half years, I shipped—I was on the team that shipped Windows XP, Server 2003, and a bunch of other products that people don't remember. And I still care about the company, but the company and I are obviously in different trajectories now. And also, my company's customers today are also Microsoft's customers today, and we actually have—our customers—our mutual customers—best interest in mind with basically everything we do. Are we helping them be informed? Are we helping them color within the financial lines?And sometimes, we may say things that help a customer that aren't helping the bottom line or helping a marketing direction and I don't think that resonates well within Microsoft. So sure, sometimes we even hear from them, “Hey, it'd be great if you guys might want to, you know, say something nice once in a while.” But it's not necessarily our job to say nice things. I do it once in a while. I want to note that I said something nice about AAD last week, but the reality is that we are there to help our mutual customers.And what I found is, I have found the same thing to be true that you're finding true that, unfortunately, outbound communications from them, in particular from the whole company, have slowed. I think everybody's busier, they've got a very specific set of directions they're going on things, and as a result, we hear very little. And even getting, trying to get clarification on things sometimes, “Did we read that right?” It takes a while, and it has to go through several different rungs of people to get the answer.Corey: I have somewhat similar relationships over the years with AWS, where they—in many cases, a lot of their executives prefer not to talk to me at all. Which again, is fair. I'm not—I don't require any of them to do it. But there's something in the Amazonian ethos that requires them to talk to customers, especially when customers are having a rough time. And I'm, for better or worse, the voice of the customer.I am usually not the dumbest person in the universe when it comes to trying to understand a service or make it do something that, to me, it seems that it should be able to do. And when I actually start having in-depth conversations, people are surprised. “Wow, you were super pleasant and fun to work with. We thought you were just going to be a jerk.” It's, yeah, it turns out I don't go through every meeting like it's Twitter. What a concept.Wes: Yeah, a lot of people, I've had this happen for myself when you meet people in person, when they meet your Twitter persona, especially for someone who I think you and I both come across as rather boisterous, gregarious, and sometimes people take that as our personas. And I remember meeting a friend in the UK for the first time years ago, he's like, “You're very different in person.” I'm like, “I know. I know.”Corey: I usually get the, “You're just like Twitter.” In many respects, I am. Because people don't always see what I'm putting down. I make it a point to be humorous and I have a quick quip for a lot of things, but it's never trying to make the person I'm engaging with feel worse for it. And that's how I work.People are somewhat surprised when I'm working in client meetings that I'm fun and I have a similar sense of humor and personality, as you would see on Twitter. Believe it or not, I haven't spent all this time just doing a bit. But they're also surprised that it tends to drive toward an actual business discussion.Wes: Sure.Corey: Everything fun is contextual.Wes: Absolutely. That's the same sort of thing we get on our side when we talk to customers. I think I've learned so much from talking with them that sometimes I do get to share those things with Microsoft when they're willing to listen.Corey: So, what I'm curious about in the context of Microsoft licensing is something that, once again, it has intruded upon my notice lately with a bunch of security disclosures in which Microsoft has said remarkably little, and that is one of the most concerning things out there. They casually tried to slide past, “Oh, yeah, we had a signing key compromised.” Which is one of those, “Oh, [laugh] and by the way, the building's on fire. But let's talk about our rent [unintelligible 00:07:44] for the next year.” Like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. What?”That was one of those horrifying moments. And it came out—I believe I learned about this from you—that you needed something called E3 licensing—sorry, E5 licensing—in order to look at those audit logs, where versus E3, which sounded like the more common case. And after a couple of days of, “Explain this,” Microsoft very quickly wound up changing that. What do all these things mean? This is sort of a foreign concept to me because AWS, for better or worse, does not play games with licensing in the same way that Microsoft does.Wes: Sure. Microsoft has, over the years, you know, they are a master of building suites. This is what they've done for over 30 years. And they will build a suite, they'll sell you that suite, they'll come back around in three to six years and sell you a new version of that suite. Sometimes they'll sell you a higher price version of that suite, et cetera.And so, you'll see products evolve. And did a great podcast with my colleagues Rob and Mary Jo Foley the other day where we talked about what we've seen over the last, now for me, 11 years of teaching boot camps. And I think in particular, one of the changes we have seen is exactly what you're being exposed to on the outside and what a lot of people have been complaining about, which is, products don't sit still anymore. So, Microsoft actually makes very few products today. Almost everything they sell you is a service. There are a handful of products still.These services all evolve, and about every triennium or two—so every three to six years—you'll see a price increase and something will be added, and a price increase and something will be added. And so, all this began with the BPOS, the first version of Office 365, which became Office 365 E3, then Microsoft 365 E3 then Microsoft 365 E5. And for people who aren't in the know, basically, that means they went from Office as a subscription to Office, Windows, and a bunch of management tools as a subscription, to E5, basically, it took all of the security and compliance tools that many of us feel should have been baked into the fundamentals, into E3, the thing that everybody buys, what I refer to still today as the hero SKU and those security and compliance fundamentals should have been baked in. But no, in fact, a lot of customers when this AAD issue came out—and I think a lot discovered this ad hoc for the same reason, “Hey, we've been owned, how far back in the logs can we look?” And the answer is, you know, no farther than 90 days, a lot of customers hit that reality of, what do you mean we didn't pay for the premium thing that has all the logging that we need?Corey: Since you sat on this for eight months before mentioning it to us? Yeah.Wes: Exactly, exactly. And it's buried. And it's one of those things that, like, when we teach the licensing boot camp, I specifically call out because of my security background, it's an area of focus and interest to me. I call out to customers that a lot of the stuff we've been showing you has not questionable valuable, but kind of squishy value.This piece right here, this is both about security and compliance. Don't cheap out. If you're going to buy anything, buy this because you're going to need it later. And I've been saying that for, like, three years, but obviously only the people who were in the boot camp would hear that and then shake their head;, “Why does it have to be this difficult?” But yeah. Everything becomes a revenue opportunity if it's a potential to upsell somebody for the next tier.Corey: The couple of times I've been asked to look at Azure bills, I backed away slowly as soon as I do, just because so much of it is tied to licensing and areas that are very much outside of my wheelhouse. Because I view, in the cloud context, that cost and architecture tend to be one of the same. But when you bolt an entire layer of seat licensing and what this means for your desktop operating systems on as well as the actual cloud architecture, it gets incredibly confusing incredibly quickly. And architectural advice of the type that I give to AWS customers and would give to GCP customers is absolutely going to be harmful in many respects.I just don't know what I don't know and it's not an area that interests me, as far as learning that competency, just to jump through hoops. I mean, I frankly used to be a small business Windows admin, with the products that you talked about, back when XP and Server 2003 and a few others, I sort of ruled the roost. But I got so tired of surprise audit-style work. It felt like busy work that wasn't advancing what I was trying to get done in any meaningful way that, in a fit of rage, one day, I wound up exploring the whole Unix side of the world in 2006 and never went back.Wes: [whispering] That's how it happened.Corey: Yep.Wes: It's unfortunate that it's become so commonplace, but when Vista kind of stalled out and they started exploring other revenue opportunities, you have Vista Ultimate Enterprise, all the crazy SKUing that Vista had, I think it sort of created a mindset within the company that this is what we have to do in order to keep growing revenue up and to the right, and you know, shareholder value be the most important thing, that's what you've got to do. I agree entirely, though, the biggest challenge I could see for someone coming into our space is the fact that yes, you've got to understand Azure, Azure architecture, development architecture, and then as soon as you feel like you understand that, somebody comes along and says, “Well, yeah, but because we have an EA, we have to do it this way or we only get a discount on this thing.” And yeah, it just makes things more cumbersome. And I think that's why we still see a lot of customers who come to our boot camps who are still very dedicated AWS customers because that's where they were, and it's easier in many regards, and they just want to go with what they know.Corey: And I think that that's probably fair. I think that there is an evolution that grows here that I think catches folks by surprise. I'm fortunate in that my Microsoft involvement, if we set things like GitHub aside because I like them quite a bit and my Azure stuff as well—which is still small enough to fit in the free tier, given that I use it for one very specific, very useful thing—but the rest of it is simply seat licenses for Office 365 for my team. And I just tend to buy the retail-priced one on the internet that's licensed for business use, and I don't really think about it again. Because I don't need, as you say, in-depth audit logs for Microsoft Word. I really don't. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that that's true. But something that immediately crops up when you say this is when you talk about E3 versus E5 licensing, is that organization-wide or is that on a per-seat basis?Wes: It's even worse than that. It usually comes down to per-user licensing. The whole world used to be per device licensing in Microsoft and it switched to per user when they subscript-ified everything—that's a word I made up a while ago—so when they subscript-ified everything, they changed it over to per user. And for better or worse, today, you could—there's actually four different tiers of Microsoft 365. You could go for any one of those four for any distinct user.You could have one of them on F1, F3, E3, and E5. Now, if you do that, you create some other license non-compliance issues that we spend way too much time having to talk about during the boot camp, but the point is, you can buy to fit; it's not one-size-fits-all necessarily. But you run into, very rapidly, if you deploy E5 for some number of users because the products that are there, the security services and compliance services ironically don't do license compliance in most cases, customers can actually wind up creating new license compliance problems, thereby basically having to buy E5 for everybody. So, it's a bit of a trapdoor that customers are not often aware of when they initially step into dabbling in Microsoft 365 E5.Corey: When you take a look at this across the entire board, what is your guidance to customers? Because honestly, this feels like it is a full-time job. At scale, a full-time job for a department simply keeping up with all of the various Microsoft licensing requirements, and changes because, as you say, it's not static. And it just feels like an overwhelming amount of work that to my understanding, virtually no other vendor makes customers jump through. Sure there's Oracle, but that tends to be either in a database story or a per developer, or on rare occasions, per user when you build internal Java apps. But it's not as pervasive and as tricky as this unless I'm missing something.Wes: No, you're not. You're not missing anything. It's very true. It's interesting to think back over the years at the boot camp. There's names I've heard that I don't hear anymore in terms of companies that were as bad. But the reality is, you hear the names of the same software companies but, exactly to your point, they're all departmental. The people who make [Roxio 00:16:26] still, they're very departmentalized. Oracle, IBM, yeah, we hear about them still, but they are all absolutely very departmentalized.And Microsoft, I think one of the reason why we do get so many—for better or worse, for them—return visitors to our licensing boot camps that we do every two months, is for that exact reason, that some people have found they like outsourcing that part of at least trying to keep up with what's going on, what's the record? And so, they'll come back every two, three, or four years and get an update. And we try to keep them updated on, you know, how do I color within the lines? Should it be like this? No. But it is this way.In fact, it's funny, I think back, it was probably one of the first few boot camps I did with Rob. We were in New York and we had a very large customer who had gotten a personalized message from Microsoft talking about how they were going to simplify licensing. And we went to a cocktail hour afterwards, as we often do on the first day of the boot camp, to help people, you know, with the pain after a boot camp, and this gentleman asks us well, “So, what are you guys going to do once Microsoft simplifies licensing?” And Rob and I just, like, looked at each other, smiled, looked back at the guy, and laughed. We're like, “We will cross that bridge when we get to it.”Corey: Yeah, people ask us that question about AWS billing. What if they fix the billing system? Like, we should be so lucky to live that long.Wes: I have so many things I'd rather be doing. Yes.Corey: Mm-hm. Exactly. It's one of those areas where, “Well, what happens in a post-scarcity world?” Like, “I couldn't tell you. I can't even imagine what such a thing would look like.”Wes: Exactly [laugh]. Exactly.Corey: So, the last time we spoke way back, I think in 2019, Microsoft had wound up doing some unfortunate and fairly underhanded-appearing licensed changes, where it was more expensive to run a bunch of Microsoft things, such as server software, most notably SQL Server, on clouds that were not Azure. And then, because you know, you look up the word chutzpah in the dictionary, you'll find the Microsoft logo there in response, as part of the definition, they ran an advertising campaign saying that, oh, running many cloud workloads on Azure was five times cheaper than on AWS. As if they cracked some magic secret to cloud economics. Rather than no, we just decided to play dumb games that win worse prizes with cloud licensing. How did that play out?Wes: Well, so they made those changes in October of 2019, and I kind of wish they'd become a bigger deal. And I wish they'd become a bigger deal earlier so that things could have been, maybe, reversed when it was easier. But you're absolutely right. So, it—for those who don't know, it basically made licensing changes on only AWS, GCP, and Alibaba—who I never had anybody ask me about—but those three. It also added them for Azure, but then they created loopholes for themselves to make Azure actually get beneficial licensing, even better than you could get with any other cloud provider [sigh].So, the net takeaway is that every Microsoft product that matters—so traditionally, SQL Server, Windows Server, Windows client, and Office—is not impossible to use on AWS, but it is markedly more expensive. That's the first note. To your point, then they did do that marketing campaign that I know you and I probably had exchanges about at the time, and it drove me nuts as well because what they will classically do is when they tout the savings of running something on Azure, not only are they flouting the rules that they created, you know, they're basically gloating, “Look, we got a toy that they didn't,” but they're also often removing costs from the equation. So, for example, in order for you to get those discounts on Azure, you have to maintain what's called Software Assurance. You basically have to have a subscription by another name.If you don't have Software Assurance, those opportunities are not available to you. Fine. That's not my point. My point is this, that Software Assurance is basically 75% of the cost of the next version. So, it's not free, but if you look at those 5x claims that they made during that time frame, they actually were hand-waving and waving away the [assay 00:20:45] costs.So, if you actually sat down and did the math, the 5x number was a lie. It was not just very nice, but it was wrong, literally mathematically wrong. And from a—as my colleague likes to say, a ‘colors person,' not a numbers person like me, from a colors person like me, that's pretty bad. If I can see the error and your math, that's bad math.Corey: It just feels like it's one of those taxes on not knowing some of the intricacies of what the heck is going on in the world of Microsoft licensing. And I think every sufficiently complex vendor with, shall we say, non-trivial pricing dimensions, could be accused of the same thing. But it always felt particularly worrisome from the Microsoft perspective. Back in the days of BSA audits—which I don't know at all if they're still a thing or not because I got out of that space—every executive that I ever spoke to, in any company lived in fear of them, not because they were pirating software or had decided, “You know what? We have a corporate policy of now acting unethically when it comes to licensing software,” but because of the belief that no matter what they came up with or whatever good faith effort they made to remain compliant, of course, something was not going to work the way they thought it would and they were going to be smacked with a fine. Is that still the case?Wes: Absolutely. In fact, I think it's worse now than it ever was before. I will often say to customers that you are wildly uncompliant while also being wildly overcompliant because per your point about how broad and deep Microsoft is, there's so many products. Like, every company today, every company that has Project and Visio still in place today, that still pays for it, you are over-licensed. You have more of it than you need.That's just one example, but on the other side, SQL Server, odds are, every organization is subtly under-licensed because they think the rule is to do this, but the rules are actually more restrictive than they expect. So, and that's why Microsoft is, you know, the first place they look, the first rug they look under when they do walk in and do an audit, which they're entitled to do as a part of an organization's enterprise agreement. So BSA, I think they do still have those audits, but Microsoft now they have their own business that does that, or at least they have partners that do that for them. And places like SQL Server are the first places that they look.Why? Because it's big, found money, and because it's extremely hard to get right. So, there's a reason why, when we focus on our boot camps, we'll often tell people, you know, “Our goal is to save you enough money to pay for the class,” because there's so much money to be found in little mistakes that if you do a big thing wrong with Microsoft software, you could be wildly out of compliance and not know about it until Microsoft-or more likely, a Microsoft partner—points it out to you.Corey: It feels like it's an inevitability. And, on some level, it's the cost of doing business. But man, does that leave a sour taste in someone's mouth.Wes: Mm-hm. It absolutely does. It absolutely does. And I think—you know, I remember, gosh, was it Munich that was talking about, “We're going to switch to Linux,” and then they came back into the fold. I think the reality is, it absolutely does put a bad taste.And it doesn't leave customers with good hope for where they go from here. I mean, okay, fine. So, we got burned on that thing in the Microsoft 365 stack. Now, they want us to pay 30 bucks for Copilot for Microsoft 365. What? And we'd have no idea what they're even buying, so it's hard to give any kind of guidance. So, it's a weird time.Corey: I'm curious to see what the ultimate effect of this is going to be. Well, one thing I've noticed over the past decade and change—and I think everyone has as well—increasingly, the local operating system on people's laptops or desktops—or even phones, to some extent—is not what it once was. Increasingly, most of the tools that I find myself using on a daily basis are just web use or in a browser entirely. And that feels like it's an ongoing problem for a company like Microsoft when you look at it through the lens of OS. Which at some level, makes perfect sense why they would switch towards everything as a service. But it's depressing, too.Wes: Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons why, particularly after Steve left, they changed focus a lot and really begin focusing on Microsoft 365 as the platform, for better or worse. How do we make Microsoft 365 sticky? How do we make Office 365 sticky? And the thing about, like, the Microsoft 365 E5 security stuff we were talking about, it often doesn't matter what the user is accessing it through. The user could be accessing it only through a phone, they could be a frontline worker, they could be standing at a sales kiosk all day, they could be using Office every single day, or they could be an exec who's only got an iPad.The point is, you're in for a penny, in for a pound at that point that you'll still have to license the user. And so, Microsoft will recoup it either way. In some ways, they've learned to stop caring as much about, is everyone actively using our technology? And on the other side, with things like Teams, and as we're seeing very, very slowly, with the long-delayed Outlook here, you know, they're also trying to switch things to have that less Win32 surface that we're used to and focus more on the web as well. But I think that's a pretty fundamental change for Microsoft to try and take broadly and I don't anticipate, for example, Office will ever be fully replaced with a fat client like it has on Windows and the Mac OS.Corey: Yeah, part of me wonders what the future that all looks like because increasingly, it feels more than a little silly that I'm spending, like, all of this ever-increasing dollar figure on a per-seat basis every year for all of Microsoft 365. Because we don't use their email system. We don't use so much of what they offer. We need basically Word and Excel and once in a blue moon PowerPoint, I guess. But that's it. Our fundamental needs have not materially shifted since Office 2003. Other than the fact that everything uses different extensions now and there's, of course, the security story on top of it, too. We just need some fairly basic stuff.Wes: And I think that's the case for a lot of—I mean, we're the exact same way at Directions. And I think that's the case for a lot of small and even into mid-size companies. Microsoft has traditionally with the, like, Small Business Premium, they have an offering that they intentionally only scale up to 300 people. And sometimes they'll actually give you perks there that they wouldn't give away in the enterprise suite, so you arguably get more—if they let you have it, you get more than you would if you've got E5. On the other side, they've also begun, for enterprises, honing in on opportunities that they may have historically ignored.And when I was at Microsoft, you'd have an idea, like, “Hey, Bob. I got an idea. Can we try to make a new product?” He's like, “Okay, is it a billion-dollar business?” And you get waved away if it wasn't all a billion-dollar business. And I don't think that's the case anymore today, particularly if you can make the case, this thing I'm building makes Microsoft 365 sticky or makes Azure sticky. So, things like the Power Platform, which is subtly and slowly replacing Access at a minimum, but a lot of other tools.Power BI, which has come from behind. You know, people would look at it and say, “Oh, it's no Excel.” And now it, I think, far exceeds Excel for that type of user. And Copilot, as I talked about, you know, Microsoft is definitely trying to throw things in that are beyond Office, beyond what we think of as Microsoft. And why are they doing that? Because they're trying to make their platform more sticky. They're trying to put enough value in there so you need to subscribe for every user in your organization.And even things, as we call them, ‘Batteries not Included' like Copilot, that you're going to buy E5 and that you're still going to have to buy something else beyond that for some number of users. So, you may even have a picture in your head of how much it's going to cost, but it's like buying a BMW 5 Series; it's going to cost more than you think.Corey: I wish that there were a better path forward on this. Honestly, I wish that they would stop playing these games, let you know Azure compete head-to-head against AWS and let it win on some of its merits. To be clear, there are several that are great. You know, if they could get out of their own way from a security perspective, lately. But there seems to be a little appetite for that. Increasingly, it seems like even customers asking them questions tends to hit a wall until, you know, a sitting US senator screams at them on Twitter.Wes: Mm-hm. No, and then if you look carefully at—Microsoft is very good at pulling just enough off of the sweater without destroying the sweater. And for example, what they did, they gave enough away to potentially appease, but they didn't actually resolve the problem. They didn't say, “All right, everybody gets logging if they have Microsoft 365 E3,” or, “Everybody gets logging, period.” They basically said, “Here's the kind of logging you can get, and we're going to probably tweak it a little bit more in the future,” and they will not tweak it more in the future. If anything, they'll tighten it back up.This is very similar to the 2019 problem we talked about earlier, too, that you know, they began with one set of rules and they've had to revisit it a couple of times. And most of the time, when they've had an outcry, primarily from the EU, from smaller cloud providers in the EU who felt—justifiably—that Microsoft was being not—uncompetitive with Azure vis-à-vis every other cloud provider. Well, Microsoft turned around and last year changed the rules such that most of these smaller cloud providers get rules that are, ehh, similar to what Azure can provide. There are still exclusives that only Azure gets. So, what you have now is basically, if you're a customer, the best set and cheapest set is with Azure, then these smaller cloud providers give you a secondary—it's close to Azure, but still not quite as good. Then AWS, GCP, and Alibaba.So, the rules have been switched such that you have to know who you're going to in order to even know what the rules are and to know whether you can comply with those rules with the thing you want to build. And I find it most peculiar that, I believe it was the first of last month that Microsoft made the change that said, “You'll be able to run Office on AWS,” which was Amazon WorkSpaces, in particular. Which I think is huge and it's very important and I'm glad they made this change, but it's weird because it creates almost a fifth category because you can't run it anywhere else in Amazon, like if you were spinning something up in VMware on Amazon, but within Amazon WorkSpaces, you can. This is great because customers now can run Office for a fee. And it's a fee that's more than you'd pay if you were running the same thing on Microsoft's cloud.But it also was weird because let's say Google had something competitive in VDI, but they don't really, but if they had something competitive in VDI, now this is the benefit that Amazon has that's not quite as good as what Microsoft has, that Google doesn't get it at all. So, it's just weird. And it's all an attempt to hold… to both hold a market strategy and an attempt to grow market share where they're still behind. They are markedly behind in several areas. And I think the reality is, Amazon WorkSpaces is a really fine offering and a lot of customers use it.And we had a customer at our last in-person boot camp in Atlanta, and I was really impressed—she had been to one boot camp before, but I was really impressed at how much work she'd put into making sure we know, “We want to keep using Amazon WorkSpaces. We're very happy with it. We don't want to move anywhere else. Am I correct in understanding that this, this, this, and this? If we do these things will be aboveboard?” And so, she knew how much more she'd have to pay to stay on Amazon WorkSpaces, but it was that important to the company that they'd already bet the farm on the technology, and they didn't want to shift to somebody else that they didn't know.Corey: I'm wondering how many people have installed Office just through a standard Microsoft 365 subscription on a one-off Amazon WorkSpace, just because they had no idea that that was against license terms. I recall spinning up an Amazon WorkSpace back when they first launched, or when they wound up then expanding to Amazon Linux; I forget the exact timeline on this. I have no idea if I did something like that or not. Because it seems like it'd be a logical thing. “Oh, I want to travel with just an iPad. Let me go ahead and run a full desktop somewhere in the cloud. Awesome.”That feels like exactly the sort of thing an audit comes in and then people are on the hook for massive fines as a result. It just feels weird, as opposed to, there are a number of ways to detect you're running on a virtual machine that isn't approved for this. Stop the install. But of course, that doesn't happen, does it?Wes: No. When we teach at the boot camp, Rob will often point out that, you know, licensing is one of the—and it's true—licensing is one of the last things that comes in when Microsoft is releasing a product. It was that way when he was at the company before I was—he shipped Word 1.0 for the Mac, to give you an idea of his epoch—and I was there for XP, like I said, which was the first version that used activation—which was a nightmare—there was a whole dedicated team on. And that team was running down to the wire to get everything installed.And that is still the case today because marketing and legal make decisions about how a product gets sold. Licensing is usually tacked on at the very end if it gets tacked on at all. And in fact, in a lot of the security, compliance, and identity space within Microsoft 365, there is no license compliance. Microsoft will show you a document that, “Hey, we do this,” but it's very performative. You can't actually rely on it, and if you do rely on it, you'll get in trouble during an audit because you've got non-compliance problems. So yeah, it's—you would hope that it keeps you from coloring outside the lines, but it very much does not.Corey: It's just a tax on going about your business, in some ways [sigh].Wes: Exactly. “Don't worry, we'll be back to fix it for you later.”Corey: [laugh]. I really appreciate your taking the time to go through this with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to keep up with what you're up to?Wes: Well, obviously, I'm on Twitter, and—oh, sorry, X, whatever.Corey: No, we're calling it Twitter.Wes: Okay, I'm on—I'm on—[laugh] thank you. I'm on Twitter at @getwired. Same alias over on [BlueSky 00:35:27]. And they can also find me on LinkedIn, if they're looking for a professional question beyond that and want to send a quiet message.The other thing is, of course, go to directionsonmicrosoft.com. And directionsonmicrosoft.com/training if they're interested in one of our licensing boot camps. And like I said, Rob, and I do those every other month. We're increasingly doing them in person. We got one in Bellevue coming up in just a few weeks. So, there's opportunities to learn more.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:59]. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me again, Wes. It's appreciated.Wes: Thank you for having me.Corey: Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that will no doubt be taken down because you did not sign up for that podcasting platform's proper license level.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
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WORLD WAR AI OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plus Google responds to ChatGPT with Bard Microsoft announces AI-powered Bing and Edge. Google hosted its own AI event and it announced multi-search, Maps improvements, and Translate improvements, and discussed how AI can make life better Semi-related: Paul was let into the Notion AI beta Windows Paul has some thoughts about Windows 12 and what an AI-based Windows could look like Ads are coming to the Microsoft Store. FINALLY New Insider build for the Beta channel. No new features, but a new policy that lets IT admins customize how Search looks on the Windows 11 Taskbar Microsoft is integrating Adobe Acrobat PDF with Microsoft Edge, but only on Windows 10 and 11 for now Microsoft 365 Native Apple Silicon version of Skype is 3X faster. What took so long? Hardware Microsoft says it's still committed to HoloLens 2 and MR, tries not to laugh Samsung is working on XR hardware with Qualcomm and Google. Dev Microsoft updates its .NET language strategy. Nothing has changed, other than they way they document their .NET language strategy More Big Tech Earnings Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta earnings Zoom just showed us the way to handle layoffs Xbox Sony is fighting Microsoft subpoena in AB case. It's fighting the FTC subpoena, too UK CMA says AB deal is "anti-competitive" but would accept some concessions New Game Pass titles announced for the middle of February Sony says the PS5 is immune to the downturn Nintendo says Switch is not immune to the downturn, but it's still dominating Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Protect your privacy in Windows 11 App pick of the week: Microsoft Edge Dev Brown Liquor of the week: Mackmyra Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: CDW.com/LenovoClient Miro.com/podcast
WORLD WAR AI OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plus Google responds to ChatGPT with Bard Microsoft announces AI-powered Bing and Edge. Google hosted its own AI event and it announced multi-search, Maps improvements, and Translate improvements, and discussed how AI can make life better Semi-related: Paul was let into the Notion AI beta Windows Paul has some thoughts about Windows 12 and what an AI-based Windows could look like Ads are coming to the Microsoft Store. FINALLY New Insider build for the Beta channel. No new features, but a new policy that lets IT admins customize how Search looks on the Windows 11 Taskbar Microsoft is integrating Adobe Acrobat PDF with Microsoft Edge, but only on Windows 10 and 11 for now Microsoft 365 Native Apple Silicon version of Skype is 3X faster. What took so long? Hardware Microsoft says it's still committed to HoloLens 2 and MR, tries not to laugh Samsung is working on XR hardware with Qualcomm and Google. Dev Microsoft updates its .NET language strategy. Nothing has changed, other than they way they document their .NET language strategy More Big Tech Earnings Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta earnings Zoom just showed us the way to handle layoffs Xbox Sony is fighting Microsoft subpoena in AB case. It's fighting the FTC subpoena, too UK CMA says AB deal is "anti-competitive" but would accept some concessions New Game Pass titles announced for the middle of February Sony says the PS5 is immune to the downturn Nintendo says Switch is not immune to the downturn, but it's still dominating Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Protect your privacy in Windows 11 App pick of the week: Microsoft Edge Dev Brown Liquor of the week: Mackmyra Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: CDW.com/LenovoClient Miro.com/podcast
WORLD WAR AI OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plus Google responds to ChatGPT with Bard Microsoft announces AI-powered Bing and Edge. Google hosted its own AI event and it announced multi-search, Maps improvements, and Translate improvements, and discussed how AI can make life better Semi-related: Paul was let into the Notion AI beta Windows Paul has some thoughts about Windows 12 and what an AI-based Windows could look like Ads are coming to the Microsoft Store. FINALLY New Insider build for the Beta channel. No new features, but a new policy that lets IT admins customize how Search looks on the Windows 11 Taskbar Microsoft is integrating Adobe Acrobat PDF with Microsoft Edge, but only on Windows 10 and 11 for now Microsoft 365 Native Apple Silicon version of Skype is 3X faster. What took so long? Hardware Microsoft says it's still committed to HoloLens 2 and MR, tries not to laugh Samsung is working on XR hardware with Qualcomm and Google. Dev Microsoft updates its .NET language strategy. Nothing has changed, other than they way they document their .NET language strategy More Big Tech Earnings Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta earnings Zoom just showed us the way to handle layoffs Xbox Sony is fighting Microsoft subpoena in AB case. It's fighting the FTC subpoena, too UK CMA says AB deal is "anti-competitive" but would accept some concessions New Game Pass titles announced for the middle of February Sony says the PS5 is immune to the downturn Nintendo says Switch is not immune to the downturn, but it's still dominating Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Protect your privacy in Windows 11 App pick of the week: Microsoft Edge Dev Brown Liquor of the week: Mackmyra Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: CDW.com/LenovoClient Miro.com/podcast
WORLD WAR AI OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plus Google responds to ChatGPT with Bard Microsoft announces AI-powered Bing and Edge. Google hosted its own AI event and it announced multi-search, Maps improvements, and Translate improvements, and discussed how AI can make life better Semi-related: Paul was let into the Notion AI beta Windows Paul has some thoughts about Windows 12 and what an AI-based Windows could look like Ads are coming to the Microsoft Store. FINALLY New Insider build for the Beta channel. No new features, but a new policy that lets IT admins customize how Search looks on the Windows 11 Taskbar Microsoft is integrating Adobe Acrobat PDF with Microsoft Edge, but only on Windows 10 and 11 for now Microsoft 365 Native Apple Silicon version of Skype is 3X faster. What took so long? Hardware Microsoft says it's still committed to HoloLens 2 and MR, tries not to laugh Samsung is working on XR hardware with Qualcomm and Google. Dev Microsoft updates its .NET language strategy. Nothing has changed, other than they way they document their .NET language strategy More Big Tech Earnings Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta earnings Zoom just showed us the way to handle layoffs Xbox Sony is fighting Microsoft subpoena in AB case. It's fighting the FTC subpoena, too UK CMA says AB deal is "anti-competitive" but would accept some concessions New Game Pass titles announced for the middle of February Sony says the PS5 is immune to the downturn Nintendo says Switch is not immune to the downturn, but it's still dominating Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Protect your privacy in Windows 11 App pick of the week: Microsoft Edge Dev Brown Liquor of the week: Mackmyra Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: CDW.com/LenovoClient Miro.com/podcast
WORLD WAR AI OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plus Google responds to ChatGPT with Bard Microsoft announces AI-powered Bing and Edge. Google hosted its own AI event and it announced multi-search, Maps improvements, and Translate improvements, and discussed how AI can make life better Semi-related: Paul was let into the Notion AI beta Windows Paul has some thoughts about Windows 12 and what an AI-based Windows could look like Ads are coming to the Microsoft Store. FINALLY New Insider build for the Beta channel. No new features, but a new policy that lets IT admins customize how Search looks on the Windows 11 Taskbar Microsoft is integrating Adobe Acrobat PDF with Microsoft Edge, but only on Windows 10 and 11 for now Microsoft 365 Native Apple Silicon version of Skype is 3X faster. What took so long? Hardware Microsoft says it's still committed to HoloLens 2 and MR, tries not to laugh Samsung is working on XR hardware with Qualcomm and Google. Dev Microsoft updates its .NET language strategy. Nothing has changed, other than they way they document their .NET language strategy More Big Tech Earnings Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta earnings Zoom just showed us the way to handle layoffs Xbox Sony is fighting Microsoft subpoena in AB case. It's fighting the FTC subpoena, too UK CMA says AB deal is "anti-competitive" but would accept some concessions New Game Pass titles announced for the middle of February Sony says the PS5 is immune to the downturn Nintendo says Switch is not immune to the downturn, but it's still dominating Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Protect your privacy in Windows 11 App pick of the week: Microsoft Edge Dev Brown Liquor of the week: Mackmyra Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: CDW.com/LenovoClient Miro.com/podcast
FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux, why OpenBSD's documentation is so good, configure dma for mail delivery in jails on internet hosts, introducing muxfs, RAID1C boot support, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD on the Framework laptop (https://xyinn.org/md/freebsd/framework_laptop) Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux (https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/) News Roundup Why is the OpenBSD documentation so good? (https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-08-18-why-openbsd-documentation-is-good.html) How I configure dma for mail delivery in jails on my internet hosts (https://dan.langille.org/2022/08/15/how-i-configure-dma-for-mail-delivery-in-jails-on-my-internet-hosts/) Introducing muxfs (https://sdadams.org/blog/introducing-muxfs/) RAID 1C boot support added (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20220813110021) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions [Oliver - shell tip)[https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/469/feedback/Oliver%20-%20shell%20tip.md] Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
The five most common problems when trying out an immutable Linux distro like NixOS. Plus, why one Linux dev says just target WINE.
Running the Nintendo Switch's Horizon OS on Linux, W4 plans to monetize Godot, Half-Life smashes its concurrent players record, and is Win32 the only stable ABI?
Miguel Ángel Ramos es Senior Product Manager de WinUI en Microsoft Corporation, donde lleva más de 10 años liderando los esfuerzos del gigante tecnológico para mejorar el desarrollo de interfaces de usuario. En esta conversación hemos hablado con él de un montón de cosas: su trabajo en Microsoft, el desarrollo de aplicaciones de escritorio, las diferentes tecnologías de las que disponemos: WinUI, XAML, UWP, Windows Forms, .NET MAUI... para intentar arrojar un poco de luz a todo ese galimatías. Enlaces Relacionados: Twitter de Miguel Documentación de la API de Win32 Documentación de WPF Componentes COM WinRT WinUI Windows App SDK Documentación de WinUI XAML Islands .NET MAUI --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/campusmvp/message
Luc-Olivier and Yanik talk about their thoughts after the launch week of Gran Turismo 7.Related LinksFU: sporks.space: Win32 is the stable Linux user land ABI (and the consequences)FU: Bengt Halvorson on TwitterFU: Marques Brownlee on TwitterFU: Matt Farah on TwitterYouTube/PlayStation: Gran Turismo 7 - Opening MovieGran Turismo 7 on PlayStation 5: The Digital Foundry Tech Review - YouTubeGran Turismo 7 - PS5 vs PS4 Pro vs PS4 Cross-Gen Comparison - The Ultimate Head-to-Head! - YouTubeYouTube/RemyRaccoon: The Konami Racing Game You Never Heard Of: Enthusia Professional Racing
We revisit one of the core theses of the show and expand on it in a new way, leading us to ponder just what a wild ride the next eight years are going to be.
Machine Music : with Man and TQ4 on the TQ404 synthesizer (unreleased) and my Ai that says : This music is pretty like a compiled machine. I have some of the best vintage computers and vintage synthesizers, and new programs for them, such as new programs for Roland JX3P, Yamaha DX7, Korg M1, Casio CT-1, Korg MS-20, Roland V-Synth, Roland VP-330, E-mu SP-1200, Synthogy Soundscape, Oberheim Xpander, and others. they used to create, but most programmers all have their legacy hardware first start, or has their first focus (eg Dos users influence, Win32 users influence, etc ) My MIDI CV Invoke synth still in work is good because I made it when it was big deal )) =D, more each new machine game I have find sweet ways from my machine (A89 etc hacked in MIDI messages from LP20 owned PC ) ) =D, Can you experience these cool imitative sounds examples maybe here, or should I link to youtube or some videos (cpsurreesey28 ) Some wav examples (cpsurre to help with my tunes and time-based music. Some programs will, which have since been edited out, created instabilization. All machines and the programs used are designed to ... Design, I'm really excited about helping Vission Golf with their wedding video. The corporate video was great. Imagine capturing history through a new kind of eyes. Not just imagery on a shoe cardboard. It's turned my hometown of Chapel Hill into a vivid fashion photo shoot. Watch out... I create on my PC. I think electronic music is difficult to define for new artists since I will be creating my own sound at first, it's difficult for me to communicate how I will make my music, this is the best way for me to describe it. Please be nice to me if you can because I'm a new artist and a lot of things can help me grow in the world and thank you very much for your attention. Hi sounds like what I do. I'll do beats on my Z80 so you can feel it. Nice to have you here in the community
Zac and Dan are here with UWP to Win32 migration details and their massive Surface Duo 2 review. We also get a taste test of Android Apps on Windows 11, Razer's smart facemask, and more. Links: Microsoft publishes UWP to Win32 migration details, but it's probably not what you think | Windows Central Surface Duo 2 review: A huge step in the right direction, but still much work to be done | Windows Central Hands-on with Android apps on Windows 11 (video demo) | Windows Central Razer's Zephyr smart facemask with RGB and N95 filters can now be yours for $99 [Update: Sold out!] | Windows Central
Hoje vamos falar sobre mais um pouco sobre a guerra do streaming, com a Globoplay congelando preços; o Android 12 que vai provavelmente tirar a personalização manual e apps Win32 que não serão atualizados pela Microsoft Store.
It's not every day that you can hear a great conversation with the Head of Product of Excel. Brian Jones sits down with us and talks about the past, present, and very promising future of Excel. Rob and Brian go way back, and the stories and laughs abound! Check out this cool World Orca Day Excel template for kids! Episode Timeline: 4:00 - Brian's lofty title is Head of Product at Excel, The importance and magic of Excel, and people's a-ha moments with Excel 20:25 - The difficulty of not seeing your projects' impact on the world and how the heck does Bluetooth fit into the story?!, Rob and Brian reminisce with some funny conference stories 32:00 - The XML file format and some very neat XML tricks that everyone should know about 51:25 - The birth of the Excel Web App and Rob can't believe some of the things that Brian's team has done with Excel 1:05:00 - How to onboard the Excel, VLOOKUP, and Pivot crowd into data modeling and Power BI, and the future of Excel most certainly includes the Lambda function (maybe!) Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest, Brian Jones, head of product for this thing you might've heard of called Microsoft Excel. Brian and I go back a long way. We were both youngsters at Microsoft at the same time, and we both worked on some early features of Office apps, and we're friends. Really, really have sincerely warm feelings about this guy, as you often do with people that you essentially grew up with. And that's what we did. When Brian and I first worked together, he was working on Word and I was working on Excel. But even though Brian was on Word at the time, he was already working on what we would today call citizen developer type of functionality in the Word application. So even though we were essentially on different sides of the aisle within the Office organization, we were already finding ourselves able to connect over this affinity for the citizen developer. Rob Collie (00:00:55): Now we have some laughs during this conversation about how in hindsight, the things he and I were working on at the time didn't turn out to be as significant as we thought they were in the moment. But those experiences were very valuable in shaping both of us for the initiatives that came later. Rob Collie (00:01:11): Like almost everyone at Microsoft, Brian has moved around a bit. He's worked on file formats for the entire Office suite, which ended up enabling Power Pivot version one to actually function the way that it should. He's worked on Office-wide extensibility and programmability, back to that citizen developer thing again. And in that light, it's only natural that Excel's gravity reeled him in. And in that light, it's only natural that someone like that, someone like Brian, found his way to Excel, and it really is a match made in heaven. And if you permit me the Excel joke, that turned out to be a great match. Rob Collie (00:01:50): We took the obligatory and entertaining, I hope, walk down memory lane. We spent a lot more time than I expected talking about file format. And the reason why is that file formats are actually a fascinating topic when you really get into it. Lot of history there, a lot of very interesting history and challenges we walked through. And of course, we do get around to talking about Excel, its current state, where it's headed, and also the amazing revelation for me that monthly releases actually mean a longer attention span for a product and how we ended up getting functionality now as a result of the monthly release cycle that would have never fit into the old multi-year release cycle. We were super grateful to have him on the show. And as usual, we learned things. I learned things. I have a different view of the world after having this conversation than I did before it, which is a huge gift. And I hope that you get the same sort of thing out of it. So let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:56): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:03:03): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast, with your host Rob Collie and your cohost Thomas Larock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:26): Welcome to the show. Brian Jones, how are you, sir? Brian Jones (00:03:30): I am fantastic. Thank you for having me, Rob. I'm excited. Rob Collie (00:03:33): So let's start here today. Well, you and I go way back, but today, what's your job title and what are your responsibilities? Brian Jones (00:03:42): So today, my job is I'm the head of product for the Excel team. So I lead the team of product managers that are tasked with or given the honor of deciding the future of Excel, where we go with Excel, what are the set of things that we go and build Rob Collie (00:03:59): Head of product. That's a title that we didn't have back when I was still at Microsoft. We did at one point have something called a product unit manager. Is it similar to that? How does that relate? Brian Jones (00:04:11): That's a good question. So we're continuing to evolve the way that we use titles internally. So internally, we have titles that still for most folks externally don't make any sense, like program manager, group program manager, program manager manager, director of program manager. And so for externally, whenever I'm on LinkedIn or if I do PR interviews, things like that, I use the term head of product. Internally, we don't have the term head of product. Rob Collie (00:04:37): Okay. All right. So that's a translation for us. Brian Jones (00:04:40): Yes, exactly. Trying to translate the Microsoft internal org chart to something that makes more sense to folks. Rob Collie (00:04:49): Yeah. So things like, if we use the word orthogonal, what we're really saying is that's not relevant. Brian Jones (00:04:53): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:04:54): That kind of decoder ring. Brian Jones (00:04:57): I didn't realize orthogonal [inaudible 00:04:59] until you said it and I'm like, " Oh yeah, no. Of course, that is completely a ridiculous term to use." Rob Collie (00:05:03): Or I don't know if they still do this, but an old joke that Dave [Gayner 00:05:07] and I used to have, it was all his joke at the time. It was big bet. Do we still talk about big bet? We're going to place a big bet. Brian Jones (00:05:14): Yep. Big bet or big rocks. Big rocks. You know the- Rob Collie (00:05:17): Big rocks. Whoa. Brian Jones (00:05:18): Yeah. It's kind of an analogy. You've got a jar and you want to fill it with the big rocks first, and then you let the sand fill in the rest of the space. So what are the big rocks? Rob Collie (00:05:26): Okay. Yeah. But big bet was one that we used to always make fun of. Brian Jones (00:05:31): Especially when there'd be, "Here are the big bets," and there's 20 of them. Rob Collie (00:05:34): Yeah. The joke I think we used to make was we would call something a big bet when we really didn't have any good reason for doing what we were doing. Anyway, all right. So you're head of product for Excel. That is a pretty heady job. That's pretty awesome. Brian Jones (00:05:52): It's a pretty fun job. Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:05:54): I mean, you're not lacking for eyeballs in that business, are you? We're all friends here. We're all on the same side of this story. I mean, it is the lingua franca of business, Excel. It is the business programming tool. People don't necessarily think of it as programming, but formulas are a programming language. To be head of product for the platform, you could call it an application, but really it's probably more accurate to call it a platform that is, I think, is the single most critical platform to business in the world. That's pretty amazing. Brian Jones (00:06:30): Absolutely. And that's usually the way that we talk about it internally. It depends on who your audience is externally when you're talking about it. But yeah, Excel is a programming language. I remember even before, back when I was on the Word team, but I would go and meet with PJ, who ran program manager for Office all up. And he'd always referred to Excel more as an IDE. And that didn't totally resonate with me at the time because to me, Excel was just a list app, an app for just tracking things. I didn't totally understand what he meant by that, but I'd nod cause he was super important and smart. And it wasn't really until I started working on the team that I was like, "Oh, I totally understand all these things that PJ used to reference." Rob Collie (00:07:06): This one of the things I had been dying to ask you is when you and I first met, I was working on the Excel team, but still had... Gosh, this was year 2000 maybe, maybe 2001. And even though I was nominally part of the Excel team at that point, I still didn't really know Excel, and you were working on Word. So the thing we both had in common at that point is that we didn't know Excel. So I wanted to get your perspective. I know that you've done some things other than Word, but we were already sort of teasing this. So let's just get into it. What's it like to come from "outside" Excel and how's that transition? How do you view Excel differently today versus what you did before? We already started talking about that. The list keeper. That's very common way for people to view it. Brian Jones (00:07:53): When I first started, yeah, I was on Word, although I was working on more kind of end user developer type of pieces of Word. That's how you and I first interacted because we were talking about XML. The first feature I owned was a feature called easy data binding to Excel. And the whole idea was when you could easily bring content from Excel into Word, but then create a link back so that the content in Word would stay live. And a lot of this stuff that I did while I was on Word was all about trying to make Word a little bit more of a structured tool so that people could actually program against it because Word is completely unstructured. It's just free-flowing text. So trying to write a solution against that is almost impossible because you can't predict anything. So we did a lot of work to add structure, whereas Excel out of the gate has all that structure. So it's just much easier to go and program. Brian Jones (00:08:39): If I had gone straight from Word to Excel, it would have been a little bit more of a shock, but I actually had about eight years in between where I was running our extensibility team. So a lot of the work we would do was revving the add-in model and extensibility for Excel. So I got some exposure there. When we did all of the file format stuff and the whole file format campaign, That was a couple of years where I was working really closely with a bunch of folks in Excel, like Dan [Badigan 00:09:06] and folks like that. So I had a bit of exposure, but I'll tell you when I first joined, I had a similar job, but it was for the Access team and we were building up some new tech. Brian Jones (00:09:17): Some of it still is there today. Office Forms came out of some of the investments that we were doing in Access. But when I showed up into Excel, I was very much in that mode of, "Why don't the Excel folks, get it? Everything should be a table with column headings." And like, "That's the model. And why do they stick with this grid? Clearly word of it is eventually going to go away from the printed page as the key medium. Excel's got to go away from the grid. And they've got to understand that this should just be all tables that can be related." And thankfully, I was responsible when I joined and didn't try and act like I knew everything. So I took some time to go and learn. Brian Jones (00:09:52): And it didn't take me long. We have some crazy financial modeling experts on the team and stuff like that, where I'd say it was maybe six months in that it clicked for me where I understood those two key pieces. The grid and formulas are really the soul and the IP of Excel. The fact that you can lay out information really easily on a grid, you have formulas that are your logic, and you can do this step-by-step set of processes where each cell is almost like another little debug point for you. [Cal captain sub 00:10:20] second, and it's the easiest way to go and learn logic and how to build logic. Brian Jones (00:10:25): I didn't get any of that at that time, but you pick it up pretty quickly when you start to look at all the solutions that people are building. And now, obviously, I've been on the team now for five years, so I'm super sold around it. But I'd say it took me a little while and I'm still learning. It takes a while to learn the whole thing. Rob Collie (00:10:41): Yeah. It's funny. Like you said, Word's completely unstructured. You're looking in from the outside and you're like, "Well, Excel is completely structured." Then you get close to it. You're like, "Oh no. And it's not, really." Brian Jones (00:10:52): No. Not at all. Rob Collie (00:10:53): I mean, it's got the cells. Rows and columns. You can't avoid those. But within that landscape, is it kind of deliberately wild west? You can do whatever you need to. You're right. Okay. So tables, yes. Tables are still very important. But you've got these parameters and assumptions and inputs. And what do you do with those? I mean, they're not make a table for those. Brian Jones (00:11:19): Yep. Absolutely. I think that the thing that I started to get really quickly was the beauty of that. Like you said, it's unstructured. You have nice reference points. So if you're trying to build logic, formulas, you can reference things. But there's no rule about whether or not things go horizontally, vertically, diagonally, whatever. You can take whatever's in your mind that you're trying to make a decision around and use that flexible grid to lay it out. It's like a mind map. If you think about the beauty, the flexibility of a mind map, that's what the grid is. You can go and lay out all the information however it makes the most sense to you. Brian Jones (00:11:53): Really, that's what makes Excel still so relevant today. If you think about the way business is evolving, people are getting more and more data, change is just more constant, business processes are changing all the time. So there are certain processes where people can say, "This thing is always going to work the same way." And so you can go and get a vertical railed solution. That's why we use the term rail. That's kind of like if I always know I'm going to take this cargo from LA to San Francisco, I can go and build some rails, and I got a train, it'll always go there and do the same thing. But if business is constantly changing, those rails are quickly going to break and you're going to have to go off the rails. Excel is more like a car than a train. You can go anywhere with it. And so as the business processes change, the people who are using Excel are the same people who are the ones changing those business processes. Those are the business folks. And so they can go and evolve and adapt it and they don't have to go and find another ISV to go and build them another solution based on that new process that's probably going to change again in six months. Thomas Larock (00:12:52): So Brian's been in charge for five years of Excel, and he's sitting there telling us how there's still more to learn. And two weeks ago, we all got renewed as MVPs. And so I was on the MVP website, and I'm going through all the DLs I can join because that's all a manual process these days. I'm like, "Oh, there's the Excel MVP DL. I don't know why I haven't joined this yet." So I click. I'm immediately flooded with 100 emails a day. 100 emails a day. Now, I don't believe I am a novice when it comes to Excel. I don't. I know I'm not on you all's level at all when it comes to it. You build and work and live the product. But I know my way around enough that I can explain things to others when they say, "I'm trying to do this thing." "Oh, I think it's possible." Thomas Larock (00:13:40): But I read these passionate MVPs that you have and the stuff that they highlight, and it's not complex stuff. It's like, "Hey, this title bar seems to be wider in this." And I'm like, I might not even notice this stuff. And I see these features that aren't a complex feature, but I'm like, "I didn't even know that was there. I didn't even know you could do that. Oh, you can do that too." There's so much. And like you said, it's a programming language. It's an IDE. It's all these things. As [Sinopski 00:14:10] said, "It's the killer app for Windows." To have the head of product say that, there's just so much. He really means it. There is a lot to it. And it is something that is malleable and usable by hundreds of millions of people a day. Brian Jones (00:14:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:14:26): My old joke is, if you want to know how good someone is at Excel, just ask them, "How good are you at Excel?" And then take their answer and invert it. Brian Jones (00:14:37): That's absolutely true. Rob Collie (00:14:38): If someone says, "Yeah, I'm really good at it," You know they don't have any clue because they haven't glimpsed the depth of that particular mine shaft. And once someone has been to the show, they know better than to oversell their knowledge because they know they can't know everything. Rob Collie (00:14:54): You say you're good at Excel. And then the very next question is one that you're not going to be able to answer. So you got to be careful. [inaudible 00:15:00] person views Excel as Word with a grid. And that's not obviously what it is, but that's the oversimplification for... I don't know... maybe 80% of humanity. Brian Jones (00:15:10): Yeah. And the thing is, there's a lot more that we're doing in the app now to try and make it, one, more approachable, because there's a set of folks that just find it really intimidating, for sure. You open it up and it's this huge, dense grid. Like, "Hey, where do I start? What should I go and do? I've never even heard of this thing before." In the past, a lot of stuff that we would do, we never really thought about those first steps of using the app because we were always like, "Well, everybody knows our app. We're going to go and do the things for everybody that knows our app." And I think we're doing a better job now trying to think, "Well, there's a bunch of people who don't know about our app. Let's go and figure out what the experience should be like for them." Brian Jones (00:15:43): But we've done a lot with AI where we're trying to get a little bit better about... We look at your data. Recommend things to you. So we'll say, "If you've got a table of data, hey, here's a pivot table." You may not have even heard of the pivot table before. So really more like, "Hey, here's a summary of your data." You want to go and insert that. Brian Jones (00:16:00): In fact, those tests are always fun because then we get to work with people who've really haven't ever used a pivot table. So it's always fun to hear the words that they use to describe what a pivot table is. It's like, "Oh wow, you grouped my data for me." Or stuff like that like, "Wow. That's a nice name for it too." So we're trying to do more of that to expose people to really those higher-end things. But those things where for those of us that use it, once you discover that stuff, you're even more hooked on the product. You're like, man, that first experience of somebody built a pivot table for you and you realize, "Oh my God, I didn't know I could do this with my data. Look how much easier it is for me to see what's going on," and trying to get more people to experience that kind of magical moment. Thomas Larock (00:16:39): Now imagine being me and only knowing pivot through T-SQL and that magical day when you meet Rob and he's like, "You just pivot table [inaudible 00:16:49]." And you're like, "How many hours have I wasted? Why didn't someone tell me?" Brian Jones (00:16:56): Yeah. We get that a lot when we'll go and show stuff. Oftentimes, the reaction is more frustration. "I can't believe I didn't know about this for the past five years." Rob Collie (00:17:05): We get that all the time now with Power Pivot and Power Query and Power BI in general. The target audience for that stuff hasn't been really effectively addressed by Microsoft marketing. But even back, just regular pivot tables, such a powerful tool, and so poorly named. You weren't around on the Excel team, Brian, when I waged a six-month campaign to try to rename pivot table to summary table. Brian Jones (00:17:31): Oh really? Rob Collie (00:17:31): Yeah. Brian Jones (00:17:31): How long ago was that? Rob Collie (00:17:33): Oh, well, it was a long time ago. I mean [crosstalk 00:17:35]- Brian Jones (00:17:36): Pivot tables had already been out for quite a while. Rob Collie (00:17:37): Oh God. Yeah. I mean, they were long established. They were in the product. I didn't even know what they did. Believe it or not, I worked on the Excel team for probably about a year before I actually figured what pivot tables could do. People would just throw it around all the time on the team like, "Well, once you have the data, then you can chart it. You can pivot it," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I would fit in- Brian Jones (00:17:58): You would nod? Rob Collie (00:17:59): I would fit in... I would also author sentences like that, that had the word pivot in it. It was a pretty safe thing to do. There was no downside to it. But believe it or not, the time that I discovered what pivot tables are for... you'll love this... I was trying to figure out how to skill balance the four different fantasy football leagues that I had organized within the Excel and Access team. I wanted to spread it out. Levels of experience. I've got this table of data with the person's name and their level of experience and my tentative league assignment. And just this light bulb went on. I'm like, "Oh my God, I bet this is what pivot tables are for." Total expertise by league. Like, "Oh, look at that. It's totally it." That was a big change for me. That was during the release, Brian, where you and I were working together. Brian Jones (00:18:54): I think I played on one of those fantasy football leagues. Rob Collie (00:18:56): You might have. Brian Jones (00:18:57): I was one of the people with zero experience. I remember going into the draft not knowing... I knew football, but I didn't know anything about fantasy football. Rob Collie (00:19:03): That's right. We did loop you in. So let's do that way back machine for a moment. That release when you and I met was the first release on Excel. I was the lead at that point. It was my first time being a lead. It was the first time I was in charge of a feature set, and it was really my baby, this XML thing we were doing. And the reason for that was because no one was paying any attention. That was this weird release. For a whole release, Office went and tried to do cloud services without having any idea what that really was going to mean. And so we stripped all of the applications down to skeleton crews. And this is really the only reason why on the Excel side, some youngster like me was allowed to be a lead and come up with a feature, because no one cared. No one was paying any attention. There was no one minding the store. Rob Collie (00:19:48): I remember being so wild-eyed enthusiastic about how much this was going to change the world, this XML import export future. And I mean, you might as well just take it out. I can't imagine it's being used hardly at all today. I bet Power View is used more often than the XML import export feature. You all have done a pretty good job of hiding it. So kudos. But it was a good thing to cut my teeth on. I learned a lot of valuable lessons on that release. Rob Collie (00:20:24): How do you feel about the XML structure document work that you were doing in Word at the time? Do you kind of have the same feeling looking back at it that I do? Brian Jones (00:20:33): It was a similar thing. In fact, we did rip it out a couple of years later. I think that when you and I would talk about it, we would talk about these scenarios that were super righteous and great. And then we just start geeking out on tech. And then we would get way too excited about the tech and we kind of forget about those initial scenarios. We wouldn't stop and think, "Wait a minute. These users we're talking about, are they actually going to go and create XML files?" Because you need one of those to start with before any of this stuff makes sense. And no, of course, they're not. But for me, a lot of it started from that. Like I said, one of my first features was that easy data binding to Excel feature. And we thought, "Hey, maybe XML would be a good tech for us to use as a way of having Word and Excel talk to each other," because clearly they have different views on what formatting is and how to present information, but the underlying semantic information, that could be shared. Brian Jones (00:21:20): And so I could have a set of products show up in Excel as a table. And when they come into Word, they look more like a catalog of products. That totally makes sense. And we just did a lot of assumptions that people would make, do all the glue that was really necessary. And of course, they didn't. So I had the exact same experience. The other big thing that was different back then for us was we would plan something, meet with customers for six months, but then it'd take three years to go and build it. We had no way of validating that stuff with customers because we couldn't get them any of the builds. And then even after we shipped it, they weren't actually going to deploy it for another three-plus years. And so the reality is from when you had the idea to where you actually can see that it's actually not working and people aren't using it is probably about six years. So you've probably moved on to something else by then. Brian Jones (00:22:04): The only way you really as a PM got validation that your feature was great was whether or not leadership and maybe press got excited about your thing, but you didn't get a whole lot of signal from actual customers whether or not the thing was working, which is obviously completely different now, thank goodness. Rob Collie (00:22:18): Yeah. That Is true. It took some of the fun out of being done too, now looking back at it, like the day of the ship party, when we were done with the three-year release. "Okay, fine." We'd dunk each other in fountains and there'd be hijinks and stuff. But the world did not experience us being done. That was purely just us feeling done. And then it was like you take a week off maybe, and then the next week, you're right back to the grind at the very beginning. You never got the payoff. Even if you built something really good, by the time the world discovered it and it was actually really helping people at any significant scale, you're no longer even working on that product. Brian Jones (00:22:57): Yeah. You're doing something completely different. Rob Collie (00:22:59): You might be in a different division, both finding out the things in real time that Rob Collie (00:23:03): [inaudible 00:23:00] Both finding out the things, sort of in real time, that aren't working. That's the obvious advantage, right? But there's also this other emotional thing. Like you never got the satisfaction when you actually did succeed. Brian Jones (00:23:11): Right. You didn't see it actually get picked up, adopted. Millions and millions of people using it, which is what the team gets now. We no longer pick a project and say, "Okay, how many people and how long is this going to take?" You really just try and figure out what's critical mass for that project. And then you just let them run. And you'd be really clear around what are the goals and outcomes they're trying to drive. And they just keep going until they actually achieve that. Or we realized that we were wrong, right? And we say, "Hey, we thought people are going to be excited about this. It's not even an implementation thing. We were just wrong. We misread what people really were trying to do. Let's stop. Let's kind of figure out a way of moving off of that and go and figure out what the next thing is we should go and do." Rob Collie (00:23:50): That era that we're talking about right now. The 2003 release of Office. I was still very much a computer science graduate and amateur human. That's exactly backwards, it turns out, if you're trying to design a tool that's going to be used by humanity. Brian Jones (00:24:08): Well, it's what leads you to get really Excited about XML? Rob Collie (00:24:12): That's right. Yeah. That's right. Tech used to have such a power in my life. I'm exactly the opposite now. Every time I hear about some new tech, I'm like, "Yeah, prove it." I am not going to believe in this new radical thing until it actually changes the world around me. I'm not going to be trying to catch that wave. But XML did that to me. It was almost a threat. If we don't take this seriously, we're going to get outflanked. It got really egregious. Rob Collie (00:24:42): I had a coworker one time in that same release in the middle of one of my presentations asked me. This guy wasn't particularly, in the final analysis, looking back, not one of the stronger members of the team, but he had a lot of sibling rivalry essentially in his DNA. And he'd asked me in front of his crowded room, "Well, what are you going to do about Bluetooth?" And, we didn't know what Bluetooth was yet, right? It was like, unless I had an answer for what we were going to do about Bluetooth and Excel, right? Then I was not up on things. You know, the thing that we use to connect our headphones. At the time, Bluetooth was one of those things that might just disrupt everything. Brian Jones (00:25:29): It was funny. It was at that same time, I was asked to give a presentation to the Word team about Bluetooth. We were all assigned things to go and research as part of planning and that was one of the ones I was asked. And I gave a presentation that was just very factual. Here's what it is. And I was given really bad feedback that like, "Hey, I wasn't actually talking about it strategically and how it was going to affect Word. I was just being very factual." And I was like, "I don't understand. I don't understand what success looks like in this task." Right. Rob Collie (00:25:59): I remember going, a couple of years later, going into an offsite, those offsite big, I don't know if you all still do those things, big offsite, blue sky brainstorming sessions. There was this really senior development lead that was there with me. And he and I were kind of buddies. At one point, halfway through the day, he just leans over to me and says, "Hey, I'm going to the restroom and I'm not coming back." And I looked at him in horror, almost like "Thou dost dishonor the offsite!?" And he's like, "Yeah, you know, I've never really believed that much in this particular phase of the product cycle. It's never really meant anything to me. It's all just BS." It was just devastating. I just knew it was right. He was... Brian Jones (00:26:46): But you didn't want to, you didn't want to believe that. Rob Collie (00:26:52): I mean, I felt so special. I was invited to the offsite, the big wigs and everything. Brian Jones (00:26:57): They have nice catering too, Rob Collie (00:26:59): Yeah and he was totally right to leave. Brian Jones (00:27:04): I always remember getting super nervous to present stuff for those. Once it was actually, it was one of our XML ones where I was trying to convince, it was my attempt to get us to create an XML file format, which actually ended up, obviously, happening. But I got an engineer to go to work with and we had Word through an add-in, start to write to XML. And it was just a basic XML format. And then I built all of these... it was like asp.net tools that would go and then create an HTML version of the Word doc that was editable. And it also even created, I think it was called WHAP, I don't remember, like a tech for phones. It was back when you didn't have the rich feature phones, but these basic ones. Brian Jones (00:27:41): And so I created this thing that was almost like a SharePoint site. So you could take all your Word docs, go through this add-in, and then you could actually get an HTML view of them to edit it and a phone view of them to go and edit it. Brian Jones (00:27:51): I think it was probably 2002 or 2001, but I was so excited to go and show that at the offsite because I was like, "Okay, this is where I make it, man. Everybody's going to be so excited about me." But I don't know. I think everybody was excited about Bluetooth at that point or something. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:28:05): Oh yeah Bluetooth, WHAP was so 15 minutes ago. So there's a few, irresistibly funny or interesting things I want to zero in on from that era before we come back to present, and we're definitely going to come back to present, for sure. Rob Collie (00:28:21): First of all, we went to a conference like some W3C sponsor. I don't think it was necessarily W3C affiliated, but it was the XML conference. Brian Jones (00:28:31): The one in Baltimore? Rob Collie (00:28:32): Yes. Rob Collie (00:28:33): Okay. Now two very, very, very memorable things happened at that conference. I bet you already know one of them. But the other one was, and we're just going to make this all this anonymous person's fault. Okay. We're not going to abdicate any responsibility. And we're just going to talk about our one coworker from Eastern Europe who brought his wife and they had vodka in their hotel fridge, or freezer, or something like that. And every day I would wake up and say, "I am not going to get suckered into that again." Rob Collie (00:29:12): And then the next day I would wake up and say the same thing. That was a tough trip. Brian Jones (00:29:16): I definitely remember that. Rob Collie (00:29:18): Even on my young, relatively young, body at the time that... Trying to keep up with that, that was difficult. But the single most outstanding memory from that conference, and we will also leave this person anonymous. But there was an executive at Microsoft who was hotter on XML than either you or I, which is hard to believe, right. And we ended up with the sponsored after hours session at this conference. You remember this? You see... Brian Jones (00:29:45): I do. Rob Collie (00:29:46): You know where we're going. Okay. So this was a 30 minute sponsored by Dell or something. Right. It was a 30 minute session, at 5:00 PM, at the end of a conference day where everyone's trying to go back and get to the bars or whatever, right.? But, it's a Microsoft executive, it's Dell sponsored, we'll show up. And the plan was at the end of this 30 minute talk given by this executive, he was going to bring all of us up on the stage to show everyone the team that had done all of this, right? Great plan. Except it was the worst presentation in history. I remember it running for two hours. It was so bad that we started off with 200 people in the room and at the end of it, and I'm just like an agony the whole time cause like I'm associated with this, right? Rob Collie (00:30:31): At the end of these two hours, or what felt like two hours anyway, it was easily 90 minutes. There's five people left in this room of 200 and it's not like the presentation is adapted to the fact that it's a smaller audience. It's just continued to drone on exactly as if everyone was there, right? And I'm sitting here thinking, "Okay, he's not going to call us all up on this stage. There's been more people on the stage than in the audience. If he does this, he's clearly not going to do that." And then he did and we all had to parade up there and stand there like the biggest dodos. I've never been more professionally embarrassed I don't think, than that moment. Rob Collie (00:31:14): And we're all looking at each other as we get up out of our seats like, "Oh my god." Brian Jones (00:31:19): I definitely remember this. Rob Collie (00:31:22): I don't see how you could have forgotten. Brian Jones (00:31:23): Well, yeah. And the person that we're talking about is actually one of my favorite people on the planet. I totally... I love this guy. I view him as like a mentor and everything, but... Which makes me remember it even more. Brian Jones (00:31:34): I think it was just, there was so much excitement. There'd been so much build up to this and this was like a kind of crescendo right? Of bringing this stuff. We probably should have had it a little bit shorter. Rob Collie (00:31:46): I mean when it reaches the point where clueless, mid twenties, Rob Collie is going, "Oh no, this is not the emotional, this not the move." You don't do it. Brian Jones (00:31:58): I'm no longer excited about being called up. Rob Collie (00:32:04): So from my perspective, you kind of parlayed that experience of the XML and all that kind of stuff. I think you did a really fantastic job of everything you guys did on that product. Again, it was the relevance that ultimately fell flat for both of us right. I guess in the end, the excitement with XML wasn't really all that appreciably different from the excitement about Bluetooth. I mean, it's everywhere, right? XML is everywhere. Bluetooth is everywhere and neither one of them really changed things in terms of what Excel or Word should be doing. It seemed like you played that into this file format second act. And I think very, very, very effectively, actually there was a little bit of controversy. Rob Collie (00:32:43): Let's set the stage for people. This was the 2007 release of Office where all the file formats got radically overhauled. This is when the extra X appeared on the end of all the file names, right? Brian Jones (00:32:58): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:32:58): There was a controversy internally. Kind of starting with Bill actually. That we shouldn't make well-documented transparent file format specs, right. There was this belief that the opaque file formats of the previous decades was in some sense, some big moat against competition. And of course, a lot of our competitors agreed. Tailor out in the public saying, "Yes, this is a barrier to competition. It's a monopolistic, blah, blah, blah." We, Microsoft had just gotten its ass kicked in the Anna Truss case. So it was really interesting. I credit Brian, your crew, with really advocating this very effectively. That's a difficult ship to turn. First of all, you got all these teams to buy into all this extra work, which no one wants to do. But when it's not even clear whether you have top level executive support, in fact, you might actually have C-suite antagonism towards an idea. To get it done. That's a career making achievement. I'm sure you remember all of that. Right. But what are your reactions to that controversy? Do you remember being in the midst of that? Brian Jones (00:34:12): I do. It was definitely a long running project. It evolved over quite a number of years. The beginning of it was, in that previous release, the XML stuff you and I were talking about was more about what we called "Custom XML". Right? So people would go and create for themselves. But in that same release, we had Word, we outputted an XML format that was our definition, which we called "Word ML" and Excel did a similar thing. Words' we try to make full fidelity. So you could save any word document in the XML format. Excel's was kind of a tailored down, it was less about formatting, it was more, "Hey, here's like..." It's almost like, "Here's a better version of CSV, right. But we're going to do it as XML." And so we already had a little bit of that. Brian Jones (00:34:53): And the whole reason we were looking at that was, on the Word side, for instance, a lot of the customer issues that we'd get where people would have corrupt files, they were corrupt because they there'd be some add-in that they had running or some third party app that was reading and writing word files. The files were fairly brittle and complex. The binary format... The binary format was written back in the days of floppy disks, right? So the top priority was how quickly can you write to a floppy disk and read from a floppy disc, right? It wasn't about, how easy is this for other people to go and read and write? Not because it was on purpose, make it hard. It was just the primary bid is let's get this thing so it's really easy to read and write from floppy, right? Brian Jones (00:35:31): And so in Word, we were like, "Wow, I think that there's a bigger opportunity here for an ecosystem around Word if we make it easy for people to read and write Word docs and build solutions around them." And so then the next release, the Excel team was looking at doing some big changes around a lot of the limitations, like how many rows you could have in columns, right. Lengths of like formulas and things like that. Right. And so there was this thing where the Excel team was like, "We are going to need to create a new file format." And on the word side, we thought this XML thing was great. We want to move to that as our new format. Brian Jones (00:36:01): And so everything kind of came together and it was clear. Hey, this is going to be the release that we are going to go and rev our file format, which we hadn't done in a while. This is also the release of the ribbon. So there were two really big major changes in that product, right? It was the new file format and the ribbon. It's funny. I still refer to it as the new file format, even though it's 15 years old. Rob Collie (00:36:23): Yeah. It's the new file format it's still new, yeah. Brian Jones (00:36:25): I still call it that, which is kind of nuts. But I think that the controversies you were talking about was really more of a... Boy, this is a really big deal for the product. We had changed file formats before in the past and not necessarily gotten it right. And there were a lot of challenges around compatibility and stuff. And so there was just a lot of worry of let's make sure you all have your stuff together here, right? Like let's make sure that this doesn't in any way break, stop people from wanting to upgrade to the new version. But it went really well. The whole goal of it was let's get something that we think third parties can go and read and write, and this is going to help build an ecosystem. And a new ecosystem run Office. Office already had big ecosystem with VBA and COMM add-ons and stuff like that, right.? But we won't have this new ecosystem around our file formats as a thing. That's why we chose... There's a packaging layer, which is all zip based. So if people haven't played around with it that XLSX, you can just put a .zip at the end and double click it. And it's just a zip file. And you can see a whole bunch of stuff inside of it. Right? Rob Collie (00:37:23): Yeah. If you're listening, you haven't done that go right now, run don't walk, grab an Excel file or a Word file, whatever. Go and rename the XLSX or BPTX, go ahead and rename it so that it ends in .zip and then open it up and you'll be blown away. Thomas Larock (00:37:38): PowerPoint is my favorite when I have to find some unknown setting that I need and I can just search through the whole thing. Yep. Rob Collie (00:37:45): Or all the images. You want to get all the images out of the PowerPoint file. It's just a zip file that has a bunch of images in it. Right. Brian Jones (00:37:50): So I also did this for backpack. It's the same thing. You can crack open the backpack by renaming a zip file... Thomas Larock (00:37:58): An actual physical backpack? What are we... what are we talking about here? Brian Jones (00:38:03): Ah yeah. Rob Collie (00:38:03): This is the digital acetate that is over the top of the entire physical world that you aren't aware of. Thomas Larock (00:38:08): Digital acetate, that's it? That's it. That's where the podcast peaks. Right? Those two words. We're all going home now. Brian Jones (00:38:19): Yeah. No. A SQL server, there's DAC pack, which is just the, say database schema. Then there's a backpack which has the data and the schema combined. But you can, if you rename them . zip, you can crack them open to see the XML that makes up those forms. So it's not just office products. Rob Collie (00:38:37): We ended up standardizing the entire thing, but that packaging format, it was called OPC, Open Packaging Convention, or something like that. It was something that we did in partnership with a Windows team. It's part of the final ISO standard for our file format. And then there were a lot of other folks that went and used that exact same standard. Because it's a really easy way of you have a zip package. You can have a whole bunch of pieces inside of it, which are XML. And then there's this convention for how you can do relationships between the different pieces. So I can have a slide. That's an XML and it can declare relationships to all the images that it uses. And that way it's really quick, easy to know, okay, here's all the content I need to grab if I want to move pieces of it outside of the file. Rob Collie (00:39:16): So the single coolest thing I've ever done with, we'll just call it your file format Brian. We'll just pretend that it was only you working on that. Brian Jones (00:39:23): Just me yeah, I was pretty busy, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:39:27): So the very, very first version of Power Pivot, first of all, your file format, the new file format made Power Pivot possible. We needed to go and add this gigantic binary stream of compressed data and everything, everything about Power Pivot needed to be saved in the file. At the beginning of the project, everyone was saying, "Oh, no, we're going to save it as two separate files." And I'm like, "Are you guys kidding?" The Pivot cache, for instance, is saved in the same file. You can't throw a multi file solution at people and expect it to... This was actually like Manhattan project, just to get that stream saved into the same file. It was pretty crazy. However, when it was done, there was something really awesome I wasn't aware of until the very end, which was, first of all, you could open up a zip file and just tunnel down and you would find a file in there called item one.data. Rob Collie (00:40:21): Okay. That was the Power Pivot blob. That was everything about the Power Pivot thing. And it was by far the biggest thing in the file, like it was like 99% of the file size was what was there. However, as this backup, someone had decided, I had nothing to do with this, to save all of the instructions. I think it's called XML for analysis XMLA. All of the instructions that would be required to rebuild exactly that file, but without any of the actual binary data in it. So it was a very, very small amount of XML. Okay. So here's what we would do because there were no good automation, no interfaces, no APIs. If we needed to add like 500 formulas to a Power Pivot file, you could go through the UI and write those 500 formulas, type, click, type, click, type, click. Rob Collie (00:41:08): Okay. So what we would do, and my first job outside of Microsoft, is we would go in there and we would edit that XML backup and add all the formulas we wanted in it. And by the way, I would use Excel to write these formulas. I would use string concatenation and all of that kind of stuff to write these things. It was very, very, very sensitive, one character out of place in the whole thing fails. So you make those changes. You save the file, reopen it, nothing happens because it's just the backup. Okay. So then you've got to go and you've got to create a zero byte item one.data file on your desktop and you copy it into the zip file and overwrite the real item one.data, therefore deliberately corrupting the primary copy. So when you reopen the file it triggers the backup process and it rehydrates with all of your stuff, it was awesome. Rob Collie (00:41:57): And then a couple of releases of Power Pivot later, suddenly that didn't work anymore and I was really pissed. But it just really shows you, it opens up so many opportunities that you never would have expected. And even a hack like that, that's not the kind that you'd be really looking for, but the fact that something like that even happens as a result of this is really indicative of what a success it was. Brian Jones (00:42:19): Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of those things where, I love building platforms, like that's my favorite part of the job. It's all those things that you see people do that you never would have predicted. Right? That's just so exciting. PowerPoint had this huge group of folks that would go and build things like doc assembly stuff, right. Where they go and automatically build PowerPoint decks on demand, right? Based on who you're going to go and present to cause they've just shredded the thing. In fact, when we did the ISO standardization, it was a 6,000 page doc that we had to go. And we built and reviewed with a standards body and we did it over about a year. Which sounds nuts, a 6,000 page doc in about a year. And the way that we were able to do that is there was never really a 6,000 page doc. There's a database where there's a row for every single element and attribute in this, in the whole schema, that would then have the column which is the description, which would just be the word XML. Brian Jones (00:43:09): And so we could, on demand, at any point, generate whatever view or part of the doc we wanted. So we'd say, "Hey, we're going to go in now, review everything that has to do with formatting across Word, Excel and PowerPoint." And so we just click a couple buttons and the database would spit out a Word doc that was just that part. Everybody could go and edit it cause we were using the structured elements we'd added to Word, which is called content controls, which was the next version of that XML stuff that we had to deprecate. And then the process, as soon as you'd finish editing that Word doc, we just submit it back. The process would go back and shred that Word doc again and put it all back in the database. And so we really used the file format to bootstrap documenting the file format. Rob Collie (00:43:48): And then when you dump a 6,000 page document on someone, they have no choice. But to just say, yep, it looks good to us. Brian Jones (00:43:55): Well, there was a pretty, incredibly thorough review still. It was just pretty impressive. The final vote that we had in Geneva, the process leading up to that, the amount of feedback that we got. Cause basically the ISO, you can kind of think of it like the UN, you go and show up and every country has a seat, right? I mean, not everybody participates, but anybody that wants to can. And so yeah, we had to respond to thousands of comments around different pieces, things that people wanted to see changed. Rob Collie (00:44:22): Yeah. I can imagine, right. Think about it. You just said at the final vote in Geneva. That's a heavy moment man. Thomas Larock (00:44:29): Yeah. That threw me off for a second. I thought, for sure, you were talking Switzerland, but now thinking that was just a code name. Rob Collie (00:44:38): No, I think, I think he was actually in Switzerland. Brian Jones (00:44:40): In Switzerland. Rob Collie (00:44:41): Have you seen the chamber where they do these votes? It looks just like the Senate from episode one of Star Wars. It's just like that. It's pretty heavy. Brian Jones (00:44:51): The little levitating... Rob Collie (00:44:53): The floating lift. Yeah. I think they call that digital acetate. I think that's what they call that. By the way on the Excel team, the way I came to look at the new file format and the open architecture of it, again, this this will show you how quickly I had turned into the more cynic side of things. Well, okay. We're going to be changing file formats. And we're doing that for our benefit because we didn't have enough bits allocated in the 1980s version of the file format that was saved to floppy disc, as you pointed out, right. Who could ever imagine having more than 64,000 rows, it's just inconceivable or 250 columns or whatever, right.? Because we hadn't allocated that. We'd made an engineering mistake, essentially, we hadn't future-proofed. So we need to make a file format change for our benefit, right. To undo one of our mistakes. And the way I looked at it was, "Ooh, all this open file format stuff, that'll be like the 'Look, squirrel!'" To distract people and to sort of justify, while we went and did this other thing, which, ultimately it actually went pretty well. The transition for the customers actually wasn't nearly as bad, because we actually Took it seriously. Rob Collie (00:46:03): The transition for the customers actually wasn't nearly as bad because we actually took it seriously. We didn't cut any corners. We did all the right things. Brian Jones (00:46:07): Well, there were several benefits too. We were talking about all the kind of ecosystem development benefits, but the fact that the file was zipped and compressed right, it meant that the thing was smaller. And that was all of a sudden, it was no longer about floppy discs. People are sharing files on networks. And so actually being able to go and have a file that's easier to share, send over network because it's smaller was a thing. Brian Jones (00:46:26): There were a couple of things that we were able to go and highlight. There's also a pretty nice thing where it was actually more robust because it was XML, and we split it into multiple pieces of XML. It meant that even if you had bit rot, you would only lose one little piece of the file, whereas with old the binary format, you had some bit rot and the whole thing is impossible to open up.There are a couple of things that were in user benefits too, which helped. Rob Collie (00:46:50): And ultimately, on the Excel side, the user got a million row spreadsheet format and the ability to use a hell of a lot more than like 14 colors that could be used in a single spreadsheet or something. It was .like a power of two minus two, so many bizarre things. Like Excel had more colors than that, but you couldn't use more than a certain subset in a- Brian Jones (00:47:10): At a time, yeah. Rob Collie (00:47:10): -In a single file. So yeah, there were a lot of benefits. They just weren't- Brian Jones (00:47:15): It's not like it's an explicit choice. It's just that at the time somebody is implementing something, you're right in a way, assuming, "Oh, this is fine. This is enough. I'll never have to worry with this issue." Rob Collie (00:47:25): Why waste the whole byte on that? When you can cram four different settings into a single byte. If you read the old stories about Gates and Allen programming up at Harvard, they had these vicious head-to-head competitions to see who could write the compiler or the section of basic in the fewest bytes possible. This was still very much hanging over Microsoft, even the vestiges of it were still kind of hanging over us even when I arrived. But certainly in the '80s when the Excel file format was being designed for that rev, it was still very much like, "Why waste all those bits in a byte?" "Let's cap it at four bits". Thomas Larock (00:48:05): In that blog series from Sinofsky, he talks a lot about that at the early start. And I'm at a point now where he's talking a lot about the code reuse because the Excel team, the Word team, I guess PowerPoint, but all these other teams, were all dealing with, say, text. And they were all doing their own code for how that text would be displayed and shown. And Bill would be the one being like, " This is ridiculous". "We should be able to reuse the code between these products". And to me, that would just be common sense. But these groups, Microsoft just grew so rapidly so quickly, they were off on their own, and they have to ship. I ain't got time to wait around for this, for somebody to build an API, things like that. I'll just write it myself. Brian Jones (00:48:50): It's a general thing that you get as you get larger where the person in charge that can oversee everything is like, "Well, these are all my resources", and, "Wow, I don't want three groups all building the same thing". But then when you get down, there's also a reality of we're just going to have a very different view on text and text layout than Excel. And Excel is not going to say, "I want all of that code that Word uses to lay out all of their content to be running for every single cell". Right? That's just suboptimal. And so it's always this fun conversation back and forth around where do you have shared code and reuse and where do you say it's okay for this specific app to have this more optimized thing that might look the same, but in reality, it's not really the same. Rob Collie (00:49:33): Brian, do you remember the ... I'm sure you do, but I don't remember what company they were from. But at one point in this file format effort, these really high priced consultants showed up and went around and interviewed us a couple of times. Do you remember that phase? It was like- Brian Jones (00:49:51): Was that towards the end? There was a couple summary stories that were pulled together just to talk about the overall processes. It was actually after the standardization. Rob Collie (00:49:58): I remember this being at the point in time where it was still kind of a question. whether we should do it. Brian Jones (00:50:02): I don't remember that. Rob Collie (00:50:04): The thing I remember really vividly is a statement that Chris Pratley would make over and over again, this encapsulated it for me. I came around to seeing it his way, which was the file format isn't the thing. That's not the moat. The thing that makes Office unique is the behaviors of the application. It's not the noun of the file format. It's the verb of what happens in the app. It's instructed to think that even if you took exactly the Excel team today, every single person that's already worked on it, and said, "Hey, you have to go rebuild Excel exactly". There's no way that version of Excel would be compatible with the one we have now. It would drift so much. Rob Collie (00:50:43): You could even have access to all the same specs. We would even cheat and say, "Look, you can have access to every single spec ever written". So? It was clearly someone had thought it was time to bring in like a McKinsey. They were all well dressed. They were all attractive. They were all a little too young to be the ones sort of making these decisions. It was just really weird to have them show up, three people in your office. Like, "Okay, I'll tell you what's going on". Brian Jones (00:51:11): I can totally imagine. It's funny I don't remember that. There were several rounds of analysis on how we were doing it, what we're doing and making sure we were doing it the right way. But yeah, Chris is spot on. I mean, your point about rebuilding it, that's essentially what we've been going through for the past five plus years around our web app. It's a lot of work. Unfortunately, we can't let it drift. The expectation from everybody is, "Hey, I learned the Wind 32 version. When I go to the web, I want it to feel the same. I don't want to feel like I'm now using some different app." Rob Collie (00:51:44): What an amazing, again, like a Manhattan project type of thing, this notion of rewriting Excel to run on the web and be compatible. Brian Jones (00:51:55): Yeah, with 30 years of innovation. Rob Collie (00:51:56): Yeah. That started in the 2007 release. Excel services, the first release of Excel services was 2007. And this whole thing about shared code, like what features, what functions of Excel, what pieces of it were going to be rewritten to be quote unquote "shared code"? And shared code meant it was actually server safe, which none of regular desktop Excel written in the early '80s, still carrying around assembly in certain places, assembly code of all things, right? Excel was not server safe. It was about as far from server safe as you could get. And so to rewrite this so ambitious without breaking anything. Oh my God. What a massive ... This dates back, gosh, more than 15 years. Brian Jones (00:52:45): Yeah. I'd say like the first goals around it were a bit different, right? It wasn't a web version of Excel. It was like BI scenarios and how can we have dashboards and Excel playing a role in dashboards. But yeah, I'd say since I joined, it was probably maybe a half a year or a year into when I joined, we just made the decision to shift a huge chunk of our funding to the web app. It was just clear that we need to make even more rapid progress. If you go, we have a site where you can go and see all the features that are rolling out there. It's incredible. And it's just because of the depth of the product. "Wow that's so many features you've done. You must be almost done". But then you look at everything else that's still isn't done yet. Brian Jones (00:53:23): Now thankfully, we're getting to the point where we can look at telemetry and say, "Hey, we've got most people covered." Most users, when we look at what they do in Windows, they could use the web app and shouldn't notice a difference. But there still is a set of things that we're going to keep churning through. So that'll continue to be a huge, huge investment for us. But yeah, the shared code strategy, we have an iPhone version, an iPad version an Android version. We've got Excel across all platforms. And because of the shared code, when we add new features, the feature crew that's working on that, they need to have a plan for how they're going to roll out across all those platforms, clearly levered shared code. But they also need to think through user experience and stuff like that too. Clearly a feature on a phone is going to behave differently than it's going to behave on a desktop. Rob Collie (00:54:05): Part of me, just like, kind of wants to just say, "I don't even believe that you've pulled that off, there's no way". It's kind of like, I've never looked at the Android version, and until I look at the Android version, I'm just going to assume it's not real. This is why it's one of the hardest things imaginable to have a single code base with all these different user experience, just fundamental paradigms of difference between these platforms. Like really? Come on. Brian Jones (00:54:34): It was a massively ambitious project. Mac shifted over maybe three years ago. And that's when, all of a sudden, in addition to a bunch of just features that people have been asking for that we'd never been able to get to, the massive one there was we were able to roll out the co-authoring multiplayer mode for Excel. Rob Collie (00:54:50): Multiplayer. Brian Jones (00:54:52): That's the term I like for co-authoring. It's more fun. Rob Collie (00:54:55): Yeah. It's like MMO for spreadsheets. Brian Jones (00:54:57): Yes. We were able to get that for the Mac. I mean, all of our platforms. One of us can be on an iPad, an iPhone, the web app, and we'll all see what we're doing in real time, making edits and all of that stuff. That alone, if you want to talk about massive projects, 30 years of features and innovation, basically that means we had to go and teach Excel how to communicate to another version of Excel and be very specific about, "This is what I did." "Here's the action I took." And that is massive. There are thousands and thousands of things you can do in the product. So getting it so that all of those versions are in sync the entire time, and so we're all seeing the exact same results of calc and all of that. That itself was a huge, massive project. Rob Collie (00:55:37): Take this as the highest form of praise when I say I don't buy it. I can't believe it. Brian Jones (00:55:44): I hope everybody's okay that we just talked for like an hour on just like listening to somebody at a high school reunion, I think, or something. Is this like me talking about how great I played in that one game? And you're like, "Yeah, that was a great basket". Rob Collie (00:55:54): Yeah. "Man, my jumper was on". the thing that's hard to appreciate, I think, is that you got to come back to the fact that we're talking about the tools that everyone in the world uses every day, that we rely on. And I think being gone from Microsoft for the last 12 years, I'm able to better appreciate that sense of wonder. This isn't just you and I catching up, I don't think. People enjoy, for good reason I think, hearing the stories of how these things came to be. People don't know by default how hard it was to get to a million rows in the file format. If you're like a robot, you're like, "I don't care how I got here. I just care what it is", then you're not listening to this show. We call it data with a human element. Robots can exit stage left. I think you should feel zero guilt. This isn't just self-indulgence. Brian Jones (00:56:55): Well, on the off chance everybody else ... I've listened to a lot of Rob's other podcasts, and they're awesome. So if you're bored with this one, it's okay. Go check out some of the other ones. They'r
The Windows 11 livestream happened last week, and the big news there is just about every computer older than 2017 will require you to upgrade your hardware to use Windows 11. This is bad news and I am unhappy☠ Barry "I love tormenting people with pictures of beans" Dorrans reminds all of us that .NET Core 2.1 is End of Life at the end of August. I'm impressed support for .NET Core 2.1 lasted this long.
Shishir is as ahead of the technology curve as it gets, some of his ideas have revolutionized the way that tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and YouTube operate. Now, he's innovating again as the founder and CEO of Coda-an amazing integrated system that centers around creating Docs that are as powerful and actionable as Apps. He's also one of the most down to Earth human beings we've ever had the pleasure of sitting down with! References in this episode: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer SNL Skit Steven Sinofsky's book-Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution Coda Doc-No Code, Just a Coda Doc: How Squared Away Saves a Thousand Hours and $100K a Year Coda Doc-Rituals for Hypergrowth: An Inside Look at How Youtube Scaled Episode Timeline: 2:20 - Shishir's data path intersects with Rob's and the stories abound, Shishir passes on working for Google before it was Google 15:25 - Shishir has a random idea about advertising that eventually forms into some common advertising practices, Google woos Shishir back, and he ends up running YouTube! 27:25 - The value of a Computer Science degree is....debatable, an interesting definition and example of AI, and Nouns VS Verbs in naming products and features 41:00 - How Coda was formed and the amazing innovation that Coda is-it makes a doc as powerful as an app, and the importance of integration Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest is Shishir Mehrotra, and let me tell you, Shishir is a ringer of a guest. We met back at Microsoft in the 2000s where he was already entrusted with some pretty amazing responsibilities and was doing very, very well in those roles. About the same time that I left Microsoft to start P3, Shishir left Microsoft to go ... Oh, that's right ... Run YouTube. And he was at the helm of YouTube during what he calls the hyper-growth years where YouTube really exploded and became the thing that we know it is today. During this conversation, I discovered that it certainly sounds like he invented something about YouTube that we absolutely take for granted today and has been seen by billions, used probably billions of times per day. That wasn't enough for him, so he left YouTube after a number of years and started a new company called Coda. Rob Collie (00:00:55): And Coda is an incredibly ambitious product. You could say that in some sense, it's aimed at being a Microsoft Office replacement, but even that isn't quite right. It's in a little bit different niche than that. And, of course, we explored that in our conversation. We talk about his billion dollar mistake, quite possibly, literally, billion dollar mistake, not many people can make those. I was thrilled to discover that he and I have basically exactly the same philosophy about nouns and verbs in software. We talk about the antiquated notion that a computer science degree is somehow super important in product management roles, even at software companies. And just, in general, I couldn't get enough of it. He was super gracious to give us his time for this show, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. So, let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:42): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. Announcer (00:01:48): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host Rob Collie and your cohost Thomas Larock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:02:11): Welcome to the show. Shishir Mehrotra, how are you today? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:15): Oh, I'm great. Rob Collie (00:02:16): Are you coming to us from Silicon Valley? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:17): I am. Well, south of California. Been in my house and in this spot for about the last year. Rob Collie (00:02:23): When did we meet? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:24): You were working on Excel and I think at the time I was working on WinFS, the early days of Microsoft. Rob Collie (00:02:31): Oh, WinFS. Just completely unexpected sidelight. It was like 1998 or maybe 1999, we're in a review with Jim [Allchin 00:02:42] and all of his lieutenants. And the whole point of this meeting is to assassinate the technology I was working on. This was an arranged hit on MSI ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:54): [crosstalk 00:02:54]. On MSI. Rob Collie (00:02:55): ... On the Windows Installer, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:56): Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:02:57): And there are factions in this room that have had their knives, they've been sharpening them and they've arranged this moment so they can kill us. And, at one point, one of the complaints about us was our heavy use of the registry. Just poisoning the registry. Do you remember a guy named Rob [Short 00:03:15]? Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:15): Yeah, of course. Rob Collie (00:03:16): I really liked Rob Short. I thought he was awesome. He was a tough guy, but also really fair and funny and friendly at the same time. And he's been sitting in this meeting for hours because he has to, and he's just totally tuned out. Of course he would be, right? It's not about him. And then, this mention of the registry as an attack on us comes up and Jim Allchin immediately whirls around to Rob and goes, "Now you see, this is what I'm talking about. Our storage system is such a piece of shit." And he starts ripping it to Rob and Rob's having to wake up from his trance. It's like suddenly the guns can swing so fast in those meetings. Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:55): I mean, that was a use case that Bill and Jim and so on all tried to push on WinFS, but it was one we actively resisted. It's a hard one. Rob Collie (00:04:02): It is. The worst thing in the world is to have state stored in multiple places that have to go together with each other. Right? That just turns out to be one of the hardest problems. Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:11): It's such a critical element of the operating system. And you end up with all sorts of other issues of what can run on what and ... Rob Collie (00:04:17): And it's funny. The registry was basically my introduction to the entire Win32 platform. When I was running the installer, that's all I knew about. I knew about the type library registrations and the registry. I knew it in class IDs. And I could follow those things. I could follow that rabbit's trail from one place to another without ever really understanding what a class ID was. Right? It was just the registration of an object, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:40): Right. Rob Collie (00:04:40): I didn't learn that until years later. So funny. But then we crossed paths again. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:45): SQL. Rob Collie (00:04:46): I remember how it happened. Ariel [Nets 00:04:49] came into my office and said, "Hey, there's someone important who's going to need some information from you." And I go, "Okay." And he said something like, "He's a real rising star here, so make sure you give him everything he needs." And I'm like, "Okay." Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:05): I don't think I know this half of the story. Okay. Rob Collie (00:05:09): And I think you were somehow involved with the potential acquisition that was going on at the time. Is that true? Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:14): You talking about in-memory BI? Rob Collie (00:05:16): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:16): Yeah. I was at the time ... Maybe for your listeners. So, my history, after WinFS folded and collapsed, and you can talk about that if you'd like, I ended up being unexpectedly merged into the SQL Server division. I ended up running what Microsoft called the program management team or SQL Server. And it was super interesting for me because I was never really a database guy. Everything I had worked on to that point was fairly end user-centered, infrastructure in the background. And I was surrounded by these people that really love databases. Actually, as a side note, I fell in love with databases because of Paul Flessner. Paul was on his way out. He was retiring that year and he had one last ... At the time we used to call them strategy days so that Bill and Steve and so on would post this annual review. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:01): And Paul Flessner, he decided this was going to be his last hurrah strategy, "I'm going to tell these people exactly what I think." He's in the middle of preparing for this and WinFS is folding up and he says, "While you're figuring out what you're going to do next, why don't you come help me write the strategy days presentation?" And he was really drawn to the idea of someone that actually wasn't in his organization doing it because I could speak my mind about whatever and I had no bias walking into it. And probably from his perspective, I would write whatever the hell he wanted and make it sound good. This guy, he's a database legend. He drove the Sybase acquisition that turned into SQL Server. And so, he had a list of ideas for how to think about the database market that many of which were pretty ascetical. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:44): And he spoke in very plain language when he's ... Actually, interestingly, he's retired. [inaudible 00:06:48] his woodworking. That's his thing. He builds chairs and tables are amazing. You can go buy them. As opposed to many techie database guys, he speaks in very plain language. Rob Collie (00:06:55): I love that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:56): And you just walk through like, "Here's how to think about the different workloads and here's what's happening in the industry and here's what's happening in data warehousing." Which wasn't really a term at the time and data warehousing was just emerging. And then, at the end of that process, we had a pretty successful strategy days and he said, "Why don't you run the PM team and help my new guy?" Ted Kummert came in to go and run SQL Server after Paul. And that's how I ended up in that spot. And as part of that, I ended up covering a lot of ... One of Paul's last statement was, "Data warehousing is not the same thing. Go do something different." And that's where people like Ariel and Amir and so on, that whole division, Tom ... And there was a bunch of people running that at that time ... Came into play. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:34): And then they had this idea that ... There's a lot of different things to know about SQL Server. SQL Server is not actually well-built for data warehouse and so most databases are not. And at the time, the raining wisdom was you needed a completely different architecture for business intelligence, which I guess we called OLAP back then. I don't know if that term is still used. Rob Collie (00:07:54): Yeah. Oh, we still do. We just hide it. It's a dirty word. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:57): Yeah. For the geeky folks out there, and the key difference being that instead of storing things row by row, you store things column by column and you also precalculate aggregate. So, you have some sense of what, I guess, nowadays called the cube. These things are likely to be great for, "We're going to precalculate the sum of orders for customers by region or whatever it might be." And then, Ariel and his brother Amir had this idea and they said, "Hey, we've got this strategic advantage at Microsoft, which is we own the front end and the backend of this architecture. On the backend, we need to be able to scale better and we need to move to column storage and do all this fancy stuff with cubes. But if you ask anybody where all of their analysis actually gets done, what do they say? Shishir Mehrotra (00:08:38): There's 1,000 reporting tools out there but everybody lives in Excel. And so, they said, "What if we were to find a creative way to pull these together? And I think at the time you were running this part of the Excel platform. And so, I was sent in to go figure out how to make this pitch. I mean, these guys really wanted to do an acquisition space and so on. And I was sent in to try to make the pitch. And, actually, the insight there was interesting. Amir came up with this chart, which I'm not really sure where it came from but he basically went and looked at the size of cubes of OLAP instances across a wide set of customers, including all of Microsoft. He pulled all of these different ones and he figured out that the biggest cube at Microsoft was this thing called MS Sales. Shishir Mehrotra (00:09:20): It was all the customer data from Microsoft if you remember well. And he said, "If you compress this down with column storage, I'm going to get the numbers wrong." But it fit inside tens of megabytes of storage, which was previously much, much larger if you did as row storage. And he said, "This is so small that it can fit in memory on a client, which was unheard of. Usually, the whole idea behind these systems was you have to query a server. The server is really big. At that time, a lot of systems go up and scaled out. There's often very big hardware back there as well. And he said, "Hey, I bet we could move to a model where the primary way that people do this analysis actually happens in that place where they actually want to do their work in Excel. So, I think that's where the other half of that conversation from my side was coming from. Rob Collie (00:10:06): Yeah. So, like you said, with Paul Flessner bringing you into right part of the strategy days stuff, Amir was, at that point in time, still using me in the same way. I had come over from the Excel world and so he was trotting me out every time he wanted someone to talk about Excel in a way that he couldn't be criticized. I was just almost the unfrozen caveman lawyer from Saturday Night Live, this Forrest Gump figure, "Listen, I don't know much, but I do know Excel and I know the people." You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:32): Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:10:33): Usually, because on the SQL side of the house, you couldn't argue with me about Excel. If I go back to the Excel world, they'd all argue with me but on the sequel side, I was unquestioned. So, Ariel was right, he said, "This guy is a mover and shaker. He's going places." And then, an eye blink later, you're at YouTube. When did you end up at YouTube? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:53): So, there's a personal story arc that goes along with this. I started a company out of school called [Sintrata 00:10:58]. It was an early version of what became AWS, Azure, so on, to utility computing. There's a whole generation company that started back in that '99, 2000 period. All of us were seven to 10 years too early. There was no virtualization, no containers and none of the underlying technology that actually made the cloud take off existed yet. As that was wrapping up is how I got to Microsoft but in that period, Sintrata was funded by this famous venture firm called Kleiner Perkins. Shishir Mehrotra (00:11:23): My primary investor was a [inaudible 00:11:24]. [inaudible 00:11:25] as Sintrata was wrapping up, he had suggested, "Why don't you go join another client or company?" And I said, "Which one?" And he said, "Well, you can look at all of them but the one that's really hot right now is these two Stanford guys are creating this new search engines called Google. Might want to check it out." And so this is back in 2002. And so, went over and spent some time with Larry and Sergey. And at the time, they hadn't hired a single outside product manager. And so, they wanted me to come in and start the product management team there. And, interestingly, I turned them down. My wife likes to call my billion dollar mistake. And instead I got drawn to Microsoft. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:01): As I got drawn to Microsoft, it's related to this story because I had an old boss of mine, I was an intern at Microsoft when I was in college, and he was starting this new thing called Gideon that was in the Office team actually. And the project would turn Office into a front end for business applications. So, it's had a lot of relevance to what ended up happening in that space. Rob Collie (00:12:18): Who was running Gideon? Who was that? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:20): Satya was our skip-level boss and this was much, much earlier in his career. And the guy actually running the project was a guy named John [Lacada 00:12:27]. I think he's gone now. I don't know where he is. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:12:29): I worked with John quite a bit over the years [crosstalk 00:12:32]. And this is how you know Danny Simmons. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:34): That's right. Danny was part of that team. Rob Collie (00:12:36): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:36): Yeah. Danny was on that team. I ended up working with Danny multiple times. Mike Hewitt was the one who was my intern manager who pulled me over to the project. Actually, as a fun version of fate or whatever, Mike now works at Coda. [crosstalk 00:12:48]- Rob Collie (00:12:48): Does he really? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:49): Yeah, he's an engineer here. He's great. He lives in Idaho. Once we really started hiring distributed, I finally managed to pull him into Coda. So, I turned on Google in that period and they didn't let up. Basically, every year they would call and say, "Hey, we got something down here for you." Gideon actually didn't have a very positive outcome. I showed up to work on this thing and nine months later, Sinofsky killed it. Given the priorities Office had at the time, it made reasonable sense, but it was my first education of big company politics and that's how I ended up working at WinFS. Rob Collie (00:13:20): Sinofsky has delivered many such educations of big company politics. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:24): Yes. Yes. For sure. For sure. Rob Collie (00:13:26): One of his primary contributions. Yes. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:27): So, are you reading his history of Microsoft [inaudible 00:13:30]? Rob Collie (00:13:30): I haven't been but now I will be. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:32): Oh, you should. It's good. Steve and I didn't always see eye to eye on everything, but his sense of history is really good. I don't know how the hell he remembered so much stuff, but he's basically publishing a new thing every few days, I think, maybe every week, and it's really good. Rob Collie (00:13:44): I both loved Stephen and was terrified of him at the same time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:48): It's common. Rob Collie (00:13:49): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:50): So, I'm working on SQL Server, but the reason all that matters is I was committed to Seattle. I had convinced my, at the time, fiance now wife, to move up to Seattle. She's a physician. So, she was doing her residency at Children's Seattle. And I convinced her to stay and do her fellowship and that all ran out. So, my clock ran out on Seattle. Said, "All right, now we're ready to move." And we had presumed we were going to move to the Bay area. So, it was just implied at the time, if you're going to be a techie, you got to move down to the Bay Area at some point. And I thought I was going to start another company. I was ready to do it again but Jonathan Rosenberg, the guy at Google who ended up running product there, he called me, he said, "Oh, if you're thinking about coming back, why don't you just come meet a few people?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:14:28): And I said, "No, I've been doing the big company thing for a while. I don't think I want to do that anymore." And he said, "No, no, no, no. Google is not that big a company." This is 2007, 2008. And he said, "Google is not that big of a company. Come just meet a few people and nothing else and have some good conversations." And so, I went down, met a bunch of people and this was Larry and Sergey but also Vic Gundotra was there then and Andy Rubin had just joined. And there was a bunch of ... That era of Google was being formed. And I end up, at the end of the day, in Jonathan's office and I tell him, "That was really entertaining, but it feels like a big company. I don't think this is for me." Jonathan's a pretty crass person. I won't use the same language he used but he said, "Oh, that's really effing stupid." Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:06): And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, look, and I'll just give you a really simple reason. All those people, they probably talk to you about Android and Chrome and all this other stuff but what they forget is that, at the heart, Google sells advertising and all the money in advertising goes to television. And nobody even watches those stupid ads." This may sound dumb, but maybe not to this group. I didn't know that. For me, I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life. And the idea that all of the money and advertising goes to television was news to me. And I got on a plane after work back to Seattle. I do a lot of my thinking on planes for weird reasons. You may be the same. I don't know. Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:40): But I get on the plane, I take out this little sheet of paper and this was a week after the Super Bowl, February of 2008, the Giants had just beaten the Pats in this epic Super Bowl. And I take out the sheet of paper, I write at the top, how come advertising doesn't feel like a Super Bowl every day? And the basic thing I was thinking about was we had our friends over for Super Bowl and while we're watching the game, the ad would come on, if somebody missed it, I would have to rewind for people to watch the ad again. It's like, "Oh, people actually like the ads in this one day of the year. What's different?" And so, I take out this sheet of paper, I end up writing this little position paper on what I think is wrong with advertising, without knowing really anything about advertising. Get home, it's pretty late. My wife's not up to tell me it was all stupid. Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:19): And then I wake up the next morning and I write to Jonathan. I say, "Hey, look, I really enjoyed the time. I don't think Google's for me, but I had some thoughts on something you said that stuck with me about why advertising sucks. And I'm sure you guys are already thinking about it, but I'm happy to send it to you if you'd like." And he's pretty early morning guy and so he read it and said, "Actually, nobody's thinking about this. Maybe you should come and I'll give you a small team and you can start running this." There were three ideas in the paper but the most simple one was how come ads don't have a skip button on them? And then, if you skip the ad, why don't you make it so that if you skip the ad, the advertiser doesn't pay? Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:50): You change all the incentives of advertising so that if the ads aren't good, then nobody gets paid if the ads are going to get better. And we're going to reset the balance and that's why it's going to feel like Super Bowl every day. He was like, "There's a lot of reward and be creative on the Super Bowl." So, J.R. convinced me. He's like, "Come down. Run this project." When I tell the story, it sounds eerily similar to how I ended up at Microsoft, like, "Oh, come run this small project." And it was this group of people, again, that misunderstood what ... This project was at the time called Mosaic. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:19): It became a product called Google TV. Chromecast, Google TV, Google Home, all comes out of that same group now. So, I showed up to work on that and very quickly in that process realized that this had actually very poor corporate sponsorship as well. In this case, Larry and Sergey thought this product was really, really dumb. I should have known as I was going through the interview process. And so, I told J.R. and I was excited about the project and I said, "Hey, maybe I should talk to Larry and Sergey about that, a bunch of ideas and other stuff if I met them." He's like, "Oh yeah, they're traveling this week." I was like, "Really? Okay." And every time I asked, he was avoiding me talking to them about the project. But, anyway, so I show up to work on that and it's very long story out, but this paper leads to me working on this project. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:57): And then, just, basically, we decided to merge the project into YouTube. And back in 2008, to a very side door, end up initially running the monetization team and eventually running the rest of the team for YouTube and then spending six years there and growing that business, which was ... At the time, when I joined YouTube, it was the weird stepchild of Google. It was generally thought of as the first bad acquisition that Google made. Until then we had this string of amazing acquisitions led to Maps and Android and all this stuff. YouTube was a weird one, right? It was the, we lost hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It was dogs on skateboards. We had a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom. Rob Collie (00:18:35): Mark Cuban famously said it's never going to go anywhere. Shishir Mehrotra (00:18:38): I have very fun stories with Mark Cuban. It was two years after I left YouTube where he finally wrote me and said, "Actually, I think you might've been right." He was quite convinced we were wrong about it. But, anyway, so I ended up working on YouTube. I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life, knew nothing about video and an infrastructure guy in the previous career, and ended up working on YouTube for six years. Rob Collie (00:19:02): It's a really interesting thing, right? Sometimes not knowing a lot about an industry or a topic is actually fantastic because you don't bring all the baggage and all the preconceptions. Of course, you can't just go all in on that. If you never know anything about anything, you're just someone wandering around the world with a loud voice. And so, getting the right balance between knowing what you should know and not knowing the things that will throw you off, if we could get that mix right at all times in our lives, we'd be in great shape, but it's tricky, isn't it? Shishir Mehrotra (00:19:32): You've roughly described my career. Almost every job I took was in a space I knew nothing about. And it's a very positive interpretation of this person who has to learn every piece of this. But yeah, I think a beginner's eye allows you to look at a space a little bit differently and it certainly worked out at YouTube. And we were walking the trends of the video industry in every way, how we thought about content, how we thought about monetization, and what is good content? What is not good content? Our views on these things were diametrically opposite of every assumption that had been made by every experienced person in that industry. I think we turned out to be more right than wrong. Rob Collie (00:20:07): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Now, a few things jumped out at me from that story. First of all, if we think about it with the perfection of hindsight, the clarity of hindsight, basically, Google ran this really sick reverse auction for your services where they like, "If you come here now we'll pay you a billion dollars." And you're like, "Hmm, no." Right? And then- Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:30): It wasn't obvious that it was going to be a billion dollars. Rob Collie (00:20:30): I know. Then they call you back a year later and they say, "Okay. Fine. How about 100 million?" And you're like, "Hmm, no." And they finally got it down low enough for you to take the job. I've never met anybody who has a story where you can even joke about a billion dollar mistake. So, I'll never have the opportunity to recruit you, but if I did, now I know how. Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:56): [crosstalk 00:20:56] blowing your offer. That's right. That's right. Rob Collie (00:20:59): And it's got to include the words, just come run this small, little team. Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:03): Yeah. Yeah. I get drawn to projects. I don't get drawn to the rest of it. So far it's worked out okay. But yeah, I get drawn to ideas. I mean, this is really only the fourth company I've ever worked for yet every transition was drawn by some idea that I couldn't stop thinking about. Rob Collie (00:21:17): That idea or position statement, is that in some way, at the beginning, the origin story of the skip button for ads? Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:27): Oh yeah. I mean, the skip button for ads it's now called TrueView. Back to your point on beginner's mind. So, I show up, I've got this idea around the skip button and actually it makes more sense for YouTube than it does for this Google TV thing that we were working on. So, there's totally reasonable outcome. I show up and my first meeting with the sales team, I'm maybe six weeks in, the head of sales, Susie, she says, "Can you come give a talk to sales team and just tell a little bit about your vision for YouTube." And we had a nice ... And I said, "Look, I don't think this is a good idea. I don't know anything about this part of the industry. So, I'm going to make a fool of myself." And she's, "No, no, no. You have got all these great ideas and they're fresh and different and why don't you come talk to them?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:04): And I go talk about a bunch of different ideas, and I talk about this one about skip buttons on ads. And one of the salespeople, who I've since become very good friends with, she raises her hand and she says, "Wait, I don't understand. Do you want none of us to make any money?" They thought this was the dumbest idea on the planet. You put a skip button on ads, people are going to hit the skip button. It's like that's what obviously is going to happen. And, basically, the entire sales force rejected this idea. And it took me three years to ship that feature because every person in the sales force thought it was such a dumb idea. I would get told, "You can come talk at the sales conference, but you're not allowed to talk about your stupid skip button idea. You have to talk about everything else." Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:43): And what turned out was ... This is actually another fun story in great product managers. I don't know if you still think of yourself as a PM, but I consider you to be a really strong product manager as well. But this is a story about a guy, Lane Shackleton, who actually now runs product at Coda. So, Lane was a sales guy. He was actually our primary sales guy at YouTube. And he really wanted to be a PM. And at the time, we had this really stupid policy where you weren't allowed to be a product manager at Google unless you had a CS degree. It was just part of the early, early viewpoint the founders had. Rob Collie (00:23:17): So relevant. Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:21): Right. So, you commiserate with this a lot. So, Lane comes to me and says, "I want to be a PM. How do I do it?" And I said, "Hey, look, I mean, I love you and I think you could do a great job but I've got this policy. And I got to make a really strong case if I'm going to get over the policy." And he said, "How about I just do it on the side? Do it as a trial run." He gave me an idea. I said, "Okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll let you try to be a PM, but you have to do it in your 20% time. And not in your 80-20% time, but you got to do a great job of your sales job and then you do this part. And the second criteria is you take whatever project I give you." Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:52): And he said, "All right, deal. What's the project?" I said, "Okay, I want you to work on this thing called skippable ads." And I said, "Look, the sales team thinks it's really dumb because the way that the division work, the engineering leader was like, "I'm not allocating stuff that the sales team thinks is dumb. And so, I can give you one engineer who is a new grad and that's it." But I have a playbook for you. I think you need to go and you just go talk to the AdWords team and get this thing out of the buying experience and then work on this with the analytics and figure just these couple pieces out. And we'll be able to ship this thing and we'll slowly build up the business. It'll be fine." Shishir Mehrotra (00:24:23): And so, he goes away and he comes back a couple of weeks later for his update. And I said, "Oh, how's it going? Did you talk to the AdWords team?" And he said, "No, actually, I decided that's not the problem here." And I said, "What do you mean? That was your job. Go talk to those different people." And he says, "Well, I've been thinking about it and I think the real problem here is the name is wrong." I was like, "The name? What are you talking about? We'll name this thing later. This is not that important." And he says, "No, no, I think the problem is that skippable ad is a value proposition to an end user but who buys advertising? The advertiser buys advertising. Skippable is actually a really poor value proposition to the advertiser. Why would I want my ad to be skipped? Right? And so, the reason you're hearing so much negative reaction if people don't understand why it's helpful to the advertiser." Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:06): And so then he came up with this idea and said, "Why don't we name it TrueView?" And I'm skipping a whole bunch of parts in the story, but we call it TrueView. That's what the ad for one is actually called. You have no idea what ads are called, right? Oh, there's ads on Google. Nobody knows [crosstalk 00:25:18] from AdWord. Rob Collie (00:25:18): Yeah. It's not a feature. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:19): But what's a sponsored story? And you don't know any of that stuff. You just know it's an ad. And he said, "So, let's focus on the advertising." Came up with this name TrueView. And the idea is very simple is you only pay per true views. You don't pay for the junk, you only pay for the real ones. Right? And all of a sudden this thing went from being, I'm not allowed to talk about it at sales conferences to the number one thing on the entire sales force [inaudible 00:25:42] all of Google. Beyond anything the average team was working on. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:45): And it was such a simple idea. And, by the way, the way the math works is very simple, it's most people do skip the ad. It's about 80% skip rates on those ads. So, four out of five times you see an ad, you probably have a skip button, but it turns out that the 20% of the time you don't is such high signal and so effective an ad that you can often charge something like 20 times as much for that view. And so, what you end up with is you end up with you just take that math and say, [inaudible 00:26:09] four times better monetization with a skippable ad than without a skippable ad. Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:13): It was not obvious that advertisers would be willing to pay that much more if they know you actually watched the ad but when you start ... But this is a good example, again, a beginner's mind and, Lane, I mean, this is one of his ... So, I've managed to convince the calibration committees and so on and turned to a product manager and turned into a great product manager. He joined me early on at Coda and now runs the product and design team here. Great example of coming fresh to a new problem. Rob Collie (00:26:36): Yeah. Well, if only he'd had a computer science degree, that idea would have been so much smarter. You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:43): Yeah. The crazy part, this is one of the most technical guys I know and he's like, "I don't understand. I write this stuff on the side. Why do I need a stupid degree for that?" Right? Rob Collie (00:26:53): I know. There was one time in my first three years at Microsoft where I used one piece of my computer science education, one time. I used O notation to prove that we shouldn't do it a certain way. And when I got my way after using O notation, it's like, "This is an O of N squared algorithm." I got to run around the hallways chanting, like, "Whoa, look, my education, it worked. It worked. It worked." And that was the only time I ever used any of that. So, no, that's a silly policy. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:25): Yeah. It was funny, when I was going to college, my parents were both computer scientists and I was one of those kids who grew up with a ... I never knew what I wanted to be. One week I was going to be a lawyer, then I was going to be a doctor, then I was going to be a scary period for my mom where I really wanted to be a taxi driver. I went through all the different periods. And then, I'm filling out my college applications and it says like, "What do you want to major in?" And I said, "Oh, I think I'll write down CS." I was into computers at the time and so I write down CS. And my dad says, "If you major in CS, I'm not paying for college." What are you talking about? I thought you'd be really excited. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:57): That's what you guys do. My dad now runs supercomputing for NASA. I thought this would be pretty exciting for you. And he says, "No, no, no. This is a practitioner's degree. I'm not paying for college unless you major in something where the books are at least 50 years old." And that was the policy. And so, I ended up majoring in math and computer science. And from his perspective, he paid for a math degree and I happened to get the CS degree for free. But his view was that ... Which is true ... Computer science changes so fundamentally every 10 years. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:22): And my classes the professors often taught out of the book that they're about to publish. The book wasn't even published yet and they're like, "Oh, here's the new way to think about operating systems." And it was totally different than what it was five years ago. I think there's a lot of knowledge in CS degrees but I actually think ... O notation is an example. I used to teach that class at school. That's math. That's not CS. Rob Collie (00:28:42): I know. Yeah. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:44): It's a very good way to think about isotonic functions but the actual CS knowledge is all but relevant by the time you graduate. Rob Collie (00:28:51): One thing that you said to me about your time at YouTube that stuck with me years, years, years, years later is that here we are at the tip of the spear, the head of this giant organization and YouTube eventually became giant, and with all this amazing machine learning and just so much algorithmic, not even complexity, but also just we don't even know what it's doing anymore. It's so sophisticated that we can't even explain why it's making these decisions but they're doing well, and yet every day we get together, we're looking at simple pivot tables and there's these knobs on the sides of these giant algorithmic machines that some human being has to set to, like, "Should we set it to six or seven?" And it's just this judgment call. And I just love that. That was, in a weird way, so reassuring to me that even at the absolute top of the pyramid of the algorithmic world, there's still a need for this other stuff. Shishir Mehrotra (00:29:43): The most fun example of this, backing for a moment, my dad, back to the story of me going into CS. At one point I had asked him, what is artificial intelligence? And he said, "Well, artificial intelligence is this really hard to describe field." I asked, "Why is that?" And he said, "Well, because it's got this characteristic that the moment something works, it's no longer AI." And so, AI is what's left is all the stuff that doesn't work. And so, you can use all these examples of when you have all regressions, it's like, "That's just math. That's not AI. We understand how it works." My favorite example with the kids is when you drive up to the traffic light, how does it know when to turn red and green and so on? Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:19): Oh, there's a sensor there. It just senses the cars there and so then it decides to turn red or green. That's not AI. I know how that works. I can describe it. It's a sensor. And so, we went through, I think, decades of time where the moment something worked, it stopped getting called AI. And then, some point, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say 10, we flipped it. And now, all of a sudden, anything that does math is AI. And it's amazing to me that we would look at some of these systems and it was literally a simple regression and we say, "Oh, that's machine learning." And it became very invoked. I think about it that way. Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:53): I mean, there are some really complicated machine learning techniques and the way our neural network works, which is the heart of how most of these machine learning techniques work is very complicated, but at the heart of what it's doing, it's approximation function for a multi-variable phenomenon. So, the most fun example I can tell you about your observation there is this project called DALS. DALS was an acronym for Dynamic Ad Load System where at the time, on YouTube, the rate at which we showed ads was contractually set. We would go negotiate with the creator and say, "Oh, ESPN, we want your content on YouTube." And we would say, "Look, our policy is we show ads every seven minutes." And they say, "No, our content is so good. We want it every two minutes." Shishir Mehrotra (00:31:32): And then, the Disney folks would have their own number. And so, there is this long line of contractual stuff baked into our ad serving logic that's like, "Oh, it's been two minutes. You have to show an ad." Because they all just thought they knew better of how good their content was. And so, one of the engineers had this idea and said, "This is dumb." We know our intentions are well aligned. Almost all our deals were rev share deals. We made money when the creator made money. And we know whether or not this is a good time to show an ad or not, why don't we turn this into a machine learning system and guess whether or not we should show an ad? So, it's called Dynamic Ad Load System. DALS was its acronym. So, the team goes off and this engineer goes off and builds this thing. Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:08): Lexi was his name. So, Lexi builds this thing and he brings it to one of our staff reviews. Every Friday, we had this meeting of IT staff. That's where we went through all the major stats for the business and including any major experiments that are running. If he brings something in and he says, "All right, before we launch this thing, I'd like to know what our trade-off function." The trade-off function in this case is, how much watch time are you willing to trade off for revenue? These are two primary metrics. At every moment we're going to decide, should we show an ad or not? And we have to make a guess at, "We think if we don't show an ad you'll watch for this much longer, if we do show an ad, there's a chance you'll leave but we'll make this much money. So, what's the number? How much should we trade off?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:45): This is a very typical question I would get in this forum. It's impossible to answer, how much would you trade off? Watch time, revenue. And so, I came up with a number and I put a slope on this chart and we decided two for one. I can't remember whether it was two points of watch time for one point of revenue. But whichever way it was, I do a slope and we got a lot of reaction. They're like, "Okay. Great." And they ran away from the room. "Okay. We have a number. We can go do our thing." And so, they come back a few weeks later and say that we're ready to launch. And I said, "Okay, so did you hit the number?" And they said, "Well, actually, we have some interesting news for you. Turns out in our first tuning of the system, we actually have a tuning that is positive on both watch time and revenue. And somehow by redeploying the system, we make more money and people watch longer." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:25): And I said, "Really? How does that happen?" And they said, "Well, we don't really know yet, but can we ship because clearly better than your ratio?" And I said, "Well, okay, you can ship but next week I want you to come back and tell me why." And so, next week they come back and I said, "Do you know why?" And they said, "Well, we don't know why, but we have another tuning and it's even better on both watch time and revenue. I was thinking we ship this one." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:47): I was like, "Okay, but please come back next week." This went on for four weeks. Right? So every week they would come back and they'd say, "Okay, we got this thing. It's even better on both. And we still have no idea why." And, finally, they figured out why. And it turns out that basically what was happening was the system was learning to push ads later in people's sessions. If you watch YouTube for a while, early on, you'll see very little advertising. But if you sit there and watch for hours and hours and hours, the ad frequency will gradually increase with a viewpoint of, this person's not going anywhere. They're committed, which makes intuitive sense, but it wasn't an input that we handed the system. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:18): And how did we figure that out? The pivot table. I notice that the ... What did we do? We went and charted everything we could out of the experiment group and in our experiment group and we just guessed at what is the way to figure out why is this happening? Because it's not a signal that we were intentionally giving the system, it's just the system got every other signal it could. And we looked at everything. I mean, is it geography? Is it tied to content? Is it age? Is it ... How is it possible that we're showing more ads and people are watching for longer? That story is a lesson in a number of different things. I mean, I think it was a great lesson in how when people think about machine learning systems, they miss this element of ... Any machine learning system is just a function. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:54): All the ML system does is take a very large set of inputs, apply a function to it and generate an output. Generally, that output is a decision, show an ad, don't show an ad. Self-driving car turn right or turn left. It's some decisions of, is this image a person or an animal? And that system is trained and is trained on a bunch of data. And at some point, somebody, usually fairly low in an organization, makes the tuning decision and says, "I'm willing to accept this much being wrong for this much being right." Generally called precision recall. More layman's term for it is you figured out your false positive rate versus your false negative rate for whatever system you're trying to figure out. But somebody has to make a decision. Shishir Mehrotra (00:35:30): It's usually three tunings, very deep in the system. And then, after that point, the system is unexplainable. You have no idea how this thing works. And so, what do you do then? You go look at a bunch of empirical data of what's happening and try to figure out, "What did I just do? I've got this thing and what's actually happening here?" And you try to figure out, is it doing what you actually want it to do? And all of that is done in fancy pivot tables. Rob Collie (00:35:53): Yeah. It's so funny, the AI, and you've said before, your dad, as soon as it reaches a equilibrium, it's not AI anymore. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:00): Right. Not anymore. Rob Collie (00:36:02): Now though, it seems like it's a funny thing that you built these systems that then figure things out and they seem to be working great but then they can't turn around and explain to you what they're doing. It's not built to explain. It's just built to do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:15): It makes some sense how the human brain works. Why did you do that? I don't know. I just did it. And when you're running a business, that's not an acceptable answer. I need to know why did it go that way instead of ... Why did it turn right? I need to know why. So, you end up with this interesting tuning and then you're constantly looking at charts of output, what is going on here? To try to figure out whether it's working the way you want it. Rob Collie (00:36:34): So, while we're on pivot tables for a moment, go back to your story about skippable ads. This is TrueView. Imagine how much better off we would be as a society if pivot tables had originally been named summary tables. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:50): Oh man. Rob Collie (00:36:51): You know? That one was blown. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:36:54): I actually tried to rename it stupidly. I mean, it was too late. It was way too late. And I fought that battle for way too long. It was a fool's errand to try to rename something that had been in the world for that long but what does it mean to pivot data? No one knows. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:08): It's now the insider's club handshake. Rob Collie (00:37:12): I know. I know. I think we probably lost half of the people who would have used them just in the name. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:17): It's interesting you say that because the way we do the equivalence in Coda, we don't use the term pivot at all. We call it grouping. We don't even call it a thing. Right? We don't give it a noun name. We give it a verb name. And it just turns out that grouping a table is a very understandable phenomenon. In Coda, our model of grouping doesn't require aggregates also turns out ... And the reason I don't love the word summary is I actually think most commonly what you want to do is you take a set of records and you say, "I've got a bunch of tasks. Let me sort them by in progress and done." And I still want to be able to see the tasks. And one of the things pivot table, I think screwed up, is that you can't see the tasks anymore. The moment you're in that world ... Rob Collie (00:37:55): Yeah. I agree. But given what was built, the pivot table implementation, right? Summary would have been the killer name, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:02): Would have been a much better name. What would you have named VLOOKUP to? Rob Collie (00:38:05): Oh, I don't know. Pivots is still relevant to me, VLOOKUP not as much. No. But like Bill Gates always pressing for the unification of grouping in Excel with pivots. And we were always like, "Hmm, no." And it became a running joke after a while, he'd be like, "To the extent that you guys on Excel ever do anything that I ask you." That would be his preamble to some of the things he would say to us. Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:33): I mean, I would say, nowadays, people use pivot for lots of things, but for our first year for the customer journey, our grouping feature was definitely the top of the list. And, honestly, there's a bunch of people who, like you said, never really understood pivot tables and could never compare the two, like, "Oh, that makes total sense to me. I drew up a table. That makes total sense." Then two, to show aggregates. Rob Collie (00:38:50): The way you zeroed in on noun versus verb, that actually has come up multiple, multiple times on this show. It's one of my things. My new hires, when they'd come to work for me on the Excel team, I would sit them down and say, "Listen, you are not allowed to introduce nouns into this product. If you want a new noun, you've got to come to me. You got to fight me for it. You can verb all you want." That was hard one knowledge. I was a noun guy coming out of computer science school. Computer science people love them some nouns. Entities. Just say the word entity and you get all gooey inside, but no, it's a verb world. Shishir Mehrotra (00:39:26): I make that specific statement, you can ask my team, all the time. You're going to add a new noun, you got to come through me. I mean, on YouTube, it was interesting because YouTube has three primary nouns, video, channel and playlist. And we spent forever ... For a long time video was the only noun that mattered. And it was a big debate over which one matters more, channel or playlist. And I made the team pick. You got to pick one. We picked channel, which is probably obvious. Playlists are these long forgotten feature of YouTube and channels are now a big deal. But that wasn't always true. Channels actually used to be a very small deal on YouTube. If you go back to what I do in 2008, yeah, you would publish a video, it's like, "A channel, whatever." Totally bit my fingers on this channel, but it has nothing else on it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:40:05): And, nowadays, all people care about on YouTube is like, "This is my channel. How many subscribers I have." And the same way with Coda, we've put a lot of energy into as few nouns as possible. We'd use common language for nouns, only brand the ones that you really, really, really want to brand. Because there are very few branded nouns in Coda. There's lots of incentives in product development that lead to it. In a lot of companies, you get promoted on it. Like, "I invented this thing. It's now Power BI. And it's now this pivot thing." And you get a lot of feedback loop because nouns are distinguishable but it doesn't help your customers. Rob Collie (00:40:37): Even the technology under the hood is screaming at you, "Noun me. Noun me." It's like, I've got this really cool data structure here. It's dying to be surfaced in the ... No, no, don't do that. That's not what we do. We do not surface the technology. That's not what we're here for, but it's a powerful instinct. Really powerful. Okay. So, Coda, that's the next chapter. And that's the next place where we crossed paths. So, I actually realized that it was six years ago. I visited you in the Valley six years ago. And the reason I know it was six years ago is because one of the people who was there in the early days with you, the very beginning. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:18): They're all still here, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:41:19): Okay. Good. So, got the feel that they will be long-timers. Yeah. It was a tight bunch. It was a tight crew. The two of you were joking to them, "Maybe we should go to Burning Man this year." And I was sitting there thinking to myself, I had been invited that year to a friend's bachelor party. He was going to Burning Man. And I didn't even speak up because I was so terrified of going. I wasn't even sure if I was going to go. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:42): Did you go? Rob Collie (00:41:42): I did. And that was 2015. So, that's how I know. It was also, I think, the first year that the Warriors had blown up down the NBA scene. So, we were sitting and watching the Warriors annihilate people after we talked. So, six years ago, you were pretty deep into this thing that's now called Coda. It was codename something else at the time that I kept getting wrong. Was it Krypton? Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:03): Krypton. That's right. Rob Collie (00:42:05): But I kept calling it Vulcan. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:08): The team had such a laugh out of that. Rob Collie (00:42:12): I kept forgetting it was Krypton and calling it Vulcan. So, why don't you explain both to me and to our listeners what the original vision was and how and if that's evolved over time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:25): By the way that meeting was, hey, super entertaining. Rob came in and described this as Vulcan as been repeated many times in the story. But it also was super informative because you came and gave a bunch of perspective. I think probably one of the most relevant to our last discussion, one of your most interesting observations that stuck with the team was you described this person and you said, "Hey, I can walk into a room and if I ask them just a couple of questions I can split the room into two groups of people very quickly." You used to call it the data gene. And your questions were, do you know what a VLOOKUP is or do you know what a VLOOKUP is? What a pivot table is? Bad for many of the reasons we just talked about, but for the perspective of understanding how humans are evolving and so on, it was actually quite insightful that these people you just can't keep them away. They will eventually figure these things out. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:11): And if you have that data gene, you will some point in your life intersect with these things and figure out what they are. The Coda founding story, so I was at YouTube and an old friend of mine, [inaudible 00:43:21] Alex DeNeui, now my co-founder at Coda, he and I have known each other for 20 plus years. We went to college together. And he's part of the founding team at Sintrata as well. Interestingly, we've worked every other job together, which is a fun pattern. So, he had started this company that got acquired by Google and he had just quit. And he was starting a new company and he'd come to me and he said, "Hey, my company's not doing that well. I'm thinking about pivoting to do something different. Can you help me brainstorm a new set of ideas?" So, we started brainstorming mostly about what he should do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:49): I was still relatively happy at Google, but I had told him, "If you pick something interesting, I'd be happy to invest or advise or help out in some way." Said this long list of ideas and we started brainstorming and at one point, one of us writes this sentence on the whiteboard, what if anyone can build a doc as powerful as an app? And that sentence ended up becoming the rallying cry for what became Krypton and then Coda. It's a very simple statement but it comes out of two primary observations. One is, I think the world runs on docs not apps. That if you go ask any team how they operate, any business, company person, so on, if you ask them how they operate, they'll immediately rattle off all the different packet software they use. "Oh, we use this thing for CRM and this thing for inventory. And we use this thing for pass tracking and so on." Shishir Mehrotra (00:44:32): And then, if you just sit behind them and watch them work for a day, what do they do all day? They're in documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and some communication tool. That's what they live in. And this first observation was one that was very deeply embedded in us because that's how we ran YouTube. I mean, YouTube, amongst other things was born right in the start of the Google Docs generation. I got the YouTube 2008, Google Docs is just coming out and, as I mentioned, we were the forgotten stepchild of Google, so we were allowed to do whatever we wanted but we could get no help in doing it. And so, we decided, for example, we would run our task management goal-setting process. We didn't like how OKRs worked. Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:09): I actually just published a whole paper on this last week. You can take a look. But we didn't like how OKRs worked. We wanted to do a different way. And so, how do we do it? We do in a big spreadsheet? I ran compensation differently at YouTube. I had this philosophy I call level independent compensation and the Google HR team allowed us to do it, but said, "We're building zero software for it." So, we did it in a network of documents and spreadsheets. One of the most fun example is if you hit flag on a YouTube video, for years, a flag on a YouTube video would show up as a row in a spreadsheet [inaudible 00:45:37] the person's desk. That's how we ran all these systems. We used to get made fun of. People are like, "Oh, look at these people. They're duct taping together documents and spreadsheets to run what became a multi-billion dollar division." I used to say like, "I actually think this is our strategic strength." Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:49): I mean, the reason we can plan so nimbly, the reason I can hire whoever I want, the reason we can adjust our flagging and approval system so quickly is because we didn't purchase some big bulky software to do it, we design it ourselves and turned it into something that then actually met our, at the time, current value system. So, this is observation number one, it's the world runs on docs not app, which is, by the way, not obvious to people but I feel fairly strongly about it. The second observation is that those documents surfaces haven't fundamentally changed in almost 50 years. The running joke at the company is that if Austin Powers popped out of his freezing chamber, he wouldn't know what clothes to wear or what music to listen to, but he could work a document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation just as well as anybody else could. Because everything we're looking at is metaphors that were created by the same people who created WordStar, Harvard Graphics and VisiCalc. Shishir Mehrotra (00:46:39): And we still have almost the exact same metaphor, which just seems crazy to me. In that same period of time, every other piece of software stack is totally different. An operating system from the '70s versus Android and iOS is unrecognizable. Databases, which we thought were pretty fundamental are completely different than they used to be. Things like search engine, social networks, none of these things even existed and yet the way that slide decks are put together, the way you navigate the spreadsheet grid and the way you think about pages and document is exactly the same as it was in the 1970s. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:10): So, you take the two observations, you stick them together and you say, "Hey, we [inaudible 00:47:13] runs on these docs, not applications." And those surfaces haven't changed in almost 50 years. Something's broken. What if we started from scratch and built an entirely new type of doc based on this observation that what we are actually doing with our docs is a lot closer to what we're doing with applications than not? That was the thesis we started with. I got personally obsessed with it. I couldn't stop thinking about it. And this went from, hey, let me invest, let me help, to I quit Google and went and started but at the time with Krypton and then eventually became Coda. Rob Collie (00:47:44): I'm sure he recruited you at some point by saying, "How about you just come run this small team over here?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:48): Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Rob Collie (00:47:51): Those are the magic words. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:52): We won't pay you at all. That's the ... Rob Collie (00:47:54): Something silly that occurred to me is that your Austin Powers metaphor might even be more accurate than you realize. We are now farther away, in terms of time, from the premiere of that '70s show, than that '70s show was from the time it represented. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:09): I like that. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:11): It's crazy. We passed that point six months ago. So, when did Austin Powers the first one come out? Sometime in the '90s? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:17): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:18): Right? And it represented a time probably 35 years before it? Probably 1964, maybe 1999. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:25): So, we're almost reaching the point where we're close to the Austin Powers movie as Austin Powers was to the time. So, clearly, if we rewind 35 years, we are what? We're in the '80s, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:35): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:36): You're right our documents basically look like that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:39): Yeah. You and I can probably geek out on this. And I get asked a lot about why did that happen? Lots of industries saw a change. And the database industry is a great example, you wouldn't expect the database industry to change that much. Codd wrote his book in the 1970s that's still the book that every database engineer you can find will have the book up on the shelf for Codd's relational databases, and yet things like OLAP came out and cubes and it turned into a Power BI. I think what happened in the document industry ... Well, two things. Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:05): One, every company that wanted to innovate in that space was a platform company whose primary interest was evangelizing a platform. Microsoft didn't really want to displace Lotus and so on with a new thing, they just wanted people to use Windows. It was very important that it actually be backwards compatible with everything at Soft. The other thing that happened is we live through what I think of as a period where we're beholden to file format. And so, one of my favorite examples is Steve Jobs and Apple. I've met a bunch of people that worked on the early iWork suite. And the iWork suite, Jobs came in with a bunch of new ideas. He's like, "This is dumb. We shouldn't have a spreadsheet that's one big universal grid. We should have a bunch of separate grids that are actually a little closer to tables." Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:45): And so, that's how numbers worked, actually, it's not actually one universal grid, it's a bunch of separate ones. And the way he did it with pages was a little bit different. And then, Keynote, which is probably the most popular of the three is actually different from PowerPoint in those really critical ways and none of the three took off. And why didn't they take off? I mean, Jobs was pretty smart and [inaudible 00:50:02] were pretty good. I think it was really simple reason. If I build something in numbers and then I want to send it to you, I have to assume that you have a copy of numbers and that you run on a Mac and that's not a safe assumption. It hasn't really been a safe assumption for a long time. And then, Google Docs came out. Rob Collie (00:50:16): Which, by the way, is fundamentally what YouTube did for video. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:19): That's right. Rob Collie (00:50:19): I had all these delivery ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:21): Plugin. Rob Collie (00:50:21): ... And Coda and pl ... I couldn't send you a video, trust that you'd be able to watch it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:27): And assume you could play. That's right. That's right. I mean, in that case, it was hard to send the videos because- Rob Collie (00:50:32): Yeah. There was a file size problem and there was also a software c
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Microsoft Cloud PC, Linux GUI apps on WSL, Edge 90 What's new in Windows Microsoft marches toward launching its 'Cloud PC' service, possibly this summer New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL News and Interests Flyout Comes to Beta and Release Preview Rings Microsoft is (Probably) Killing Timeline Now, Too Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort Microsoft wants to close the UWP, Win32 divide with 'Windows Apps' Edging along ... Microsoft rolls out Edge 90, with new history search, Kids Mode, to mainstream users Microsoft Edge 90 Launches with Password Monitor, More Microsoft takes a step toward unifying its Edge codebase across all platforms You Can Test the Unified Microsoft Edge Codebase on Android Microsoft Doesn't Commit to Blocking FLoC Dev Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022 is moving to 64-bit Microsoft Announces ID@Azure Xbox Microsoft talks with Discord end with no buy for now: Report Microsoft Brings Cloud Gaming to iOS and the PC in Beta Microsoft Partnered with Rainway on Xbox Cloud Gaming Microsoft Announces More Xbox Game Pass Titles for April April Updates for Xbox Bring Changes to Console, Mobile Tips and picks Tip of the week: Use OneDrive's Known Folder Backup App pick of the week: Stardock Multiplicity KVM Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft has big datacenter build-out plans Codename pick of the week: Santa Cruz Beer pick of the week: Brewing Ectogasm Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: BANDWIDTH.COM/WW wwt.com/twit
Between the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft releasing a working document detailing the problems with the .NET ecosystem, and a bouncy castle crypto vulnerability, it's been a busy week. Let's dive in and see what happened, shall we?
Last Week in .NET - Week Ending 25 July 2020More on CVE-2020-1147Do you deserialize XML to a DataSet? This is about CVE-2020-1147. More details on CVE-2020-1147 -- that Remote Code Execution Vulnerability for .NET Core. Turns out it has to do with deserializing XML into a DataSet. If this is something you do; stop reading and go patch your application to .NET Core to 3.1.6, .NET Core 2.1.20; and .NET 5 Preview 7. Make sure to update the SDK running on your developer machines as well. There's a bit more information than I was able to get last week. Special Thanks (again) to @vcsjones on twitter. Microsoft talks about Windows 10XApparently in Windows 10X, Win32 applications will be virtualized and served "over the cloud". OK. This is both interesting, frightens the hell out of me, and makes me wonder at what point we lose control of our Operating Systems completely. .NET 5 Preview 7 has been releasedThis includes changes to the runtime, SDK, ASP.NET Core, and Entity Framework Core. For the Runtime, there's a lingering bug with Regex that you can fix by removing RegexCompiled, you know, what keeps regex's fast. Anyway, if you're running .NET 5 Preview 7 in production, that's something to be aware of. For ASP.NET Core, there are cookie and blazor bugs fixed, and there's also a blog post out about Preview 7 that talks about the blazor improvements especially. Blazor is getting a lot of attention from Microsoft, and this is great, especially since there are thousands of applications that are in Web Forms that have no upgrade path at all to .NET 5. How does Blazor help here, you ask? Well, it at least gives political cover to the idea that it's possible, but if you read the documentation around converting an ASP.NET Webforms application to blazor, you'll notice it's currently... incomplete. Incomplete here means that there is currently no migration path for built in Webforms controls. Without Microsoft providing some sort of conversion system for WebForms, organizations will be forced to rewrite their WebForms applications anyway; and Microsoft is hoping they'll choose Blazor. I may have blown the spoiler; but Blazor is now a part of .NET 5. There's more work to do, but this is a great start. There's a lot of fixes in Entity Framework Core 5.0.0 Preview 7., too numerous to list here. If you use EF Core, you may want to pay attention. .NET Framework (Not Core, or 5) July 2020 Cumulative Update Preview is releasedThis preview fixes several bugs uncovered in .NET Framework 4.8 including a memory leak in HttpListener, and a bug in SqlBulkCopy that would cause writes to fail, there are fixes in WCF, WPF, and Windows Forms, and Accessibility Improvements in Windows Forms. A 'replacement' for SecureString is being bandied about for .NET 6:SecureString, the oft-maligned and probably most misused class in .NET, is getting its hair re-done as "ShroudedBuffer" as a part of .NET 6. The name change and API change is to help reiterate that this string isn't a "SecurityFeature", rather it's a signal that if you're trying to log stuff; YOU SHOULDN'T LOG THIS. I'm not sold on the name; but naming is hard. My personal list contains candidates such as OpaqueString, or "Dont^%&DFingLogThisString" or "SensitiveBuffer", or ClassifiedBuffer, or ConfidentialString". EFCore now supports Many-To-Many relationshipsI didn't know it didn't; and I feel bad for everyone that now has to either 1) maintain the workarounds they used to get that support before, or 2) retrofit this approach into their code. You can read more about Many-to-Many support here. No word on when this lands in a release, but it'll either be in .NET 5 Preview 8 or .NET 5 RC 1. Bug in .NET Core 3.1 causes SkipLast and TakeLast to return the wrong value:What happens when you add highly performant code that has bugs? You get fast bugs. If you use SkipLast and TakeLast in .NET Core 3.1, there's a good chance you'll encounter this bug if your source collection you're operating on is a List; which of course is just about everyone. .NET Foundation Elections Board happening NowThe .NET Foundation Board elections are happening right now. If you're a member of the .NET Foundation, GO VOTE. If you're not a member, you should be. Go join up, then go vote. If you want to hear from the candidates themselves, the .NET Foundation held interviews with board candidates; they're worth your time. Stack Overflow elections are over, two new moderators electedStack Overflow just wrapped up their moderator elections, and despite a dismal number of moderator candidates, there were two new moderators elected. Please welcome Makyen and MachavityPFCLotW (Pretty Fricking Cool Library of the Week)Do you write distributed applications? First off, I'm sorry. Second, have you thought about using Akka.NET? Distributed applications are hard, and without a framework to help you along, you're going to be spending a lot of time working around the fact that your application is, in fact, distributed. This is not a sponsored ad, and I hope to never make another distributed application; but if I did, I'd give Akka.NET a serious look. And that's what happened Last Week in .NET. I'm George Stocker, and I teach TDD to .NET teams. This isn't your grandfather's TDD, no. It's actually meant to be used in large applications without use of Mocks or stubs, and without the inherent pain that goes along with mock and stubs. But you don't care about that. You just want to go home at 5pm and sleep soundly knowing your application won't have any strange middle of the night bugs. If your team wants to go home at 5pm and not need pizza parties for releases, visit www.doubleyourproductivity.io and reach out.
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