Windows Insider Podcast

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Latest Episodes:

Gaming (Are You Not Entertained?!) Jul 03, 2019

Show notes

Learn more about accessibility in gaming and how when everybody plays, we all win in this two-part episode of the Windows Insider Podcast. Jason chats with Tara Voelker, a program manager at Mixer about gaming for everyone, the Game Accessibility Conference, the evolution of Mixer, and the future of streaming.

Then we get together with Gabi Michel, the program manager behind the Xbox Adaptive Controller. She takes us through how her team developed the controller, Microsoft's commitment to accessibility, and how the controller's marketing was so impactful.

Resources:

insider.windows.com

@windowsinsider

Mixer

"Xbox: Accessible games can 'mean the difference between existing and living' for disabled people"

Game Accessibility Guidelines

Xbox

Mixer.com/MixerBlueShow

Mixer.com/WindowsInsider

Cerebral Palsy Foundation

Quantum Leaps and Windows Updates Jun 05, 2019

Show notes

Take a fascinating dive into Microsoft's approach to quantum computing. Then, get an inside look at recent improvements to the Windows Update experience. Machine learning and increased transparency are helping the Windows team track user feedback and deliver our best update experience ever.

Resources:

Windows Insider podcast page

Janet Schneider, Principal Software Engineer in the Cryogenic Computing Group at Microsoft.

Microsoft Quantum Development Kit

Microsoft.com/quantum

AI for Africa

brilliant.org

Windows' new public-facing health dashboard

Mike Fortin's blog

Microsoft Build Conference 2019

Security Now May 01, 2019

Show notes

Join us as we dig into all things security in this two-part episode of the Windows Insider Podcast. Jason chats with David Westin, group security manager for operating systems, about big picture security, including red team versus blue team operations, the importance of securing public infrastructure, and the future of AI. Plus, get an inside look at how Insiders make his job easier.

Then, Jessica Payne, a senior security researcher for Microsoft Defender, joins us for a conversation about how you can stay secure. She shares a peek into how attackers in the current landscape are taking advantage of vulnerabilities and walks us through what Microsoft's doing to protect you and what you can do to protect yourself.

https://twitter.com/windowsinsider

https://insider.windows.com/

https://www.instagram.com/windowsinsider/

Days of Future Passwords Apr 03, 2019

Show notes

The Windows Hello team chats about security features that make passwords obsolete and authentication safer and easier than ever. Then Jason meets up with Dona Sarkar for an inside look into the Windows Insider Program's impact on Windows 10 and exciting new possibilities for the future.

Resources:

Windows Insider Program

Jason Howard

Dona Sarkar

Nadya Amirchoupani

Anastasia Tarnouskaya

Other Microsoft podcasts of interest:

The Intrazone, a show about the SharePoint intelligent intranet

Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott

Women in Business and Technology

M365 Modern Desktop

Jobs of Tomorrow Jul 25, 2018

Show notes

Technology and the jobs that go with it are evolving exponentially faster. How can new grads and seasoned pros alike be prepared for the jobs of tomorrow? How does Microsoft hire the brightest minds to work on leading edge tech? We ponder these questions and more with Dave Wecker, Architect at Microsoft's Quantum Computing team, and Tyler Roush, of Microsoft's talent sourcing team. Dave gives us a peek into his work on the frontier of quantum computing, and Tyler shares what it's like to source talent for an international dream team. Then, we sit down with Microsoft engineer Raymond Uchenna Ononiwu to get his tips on landing a Microsoft internship and how to turn that into a full-time job offer. Episode Transcription Jason Howard: You're listening to the Windows Insider Podcast and I'm your host, Jason Howard. This is Episode 17: Jobs of Tomorrow. Technology and the jobs that go with it are evolving exponentially faster. How can new grads and seasoned pros alike be prepared for tomorrow's jobs in tech? How does Microsoft hire the brightest minds to work on leading edge tech? We ponder these questions and more in this episode. Before we get to our first segment, we've got a great opportunity we want to mention called the Windows Insider Women in Computing Award. If you are majoring in computer science or a related field, you could win a trip to the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world's largest gathering of women technologists. Winners will also receive mentoring at Microsoft Headquarters. You can get full details by going to Insider.windows.com. In case you didn't know, the Windows Insider Program runs quite a few awesome contests and they are only available to Insiders. So that's my shameless plug – if you aren't yet a Windows Insider, go to our website and register. It's free, it's easy, and you become a part of a global community shaping the future of Windows. OK, onto the show! (Music.) Jason Howard: First up, we have special guests from Microsoft's Quantum Computing team to talk about life on the cutting edge and what Microsoft looks for in candidates for jobs on the frontiers of innovation. Dave and Tyler, welcome to the show. Would you please introduce yourselves for our audience? Hi, I'm Dave Wecker. I'm the Quantum Architect and my job is to pull all the pieces together from the very top which is the software, we normally do all the way down to the materials, the fridges, the devices that we put in our labs all over the world. So, I spent a lot of time on an airplane going from lab to lab. (Laughter.) Tyler Roush: My name is Tyler Roush. I work with our talent sourcing team and I've been working with Dave for the last two years but most of my job is trying to understand what they do as much as possible and identify some of the skills that we need to come on to Microsoft to help build a quantum computer. Jason Howard: So he's doing a cool stuff, and you're getting people to come in and do the cool stuff. Tyler Roush: Exactly. Jason Howard: Awesome. So Dave, we start with you. Can you help us understand in kind of layman's terms what quantum computing actually is. Dave Wecker: Yeah it's actually fairly straightforward, if you think of it compared to classical computing. Classical computing we have bits, and a bit is zero or one. The qubit which is the basic unit in quantum computing is also zero and one but it can be zero and one at the same time. It's actually a little more than that because there's more information than just the zero or one in there. So, you can do a lot of computing with a single qubit. If 32-bits holds one number, let's say on your phone, that number can be from zero to four billion, 32 qubits can hold four billion numbers at once. So, all of a sudden, you're doing computation on a massive amount of information at one time, this unlocks a whole bunch of possibilities for what you can do computationally that you can't do with a classical computer. Jason Howard: So, what are some of the possibilities that kind of like get you going, things that you've found and they have expanded your mindset and way of thinking about it when it comes to what quantum computing will enable us to do? Dave Wecker: Well there's some poster children we use, things that are good examples of what you can do. A lot of people bring up cryptography, Shor's algorithm but to be honest that's not our focus, it's not the type of thing that we want to do in terms of solving problems for the world and doing things for Microsoft that we think are worth doing and are important. So, I'll start with a very mundane one, which is fertilizer. Fertilizer is something that is extremely expensive for most of the world and the reason is it takes a process that uses a lot of energy, a lot of pressure, high temperatures to make and so a lot of the emerging world can't buy fertilizer because it's out of their price range, because of the amount that it takes. We're talking on the order of five percent of the natural gas on the planet every year is consumed to make fertilizer, three percent of the total energy output of the planet. On the other hand, there's a little, tiny anaerobic bacteria that sits in the root of all plants, that sits there happily at room temperature and room pressure, low energy and it takes air and breaks the nitrogen bond and makes fertilizer, makes ammonia. We know we can do this, because it can do it, but we can't analyze the actual molecule that's in there, that causes the fertilizer to be made. We can't because it uses quantum effects that can't be analyzed on classical machines but can on quantum computers. So, you could make low-cost, artificial fertilizer if you had a quantum machine to analyze it. Same problem for global warming. We could build a algorithm that looks at the global warming problem, and we know that you could make a paint that we paint everything in the world and it just sucks the carbon out of the air. All of these take on the order of 200 logical qubits. So, we're not talking about giant machines, and we'll be able to solve first-world problems that we have no way of approaching today. I'll give one more, is transmission lines the United State, 15 percent of our energy output is lost by just sending the energy from one place to another. If we can make room temperature superconductors, again type of problem we can analyze on a quantum computer, we'd get that 15 percent back. That's a large amount of energy that we lose every year. Jason Howard: Just between the actual cost of generating the energy, obviously the extra work that goes directly, that gets put into trying to make it more efficient, to transfer it, you solve those problems and you kind of work backwards and there's kind of savings all the way up the chain until you know the actual energy creation process. Dave Wecker: Exactly. Jason Howard: Wow. These are like some real-world things that you're potentially solving here, this isn't just some hypothetical, "Hey, we think we could potentially try something crazy." Like they are actual problems that exist right now, then obviously there are some understanding behind, "Hey, once we crack this Quantum computing thing and get further with it, we're going to be able to tackle some pretty big things with it." Dave Wecker: So we view it just like you view a co-processor in Azure—the way we use specialized GPUs, we use FPGA's, we use various processors in Azure to solve specialized problems. Like in machine learning, for example, the Quantum computer is not very good at the things the classical machine is good at. But it is good at the types of things that we're describing. By making it a co-processor in Azure, you wind up getting the best of both. You can do super-computing like classical work in Azure, and then offload the work that is best done on a quantum computer to it and now you can solve definitely real-world problems as soon as the technology becomes available. Jason Howard: So, obviously knowing the problems that the world is facing, we could get into an all-day conversation about ideas you have, problems you want to tackle and things like that. But when it comes to doing your day to day job, what's your favorite part of it, what actually gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to work on these problems? Dave Wecker: That's easy. The group I work with is some of the best people in the world in all the various areas you need. Everything from quantum physics, to materials design, to refrigeration of cryogenic systems, to cryogenic classical computing, to on and on and on, and I get free training. I'm at the point now where if I wanted to, I could probably go back and easily get a PhD in various fields, because I've had the best people in the world hand me all the textbooks and say, "Here, read this, now read this, now do this." I get to work in the labs, I actually get to do these quantum experiments with the professionals that are there, I get to write software that analyzes the data, I get to work with building and growing materials that we use to make the devices. So, I'm like a kid in a candy store, I get to do everything you could think of from top to bottom and I get to go all over the world at the same time and work with, like I said, the best people I've ever met. Jason Howard: So, I want to highlight something because this definitely caught my attention as we've been talking here. So, you're not only working on the software side of things, you're creating the technology and the hardware being used to do this computing. So, you're building the platformsm on which you're then building the software on top of, to gain the outputs that you need to drive some of this technology? Dave Wecker: That's completely correct. So, my backgrounds is electrical engineering originally. I also have a business degree, and so I actually work on what makes sense as a company that Microsoft should be doing and how we should do this and how we plan over the next decade of bringing this to fruition. And it's also the type of thing where it's like a Bell Labs or a NASA project. I can't go and buy the wires that I need to go from 15 Milli-Kelvin to 4 Kelvin. These are extremely cold, 100 times colder than outer space, and you can't even make normal wiring work, so we have to develop our own. We have to do our own connectors. We have to do our own boards, our own chips, our own materials, top to bottom. So, it's something where we really have to build all of it before we can write the software that goes on top of it. Jason Howard: I thought it was bad trying to keep a computer cold to do basic overclocking. Dave Wecker: Exactly. It's also the case that we really don't have to wait for the hardware. We can simulate a quantum computer up to a certain size, beyond a certain size is impossible on a classical machine, but up to about 30 qubits, it's not very hard. So, we ship a Quantum Development Kit that we make available to the public, it's free, it's open source, it's available to the world. In that kit, you have a quantum simulator that let you write the algorithms and run them on the simulated quantum computer just like they would run on the real one. It would just have more qubits when we're done. So, we have a very large software development effort that's going on in parallel with all the hardware and the devices, so when the hardware shows up, the software will be ready for it. Jason Howard: Wow. Tyler. Tyler Roush: Yes. Jason Howard: Got to couple of questions for you. Tyler Roush: Absolutely, let's go. Jason Howard: Can you share a bit about what it's like to hire for the Quantum Team? Obviously, you have some pretty smart folks you're trying to bring in if they're writing their own software, creating their own hardware, obviously there's a lot of travel required to connect the dots with smart people all around the globe. This really is the cutting edge of the cutting edge. How is hiring for this Quantum Computing Team, what is it like? How do you source talent when you're talking about this level of expertise and knowledge that's required? Tyler Roush: Sure, it's challenging, but it's the right type of challenge that I like to go after. So, when we think about the Seattle market in terms of talent, there's Amazon, there's Microsoft, it's a growing ecosystem of companies that are in the area. So, finding software engineers is relatively frequent for us to be able to go out and find people in the area, who are already located here. Even the Bay Area being really close. My experience with the Quantum Team the last two years has been a lot of international travel as well. Most of these conferences, because it's such a small community, there's only a few that everyone will attend, and they're also located all over the world. So, Europe has been a location the last few years in trying to identify people. Then, also the types of people that are in the field right now, because it's just transitioning now into more of a product environment or heavily in academia. So, when you think about having a conversation about career with someone, that conversation looks a lot different if they're coming from Amazon or another industry company that we're familiar with versus someone who might be a professor at an academic institution. The considerations they have to make, if they have PhD students, the considerations they have to make, if they're on tenure track, and so just that career conversation has been a really interesting perspective to have to learn the last two years. Jason Howard: It sounds like there's a lot to be done between the theoretical side of things where people are exploring and trying to forge new ground and make a name for themselves. As opposed to jumping into what would be a more professional track, where you go and you're pouring your expertise into a company, actually doing some of the development there. How does the split work between doing it in a more academic environment versus a professional environment, like here at Microsoft? Tyler Roush: So, from the conversations that I've had in the past with candidates, it's different, and I think there's a little bit of education that usually happens in the conversations as well. So, when people think about an industry company, they usually think about very product-oriented goals, tight deadlines, and in research, there's a lot of autonomy that you have to be able to draw your own research, and essentially go after topics that you really find interesting. In Microsoft Research as well as the Quantum Computing Group, that's still the case. So, just having to really educate people about the experience of what it's like working at Microsoft. Some of the biggest advantages, as opposed to being a professor, is you don't have to raise money. When you are a professor, you have to go and find grants to your students all the time. That's a lot of work that professors don't tend to get associated with. But, for us in working for Microsoft, there's a lot more time that you could actually spend researching the topic that you want to research, whether some of the materials work that Dave was mentioning. That was actually what I was thinking of as well when he gave his answer there. Quantum materials development, I think, is one of the most interesting areas that we'll see in quantum computing in the future, just because there's this convergence of the physical,…

Full show notes at the publisher

Next Level Gaming Jun 27, 2018

Show notes

What's next for the future of gaming? To find out, Dona Sarkar chats with Joe Neate, Executive Producer of the hit pirate adventure, Sea of Thieves. Joe talks about major gaming trends that are influencing Sea of Thieves and the expansion of the game's rich storylines. Next, we explore the growing popularity of game streaming by chatting with Microsoft's Mixer team. Marketing director Jenn McCoy and engineer Chad Gibson discuss how the Mixer platform is sparking new experiences in gameplay and innovations in game design. Finally, we catch up with Windows Insiders at E3 and get their impressions on what's most exciting about the future of gaming. Episode Transcription JASON HOWARD: You're listening to the Windows Insider Podcast, Episode 16 -- Next-Level Gaming. I'm your host, Jason Howard. This episode, we'll be chatting about exciting trends hitting the gaming universe -- namely, gaming as a service, and interactive live streaming with Mixer. First up, Dona Sarkar, head of the Windows Insider Program, sits down with Joe Neate, executive producer at Rare. Rare is the game developer behind Sea of Thieves, the multi-player pirate adventure that has taken Xbox and Windows 10 by storm. Here's Dona and Joe. (Music.) (Sea of Thieves pirate audio clip.) The life of a pirate is fraught with danger. For you see, to journey out onto the waves is to take a step into the unknown. There are things that have lived there and rulled there far longer than us. Great terrors from the deep. Some I've seen with my own eye. DONA SARKAR: Hello, again, Insiders! I'm Dona Sarkar, head of the Windows Insider Program. And you just heard a snippet from one of the new content trailers for Sea of Thieves. Here to talk about Sea of Thieves and new trends in the gaming universe is a very special guest -- Joe, welcome to the show. Could you start by introducing yourself to our audience and sharing a few words about what you do? JOE NEATE: Yes. So I'm Joe Neate, and I'm the executive producer on Sea of Thieves. Ultimately, I've been involved in the project from the very start from when it was kind of just Post-Its on a whiteboard figuring out what was next for Rare, through to what it is now. Yeah, ultimately, responsible for vision and maintaining the vision and delivery and now running and operating, growing it as a service. DONA SARKAR: That's amazing. I want to ask you all about the latest Sea of Thieves news -- our Insiders definitely want to know. But first, can you please share what it's like to be the executive producer at a gam dev company like Rare, being the chief wrangler and all? JOE NEATE: It's an amazing responsibility. So to have that responsibility of coming up with what is next for a studio like Rare. You know, Rare has been in the gaming industry for 32 years now, which is pretty much since the games industry began, and they've done so many different games. And so to have that opportunity to sit down and look at the kind of emerging trends in the industry, to see where player tastes are going and figure out what you think is going to be the place you should take gaming and you should take players with you is an incredible feeling. Even just the different stages of game development from when you've just got the idea through to kind of pitching it to prototyping to getting into the real production of it, and then starting to build a community and bring fans in and then get people playing it and go through all of that, and then eventually get to launch and have an incredible launch. And now we're in this place where we've got this game out there, we've got this huge community, and now we just want to grow and build on top of it. I'm very privileged to have the job that I have and to get to do what I do every day. DONA SARKAR: That is amazing. So for the very few, small number of people in our audience who are not yet familiar with Sea of Thieves, can you give us a quick rundown of what the game is all about? JOE NEATE: Yeah. Absolutely. So when we set out at the start, we wanted to create what we called a "shared-world adventure game." The acronym for that is SWAG, which we're particularly happy with for a pirate game, but we love our acronyms at Microsoft, right? It's really about putting people into this shared-world, multi-player game where you're off on your own kind of pirate adventures, doing what you want to do in a pirate world from, you know, maybe you've grown up reading Treasure Island or you watch The Goonies or you love Pirates of the Caribbean, or anything like that. And whenever you see a set of sails on the horizon, or you encounter another pirate on an island, that's going to be someone else. And they're going to be on their own adventure doing their own things, too. And the collision of those adventures, the encounters you have with other players out there are going to play out in different and unexpected ways every time, just like if you were, you know, a pirate out adventuring on the open sea. And that's the world we wanted to create, where every time you play, the adventure is different, the encounters are different, and you're going to have these really memorable moments and stories that you want to tell your friends or you want to share and you want to stream it on Mixer or on Twitch, or you want to just go and post it on Twitter or on Reddit or wherever. And that's what we've created. We wanted to create a world where every adventure would be different, and we can put all these ingredients in. And as we grow and evolve it, we'll just keep doing that. We'll keep adding new ingredients for players to play with, leading to just richer and richer moments and stories. DONA SARKAR: That is amazing. One of the key ingredients, as you said, is multi-player. Now, gamers are pretty familiar with multi-player format since the good old days of Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, et cetera. And multi-player continues to be a big favorite among the gaming community. In our view, what is game-changing -- ha -- about Sea of Thieves? JOE NEATE: I think a lot of multi-player can be very competitive and directly competitive. You know, you listed Counter-Strike there, and if you were to go on Mixer or Twitch, you'd be looking at Fortnight and PUBG and all of those games out there now. What we've tried to create is a game where we call it the "fun and welcoming" multi-player experience. Where maybe you haven't really got into multi-player before because you're not an overly competitive player, you don't like that high kind of ceiling or barrier to entry, or maybe you've experienced toxicity or negativity in a multi-player environment before. We tried to create a game that encourages different online interactions and encounters between players. There's an emphasis on cooperation in crews, but also if you encounter other crews, you can have those moments, too. And, yes, there's room for competition in a pirate game, but we've tried to do it in a way that's tonally right, that doesn't encourage real competitive multi-player. And so we've just tried to create something that appeals to a wider group of people than perhaps are just playing multi-player now and scratches different kind of motivational itches, I guess. That's always been our goal. And, again, as we grow and evolve it, we want to keep doing that. We always want to encourage different player encounters, different stories, so that you can have really memorable multi-player moments in the right way from encountering other players. DONA SARKAR: That fits me exactly because I'm inherently not competitive, so that idea of like a collaborative multi-player sounds super interesting. So, can you break down this gaming-as-a-service thing that you guys are adopting and working on -- or a service-based game, as some people say? How is it different than a boxed game that releases an expansion pack every once in a while? JOE NEATE: We built our game form the ground up with the goal of basically updating and growing and adding content to it as far into the future as we can see, you know, as far as people will be playing and updating it. For us, that means there's always -- we launched just over two months ago, right? And had a fantastic launch, loads of people come in, like overwhelmingly large amounts of players coming in that far exceeded all of our expectations and numbers. Which led to the first couple of weeks, we were stabilizing and making sure everything was working as expected. You know, the amount of concurrent players and users we had exceeded any scale tests we'd done up to launch. But we want to really swiftly kind of get through that phase and get into the position where we're updating the game on a weekly basis. So we run quite a lot of automated testing internally when we're writing features and entering stuff into the game. We try and test it as we go to try and not build up loads of technical debt. And it means we have a decent degree of understanding when we're releasing features that the game's going to stay live, it's going to stay working. But we've always wanted to basically have an ability to react to our players, to update, to release new content, new cosmetics, new stuff, but also whenever you play the game, we always just want there to be new things to return to. So we've just released our first content update called The Hungering Deep. And this is where we've released this new AI threat, this megalodon into this world, so this giant shark that's now out there. Players have to kind of hunt it down, work together to take down this threat and earn these rewards around it. But beyond that, we then want to move into weekly events. So every week, we're going to be introducing something cool that's new to players, like there's a new goal with a new set of rewards, a new way the play, and really, it's about keeping players engaged with your game for as long as possible and as regularly as possible because players nowadays love to keep playing in that same world and in that same kind of social space with their friends, or friends they've made playing that game. And they love to embrace this and play for years. Right? We see this with a lot of games now. And so I think it's our responsibility to keep bringing new players to the Sea of Thieves, but also to give players that have played it as many reasons to return and to keep playing it because that's how player behavior has gone with whichever game it is that's out there now -- PUBG or Fortnight or League of Legends or World of Warcraft -- many different things. But we've set ourselves up to be able to keep delivering new things, to keep listening to what players are saying, and also change our plan. We want to be very reactive based on what feedback is coming in, what telemetry is telling us, and what other things players are liking the most, what things that they want to see more of. I think that kind of direct communication with your community in terms of listening to feedback, updating them to what you're doing is a super important part of the games as a service because if you just go dark or go quiet and don't talk to your players, don't let them know that you're listening, don't let them know what you're doing next, don't let them know that you're listening to their feedback and you're hearing it, they won't stay connected and they'll start mistrusting you and everything. We're trying to deliver a game that players love and that players want to keep playing for years, ultimately, but that's a big "ask" from us to our players. And so I think there's a big responsibility for us as a studio and as a development team to be very open and transparent, to let people know what we're doing, why we're doing it, what we're making decisions and that we're in this for the long haul and that we're very respectful of the feedback and opinions they have. That's been a big part of our strategy prior to launch with our Insider program that we have for Sea of Thieves, and then post launch as well, we're behaving very much the same. DONA SARKAR: So you're very much co-creating with your Insiders, the game, what they're looking for, et cetera, et cetera? JOE NEATE: Yes. DONA SARKAR: That's awesome. As you know, Windows Insider Program is all about getting users involved in the evolution of Windows, and I love hearing that Rare has its own Insider program where you do something similar, and your fans have had a heavy hand in this gaming-as-a-service thing that you guys are doing, which is fabulous. So, Sea of Thieves is gorgeous. I am bad at playing it, but I like to watch people play. So this is where Mixer is really useful for me, because I think it's beautiful and absorbing both in terms of visuals and the stories. And for people like me, how is the trend of live streaming games, such as on Mixer and such, factored into the design of Sea of Thieves? Because I recently learned that the number of people watching people play games has surpassed the number of people actually playing games. I find that fascinating and wonder how it affects your design plans. JOE NEATE: Yeah. So we conceived Sea of Thieves about four years ago now in terms of just coming up with the idea, coming up with what we want it to be. And before it was even a pirate game, and way before it was called Sea of Thieves, the original pitch slides was called Players Creating Stories Together. And we always envisioned a game that because you give players this shared world, because you kind of give them control over their own goals and you give them a bunch of emergent tools, and those encounters with other players, in a world where there's some cooperation, some competition, would lead to really interesting stories which are naturally going to be watchable and shareable. So it, inherently, was built into the game's design from the very start. And, you know, we were watching games like DayZ back in the day, like even a big science fiction space opera. There were really interesting stories emerging from them, whether it was on YouTube at the time because Twitch had only really started up and Mixer wasn't even a thing then. But we saw this avenue of -- this was the way that we thought games were going, that the more emergence and control that you let go of, and as game creators, it's quite hard to relinquish control, right, and hand it to our players, because you naturally want to create this crafted experience where everyone has this perfect story or moment or thing that you've designed, whereas we now hand control of the game to our players, and we give them some goals and there are things to go and achieve. But also the thing that we're most excited about and the thing that we love the most is whenever there's an unexpected story or a moment that we didn't predict from the different tools we've given players. And so it's been inherent in the design from the get go from two perspectives, from a cold, hard, business and strategic perspective, we made a really good choice because of the way that the games industry has taken off in that way over the last four years. But from a richness of watching, and like I say, every adventure being different, it kind of depends who you're watching and what they're up to and what players they encounter or what things happen to them in the world, that's what makes it so watchable, because you never know what's going to happen, right? Everyone's adventure is…

Full show notes at the publisher

Updates and Features and Engineers—Oh, My! May 30, 2018

Show notes

With the release of the Windows April 2018 Update, we chat with Microsoft engineers about three exciting features that Insiders voted as part of their top 10 favorites. Tom Alphin joins Jason Howard in the studio to talk about Timeline, a new, chronological way to keep track of all your stuff, including across multiple devices. Jake Cohen chats about Eye Control, an accessibility feature that Microsoft developed with the help of Steve Gleason, an NFL football player for the New Orleans Saints who is living with ALS. And Samuele Dassatti, an 18-year-old Windows Insider from Italy, shares his experience developing his app, Fluenty, using Fluent Design. Then, Dona Sarkar and Jason have a candid discussion about what it's really like to be a Microsoft engineer and evolve an operating system used by more than a billion users worldwide. Episode Transcription JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Howard, and this is Episode 15: Updates and Features and Engineers—Oh, My! This episode, we'll chat with Microsoft engineers about Timeline and Eye Control, as well as a Windows Insider about Fluent design. All three of these features were voted by insiders as part of the top ten features within this update. Later, Dona Sarkar and I will chat about what it's really like to evolve an operating system used by more than a billion users worldwide. JASON HOWARD: To talk about the new Timeline feature today, we have Tom Alphin. Welcome to the show. TOM ALPHIN: Thank you. JASON HOWARD: So could you please introduce yourself to the audience and tell them what you do here at Microsoft? TOM ALPHIN: Sure. So I'm Tom Alphin. I've been working at Microsoft for about 15, 16 years. Been on the Windows team for most of that, and most recently, as you introduced me, I've been working on the Timeline feature. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: And for those who may not be familiar, or may not have watched some of the webcasts we do, back in December of 2017, we did a little demo -- what was it? About a week early before the Timeline feature showed up Insider builds? TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: Actually had you on the air, got to do some demos -- they worked. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Yeah. JASON HOWARD: Which was awesome. (Laughter.) Doing live demos is always a risky proposition. So for those that are listening to the show and may not be familiar with the functionality, since it's just now like properly releasing to the public, can you give us a bit of a rundown on what Timeline is? TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Before talking about Timeline itself, it's worth speaking for a moment about what problem we think Timeline solves. We identified some years ago that people were struggling to find their stuff. It used to be that I knew where all my stuff was. It was on my one laptop on the hard drive. And now with a world of cloud services, OneDrive and Dropbox or whatever your favorite storage solution is, it's kind of hard to find stuff sometimes. Or it might even be on the C drive of a different laptop. And it's like, "Where's my stuff?" And so rather than just trying to make sure even puts all their stuff in one place, which of course we're investing in making OneDrive a great place for your stuff, we also recognized, you know, people are going to use a mix of things. So why don't we give them one view of all their stuff? And it's organized, actually, chronologically, not by physical storage location. And that was sort of the conceptual journey that we went through to get to the idea, "Hey, maybe we just give people a timeline of their stuff." And that's the gist of it. When we ended up, ultimately, shipping today is the ability for users to click on the task view button that's been part of Windows for a while now. Instead of just seeing what's running, you can actually go back in time. And you're seeing your chronological view of stuff you've done in the past. And from that chronological view, you can click on something because you want to get back to that document or that website, and it will just launch. And we've made it really easy. We're hoping people habituate to that as an alternate way to go back and find things they care about. JASON HOWARD: And it seems like the name was pretty easy to stumble upon, it kind of named itself. (Laughter.) TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. I mean, the name of the feature kind of just is the essence of the feature. Although, we use that name as a bit of a guiding principle. We were, like, when we started thinking about search results in the timeline experience, we could have organized the search results in any manner of ways. We could have organized them by application, we could have organized them by some sort of relevance algorithm. We chose, ultimately, to organize them chronologically because we're, like, "This is Timeline, we've got to keep things organized in a predictable, consistent way." And that bounding concept is chronology. So reverse chronology, center of Timeline. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And, I mean, if you've got files in five different locations and you're struggling to remember where it was to begin with, right? Because if you knew where it was, you could possibly just go and open the file and be done with it. Having remembered when the last time you worked on it, for some people, myself included here, it's probably a little bit easier to do it that way as opposed to, okay, which PC was this on or which, you know, cloud-based service did I upload this to at what point in time? And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, yeah, I worked on this on this other machine, it was two days ago, cool. Zip back in time, and there you go. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. So, basically, we're giving people one more way to find their stuff. You can already find it if you know where it is, go find it in File Explorer, the appropriate app. You can already find it in search if you know exactly what it's called. And now we've got a way you can find it if you know when it happened. JASON HOWARD: That's awesome. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: So it sounds like that was a bit of the core of why the team was excited to create the feature. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: So as an end user, right, it sounds like they have this third kind of pillar of a way to go and find files. But besides just finding something that they had been working on, right? Like, how does this change the game for users? Like, how does this improve their workflow and make lives easier for them? TOM ALPHIN: Well, we know that people use computers in a lot of different ways. Some people will do simple tasks, just get something done, move on. Other people use it for more entertainment or shopping or any of these other scenarios. And every one of those scenarios is going to have a different use case or use pattern. And for each one of them, they might use something like timeline differently. If you're using it for shopping, it's great to be able to go find that thing you were looking at a couple days ago because maybe you saw something you really liked, but you weren't quite ready to pull the trigger and buy it. You closed the Web browser, it's pretty hard to find it again. And now, you know, you just scroll back in Timeline, you can find it, get back to it, make a purchase decision. If you're doing a more complicated task, maybe you're working on writing a book or trying to research a trip or any of these tasks that take many days and many, many documents and objects it's going to take you a while to build out that state. And then you've got all the information at your fingertips, and then you have to switch to something else, getting back to that stuff is challenging and Timeline is one way we think people can do it more easily because it's all there. And since you're going back in time to two days ago when you were looking at the trip planning, you'll see in that two days ago area, other things that you're doing at the same time, it's very likely those are the same things you want to bring back as well. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. So instead of finding just the one thing, you may have forgotten about something else that's important and relevant that hadn't kind of clicked back into your memory. And, you know, when you go back and find this, it'll be sitting there waiting for you as well. And you're, like, "Oh, my goodness, I completely forgot about that." TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Exactly. JASON HOWARD: So it sounds like everybody's going to get this kind of "one history to rule them all" type, you know, experience, right? In a recent survey, Windows Insiders chose Timeline as one of their top ten features that is now going to be available in the April 2018 Update. Obviously, it's now out in public. From your perspective, are there any users, individually or in particular, that you can think about that are going to be super excited about this feature? TOM ALPHIN: I think the feature is valuable if you have exactly one Windows PC, but it's going to be significantly more popular amongst people that have either multiple PCs or multiple PCs and a phone where they're choosing to use Office or Edge because then you can actually pick up the activities across the device boundary. And that's really powerful because once you find that cool website on your phone, trying to get it off of your phone is a pain. And if I could just change nothing about how I use my phone, but when I sit down at my PC, I know with confidence if I go into my timeline it's going to show me the stuff that I was viewing on my phone earlier today or yesterday. That is a bit of a game-changer because I don't have to change how I use my phone. All I have to do is have confidence I can get back to that stuff easy in the future. JASON HOWARD: Well, even when you look at individual applications, right, you look at Edge, and it can port your favorites across different devices, right, correlated to your Microsoft account. And there are other Web browsers out there that will port your history and things like that so that, you know, you're on PC A, you search something, gets correlated. But, again, that's a separate profile that you have to have connected in the background, things like that. Rather than having two or three different profiles, or five different profiles across all these different applications, at least in this type of scenario where you have your one Microsoft Account that's connected to these multiple machines, you don't have to worry about remembering five accounts and five logins and tying all of that together. You get to kind of have this one simplified, seamless experience where, hey, this is the same login I have across multiple machines. And guess what? All of this just happens seamlessly in the background and the user experience seems like it's pretty smooth. TOM ALPHIN: That's right, yeah. Because your activities are roaming between your devices based on your Microsoft Account, so long as you use the same Microsoft Account on both of the devices, you'll have the same Timeline. Actually, that's a good segue to another capability that's tied up in Timeline is if I go from my first PC, where I do have a particular application installed, to a second PC where I don't have that application installed, we will actually help you when you click on that activity from that app, get that app installed on that second computer and we're really bridging the gap for the user so they can really get right back exactly into the app and content that they want on a device that maybe they don't use as often or maybe that device is new to their ecosystem. And we're just helping bridge the gap there. We really think this will help the multi-device user a ton, and again, that phone scenario is super cool. I can get back to that Word document I was reading on the go super easily on my PC, get back to that website. It's all really nicely integrated, and we think that it will continue to grow as people habituate to this and as developers embrace the platform that Timeline's built on, you'll see more and more high-quality activity cards in Timeline coming from the various apps you love. JASON HOWARD: So, obviously, this is available on Windows 10 across, you know, all the PCs that, obviously, have taken this newest update, right? So the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, you need to have that installed kind of as the baseline, and that's when the feature will show you. So you mentioned mobile OS's. What mobile platforms is this available on currently? TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. So if you have Edge on your iPhone or your Android device or your Office suite on those platforms, those will be sources that activities can get created back to appear on your PC. And it requires a new version of Edge which either is out or is about to be out for that to work properly, but Office is already working today. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Future plans, right? I don't want you to give away the secret sauce, right? I love asking this question because anybody I ever talk to and ask them, "Hey, what are you doing next?" You know, there's that mixture of, "I can talk about some of it, I can't talk about some of it." Any cats you want to let out of the bag? TOM ALPHIN: Well, I actually can talk about something, because we've already been talking about it for a while. At Build last year, almost exactly a year ago, because we're getting ready for the next Build Conference, we made it very clear to app developers that if you write these activities into the roam APIs, they will make it into your timeline on all your PCs. And that's a big deal. What we're excited about is that we really think these activities can showcase elsewhere in Windows. One example that is already part of the product as well is if you switch between devices and there's a strong signal that that activity you were working on PC A is something you'd want to resume on a second PC, we could offer a little notification for you, "Hey, would you like to keep working on this?" And we think that's the beginning of a whole host of ways to infuse the Windows operating system with exactly what you need next. And I can't speak to exactly what we're going to do with that, because we're still kind of inventing the future, right? But we know that these activities that the Microsoft first-party applications and our third-party partners are creating, that those activities are sort of at the center of a new type of productivity in Windows. JASON HOWARD: I know we've covered a lot here, but anything else? Any other tips or tricks that you want to share about Timeline? Obviously, people need to get the newest build and get it installed so they can use it. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. I mean, the main point that people encounter when they play with it for the first time is that we do want to make sure people's privacy are respected in this experience. So you will see when you use it for the first time, we do ask you if you'd like the activities from this PC to go back up to the cloud so they can get to your other devices. We give you a couple days of Timeline, and then below that, there's an experience built into Timeline to actually opt in and move those activities back up to the cloud. So that's something people will discover when they play with it for the first time a little bit. Another thing is I really encourage people to play with the search capability as well because I kind of find the combination of even an imperfect search term, I happen to love LEGO pr…

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What's Up with Machine Learning? Apr 25, 2018

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Everyone's favorite new buzzword is 'machine learning' (or 'ML') but what exactly is ML and how is it already transforming everyday life and business? We chat with Microsoft engineers about machine learning and the significance of Windows ML, a new AI platform for developers available through the upcoming Windows 10 update. We cover how ML is changing the field of app development and how developers can get started with Windows ML. Finally, a Windows Insider gives us a tour under the hood of his app and discusses how machine learning is baked into the app's evolution. Episode transcription JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Howard, and you're listening to Episode 14, What's Up with Machine Learning? In this episode we chat about ML, its future influence on app development, and the impact of Microsoft's recent Windows machine learning announcement. Here in the studios with our first guests is Dona Sarkar DONA SARKAR: Hi. I'm Dona Sarkar, Chief Ninja Cat and head of the Windows Insider Program I'm here today in the studio with some special guests from Microsoft to talk all about everyone's favorite new buzzword, machine learning. I would love for our guests to introduce themselves. Clint, would you like to go first? CLINT RUTKAS: Hi. I'm Clint Rutkas. I am a Windows developer community champion. So if you guys have APIs you want in the system, please talk to me. DONA SARKAR: Exactly. You'll see him on Twitter a lot talking about the Windows SDK. So for all of your Windows SDK needs, tweet @ClintRutkas. And then Lucas. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Hi. I'm Lucas Brodzinski. I'm the program manager lead of the Windows AI platform team. DONA SARKAR: That is awesome. What does that mean? LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Well, we're teaching the robots how to think. You know, we've added capabilities to Windows for people to do machine learning inference on the edge. So we're introducing the intelligent edge to Windows. DONA SARKAR: That is really cool. Thank you for joining us. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Thank you for having me. CLINT RUTKAS: I actually think it's even more than that. Think about we're adding machine learning, the ability for every Windows device, not just desktop, device, to be able to do machine learning. So I think the big question is like, what is machine learning and why do we care? DONA SARKAR: That's exactly the very first question I have for both of you, which is let's go all the way back, back, back. What is machine learning and why is it different than AI? LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Cool, totally. So the way to think about AI and machine learning is machine learning is a subset of AI. The whole concept of AI is you're trying to get a computer to act intelligently, kind of like a human would. So you can get a computer to do a function like a human would and get a response from the computer as a human would. Machine learning is a specific technique to try and do that. So for instance, if I'm having a conversation with you guys in real life, like I am right now, you know, I can read your facial expressions and I can kind of change my approach to the conversation based on the facial expressions you guys are giving me. So that's my intelligence. And we would love to teach computers to be able to react to human interaction in that way. One potential technique to go about doing that is emotion detection, which there are machine learning models to do. However, machine learning is this technique towards building out this larger intelligence, which is AI. CLINT RUTKAS: So I think the question is, why would you use machine learning? Let's say for whatever reason you want to build out a vegetable detector. Let's say I wanted to detect a carrot versus broccoli versus cauliflower. So what is a carrot? So would I do it based on color? So I have an if-statement that says, okay, well, if it's shaped kind of like a triangle, if it's orange and it's roughly this long in the photo, that's a carrot. Well, there's purple carrots. DONA SARKAR: Right. CLINT RUTKAS: So now I have to add in an additional if-statement there. And then, okay, well, now, what's the difference between a carrot and broccoli? That's a bit more easy. But what's the difference between broccoli and cauliflower? If you ask a kid that doesn't know, has never seen them, they might go like this is a baby version of that. So all those things, once you start having to factor in more and more and more, that code becomes extremely unwieldy, and then that's when machine learning comes in, because now you can start giving -- start training your model, this is exactly what a carrot is. Here are all the different examples, all the different images we have of carrots, from different angles, different viewpoints, different coloring, different variants. Same thing with broccoli and cauliflower. And then magically now we can start getting high confidences with that model, and all I had to do was call a couple lines of code. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: You hit it really on the nail there. There are some problems that what we face as developers, you know, our human intuition can solve that problem very, very easily and quickly. However, when we sit down to write code to fix that problem, it gets a little hard. So, you know, to write the code to detect the difference between two different types of apples can get pretty challenging. An example, the cool thinking about machine learning is, like you said, it creates this model that abstracts that problem away from the developer, so the developer can feed a model on input, an image of an apple. The model does a lot of computational work to figure out the small nuance differences between different species of apples based on all the training dataset that went into making that model, and the developer just gets an answer of what type of apple it is. DONA SARKAR: So just to cut you both off for a second rudely, what is "the model?" You guys are saying, train the model, you know, give the developer the model. What is that? CLINT RUTKAS: Okay, so I think maybe a good thing we should probably talk about machine learning is maybe how it works and what are the big components. So you have an engine, the inference engine, you have I'll say the training system, and then you have the model. The model is actually what is kind of evaluated. So if you said, is this an apple, you give the system the model of what is an apple. Is that a good way to think about it? LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Yeah, the best way to think about it is, given this large set of data, you can train on that data, which basically means you apply a lot of math to it, and you come up with an algorithm that notices patterns, that can solve functions. And all of that is contained within this model. So the model is the thing that describes the data that you fed it during training. DONA SARKAR: I see, okay. CLINT RUTKAS: And then you have the inference engine, and the reason why it's called an inference engine is because we're not 100 percent confident. So we're inferring is this thing an apple. It may be an apple, we may be 99 percent sure it's an apple, but we're not 100 percent sure. So it's not a definitive answer, but you have to have a confidence that, yes, if it's, you know, let's say above 80 percent, we're pretty positive this is an apple. Speech recognition is a great example of this where you may say, turn on the lights. It's going to give you a fairly high confidence rating if the model properly interpreted your natural language, but it's never 100 percent sure. DONA SARKAR: That's right. And do you feel like right now machine learning has already taking over our lives a little bit, that it's already kind of infiltrated tools and services that we use on a day-to-day? Do you feel that that is true? And if so, what are some examples that normal people will understand? LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Yeah, totally. So, you know, the most recent example is if you look at the Windows photos app, you can actually go into the photos app and type in what you want to search for. So you can type in "dog" into the search field, and suddenly, all of your photo albums will be searched for what the computer thinks is a dog inside the picture. And as a user, you're presented with all the pictures that have a dog in it. And that's using machine learning to do image classification and find specific things and images, in this case being a dog. DONA SARKAR: That's pretty awesome. CLINT RUTKAS: Yeah, think about all the speech recognition that is in the world now. So if you have let's say an Amazon Echo Dot or a Harman Kardon Cortana device, if you talk to it, that's machine learning. You have machine learning built directly into Windows. If you search as well, that's all machine learning. If you go to a search engine, that's machine learning. There's tons of areas in our lives that we have it, we just don't realize what's it's called yet. DONA SARKAR: So we think of it more like computing rather than machine learning? CLINT RUTKAS: Yeah. I mean, machine learning I view it as it's much more of a topic programmers care about, because it either benefits or hurts us the most when it comes to programming what we need to program. As an end user you just want your answer. It's like going to a restaurant. You don't care how the food is made, as long as it's made sanitary, but you get the food and you're happy. You don't care if it's one person making it or 20 people making it, you just get your yummy food. DONA SARKAR: Okay. So that phrase, machine learning, is quite buzzy these days. Everyone thinks they're working on machine learning or want to work on machine learning. And I think it was the most used term in job descriptions last year. That and AI. So why do you think people, who may not be technical, are so excited about this phrase? What do you think is the potential like going forward? We know it's been used a lot, but how can it be used to transform all these other somewhat old school industries, like think hotel, transportation, manufacturing, et cetera? LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Sure. So, you know, I think we're living in this time where you really have two massive things coming together to kind of fuel all this. One of it is data. There's a lot of data out in the world. And the key thing for machine learning is you need a lot of data to be able to rationalize over. The other part of it is having access to a lot of compute. The process of training a machine learning model can be quite rigorous from a computation perspective. And we're at a point where these two technologies as a for instance having the data and having the compute power have come together. And when you think about sort of all the cool end user scenarios that are possible, I mean, wouldn't it be great if we could have systems that, based on sort of the weather forecast, could predict what kind of hotel availability may be available in a specific city? That's just one example of how you can make sense of all this data that's around us in a way that could benefit a user. CLINT RUTKAS: So think outside just the user, think about how this could benefit humanity. So with machine learning think about growing crops where you can directly use machine learning and models to determine is this a good area for that crop, is something bad happening, should we create targeted pesticide usage versus just blanketing everything. Or disaster recovery potentially. Like there's so many different areas where you could do things smarter and faster with machine learning. Manufacturing is another great example. We showed this at Windows Developer Day. Imagine you're building out a circuit board, and for whatever reason something hiccoughs and a single transistor is skipped. With machine learning you can quickly look at it and say, oh, this is missing. And it's the same model then that would detect if a capacitor was missing, for the most part. I'm looking at Lukas to verify. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. CLINT RUTKAS: You can use that same thing, and then now rather than have to do a recall of, you know, 100,000 units, you caught it before it even shipped out. DONA SARKAR: That's right. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Yeah, and, you know, to build on that example, there are cases where in order to make sense of the data that's available today requires a lot of specialized expertise in an area. DONA SARKAR: That's right. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: And sometimes, that expertise is not always available. With machine learning what you can do is offer the computer to make sense of all the data that a human expert would have accumulated over years, and make some predictions that, you know, the hope of machine learning is to create a model that is accurate enough to sort of mimic what a human would have done in that situation. And that's the really cool part about it, too, because you're potentially unlocking a lot of scenarios where we just don't have enough human experts to do something, and the machine could help in those cases. DONA SARKAR: That news article that just came out, like the farmers in India who are figuring out how to grow crops more efficiently using machine learning, because they definitely don't have the computational expertise to look at petabytes of data on crop growing, so they've been using machine learning to do that, I thought that was such a cool story. CLINT RUTKAS: Yeah. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Yeah, totally. DONA SARKAR: That applies in like every country in the world, agriculture as a thing, so yeah. Okay, so recently, Microsoft, we made a big announcement about the next Windows 10 update and machine learning. Do you mind sharing with our listeners what the announcement was? CLINT RUTKAS: So in Windows 10 Version 1803, Windows Machine Learning is built in. So that means every system that is running version 18.03 will have machine learning built-in. And it smartly takes over. If you're on a GPU, it will leverage the GPU. If your device only has a CPU, it will only leverage the CPU. As a programmer you also have some toggle so you can pick and choose. This also runs on basically any system -- correct me if I'm wrong here, Lucas -- that runs 18.03, it will just work. LUCAS BRODZINSKI: Yeah, and the cool thing about it is what we've announced that's going to ship in our next major update is a preview that solves a bunch of problems for developers. So historically, when a developer has approached machine learning problems, there was a couple of barriers of entry that made the process a little hard. So first, as a developer you would have to figure out, hey, I have this model file that came from somewhere. And that somewhere could have been one of a handful of different training frameworks. And each one of them had its own sort of file format associated with it. And the very first task you would have to do as a developer is to ask, well, given this model, I need the corresponding evaluation engine that ships with my software to be available to evaluate this model. With Windows ML we've taken that pain point away, because every single version of Windows has Windows ML in it and is able to evaluate that model. The other problem was having these handful of different training frameworks and different formats meant that as a developer you had this giant format issue of, hey, there's like, you know, six or plus different formats. So, Windows ML has the ability to take an Onyx as a model an input format. Onyx is something that we're working with in…

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Lifelong Learning to Grow Your Career + Side Hustle Mar 28, 2018

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In this episode, we delve into lifelong learning – the key to growing your superpowers, whether you're interested in taking the next step in your career or feeding your side hustle. We gathered expert tips and advice on how to keep learning and how to decide what new skills will most benefit you. We also get the scoop on how to get the most out of learning conferences and what it takes to earn a certification from Microsoft. Listen to this episode for a chance to win a free three-month subscription to LinkedIn Learning! One lucky Windows Insider will be selected to access the entire LinkedIn Learning library of 10,000 courses. To enter, tweet about the new talents and knowledge you've gained through LinkedIn Learning, and we'll randomly select one entrant to win. So, let us know on Twitter how you've used LinkedIn Learning to up your game. Then, tag your Tweet with #alwaysbelearning and #windowsinsider to be entered into the drawing. Entries must be received by Wednesday, April 18. Episode transcript JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast. You're listening to Episode 13. I'm your host, Jason Howard. Today, we're talking lifelong learning, that is, how to continue growing your superpowers, whether you're interested in taking the next step in your career, feeding your side hustle, or an amazing new hobby. Plus, we'll share our Windows Insiders can access exclusive free courses on LinkedIn Learning. Our first guest is "the" ultimate lifelong learner. She took a break from her busy job at LinkedIn to share pro tips for acquiring at least three new skills every year. SAVANNAH BARRY: I'm Savannah Barry, and I am a marketing manager at LinkedIn, and I work primarily on LinkedIn Learning. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Welcome to the studio. SAVANNAH BARRY: Thank you. Thank you for having me. JASON HOWARD: So, we've heard from our colleagues at LinkedIn that you are "the" ultimate lifelong learner and are really savvy in terms of being able to work on new skills to grow your career. Would you mind sharing with everybody your method for doing this? SAVANNAH BARRY: Yeah, totally. So, I'm just a curious person in general. If there is a problem that I come across, I'm very eager to learn how to fix it. I have a hard time, like, just kind of stepping back and saying, "Like, okay, like, someone else handle this problem." Which I think has driven me to be naturally a very curious learner, and kind of have a desire to learn a lot. So when I first joined, I actually joined the Lynda.com team prior to LinkedIn acquiring Lynda.com, and I worked on our enterprise marketing team there. And a great example about what I did there was we needed some e-mails to be coded, and we had to basically rely on an engineering team to build them. And I was, like, "This is not efficient, I cannot get stuff done in the timely manner that I would like it to be." So I basically taught myself how to code e-mails, which I had no idea how to do. But I had a need. I had a problem I needed to overcome, I had some campaigns I wanted to ship, and yeah, I spent months after work learning HTML, taking courses on Lynda, LinkedIn Learning, reading books -- just like basically picking my fiancée's brain, like, "Please teach me how to do this." And at the end of the day, you know, I think it, in general, has made me a better marketer. That's a great example of just like one very tactical thing I did. But I reserve an hour out of my week, every single week, to learn. Truly, I have a calendar invite on Friday, it actually will be after this podcast, where I will basically just reserve at least an hour just to sit down and read something that's like relatable to my career, watch an online course, listen to a podcast -- really, anything that can kind of help me achieve my goals, which I think that has been on my calendar as long as I can remember, so that's kind of how I can carve out time. JASON HOWARD: Well, it sounds like you have a bit of a system -- almost like you've planned out time to go and learn new things. Can you describe some of the, like, the mindset and the process you have behind that? SAVANNAH BARRY: Yeah. I think just knowing that you need to make the time, like, kind of just clearing things out of your brain, off of your desk. I actually go to like a different place. I'll go to a coffee shop, I'll go to a different room in my house, just kind of find a place where I feel a little bit inspired, just to really sit down and focus on the task at hand. So, for example, right now, I'm learning UX design. So I got a bunch of books. And this all stemmed because I was using an app and I was, like, getting really frustrated at it. And I was, like, "Why am I getting so frustrated at this app?" And there's such a psychology behind how we, like, interact with things. And I was very keen to understand. So that is currently what I'm doing. And I have a book in my car that I will be diving into when I get done here, and probably go into a coffee shop or something and read. JASON HOWARD: So one of the things that I was kind of told on the side is that you have a vision board, right? And you list personal and professional skills -- SAVANNAH BARRY: Yes. JASON HOWARD: -- that you want to learn. What prompted that? Where did that come from? I don't have a whiteboard at home, so -- I mean, you know, you might inspire me to go out to Staples or something and go get a whiteboard this afternoon. SAVANNAH BARRY: Yes. I personally think that everyone needs vision boards. I try to make my family and friends make vision boards with me. It hasn't really caught on with them as much as it's caught on with me. (Laughter.) But this year, I actually did it on a whiteboard, and I like drew out what I wanted to do. So I draw, like, pictures and goals and just what I want my year to look like. And that always consists of three professional and three personal things I want to learn. So where did it start? I think I was like in college and one of my psychology classes, like, talking about vision boards or something -- I don't know. I don't even remember where -- exactly where it started, but I've been doing it since I was in college. I used to make my roommates in college do it with me and cut out pictures from magazines and glue them on paper. We'd go get the hot pink, big poster boards -- JASON HOWARD: Oh, goodness, yeah. SAVANNAH BARRY: -- and like glue stuff on there. Yeah, I did that. JASON HOWARD: It's almost like a high school collage. SAVANNAH BARRY: Yeah. But then when I joined LinkedIn, we have these things called "in days" where we have basically one day out of a month where we focus on doing something outside of your job. So every January, it's like a vision "in day." So they actually encourage you to make mood boards. Like, okay, perfect. (Laughter.) So started doing it at work and now I work at home, so now I have a little bit of a different vision board area, but yeah, it's truly pictures, words, things that just inspire me and kind of keep me motivated throughout the day, throughout the year, and just a way to kind of keep myself accountable for the goals I set early on in the year and just really make sure that those are staying top of mind for me throughout the day. JASON HOWARD: Was this something that you did individually? Did your team come together and you kind of like group -- encouraged each other? Like, what was that process like? SAVANNAH BARRY: Yeah, it was a little bit individual, but I definitely tried to source feedback from, like, my manager, my peers, like, here's kind of what I'm doing, do you have any ideas on, like, professional goals that I should maybe focus on for next year? This year, one of my learning goals is SEO and SEM, which I haven't really gotten my feet wet with yet, but my manager was basically, like, "Hey, here's something that would be pretty interesting I think for you to learn." And so that's another thing that I'll be focusing on. JASON HOWARD: I'm assuming SEO being search engine optimization? SAVANNAH BARRY: Yes. Yes. Yes. JASON HOWARD: Okay. SAVANNAH BARRY: Thank you for clarifying. (Laughter.) JASON HOWARD: No, hey, I mean, you know, this is my Microsoft, we use acronyms like they're going out of style. (Laughter.) So can you tell me a little bit about, like, your decision-making process? You said in this circumstance, you know, your manager, you know, you sought some feedback to help you guide down that path, right? And, obviously, there's things that you come up with on your own that you want to learn. So how do you decide what's going to be the best use of your time? Because, I mean, that's kind of the limiting or deciding factor here is you have to make the time to do it, so where does that decision process come from? SAVANNAH BARRY: Yeah, you know, I really try to focus on things that I think will help me become the professional that I want to be, and really the person that I want to be. I think about, "Where do I want to be in five years, and like, what skills will help me get there?" So I do a lot of research. I read a lot of blogs, I do a lot of peer research, asking around, like, people who are in jobs that maybe I aspire to be in, like, what are some skills that they think helped shape their career, take them to the next level? And I usually start with a pretty long list. I'll, like, throughout the year, I'll have, like, a running Word doc and I'll just put stuff in there, and then I can reevaluate and say, "Okay, here are the things that actually feel tactical for the year." The UX one was definitely not on my list, it just like -- my, like, obsession with, like, how I'm interacting with things, I was, like, I need to. This is a learning thing that I need to do, and I do think it'll make me a better marketer at the end of the day. So that was an off-the-cuff add to the list. JASON HOWARD: Wait, so when you look at the concept of lifelong learning, on the surface, it seems like this great goal, everybody should be doing it, but given, you know, we mentioned time a minute ago, some of the listeners are going to sit back and say, "Hey, you know what? I'm crazy busy, I have laundry to do, I've got work, I've got kids, I've got family, I've got to feed the dog." Right? You know, I had to get up at 6:00 in the morning, it feels like I don't get to sit down until 10:00, 11:00 at night. And it was never my time for me to invest in myself. So how do you stay motivated to make that time? How do you drive yourself to make sure that you put it on the list of things that you absolutely have to do? SAVANNAH BARRY: Totally. I think that everyone is very busy, and I think that's, like, in general, a big blocker to learning for people. I've just found ways that it organically works in my life. So I listen to podcasts a lot. I'll find relevant podcasts that are aligned to something that I'm currently learning. And maybe that week I can only listen to a podcast while I'm walking my dog. Like, that's all I can do. And that's okay. Every action you take and every step that you take I think is part of your learning journey, and not everyone has an hour a week to carve out for learning, and that's okay. If it's bi-weekly, if it's once a month doing two hours a day, I think that, in general, if you need your support of your friends and family and managers, like, it's fun to make it a little bit more of a collaborative experience. Like, "Hey, guys, I want to make time for learning, you guys should, too." And I think that also helps create a little bit more accountability, and also maybe frees up some time for you, if everyone around you knows that it's a priority. JASON HOWARD: So how has learning helped you professionally? SAVANNAH BARRY: Well, in general, I think -- I've gotten a couple promotions within my role just specifically because I've been able to go above and beyond of what my normal job consists of. I think it -- in general, it's made me a great cross-functional partner. I mean, a lot of the work that I do in marketing, and I'm sure a lot of other marketers out there, is very cross-functional. You're working with a ton of different people, a ton of different teams, and I think my desire to understand HTML, desire to understand SQL, desire to, like, understand some of these things that maybe I'm not using a ton, but other people are, has really helped me to be a more empathetic partner, to be a more constructive feedback-giver, it's just really helped me a lot in, like, developing really strong relationships. So I feel really lucky that I actually work on a learning product, it's kind of crazy, it's truly the perfect job, I love it. But, yeah, I think it's just that curiosity and that desire to always want to be doing more and really just -- that curious mind. And I think it has helped me in my career, and it's allowed me to start doing like more of a different marketing role. And I was, like, "Ooh! This marketing role looks interesting." And so I started learning and developing and asking people who did that job, like, "What does your day-to-day look like?" And I was able to move into that role with not having the total skillset that I needed to have, but I think my managers felt confident that I knew what I was doing, and I could handle it. And if I couldn't handle it, I would learn how to do it. (Laughter.) JASON HOWARD: So one important question that I want other ask you is: How do you inspire somebody else to learn? Through the conversation that we've had, it seems a big piece of it is you have to have some of this natural desire, right? If you're not the curious type, it sounds like it could be much more difficult to kind of get personally inspired. It's almost like you need to look externally for some of that motivation. You mentioned mentoring. That's one of the things that's really important here at Microsoft is the concept of having a mentor, finding somebody who's in a space, hopefully outside of what you're doing, because at least within this company, there's a lot of leaning on your team, leaning on your peers, like partner teams, and you kind of naturally build up some of that learning along the way as you work with other people, but having somebody outside of the circle of which you normally focus on, they can give you a much different perspective. You know, obviously, this is a bit work focused, but they can give you a much different perspective than the way that you are accustomed to looking at things. SAVANNAH BARRY: I 100 percent agree. I think something that's been really valuable for me is having those mentors who can help me look at what is outside of my narrow range of focus. And as a mentor, that's something that I strive to do, too, is say, "Hey, like, what do you want to do? What do you want to learn? What do you want to be, you know, five year -- two years, next month? What do you want to be doing day to day?" And if that doesn't align with what you're doing now, then how can we really set you up for success to be where you want to be? What are those skills you need to learn to get that promotion? What are those skills you need to make a horizontal move? And I think learning can be tied to your professional goals. And I think so often we lose sight of what those goals are. I mean, everyone is busy. Work is crazy, personal lives are crazy, your kids are running all over the hous…

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Closing the Digital Divide Feb 28, 2018

Show notes

What does the world stand to lose without equal access to technology and the internet? Microsoft's Dona Sarkar and Leonardo Ortiz discuss the Microsoft Airband Initiative and why the future of jobs and education make closing the digital divide more important than ever. Then, Windows Insider MVP Andre DaCosta from Jamaica, shares his thoughts on the power of connectivity, plus a few tips for optimizing Windows while having limited access to the internet. Episode transcript JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast. You're listening to Episode 12. I'm your host, Jason Howard. Today, we're exploring the digital divide and access to the Internet, what does the world stand to lose if some people have access to technology and the Internet and other people don't; what can be done about the digital divide; and why should all tech companies care. Those questions and more coming up in this episode. First up, Dona Sarkar, head of the Windows Insider Program, chats with Leonardo Ortiz of Microsoft Philanthropies about how the digital divide profoundly affects communities, education, and employment. Here are Leonardo and Dona. LEONARDO ORTIZ: My name is Leonardo Ortiz. I've been in Microsoft for 18 years now, and I currently work for the Microsoft Philanthropies group where I oversee our global execution. DONA SARKAR: Which is, you know, kind of amazing LEONARDO ORTIZ: It's definitely fun, you know, and it has to do with figuring out how we land our programs all over the world. DONA SARKAR: That's right. So as a society we're in the middle of an exciting technological transformation, but there's billions of people around the world, and millions right here in the U.S. who don't have access to tech and the Internet. Why is this issue of digital divide so critical, and why is Microsoft Philanthropies so committed to solving it. LEONARDO ORTIZ: As you say, you know, the world is changing at a very rapid pace. Everything is becoming more digital, which means the way in which we work, the way in which we learn, the interaction with government, with commerce. And as the world becomes more digital, when you have more than half of the population in the world with no access to technology or connectivity, which on itself shouldn't matter that much but for the fact that that connectivity allows you to access opportunities, content, knowledge, services, then these people are lagging behind even in a more rapid pace. They are underserved already, and the gap gets just widening in a more dramatic way. And they're not being able to advance and access technology by market means, which means that companies like Microsoft, we really need to step up and do some extra work in addition to what we normally do in our business model to ensure that technology advances but that we left no one behind, to the extent possible. DONA SARKAR: You said over 50 percent of the world has no connectivity. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Exactly. DONA SARKAR: That's enormous. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Not even a feature phone, nothing. DONA SARKAR: Nothing. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Nothing. DONA SARKAR: So more than 50 percent of the world is never connected. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Exactly. DONA SARKAR: That's pretty extraordinary. And I know you guys have been doing a lot of work over the past few years to ensure that people in communities have access to the opportunities that tech provides. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been doing. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Yes. So our main goal is to bridge that digital divide, to ensure that people have access to technology, but most important to ensure that people is ready for the future. In a world in which we're going to see more artificial intelligence, more robotics, the way of working is going to evolve rapidly. We need to make sure, and I'm going to start with young people, that all the future generations that will come to the workforce are future ready, that they're learning not only how to use technology but how to create technology, which is now going to become not just something that is useful for the software industry, but for everyone, regardless of the discipline that people pursue. So that's going to more generalized in the future, and we need to make sure that that happens. Right now, we're seeing displacement starting to happen, job displacement, people whose jobs are going away because of automation, and especially in areas like the manufacturing industry or retail industry. And we need to work with society, with academia, with nonprofit sector to ensure that we're identifying those people, that we're reskilling those individuals, and that we're matching them to the existing jobs that are out there, because people may just think jobs are going away, but you know what, every time that technology evolves and that industry evolves, jobs go away but other new jobs come up. DONA SARKAR: That's right. LEONARDO ORTIZ: But we just need to make sure that people are trained rapidly enough to be able to plug into the existing jobs. So we're working on those two fronts, and a third area of work is ensuring that the nonprofit sector, which is one that doesn't have a lot of budget and that solely focuses on addressing some of the most difficult societal issues in the world, that they are also adopting technology so that they themselves become more effective, more productive, and do more good around the globe. DONA SARKAR: The best way to empower them is by being able to scale with tech. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Exactly. DONA SARKAR: I love that. What you just said about jobs go away but new jobs emerge, and we have to really take the responsibility to train the next generation to be able to do those jobs, it reminds me a lot of that article that Brad Smith recently wrote about the retirement of the horse - LEONARDO ORTIZ: Oh yes. DONA SARKAR: -- with the introduction of the car, and all of the new jobs that came along with the introduction of the car, different jobs, completely different. LEONARDO ORTIZ: That's a great example. A great stat from that story is that in the year 1900, New York City used to have 100,000 horses. DONA SARKAR: Wow. LEONARDO ORTIZ: That was what made possible everything in New York, right, people moving from one place to another, products being moved. And then 20 years later, those horses were gone. Imagine the amount of people that were driving the coaches or the veterinarians or people feeding the horses or cleaning after the horses. Those jobs went away, but now you needed chauffeurs for cars and drivers, mechanics, and a breadth of other roles that existed. Now, can the person that was cleaning the barn after the horse, was that individual skilled to now go and repair a car? No. DONA SARKAR: No. LEONARDO ORTIZ: But something needed to happen. And that happens in any industrial revolution, and that happened all over the world. The countries that have the ability or the societies that have the ability to learn faster and adapt faster are the ones who emerge to the top. DONA SARKAR: So true, and history has dictated that this will happen over and over again. LEONARDO ORTIZ: It's happening, yeah. DONA SARKAR: It's happening. So speaking of happening, can you share a success story that represents what people or communities can achieve once they have access to technology? LEONARDO ORTIZ: We see a lot of different stories, all inspiring. Especially, when I talk to people, to journalists and other people around the globe, and we talk about all these 52 percent of population in the world that has no access to technology, some of those communities don't even have running water or electricity. They barely have food. They have no education. So people ask us, why would they care about having technology when they're not even covering these needs, right, their essential needs. And the answer is that technology helps leapfrog certain stages of development. And technology helps accelerate the ability for communities to access things, content, different services, that will allow people to improve their quality of life. A great example of this is these three kids from Uganda, Aaron, Joshua, and Josiah. A couple of years ago, they participated in a competition that we have in Microsoft called Imagine Cup, you probably have heard of it, which is inspiring kids in high schools and colleges to learn how to develop software. And then by doing that, they enter this competition in which they create solutions for problems that they see in their communities, whether it is related to health or education or the environment or something else. These kids are from Uganda, and they realized that the rate of mortality of mothers and newborns was very high in rural areas, these places that had no running water, on electricity, nor clinics. And the mortality rate was high because there wasn't enough health, not even physicians but nurses or other people, practitioners or facilities to even monitor the pregnancy. And where you had community clinics of some sort, they didn't have the equipment, like no way to do an ultrasound, right? So with a mobile device, a mobile phone, and coding, they invented a very low-cost device, and software, to actually replace the sonogram or the ultrasound machine at a super-low cost. Basically, it's the cost of the device, just the phone. And they started deploying it in rural Uganda. And they tried it, they created this thing no one had ever created something like it, definitely not the industry, because it's a very cheap solution. And in the communities in which they piloted, the mortality rate started going down very quickly. They have now been in contact with local governments from a couple of African countries, or national governments from African countries that are now interested in expanding the use of this solution to be able to provide a better quality of health to expecting mothers in rural Africa. That's a story I love. DONA SARKAR: I love that story. LEONARDO ORTIZ: And like that we see a lot of other examples of great things being done. DONA SARKAR: I love that. That's such impact, because it affects not just the mothers but their entire family, it affects huge communities. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Oh, it's a multiplying effect. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Yeah, that's why organizations say that if you work with women, the multiplying effect in society is huge, because in many cases, especially in developing countries, women are heads of family. So you impact the whole family immediately. DONA SARKAR: I think that's fascinating. What you said about leapfrogging is really powerful, because we have a Windows Insider named Caleb teaching Code.org tutorials. He used the Minecraft ones that your team produced to teach basic tech education to these kids outside Nairobi, in Kenya. And these are kids who have never seen a computer, who have never been in a connected area. So he goes to town with a car, some PCs, Code.org tutorials, sets up this hub, and actually gets them hands-on time with these tutorials. And what's fascinating is that the kids take to it immediately, they learn it right away. LEONARDO ORTIZ: They do. DONA SARKAR: And parents will often come and say, "What are you wasting your time with, this has no place in our life, we need you to be helping on the farm," you know, this kind of thing. So Caleb told us a story that his best student is a ten-year old named Bernice. And one day, Bernice's mom comes to school and says, "Why is she wasting her time with this? This has no room on our farm. We need her to work on the farm." And Caleb said, "She is learning things that will enable her to bypass farming forever." And to Eunice that's like a shocking stat, right, she doesn't know that that means. So what Caleb did was he pulled in the parents and the teachers into learning to code so they also have the opportunity to leapfrog their lives, and they're able to actually help their kids with technology, because when kids have questions, you go to the adult in your life. And Caleb knows he's not going to be around in their village forever, so he's systematically changing people's lives, not just kids, but the adults who love them, who care about them. LEONARDO ORTIZ: This is a great example, and it speaks to what we're really getting when learning how to code, which is it's not the coding, it's you're learning critical thinking, problem-solving. DONA SARKAR: That's right. LEONARDO ORTIZ: And in the long term we in Microsoft and many other players in the industry and in academia are convinced that computer science education is fundamental and should be compulsory in the same way in which we all learn biology and chemistry and physics. Not because we will become part of the health industry or go and work for a chemical company, but because, for example, for you to know how your body works you needed to learn fundamentals of biology. In an increasingly digital world, if we want to understand how things work in society, we need to learn computer science. DONA SARKAR: Oh, absolutely. I think everyone has to learn computer science. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Even if you're not going to become an engineer. So that's -- DONA SARKAR: Essentially if. And I tell everyone it's like reading and writing. Just because you can read and write doesn't make you an author. You don't need to become an author necessarily. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Exactly. DONA SARKAR: But it's fundamental to learn. LEONARDO ORTIZ: Exactly. DONA SARKAR: So in order for people to actually learn computer science, we need connectivity. And like you're saying, over 50 percent of the world's population isn't online. And in the U.S. 23 million people in the rural parts of the U.S. don't have access to high-speed Internet or broadband. LEONARDO ORTIZ: You know what's crazy about that? Even in some of these communities we have data centers, and other companies have data centers. Can you imagine you go outside of a data center there's no connectivity for the community, the neighboring families? DONA SARKAR: That's crazy. LEONARDO ORTIZ: So that's a big problem. It's a global problem, of course. We have been as Microsoft engaged in trying to address this problem for a few years now. We have around 18 different projects around the globe. We're currently heavily investing in India, which is a vast country, also with a huge gap in connectivity. But you would imagine that people would say developed countries don't have this problem. DONA SARKAR: Oh my. LEONARDO ORTIZ: But you then go and look at the stats, and, you know, 24 million people in the United States -- DONA SARKAR: That's not a small number. LEONARDO ORTIZ: -- that live in rural areas don't have access. Actually, the number is greater when you add the people in urban areas. It actually goes up 32 million people in the United States, 23 of which are in rural areas, which is where the problem is more pronounced. And that's an issue. Why? Think about the education model in the United States, for example, right now, requires students of all grades to access resources and do homework online. DONA SARKAR: That's right. LEONARDO ORTIZ: That's generalized. It's like all districts have components that are online. More and more and more as a parent you need to engage online. The kids come home, and they need to do homework online, and they check for answers of their math homework online to see, okay, did I solve this problem right, and then online you have the whole construction of how you did it. If you don't have access, if you're an 11-year-old or a 12-year-old in middle school, you had no way of knowing…

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