MJFChat: How Microsoft Viva Can Improve the Employee Experience
Aug 13, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is all about Microsoft’s Viva employee experience platform and how it can help customers with employee attrition during this current “Great Resignation” wave. In this chat my special guest, Microsoft 365 General Manager of Product Marketing Seth Patton, brings us up to speed on what’s happening with Viva and why Microsoft contends that it can make a difference in keeping employees and keeping them happy.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Transcript:
Mary Jo Foley (00:02): Hi, you’re listening to Petri.Com’s MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and our listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be focused on Microsoft’s Viva, Employee Experience Platform, and in particular, how Microsoft believes Viva can help companies deal with the current “Great Resignation” wave that’s happening out there. My special guest for this chat today is Seth Patton, who is the general manager of Microsoft 365 Product Marketing. Hi, Seth long time no see in person, but I hope soon. And thanks for doing this chat with me today.
Seth Patton (02:08): My pleasure, Mary Jo, thanks for having me.
Mary Jo Foley (02:11): So let’s start out with a really high level refresh for our listeners about Viva. I feel like we talked a lot about Viva a while ago, and now we haven’t as much recently. So I’m going to say, if somebody asked you for your elevator pitch on Viva, what would you say?
Seth Patton (02:30): Well, it depends a little bit on how many floors we have. But if I have just a short, couple of floors, I talk about Microsoft Viva as the first ever Employee Experience Platform that was designed for the hybrid work era. So it brings together employee communications, knowledge, learning, workplace insights, and importantly, all the other company resources that an employee needs to succeed right in the flow of work in Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps. And then if I have a little more time, I also will add that with Viva, our goal is to go beyond productivity and collaboration to really rethink company culture, employee wellbeing, knowledge sharing, and learning so that people are more connected and engaged. They’re more productive, but they’re also more balanced no matter where they choose to work. So it’s really a focus on developing people, growth, and wellbeing so that people in organizations can achieve more sustainable performance and not just those short-term productivity gains.
Mary Jo Foley (03:35): Okay, great. So also let’s talk about the concept of the “Great Resignation”, because I’ve heard that term bandied about a bit, but what does Microsoft consider that to mean? And why is it happening now? Is it just a product of the pandemic and pandemic burnout, or is there more going on around this idea of everybody suddenly is quitting their jobs?
Seth Patton (03:59): Yeah, so as companies learned, you know, during the pandemic and now as they prepare to reopen physical office locations, there is this growing recognition of the challenges with hybrid work. And according to recent surveys that we have, 60% of people say that they feel less connected to their team and their organization. After that shift to remote work. 85% say that their wellbeing had declined, 56% say that job demands have increased. And so while remote work has its challenges, at the same time, 73% of employees want flexible remote work options to stay. And so really keeping people engaged, balancing productivity and wellbeing, developing and growing skills is more important than ever, but it’s also more challenging when people are disconnected and physically apart. But now we also find ourselves in this highly competitive labor market. And so, you know, the “Great Resignation” as you called it, in fact, 41% in our workplace trends index say that they’re considering new roles and new jobs altogether coming out of the pandemic.
Seth Patton (05:07): But really this only tells I think one part of the story. There’s the flip side of that, which is the “Great Onboarding” or ultimately what is happening, a term coined by Ryan Roslansky, who’s the CEO of our LinkedIn sister company here, is the “Great Reshuffle”. And so as you think about this, every company rethinking how they work, their culture and their values and employees, similarly, trying to find that right fit for them and their expectations have certainly changed, but what their goals are and what they’re trying to achieve has as well. So think about, you know, we’ve talked about the future of work for the last, maybe decade on how technology was going to change jobs and how people could get ready for those changes. But now we’re talking about things like work-life balance, how people want to feel more fulfilled in their job and more in control of their careers. And so we really expect this to result in some pretty significant talent shifts as companies and employees make these decisions about their workplace norms and values and policies. And we do think you know, as a part of this, we’re going to see somewhat of a reshuffle. And I think ultimately it will be a positive thing, especially for organizations who embrace flexibility. I think it will be more difficult and more challenging for those that stay a little more rigid.
Mary Jo Foley (06:32): Yeah. So Microsoft’s actually making the claim that Viva can help users meaning like the leaders of a company prevent, or at least mitigate turnover and attrition. That’s the kind of things we’re talking about with this “Great Resignation” wave. So how specifically can an employee experience platform do that?
Seth Patton (06:58): Yeah, so I read recently, and I’ve spoken to one of the leading HR and EX technology analysts. You may have heard of Josh Bersin and he recently talked about it as the new war for talent will be won on employee experience. And you think about it today, the employee experience in most organizations is too complicated. There’s, you know, over the years, companies have purchased and deployed a proliferation of, you know, HR and digital technologies, think employee engagement surveys, wellbeing programs, learning systems, tools for employee communications, and on and on. And while the intentions were good, the reality is that these systems are fragmented and disconnected from people’s day-to-day work. And this leads to, you know, low utilization, lost productivity, a poor employee experience. And the pandemic frankly, is exposing that fragmentation. And most employees don’t want to spend their time in HR tools. No offense to HR tools, but they prefer to get the real time answers that they need and the support that they need in the flow of the work, and the tools where they’re actually getting their work done. Things like Microsoft Teams and Office.
Seth Patton (08:09): So I think about, you know, just making this real, I have a number of employees who have started and many people have started a new role in the last year or a new company, where you’ve never met a single person face to face, never stepped foot in a physical office. And the challenge is how do you ensure that person feels connected to the company culture, purpose, and mission? How do you ensure that they have the right onboarding training and continuous learning and development, and how do you ensure that they’re able to balance productivity and wellbeing so that we can sustain that performance? And how do we know that this is going well or not? And so those are really the things that we’re tackling with Viva. In a world where people are working from everywhere, how do we actually bring that sense of connection, of belonging, of purpose, and growth and development within the tools that you’re doing your work in. And then just at a very high level, in case people haven’t read up on their you know, their Viva guides lately, there are four specific modules.
Seth Patton (09:11): Viva Connections is really focused on that culture and communications. Viva Insights helps balance productivity and wellbeing. Viva Learning is focused on bringing all the learning together in one place in Microsoft Teams, which makes that learning more collaborative, but also uses AI to make learning more personalized and relevant. And then finally, Viva Topics is really focused on helping people find knowledge and experts from across their organization, and then put that into work in the apps that they’re using every day.
Mary Jo Foley (09:41): Nice. I’m going to drill down in those modules a bit with you in a bit. But first, I want to ask a question on behalf of a listener, Microsoft MVP Kevin McDonnell asked a question about how users can help increase the confidence for senior stakeholders around activities to retain staff and how do they know that’ll work? You know, he mentions Workplace Analytics, and said Workplace Analytics can be great when you want to highlight some of the things, but it’s also getting the right focus, it seems to be key. So he wants you to talk a little bit about the idea about how do you know this is all going to work when you have all these different pieces and modules, like how can leaders feel like a sense of confidence about this?
Seth Patton (10:30): Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I think the term employee experience has been around for a while and certainly in the HR domain, the notion of people as an important asset to invest in has been around. I think the shift that we’ve seen is both in terms of research data and since the pandemic is that what was once an HR priority is now becoming a business imperative. And we now have research that shows us that investing in our people and investing in employee experience can have a real impact. So for example, highly engaged employees are 12x less likely to leave their company than those who are not engaged. 94% of employees say that they will stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. And we have similar research that shows higher employee engagement also has a positive impact on customer satisfaction.
Seth Patton (11:21): So it’s not just about the notion of making employees happier. It’s really having now a direct impact on the bottom line. And then I think you know, just because I think you mentioned it was Kevin, Kevin McDonnell,
Mary Jo Foley (11:35): Yes.
Seth Patton (11:35): Asked a question around Workplace Analytics. The thing that we’re finding is even more powerful is when you take the data from Viva Insights, which was formerly Workplace Analytics, and you combine it with other data like employee survey data. So Viva Insights gives you an understanding of how work is happening. After hours collaboration, connections between Teams, long and large meetings, all these things, but then combining it with employee survey data about how people feel you can start to correlate. For example, if you’ve had three weeks or more of after hours collaboration in a certain part of your organization on average, does that also correlate to people saying they’re burnt out or they have a problem with work-life balance. And then over time you can even look at that in terms of retention and that’s where you start using data to understand how are you doing? How do you navigate the change and then measure progress?
Mary Jo Foley (12:32): Okay, great. Now we’re going to have a quick word from one of our new MJF Chat sponsors, which is SmartDeploy. SmartDeploy allows IT departments to re-image unlimited computer models from one golden image, search their library for your models and grab your exclusive free software, worth over $570 by using the URL smartdeploy.com/MJFChat. Okay. Back to you, Seth, for some more questions. Now I want to drill into the four modules of Viva that you mentioned earlier. Let’s start with Connections, Viva connections. So I know this is supposedly something that’s going beyond Yammer and it focuses more on the idea of community. And community building is a lot more tough virtually than in person, I would think. So, how can Viva Connections actually make that experience better?
Seth Patton (13:37): Yeah. So in a world where we are all physically disconnected, these online communities play a more important role than ever because they’re helping us connect with people across our company, with company leaders, and leaders engaging with employees and with each other. And it’s not just about building connections and networking. It’s also about sharing ideas and harnessing that knowledge from experts across your organization. Understanding what projects are going on that are related to your projects and keeping a pulse on feedback. For example, from your customer service or your field, on your products in order to improve product, the product innovation. So Yammer of course, provides that underlying Communities capability for Viva Connections and across Microsoft 365. So Communities are already integrated into Teams and Outlook and not surprisingly usage of Yammer has more than doubled in the last year due to that growing importance of communities and employee engagement.
Seth Patton (14:36): And last week we announced Yammer Communities are now integrated into Viva Connections. But importantly, Viva Connections is far more than just Communities. So you can think of Viva Connections as your company’s employee app. It’s like a gateway to all of your company communications, news, the people, tasks, company resources, all within a single company app that can be branded. You know, for me, it’s our Microsoft app in Teams. So Viva Connections is for people who are familiar with sort of having a company intranet, it’s like taking that intranet, making it much more dynamic, having it be a personalized employee app that helps people feel connected and engaged no matter where they’re working.
Mary Jo Foley (15:22): Okay. Viva Insights. I have to say of all the modules, this one feels a little touchy feely for me, I’m really old school. So I’m like, oh, I don’t know about this analytics stuff. So I’m curious what you’ve heard so far from customers, have they found Insights to be helpful or more, a little more creepy, like, oh man, my employer’s going to know way too much about me and I don’t really want them to know all that. And if it is helpful, why do you think it is helpful versus creepy?
Seth Patton (15:56): Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a good discussion. If you think about just AI in general, it is extremely powerful in terms of things like helping people find information and experts giving you a more personalized experience in the context of, you know, knowing your preferences and work patterns, helping you be more productive. Everything from creating a document, or delivering a presentation, or providing you recommendations to be a better manager. So those are just examples. The same time with this power does bring up concerns about privacy, which is I think what you’re getting at. And at Microsoft, we have hit this just head on and there’s been good learning over the years to get this right. And we came to the conclusion that privacy is a human right. And that we’ve decided to make privacy a top priority and a promise to all of our customers.
Seth Patton (16:51): And this means that we build privacy built into everything we do, including Viva Insights. So for example Viva provides analytics both at the individual level, as well as at the organization level. And for individuals, I get great things like reminders to take a break, if I’ve been working for too long. I get an understanding if somebody in my network I’m losing connection with, I get an understanding of how much time I’m spending in meetings or an email versus, you know, focused time. I get an understanding of how much time I’m spending after hours. I get the virtual commute feature to let me mindfully wrap up my day, so I’m more present with my family and those are all super valuable to me, but they’re only available to me. So with Viva Insights, your personal insights and your individual insights are only available to you.
Seth Patton (17:44): Now, we also provide powerful insights analytics at that organizational level, but those are de-identified, aggregated, so that privacy is maintained. Now that’s where you get an understanding of groups of employees that are maybe at risk of burnout, or experiencing meeting overload, or connections between teams are becoming weaker. Like since the shift to remote work, my sales team is less connected to my marketing team. My engineering team is less connected my customer service team and those insights by the way, are also extremely valuable as organizations are planning their return to the offices, understanding space planning, who to bring back when, et cetera.
Mary Jo Foley (18:24): Hmm. Okay, great. Viva Learning, I can totally see how this would make employees feel connected and engaged and purposeful, but if you’re, you know, kind of helping employees access all kinds of training materials, not just for your company, but to further their own education, couldn’t you kind of help them be looking for jobs outside their own current place of employment. I can see it being like almost a double-edged sword. Like you’re really helping them be smarter and better educated in their work where they are, but you’re also kind of opening the door to them to learning more and maybe being more successful and able to communicate their skills outside of the organization.
Seth Patton (19:10): Yeah, I understand. Skill them up and then they find a job somewhere else.
Mary Jo Foley (19:13): Exactly.
Seth Patton (19:13): I get it. Yeah, so according to our our research, 79% of CEOs, state that a top concern for them in their future growth. So like one of the top concerns of barrier growth is the lack of those essential skills in their workforce. And then according to a study from LinkedIn, 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. Another one is that 86% of top performing companies reported that digital training programs, boosted employee engagement and performance. I think we’re at a point Mary Jo, at this point where you don’t really have a choice, you have to take upskilling and development seriously. And even at the risk of them going to another organization, but taking the long game, being an attractive place where employees know they’re going to get invested in developing and growing, think is the only way you’re going to maintain your competitiveness.
Mary Jo Foley (20:15): Okay. Interesting. All right. Now Viva Topics, I have to say as somebody who covered Viva before it was Viva, I was super interested in this module because it’s all about knowledge management and how companies basically pass on knowledge through the generations and through their own employees. I’m curious though, how does that fit into the idea of staving off retention problems?
Seth Patton (20:43): Yeah, no, it’s a good question. So we talked about, you know, this past year employees starting, who have never set foot in an office, never met their manager in person. You know, they’ve had to navigate the resources, trying to find information, making those connections all without you know, a coworker to turn to, or to ask for help. And so we did recent research with Spiceworks which shows that workers are losing 5.72 weeks per year of productivity because 11% of their time is spent searching for or recreating information. And that research also found that employees can gain 11% to 14% in daily productivity with a properly deployed set of knowledge discovery tools like Viva Topics. So Viva Topics uses AI to surface knowledge that you have across your organization already, in the content, in the conversations, and the people, but they do it by bringing it to people without them even maybe knowing that they needed to search for something. Because you’re working on a project or working on a document and you see an acronym that you weren’t familiar with and Viva highlights it for you. And then it’s as easy as hovering over that highlight to understand that product, that project, that finding experts associated with that topic. And so that really focuses on harnessing collective knowledge across the organization to make people more productive and turns out people don’t like spending a lot of their time wasted looking for information
Mary Jo Foley (22:15): Surprising. All right. Finally, any resources, sites, podcasts, books, or any other kind of information you would recommend for people who are interested in this topic?
Seth Patton (22:29): Yeah, I think one place that I would recommend people go see, if they haven’t already is the Microsoft WorkLab, a lot of the surveys and the research that I talked about, the different data and the workplace trends index is all housed there. Along with a lot of thought leadership articles, as well as guide books for shifting to hybrid work, both for leaders and for employees to help make that shift easier. And then of course you know, go to our Microsoft.com Viva site, Viva.com to learn more about Viva and our ecosystem of partners. Cause it’s not just about Viva, it’s also all of the partners that are integrating into Viva that make it an employee experience platform.
Mary Jo Foley (23:11): I also noticed you’re starting to fill out the Microsoft Docs site with more Viva information too. Right?
Seth Patton (23:18): Great point. Yes. Always a good spot to go, especially for more of the technical documentation.
Mary Jo Foley (23:25): Great. Well, thank you so much for the time today, Seth, and it’s always great to get to chat with you and I hope I get to see you and do this in person soon.
Seth Patton (23:34): You as well, Mary Jo, thanks again.
Mary Jo Foley (23:36): Great. For everyone else who’s listening right now or reading the transcript of this chat. I’ll be putting up information soon about who my next guest going to be and what the next topic will be. Once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter, using the #MJFChat, and we need you to use the hashtag so we can find the questions and add them to our list. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these chats, please do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: Managing Windows in the Cloud with Windows 365
Jul 28, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is all about how and why Microsoft is backing open source. My special guest is Bryan Dam, a software engineer at Recast Software and a “Dam Good Admin.”
In this episode, Bryan and I chat a bit about Microsoft’s recently announced Windows 365/Cloud PC VDI service — specifically focusing on the management side of things. Bryan also answered a few listener/reader questions about how Microsoft Endpoint Manager (MEM) figures into this new offering.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley: Hi, you’re listening to Petri.com’s, MJF Chat Show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be focused on Microsoft’s recently announced Windows 365 Cloud PC, and specifically about how IT Pros should be thinking about managing this new service. My special guest today is Bryan Dam, a config manager architect, and software engineer at Recast Software. He’s also a damn good admin, if he does say so himself. Welcome back to the MJF Chat, Bryan, and thank you so much for doing this today.
Bryan Dam: Thanks for having me, you know, this is my second time on. The first time was on me, the second time that’s on you. That’s your fault.
Mary Jo Foley: We got a complicated topic here today,
Bryan Dam: Ah, yeah.
Mary Jo Foley: But I think you’re ready.
Bryan Dam: Oh, yeah.
Mary Jo Foley: So Microsoft just came out a week ago with this thing called Windows 365 Cloud PC. We kind of knew a little about it. I was tracking it as codenamed Deschutes. But I’m curious about what you think of this. Like if you had to give somebody a really short elevator pitch and they said, what is Windows 365 Cloud PC? What would you say? And especially how is it different from Azure Virtual Desktop, which used to be Windows Virtual Desktop. That’s a malleable layer, but yeah.
Bryan Dam: So the, the elevator pitch, the short version of it, I think is this, is that Windows 365, the elevator pitch for that is, do you just want to think about Cloud PCs as if they’re physical PCs, which is, or do you just not really want to care? Do you not want to have to know or care about whether it’s a physical or a Cloud PC? It’s just a PC, just like anything else. And you’re not worried about all the, how that sausage is made. If that’s the case, if that’s where you want to be, then I think Windows 365 is a compelling option. And that’s how it differentiates itself from Azure Virtual Desktop.
Mary Jo Foley: Because you need to know a lot to run that, right?
Bryan Dam: Right. I mean, it’s a continuum, right? So the longer answer there is, you know, if I think about, let’s think about the pandemic had happened 10, 15 years ago, like, what would an org do? Like, you know, we got 20,000 people. Most of them don’t have laptops. None of it can be in the office. And we don’t, you know, we can’t, you could theoretically ship the desktops to their home, but like, that’s not gonna work either. There’s reasons that’s not going to go well. So you’d be like, well, let’s spin up terminal services, you know? And then Microsoft will tell you, well you got to go talk to Citrix. Or I don’t know if VMWare was in that market at that time. But, you know, they basically tell you to go set up at Citrix farms so that your users can, whatever machine they have to go get it.
Bryan Dam: Right. And I mean, what would it take to do that at scale, it’s going to take, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of hardware you got to get in, you need all that infrastructure on prem. You need the people who know how to put that together. Right? You need somebody who can put together a petabyte storage array that works really well. And it’s backed up, right? There’s all this stuff you’d have to do. Right? And I used to work at an org that we had that team and that team’s not cheap. Right. I looked at my team and I was like, okay, this is a multimillion dollar per year team, just to have the people butts in the seats. Forget, you know, all the things those people want to go off and spend money to do. So like that would be the story.
Bryan Dam: And then what sort of, in my mind, Azure Virtual Desktop is. Okay, well, let’s take that back. Right, instead of you don’t have to worry about the physical infrastructure, but you do have to know how to put the pieces together, right? Like you don’t need the storage guy, who’s doing crazy storage things. But you can pick from different storage options and there’s pros and cons there. And so when the pandemic did hit us a year ago, I can tell you, I know some really smart people, Donna Ryan, over at CDW, and some other consulting firms, like suddenly everything they were doing dropped, and all they were doing was Azure, Virtual Desktop. Right.
Mary Jo Foley: Wow, yeah.
Bryan Dam: Because people, good people were caught in that. Let’s say you had 20,000 people and you know, most of them didn’t have laptops. And you’re like, well, we want to go buy laptops. Too late, you couldn’t do it.
Mary Jo Foley: Yep, I know you couldn’t find them.
Bryan Dam: If you wanted to, you couldn’t. And so what you could do is just take a big pile of money and shove it over to Microsoft and say, we want to spin up Azure Virtual Desktop. But even that, like you needed expertise in Azure, Virtual Desktop, right? Like, okay, we need to know which storage options, again, you don’t need that person that you’re paying 150 to $200,000 to set up storage for you. But like, you need to know which one to pick and you need to know what the options are and right. There’s all these dials. They give you a bunch of dials and that’s great. Like, that’s not a bad thing. Like it’s good, but it takes a certain amount of expertise.
Mary Jo Foley: It does, it does.
Bryan Dam: Today with, you know, Windows 365, let’s say the pandemic were to not happen till now. I could, you know, you and me in a day could sit down and with a bit of PowerShell, we could probably spin up 10,000 machines.
Mary Jo Foley: Wow, really? Okay.
Bryan Dam: Yeah and we don’t care. We don’t care about the storage. We don’t care about, you know I mean maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but as long as the pieces were in place, like some of the pieces, and I’m just saying, like, you had an Azure subscription. Like if you were completely 100% on-prem, yeah okay there’s some stuff. And you have to set up some things. And even that, I think that they’re hoping to lower the bar there. But like, if you were in Azure and you had some stuff, and you had, specifically, if you were hybrid Azure, AD joined, and I don’t want to go too deep down that, but we can talk about that a bit later. But like, if those, some of those place things were in place, which aren’t too crazy. Then yeah if you said, Hey, we just need to spin up 10,000 desktops. It’d be like, okay, let’s go do it. Right. And we don’t have to think about the storage. We don’t have to think about all these, you know, all these sorts of things, we just don’t have to necessarily think about.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, true.. So, let me ask you this, because this is a good segue into this now. So Microsoft, when they’re pitching Windows 365, they say, you know what, one of the big advantages is it doesn’t require a big mindset or a skill set change for IT admins, because you can actually use the same tools that you already have to deploy and manage physical PCs, but you can now use them for Cloud PCs. Is that true? Or is that way over simplified and not really the case?
Bryan Dam: It’s shades of both, I would say. It’s often Microsoft, you know, so when they say you can use the tools you already use and, and the asterisks there is, as long as it’s, you know, one of our tools. As long as it’s, you know, you can have any tool you want, as long as it’s Microsoft Endpoint Manager. And even then, we can parse that a little bit later, but like, when they’re really saying that, that’s sort of what they really mean. But it goes back to one thing that did come out. One thing I’ve heard them say again, and again, that’s what informed my elevator pitch a few minutes ago. Was like, they’re really going after this idea of what is the cloud version of a physical PC. Because when we talk about Azure Virtual Desktop, there’s all these little button and dials. There’s things you can do that are really specific to that, not the use case, but there’s a bunch of things you can do when you’re controlling the virtualization and how it works.
Bryan Dam: And there’s all these kind of cool things you can do. Where this is like, no, no, no. It’s just, you know, it’s a persistent, virtual desktop, is the word. And what that means is like, it is one-to-one per user and we’re just spinning up an operating system in our virtualization environment. And we’re assigning it to this single user and that’s it. Like that user this is their thing. It’s just, so when they log in, that’s just like powering on a physical device. And so that really is like, they just kept saying that again and again, which is like we are going for you know, the analog of a physical device. And so the tools you would use to manage a physical device should for the most part apply to a Cloud PC.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, let me ask you about the Microsoft requirement there though, that you touched on. So you have to have Microsoft Endpoint Manager subscription to manage this, right? And you have to pay for that separately. It’s not part of what you get when you get Windows 365, right?
Bryan Dam: So we should always preface any licensing discussion with nobody understands this.
Mary Jo Foley: I know right.
Bryan Dam: Including anyone you would talk to at Microsoft. But I will say they did give some clarity. And I think this is one case where it is actually, you know, it is comprehensive. You can actually comprehend this. Which is Windows 365, as I understand, is really an add on to Microsoft 365 or M365. So M365 subscription is a requirement before you can get Windows 365. And in the Microsoft, I have to keep parsing these in mind, right? The Microsoft 365 thing. There’s multiple levels in there, right? So there’s a business level. And so there’s some business level licenses in 365 that don’t include Microsoft Endpoint Manager, specifically what you would say into. They keep saying Microsoft Endpoint Manager, but it’s actually an umbrella for both what we would know as Configuration Manager or System Center Configuration Manager to most people, and then Intune. Right, so what they’re really talking about is Intune. So you get an Intune license when you get into, I think I want to say it’s Business Pro and then any of the E, so the E3, the E5. And then their education equivalents, which I think it’s what K, I think it’s K3 and K5, I’m not sure.
Mary Jo Foley: I know there’s, A’s, there’s K’s, there’s F’s, it is a lot of things, yeah.
Bryan Dam: Right. And so you need a Microsoft 365 subscription of some kind to have a Cloud PC. But there’s two, the key things to understand, and this is where it gets slightly complicated. So it’s actually two additions of the,
Mary Jo Foley: Win365, yeah.
Bryan Dam: Cloud PC, right? Yeah. I’m not even sure what to call it. Right? Like, is it cloud like yeah, there’s three.
Mary Jo Foley: I kind of call it both at this point, because I’m like, well, it’s kind of both.
Bryan Dam: Right. So, there’s two additions of that. And I would put in parenthesis, there’s the parenthesis small business version, and then there’s the enterprise version.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. So those two, there’s Windows 365 Business, Windows 365 Enterprise. So, are the same set of tools for managing these going to be used for both of these SKUs or does one, like have Microsoft Endpoint Manager as the way you manage it? And the other one is like, Microsoft will manage it for you?
Bryan Dam: You’re exactly half right. So, the enterprise version of Cloud PC requires that you have a subscription to Intune. So, any of the licenses we’ve talked about before, Business Pro, and E3, and E5, and other EDU equivalents, you have Intune. And so you have, or what they’re referring to as Microsoft Endpoint Manager. And so that means you have the portal to go into and you assign, right. You’re assigning those licenses to users. And if those users have those, then you can assign them a provisioning profile for a Cloud PC. So when I was talking a minute ago about how, Hey, in a few minutes, you and I can do great things, right? It’s like, well, we would set up this provisioning thing for this is the particular Cloud PC we want to use, right? We have some options in terms of GPUs, this is the thing we’re going to assign to this provisioning policy. And we just assign that to a group, right? We just assign that to a group of users, and then we just need to put users in there. And then on the enterprise side of things what’s going to happen is it’s going to provision those. And it’s gonna auto, that provisioning process will automatically enroll them into Intune, and once that’s,
Mary Jo Foley: That’s on enterprise, but not business right?
Bryan Dam: Right. Only on enterprise, it will automatically enroll in Intune. And then that’s it, right? Like at that point, it’s in Intune and it’s your machine. They’re not going to update it beyond that. And they’re not going to configure it beyond that. It is now your, right, just like a physical PC, it is yours to manage or not manage, as you see fit. They will not update it for you. They, aren’t going to configure it for you beyond that. They get you enrolled in Intune and you can take it from there. On the business side of things, right, so you don’t have a license for Intune. You can still provision, you can’t provision Enterprise Cloud PCs, but you’re going to provision Business Cloud PCs, and those are completely unmanaged.
Bryan Dam: So, they’re literally just giving you an operating system. There’s I think, I believe they will auto configure the update mechanism, like you would normally do with group policy, but you don’t have group policy on this machine, at least not yet. Like they would configure it out of the box if you use their provided image, that they’re gonna have some frequency in which they update themselves, but it is up to the business to add in whatever management they want. So you can actually set up if youwanted, I’m told you could conceivably, if you were a very small business, you could spin it up a Business Cloud PC. And then you could like manually or automatically roll it into Intune if you wanted. Or some other third party product. Right? So if you had any of the other non-Microsoft sort of management tools out there, you could absolutely put that on a Business edition of a Cloud PC. The big caveat there is the max is 300.
Mary Jo Foley: Right, 300 user maximum, right? Yeah.
Bryan Dam: Right, right.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, so you’re touching on something I wanted to ask about, which is feature update. So, you know, Microsoft’s gonna move with Windows 11 and a one feature update a year, but with Windows 10, we’re still on two feature updates a year. If you’re running Windows 365 Cloud PC, what does it look like when a new feature update comes out? Like, is it just business as usual? You the admin are in charge of applying that to the PCs, whether they’re in the cloud or not in the cloud, or is it different with Windows 365?
Bryan Dam: You nailed it. It’s no different, right?
Mary Jo Foley: It’s no different? Wow, okay.
Bryan Dam: Yeah. I know I was also slightly surprised by that myself. Especially, when I think of, cause I specifically asked about not just feature updates, but okay at some point people are going to do a migration to Windows 10 to Windows 11, right? And, you know, maybe they will surprise us at that point, but right now, nope. If you were to provision a Windows 10 PC for yourself or me, today, you know, there is no built-in mechanism to where someday you just log in and it’s Windows 11. So it’s going to be, you know, if it’s enterprise it’s going to be enrolled into Intune. And Intune has a bunch of features for rolling in a feature update. And so your users are going to have that same experience in their Cloud PCs, right?
Bryan Dam: They’re going to get a notification that, Hey, you have Windows, you know, a feature update or Windows 11 is available. And if they click it and it’s going to have to install and reboot and all those things, right.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, cool.
Bryan Dam: So I think it’s slightly a missed opportunity there. But again, this is one of the big differences between Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. On Azure Virtual Desktop, you’d say, well we have this golden image and we lay everything on top of that. And so, you know, all we need to do is update this golden image. And then when somebody logs in, we’re laying all this stuff on top of it. You know, those are the kinds of things you can do in Azure Virtual Desktop. But again, that’s not what you do on a physical PC.
Mary Jo Foley: That’s right.
Bryan Dam: Right, so it’s like, it’s simple, it works like this. And so when you, and again, it goes to that whole philosophy of like, well, you’re not managing thinking, well, I need to manage the feature updates for Cloud PCs and I need to manage them for physical PCs. Nope. It’s just manage.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, that’s good.
Bryan Dam: Yeah. I mean, it’s a choice, right? Like
Mary Jo Foley: It is. It’s a choice. That’s a good way to look at it.
Bryan Dam: Right?
Mary Jo Foley: If you want less things to do, then you pick one. And if you want to retain control as an admin, you would probably go with Win365, right?
Bryan Dam: Yeah, again, it just hearkens back to that, I think earlier, it’s just kind of, what kind of business are you, right?
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly.
Bryan Dam: Cause one of the things, we haven’t talked about pricing yet. Again, there was no pricing announced, you know, one of the things I saw Microsoft talk about, which is one of the PMs kind of admitted. He’s like, well, you know, in terms of pricing, we don’t have pricing, but realistically speaking, if you were working in Azure Virtual Desktop and you tweaked all the dials, and if you stay on top of that, maybe you could eek out, you know, it a little bit cheaper. But it takes work, right? Like it takes work to do.
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly, yeah.
Bryan Dam: And so like when it comes to this specific persistent desktop scenario, you can do it in both. It’s just how you think about it and how, you know, what kind of organization are you? What are you bringing to the table will inform your decision of like left or right.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Let’s do two reader/listener questions from Twitter. So Neil G asked us if we think Windows 365 Cloud PC will be suitable for small secure clients? He said things like a small law office, a small medical practice, or a business owner of a company with sub 100 people in it. Like, do you think it would make sense for that type of a company to go with Win365?
Bryan Dam: In that scenario we’re primarily thinking the business edition. That’s where my mind goes. So this is where sometimes it’s funny because I think he specifically mentioned legal. So legal is one of those really interesting, I mean, we talk a lot about education being this interesting space, but like the legal thing is like a whole other ball game. It’s usually super small, right? Like he’s saying, it’s like law firms tend not to have tens of thousands of people. They don’t work at huge scales. But the people you do serve are really picky and and they get whatever they want. And so I have seen law firms, you know, with like double-digit people in the org and yet they’re setting up config manager and all that stuff, which is, you know, it’s a lot of work.
Bryan Dam: It’s not a use case I would go to initially, but they’re doing it for that level of control. So all that to say, yeah, if you’re a small business and you’ve got small numbers of people I would absolutely trust that the data that’s in the Cloud PC stuff, that, that is as secure as anything. Right. I mean in terms of the cloud infrastructure and where that PC is. Now, there’s no, like out of the box, you get no management tool. Right. So there’s nothing that, you know, there’s nothing prevents somebody logging into a Cloud PC and then doing stupid things, right? Like you know, there’s no inherent antivirus protection on a Cloud PC. I mean, there’s built in Defender, but there’s no management tool for that built in to the business edition of this. Right. So it’s as secure as you want to make it on that side of things.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Speaking of education, I thought it was interesting when Microsoft announced Cloud PC Win365, that they didn’t mention education as a customer base, right? I feel like it’s implied that they’re a customer base, but then they didn’t mention anything about like education SKU or education kinds of customers and the same thing for government users too. So I’m curious because I’m getting a lot of questions from people. Do you think Microsoft will offer Windows 365 for education and government? My guess is yes, but I don’t, I’m just kind of guessing on that.
Bryan Dam: I mean, for government a hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I saw in multiple places, people are like, you know, your typical government agency looks at everything that was talked about so far and be like, that’s cool I can’t wait to use it. You know, when you put it in a place that I’m contractually, or legally, or policy wise allowed to use it. And so yeah, the team has made it super clear on the government side of things. Yep, they understand. Right? Of course they understand, like this isn’t Microsoft’s first rodeo on Azure government stuff. Right. Like, so yeah they totally know that they’re going to have to go do that and they are committed to doing so. Like, so, I mean, when? No idea, right. None of us work there. So, I don’t know what engineering resources are committing to it and yada yada, but absolutely government a hundred percent, there’s going to be a government cloud version of this.
Bryan Dam: I’m a little less certain on the education side of things. Now, maybe in terms of a SKU in pricing. Sure. I think that’s conceivable, but I think even within, I’ve talked to some education people about like, Hey, what are the use cases for this? Right. Like what would you use this for? And they’re like, oh, absolutely, yeah, I would totally use this. And part of what they’re excited about is a couple of things. One is just the actual hardware you’re giving. Right. A lot of them are, in EDU, you want to give them crappy hardware because you know, it’s going to get destroyed. Right. It’s just going to get absolutely wrecked.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Bryan Dam: And so what we want to do is have really cheap hardware we can give out, that’s almost disposable. And yet what we want to do is connect it to something that’s less disposable and more, you know, more manageable and more reliable.
Bryan Dam: And so like that lines up, right. That totally lines up to use, to the education workspace. The other thing I heard them excited about is like, yeah, there’s times when, you know, especially when you get into high school, there might be some groups they’re in a design class where they’re doing you know CAD stuff, and we need to give them CAD, but not for four years. Like I need to give them CAD for like a semester. And that’s Windows Virtual Desktop, oh sorry Microsoft, oh Windows 365 is perfect for that because you’re like, you’re provisioning the user, right. Let’s say you were doing all years, all four years they have it, but oh, they’re in this class. Boom. We can literally just go push a few bits and suddenly now they have this awesome PC that can do amazing things and you’re going to pay a little bit extra for that. And then when they’re done, you’re like, oh, let me go take that back. And like the user is none the wiser, specifically on that use case, one of the forthcoming things they’re promising is a virtual desktop that has, sorry, a Cloud PC that includes a GPU. Right. So they don’t have that announced yet, but like, yeah, that’s a thing, they’re going to do it, to enable those kinds of use cases.
Mary Jo Foley: That makes sense. Yep. Another question from Twitter Ashraf Kharrubi asked a very specific situation, but I think this is something people need to know. He said, I have a Microsoft 365 E5 account, and I was wondering about the timeline for not having to connect to an on-prem account in order to provision a Cloud PC. I saw a few people asking this, they had an AMA yesterday and a few people were asking about this. What’s the guidance there, anything?
Bryan Dam: I will tell you that in that AMA, I think it’s almost a direct quote to say it’s an engineering priority. And some of the background there, which is for a while now, Microsoft has been saying which is hybrid Azure AD join is a bridge and it’s not a destination, which is different than when they talked about co-management. And it’s like, no, co-management can be a destination, not a bridge. And, you know, we’re not really telling everyone they have to move to Intune. And that’s all a separate topic. But they were very specific like, no, no, no, you can, you know, because you know, the early marketing stuff had an actual bridge, it was like, no, no, no, no, you can stay on that bridge. You can park on that bridge. But for a while now they’ve been saying, no, no, no, hybrid Azure AD joined is not a destination. It’s a bridge.
Bryan Dam: You do it, so you can move from on-prem to cloud. And, you know, we don’t really want you to live in that space, ideally. And I’ve seen Microsoft people espouse that exact view. And so a lot of people were sort of like, so if you drank that Kool-Aid and you’re like, oh, great, okay, we’re going to spin up a new company, or we’re going to, you know, we’re going to try and move an existing org to what Microsoft in air quotes would say fully modern. You know, we’re gonna rip out local Active Directory and we’re going to go full Azure. And there’s just no on-prem stuff. Today, you can not use Windows 365 because there is this requirement for hybrid Azure AD join and it requires you to actually, so when you’re in that provisioning process, you need to be able to reach out to a on-prem domain controller. And why that is, I don’t fully understand. But that is actually going to be a blocker for people that, you know, toed that line. And we’re like, okay, fine, we’re going to rip all that stuff out. We’re going to be fully cloud and we have nothing on-prem. And then they’re like, except you can’t run a Cloud PC.
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly. Which is kind of ironic, right? Given the name Cloud PC.
Bryan Dam: Exactly. So, there were a lot of people, I know some of them were like, you know, Hey, we follow your advice. So there are some people that are, I can think, understandably angry that, okay, the first impression here is it’s not for you, which is just mind boggling. And so they have to, Microsoft has to know that and fix that.
Mary Jo Foley: I’m sure they know.
Bryan Dam: Right. Right, bloody quick.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, we’re almost out of time. So I just want as the last question to say, I know you looked at Microsoft’s AMA about Windows 365 Cloud PC yesterday. Was there anything I haven’t asked you about that jumped out at you that you think IT pros should know, or they should go check out in that AMA transcript?
Bryan Dam: You did a really great job of covering a lot, the questions you had were really lined up very, very well. I don’t think there was anything I learned in that AMA that was super surprising. There was a lot of clarification. One of the big things I want to know is, was, yeah, I’m the software updates guy. Like, I don’t know why, I can’t even explain it to any rational human being, why I’m so interested in that particular topic. It makes no sense to anybody, but like, you know, like I was really looking for like, is there not this concept of there’s this base OS and you just keep it updated. Right. And the users never know, right? The users should never know that they’re using running the latest OS or whatever. And the answer is no. And it gets to there, it just, that AMA really helped clarify for me again, that elevator pitch that like the way that this team is looking at this solution is what’s the physical PC analog in the cloud? And the answer is it’s a Windows 365.
Mary Jo Foley: Cool. That was the perfect wrap for this chat. Thank you so much for doing this today, Bryan. That was awesome.
Bryan Dam: Oh, thanks for having me again.
Mary Jo Foley: Great. And for everyone else, who’s listening right now or reading the transcript, I’ll be putting up information soon about who my next guest and what my next topic is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter, just like people did today for Bryan, but you’ve got to use the #MJFChat so we can find them and add them to our list. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else, or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these chats, please do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: How and Why Microsoft is Backing Open Source
Jun 30, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is all about how and why Microsoft is backing open source. My special guest is Tom Kerkhove, Azure Architect and Containerization Practice lead with Codit. Tom also is a Microsoft MVP, the maintainer of several OSS project such as KEDA, a GitHub Star and CNCF Ambassador, among other things.
Tom has written a series of blog posts about Microsoft’s open source journey. In this episode, he talks about his thoughts on how Microsoft has evolved its thinking about open source. He also shares tips and tricks for open source maintainers, based on his own experience. Plus, he answers a number of reader and listener questions.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley: Hi, you’re listening to Petri.com’s MJF Chat Show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate, and I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and our listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be focused on how and why Microsoft is backing open source. A very interesting and maybe controversial topic. But I have the perfect person to talk about this, my special guest is Tom Kerkhove. He is an Azure Architect and Containerization Practice Lead with Codit. He also is a Microsoft MVP, the maintainer of several open source projects, such as KEDA, a GitHub star, and a CNCF ambassador among other things. That’s quite the resume, Tom. Thank you very much for doing this chat with me.
Tom Kerkhove: Thank you very much for having me.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. I’m excited about this topic because it’s a giant one. I mean, we could talk over a whole bunch of series of blogs and podcasts about this. And in fact, I should mention, before we start, Tom did a really excellent series on his own blog, which is blog.tomkerkhove.be about Microsoft and open source. So if this is a topic you care about you should go check out his blog posts. He wrote about Microsoft’s open source journey, about Azure and open source, and even how Microsoft’s giving back to the community. So Tom, to start, I take it after reading those posts that you really do believe that Microsoft has changed from the battle days when some of its leadership called Linux a cancer. So I’m curious why you think Microsoft changed? Was it just out of necessity to stay competitive or do you think there were more things at work here?
Tom Kerkhove: I think it’s definitely because of the necessity, because in the end they need to make money and there’s a lot of computes for Linux. So once they started embracing Linux on Azure, I think it fairly quickly skyrocketed. And I think nowadays Linux is more than half of the whole consumption of the Azure CPU. So I think that’s one, but I think another one is also that they are putting the customers first now in the sense that they want to help their customers be successful at running what they need. If it’s Windows, if it’s Linux, if it’s any open source product, basically they make it easier for you to do that on Azure. And you can see all the major open source products now becoming a true path instead of you having to run it yourself. And that’s the big shift that I’ve seen over the last years.
Mary Jo Foley: They’ve also hired a lot of pretty well-known people from the open source community to work at Microsoft too. So I’m sure that’s influencing things as well. All right, I’m going to just dive into reader and listener questions because when I posted this on Twitter, we got a lot of people chiming in with questions for you. And it’s an interesting mix. Some questions about your expertise in maintaining OSS projects and some more about your views on Microsoft. So let’s start out with Khalid’s question, he said open source means many things to many different people, given its evolution over the decades. What’s your personal definition of OSS? And do you believe that your definition is the same one that Microsoft uses and operates under? And if so, why? And if not, why not? That’s a big one to start.
Tom Kerkhove: There will always be different definitions, but mine basically is let’s build open software together as a community and collaborate to fix the problems that we have as an industry. Does Microsoft have the same one? I would say the typical consultant answer, it depends. Based on the teams and the products, I would say some do and some don’t. You can see all the, really being part of the community, be open while all the products are open source technologies are more like, let’s just push a code publicly, but that’s about it. We’re not really open to any collaboration because this is how we do it, take it or leave it. The last part is definitely not what I like, but it happens. So you have to focus on the ones where you can help as a community. There’s a lot of them. But for example, in the cloud native space, Azure Functions is also open source where you can collaborate and contribute features to, which I did as well. But of course it’s an Azure, well, Microsoft product, you will not be able to change the whole vision of the product itself, but you can help make it improve. And Dapr is also a recent one, which is a good example of the community picking it up and increasing the added value there.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, it sounds like it’s, if you’re somebody who comes in thinking I can redo Microsoft’s strategy or vision for a product, you’re going to be disappointed. Right? And if you are more like you’re saying you know, someone who thinks they can contribute and help steer it a little bit, you might feel better about contributing. Right?
Tom Kerkhove: Exactly.
Mary Jo Foley: Ok, now we have a question from someone, I think you know, Maarten Balliauw, I’m sure I’m doing a terrible job on his last name. He asked if there is one thing in the Microsoft OSS strategy that you would change, what would it be and why? That’s a loaded question, but an interesting one.
Tom Kerkhove: Yes. Again, it depends on the teams. But I would say that Microsoft could do a better job at supporting open source projects as a whole. And by doing that maybe avoid reinventing the wheel sometimes. For example, I have an open source project and it integrates with Azure. I extend Azure. So they give me Azure sponsorship through credits, but why am I an exception to this, for example. Why is there no open source program for Azure where maintainers can apply and get credits as well? So that would be one thing, because in the end we help improve Azure by doing so. The other one is the .NET space, there have been some cases where Microsoft is reinventing the wheel and while I think it makes sense from a Microsoft perspective, it’s not that nice to the whole community.
Tom Kerkhove: For example, Newtonsoft’s Json is, I think it’s package number one in NuGet.org. But instead they wrote their own Json library, which is now part of the .NET framework which is good. But now everybody has to move over one. Instead why don’t you fully rely on the .NET foundation project that is already there. There’s another one, like IdentityServer had a big fire because it was not sustainable, because organizations were not supporting them well. So they decided we need to go with a paid model to keep on supporting and building this product. And I fully agree with them. While instead, maybe Microsoft could have done a better job in supporting that open source product because they already recommended it. So why not see how it can be helped more? That was also a .NET Foundation approach. Well, it still is, but I think there’s a lot of room for improvement there. Obviously. It’s not that simple. But yeah, I would try to improve that a bit. And I also think you would really like, Maarten because he likes a lot of beer as well, so maybe you should meet him.
Mary Jo Foley: I think I need to meet him then for sure.
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Now we have a question about open source maintainers from BaskarRao on Twitter. He asked what would be the steps recommended to maintainers so that they don’t feel burnout due to financial stress and eventually the product can stay open source.
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah, that brings me to my new blog series. So I’ll be writing about my adventures as a maintainer.
Mary Jo Foley: Oh neat.
Tom Kerkhove: But I can already spill the beans a bit. If it’s a free open source project, then what I’m doing is, don’t give any guarantees because they’re not paying, so why should they be the boss of you?
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Tom Kerkhove: Because if that happens, then you will indeed have a burnout. So don’t let that happen. Set the right expectations, ensure that you have the documentation about your support model about your licensing. And if somebody requests a feature, I always ask, are you willing to contribute this, so that you can guide them. And maybe they can start contributing more and more because in the end, if you’re the sole maintainer, then that’s not sustainable. You might be very enthusiastic about it, but at some time, at one point you’ll hit that wall.
Tom Kerkhove: And then you’ll either stop the whole project and nobody will win from that or you will decrease. And I think that’s the only way to do that. In terms of the financial perspective, you could use something like GitHub sponsors, so that people can sponsor you. But that’s a bit of another thing we need to fix as an industry. It’s mainly individuals sponsoring other maintainers and not organizations. And it’s really the organizations that we need to get on board, because then the end if they use open source and it becomes unmaintained, the cost of that is a lot higher than just donating back to those projects. It’s a bit of a problem.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, I was going to say, aren’t there some companies now, some of the bigger tech companies who are actually doing like executive sponsorships of OSS projects? Microsoft might even be doing that, right?
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah, Microsoft has a free and open source fund actually. So every month they give, I think it was 10K to a single project and all the employees can vote on what that project should be. While I really liked that idea, I think that is mainly going to be targeted at the bigger projects because they are more well known, which is also very fine. But if you’re a smaller project you will have less chance. But that also makes sense on the other side.
Mary Jo Foley: That’s true.
Tom Kerkhove: But at least they’re already doing that as a first step. Who knows, they will maybe split the 10K into twice 5k a month, so they can have more support. Who knows?
Mary Jo Foley: Another related question to this, from Khalid again, is he asked about how do big companies like Microsoft and I’d put Oracle in here too, maybe Salesforce, a few, other of the big ones, refrain from hurting smaller OSS projects that they become a part of? So sometimes, you know, these big companies, they come in to an existing OSS projects and a lot of the people who are already part of it feel like they are basically cannibalizing it and taking it for themselves. So are there any mechanisms that are in place that can stop this from happening?
Tom Kerkhove: Looking at it from a KEDA perspective, I would say that the CNCF or any foundation helps there because they help you with everything around the project itself, making sure that not one party can take ownership of the whole project or so. So basically you’re making sure you’re more vendor neutral, make sure you have that governance around it. Of course, that’s something that has to grow. And that’s more for bigger projects. In terms of smaller projects I think that’s sometimes a bit harder to avoid.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, I know. I know there’ve been a number of open source projects where people felt like they put a lot of time and effort into it and then it kind of spun out of their control. And then it felt like the bigger companies were using that as a basis for, in some cases, even a commercial project, right? Or a product.
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah. And that’s a bit of a pity, which brings us back to support projects in any way you can. Either through contributions through donations or something else. But yeah, if a big corporation suddenly starts using a project and contribute, it also brings a lot of overhead because you as a maintainer need to review everything, reply to everything. So there’s a lot of work there. So yeah, I don’t have a silver bullet for that, but I would say communicate and see what the options are.
Mary Jo Foley: That’s good. Okay. Here’s the flip side question from Khalid. Khalid had a lot of questions, but they’re all good ones. He wanted to know how do you trust that organizations won’t abandon an OSS project when it’s no longer in their best interest or it’s counter to their business goals? And he said it as an aside, after all Microsoft is a publicly traded company and it has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. So I don’t know if he’s thinking of a specific case where Microsoft abandoned something that was open source. But do you have any guidance or thoughts on how you can kind of hedge your bets on that kind of a situation?
Tom Kerkhove: Well, I think the question actually applies, so there’s two types of open source, in my opinion. One is organization sponsored open source. So a company invests money so that developers start making products open source, for example. And you also have the individual open source projects where one person does it as a side project or maybe in his free time. And I think the question actually applies to both. Either an organization can abandon it because it’s not of their interest anymore, or the individual can lose interest or can get burned out. And then you have an unmaintained project. So I think that you have risks in both scenarios. And I think that’s maybe the beauty of open source because if somebody abandons the project, you can still work it and continue on your own or internal or wherever. While if this would be a closed source project and they abandoned it, it’s abandoned.
Tom Kerkhove: There’s no future, right? You have the URL dead end. But with open source, if you have the capacity, of course, you can extend it yourself. Of course, if it is part of a foundation and you have multiple organizations already investing in it, it’s a bit of a different story. But if it’s just one, one organization you can still work and continue, but of course it is a big risk. But yeah, you have to make the equation, what’s the biggest risk? Is the biggest risk that they abandoned something that fixes my problem, or should I, as a company reinvent the wheel because we will then understand what it does.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. That’s a tricky one for sure. Okay, I have a couple questions of my own I’d like to ask, while I have you here as a captive audience. One is, I don’t know if you remember this, but it was several years ago and Mark Russinovich, who’s the CTO of Azure said, I think it was on Twitter that Microsoft, because of how things were changing so quickly, could even one day open source Windows and people flipped out, as I recall. Like, wait, what is he kidding? Is he serious? I’m curious, do you think they ever really could or what would stop them from doing it and if they did, who would benefit from that?
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah, I think the biggest question is the last part who would benefit from it? So it would certainly be a publicity stunt, right? So journalists would love that.
Mary Jo Foley: You’d have to clean up the code first. Right?
Tom Kerkhove: That was going to be my point. There’s a lot of legacy in there. So that would be a huge investment to clean it up, but what’s the added value?
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Tom Kerkhove: Also from a security perspective it’s a double edged sword. So one is hackers could more easily find vulnerabilities, but on the flip side, Linux is open source as well. So the typical thing with open source projects is that security improves over time because the community makes it better. But with Windows, I’m just not sure because there’s not much added value. And if you have a look at Windows 11 now where they’re changing a lot of things and everything was still on the wraps, nobody knew what was coming. That also has benefits and they have everything under control. So I’m not sure this will ever happen and what the reasoning would be. If it would ever happen, it’s maybe because they see less investment in Windows and they want to start giving control to the community so that they could eventually abandon it. But I don’t see that happening soon.
Mary Jo Foley: I don’t either, especially with Windows, like you said, Windows 11, just coming out. And there’s a lot of new levels of security baked into that which have been the source of complaints so far by some legacy users. But yeah, how do you disentangle that from the actual core of the operating system, right?
Tom Kerkhove: Yep, exactly.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. And then I have, I have a question for you about are there any like one or two things you would say your biggest surprises about Microsoft and open source because you’ve been watching them for a while. You’ve seen them along this journey, make a lot of twists and turns and good moves and maybe some mistakes. Was there anything that really surprised you either positively or negatively about what they’ve been doing with open source?
Tom Kerkhove: There’s not one thing that I can pinpoint other than maybe them buying GitHub. I didn’t see that one coming. But in hindsight I think that was a very good move.
Mary Jo Foley: Me too, I do.
Tom Kerkhove: To nurture the open source community the godfather of it, let’s say. But I think the shift that we discussed from Linux is a cancer, to where we are today is really interesting. How the company transformed over those years and actually on GitHub, there’s a nice timeline of everything that Microsoft did. But just all the various foundations that they started or co-funded, how they adopted Linux, how .NET became open source and all the people they hired and the companies they acquired. Just to name a few, but like Brendan Burns, Miguel de Icaza, Ned Friedman, Scott Hanselman, then the whole Deis acquisition with all the folks that are now contributing to the CNCF. That’s really big in my opinion. And that really changed how, how Azure has been transforming in the last couple of years with Kubernetes as well. So yeah, I think they are on a good track there. In terms of not itself, I think there are sometimes some discussions in terms of the.net foundation, how that one is being governed and the foundation itself. And of course there’s room for improvements, but I think they’re improving a lot over time.
Tom Kerkhove: Of course there was the big debate with the Windows Package Manager and AppGet, a pity. You should retail that
Mary Jo Foley: You should retell. tRetail that for people who don’t remember what happened, if you don’t mind
Tom Kerkhove: I don’t recall the whole story. But before they started Windows Package Manager, there was a tool called AppGet and there are other ones like Chocolatey, for example, that already do what Windows Package Manager did. And they started talking to the maintainer of AppGet to see if they can collaborate, if they could hire him or whatever. They started the discussions, and then eventually it stopped. And then after a couple of months they announced Windows Package Manager, which was not an exact copy, but very, very similar, and was a bit of a pity because yeah. Instead of collaborating with the maintainer, they just somewhat reinvented the wheel. And I think at that time they didn’t give the attribution which was even worse, in my opinion. If we could avoid those things more in the future, that would be really great.
Mary Jo Foley: And they kind of came back and fixed that right? As I recall. Did they even hire the guy? I couldn’t remember if they hired the guy.
Tom Kerkhove: I don’t know.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. But at least they did come back and give him credit, as I recall. So, you know, it’s like Microsoft likes to say to us journalists, it’s a journey. They love to tell us that. And I think for them with open source, it’s also been a journey, right? Like sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they do amazing things, like buying GitHub. And it’s, I don’t feel it’s like one step forward, two steps back. I don’t feel like that. But you know, I think the good part is it feels like when they do make a mistake these days, they at least acknowledge it.
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah. And that’s a big one, learn from your mistakes. And of course there are other companies doing a better job at open source, but if you come from the Lunux is cancer to today, I think they’re doing good job. And I also look at AWS, for example, in the cloud native space, I think Microsoft does a lot better because they actively contribute back. They invest in the community. And AWS does not, for example. Or does a lot less. So yeah, I’m not complaining, of course it can always be better.
Mary Jo Foley: Who do you think does a good job? Like you just said that, I mean, do you consider Google, especially what they do in the cloud is doing a better job? Or who are you thinking of when you say there are people who do better?
Tom Kerkhove: There are so many companies.
Mary Jo Foley: I mean, smaller companies definitely, right? And people who grew up as open source vendors for sure, right?
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah. But for example, Red Hat is a big one, of course. Which got acquired by Oracle, I think? Was it Oracle? Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley: I think it was IBM. Was it?
Tom Kerkhove: Or IBM I don’t recall.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. I know. And it’s good that Microsoft has has been working with them right on a lot of different partnership fronts with Red Hat. That’s been positive, I think for the community.
Tom Kerkhove: So for example, KEDA was initially started by Microsoft and Red Hat, and then they donated that to CNCF to become more vendor neutral. But you can clearly see that both of them want to fix this gap in the Kubernetes space, of course Azure benefits from this with Azure Functions, for example. But as a customer, I don’t really care as long as that fixes my problem. I’m okay with that. And that’s the beauty, because in the end you need to benefit from all your investments. Right?
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Tom Kerkhove: So that’s fine for me.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. To close out this, because we’re running out of time here. Could you just give a quick brief definition of KEDA? We’ve been saying KEDA, but I figure not everybody knows what KEDA is.
Tom Kerkhove: Yeah. sorry. So KEDA stands for Kubernetes Event Driven Auto-scaling and basically we aim to make Kubernetes application auto-scaling that simple so that a non Kubernetes experts can even use Kubernetes and make it simple for them.
Mary Jo Foley: Nice. And CNCF is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, right?
Tom Kerkhove: Yes, that is correct.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Yeah. Just, there’s so many acronyms in the open source world. I’m pretty good on the Microsoft ones, but now there’s a whole other set I need to remember and understand.
Tom Kerkhove: Once you go into the container and Kubernetes world, it’s a brave new world. You’ll learn a lot of new stuff.
Mary Jo Foley: I know. I know.
Tom Kerkhove: Which can be overwhelming.
Mary Jo Foley: I’m sure. Well, thanks, Tom. This has been really good. It’s great to know that you’re keeping tabs on what’s going on with Microsoft and open source. So whenever I have a question, I have the right person to ask.
Tom Kerkhove: Uh-oh. No, it’s my pleasure. Thank you very much.
Mary Jo Foley: Great. And for everyone else, who’s listening right now to this or who is reading the transcript. I’ll be putting up information soon about who my next guest is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter all week, just like people did for Tom this week using the #MJFChat. And in the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these kinds of MJF Chats, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: What’s New on the Microsoft Security Front
Jun 17, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is all about what’s going on lately in the Microsoft security world. My special guest for this chat is Ryan Naraine, editor of the Security Conversations podcast and newsletter. Ryan has been covering the security space forever and has worked at Kaspersky and Intel, among other companies.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley: Hi, you’re listening to Petri.com’s MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and our listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be focused on the latest on the Microsoft Security front and who better to do this then my special guest and longtime friend, Ryan Naraine, Editor of the Security Conversations podcast and newsletter. Hi Ryan, and thank you so much for doing this chat.
Ryan Naraine: Thank you, Mary Jo. Thank you for having me. You and I go back a long, long time watching Microsoft together,
Mary Jo Foley: I know.
Ryan Naraine: And watching from the security trenches at the weekend, CDNet as well. So it’s fun to be here talking and stuff.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. And I got to admit this, security is like an area I am very overwhelmed. I write about stuff like licensing and Windows kernels and all that. But then when we start talking about zero-days on ransomware and supply chain hacks, I’m like, okay, I’m out of my depth. So I’m going to definitely count on you to help out here with all this.
Ryan Naraine: Absolutely. And you know, Microsoft is in the middle of it, is in the middle of all this noise. You can’t talk about malware attacks or any of the big breaches or data issues without Windows being in the middle of it. So obviously Microsoft is.
Mary Jo Foley: Yep, that’s true. So I had an idea about starting very broad and talking at a high level about a couple of things and getting a little deeper after that. So here’s kind of a question you can answer any way you want, what is Microsoft doing right, right now on the security front and where could they improve?
Ryan Naraine: Microsoft is doing a lot of things right. But again, it depends on comparing it to the previous Microsoft that I’ve been covering as a journalist over the years. Microsoft has been through these transformations and transitions in computing along the way. You remember the early two thousands, it was worm attacks and just these kinds of destructive things. Now, we’re starting to see a model where attacks and malicious hacker activity come with a business model attached to it. So ransomware and supply chain, ransomware specifically is data extortion attacks where, you know, someone infects a Windows machine, encrypts everything across the board, and then extorts the company for data to to get a decryption key to get that. A lot of that is in the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft it’s tough to get a lot of it right.
Ryan Naraine: What has been super impressive about what Microsoft has done over the years is build a security response process and an automatic update pipe and an automatic update mechanism to ship security updates, I think better anyone else in the industry. And they’ve had experience with it over the years with all the attacks and all the stuff they’ve dealt with over the years. But they have a very, very mature security response process to take in vulnerability reports, get patches created and tested of proper quality and then a Windows update mechanism and a pipeline to deliver that reliably, to get things fixed. So they’ve done very, very well architecting that and building that over the years. They could still do a lot I mean, in terms of where they stand to improve, it’s still a big problem. zero-day attacks are still escalating on the Windows ecosystem as we speak. They’re still addressing security vulnerabilities and classes of vulnerabilities that we expected would have been gone by now.
Ryan Naraine: Yeah. And then there’s a whole bigger discussion we can have around Microsoft, as operating system and cloud provider and Microsoft as a security vendor securing that entire product that they just sell you. So there’s a little bit of, there’s overlaps between Microsoft now becoming a big, giant, significant security vendor. And where does the responsibility lie between, is it your responsibility to protect this prior to your selling or do I have to pay for an upsell to do it? So there’s conversations there and that’s where I would say there’s a lot of things they can improve to help address the security poverty tax across the board.
Mary Jo Foley: I’m definitely going to ask you more about that as we go on. Cause that is a topic that comes up among my readers and my listeners a lot. So before I ask you about that though, another one that’s kind of very high level, you know, we’ve had all these commonly targeted attacks of Windows and other products in the Microsoft ecosystem with like Nobelium and SolarWinds, right. It just feels like every week we hear about another one of these new kinds of similar attacks. So some people say this is Microsoft’s fault, right. And they should take the blame for these kinds of things. And other people say, you know what they’re not even indirectly at fault, like they’re just trying to defend their products against these kinds of attacks. So I’m curious, do you think we can blame Microsoft for this? Or is that just overly simplistic?
Ryan Naraine: Well, by nature supply chain, just the definition of supply chain means that you’re part of a chain of things. You’re part of a chain of things that have to go around where, or something has gone wrong within the chain. And like I explained earlier, everything in the computing chain touches Microsoft in some way, whether it’s part, whether it’s desktop server. Now they’re dabbling in IoT and doing a lot of additional stuff. Again taken advantage of that updating pipeline to find business models around it, deployment of IoT and so on. But going back to the point, there’s too much nuance to say you blame one vendor directly because you know, it’s Microsoft could be a pivot point for an attack that started somewhere else. Microsoft is a pivot point to get the attacker to somewhere else.
Ryan Naraine: And that might not even be the eventual target that somewhere else might just be a third pivot point to actually get to the actual target. So blaming people in supply chain attacks doesn’t help anyone. I mean, it’s easy for headlines and it’s easy for a lot of folks to, you know, to point fingers. And the other thing to keep in mind that Nobelium and SolarWinds and these supply chain hacks is, these are nation-state level apex predators who have access to all the resources they have all the zero-days, the best type of talent to write exploits, access to unlimited resources, and a goal that is driven by nation-state objectives. When a nation-state wants to get into your network, like Microsoft will tell you, you have no chance. The SolarWind CEO, explained this throughout. He’s like if an advanced resource nation-state attacker wants to get into a target, they’ll get into the target. And blaming someone in the supply chain, I think, it helps to keep an eye and keep vendors focused on doing the right things. But I think there’s just too much nuance in the supply chain things to say it’s Microsoft’s blame or not their blame.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. So this idea of a software supply chain security issue means, I’m going to oversimplify this myself. When you send out an update, there could be malicious code in it. So, do you think Microsoft is doing enough about that concept specifically in trying to address where the weakest link is here? Or is there something they could do better or more of to try to help secure as a software supply chain in your view?
Ryan Naraine: I think Microsoft has a role to play as it relates to taking this very modern, robust, automatic update mechanism that they’ve built over the years. And I’m not sure if open-sourcing it or contributing it in some ways to help the rest of the ecosystem, get to that level of maturity might be something to address it. But I think there has to be a way to address what we are now. As a security industry, we love automatic updates. We taught everyone turn on automatic updates, make sure it’s on by default, leave that up to the vendor because you’re never going to remember to go apply patches and so on. So automatic updates from a security perspective and security experts, we’ve been advising companies get to that place where you can ship automatic updates. Now we’re starting to realize that that has become a big, not necessarily a weak spot, but a big entry point for the types of high-end supply chain attacks that are now coming through that automatic update mechanism that is meant to keep product secure, you know, shipping malicious things through there.
Ryan Naraine: Very, very, very difficult thing to address. I know the government and there’s a lot of leadership talk around s-bombs and ingredient lists so that people can have a full ingredients of what’s in the software so they can figure out where malicious things are. And there’s a lot of new investment and innovation coming around, like addressing the supply chain thing. But again, I don’t see this as a Microsoft specific thing. This is an industry specific thing that Microsoft would have the dictatatorship to get it right. But it’s really interesting to me over the years to watch the automatic update technology and automatic update pipeline now become part, like it becomes dual use. You know, instead of being primarily for defensive purposes, now it’s now being part of a attacks. And it’s not new either, we saw it in Stuxnet and we saw it in some major attacks in the past. A bigger issue, and it’s something that Microsoft raised and something we should mention here, and Microsoft itself has asked governments to back off of touching automatic update mechanisms. It’s like one of those things where in conflicts and war, you kind of back off from touching hospitals. I think governments at the higher level should understand that dabbling and messing with automatic update piping mechanisms, hurt computing as a whole. And there’s been, there’s gotta be certain responsibility there. I like that Microsoft is leading the call for that.
Mary Jo Foley: Yep. Okay. All right. Now we’re going to get to that issue you raised earlier on, I was looking through some of your Security Conversations podcasts and newsletters, which if folks don’t know about this, you should definitely subscribe. And you made a very provocative statement there, which I’ve heard other people make similar statements too, as well. You said we’re at a place where vendors sell you a product, then they upsell you on the tools to secure that product. So I know Microsoft gets dinged for this a lot. And I feel like right now, they’re very much on the defensive about this in terms of what kinds of tools they give you for free versus tools they charge you for as an IT pro. So do you think this is a fair criticism and is Microsoft really in the wrong place on this issue?
Ryan Naraine: It’s a great question. And listen, there’s a lot of people at Microsoft that I admire and respect, and I know there’s people at Microsoft that genuinely are there making decisions, making the right decisions for the rest of the computing ecosystem. But cybersecurity is big business. And when you’re a big vendor like Microsoft and you have responsibilities to shareholders, you cannot ignore this giant pile of cash sitting there called cyber security. It’s really interesting and fascinating to me, to watch Satya actually make a point of breaking out the news that Microsoft is now $10 billion a year in cybersecurity revenue. It was kind of eye-opening for me, biggest vendor like Akamai, for instance, that’s had a track record of doing cybersecurity in our industry. Makes a billion dollars a year in security revenue. Satya comes along late last year and said, we’re making $10 billion a year selling what they call advanced compliance and security services.
Ryan Naraine: I mean, you think about it. It’s upselling, they’re upselling security technologies and security and compliance technologies and Azure Defender and all the Sentinel logging and analytics capabilities. They’re all just bundling that into their big Azure deals and selling it. And it becomes complicated because Microsoft has done an incredible job of building amazing technologies you know, UpGuard and some of this stuff that they funneled into their E5 licensing. It’s amazing technology that can really, really go a long way to help address malware coming in on Microsoft Word documents. But you’ve got to pay for it. And it’s pretty expensive. And Microsoft is now boasting not only that it’s pretty expensive, but Microsoft is now boasting that we’re a big name, big name, security vendor.
Ryan Naraine: But, when there’s a supply chain and a ransomware epidemic happening on your platform, it feels wrong. Even if it’s not, it might not be around because companies need to be paid for their innovation. Companies need to be paid for their technology investments. Microsoft has spent record numbers of money on security technologies. They should make money on it, but it feels wrong when we’re in the middle of a ransomware epidemic on Windows or supply chain issues that’s dragged Microsoft into it. And then I go on Twitter and I see all Microsoft executives selling security products, selling security products. It just, it feels wrong. And I feel like we’re taking a step back in time where Microsoft moved from being that pariah, that kind of company that we made fun of to become a trendsetter over the years. And I talk about their maturity on security response and maturity on patching and so on.
Ryan Naraine: And now it feels like money has forced them to take a back seat and we’re starting to see it affect security in certain ways. You’re starting to see a lot of minor restructuring happening in Microsoft. And a lot of brain drain, a lot of talent shifting. And a lot of it is driven by guys are not comfortable with a lot of the things that have to be sold versus, but again, it’s a tough conversation to have.
Mary Jo Foley: It is.
Ryan Naraine: Because Microsoft is, they’re investing a lot of money into building this thing. Why give everything away for free, right? I mean.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. I know. It’s hard to know where to draw the line there, right? Because like you said, I think it’s a calculated risk when they say we’re at $10 billion security vendor. Because it kind of makes people go, oh yeah, but wait, you’re securing products that I paid money for right? And you’re expecting me to pay for it.
Ryan Naraine: Right. But, let me give you the counter to that argument as well. As much as I complain about it and I’m whining and moaning about it on my podcast. The CISOs will tell me, listen, I would rather live in Microsoft’s world and have Microsoft understand this better than anyone, than outsource it to a third-party vendor who doesn’t understand how Azure works, who doesn’t understand my infrastructure, who doesn’t understand how it’s properly deployed in my system. I would rather Microsoft be the experts at doing this. And I would rather get a better E5 deal if I can say yes, send me those security things. And I can bundle everything into one and keep my costs down. So the whole security conversation becomes a business conversation. And I think that’s also why we are seeing across the board organizations and enterprises are less secure today because decisions aren’t made based on quality of products or quality of protection, it’s based on what you can bundle into the best, into the cheapest possible thing. And that comes with all kinds of implications as well.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, for sure it does. Okay. Here’s another one, one of these kind of phrases, you hear people say it off the cuff and you’re like, but is it true? So you hear Microsoft say this a lot. The best offense you can make is to move to the cloud because that’s where the most secure technology is, that’s always up to date, and where we put all our first run innovations out first. So is it overly simplified to say, if you really want to take an easy first step to securing your organization, you should go with the cloud.
Ryan Naraine: Yeah. That’s easy to say until the next cloud outage, right?
Mary Jo Foley: I know, right.
Ryan Naraine: And then all the guys who are on premises, see you see those morons scrambling so quickly to move to the cloud, I’d rather be here. The reality though, is that everything is moving to the cloud. The reality, just the bare reality is that digital transformation has been happening. And has been kind of forced by COVID as well. COVID has forced a lot of companies to just cloud-ify things that they weren’t ready to cloud-ify yet. And I don’t believe, I don’t agree with Microsoft, that our best defense is the move to the cloud. I don’t think that our organizations have the required skills, expertise, and we have a cybersecurity skills shortage, which means that that will continue to be a problem. They don’t have enough of the skills and legs to do security in-house.
Ryan Naraine: You’re better off outsourcing that to these big vendors who can just fix things and patch it automatically. And you don’t have to worry about any of it. What I do worry about is implementation of these technologies. A lot of the hacks we are seeing are not necessarily big high-end zero-days. It’s a lot of the cloud is badly configured. Something was left exposed, and here are all your records are long gone. So moving to the cloud is inevitable. I don’t think you’re going to see many more on-prem, startups aren’t even investing in on-prem products these days, unless it’s like a high, high, high priority. You think everything is in the cloud. But, what I don’t see is enough innovation around deploying and configuring cloud deployment security, so that, that isn’t a weak point. So there’s a lot of work to be done there as well.
Mary Jo Foley: That’s good. Let’s switch gears and talk about IoT. Microsoft lately has been on like an IoT related buying spree. They bought ReFirm Labs, which makes Binwalk firmware security analysis software. And last year they bought a company called Cyberex in the name of bolstering their IoT security. So I have two questions for you about this, one is, is it really a huge worry IoT in terms of security? Or is this just like the next fad? And what about firmware, firmware security? How important is this to organizations?
Ryan Naraine: But I think it’s important for us to define IoT security in this context. When people think of IoT security, they think of all those junk things like, you know a talking toothbrush or a fork that can weigh how much calories you’re weighing and like all this dumb IoT nonsense, right? And we’re kind of like, who cares about security in those? They’re throw away things anyway, they’re disposable items. In this context, when you see Microsoft buying ReFirm and investing in and buying Cyberex and kind of merging all of that into an IoT security product or an IoT security, I don’t want to call it a process, but some sort of, or are investing heavily there. They’re not looking at this spoons. They’re thinking about smart light bulbs in the organization. Every enterprise has a lot of these IoT devices scattered around printers, light bulbs, thermostats, all these little things are connected to your network and it becomes a big security problem.
Ryan Naraine: Not because someone wants to hack into a thermostat. That’s why everyone looks at it, who cares about hacking into a thermostat? That’s not the issue. The issue is breaking into a vulnerability in the thermostat, and then using that as the pivot point to get into Active Directory. Using that as a pivot point to get to another part of your network and plant ransomware or getting to that thermostat and ransoming it. Planting ransomware on some of these IoT devices that becomes unusable. So if you’re in a factory and your thermostat is unusable, you have to close the factory. That’s millions and millions of dollars in losses. For organizations that’s a big, big problem. That reality that the IoT device becomes the hot point and the jump point. And Microsoft has documented places where the printer, a hacker exploits a vulnerability into a printer.
Ryan Naraine: And IoT device that was kind of left sitting their unpatched. And then just pivoted from that printer into the network and then ransomed the entire network. So it’s like that entry point, that pivot point that gets forgotten in the organization. There’s tons of these sitting around the organizations. Unpatched, just sitting there waiting to be exploited. And the way to fix that is through firmware, I mentioned this automatic update mechanism that Microsoft has. And again, you can start to see it’s taking shape. Microsoft is going to start monetizing that. Now they can say, listen, every one of those IoT point vulnerabilities within your organization, let Windows automatic updates address it, so we can fix that firmware for you. And now with Cyberex, they have this kind of drag and drop functionality they’ve built into kind of a Virus Total functionality so that former developers could check firmware for signs of malicious things. Even at the enterprise side, people can scan their entire organization and see what kind of IoT devices are in here and how does it affect my entire Windows deployment.
Ryan Naraine: So it just makes natural logical sense for Microsoft to do this from from a we have to defend the Windows ecosystem and there’s big, big money in cybersecurity. And the next wave, there’s big, big money in this automatic update pipe. If you drive a Tesla today, if you buy a Tesla today, in a month, that Tesla will be even better because automatic updates keep making the car better. Microsoft wants to play there. There’s billions and billions of dollars in monetizing that update mechanism for IoT and for firmware. And as you start to see these acquisitions take ship, you start to see where the vision is around Microsoft becoming this big, giant security monster, you know?
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. I don’t know if you covered this much, but they have this thing called Azure Sphere where they actually are trying to secure things at the microcontroller level even. And it just, it’s kinda mind boggling to me like how deep they’re willing to go into this pipeline to try to find new ways to kind of turn it into a cloud service.
Ryan Naraine: Well here’s the thing, that’s the next frontier for attackers as well. That below the operating system. As Microsoft has done more and more of a better job of firming up the operating system. And as the cloud is kind of given them, you know, good visibility and good protection on the top, anything below the operating system from firmware, going down to hardware, going down to chip becomes fertile ground for the future of where malware is. And if you, you know, they’re very, very incredibly smart people at Microsoft, the security leadership who’ve already understood that advanced attackers are going below the stack and going below the operating system and shoring up, that becomes it’s an existential priority for Microsoft moving forward. You’ll see them doing a lot of secured-core PCs a big deal, Windows Defender for IoT.
Ryan Naraine: A lot of these things are Microsoft’s already foray into addressing the operating system that they worry about. You know, 10 years from now, it’s going to be headlines with firmware attacks and supply chain attacks on the hardware level, like, like normal, like the way we reading ransomware attacks today, we’re going to be reading about firmware attacks in 5 to 10 years. Microsoft knows this. These guys are well aware of where the level of investment needs to pick up. And it’s, from my point of view, just as an onlooker, it’s fascinating to me to watch Microsoft really kind of see the game as it’s being played and the long game and to watch how automatic update and the update ecosystem becomes a crucial part of it. And I think that’s why Brad Smith started complaining to Microsoft to leave automatic updates alone. Cause that’s a cash cow as well.
Mary Jo Foley: It is, definitely is. Okay. Last thing I want to talk to you about, cause we’re almost out of time here is about hybrid work and working remotely. And the reason I want to ask you about this is lately, my inbox is full of pitches from companies talking about how they can secure Teams, right? It’s like, this is the new thing I’m getting so much email about. So I’m curious if you think there are steps that IT pros can and should be taking right now, when they’re thinking about securing remote work and especially in specifically Teams.
Ryan Naraine: Stop buying. But first thing they need to do is stop buying point products to secure Microsoft Teams. Like you have, Microsoft Teams is just another cloud collaboration tool. Like to treat this as some new, fantastic thing that needs to be protected in some unique way is a recipe for, you know, being distracted from your security work. What the CISOs and the security defenders will tell you is, listen, I’m focused on setting up your foundation and focused on setting up all these five foundational things. multi-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication all the things. If you put MFA in front of Teams and you zero trust everything where users have to be properly provisioned and segmented before they get Teams access. Once you set up the foundational layers and Teams is just another Slack or another Skype, or just another app in your organization. Focus on the basics, focus on all the, you know, keep things patched, your cloud deployments. You may need to be properly configured and more importantly, multi-factor authentication all the things, add two-factor authentication everywhere. And that’s where you shore that up. Treat it as just another cloud deployment that needs to go through these checklists of things and other vendors start trying to sell you anything, chase them away.
Ryan Naraine: It gets really aggravating for me as a security watcher for many, many years to see vendors, pitch point products to solve problems that can be solved if a CISO just runs a security program properly.
Mary Jo Foley: Yup. Fair. All right, Ryan. Well, thank you so much for this. This was awesome. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about all these hot buttons with me today.
Ryan Naraine: Absolutely. The pleasure was all mine. Best of luck, Mary Jo, I’m a big fan of your work.
Mary Jo Foley: Aw, thank you so much and same here. For everyone else, who’s listening right now to this or reading the transcript. I’ll be putting up information soon about who my next guest is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter all week using the #MJFChat hashtag. In the meantime, if you know of anybody else or even yourself who you think might make a good guest for one of these chats, please do not hesitate to let me know and drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: Developers, developers, developers!
Jun 03, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is all about what’s happening on the developer front at Microsoft, especially around DevOps, GitHub and Azure. My special guest for this chat — hot off the Build 2021 speaking circuit — is Donovan Brown, Microsoft Partner Program Manager, Azure CTO Incubations. Donovan answered a number of reader questions in this episode.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley:
Hi, you’re listening to Petri.com’s MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be on Microsoft’s love of developers, developers, developers. I think you’ve heard that somewhere before. My guest, hot off the Build 2021 conference speaking circuit is Donovan Brown, who is the Partner Program Manager with Azure CTO Incubations. Hi Donovan, thank you so much for doing this chat with me.
Donovan Brown:
Oh, it’s my pleasure. We were talking just a moment ago, we’ve been planning this for a really long time, so I’m glad we’re finally doing it.
Mary Jo Foley:
Me too. And a little funny story, I met Donovan crossing the street in Seattle. I think it was during a Build conference a few years ago. And I remember saying to you in the middle of the street, Hey, I want to interview you someday. So here’s some day, some day is today.
Donovan Brown:
I told that story not too long ago, either because I remember I was, I think I said something like, I can’t believe that person knew me. And then you said, everyone knows you, you’re rub DevOps on it. I’m like, oh my God, I guess that’s a thing.
Mary Jo Foley:
Yep. Yep, yep. But now you have a whole new job since that time, you’re in part of Azure I don’t really know called CTO Incubation. So I’m guessing you work for Mark Russinovich, who is the CTO of Azure, but can you tell us a little more about what do you do in your new job?
Donovan Brown:
Sure, absolutely. So you’re absolutely right. So, Mark Russinovich is the CTO of Azure and he has a team called his Incubations Team where we go off and take the feedback from our customers, from the community and try to figure out how we can solve problems that are going to disrupt the industry. So these aren’t adding features to existing products. This is all right, this is a serious problem that if we solve it correctly is going to change the way that people write software or use the cloud forever. And so one of the projects that we already released was Kata, which is a Kubernetes based, event based autoscaler. So you can basically, instead of auto scaling off of CPU or memory, you can, now auto-scale off of the contents of a queue. So as the queue goes down to zero Kata also allows you to scale down to zero, which most scalers don’t allow you to do. And then as it starts to see items, show up in the queue, it’ll start to scale up the nodes necessary to process that queue. So that came out of the Incubations Team. And then Dapr is the newest thing that came out of the Incubations Team, which is making writing microservices really, really easy.
Mary Jo Foley:
Good. I have a lot of Dapr questions coming up for you.
Donovan Brown:
Cool.
Mary Jo Foley:
Yeah, one time I was interviewing Mark Russinovich and he started trying to explain Dapr to me, assuming that I know what things like the actor model are, and he’s like, you know what that is, right? And I’m like, so no, and he’s like, I know, you know what that is. And I’m like, I’m not a developer Mark. I don’t, I don’t know what it is. So, yeah, but I’m going to ask you more about that in a bit. But before I jump into my questions, we got a lot of interest on Twitter for this chat, which I wasn’t surprised about. And some of these questions could be books in and of themselves. So I’m going to try to skip around a little and do some serious questions and intersperse them with some fun questions to keep things light.
Donovan Brown:
Sounds good.
Mary Jo Foley:
Okay. So the very first one, let’s just start with one that we got from several people. I think you saw this on Twitter Tero Alhonen asked it very succinctly, he said, okay, GitHub or Azure DOps? How is a developer going to decide?
Donovan Brown:
That is the number one question I get asked every time I’m anywhere for any reason, they ask me which one should I use? And I’ll tell you the exact same thing I tell our customers, you need to evaluate them both because they both have their strengths and both have their weaknesses. And what you need to do is determine which one of them solves the problem that you’re currently having. The best analogy I can think of, and I see this in my head every time someone asks me that question is, if you’ve ever worked with building a lot of things you’ll come across a screw where the head of it clearly is designed for a Phillips head screwdriver, which is the one that looks like an X. But if you look really closely at that screw one of the lines goes all the way across the screw, which means you can also use a flathead screwdriver and still drive that screw.
Donovan Brown:
So there’s no wrong answer. It’s like, which one do you use? You know, which one you’re gonna use, you’re gonna use the screwdriver that’s closest to you. If you have a flathead, that’s closer to you than a Phillips head, you’re going to use that flathead screwdriver. And you’re going to drive that screw. If you happen to have a Phillips head screwdriver, which would fit better and less likely to strip, you’re going to use that one instead. And I use the same analogy when you’re thinking about where should I do my CIC? Should it be in GitHub Actions? Or should it be inside of Azure DevOps? Well, which one’s closest to you? And if your code is already in GitHub, the closest thing to you is going to be GitHub Actions. And what you need to do is evaluate that and say, does this have all the features that I need to achieve the goals that I currently have? And don’t waste time talking about, oh, but it doesn’t have this feature and that feature that you have no intentions of using. I used to hate that debate where people are like, oh, this one’s best in class. And then I would ask you what makes it best in class? They’d rattle off three or four features. I’m like, great, which of those features are you planning to use? Well, none of them, I was like, so why are we talking about that?
Donovan Brown:
Why are we wasting time? So stop looking at which one’s the best in the industry, which one has the best XYZ. Look at the one that solves your problem, the best, and that’s what you need to be focused on. And we support them both. So there’s no wrong answer. To me this is a question of choice. And at Microsoft, we love giving our developers choice. Which is why you have Visual Studio and VIsual Studio Code. Which is why you have the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. And this is why you have GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps, right? We give you options all across the board here at Microsoft. And this is just another example where we’re giving you that. And we have features that just dropped in Azure DevOps on the 26th. What was that, yesterday, day before yesterday? So there’s still development there. There’s still active support there.
Donovan Brown:
So the first question I ask all my customers is where is your source code? If it’s in GitHub, fine, let’s go evaluate GitHub Actions and see if it does everything that you need. If two things, if your code, one, is not in Azure and GitHub, then GitHub Actions aren’t an option. Or, two, you found a feature that you really need that GitHub Actions doesn’t have today. Well, then let’s go ahead and switch over to Azure DevOps, which can get your code from anywhere and is older. So therefore has by the nature of that more features and has been battle-tested and is used by companies of all sizes across the world. So, and we’re still going to support it. We can’t not support it because it’s so popular, right? To me, there’s no wrong answer. You just need to find the one that fits your problem the best. And I use them both just to be very transparent. There are projects where I’m still full blown Azure DevOps, and there’s other projects where I’ve either migrated them or started from scratch and was able to achieve my desired goals in GitHub Actions. And it was convenient because all my codes are pretty much in GitHub now anyway. So my answer is evaluate them both and choose the one that solves your problem the best.
Mary Jo Foley:
That’s a great answer. I’m like so happy to hear somebody give a succinct, clear answer to that because I think the reason people ask it a lot is people are afraid that Azure DevOps is going to be discontinued. And so they’re already panicking and way ahead of time they’re like, yeah, but what happens if Microsoft discontinues it because GitHub is the favorite child and I’m like, you know what they haven’t said they’re going to, and if they ever do, I’m sure they’re going to give you a very long runway and a big heads up on that.
Donovan Brown:
You nailed it. You just nailed it. And if you go through my Twitter feed, I think you’ll find a response that was very similar to that. I said, stop listening to rumors, wait til you get an official announcement from us and look at TFVC, right? They had the exact, remember when we started investing in, Git, and people panicked about TFVC, and guess what? You can still use TFVC to this very day, right inside of our product. So like, stop, I understand you don’t want to invest in something that’s going to be taking away from you. But I have a, this is just me. we don’t do that with something as popular as Azure DevOps. Right, It’s just, we couldn’t do that because it’s so popular and it’s such a great product. I’m obviously a huge fan. I was on the team for a while. So I’m a big fan of it as well.
Mary Jo Foley:
Okay. Speaking of Git, you just gave me an excellent segue into the next listener question. Ian Ceicys, I think is how he may pronounce his name, said, ask Donovan, what is the difference between DevOps and GitOps?
Donovan Brown:
I’m going to try my best, not to get on my soap box about all the ops. I am about sick of the ops. I mean, we don’t need all the,
Mary Jo Foley:
What about MLOps, what about this, what about this?
Donovan Brown:
And DevSecOps, which I had a lot of talks on, and I don’t even know if I ever said that term, if you notice, like those are DevSecOps sessions, but I just said security, because to me you need security. Even before you’re doing DevOps, you need security on your actual dev machine. You need to have that bit lockered and protected and multi-factored authentication. You need to have it in your repository, in your pipeline and in production. To me, security is something that we should have been thinking about a long time. And I didn’t need a special word to say it. For me, GitOps sounds a lot like infrastructure as code, but we’re going to confine it just to using Git repositories.
Donovan Brown:
You can’t use TFVC or Subversion or some other thing. And I just, pardon me, I almost rolled my eyes when I read that. I’m like, really, like, we need another ops? Like it’s infrastructure as code. And just because you’re confining it to only use Git based repositories to me, it was just like, all right. I mean, I just shrugged it off because I’ve already been doing infrastructure as code, as part of my DevOps pipelines, because I think infrastructure code it’s one of the unsung heroes of DevOps best practices. And I was a late bloomer to that. I wasn’t a big believer because I come, I started my career at Compaq Computers. I remember deploying my software on ProLiant servers that were the same configuration a year later that they were the first time I deployed to them.
Donovan Brown:
So infrastructure as code and configuration as code didn’t really pop for me, cause I was like, I don’t change my infrastructure very often. So why am I going to invest in automation of something that never changes, but then you fast forward to the cloud and you realize no Donovan, those environments change all the time potentially. And you’re going to want the ability to tear down an environment and spin it back up again, like your dev and your QA environments that don’t need to live forever. And then all of a sudden that light bulb comes on. wow infrastructure as code is really, really powerful. And then you start talking about disaster recovery because if I have this script, this automation that I can use to stand up another version of my environment, somewhere else in the world, when a catastrophic failure happens. No longer, is it a all hands on deck, no longer are we ordering in take out.
Donovan Brown:
And everyone’s in the war room trying to figure out how to get our services back up. It’s just like everyone go back to sleep. I’m just going to push this button and we’re going to stand up another one and go back to sleep. And that’s when the light came on for infrastructure as code. So when I started reading about all this, GitOps stuff, I’m thinking this just sounds like the things I’ve been doing already. And I even found some articles that compared the two of them or talked about what is GitOps versus infrastructure as code. And even then I was having a hard time saying, I haven’t been already doing this stuff, call it whatever you want. I think infrastructure as code is a very important DevOps best practice. One that people should be employing as quickly as they possibly can. If you want to call it, GitOps great, but don’t confuse yourself. Thinking that GitOps is one thing and then DevOps is another. You should be doing infrastructure as code in your pipeline that you’re deploying your applications with. I hope that answers that question.
Mary Jo Foley:
Yeah, that’s really good. Another nice, clear answer. I liked it. Okay, Mickey Gousset, who I think you may know, what is the next big thing after DevOps? What’s the next big catchphrase or idea? And the reason, I think, you’re being asked this is because one of your big claims to fame was popularizing the rub a little DevOps on it concept. Right? So I think everybody wants to know, what do you think is going to be the next big thing?
Donovan Brown:
It’s funny because I didn’t even know that was going to be a big thing. It just, I remember the first time I ever said that I was sent to a customer to prove to them that we can build their gradle scripts these big, giant gradle scripts using VSTS at the time. And they didn’t think that we could do it because they were a Java shop and Microsoft doesn’t have this reputation for Java, especially at the time that I did this back in, I think it was 2015 when I was there. And I’m in this war room and every time they brought up what they thought was a challenge I’m in there and I have my peers with me and we just would solve the problem immediately or write a custom task and just showing how flexible the tool was.
Donovan Brown:
And then they came up with another one I just said, oh, we’re just gonna rub a little DevOps on this. And this problem is going to go away. And everyone in the room laughed. And I thought, ooh wait, I’m going to store that one away. Maybe I’ll be able to use that sometime because I didn’t expect that reaction. 2016, I get the keynote Build and that’s the first time I ever said it out loud to a public audience. I said, do you remember that application you just saw on the last demo? We’re going to rub a little DevOps on it to make it better. And the next thing I know, it’s all over Twitter. And people, some people hated it. Some people thought it was hilarious. And I remember there was a fun story where one of the people who really, really hated it, I met him in England and he was just giving me this hard time. He’d already attacked me on Twitter. We’re having fun with it though. And then he came to a meetup that I had that night and I didn’t say it. And he was just furious. I’m like, dude you hated it anyway, and I didn’t say it. And you’re like, well, how did you not say it? You say it all the time, I said, Oh my goodness, this has gotten way out of control.
Donovan Brown:
There’s been news articles written over that phrase. It’s just been nuts. So what will be next? I have no idea because I didn’t even know that was going to be a thing, it just seems to happen. And I’ve noticed that when I’m on stage, what people pick up on is not what I expected them to pick up on, because I rehearse everything that you see.
Mary Jo Foley:
I’m sure.
Donovan Brown
I’ve said all those lines, hundreds of times. And I kind of in my mind think, okay, that’s going to land there. And I’m usually pretty good and the jokes pretty much land, and I’m like this, this is going to trend and it never does. But how did that not trend? I orchestrated that to happen and nothing. And then all of a sudden they picked up on something else I said, or did, or there’s a meme of me kind of dancing around because I said warm and fuzzy once.
Donovan Brown:
And I kind of pantomimed it and all of a sudden, I become a GIF. Oh my goodness, that’s what you latched on to. But not this other thing. I’ve been saying a lot though, that might catch on. I haven’t actually been saying it. I picked it up from my buddy Mark Fussell, who is on my team now. He uses the term Dapr-ize a lot, which is funny. Cause you want to talk about Dapr and we’ll get to that. But to Dapr-ize an application is first of all, very easy to do. And you get a lot of free stuff just by running your app in the context of Dapr, you get traceability, you get observability, you get security. And it’s all a lot of cool stuff and he calls it to Dapr-ize your application. And then another thing that we’ve been saying is that Dapr does that and it became a hashtag during a show I was recording.
Donovan Brown:
I didn’t even realize that I was saying it a lot. Just Dapr does that. I don’t have to worry about that, cause Dapr does that. And next thing I know, I look up and there’s a hashtag Dapr does that, I mean that’s kind of cool. So I think there might be some Dapr specific trends coming up. But to answer the first part. So one of them is what’s the next trend or what’s the next catch phrase? I think Dapr is going to have something to do with that, if I’m right, but I’m probably not. So it’s probably going to be something I’m not even thinking about, that’s going to take off. The other thing was, what’s going to be the next big thing after DevOps or where does DevOps go? And I think a lot about this question still, even though DevOps, isn’t my primary focus, because when it was my primary focus, you’re constantly thinking about what’s going to be next.
Donovan Brown:
And what I kept telling people is I hope there’s nothing next because I’ve been writing software since ’96. I joined Compaq Computers in.’96 and I remember setting up a CI system was only the brightest on your team could do that, because you had to make files. And you had to figure out how to trigger the CI system whenever a commit happened. And we weren’t using Git or Essentia, like it was just you had to be really, really smart to set up a CI system. And today It’s a checkbox. Like you can go anywhere and click a check box or add a value to a YAML file. And you get CI automatically, nobody thinks about it, it’s not a big deal. What I hope is that DevOps goes that way, to where DevOps is literally a checkbox or a value that I check set somewhere.
Donovan Brown:
And I don’t think about the infrastructure as code the security that I have to apply. How am I going to deploy the application? I want all that taken away from the developer. I want the developer to say, here are my files. Here’s the URL I want to access those files from. Azure, take care of the rest. I don’t want to know if it’s going to AKS or Azure App Service or to Azure Functions or Static Web Apps. I don’t care. Like I honestly, as a developer, I really don’t care. I just want my app to show up when I type in DonovanBrown.com. Go make that happen.
Mary Jo Foley:
Nice.
Donovan Brown:
But what I’m hoping is that yeah, DevOps goes that way. Right? It just, we don’t think about it anymore. We just hand Azure our files and our URL. And five minutes later, our app is running. And if Azure decides it needs to move it from Static Web Apps to App Service or from App Service to Kubernetes. Great, go ahead, Azure, do what you gotta do to make sure that my customers get the best experience that they can. I really don’t care. So I hope DevOps is not what we’re talking about 10 years from now.
Mary Jo Foley:
Okay. That’s very interesting. And I get your point. There are certain concepts here, like it can’t just go away or be replaced. It just has to become a natural part of the whole way you operate. Right?
Donovan Brown:
Absolutely. Because CI didn’t go away. We just made it so easy that no one cares about it anymore. No one talks about it anymore. I shouldn’t say, we don’t care about it. We care about it because it is an extremely integral and important part of your CI/CD pipeline. But it’s just not something that you’re losing a lot of sleep over because setting up CI has become so simple to do. And I want DevOps to be that simple to do. We’ve got a long ways to go. But I think it’s clearly possible because we’re getting these patterns. We’re getting these systems that work over and over again, we’re getting down to containers, just becomes that one unit of distribution, which makes things a lot simpler for us to go off and automate in a very consistent way. So I think in the future, DevOps isn’t as popular as it is right now. And we’re gonna be talking about something else and DevOps will go the way of CI.
Mary Jo Foley:
Okay. So we’ve danced around this long enough, I’m ready to take the bull by the horns. Let’s talk about Dapr. Okay. Dapr, distributed application runtime. Now here’s your challenge for me, explain in plain English to somebody who’s say an IT pro, why this is important, what it is and why they should be thinking about it? But keep it and keep it like kind of high level. So that even a journalist like me can understand it.
Donovan Brown:
Okay. Challenge accepted. Let me see if I can do this for you. I’m going to give you a little bit of an anecdote first and maybe that’ll help tie it together. I’ve been a developer for a really long time. Distributed applications are very difficult to write. And one of the reasons that they’re difficult to write, are there are so many moving pieces. You have to worry about how you call other services. How do you find out where they are and what their names are? What if there’s 10 of them? Which one of those do I call? What if I’m calling it too often? How do I back off and know how to back off? What if my first call fails? And I need to try again, what’s that retry logic look like? That’s a lot of code that I’m writing. And if I want to connect to something like Redis CAS, I now have to download their SDK, have to learn their API.
Donovan Brown:
But what if tomorrow we switched from Redis CAS to Azure Cosmos DB. Well, that’s another SDK I have to download. And another API I have to learn and code I have to change because it no longer points to Redis and now points to something else. And that’s just one example of just where I want to store state. You have to multiply that by service discovery, secrets management input and output bindings, all those things come with their own tacks of SDKs. You have to download dependencies, you have to have in code you have to write. But what if I were to tell you, there is a world where you don’t have to write that code. You don’t have to learn those APIs. You don’t have to download those SDKs, but you have the exact same power you had before. That’s Dapr. Dapr is that piece that you rely upon that understands how the talk to Redis and also understands how to talk to Cosmos DB so that I don’t have to know how to talk to those things.
Donovan Brown:
I say, Hey, Dapr, I need you to store this for me. I’m going to ask for it later. Okay, no problem I’ll store it for you. Whenever you want it just ask for your dog’s name and I’ll give you dog’s name back. Might be stored in Redis cache, might be stored in Azure Storage, might be stored in Cosmos DB, might be stored in AWS, might be stored in GCP. I don’t know, nor do I care, but I know that when I ask for that secret, I’m going to get it back. When I ask for that state, I’m going to get it back. There was an app that I’ve been demoing quite a bit, where I actually take in tweets from Twitter and I take the text and I send it to Cosmos, I mean, to Cognitive Services, to get the text analyzed and tell me if it’s sentiment analysis.
Donovan Brown:
I didn’t have to write a single line of code that understands the API from Twitter. I didn’t have to download any SDKs for Twitter. I just said, Hey, Dapr, whenever you get a tweet that looks like this, call me please. And there was like, no problem. And next thing you know, all these tweets just come funneling into my code. And all I wrote was I think 12 lines of code. That’s it. Once I get a tweet, do this with the tweet. So Dapr makes writing microservices easy because it takes away all of the heavy lifting that an engineer would normally have to do. And it also reduces the amount of code you have to change. So let’s say on my local machine, I’m running against Reddis CAS cause it’s convenient, but then I’m going to be running against, I don’t know, Cosmos DB in the cloud. I don’t have to change any of my code. I just change my configuration and it just runs there. And so to me, in a nutshell, Dapr makes writing microservices easy because it does all the heavy lifting for you.
Mary Jo Foley:
That’s good. Where does it sit? Like if somebody wants to use Dapr, where is it?
Donovan Brown:
No, that’s a good point. So Dapr, when you’re running inside of a Kubernetes cluster is a sidecar. So a sidecar is another basically container running right next to your container in the same pod. So you just communicate with Dapr and Dapr does all the translations of communicating to everything else for you. So it’s just a sidecar, but it doesn’t only run inside of Kubernetes. You can actually run Dapr locally on a VM, if you’re still on-prem and you have systems that need to communicate with each other or store state, or get secrets, you can still use Dapr. And it just runs as a process right next to your application on the same VM as well.
Mary Jo Foley:
Okay. That’s good. Yeah. Mickey also wanted me to ask you about air hockey and racing cars. I’m like, you know what? Those are two topics I know even less about than I know about Dapr. So I don’t know even what I would ask you. I just, I have heard you’re really big into car racing.
Donovan Brown:
Yes, back in ’97 I bought a BMW M3, which is a very, very fast car. And a friend of mine convinced me that I should autocross it. And autocrossing is where you’re the only person on the track at a time. So it’s not wheel to wheel racing and you’re timed against a clock and everyone has to drive the exact same course and the person who drives it fastest without any penalties, obviously wins. And eventually, I tried it and was just amazed by the vehicle that I had purchased. Cause when you’re driving it on the street, you really don’t understand all the engineering that you purchased. But when you track a car, you start to really appreciate how amazing they are. And I obviously being a software engineer figured out a way to create a registration system for people who wanted to race their cars and turned it into a business that I ran for about 20 years.
Donovan Brown:
But it also was a cool way to race my car because I was getting paid to race my car. I felt like a professional driver because I was sponsored by the website that was about racing cars. And I raced all over the United States at the national level, which was a lot of fun. So I still race every once in a while. Not near as much, since COVID hit, I haven’t raced. But now that I’m fully vaccinated, I think I’m going to start to venture out and track my cars again. And then I did the same thing with air hockey. Abel Wang is my best friend and he and I played air hockey a lot and thought we had to be the best two air hockey players in the world. I mean we had to be. We played hundreds of games. There’s no way anyone plays air hockey as well as we do.
Donovan Brown:
So we started searching on the internet for if anyone else played air hockey like we did. And lo and behold, two weeks out from the day we started searching was the Texas state tournament in Dallas, Texas on, I think it was 2007 when this happened, I was like, Abel, man, we got to go to this tournament and teach these people how to play air hockey. This will be awesome. And unfortunately Abel couldn’t go, but I could go. So I flew to Dallas and I show up at the hotel, there’s players from all over the country there. And I remember a gentleman comes up and says, you want to play? I’m like of course I want to play. I’m like, this is awesome. Finally get to teach these people how to play air hockey. I get on the table, the game lasts probably 30 seconds. I don’t score a single point. This guy is doing things I’ve never seen before. Things I didn’t know you were allowed to do on the air hockey table. And all I remember doing is picking up my phone and texting Abel, we suck. He’s like really? Like, dude, we’re horrible at this game. These people are amazing. And I’ve been hooked ever since. So again, created a website, created an app that scores them. So we could broadcast the matches from my house over the internet and was ranked 11 in the world at one point.
Mary Jo Foley:
Wow. Really? Interesting,
Donovan Brown:
Yes, that was my best finish ever. And it was a finish where my wife and I went to Denver for the world championships that year. And I just went to support the community. Cause I wasn’t in practice. I hadn’t been training and I was just like, let’s just go have fun. Let’s just go support the community. So we flew to Denver and not taking it as serious, I ended up 11th in the world. And the reason I think I ended up 11th and not 10th is because when I went to the 11, 10 spinoff, I started taking it seriously thinking, oh man, I will be in the top 10 player in the world. And I took it so seriously, I psyched myself out and I lost. And it’s just interesting where you just do it for fun, I ended up playing better than I had when I was taking it way too serious.
Mary Jo Foley:
I wonder if that has implications for developers, I bet it does.
Donovan Brown:
I think so as well because most of the developers will tell you the ideas and the solutions don’t come when you’re sitting in front of the computer.
Mary Jo Foley:
Right.
Donovan Brown:
They’re coming to you when you’re falling asleep or when you’re waking up or when you’re doing something else. And then you have to run back to the computer to get that out of your head. But sometimes if you just, you look at it for too long, you can’t see that one semi-colon that’s missing or that one logical, that one line, and it’s usually one line or one character that’s wrong. That’s been blocking you for the last day and a half. And you won’t see it when you’re staring at it and you’re just focused on and determined. Sometimes you just have to turn your brain off, go watch Nacho Libre and laugh at stupidness and then come back and the answer will be right in front of you.
Mary Jo Foley:
Exactly. All right, we’re running out of time here. I want to sneak in one more question. I know you spoke at Build this week and one of the sessions you spoke on, I’m very interested in, I haven’t watched it yet, but I’m going to. It’s called Running Open Source Applications Your Way on Azure. And I’m wondering if there are any bits from that, that you think would be important for IT pros to know. Like a key takeaway or two from that session that you can kind of summarize here for IT pros.
Donovan Brown:
It’s interesting you qualified it as IT pros because I think what I’m about to share everyone needs to know. It doesn’t matter if you’re a developer, an IT pro, or PM. If you’re working in an organization, I think you need to understand that at Microsoft, we can support you with your Java workloads. People don’t associate Microsoft and Java, but they don’t realize that LinkedIn has I think a hundred. What is it? 1800 microservices running Java right now. Minecraft uses Java. I think we have Java in Azure itself. We also have Java in other places inside of Microsoft. So we have a vested interest in making sure that Java runs well in Azure. And we have a lot of experience running large enterprise workloads that are written in Java in Azure. And we can help our customers with that as well. So that’s a message that I hope people take away from that session is that we’re not just here to help you with .NET.
Donovan Brown:
We can help you with any language that you’re writing. It doesn’t matter if it’s Go or Java. We have a lot of investments to make sure that any code that you write runs really effectively inside of Azure. So that open source session is about, doesn’t matter what language you program in. It doesn’t matter what open source databases you use. Doesn’t matter if you’re running on Linux or Windows, here at Microsoft, we’re here to help everyone be more effective with their job. Be it a citizen developer, which is a low code, no code type of developer, a pro developer, that’s writing really low-level microservices, doing proper infrastructures code for your spring boot applications. It doesn’t matter what hat you wear in your organization. If you want to run open source in Azure, we’re here for you.
Mary Jo Foley:
Oh good. Okay. I’m definitely gonna watch this now. That sounds really good. Donovan, thank you so much, especially doing this at the end of a super busy week. Really appreciate you taking the time.
Donovan Brown:
My pleasure.
Mary Jo Foley:
And for everyone else, who’s listening right now to this or reading the transcript. I’ll be putting up information soon about who my next guest is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter like people did for Donovan all week this week, using the #MJFChat. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these chats, please do not hesitate to let me know and drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: Bye, bye Windows 10X
May 13, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is all about Microsoft’s decision to shelve its Windows 10X operating system — and what’s likely to become its new Chrome OS-compete strategy in its place. My special guest for this chat was Brad Sams, Executive Editor of BWW Media Group. Brad also answered a number of listener questions in this episode.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley: Hi, you’re listening to Petri.Com’s MJF Chat Show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to focus all about Windows 10X, which was the latest cornerstone of Microsoft’s Chrome OS compete strategy. 10X is now on the back burner and likely to never come to market, I believe. So we’re going to talk today about what is next for Microsoft in terms of its Chrome OS compete strategy and Windows strategy going forward. Who better to be the extra special guest on this, than Brad Sams the Executive Editor of BWW Media Group. Hi Brad. Thank you so much for doing this chat with me.
Brad Sams: Thanks for the invitation. We talked ironically, I guess, somewhat about this. I think it was two years ago.
Mary Jo Foley: It was, it was.
Brad Sams: During the early days, I think we were calling it Lite OS
Mary Jo Foley: We were, and then a week or so ago you had the big scoop about Microsoft shelving 10X, and I’m sure you’ve been very busy in the interim signing autographs and such.
Brad Sams: Yes, exactly.
Mary Jo Foley: So let’s revisit first quickly what Windows 10X is/was.
Brad Sams: Yeah, so the interesting thing about 10X is, I think if Microsoft had a time machine, they go back to 2019 and go to what I consider to be one of their most ambitious keynotes, because in the fall of 2019, they announced the Surface Duo. They announced the Surface Neo, and they also announced the Surface 10 or Windows 10X, I should say. And all of these products weren’t launching for more than a year. And now that a couple of, time has elapsed. One of those three products actually shipped, which was the Surface Duo, which is the only device not running a Microsoft operating system. And so Windows 10X, as it was initially conceived was supposed to be a more, I don’t like to use the term modern Windows, cause we’ve heard that so many times with like RT with Windows Phone and other things. It was supposed to be a more lightweight version of Windows because Microsoft sees the threat of what Chromebooks have become and they needed a response. And as Microsoft likes to do, what do you do when you need a response? Well, you spin up a new project. And that project was Lite OS or 10X as we know it today.
Mary Jo Foley: So why do you think after about three years of development on and off, Microsoft quote, backburnered it, and I’m using quotes there because I feel like that’s kind of a euphemism for killed it.
Brad Sams: Yeah. So there’s a lot to story and I personally don’t think we know the full story yet.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, agreed.
Brad Sams: There’s a lot, I mean, you go back to Microsoft announcing this thing and then a build leaked in January. And so we could all download it and install it on various pieces of hardware if you really want. And then all of a sudden around like the earlier part of this year, Microsoft just stopped flighting this stuff internally. And that’s a really interesting move for a lot of reasons. You could interpret it one way, it’s like, Hey, they’re trying to be super secretive about it. We’re not letting you, we don’t want to play our cards or something like that is one way to interpret it. I interpreted it to mean that like, Hey, something significant has happened. And so you start going down that rabbit hole of what happened and you ask around enough times internally and externally and partners and all that stuff. And nobody has a response and you really start to wonder, it’s like, where is this thing going? There’s no way they’re going to ship it. If nobody knows what’s happening with it. And that’s how we got to the conclusion that it’s not coming anytime soon. And I’m pretty much of the conviction that if it does arrive ever, it’s going to be more advanced in capacity than what we have seen so far.
Mary Jo Foley: Agreed. Yeah. I think the game plan was to actually have some OEM ship it this year, right? Like the spring summer timeframe. Right?
Brad Sams: Let me ask you a question Mary Jo. I mean you know this stuff just about as well as I do, who would buy, other than enthusiasts, who would buy a version of Windows that doesn’t run legacy applications? That as we knew, it only ran things in full screen. I mean, yes, it had a start button if you will. But other than that, it was quote unquote, just a shell of what we know as Windows.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. I know. I agree. Because I was thinking back to last February when Microsoft actually talked a little more about how everything was going to work with 10X and they talked a lot about the various containers they were going to offer with the product and how containers is the way that they would run most Win32 apps. But then we started hearing bits and pieces from people who said, yeah, you know, you could do that, but the performance is terrible. So even if they did somehow ship the container, allowing them to run legacy apps, if the performance was terrible, especially if apps like Teams, who would buy this, right? Nobody.
Brad Sams: And then the information started coming out about, Hey, maybe they’re just going to start streaming the apps from the cloud.
Mary Jo Foley (05:46): Right, right.
Brad Sams: You can’t forget, that was a big part of the narrative as things started to shift around, but then you get it to this weird world of why does it, why don’t we just do this on normal Windows?
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly. Right. And I am curious, we’re going to talk more about that as this chat evolves, but like kind of what the next step is, but first, let’s get to some of the listener and reader questions that we have. Cause we had a lot of questions on Twitter about this topic, unsurprisingly. And you know, at the beginning I was seeing a lot of questions from people about WCOS, the Windows Core OS and just to level the playing field, so everybody knows what we’re talking about here. The way 10X was supposedly architected was the bottom layer was Windows Core OS. And then there were shells and containers and other kind of shims and things on top. Right? So here’s our first question from someone about WCOS. So Padre Pedro on Twitter asked, do you think Microsoft will continue with WCOS? If so, will the classic Windows 10 become one of the WCOS variants again, even though probably only on the longterm in that case? Yeah. There are a lot of questions about this, right?
Brad Sams: So this just, and I might be crossing my wires, so please feel free to correct me here, Mary Jo. But weren’t there, wasn’t it expected that Windows Core OS was supposed to come to the Surface Hub 2S as well?
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Brad Sams (07:20): And it hasn’t and they, was it last year that they just said here’s proper Windows 10?
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah.
Brad Sams: I’m wondering if that wasn’t the start of the decision tree,
Mary Jo Foley: I know.
Brad Sams: that brought the end of the 10X movement. Because they said the shell idea, which this person is very rightfully bringing up. That was part of the benefit, right. You just slap in the shell and it runs on this large screen, you slap a smaller shell and it runs on this little Chromebook device and then that hasn’t materialized. And now here we are. My understanding is that a lot of that, those features and functionality, it will, if they haven’t already started, we’ll migrate their way to Windows 10, as we know it. I don’t think, I still struggle with why do they need a different OS that isn’t Windows, they’ve tried it from many different lenses and it never works out and it ends up just being a distraction. And so I can’t see them just tossing that hard work and effort away, but I would look at them to see like how they’re going to ingest it into the Windows that you and I, as of right now are recording this on.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. Yeah, a lot of people have questions about this because I feel like people get all excited about the idea of Windows Core OS with all these different shells, like there was Polaris and Andromeda, which was supposed to be the Windows-based phone. Aruba, Oasis, like there were all these code names, right. Tourniquet, another listener/reader said, you know, only the HoloLens lens version 2 uses WCOS currently, which is right. I don’t think any other products ever actually had WCOS inside. And so he asked us, what’s the future of WCOS now that the only other SKU that was supposed to get it in any kind of timeframe, 10X seems to be dead? So do you think they’ll keep up with WCOS? Do you think they’re going to keep trying to make that work, that idea of one Windows across all the different SkUs and all the different devices?
Brad Sams: It’s a brilliant question because Microsoft has been chasing this dream for what was it? Three screens and a cloud, like whenever that was so many years ago, that was the initial sort of launch of this idea. And they’ve been poking at it from so many different ways, but the reality is they always end up back in the same spot. They always end up with, people just kind of want Windows. And I think they came to the realization that, I mean, listen to what Satya said in the last call, 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10. On a monthly basis. That is a substantial number. Now you could make the argument like, well, where’s that number going to be in 10 years if they don’t launch something modern? You know, that’s a question we don’t know the answer to. I don’t think that they will give, I don’t want to say that they’re going to give up on Windows Core OS because what I suspect they are doing is, and it keeps coming back to the same answer. They’re going to take the technologies that make sense that were developed and apply them where they logically make sense, rather than trying to just shove a modern OS out there, because it’s a solution where there may not be a problem.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. Right. This is an interesting thought I hadn’t thought about, so now we’re going to introduce the concept of Sun Valley, right? So Sun Valley is the code name for the next UX/UI that we think is coming to Windows 10. Joe Finney says, okay, with Windows 10X gone is Sun Valley the only Windows shell project left standing? And I never really thought of Sun Valley as one of these shells, but I guess it is, right?
Brad Sams: It’s definitely a shell update. I mean, I tend to agree with your, like, I didn’t think of Sun Valley as like a different shell. But I guess technically it is, at the end of the day. It’s going to be a pretty significant visual update. The challenge here is that this is the first, pretty much back from the front to the back of the book, complete overhaul that Panos is in charge of.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Brad Sams: Right. This is his time to lead Windows. So there’s definitely been changes. There’s definitely been more secrecy this time around than we had seen in previous updates. And more bluntly Windows actually has a singular point of leadership. For previous generations we’ve had multiple people kind of stirring the pot and Windows just kind of floated around. And now Panos. Now I know people could make an argument that there are multiple people still leading it, but Panos is the end point for Windows these days. And so from an outsider perspective, you kind of got to get your bearings on how is he going to operate the org now that he’s running the show. And so there’s still some learnings, at least from my perspective about watching the water drip out of the bucket to see what’s left in the bucket, if you will.
Mary Jo Foley: Yep. I also like how you use learnings just threw that in casually, you know, little micro, micro speak in there.
Brad Sams: If I say the word efforting, please, please slap me down.
Mary Jo Foley: Virtually slap you. I will. Okay. More Windows, 10 WCOS questions. Tourniquet had another good one. He wondered, will there be any development going on to bring either Windows, meaning Windows 10 and/or WCOS to other new form factors with 10 inch screens and sorry, other than 10 inch and up screens? So he’s asking, do you think you’ll see Windows on things like smaller tablets, foldables, like what’s going to be next for that kind of a form factor, because we kind of thought that was where 10X might sit, right?
Brad Sams: Yeah, no, that’s, these are all excellent questions.
Mary Jo Foley: They are excellent questions.
Brad Sams: Because unfortunately, Mary Jo and I can’t just you know look into our book of knowledge and have all these answers. Like it takes a significant amount of research and finding people who can help explain what is going on. But it’s a good question because the device that this falls into is what happens to the Surface Neo, because that is exactly the end point where 10X was supposed to live. My gut would tell me that if they ship Neo, it’s more than likely just going to run the desktop OS that we see, I can’t imagine them running, shipping, nothing with Android.
Mary Jo Foley: I know, I’ve seen people debating that on Twitter, like, which makes more sense now, Neo, the dual screen Windows device with just plain old Windows or with Android? And I’m like, hmm,
Brad Sams: People are going to get upset about this, but what is the point of Neo then?
Mary Jo Foley: I know, right. Yeah. Because Neo was supposed to be Windows. Right.
Brad Sams: The existence of Neo was to be a showpiece if you will, for 10X.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. I guess a lot of people they kind of, because Microsoft introduced Duo and Neo together and Duo was Android. A lot of people thought, okay, so why not just make both of the dual screen devices, Android? Why not? Right?
Brad Sams: Yeah, I mean Microsoft for better, for worse has some tough decisions to make. And I think they already made one related to 10X.
Mary Jo Foley: Me too.
Brad Sams (14:57): And that’s why I keep saying if they had a time machine, I bet they’d go back to 2019 and just remove a lot of stuff from that keynote.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, for sure.
Brad Sams : A lot of stuff.
Mary Jo Foley: Yep. Okay, I love this next question, because this is a question I have myself. And I’m curious of your take on this. So Bart W on Twitter said, do you expect Microsoft to split into two versions, what happens next with Windows? So one for consumers, one for business and enterprise, now that 10X has been shelved.
Brad Sams: Yeah. So I have, this is mostly just speculation at this point, because here’s the scenario that we don’t quite know yet. We know that visual change to an OS can be pretty significant, even if it’s only just visual. I could see a scenario where Microsoft retains Windows 10 as it exactly looks today. And they give IT pros/admins the capability of turning off the new UX, at least for maybe this iteration, because let’s say they move that start menu or start button to the center. And they actually do ship with a 10X style launcher. That is going to require some end user education. And you can imagine if you’re a a hundred thousand person organization, your help desk tickets are gonna explode when the cheese gets moved. That is how I think it could split. This is why I don’t think 10X ships, because that’s a lot of effort, I almost said efforting.
Mary Jo Foley: Ooh.
Brad Sams: That’s a pretty significant, you know, dichotomy of what we’ve seen in the past for Windows. And Microsoft through the trials and tribulations of Windows 8 knows that if you move something that has been in the bottom left corner for 20 plus years, you’re going to break a lot of people’s workflows and they have to be extremely careful with that, especially in the enterprise space.
Mary Jo Foley: I agree. So yeah, the rumors we’ve all heard are that when, and if Microsoft does bring Sun Valley to market, it will be something that IT admins can control. But I keep thinking, okay so does that mean they’re just is going to be Windows 10 with Sun Valley as the next version of Windows, or is it going to be Windows 10 with Sun Valley and then just plain old Windows 10 for enterprises, you know, like could they, and should they have two paths at that point? Because to your point about Windows 8, like you change one small thing and it may look small to IT enthusiasts and maybe many IT pros, but your user, they don’t want that. Like, if you go around to IT pros out there and you say, do your users want to see more consistency and new icons and a more beautiful UI in Windows? The answer will be no. Right?
Brad Sams: I fully agree with you.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. So I wonder how they’re going to solve this challenge, I do.
Brad Sams : I’s again, this is another good question that we don’t have the exact answer to because Microsoft hasn’t been super transparent about it, but if they truly are going to ship this thing in the fall, as we pretty much all expect at this point, they’re going to have to start talking soon because people one need to, well, first off they need feedback.
Mary Jo Foley : Right.
Brad Sams: Hopefully that they can implement in time. There’s always that clock ticking, but in the enterprise space, you’ve got to educate users. And we know that most of them will install the fall update because of the 30 month cycle of support.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. Exactly. So is the fall update the Sun Valley update or is it just another Windows, 10 iteration, and then you get the Sun Valley thing on the side, right? I don’t know. We, I mean, we, the big Microsoft watching community, when I say this, we all think there’s going to be an event this summer where Microsoft talks about what’s next for Windows. Right? And that’s not Build that’s something after Build. So maybe we’ll get more answers at that point. I mean, the other question that comes up all the time Edmundo Mendiola asked this very question. What about Windows 10 on ARM? Right? So does a death of 10X mean that Microsoft will put even more focus into fixing, advancing Windows 10 on ARM? And he says, maybe motivated by Apple with the M1, but I don’t even think you need Apple in that whole equation there. What do you think? Do you think more will happen with Windows on ARM now that 10X is kind of out of the way?
Brad Sams: I hope so. When you put it that way. If you’re Microsoft and you’re looking at the future, and you’re saying I’ve got X amount of dollars to bet on the future, do you bet that Chromebooks are going to overtake your 1.3 billion users? Or do you bet that ARM is going to overtake what Intel and AMD are currently shipping? And I think we both know that answer, where they’re going to place their bet. Personally, I hope that ARM takes off in the Microsoft ecosystem, not just because of what, Apple and the M1 is a silo in the market. And it will always get compared to Qualcomm and it will always get compared to every other chip. But the reality is there’s only one way to get that. And there’s only one OS you can run on that. And so while it is a threat to what Microsoft is doing it’s also just sort of off doing its own thing. Microsoft can’t do anything to control that. And so I hope that they invest heavily into ARM and truly make ARM a first-class experience because right now it is absolutely not. It’s close, but
Mary Jo Foley: It’s pretty bad, yeah.
Brad Sams: realistically like Windows 10 on ARM is a better 10X than 10X was because you get that power functionality, you get all of the benefits of it. But the problem is, as soon as you start poking around Windows 10X, anything other than the basic apps experience really starts to fall apart because you’re either running a container or it’s X64 and it doesn’t run well, or there’s a bunch of other myriad of issues. But if I had a billion dollars to invest, I would drop it on ARM before I drop it on 10X.
Mary Jo Foley (21:36): You know, this, this brings up something I think about a lot, which is Panos, like not, not in a weird sense of thinking a lot about Panos, but I feel like Panos and the Surface team have been very focused on competing with Apple, right? Like, I mean, if you look at the way they position and build and sell Surface devices, they’re taking on Apple, right? But 10X was about taking on the Chromebooks. It wasn’t about taking on Apple. So I think it’s going to be interesting to kind of see where they put the bulk of their resources and their money in the future, because if it were just up to Panos and the Surface team, I think they would go after Windows on ARM and Apple. But I think the reality in the market, especially in education and FirstLine worker, parts of the market is, your competitor, there is Chrome OS, it’s not Apple.
Brad Sams: Yeah. Let me ask you a question here. Now this is going to be a bit of repeating history because you understand this. What if Microsoft was able to get Windows to run exceptionally well on a $300 device? How, and we’re talking the Windows that we are recording this on today.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Brad Sams: How would that change the narrative for either Microsoft and or Windows 10X?
Mary Jo Foley: I don’t think they need something that is Windows 10X, right? Like, I feel like they did that because they felt like regular Windows couldn’t be streamlined enough, couldn’t look different enough, couldn’t be simple enough. But if it could be, like you’re suggesting, why do you need another variant? You don’t, right?
Brad Sams: And that, is I think the conclusion that Microsoft came to.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, I think so, but I’m curious how adding Sun Valley either makes that happen or maybe takes away from that happening. You know, because once you start talking about adding new fancy icons and you know, different kinds of things they’re doing to tweak, possibly tweak like the tablet experience and the touch experience and all that. Does it again, bulk up Windows or does it actually not affect the size and the weight of Windows?
Brad Sams: Yeah, it’s interesting times, I think. Because there’s so many moving parts, I’m hoping that we’re going to get transparency on what is going on with the Windows Store, because I think that is also a component that plays into the back burner during the shelving of Windows 10X, because if Microsoft aligns to what we’ve heard about allowing third-party developers to be able to put effectively anything into the store and manage it through their own CDNs, that makes the Windows 10X narrative even harder, because then it’s like, well, here’s the store you can download stuff from, but like half of it’s not going to work. Doesn’t go over so well.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. That’s an interesting question too. Okay. Last kind of wrap up question here from our friend Tero Alhonen, he also was kind of mulling over the idea about Neo and what the future looks like with Neo and 10X being gone. And he brings up an interesting point, he said, if what really matters to Microsoft is Azure or this future product coming cloud PC consumption, and not necessarily the OS and device consuming it, does it matter what OS it even runs?
Brad Sams: Yeah. So I don’t want to say my heartbreaks, like hearing that because,
Mary Jo Foley: I know, I know.
Brad Sams: Yourself, myself, like Paul, like we all love, like we enjoy Windows. Like we love Windows. Vista was where I cut my teeth, like trying to build PCs and run home theater boxes. And hearing like from the Microsoft perspective that the OS doesn’t matter to some extent he’s right, because Microsoft, the hundred year future for Microsoft is delivering a thin client somehow over the air. It’s not everybody building a PC or having a PC, but at the same time, Microsoft, at one point thought that Windows was just going to kind of ride off into the sunset and not be the thing that it was for the past 20 years. And yet here we are with 1.3 billion devices running it, the OS in itself. And that org makes tens of billions of dollars each quarter. And they can’t ignore it that it’s, you know, kind of clung on for life, so.
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly. Especially during the pandemic. Right?
Brad Sams : Right, exactly.
Mary Jo Foley: All right, well, Brad, thank you so much. This was awesome. I love speculating on Windows. It’s a blast.
Brad Sams: Yes.
Mary Jo Foley: So thanks for taking me along on the journey. And for everyone else, who’s listening to this right now or reading the transcript, I’ll be putting up more information soon about who my next guest is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter using the #MJFChat for the guest. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these chats, please do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: Getting Ready for Windows Server 2022
Apr 27, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is focused on how IT pros can get ready for Windows Server 2022, Microsoft’s next version of Windows Server. My special guest for this chat was Michael Reinders, a systems engineer and new Petri.com contributor. Michael and I talked about some of what we know — and still don’t — about Windows Server 2022. Michael also answered a number of listener questions in this episode.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley: Hi, you’re listening to the Petri.com MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be focused on how to get ready for Windows Server 2022. And my special guest for this chat is Michael Reinders, a systems engineer and a new Petri.com contributor. Hi, Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to do this chat.
Michael Reinders: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.
Mary Jo Foley: Great. So this is a huge topic and we’re going to try to keep it to our usual 30 minutes. So I think a good way to start out might be to say, what do we think Windows Server 2022 is? And the reason I say think is because Microsoft’s been dribbling out bits of information about this in kind of a haphazard way over the past year or so. So we do know it’s the next on premises version of Windows Server, and that it’s going to be an LTSC release, which means long-term servicing channel. So Michael, what else do we know about this thing right now?
Michael Reinders: Yeah, so it’s, it’s going along the line of Microsoft’s recent schedule release of the LTSC releases, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, and three plus three plus three, Windows Server 2022. So, they’re going in line with what they’ve done. It’s essentially, you know, they’ve been doing, they started releasing the Semi-Annual Channel Server, which included, you know, more features at a steady pace, like every six months with, you know, the Windows 10 client. But this is the, you know, heartened LTSC release, just like with Windows 10. So it’s the standard for again on-premise. So it’s just what you install or upgrade to and get I believe it’s, I think that they’re still saying 10 years of support.
Mary Jo Foley: Right, that’s good. I’m glad you think that too, because they have been cutting length of support of some of their LTSC products, but I don’t think they’ve said they’re cutting Windows Server so far.
Michael Reinders: Right, Office 2021, which they just released yesterday, a preview of, that is going to go to five years. I think that’s coinciding with Windows 10 LTSC right?
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, also five years now.
Michael Reinders: Right.
Mary Jo Foley: So yeah, we’ll say 10 until we hear otherwise.
Michael Reinders: Yes, so with the server product it’s interesting. The other note I had right off the bat was, how these are tied together. So they kind of, I know you’re going to ask this a little later on, but cause Windows like Windows Server 2019, the last LTSC that was Windows 10, I think version 1809. So there’s code based similarities. But the thing with this one is, is it’s going to be with Windows 10 21H1 and 21H2 now. Well, probably not because the build numbers are different plus 21H1 is supposed to be the new, you know, the Sun Valley GUI and it’s, yeah. So that’s, that’s kind of the one I’m funny about dribbling out, you know, here’s the month, here’s a one piece of information for the public. We’ll see you in a month. So we’ll see.
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly I know that was one thing I was going to ask you because a year ago, when Microsoft first said, by the way, this is going to be the LTSE release of Server, they said it’ll be out towards the end of calendar, 2021. But since that happened, I’ve heard from some of my contacts that Microsoft is no longer necessarily tying the release of Server and Client together. They’ve actually decoupled the releases. So if that is true Server 2022, doesn’t have to wait for Windows Server 21H2, right. It could even come this summer, maybe.
Michael Reinders: They’ve decoupled. Now, does that mean like GA, RTM? I know.
Mary Jo Foley: That’s a good question. And so I think it just means, I think it means they’re on their own independent tracks for engineering and development. So technically I would think it could mean that server could be out earlier and Jeff Woolsey, who’s one of the big Windows Server guys on Twitter from Microsoft. He’s been hinting around like, yeah, it might be out sooner than you think. And I’m like, Oh, I wonder if they’re going to release Server like maybe late or, you know, mid summer, late summer. They could it’s kind of done, right? I mean, they’re kind of in the final phases of it.
Michael Reinders: I mean, it’s fun. It’s interesting because now really quick. Yeah. So like the other question about decoupling is like the code base. So I, of course we have no idea what the build number set is going to be for 21H2 for Windows 10, because of course the dev channel is not tightened released, blah, blah, blah. But they’re making, and then I’ll get to this a little later on, but they are making, there’s like branding changes even on the recent builds in terms of what it’s called. Cause like, I don’t know, a month, month and a half ago, they finally dubbed and put in a sub program Windows Server 2022. And they pseudo, publicly announced that. But now recently they’ve stripped that out and it says, you know, Windows, no it says Microsoft Server Operating System set up instead of just like set up. So that just happened, but we’ll see, we’ll see what that means.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. So that is interesting. I saw that change being, well, it wasn’t announced, it was acknowledged. I think one of our frequent commenters Tero Alhonen, he posted a picture of it. And then somebody from Microsoft on the server team, I’m forgetting who this was said, you know, don’t read too much into that. This is just us using a placeholder name because of how we have Azure, gosh, they have so many names now, Windows Server, Azure something. So I think they need to rename this and I think they need to rename the whole family of Azure and Windows Server because of how they do hybrid computing. Right. It’s very confusing, these different names, like Azure Stack HCI, and now they’ve got Windows Server, Azure Edition. I’m like, okay, so they’ve got to have some more consistency in the naming because it’s very, I think it’s very choppy and kind of unclear what is what anymore.
Michael Reinders: Right. Because I got that. Yeah. Azure, you said the magic word cause a couple of years ago you discovered that, you know, the engineering, like I think it was January and June is when Microsoft, at least on the client side, finalizes the code base, so to speak for Azure. Literally for Azure first and then, you know, enterprise customer’s, home later, but that’s how they you know, the engineering model. So that’s the question, is so like this is nothing really pertinent pertinent, but, when you host, when you have a Windows Server, like when Azure hosts Windows Server for say SQL server, what are they using? Are they, you know, when do they solidify their, their build of Server 22? Are they using server 2019 on the backend to host everything in Azure for all the customers. That’s another curiosity if this is tied to Azure in anyway.
Mary Jo Foley: Yep. So this kind of leads me into another question for you. Do you, as a tester of Server actually get any more help or information from Microsoft about what’s, like, I feel like we get a lot of new builds of Server and we just see a post go up saying, yeah, there’s a new build of Server out. And there’s absolutely nothing in it. As far as a change log, a list of new features, a list of fixes, nothing. I’m curious if testers actually see or know anything more than that.
Michael Reinders: Yeah. So I don’t know if I’m, I guess I’m officially, I mean I’m technically a tester. But yeah, so the Windows Insider program in the past announced these builds and yes, they often did not show almost any new features, not like the Windows 10 client builds. But, I even pressed one of them kind of a month ago maybe. So I noticed that Windows Server 22 preview build, blah, blah, blah, just came up, you know, what, is there information anywhere? He actually let me know. So there’s a Windows Server Insiders community forum that actually is hosting and posting these releases. So we can have, you know, put that, publish that on Twitter somewhere after this. So that actually does announce each of the new server builds coming out. There’s two builds from August or September, actually, 2201, 2206 that actually describe the new features that are coming in 2022 from a pretty detailed standpoint, which we’ve probably seen, probably is what you’ve probably posted back in September or that timeframe or August about what’s coming.
Michael Reinders: I mean even the new features, they’re not, they’re barely saying anything about what is new and included I’m sure. Which leads, to your theory about it being “done”, that it’s probably just being tweaked, branding, fixing you know, last minute bugs, that kind of thing. But in terms of that, I don’t have any access on, like I said, I just discovered that forum like less than a month ago. So there is one bug or question in Server 22 that I’ll get to later on. That’s one of the questions that we’ll get to later.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, so we’ve kind of hinted that there aren’t a ton of new features, at least ones we’ve seen them post about in this coming release, but is there anything that they have said that you think could be especially interesting to IT Pros or really stands out? So I saw they have some things coming with Azure Arc, you know, as a way to manage and govern Windows Server. They’ve got things about storage migration service and some new threat protection, but is there anything that you saw that you were like, okay, that’s really interesting that that’s in there, or is it just kinda more goodness all the way around?
Michael Reinders: Yeah. I think to go this all the way around there’s there is some UDP performance improvements, TCP performance improvements, that looks interesting, that you’ll just be in general once you get, you know, once you’re running that server. AES-256 encryption, which I believe is new, I think it’s going to be an option. Compression being added for when you’re doing like Robocopy or Xcopy using that to copy files from A to B, there’s some compression. And it’s compatible with patched Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10 computers also have this. So if you’re copying from any one of those machines to a Server 22 file server, it’s going to actually compress that. That’s probably going to be stupid faster. So that’ll be an IT Pro kind of like, okay, cool. You mentioned storage migration. I’m just looking through the post here, you know they’re, Microsoft releasing a new LTSC release on-prem because enterprises need it.
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly.
Michael Reinders: Does Microsoft really nitty gritty want to? Ah, well, we’d rather just get everybody up in the cloud. So it’s a good, especially with 2019 and 2022, at least they’re high-level Windows Server marketings, then this will help you get into Azure.
Mary Jo Foley: Right? Exactly, exactly.
Michael Reinders: Server, like the containers. So they always keep optimizing the server core containers space-wise I mean, even just like an install of 2022 like the core version, which doesn’t include the GUI, it uses 8 gigabytes on the virtual machine in the C: drive, which is crazy small.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. Yep. Nice. Okay. We have a lot of people who submitted questions on Twitter about this chat, and a lot of them are very specific. They want to know, is this feature going to be in. I realize, unless you have some secret back channel, we may not know the answer to all of these things. But I’m going to ask them anyway. And, you know, saying don’t know is a totally acceptable thing here, but I think it just shows people are super curious about what’s coming with this. So Miha Pecnik on Twitter asked if you know of anything coming on the Active Directory front specifically. And he said, you know, based on what we’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem like a release with a lot of features, but he’s very interested in AD.
Michael Reinders: Yeah. So, so in terms of AD features, and this is probably the question of, it typically has been tied to, you know, other domain and functional levels that are added. So like, cause Windows domain, when you have an on-premise domain, you have a forest and a domain functional level, it’s kind of like spur on security, with features in like the Active Cirectory Users and Computers tool. So they essentially stopped, so far at Windows Server 2016. So when you upgrade to Windows Server 2019, your domain controllers, there’s no new forest or functional level. So it hasn’t been publicly announced or specified, but, and I’m actually going to probably find out which I’ll allude to, I’m going through a a mock in about a month, but just testing, upgrading Server 2016 on-premise domain and AD domains 2022 as well, probably find out for sure, but it doesn’t look like there’s going to be new forest and domain functional levels in 2022. And this probably ties to enterprise, let’s keep things clean. Let’s keep things easy. We’re getting people into Azure Active Directory, who cares about AD. Again, just kind of a, kind of a high level marketing potential theory from Microsoft,
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, cool. That was actually one of the questions specifically about the forest and domains that Tero Alhonan had, he asked a lot of questions on Twitter for this chat. So one of the ones I thought was kind of interesting is if you’ve seen in any of the builds that you’ve been testing any references to the code name of which engineering branch this might be from. So, you know, Microsoft’s using the periodic table of elements to refer to the different semesters when they build features. So he said, have you seen anything that indicates whether Server 2022 is Iron, Cobalt or even Nickel? Have you seen anything like that?
Michael Reinders: This is Iron right now it’s Fe_release. I’m not sure when that started, but so when you install them the, Oh goodness, what do you call it in the lower right corner of the, oh Windows 10 Insiders have always loved when they removed that, we’re getting closer and closer to release.
Mary Jo Foley: Oh yeah, the watermark, right? The watermark thing, yeah.
Michael Reinders: So Windows Server 20, right when they started saying Windows Server 2022 data center or standard. Yes. So it is Fe_release. So it will be Iron which is interesting to see because the Windows 10 dev just went to Cobalt.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Michael Reinders: Which of course, it’s interesting, because again, if we’re thinking, and of course they just switched to Cobalt. I think they were on Iron. So maybe that last branch, before they branched Windows 10 to Cobalt that Iron release, they might’ve just frozen that code per se, or are keeping that in sync with Server 22, and that’s how they’re going to, I don’t know, because then it doesn’t make sense because what’s 21H2, Windows 10 going to be, ah I know it’s crazy.
Mary Jo Foley: You know what makes this even harder to explain to people from my standpoint is in the old days, you could say a particular code name referenced, it basically was equal to what they were building inside of engineering, but that isn’t the case anymore. So, they have semesters when they build features, but you don’t necessarily have to take all the features that are built in a semester to put it into a publicly available release. Like you could even take something from a future release and backport it to something. So it really confuses the lines, right? It’s not just like Cobalt. You can’t just say Cobalt is 21H2. You can’t say that because there may be features from Iron. There may be features from Nickel coming into those different things. So, yeah, it’s hard because we all want something very definitive that we can call a release, like have a code name, but it doesn’t work like that anymore.
Michael Reinders: Right, cause Windows 10, 20H2, it’s kind of the last minute, from the dev build, they were like, they tweak the start menu. And I know Mary Jo, you were a total fan of GUI,
Mary Jo Foley: I was like stunned at that.
Michael Reinders: Looking at how it was and how it is now, and you would say, I don’t know, same difference.
Mary Jo Foley: I know, I’m terrible in that way. I really don’t have an eye for UI and UX changes very much so,
Michael Reinders: But they put that into 20H2 like, which they can, but it was kind of a surprise. And then of course they just announced with it Wednesday, yeah this week, the News and Interests is now going to like all supported versions, That was yesterday, so you missed it on Windows Weekly. So that’s been going back to all supported versions of Windows 10, not just last 6, oh my goodness.
Mary Jo Foley: I know it’s a big messy world.
Michael Reinders: Huge preview for next Windows Weekly.
Mary Jo Foley: I know, right. Okay, I’ve got more questions from Tero. He had a lot of things to ask. He wanted to know about DNS over HTTP for a 2022. And I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about whether the Windows DNS Server is getting this particular feature or not, but he was wondering,
Michael Reinders: Yeah, I know that like on the client’s side, I haven’t seen it on a server and I would, because that’s kind of big and I totally would’ve assumed that that would have been even sprinkled out from Microsoft by now. So I’m guessing, no, but I don’t know for sure.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. That’s good. He also wanted to know about WSL, which is the Windows Subsystem for Linux V2. The new one, if that may be supported in Windows Server 2022?
Michael Reinders: So this is literally a, we don’t know. And I’ll tell you why, while trying to be as brief as I can. So I got one of the Windows Server 22 test builds, and I was going to try that because I saw that question. So of course on Windows 10 Insider builds and Windows Server, 22, you go to an administrative command, prompt or PowerShell, you type WSL space, dash dash install. It literally does everything for you, it’s ridiculous. But installs the sub-components, downloads Ubuntu, and ask you to reboot your machine. So when I go through those, I look online to find the commands, to enable WSL 2 and make that Ubuntu version 2. So as soon as you type that command in and I confirmed it, hit enter and it just, it basically spits back as if you typed in WSL dash help, like the commands you can use. So I found online it’s been broken in like the last month or so, enabling WSL 2. And there’s been no response from Microsoft yet. So will WSL 2 support being toward 22. I have no idea we’re going to find out before it’s released, I guess.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, I would guess yes, right? I mean, is there any reason it wouldn’t?
Michael Reinders: I don’t know. I don’t know why it wouldn’t and I know, I don’t, my brain doesn’t naturally go to using WSL on a server, but that’s my lack of experience, but I have no idea why they’ve had WSL version 2 for, I don’t know, a year in one of those channels. Why they, and it’s not, I don’t know if you could even enable it on Server 2019. I’m not sure, but it would be very odd. And if they did not make sure it’s fixed for release.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. a couple more, very specific feature questions. Matthew Reyes wondered about TLS version 1.3 and will it be available in IIS?
Michael Reinders: So actually I did see the TLS version 1.3 will be on by default and you’ll have to, which means, you know FTP HTTPS, you know, and IIS, so that should be out of the box. Probably, they’re always on the security mantra. I’m sure you would have to optionally, you know, enable TLS 1.1 or 1.2. 1.0, might even be like out of support or something, but yeah, TLS 1.3 will be on by default.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, great. Daniel Viklund asked about ADFS 5.0 support for multi-tenant, multifactor authentication registration. Wow, that’s a mouthful. You know anything on that?
Michael Reinders: That I’m not sure. I know ADFS, at least if he’s asking ADFS 5.0, that’s tied to Windows Server 2012R2, unless I read that wrong. That I honestly don’t know. I mean, when I hear MFA registration, I think of Azure AD. So it might be just something I’m not familiar with, but that I have not seen a yes or no answer on.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, great.
Michael Reinders: I don’t know.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. There’s a lot of, you know, I feel like that’s the biggest thing I write anymore when it comes to Windows, we just don’t know
Michael Reinders: That’s the chain, that’s the way it is right now.
Mary Jo Foley: All right. Now let’s, let’s do some pure speculation stuff. Padre Pedro on Twitter wanted to have you do some guesses about how Windows Server might evolve over the next decennium. That’s a big question mark. Okay. So he specifically asked about classic roles. So he means things like WSUS you know Remote Desktop, DNS, DHCP, clustering. Do you think these will get, or get again somewhat decent attention? Or do you think these will be downplayed in the future? Any just kind of random observations on that?
Michael Reinders: Yeah, I’m, like we said earlier, I would guess things will simply be downplayed and slowly deprecated. WSUS, then you go to, I haven’t tried it on 2022, but I remember doing it on Windows Server 2019, just installing the WSUS, i don’t know if it’s a role or probably a feature. Essentially unchanged from, I want to say Server 2012, not even R2, like server 2012. So it’s all going on 10 years. It’s there, and again, that’s probably, I mean, I know Remote Desktop Services, they’ve kind of done some tweaks on recent server releases. And AD of course, like I said, it’s there. They haven’t had any change features to it. I think this is just every three years. It’s just moving more of these. And again, all of these services have either been reimagined, replaced, you know WSUS is no SCCM or Windows.
Michael Reinders: Microsoft Configuration Manager in the cloud with Azure, that handles the exact same duties that WSUS handles. WDS, you know Windows Virtual Desktop could even be a, not technically accurate, but it could be a replacement, DNS, DHCP, I mean that’s all handled by, can be handled by Azure clustering. Again, there’s some clustering new features. But it’s more like for the IT Pro. I think there’s some more network validation tests, I believe now with the fail over cluster service role, which is obviously a good thing. And you have a better, before you get that cluster going, it’s going to confirm that all the networking’s right. But like I said, I think it’s just this slow because this is enterprise and there’s hundred thousand PC companies out there, slow transition to the cloud. I mean, I believe if Microsoft had their way, they wouldn’t be releasing a new, you know, like the Office 2021 on-prem essentially, not Microsoft 365, you know, new project server or a new SharePoint server. They would just have one good hub. Cause they have one Azure engineering base to support and grow.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. I think that would be their goal too, but I think it’s great that they are still continuing to listen to customers and make available these on-premises products. And these aren’t the last versions either. They’ve said there’ll be more coming in the future. So yeah, I think that’s goodness for sure. Okay. So any last things you want to make sure to add about Server 22? And I wanna, I don’t know if I’m letting the cat out of the bag here, but I know you’re working on a series for Petri about Server. Could you talk a little about that and what you’re doing there?
Michael Reinders: Yeah, yeah. So I just kind of hinted at that before. Like I said, I just, I bought myself a new desktop computer, which I haven’t done in 15 or 20 years as an aside,
Mary Jo Foley: Wow.
Michael Reinders: I’ve always had with my, you know, my day job, I’ve always had at least a laptop from work essentially. And I didn’t use it as a personal device, blah, blah, blah. But it’s a silly, not inexpensive HP, you know, the C2 kind of enterprise workstations, and it’s loaded with Ram and hard drive space. So right now, so I’m building, I have a Windows Server, 2016, a couple of domain controllers, a a file server on Core file server. I’m using Windows Admin Center, which is the tool to manage that they released, which I was actually at Ignite 2017 where they literally announced Windows Admin Center. I don’t think it was even called that then, it was operation or code name something. I don’t remember. So I have all these and I added in another file server. So I’m gonna plan to go through and upgrade this environment.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, that’s cool. Like a real hands-on like, here’s what it’s like to upgrade.
Michael Reinders: Right. So it’s kind of like the series is going to be like, okay, here’s IT Pro getting ready for Windows Server 2022? What do you need to know? What are the gotchas, what do you need to plan for, you know, before you upgrade your file server. You make sure you do these things. Before you upgrade your domain controllers, which of course is huge. You know, in the past it’s been, you have to spend money for a third party to make sure everything is right or pay Microsoft to do it right, because it was so intricately involved and so high risk and impact. But we just know like the day job I have, we did that about a year ago, we went from 2008R2 to Server 2019 for our domain controllers. And there were a few little gotchas posted, but I mean, it was within a week or so.
Michael Reinders: I mean, we were done, and it’s, you know, for domain controllers. So anyway, it’s still a foundation to your on-premise Active Directory domain. So I’ll be going through that over the next couple of months. Hopefully it all ties in with, you know, the actual release and it’ll be a good series for IT Pros to keep tabs on because we know it’s Microsoft. So we know there’s going to be a surprise. And why was this at the last minute? Or why was this added or he didn’t tell us about this. So hopefully we’ll, Petri and I can keep everyone in tune.
Mary Jo Foley: That’s awesome.
Michael Reinders: No pun intended.
Mary Jo Foley: Great. Also I wanted to ask, as a last question, any other resources you’d recommend for IT Pros who are trying to keep up with what’s going on with Windows Server. We mentioned the blog that they have, that you found recently where they talk about some of the new builds that they’ve been putting out with Server 2022, but is there anything else you use regularly as a resource yourself to keep up with this?
Michael Reinders: I don’t think anything beyond what we mentioned. Like I said, I’m following a good number of the server PMs. And like you said, Jeff Woolsey’s definitely one of the heads of Windows Server. A couple of the heads of Azure in terms of the Azure platform, I guess you’d say, but you know, like following a lot of people on Twitter and just again, I literally literally just discovered this a couple of weeks ago, the Windows Server Insiders Community Forum that is actually publishing these new releases. But aside from that, it’s mostly, you know, like techcommunity.microsoft.com. They are publishing new features, mostly on Windows 10 or Office, Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, that kind of thing. But I actually don’t have any really secret or even a common thing beyond what we just mentioned.
Mary Jo Foley: All right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I found it super interesting and I know the readers and listeners will too. So thanks, Michael.
Michael Reinders: You’re very welcome. Glad to be here.
Mary Jo Foley: Great. And for everyone else, who’s listening right now to this chat or reading the transcript. I’ll be putting up more information soon about who my next guest is going to be. Once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter using #MJFChat for that guest. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these chats, please do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: What’s Next for Windows?
Apr 13, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is focused on Windows 10 and what’s likely next for Microsoft’s operating system. (We have to say “likely” here because Microsoft hasn’t yet shared many details about expected deliverables like Windows 10X, Windows 10 21H2 and “Sun Valley.” My special guest, Windows Central Senior Editor Zac Bowden, has some pretty good sources and has had some great insights into what Microsoft is likely to do here. He and I chatted about these topics and lots more in this episode.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley: Hi, you’re listening to the Petri.com MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be focused on what’s likely next for Windows and who better than Zac Bowden, a senior editor at Windows Central to join in on the speculation. Hi Zac, I’m really excited about this chat today with you.
Zac Bowden: Hey, Mary Jo, thank you so much for inviting me on. I’m so excited to be here.
Mary Jo Foley: Yay. So we got a ton of questions on Twitter about this, which isn’t surprising. And I’m going to ask you a number of those on behalf of our listeners during the chat, but before we start, I thought it might be good for us to just do a quick lightning round about some of the biggest Windows news that isn’t as anticipated between what’s left of 2021 and going into 2022. Because you and I are really immersed in these code names, but not everybody is. Yeah. So let me ask you, you know, based on your well-sourced perspective about some of these things, just to give people kind of a broad brush understanding. So I’m going to just list some things that we think are going to debut in the coming months as Microsoft, likes say in the coming months, Windows 10X is one of those. How would you describe that to people who may not be all that familiar with it?
Zac Bowden: So Windows 10X is Microsoft’s attempt at a lighter weight, more modern version of Windows, sort of aimed at the enterprise slash commercial market in the low end. And also eventually, maybe in the high end for sort of unique new devices like dual screens. If they ever get around to actually doing those. I look at Windows 10X as Microsoft’s iPad iOS. It’s a sort of, not as capable platform that Microsoft would like the mainstream to use one day, but obviously isn’t there yet.
Mary Jo Foley: So do you, when I think about it, I also think of it as like their Chrome OS.
Zac Bowden: Right, exactly. Yes.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. Okay. So we’re on the same page there. 21H2 and the thing you first broke called Sun Valley, what are those things and how are they related?
Zac Bowden: So 21H2 is the next big update for Windows 10. We set up 21H1 to come, but 21H2 will be launching in the second half of this year. And the Sun Valley code name is a sort of UI project that’s supposed to be delivered alongside 21H1 that reinvigorates the Windows UI and UX by adding some new features, rounding off corners in the UI and just making Windows a little bit different than what it is currently. Windows 10 has been sort of stagnating for a while. It’s looked same for a number of years. And with Sun Valley they’re trying to freshen it up, give it a new look, possibly like just a reinvigoration of the marketing around Windows and stuff. And just making people aware that Windows is still a thing.
Mary Jo Foley: I’m glad we already hit the magic phrase, rounded corners, 5 minutes in.
Zac Bowden: I had to slip it in there somewhere.
Mary Jo Foley: I knew you were going to, next up dark mode, right?
Zac Bowden: Exactly.
Mary Jo Foley: Project Latte
Zac Bowden: Project Latte is a codename I heard that I was told is about bringing Android apps to the Microsoft store on Windows 10. Now, unfortunately, details around exactly how this will work or when it will show up are still pretty light. I know that, I mean, when I heard about this, I think it was late last year. I heard that they were hoping to get it into preview later this year. And yeah, I assume it’s based on when WSL or some technology similar to that, because Microsoft has tried this before, right. With Project Astoria, and that was using some kind of Linux subsystem of some kind. So perhaps they’re going along the same path there, but yes, Android apps in the Microsoft store on Windows 10,
Mary Jo Foley: Do you know or think this will be handled by virtualization or emulation somehow? Or do we even know that?
Zac Bowden: I don’t know if I had to guess, I’d say it’s using whatever WSL uses these days.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. Okay, I’m very intrigued on that one. I got to say, when you first reported about Latte, I’m like, who wants Android apps on Windows?
Zac Bowden: I agree. I have no use for it. I think it might be more of a developer play, but I don’t know.
Mary Jo Foley: Well, it’s funny because I wrote something about it and I put the question out to people and I’m like, do you want Android apps on Windows? And I couldn’t believe how many people wanted it.
Zac Bowden: I know it’s crazy. I just, I can’t think of any Android app that I want on Windows.
Mary Jo Foley: You know, a lot of them are like home automation kinds of things and entertainment kinds of things, you know? Yeah, so that one, I was like a little perplexed about, I was like, wait didn’t they decide they weren’t going to do this. And now here we are again.
Zac Bowden: We’re back.
Mary Jo Foley: I know, I know. Okay. One near and dear to my heart, Cloud PC, which was codenamed Deschutes. How would you describe that?
Zac Bowden: Windows, like legacy Windows apps in the cloud, or basically xCloud for Win32 programs is another way of thinking about it, I think I think you know more about this than I do, but I think Cloud PC is, I first heard about it in regards to Windows 10X, because Microsoft changed strategy with Windows 10X. It was originally going to run Win32 programs locally. Then they pulled that tech out and now Windows 10X, when it eventually launches, we think will launch without Win32 program. And they’re going to promote Cloud PC as a way of streaming legacy Win32 programs to those platforms instead.
Mary Jo Foley: I also think from what I’m hearing about it, that it’s also kind of, even in a broader sense, like Desktop as a Service, right?
Zac Bowden: Yeah, for sure. What I heard it was based on Windows Virtual Desktop, which is already a product and service that exists, and it serves its purpose quite well in the enterprise market. And I think Cloud PC is just trying to take that and putting it in front of normal PC users who don’t run an enterprise.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. And who want to pay for it in a different way, not based on a consumption model. Right. Yeah, I’m very intrigued on that one. And then of course they’ll likely be a lot more surface devices, both PCs, tablets, and maybe even a Duo 2, version two this year, right?
Zac Bowden: Yes, we are. So I believe we will see a new Pro 8 in the fall and maybe a Duo 2 and possibly Studio 3. Studio is such a weird one because that’s always overdo a refresh and it never comes. So we don’t know when the Studio 3, but hopefully at the end of this year, we’re also expecting a spring event as well, Surface Laptop 4, new headphones and stuff. I think usually the spring events were a lot more minor, at the fall events where Microsoft really pushes the boats out and tries to announce new stuff. But that’s, yeah Duo 2 and I think a refreshed Pro 8 with a slightly new design is probably likely this year and Studio 3 is a wait and see.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. Yep. I know. It’s funny just today, somebody asked me is the Surface, Studio line dead? And I’m like, you know, I don’t know.
Zac Bowden: I wouldn’t blame you if you felt it was.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. That was great. That was like a perfect lightning round. And now let’s go to some of the questions that we got through Twitter. There is a Twitter user, name, tyrankoos, who asked a million questions. I’m going to pick a couple of them. They were all really good questions. So we have to broach the subject because a few people asked about this, whether you think we could see Windows 10X on a phone or Windows 10 come to a phone device, or if you think Microsoft is going to stick with the Android platform there?
Zac Bowden: I think it would be weird for them to announce an Android phone and then release a Windows phone.
Mary Jo Foley: Me too.
Zac Bowden: You know within the next five years. I think Windows on phones is a dead idea at this point. I’m not aware of any project to bring that back. I know people want to see Windows 10X on a Surface Duo like device or a phone device, but as far as I’m aware Microsoft did not build 10X with that intention in mind. The UI, although I guess it scales well to a phone size, not everything does. And as far as I’m aware it doesn’t even have any telephony capabilities anymore. I think they’ve ripped that out of Windows a while ago. I’ve honestly, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see it, but I don’t think they’ve got that in any of their plans, at least for the foreseeable future.
Mary Jo Foley: I agree. I hate to be the Debbie downer all the time when people ask me about it, but I’m like, eh, don’t get your hopes up on that. I don’t think they’re going to do that.
Zac Bowden: I mean the reason why It won’t happen still is because the app situation is still the same. Right? That hasn’t changed. And I think Microsoft burnt a lot of bridges with their OEMs when, well, their phone OEMs back in the day with how they handled Windows 10 Mobile. And I think it would take a lot of convincing to get those OEMs back on board, the idea of a phone powered, but a Windows powered phone device.
Mary Jo Foley: Now the same user, tyrankoos, asked, whether you could see somehow 10X passing, I’m kind of paraphrasing here, passing through to an Android phone and then somehow powering Surface AR glasses. Like I think this person’s really looking for like a way to bring phones and AV, AR kinds of stuff all together into one ecosystem.
Zac Bowden: Well, I’ve not been told that they’re working on AR glasses, that’s for one. I mean, with regards to HoloLens Microsoft already has a version of Windows that runs it on an AR headset of some kinds. That’s what HoloLens 2 runs, but regarding Surface glasses, that’s just a sort of mythical idea at this point. I guess if you look at the rumors around how Apple are planning to do it, I think the rumors suggest that they will be using the power of the iPhone and streaming to their glasses. Maybe the question is, you know, could Microsoft do a similar thing with Android? And the answer
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, I think that is his question,
Zac Bowden: But I don’t know if Microsoft could and would Microsoft want to? Because that’s the problem not having a Windows phone, right? You don’t own the platform. So you have to work around the constraints of other people’s platforms. Could Microsoft still do a heads-up display in glasses powered by an Android phone? I think they could do it. Cause I think there’s third party companies out there who’ve already tried, but does Microsoft want to do that? I don’t know.
Mary Jo Foley: I know. Right. I mean, there’s technologies they have that make you think they could, if they wanted to, you know, how they were doing compatibility with Arc and that kind of stuff, I’m like, okay, maybe, right?
Zac Bowden: I think it would be well worthwhile for Microsoft to try and release like a consumer facing HoloLens device first because AI doesn’t really exist yet. There’s no market for AI and Microsoft in the enterprise space is doing the best so far with HoloLens 2. So maybe there’s room for a consumer AR device and whoever gets there first may take the cake on that, but who knows at this point.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. I think they’re pretty happy with being in the enterprise space there, given that recent contract rate that they had with the virtual system for the army, I think it was. Which is some crazy $20 billion according,
Zac Bowden: A lot of money.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. Let’s see, Billy Lariviere, on Twitter asked, is there any future for the Windows Photos app to be deployed on Android and iOS? Or should we just think about moving our photos to another more universal photo service?
Zac Bowden: So I’m not too sure about a universal Microsoft photos app for Android, but I have heard that Microsoft was considering building its own gallery app for the Surface Duo. Cause right now the Surface Duo chips have Google Photos, which is kind of weird if you think about it. Microsoft has OneDrive and has its own photos backup service, but on the Duo, you’re using Google Photos for some reason. So I guess Microsoft could bring whatever gallery app they build for Duo to old Android devices. But I don’t think Microsoft’s competing in that market. If anything, I could see Microsoft upping the OneDrive app and making it a more capable photo viewer, because you can already view your photos in the OneDrive app on Android, but it’s not very good. If they improve that experience, then I would be happy using OneDrive, the app itself, as my gallery on Android and iOS, but we’re not there yet, unfortunately.
Mary Jo Foley: Right, right. And then another Surface Duo question. I’ve seen a few different questions saying, do you think they could ever bring 10X to the Duo? And then just Billy’s question is, is Surface Duo 2 really coming this year and do you think it could include touchless payment?
Zac Bowden: So Microsoft obviously has these internal sketches that they hope to reach and often they don’t reach them. As far as I’m aware Microsoft is wanting to get the Duo 2 out by the end of this year. And regarding NFC payments, I think is what contactless payments are. I have heard that it will have an NFC. I’ve been told that what the Duo 1 was missing in regards to obvious phone like features the Duo 2 should have. So think of NFC, possibly wireless charging, a better camera. Those are all things that are on the cut, because Microsoft is aware that the Duo 1 wasn’t a great phone. They’re not blind to that idea. And with Duo 2, because they definitely want to do a Duo 2, and I think they even want to do a Duo 3, at the very least. That they will improve upon it in the obvious ways that where people have complained the most, and NFC is definitely one of them.
Mary Jo Foley: You know, what’s funny about that. Hearing you talk about bringing more phone like features to it. When they launched the Duo, they kept trying to pretend it wasn’t a phone right. Then they threw it in the very first demo of it publicly, it being used as a phone. So it’s like, okay, you know what? People are going to use this as a phone.
Zac Bowden: Yeah. Well, I think that stems from what the Duo originally was, which was this device code named, Andromeda. I snuck that in there as well, finally. Which, Andromeda was supposed to be this sort of pocket PC like Windows device, right? And it was the shape and size of the Duo, but unfortunately the Windows part of that fell through and that never happened. So they put Android on it. But when you move to Android, you automatically position it as a phone because that’s what Android is. Android is a phone platform. I mean, sure you can get it on tablets and stuff, but it does phone stuff the best. So Microsoft really couldn’t avoid it for much longer. They have to acknowledge that it’s a phone because it is, that’s what it does. It’s a phone device.
Mary Jo Foley: Right, right. Billy’s got a very all encompassing question here. But I think you and I have privately talked about this a bit. He wants to know, is there any active development on the idea of a next “Windows” kind of paradigm? He doesn’t mean Windows 10 increments, but a whole new Windows concept.
Zac Bowden: It was interesting because with the Sun Valley stuff, it really does sound like Microsoft wants to reposition us or reignite the fire that is under Windows. Like Windows is I think fallen by the wayside quite a bit in the last couple of years ever since Terry Myerson left. And I think what really did it was the October, 2018 update, which when that came out, if you remember launched with a bug that deleted files or something, and that was a really big deal. And after that Microsoft really scaled back, like okay, we’re not doing any major changes to Windows. Let’s just focus on keeping it stable and leave it as is. Back in, I think it was February last year, Panos Panay took charge of Windows. And since then, all we’ve really heard about is new and big changes coming to Windows to reinvigorate, re-light the fire underneath it.
Zac Bowden: And later this year when Sun Valley launches or when 21H2 launches, will we see Microsoft rebrand or, you know, give like a new version of Windows. And I think it’s possible, right. I have heard that in regards to marketing Microsoft is planning a big, the “new Windows” kind of push. I think a WalkingCat tweeted a bit about that as well. And the phrase, “the new Windows” sort of implies that, you know, this isn’t Windows 10 anymore. This is something more. Regarding whether it will be Windows 11, I don’t think they will do that. But I think I could definitely see them removing the 10 and just calling it Windows. Cause I think that’s what they’ve always wanted to do, right?
Mary Jo Foley: Right, right. And I’ve seen people being confused about what, you know, and Panos has hinted around about something bigger or something new. I think people are confused. Is he talking about Sun Valley in 21H2? Or is he talking about 10X, which I don’t think he is?
Zac Bowden: No, I don’t think he is either. Only because 10X, as far as we understand it, 10X, the launch of 10X this year will be a relatively minor one aimed primarily at sort of commercial markets. Whereas Sun Valley will be going to all 1 billion Windows 10 users, more or less. So I think that Microsoft wants to shine the spotlight on Sun Valley. Cause it would be weird for them to do this Sun Valley stuff and then also announce and launch 10X and sort of give that the marketing budget because Sun Valley is where Microsoft users are. That’s where 1 billion Windows 10 users are. Windows 10X currently has zero users.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Zac Bowden: And with it launching only for commercial markets, I think it makes more sense to Microsoft, to launch Sun Valley, focus on that for the next 12 months or whatever. Then later next year, 2022 to start focusing on Windows 10X a bit and beginning that transition to here’s this new version of Windows it’s called 10X or whatever. And here’s what it can do that’s better than Windows 10, et cetera, et cetera.
Mary Jo Foley: For the IT Pros in the audience who are listening. And I know we have a lot of them on Petri. Don’t worry too much about all these sweeping changes you’re hearing about Sun Valley, right? Because I’ve heard Zac say publicly that likely those are gonna be able to be turned off.
Zac Bowden: Yeah. so not all features will be turned off. I think Microsoft is going to pick and choose which ones will be an option for users. For example, I did hear they were working on a new start menu layout and I have been told that you can turn off the new start menu and go back to the existing one. That’s just an example. But also I think Microsoft would do things regarding how they’re delivering this update. I don’t think it would be like a day one, everybody gets it. I think they’re going to take it very slowly, roll it out here and there. Enterprises will likely be able to delay it like they normally can. I think you’ll be able to stick on 21H1 for as long as you want. And then slowly but surely update to 21H2 or even 22H1, or whenever you want to do an update. Yeah, Microsoft is aware that they can’t upset their enterprise and IT Pro customers, they need to be careful. And you know, introducing a brand new UI is risky, it’s risky business, right? Especially for Windows. If you look at Windows 8, they did a terrible job at that.
Mary Jo Foley: Just gotta bring that up. Yeah, I think they learned their lesson maybe.
Zac Bowden: Yeah, I think they have, and I don’t, as far as I’m aware, the Sun Valley changes aren’t on the level of Windows 8. It was still looking still like Windows. Like they’re not drastically changing up the UX. We’re just getting, it’s going to be shinier and look a bit nicer. Some of the start menu layouts will be different and whatnot, but I think overall it was still looking still like Windows.
Mary Jo Foley: Hmm. Do you think if you’re trying to figure out where Microsoft’s going, with Sun Valley a good place to look is Mac OS?
Zac Bowden: Well, I don’t think they’re going to copy Mac OS one-to-one. I think they’re definitely looking at how Apple delivered Big Sur, cause for those who don’t know with Mac OS Big Sur, they’ve delivered an entire new UI refresh with it. So basically the old version looks a bit different. The new one looks shinier and stuff. I think that’s what they’re trying to do at Windows 10. But I don’t think it will like be similar to Mac OS. I still think it would be much more Windows like, and maybe they’ll copy the rounded corners. They probably definitely are copying the rounded corners.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. Kind of like the News and Interest thing, doesn’t Mac have something similar to that too?
Zac Bowden: I wouldn’t know, I don’t use my Mac OS.
Mary Jo Foley: Neither do I. Look at us rebels.
Zac Bowden: Well, I think the News/Interest thing’s interesting because it’s essentially msn.com in the task bar, right? That’s such a weird play for them in my opinion, but I guess there’s a purpose behind it
Mary Jo Foley: Probably ads my guess.
Zac Bowden: Yeah, probably yes.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Another Sun Valley question from, Sergio Dilor on Twitter, this is very specific. He said, will Sun Valley include changes around font rendering?
Zac Bowden: I have no idea.
Mary Jo Foley: I know I’m like, wow, that’s very specific.
Zac Bowden: That is very specific, I forgot to ask that one. Sorry.
Mary Jo Foley: So Sergio also asked a couple other good questions. He asked are features like windowed apps, virtual desktops, multi-user support possibly, eventually coming to 10X.
Zac Bowden: Yes. So obviously with the 10X that’s been announced, the 10X announcement has been weird. They announced it for dual screen and they sort of backtracked on that and they haven’t really shown off 10X for single screen PCs yet. So as far as I’m aware, we have no idea. But based on a leaked build of 10X, which came out, I think in January it doesn’t yet have windowed apps. However, I’ve seen builds of Windows 10X that does have that capability. So they definitely have considered it. I believe they’ve built it. And I think what they’re doing is they’re just, they’re being a little bit more cautious as to which devices have what features. I think regarding app windows, for example, I think they were limiting it to devices with screen sizes of 13 inches or above. The problem is I don’t think we’re going to see any Windows 10X devices with that screen size, just yet. I think they’re going to be much smaller, less than 13 inch, sort of mini laptops or tablets at launch, but over time, yeah.
Zac Bowden: Microsoft definitely wants Windows 10X to eventually become the mainstream version of Windows. And that will include having to bring things like multi-user support and app windows to 10X, otherwise nobody will use it. So yeah, over time this will happen. But because 10X is built on this new Windows Core base, it takes them a lot longer to really implement these things. Which is, I guess, why they they’re scoping the launch to such a sort of unique market, the commercial sort of low end market so that the mainstream audience doesn’t catch that it’s not ready yet for most people.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. Right. A couple of points on 10X. One thing that we both have heard I believe is that it won’t run on existing devices, right? Like it’s being built for brand new devices that aren’t in market. Although inside Microsoft, they actually are running it on existing, a couple of existing Surface devices.
Zac Bowden: Yeah. So, internally I believe they’ve run it on the Surface Pro 5, 6, 7, and the X as well as the Surface Go. And I believe Surface Go 2 and they do that for like engineers to sort of test the bills that they are working on and stuff. But externally, yes, the plan is to only launch 10X on new devices. So you won’t be able to buy a Windows 10X license and then download a Windows 10X ISO to install on your existing Surface laptop or HP laptop or something. And the reason for that is one obviously it allows Microsoft to control the marketing, control who gets access to it and stuff. But two, it’s also because from a technical perspective, Windows 10X and Windows 10 are very different operating systems. I know Microsoft would like you to believe that they’re basically the same OS with a different skin under the hood. That’s not true. Windows 10X being based on Windows Core is basically a new version of Windows. It’s a rethinking of the Windows code base and how it lays itself out on a hard drive, for example, whereas Windows 10 is very much legacy Windows. Windows 10, you can dig deep into Windows 10 and find things that go as far back as Windows 95, if not further, that’s not the case on Windows 10X.
Mary Jo Foley: But do you still believe some of the look and feel and features of 10 X will come to big Windows, regular Windows, at some point?
Zac Bowden: Yeah, I think that’s kind of half what Sun Valley is trying to do. I think it’s trying to bridge the UX experiences across 10X and desktop. I think not everything of course, but definitely some of the best parts of 10X. I think the action center from 10X will come to desktop with Sun Valley, if not slightly a bit tweaked, but I definitely think that they’re trying to join those UIs where it makes sense.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. We got a couple of questions about Cortana,
Zac Bowden: Oh, good.
Mary Jo Foley: I know, which was kind of surprising, I thought. But yeah, people want to know, is there a future? What is the future? So I’ve tried to explain this myself before about how Cortana has changed, but let’s have you have a go at it?
Zac Bowden: Well, I don’t think my answer is going to be any different. Microsoft has repositioned Cortana. When it was first announced Cortana was this sort of Siri, Google Assistant competitor right. There’s no arguing against that. In fact, when Cortana was announced, it was arguably better than those other competitors at the time. But today that is not the case. Microsoft has slowly but surely sort of retrenched Cortana. And it’s now something that they focus on more of the enterprise, more productivity based stuff, rather than being a sort of all purpose assistant for news, weather, you know, controlling your lights. That’s no longer the case. And as far as I’m aware, they’re not planning to bring that back. Cortana’s future is cemented in helping you write emails or helping you create calendar events. We’ll put people at work and whatnot. I do not expect them to return to the, to the Siri, Google Assistant market, unfortunately.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. I don’t either. People I think, have hope against hope that that’s going to happen, but I don’t think it will or can. Okay. And then back to Sergio Dilor, he also had a question about the apps and we already talked a little bit about photos, but he said any idea or news about what might happen with apps, and he said, what about OneOutlook? And he even put Groove in there, which is interesting.
Zac Bowden: So, regarding in-box Windows apps. I have heard that most of them will be getting some kind of Win UI update with Sun Valley. To what extent? I don’t know, some of them will be updated more than others. I have heard that there are some updates coming to the photos app, although I’m not too sure on what the specifics are around that. I know there’s a lot of complaints around the photos app being kind of slow and a bit clunky for what it’s supposed to do. And I think one of Microsoft’s goals is to sort of make it a lightweight photo viewer. Cause that’s what it’s supposed to be. Other apps like mail and calendar, they’re in a weird position because as I’ve reported, they are working to replace those eventually with OneOutlook, or I think it’s codenamed Monarch, and that is a web. Basically Outlook web, but built as an app for Windows and Mac OS and probably Linux as well.
Zac Bowden: And they will replace the mail and calendar apps eventually, but that won’t be ready until 2022 sometime. So, you know, they’re taking their time with that. But yeah, I mean with the latest Windows Insider build. You may have noticed that they’ve started to reshuffle the apps list quite a bit. And I think what they’re trying to do is simplify the apps list as much as they can. They’re definitely hiding some legacy stuff. They’re moving things around. They’re promoting some legacy stuff as well, like the Paint app and Notepad, are now on the main apps list. And they’re really sort of prioritizing what users use and what users don’t use. And going so far as to hiding them. I think they’ve hidden like three main folders in the apps list now. And I don’t think they’re going to stop. I think they’re going to keep simplifying where they can. Cause you know, if they’re looking at Mac OS and iPad OS, they’re very simple looking platforms. Right? And I think they’re trying to do the same thing with Windows.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Last question is from me to you, where do you think we’re going to hear about things like 10X and Sun Valley? Do you think they’ll actually talk about this at Build or we keep hearing it might be a what’s next for Windows event, which may or may not be the same thing as Build. Any idea about how they’re going to tell us about this?
Zac Bowden: It’s a good question. So the last I heard back in February, I was told that there would be a Windows event in June or an event or some kind that would focus on Windows in June. But as we now know, Build is late May. So I’m wondering if maybe they just weren’t sure when Build was going to be, and now they have the dates. So late May will be that. But as far as I’m aware, a Windows event sounds like it was going to happen in June. And that lines up with the schedule I have internally regarding when Cobalts and Sun Valley development are supposed to sort of be done. So as you may have talked about it before Windows is developed on a semester-based cycle.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Zac Bowden: And there’s two semesters a year, there’s the first half and the second half. January to June and then July to December. Currently right now we’re in the Cobalt semester.
Zac Bowden: So it was codenamed Cobalt, and that’s just how they refer to it. And that’s supposed to be done in June, which would line up with this Windows event that I’ve, that we’ve possibly heard about. But Sun Valley is interesting because they’re developing it, there’s two parts to it. It’s not just one release, there’s the initial Cobalt release, which will be done in June. That will go off to OEMs once it RTMs. But then there’s like this I21 release, which sits on top of the Cobalt RTM, and that will add additional features and UX changes and whatever else they’re planning with Sun Valley. And that will be in testing throughout the summer. And won’t launch to the public until probably October, which is usually when the H2 version launches. So I think for Insiders, this matters more because they’re going to see somebody sort of show up in the summertime, but for the public, they don’t really need to worry about anything until October.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Yep. That’s good. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Zac. That was really fun. Whirlwind tour of what’s likely next for Windows. So I appreciate the time.
Zac Bowden: Thank you for having me on. I’m happy to be here.
Mary Jo Foley: Great. For everyone else. Who’s listening right now to this chat or reading the transcript. I’ll be putting up more information soon about who my next guest is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter using the #MJFChat. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these chats, please do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.
MJFChat: What’s New With Windows Update?
Mar 30, 2021
We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”
In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.
Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)
Our latest MJFChat is focused on the latest developments in the Windows updating, patching and servicing space. My special guest is Harjit Dhaliwal, a senior sysadmin, tech evangelist and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). He and I talked about what’s new in Windows Update for Business, WSUS, patching and lots more in the course of this conversation.
If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there…
Mary Jo Foley: Hi, you’re listening to Petri.com’s MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be all about what’s happening lately in the Windows, updating and patching space. And my special guest today is Harjit Dhaliwal. Who many of you know, better as Hoorge on Twitter. Harjit is a senior sys-admin and a tech evangelist, and he’s also a Microsoft MVP. Hi, Harjit, thank you so much for doing the chat with me today.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Hey MJ, thanks for having me on this chat today. This is going to be so much fun.
Mary Jo Foley: I know I’m, I’m glad you’re doing this because we just had the virtual Ignite conference for IT Pros and I found out later that there was a bunch of Windows updating and patching and servicing news that wasn’t in the book of news. It was kind of a little bit under the radar. So I thought it’d be fun to have you go through some of the announcements so that we have a better perspective on them.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Yeah, there were a bunch of announcements you know, particularly focused on modern device management and modern work, right. Because you know, the new norm now is working from home and that kind of thing. So, and I believe we are going to talk about a few of these announcements in this chat, right?
Mary Jo Foley: Right. So one of the ones that caught my eye right off the bat, when I was looking through the list on the Windows IT Pro Blog was the fact that Windows Enterprise admins, soon they’re going to get full control over driver and firmware updates. And that’s a very different situation than what’s possible right now with Intune and Config Manager, right. So I wonder if you could go over that a bit, like what’s going to change and why you think this is important for IT Pros to understand.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Yeah. So that is correct, right. I mean, the highlight of this is definitely IT admins will get more control over driver firmware updates, and I know we’re going to talk more in depth. You know, very soon, but this has been a pain point with managing devices. You know, we can do OSD and stuff like that, but drivers and firmware has been a major challengem for sure.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. And it’s also very inconsistent, it seems like from what I have read, like Intune admins right now have some access to policies that can allow or deny all drivers on devices from Win updates. But then they can’t allow drivers only after administrative inspection. Sorry, I’m having trouble saying words here, but then Config Manager has a whole different thing, right. Admins there can’t sync drivers from Windows Update with WSUS. So it just feels like it’s kind of like a hodgepodge right now. And Microsoft seems to be trying to kind of bring some consistency over the driver and firmware updates situation through a Windows Update for Business, right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: Yes. Windows Update for Business is the new hot stuff.
Mary Jo Foley: Tell me more, about that?
Harjit Dhaliwal: All right. So you know, first let me give a quick definition of what Windows Update for Business is, right. You know, which is also known as WUfB, sometimes you hear people say WUfB right, the acronym for it. And I’ll go back and forth with this so, and there has been some confusion of what it is and also some resistance from IT admins. You know, and I’ll explain that a little bit here. So Windows Update for Business is really a set of cloud controls to manage which updates are offered you know, from Windows Update, meaning from the cloud. So when we mentioned Windows Update, it means from the cloud, right. It’s connecting to the Microsoft cloud services and then IT Provides, hopefully IT Provides you know, positive end user update experiences.
Harjit Dhaliwal: You know, the Windows Update for Business settings can be configured with group policies or MDMs, like you know, such as Intune, right? So Intune is also growing fast. So regarding driver and firmware updates, you know, they traditionally have been a major pain point and a huge challenge for IT admins, particularly to implement and deploy. Oftentimes, this is, you know, we tend to neglect and forget it once we have deployed a device or a user. For example, you know, you get a brand new machine or something like that, you image it, you put whatever the latest Windows 10 version is. You know, you patch it up and everything like that, you give it to the user and it’s kind of forgotten, right. So you only deal with it on a one-on-one basis, maybe three years down the road from this particular device, or this user for something that’s not working? Right, it’s a one-off thing. And you’re like, Oh, okay, you’ve got this issue. Okay, you need firmware, you need to update your BIO. So, you know, UEFI, or you know, there’s some drivers from Dell or HP that we need to add on and stuff like that. Sometimes we’re doing this stuff for like mitigating security risks. Right, you know, so this is, there’s this new mechanism that, you know, Microsoft’s providing, it’s actually a really neat thing. It’s good, in my opinion.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, I think there’s a private preview of this new capability this month. I don’t know if they actually said when the final would be rolling out to other people. But yeah, it does, it sounds at least on paper and on the web, like it’s going to be a big deal for IT Pros.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Yeah, it is. It is. And the neat thing about this is that what it is, it’s going to leverage all the cloud services.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So, you know, Microsoft Endpoint Manager, which is, you know, the Intune side of things and right. So that is where this stuff is going to come down from. So when you’re doing your traditional Config Manager, which uses WSUS, you can’t do any of this stuff. You can’t you know, manage drivers and firmware, but what some people have been doing is, like I said, like a one-off basis, like either they are doing it during imaging timeframes, like, okay, now we update our OSD and we’ve got all the latest BIOS and we’ve got the latest, you know, whatever updates we need. Or you have to use third party tools that some, you know, MVPs have created this really awesome third party tools to check on your fleet of devices. Whether you have HP, Lenovo, Dell, whatever, and then it lets, it goes out to the manufacturers, get those you know drivers, puts it in, it integrates with Config Manager, and then you can do it that way.
Harjit Dhaliwal: It’s so tedious, right. Cause you have to implement this, another thing over something that should already have this capability.
Mary Jo Foley: Exactly.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Right?
Mary Jo Foley: This hits home for me a lot, because it’s not exactly the same situation, but I have a Surface Laptop 3. Recently I had a big problem with it. Like, I couldn’t see anything on the display. So somebody who was helping me at a computer shop, I saw what he was doing. He was like looking for all the separate drivers that weren’t part of Microsoft’s drivers and then installing like the Intel drivers and this and that, you know, like layering it on. And then the drivers were conflicting with what Microsoft was downloading onto the machine, right? So it would say on it, like, which of these two drivers is the most up-to-date driver? And I’m like, oh man, this is such a nightmare.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Right, right. And you know, so one of the things why I’m really excited about this is because, and I think it’s going to be good for all of us, who manage devices, is it comes down to security. One of the things it’s about, it’s not just about functionality and you know, all that stuff, which is really neat, but it also comes down to security mitigation. Because, you know over the last, I don’t know, just a few years, and even very recently, some of the major security threats have involved, you know, you need to patch the firmware, like the Intel, you know, processes and right. So you just, you just can’t patch Windows, but you got to patch the hardware as well. And that has been such a challenge, like, how do you do this?
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. Well, hopefully this new service is going to help a little towards this goal, making it a little simpler. Right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: Right. But for the consumers, like if you’re a regular consumer or even like you know, a general user that, they did built in the capability of installing drivers with Windows Update. So when you go to Windows Update, and I think it’s under optional updates or something like that. But you know,
Mary Jo Foley: No one ever checks for that.
Harjit Dhaliwal: No one checks there, right. One, they don’t know that they need to check that. Two, like do I really need this?
Mary Jo Foley: I know, I know. I’m always looking at things there going, should I install this, or shouldn’t I? Right. I know. I know. Okay. So let’s, let’s move on to another announcement, which I thought could be potentially interesting for IT Pros. So there was a blog post about something they called, a new Windows Update for Business Deployment Service. And in that blog post, they said, this is, quote, “an exciting next step in the evolution of Windows as a Service.” And from what I could tell, it was supposed to extend management services to any devices connecting through Windows Updates. So people, so admins could do things like schedule update deployments to start on a specific date or bypass a pre-configured policy. So this sounds like it could be really big, right? Like if you give IT Pros much more granular control, right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: It is. And that’s exactly what I was going to say, right. This is definitely a new cloud service and an extension of Windows Update for Business. So in its infancy, right. When Windows Update for Business came out, it was very much consumer driven, right? So just like you would or, you know, your mom and dad, you know, trying to install updates on the computer, right. It was almost like that, but it was made for businesses and enterprises and they were like, wait, but all I’m trying to do here, if I enable Windows Update for Business, I’m just telling my devices to go out to Windows Updates whenever they are available, install and reboot. So enterprises were very reluctant. This is why I was saying earlier, when we started this chat, there was some resistance, it’s because there was no granular control. You’re like, no, I want to make sure that I can, I’m only delivering these updates on these dates and I’m controlling reboots. So this new service is going to allow you to do all of that.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Right. So, you know, some of the things that you’re going to get out of this new service, you already patched upon it. Like you can schedule updates to happen on a specific date. You can stage deployments and they have this thing, something new called rich expressions. It’s almost like, you know, if this, then that kind of a situation, right. So where you can deploy a particular Windows 10 feature update to let’s say x number of devices each day starting on such and such day. Right, so you can do those kinds of things. You can override existing Windows update policies to push out like emergency you know, patches. And we can talk more about that later. You know, you can, there’s so many things, there’s some machine learning stuff that’s built in. They’ll identify and pause deployments. And you know, that Microsoft determines from all the data that they get and also the validations that they get from customers and also internally from Microsoft itself. But this validation, or this thing, what they call is a save that hole, but save that hole doesn’t work or doesn’t apply if you are using WSUS. Meaning, you have to use Windows Update, which is the cloud-based mechanism to update. And then you have these protections in place.
Mary Jo Foley: Got it. It is a multi-layered can of worms to mix.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, here’s another one that I definitely need help understanding. There was some announcements around Known Issue Rollback, right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Oh yeah.
Mary Jo Foley: So now, here’s what I was puzzled about, Known Issue Rollback exists at least to some degree. Right? So what is actually new that they’re announcing at Ignite? Can you give me a brief recap about this?
Harjit Dhaliwal: So Known Issue Rollback or also known as KIR, that’s an acronym they’re using. Again, it’s a new capability. Well, it’s not really a new capability, right? It’s to quickly return you to a working condition. Right?
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So they did have this already implemented but very partially in, I believe in 1809 and 1909, if I’m not mistaken, but now it is like more in 2004 and 20H2 versions and the future ones. So what it really is, is that apparently Microsoft you know, the developers, when they code, they, you know, they’ll add these non-security bug fixes in the code, but they also keep, you know, the old code you know, intact. Like they probably like just comment it out or something like that.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So when a problem exists or what they call regressions and they need to revert, they go back to this code. They basically, you know unremark the old code and block out the new one. So you kind of go back to the older one, back to where you first started until they figure out what’s going on and come up with a new patch. So what this is, is that you know, you can look at for example, an analogy I’ll use is like a carton of eggs, right? So we know now patches are deployed as a CU, LCU right? The latest computer update. But to the layman, it looks like it’s just one update, but it actually, it’s not, it’s like multiple fixes in that one update. So like a carton of eggs, right? You’ve got 12 eggs in a carton and you’ve got one egg that’s gone bad, but you’re not going to throw out the entire, the other 11 eggs. So you’re going to take the one bad egg out, do something like either replace it or not. That’s basically what this whole Known Issue Rollback kind of mindset works. Does that make sense?
Mary Jo Foley: It does. It does. It reminds me of something that’s ongoing as we’re recording this chat, which is the whole printing issue that happened. The latest, I think it was the latest set of Patch Tuesday updates they had.
Harjit Dhaliwal: The March ones, yes.
Mary Jo Foley: Right. They had a problem with a number of printers and Windows 10. So they had to fix that printing issue. But I think they’re up to their third attempt at this, right? So is this an occasion where the Known Issue Rollback would kind of come into play?
Harjit Dhaliwal: So this is very, very interesting question. So this is, my take is that this should be a KIR thing, but according to Microsoft, the people who are delivering the patches, they’re saying, it’s not, it doesn’t apply to this particular situation. So there is a blog post on Tech Community by the folks who manage patches at Microsoft. And I’m a little confused because there’s a little short video where they do describe a similar issue with printing you know, printing gone bad in April 2020, right last year. And apparently KIR came into effect and solved and stopped and mitigated those bad patches. But apparently it doesn’t apply right now. So I’m a little confused. I’m not sure why, I’m thinking this would be the perfect case for this. So the other thing that is really interesting about this KIR thing is that they are also saying that they provide group policies for the specific use cases.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Like, so each, let’s say, let’s take this printing thing, for example. So they’ve discovered it. They said they’re going to roll back, whatever. So if you’re an on-prem admin and you’re using WSUS and stuff, obviously you’re not going to be able to use KIR, right? Cause it’s all cloud based. So what they’re doing is that they’re giving you group policies for this one particular KB, Windows Update KB, right? And which they will put in the release notes and, you know, whatever. But so with that, what you can do is that once you add that to your group policy, you can deploy it. And next thing you know, everybody’s fixed, but here’s what happens though. Each of those KBs are individualized. So over time, let’s say in a year, if you do this twice a month or something like that, right? You’re going to start seeing a bloat of group policies in your group policy management console. And the way sys-admins work is like, once we set a group policy, we really kind of don’t look back like, Oh yeah, there was a problem with this particular thing. Here’s a group policy and boom, we set it. And then, you know, maybe five years down the road or something, someone new comes in or whatever, and says, Hey, what is this for? I don’t know, right?
Mary Jo Foley: It’s just sitting there, yeah.
Harjit Dhaliwal: That’s one of the concerns that they need to fix that, they can’t have these group policies just bloating the environment.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, yeah, got it. I know, like I said, many, many layers of issues on all of these pieces, right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: So many.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. We have to talk about security, right? Because what is a chat without talking about security?
Harjit Dhaliwal: Well, they work hand in hand though.
Mary Jo Foley: They do, they do. So another one of the Ignite announcements was about how Microsoft is trying to expedite Windows 10 Security Updates within the Endpoint Manager Admin Center. So I believe that’s also coming soon as a public preview. What’s this going to mean to admins in your opinion?
Harjit Dhaliwal: So again, this is going to be utilizing Windows Update for Business, right? So Windows Update the cloud-based.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So right now, when a emergency patch comes out, for example, there were some this month and, you know, some in the previous months, because of some major security blow out. Oftentimes these out-of-band patches, they’re not available in WSUS. You know, they’re not dealt with that way. So you literally have to go and import it, like go into the catalog, import it, add it, sync it and so on and so forth and then deliver it. So this expediting thing is, what it does is that you can have your existing Windows Update for Business settings or profiles, right. With your different you know, targeting like, you know, some people, when they deliver patches, they deliver to their insider group first, like maybe five devices or five users.
Harjit Dhaliwal: And then they’ll expand it, after two days they’ll expand that to you know, the first wave and then the second wave and so on. What this does is that this doesn’t change that, but it will push that emergency patch above all else. And lets you install that first, pausing everything else. Once, it’s emergency patches is installed and it’s successful, then it really enables those other policies that you have with Windows Update for Business. So it’s a quick way to remediate things. Right?
Mary Jo Foley: Okay, yep.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So,otherwise you have to restructure your whole patching methodology, right? You go like, wait, I’ve got this one, but it’s not, but I’m also delivering the other patches and this is not going to work. So yeah. It’s like pausing things and let’s get this in first. And then, you know, here’s another analogy I just thought about. So it’s like a VIP, right? Who’s got a police escort, right?
Mary Jo Foley: Right, cause you can hear the sirens in the background.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Right, there you go. So you’ve got a police escort. So instead of waiting in traffic, you just have other cars move to the side and let the VIP go through. And then after that the rest of the traffic goes through, it’s kind of simple.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. It’s all about prioritization, right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: Exactly.
Mary Jo Foley: Which is an issue. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Now we’re getting to the fun part. We got a couple of reader questions here for you. And I like this one a lot from Tero Alhonen on Twitter.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Oh, yeah.
Mary Jo Foley: He wants to know what you think about the future of on-prem WSUS and you know, we’ve been mostly talking about cloud updates during this chat, but we’ve mentioned WSUS a couple of times and he says, he noticed that it hasn’t gotten any major updates and the latest policy gives users yet another option to use cloud services and not on-prem. So what do you, this is just your opinion, but what do you think is going to happen with on-prem WSUS?
Harjit Dhaliwal: So, Tero makes a very good point. And this has been raised by many config manager admins and you know, who have this love and hate relationship with WSUS. And I would say more like hate than actually love, because you know, like Config Manager requires WSUS to be there. Right? It needs WSUS and that’s one of the required components. So you got no way around it. And then there are a lot of complexities to keeping it running, you know, like a well-oiled machine, right? You gotta do regular maintenance things to it. You have to, you know, clean up the database and do your indexing and tune IAS and so on and so forth. And there are times like where syncing will break or, you know, or you’ll have a bloat and things like that. And things don’t clear out, you’ll have to like sometimes uninstalle WSUS and re-install, so it is really a challenge, right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: In my opinion, I think WSUS is going to be around for a little longer, or at least until it’s no longer a dependency for Config Manager, right?
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah, right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So until we don’t get rid of that dependency, it’s going to be around. But you know, we’ve seen all these, like all these announcements from, you know, Microsoft and whatever, and we can see the direction that they’re moving, right? Which is cloud, right?
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Cloud centric, ecosystems. That’s where things are moving, Windows Update for Business. You can see the writing on the wall. Because things are moving, right. So I think that’s what it is. And I think Windows Update for Business it’s going to have more and more and more features added to it over time. And then WSUS is just kinda gonna fizzle away. But at the same point, WSUS is actually also used by quite a few companies or organizations to patch like your servers, because standalone, not even using Config Manager, right. Standalone, because it’s free, it can do what it’s supposed to do, but it doesn’t have granular controls.
Mary Jo Foley: Right, right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: You know, so it’s still being used, you know, it’s like maybe some small organizations and stuff.
Mary Jo Foley: Yeah. I know. I feel like it’s a similar discussion to Windows Server on-prem and Office on prem. There are people who use it, right. And so as long as there are customers, especially some important customers of Microsoft who want it, they’re going to keep it around.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Mary Jo Foley: Okay. Another good Windows question from Tero and this one I think is pure speculation, but maybe, you know, an answer I don’t know here. And he’s he asked if we have heard anything about what Microsoft’s likely to do with Windows 1021H1, which isn’t out yet for the mainstream in terms of support. So usually the way Windows support has been working, Windows 10 support is 18 months of support for enterprises and education. Sorry, we have more sirens, for H1 feature updates and then 30 months of support for H2. But this year is different because the H1 update of Windows 10 is supposed to be very minor, almost like a cumulative update. And each shoe is supposed to be pretty big and substantial. So he’s wondering, do we think they could flip it this time and make it be 30 months for H1 and 18 for H2?
Harjit Dhaliwal: No, I don’t think so. So no, I you know, 21H1, you know, it just came out. I think just a couple of days ago, a few days ago, as a commercial screen release, right. So it’s still under testing it’s still under windows Insiders and all that stuff, right? So when you look at it, like you mentioned earlier, 18 months and 30 months, the spring versions, which is the 21H1 is always 18 months. And then the fall ones are going to be the second one is always going to be the 30 months. I don’t know why they kept it different like that, which creates a lot of challenges with maintenance and, right. So and you also talked about like, you know, there’s not much difference. Yes, because 21H1 is really from my understanding, it uses the same code as 20H2 and 2004.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Even the cumulative updates are the same.
Mary Jo Foley: Right.
Harjit Dhaliwal: And stuff like that. So it’s still under testing, if there was really a you know, an RTM version right now, then we can say something different, but it’s still under testing. We’re already in March. So by the time it’s going to come out, it’ll be May. We give another few months, there’ll be 21H2, which is going to have a ton of features. This 21H1’s going to morph into that. And then you have 30 months. And a lot of my peers that I talked to, who work in various organizations, and most of them, 90% of them will skip the spring version all the time. They don’t even deploy that. They don’t even give that as an option to their users. Because why you have the longer timeframe to have some breathing room, right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: To figure out your applications, compatibility and all that stuff rather than yeah. Because by the time it comes out, and then you want to try to deploy it. You’re really going to lose a few months from that. So the 18 months, is not going to be 18 months, it might be 12 months maybe. Yeah. So I would say skip it, you know, but definitely use it as a test, you know, test it out, play with your, you know, your line of business applications and give Microsoft feedback about what you’re seeing and bug fixes and stuff like that. That’s what they want you to do. They want you to give them that information.
Mary Jo Foley: So you think business as usual basically, right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: Right, right, right.
Mary Jo Foley: Cool. All right. Last question for you, because we’re pretty much out of time here, is about resources. So I’ve mentioned a couple of times Microsoft’s Windows IT Pro Blog, but I’m sure there are lots of other resources that you might recommend or suggest for people who want to keep up with what’s going on in Windows patching and servicing and updating, any off the top of your head suggestions here.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So, there are lots out there. And I’ve got an RSS feed of a bunch of them.
Mary Jo Foley: Oh wow, nice.
Harjit Dhaliwal: But yeah, so I keep a very close pulse on patches, like every month, I’m like, you know, monitoring this stuff, you know, sometimes a week before it happens and the day before, the day it happens and so on. So what I’ve started doing to help the community is, I’ve started my own blogs every month, about each month’s patches.
Mary Jo Foley: Nice.
Harjit Dhaliwal: So, my blog site, it’s harjit.us. And you’ll see when I started in January, February, March, and then I put some updates to it, like, as I find like, oh yeah, you know, on such a day now there’s a new update for this, whatever. And I also cover third party patches as well. Like, you know, Oracle, Java, you know, things like that.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Adobe. So it’s like a one-stop shop kind of a thing for people, and I have links. So that’s one site. And then obviously my Twitter, I’m very active on Twitter. And my friend, Anoop Nair from India. He’s a huge, because of Endpoint Manager guy. And we started a technical YouTube show called Namaste Techies, right.
Mary Jo Foley: Oh, cool.
Harjit Dhaliwal: You know, we’ll often tweet that out and all that stuff. So we started doing that stuff too. We started sharing there as well. So there’s lots of information. I think the best easiest is to follow my blog and then expand out from there because I provide all the other resources there.
Mary Jo Foley: Great. I didn’t know about your blog. So that’s a new resource for me. I follow you on Twitter obviously, and if you don’t already follow Harjit, he’s @Hoorge, right?
Harjit Dhaliwal: Yes, that’s right.
Mary Jo Foley: So you should follow him.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Thank you.
Mary Jo Foley: All right, Harjit. Thank you so much for taking all the time and explaining all these posts, because there were a lot of them and I felt a little befuddled, I have to admit at the end. So now I feel better about understanding them.
Harjit Dhaliwal: Yeah, no, and you know really thank you for having me again. I know I did this with you once before so it’s a lot of fun and it’s nice to just be, you know cordial and just talk about this stuff and hopefully like, you know your listeners will have something to, walk away from this chat that we had. And definitely reach out. And I encourage them, you know, to reach out to me. I’m not, you know, I’m not closing the doors, you know, reach out, contact me if you need some assistance or information and things like that and I’m happy to engage.
Mary Jo Foley: That’s great, thank you very much for doing that. I use you that way myself sometimes when I need help on patches and thank you very much. For everyone else listening right now to this chat or reading the transcript, I will be putting up more information soon about who my next guest is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter using the #MJFChat. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else, or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these chats, do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.
Harjit Dhaliwal: All right, great. Cheers, everybody.