Hey, It's time for Windows Weekly. It's the show that sticks in your brain like a Windows 10 nag screen.
I'm Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ. The digitial jesuit in for Leo the Fourth who is currently, on a boat.
But of course, it's a special edition because we got Paul Thurott and Mary-Jo Foley, they are bringing the fire to Microsoft Ignite.
Uh, Mary-Jo, Paul, so good to see you, you're in some sort of?
Mary-Jo: It's a connector.
Paul: It's a connector.
I'm not sure what that means,at ome point you're going to have to tell me, but,
You look good, you sound good, and it's nice to have you straight from one of the biggest microsoft events of the year.
Tell me, for the folks who haven't watched windows weekly, and are joining us for this show,
What is Microsoft Ignite supposed to be?
Paul: What is it supposed to be?
What it is, is the biggest show in the world for IT hosts
20,000 people
Mary-Jo: 25
-25,000 people, all of them crammed into this room Off of a small hallway between two gigantic conference centers
Mary-Jo: It's the show for everything.
-It's like the show for all microsoft technologies. Windows, sharepoint, (inaudible)...everything you would like in one show, no xbox.
(Fr. Ballecer) Wait, no xbox?
There was a small bit of onedrive news this week, that justified my travelling here.
Now, every year at Ignite, we seem to be walking away with takeaways. Things that you like the most.
You've had just a little bit of time and I understand it was a late night because
Mary Jo decided you need to try every craft beer in Atlanta, But, what have been the big ticket items so far?
Big Picture, I would almost say security.
-Yep, for sure.
Security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well.
Well the transformation of the cloud.
-Right. -Which is kind of ongoing. -Definitely.
So I feel like the messaging we hear is microsoft is all in, in the cloud.
All in on security.
All in on sharepoint. I have to keep going back to sharepoint.
- Who doesn't.
-Everyone.
I know, security is pretty across the stack. When you think that its a big deal its not just high tech security
Not just server icloud security
It's security even in the fabric.
Right, it's a hybrid.
The message was hybrid.
What microsoft means by hybrid cloud is a little more comprehensive than some of the other members.
I found a new way to get quite excited, Hybrid is an activity, right?
-Oh, that would get her very agitated.
(Fr.) Has there been much talk about Windows 10, internet of things edition?
No. -No.
A little but not alot.
Actually, there really hasn't been alot of windows 10
There was obviously some security enhancements in the anniversary update, some coming things as well.
-Right.
Edge is getting some sort of security isolation technology.
That may or may not make it's way to other apps,
Browsers.
- That was code named Barcelona. Did you know that? - Now I do.
Thats a really interesting feature because it's suppose to use containers in windows 10.
In the browser to isolate possible malicious attacks, and be able to detonate those to the side.
So, very interesting technology, something we'd heard rumored.
I thought it might have been a previous version windows 10. Never made it, so its looking like red stone 2.
-Yea, Spring. -Spring. "Whatever that means".
Some of the news has been trickling back here from the day 1 keynote when Scott officially made the announcement that
Windows 10 is now on 400 million devices. How solid of a number do you find that?
Of course we've dropped down from the official target of a billion devices by the end of the year.
Will they make half a billion before the holiday season?
Thats interesting. - I think so, do you?
So at the current clip, no.
Of course you see a seasonal bump because of the holiday. It's possible.
They don't have that kind of a goal, right?
They were talking about 1 billion active PC's by 2018. -2018
That's moved out a bit obviously since the original proclamation.
Which I'm sure they regret.
But they do still plan and expect to get up to 1 billion active devices.
-Around that time or slightly later, perhaps.
They still are saying 1 billion, yes.
Right, I would be surprised if they hit half a billion by the end of the year.
(Fr.) Would that count devices that have been upgraded then downloaded several times?
Paul: Yea, that would get counted twice, ha ha!
Because, I've got like 15 devices on this laptop.
Actually it's interesting as you move from selling software to store
Where you can say we shipped x number of these boxes
To counting something that seems a little more ebulous
Just monthly average users or in windows 10 case,
active devices.
This is actually an instance where this is a more meaningful real world number
because it's instances of the op system running and being used actively.
It's actual users,
In the past when ms used to sell 20 million in windows 7 licences a month.
It was a real sale. It was something they could put down in the books.
But those things weren't neccesarily brought up and running
Most of them probably were not a month
That's the nature of that style of accounting.
I think for normal people, looking for something that is a real world metric
active devices is a real good one this time -yea.
An accurate one.
It does make it a little hard to compare it to previous versions
and how they were doing at this point
With windows 7 they weren't talking about active users. It was a different metric.
So, I think this a good metric.
I think it means people are actually using it vs. just have it on a shelf somewhere.
For use maybe one day. -Exactly.
Paul: Or maybe running another version because alot of time
in windows 7 day, it's hard to imagine they would have went back to vista but
alot of businesses might have been running XP
in other words, what they're buying is a windows 7 license
because thats what ms is selling but you get downgrade rights on that licence.
They might have gone back to an earlier version of the OS
Hard to tell from those numbers how many people were actually using it
which is why you see shared numbers from market share or whatever are kind of interesting.
MS can look at how many machines are hitting win update everyday or whatever
-Mmhmm.
Get figures that way as well. -yep.
Would there be a better way to count this?
Is there a better metric that would show actual engaged windows 10 users?
I think for windows this is the most accurate way to gage the success of this thing.
I think this is the way to go.
They don't do this with everything else.
One of the things we sort of complain about is you try to understand how microsofts various businesses, they have
different ways of judging the success of different businesses
or products.
When the xbox one fell behind the PS4 for example, they stop sellling
guess how many of these things they sold
Now they talk about engagement.
Which is things like number of hrs. spent on xbox live.
against number of hrs. playing games against other people..
I think those numbers have their value. -Yea.
Like with windows, I sort of feel like those sales mean something
because it's a retail product literally shipped in boxes -right.
A sale's a sale.
Those kind of things make sense.
Obviously they're accounting for things in different ways depending on the product
Have either of you been able to play at all or see a demo of one of the technologies that
was announced at ignite?
That is that edge is gonna run in a micro vm
not a regular vm, but a very lightweight vm that should
sandbox it off completely from the rest of your system
I'm excited by this, I saw a demonstration
of similiar technology that
was released over at the intell developer forum
And I couldn't believe how far they come, it was so fast to load
it was basically a 15 milisecond delay over what you would get
just starting the app.
Is that hitting the floor, can you actually see it, or
is it in the preannouncement stage?
It's gonna come out to insiders first and it hasn't come out to them yet
So, i dont think unless there's some sort of simulation demos
I dont think so.
Paul: So its a RS2 feature, something thats gonna come
in the spring.
It's probably gonna come to other applications in windows, in 3rd party apps, and 3rd party browsers
Mary-Jo: Yes.
Which where it gets interesting.
Not because I feel that edge is ever going to have meaningful usage here but
You want to protect the whole range of users obviously
So hopefully that happens quickly as well
Mary-Jo: If you go back and you look at what ms done in this space
they're were all these ms research projects
dating back 10 years
Where they were trying to figure out what you could do
in the browser
to isolate potential malware attacks, malware and other kinds of attacks
and I feel like this has finally becoming a product
now that they've researched all that
Other things like gazelle, all these weird code names coming out of
ms research
where they were doing the work in that space
I feel like this thing barcelona, has to do with containers, windows 10
is kind of the fruition of all that. -yea
Maybe maturing is the wrong way, but sort of an evolution
on thinking behind security for a long time was trying to
proactively figure things out
use machine learning and different things
Frankly, we're almost at the point now you want to control
the scope of damage so we sort of almost accept that on a clients system someway
something is gonna happen.
If you can relegate that and have it stay in that one place
you're impacting the security of everybody in a very positive way
that's a very important thing to do
I think this edge and some of the other things we see
in windows 10, office 365, across the stack
is kinda aimed at that.
These things are gonna happen
Let's just isolate it to the place where it happens Mary Jo: yea
And prevent it from spreading.
(Fr.) I like that idea that this is gonna spread to other apps of the programs in the windows ecosystem
or even 3rd party because
ultimately, isn't this where we go
If windows 10 becomes really secure, shouldn't it essentially become a hypervisor
and everything and just runs in micro vms
Todd: Right its almost the universal windows app
universal windows pocket app model
contain everything, virtualize everything
and keep everything seperate from each other Mary Jo: Right.
Apply to security. -yup.
What needs to happen between now and then? So what's holding us up from running everything in vm?
This has actually been in the news for windows for quite a while
that windows 10 was gonna support this.
It seems like only the enterprise nerds are really excited about it
That's where it hits first Mary Jo: Right.
Where hypervisors are already are in windows 10 containers
is the enterprise version
It's gonna be there first, I would guess.
Todd: It's a step too, isolation technologies
is whatever form they take
Containers and whatever kind. App v or med v back in the day
These are the type of technologies (I'm getting attacked, heh) (Mary Jo laughing)
That debut in the enterprise
(Both laughing!)
I'm literally collecting flys. Mary Jo: You are!
(Fr.) Welcome to Atlanta!
Todd: I had BBQ for lunch, I.. Mary Jo: Lemme try again
-Yea, hit me please
(Thud!)
(Fr.) Ha! Ha! Ha!
Sorry, I kinda got it
(Fr.) She wasn't even aiming for the fly!
Sorry. -That really hurt.
We have to talk a little about Assure, about cloud