Windows Weekly 485: Live From Microsoft Ignite

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

Paul: 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.

Paul: 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!

Paul: 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

Of course that's been a big focus

Something I heard on the keynote

Surprised me, was that ms really liked this idea of pushing for azure as just not a service platform

Not something you just drop something else on top of

Which seems to be a little counter trend that we're seeing in the industry

More and more vendors are coming out like vm ware saying

"We want you to not care about what cloud service you're on"

"In fact, we want you to use multiple cloud services without being able to tell the difference"

(Fr.) Why is ms going in that direction?

Are you talking more hybrid now?

Like how they're kind of redefining hybrid or defining it?

Precisely, the new definition of hybrid is not just cloud and premise

it's premise, cloud, cloud, cloud

You should be able to use multiple cloud vendors, without even knowing the difference

Mary Jo: Right, and also, Scott made this point repeatedly,

some other vendors that talk about hybrid, what that means to them

is being able to plug your ipram to your cloud

and thats all it means.

He kept emphasizing during the keynote, we also need common api, common resource manager

We're talking about all different levels of the stack even up to things like the database

We wanna make it a common environment so that if you

If youre on pram the cloud isn't so foreign

and it's easier to connect to.

But it's not a pure networking thing. '

Like plug your iprom into the cloud.

and this is where azure stack plays in, which is ms

coming hybrid system where its going to be kind of a

a custom version of azure on premises hardware

That partners and customers can run on their own data centers.

Paul: Right.

So even that is just a piece of ms hybrid strategy.

I feel that ms has a much more complete strategy there.

Paul: Yea, thats exactly right.

Paul: The word is comprehensive. Aside from the obvious stuff, ms is the only vendor that can bring on prem systems into this world

In stages, deployments, I'm sure in the early days we thought

It would be all cloud at some time but realistically, it will be mostly cloud

and a combination of private, public cloud and i pram going forward, whatever

ms pushes things in interesting ways, you think about the ireland email issue

you want to have data that is different countries for different reasons, a country like Germany

where you have laws on data from that country

has to be stored in that country

and they address those issues

it's kinda obvious how that happened

but then the next step is what about multi-national companies?

what about companies with branches everywhere

how do you determine the data from various parts

of that company is stored. Thats the next step.

Mary Jo: There are rumors that google tomorrow

Thursday, is going to announce along the lines of what they mean by hybrid

or even private cloud

Paul: Try not to laugh

Mary Jo: I'm trying not to, yea

I think that its interesting ms made this a big theme

because they know something is coming tomorrow

I dont know what it is, alot of rumors

Paul: It doesn't matter what it is, google had an internet in a box solution

at one point.
-yeah.

I don't think they offer anymore

Google's a great company, great technology, great solution for alot of people and companies

But they'll always be bound by the fact that they're a cloud kind of company

Thats when they came of age

MS biggest advantage in some way is that it grew up with

the enterprises that it serves.

It's making this transformation to the cloud

It can bring these companies with them

and offer them both sides of the equation

I'm sure whatever they offer will be fantastic.

It's no way they can address this to the way ms can.

Mary Jo: Right

It's funny I see over and over analysts

watch this industry's saying of course ms wants hybrid cloud

they've got all this on premises stuff

what are they going to say otherwise?

I think if ms had it's choice, it would love if everybody was in their cloud

Paul: They'd prefer that

They would rather have you get off of on prem

I feel that because ms has the enterprise chops and the enterprise customers

they understand that not everybody can bring every workload

to azzure

Paul: And most don't want to right now and that's the point

(inaudible) Thats where the customers are

Mary Jo: And also, comliance reasons, they're alot of reasons

that people can't move everything to the cloud

When you hear people like amazon say "nobody really wants private cloud"

it goes against what I hear people say.

Public cloud with 2 day shipping.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: I think the fly is in my hair, btw.

(Fr.) Did you go for the fly again? Just give it a bigger whack

- It's ok
-I'm here to help, ha ha.

(Fr.) We also had the announcement that Adobe is going to be using

Azure as the "preferred cloud provider"

Paul: See you got, yea

Mary Jo: That's an interesting one.

We were discussing this earlier,

- So one of the big things at the keynote that we didn't mention

was MS charted out Adobe and said "Hey bud, btw, Adobe is now using Azure as it's preferred cloud vendor"

So try and parse this and figure out what that actually means

has been interesting.

I wondered if it meant any Adobe services in adobe's cloud or in aws because alot of

other services are on aws are now moving to Azure.

A press release that MS put out did not say that

So I don't feel like I could say that

Paul: Alot of people took it that way.
- I know.

I think the reality is that adobe that MS serves companies have different needs

Some of them for some reason may want to go to aws
-Yes.

And that will be their option.

MS is the preferred vendor
- For some.

It doesn't mean its going to be the vendor
- I know

Mary Jo: It wasn't clear because they talked about the creative cloud

the document cloud, the marketing cloud all coming to

Azure, right

But, if I were MS, I acutally got Adobe to only host on my cloud

my headline would've been a little different on that press release.

Paul: Sure.

It would've been "we just kicked aws' butt and everything is on azure now"

But it doesn't say that, ha

-We'll get there.

So we don't really know what this means although it seems like good news

At least adobe is opening itself to working with MS, not just on

this but also, in tying to the back end dynamics 365 system thats coming

there's alot of different parts to the agreement
Paul: Yea

I think it's a good agreement

I just wish I knew what it really meant

Paul: The press release is 127 words, it's kinda small

What's going, on here?

(Fr.) Lets keep going down the list on that press release

Another one of the items was that azure is now available in twice as many regions as aws

It's got 34 specific regions to operate out of

What kind of competitive advantage does it give azure over aws?

So AWS is still the #1 cloud player but,

pretty much everybody's metrics

-Right

Azure's #2 by many peoples metrics.

I think the scope that MS has is helping them, the more availability that you have

the more potential you have to pick up customers

in different markets

that AWS may not have a data center in.
- Right.

And also the region center stuff which is important.
- Right.

I think it's important MS advantage in the scale

of their cloud is something

definitely that they should be counting

but so far they're #2

still trying harder

It's great to be #2 when they came out of nowhere

There's so many other vendors, I don't want to say orracle but i will

"Hey we're gonna kill AWS in infrastructure"

and oracle's not even there, so

I think at least MS has the credibility of being there

having offerings in both

in IS and (inaudible)

and also applications running on azure
-Yea.

we expect a supply in this market as well

I think those are the 3 big players
-Pretty much.

And Icloud obviously

-Obviously, ha ha

(Fr.) Last week, Larry Ellison got up at oracle world and

basically made fun of AWS
Mary Jo: I know.

Paul: He's the clown prince of technology.
Mary Jo: He is, pretty much

(Fr.) So is he in spoiler mode now?

Can he throw punches whenever he feels like it?

I've covered this industry so long I remember every time

Oracle would announce something

Like whatever it was

databases, any part of the tech industry

the PR people would just be like

"Huh, he said we have that?"

"Really"
-Ha ha ha

I think it's in his ammo that he just says things then they try to fill in the gaps

-Right

The only time I ever saw him in person he was jogging through

a Las Vegas casino with 20 bodyguards all in black
-Really?

It was the craziest.

-Were they all women?
- No, ha ha, no

That would have been excellent, like a James Bond movie.

It was just some crazy Muhammad Ali moment
-Wow!

(Fr.) He did say that amazon was literally 20 years behind