Windows 11: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ryan Purvis  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face and how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, they will help you to get to grips with the digital workspace inner workings.

Heather Bicknell  0:32  
Well, I thought it might be fun with the Microsoft event coming up this week, on the future of windows to talk a little bit about our maybe our predictions, our suspicions. And then just you know, for a bit, I don't think we have that, well, maybe we'll see how long we can go but and then maybe merge that together with our post event analysis once we actually find out what the news is gonna be fun.

Ryan Purvis  1:03  
Yeah, it's a good idea. It's funny. It's only we talked about it, listen to podcast and someone talks about Windows 11. I think about it. And I always forget to send your text message. So I'm glad you remembered.

Heather Bicknell  1:18  
Is that what you think's going to happen? windows 11?

Ryan Purvis  1:21  
Yeah, I think I mean, a lot of people have made mention that, you know, one point windows marketer that never make another windows. But I think the reality of the world, as independent, me included, is that Windows 10 has been pretty much a failure. And that's probably a strong word for some people. But I think it's a pretty poor operating system. So I think that in order to, to reestablish themselves, I had to do a Nic a new version. And hopefully it's an improvement, but it doesn't sound like it's going to be it is ironic that a lot of the things people are talking about is becoming more and more Mac like rounded corners and, and that sort of thing. But I think the is not rewriting the base, or redoing the base, then I think it's lipstick on a pig. Yeah, it

Heather Bicknell  2:25  
certainly seems like they're teasing, the windows 11 idea so strongly that it would be surprising if it were anything else. There's that video they put out. That was 11 minutes long. They're having the event at 11am. Eastern, I saw that there's that end of life date now for Windows 10. So all of those things together certainly do seem to point to new operating system. But yeah, people are surprised because they did brand windows 10 as the last version of Windows as Windows as a service evergreen. This is it. So we're just gonna update this. But you know, as you mentioned, there's been a lot of frustration with aspects of Windows 10. I think a lot of it for an IT side has been the the frequency of the updates and just kind of keeping up with, you know, rolling those updates in kind of looking at, Did it break anything? And having to sort of make that more of a continual management process versus like, you know, a longer having more time in between. Yeah, did you did you? I mean, how is it managing windows 10? better for you?

Ryan Purvis  3:56  
Well, I mean, so the last big organization I worked in was still on Windows seven. And I remember speaking to the CIO at the time, and asking him, Do you think we'll ever go windows 10? And he kind of gave me the look like, I don't actually ever think we will. But he said, I don't know. But that's kind of was code for I don't think we ever will. Because I think the reality is for for big corporates, most of the users are using some sort of application. And most of those applications are browser based. So as long as you go stable, obviously could supply the browser here unless you need to have a Windows device. Now, that's not to say you don't need something that can provide the office tools. And I think the office tools, those are great tools. But like I say, I think I think the problem has always been windows 10. And I know that in conversations with sort of my peers that time in different different banks and that they wish Huge frustration around the and they were running under Windows 10 around the performance or the lack thereof, of their applications on Windows 10, you know, issues with Excel, not even using any additives to excel there were problems. So I guess the thing that I think about when you talk about manageability is, you know, what are you are you are you managing the, the ability of us to do work in some kind of complicated way, and then you need to support them. Or you just try to manage to build a platform that you put in and Windows tend not to have direct exposure, but is just an idle stuff, I heard, it was almost more difficult to use Windows 10, than to not use Windows 10. So you'll be stuck with Windows seven, for example, which I know we did. It was a much more stable platform. So we can actually deal with the complicated stuff we had to deal with. Whereas the other guys that were suffering to Windows 10, were suffering with the basics. And then that was always a concern for us. The other thing that I found interesting, and I remember sitting at a, someone presented their approach the sort of ring approaches, but I found different between windows seven, and Windows 10. Because Microsoft almost removed it from their own testing people to the actual to their customers. So you could be an early adopter, you could be, you know, depending on ringer in and you're getting exposed to things a lot sooner, but a lot sooner. stuff, which was also unstable. If you weren't careful, if it kicked you updates too often, you almost got to build up a ring. without really realizing that you were You're in for more pain. And I think that also created a lot of frustration. I know my frustration. And I think this is this is also due to high reconsideration. Tried to accommodate all the different devices, etc. Later, a lot of driver problems and a lot of you know, simple problems became big problems, which to be honest, having fun in the medical world, I found the medical to be a lot simpler. And that's what I think it needs to get to. So my my hope and my dream, I guess if it weren't for the windows world is that they they cut a lot of the complexity away. And then they get into their assembler OBS does what it's supposed to do. That's more stable, that doesn't require a lot of hand holding and management. That's what I'm hoping. But we'll see what comes out.

Heather Bicknell  7:42  
We'll see. Yeah, oh, you're talking about the all of the sort of manageability aspects of Windows 10. I mean, I know there are still organizations today transforming from Windows seven to Windows 10, or a lot of organizations that have made that change just within the last year or two. So I expect the enterprise will lag on Windows, you know, Windows 11, it's going to be probably many, many years later before we see mass adoption of that in the enterprise.

Ryan Purvis  8:20  
Well, we all know about Windows seven is I know a few corporates that paid the fees to keep windows extended

Heather Bicknell  8:27  
support.

Ryan Purvis  8:29  
Yeah, because I just didn't want to move to Windows 10. And I think windows 10 does count for so much blood, I don't think we have a conversation with the jet from from agile, you know, the, the Linux operating system as a gig, the Windows operating system as like 21 gigs. But in essence that you pretty much the same thing. I can kind of put an oversimplification, but it's probably not. You know, I was I was just installed a Linux distribution on this Windows laptop that I had. It was a gig. And I can do pretty much everything I could do on a Windows device with Libre Office. And it runs like a dream, you know, none of the blue screens I was having when stuff stopped. So there is definitely a lot of question marks. I think the competitive landscape, I think there's there are other options. Now. You can go the Chromebook, you can go with a Mac, you can go with a Linux distribution. And I wonder how many corporates with the road, the right sort of design, we look at something else and use this as an opportunity to look at something else.

Heather Bicknell  9:45  
I mean, I'm sure it's looking at the future to have cloud computing, thinking everything and when all of your applications are SAS and everything's a web app that people use for productivity. You know, the browser is what you need, what that browser runs on becomes less significant. So perhaps a future proofing.

Ryan Purvis  10:12  
And you look at any look at some strategic decisions that marshals made, and that's it. So so they had their Edge browser, which was built one way. And then all of a sudden, they redid it as a chromium based browser, very much like most most browsers, brave chromium, Chrome, etc, or chromium based. And one of the things that Google pushes down quite heavily on is progressive web apps, which, for me, is something that I've even spoke to your big boss about a few times. It's because a lot of applications and again, comes back to though it's been simplified, you can probably get away with a very simple app that's built as a web pack website, web application as a pw a, that a user could use offline, and then synchronizes back, when it comes back on using html5. That takes away so much pain for whatever packaging team, app development team, etc, because they don't have to go ballistic client anymore, they don't have to go. And you're not going to, you're not going to escape necessarily. Some heavy applications like Visual Studio, that's the heavy application and still three gigs or whatever it is. But they both Visual Studio code using electron, both teams using electron. There's all JavaScript frameworks that allow for multi platform delivery. So it's, again, it comes down to you know, the operating system is becoming less of a DOM denominator. And what it should be about, which is what we always talk about the end user experience and the ability to get work done. Without without friction.

Heather Bicknell  11:55  
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's the number one. And it's, you know, people are using so many devices now for productivity. And a lot of that is, again, enabled by web apps. And, you know, you can move from your laptop, to your tablet to your phone and around again, so it's less about the Windows desktop,

Ryan Purvis  12:26  
I think, yeah, I think your point about the sort of cloud services or the Windows desktop as a service, I think there's still a place for that. And I would, I would rather use Windows through a remote desktop section session into a cloud desktop, then use it on a laptop directly. That might sound counterintuitive, but I believe that if it's in Windows virtual desktop, what do they call it as a module? Is it Azure, it's Azure,

Heather Bicknell  12:54  
virtual desktop aivd.

Ryan Purvis  12:57  
If it's in there, now, I believe that it's at a much more stable world, it's got to be put together properly. And all those those hardware variables that cause so much pain are basic cut out. that don't make sense. I think the other thing which I've been playing with this, because we didn't have it, on the 14th of July, on robotic robotic process automation, a lot of that stuff is going to play its part where as you say, you you're on your phone, you do something, then you go to your desktop to do something, and you go to your to tablets, do something. And those things, only to integrate together to probably deliver something else, which removes your manual steps. So what I was doing, for example, this week, I've been working on getting some data, I have an API, I need that to spit out an Excel spreadsheet. But I want it to be done in such a way that the people that need it can ask a team's channel bot to say, send us a spreadsheet. So they're not gonna pull the latest spreadsheet and go dump it to a OneDrive folder, and then get it whenever they need it. Okay, look, it does take a few hours to run so they can get probably the next morning. But the point is, they're enabled and they can pick it up on whatever platform they're on, because teams on most platforms now that i think that's that's true to what you're saying in the sense of the multi channel environment now. any device anytime, anywhere.

Heather Bicknell  14:26  
Yeah, so looking forward to watching that announcement. I did. And I know I mentioned we had a webinar scheduled at the same time, which we planned you know, prior to Microsoft announcing the event, but we moved ours up an hour. So I will be watching watching the Windows Event live. So looking forward to that this week, and all the news that will pour out. After that. We can come back to it and add to add what really happened and we'll see If they change anything surprising,

Ryan Purvis  15:03  
when I think they've got to the point is that Windows is quite a big revenue spinner for them. It's not as big as Azure is now. But it is the way that the worship stays in enterprise. So hopefully they've listened to some of the pain that people have had. And they've improved on that too interesting to see. Because it comes out quite soon. And that has already been leaked out into into China, so that it can be part of the change around. Yeah, that's almost the standard way to release a product, not as you did have a little bit of glitter first, to get a bit of indication, and then you do the official.

Heather Bicknell  15:49  
I hadn't seen that. I saw some. Yeah, just some, some images. I didn't know there was

Ryan Purvis  15:59  
supposedly there was a Windows. Let me let me see if I can find the article. There was a Windows 11 leak. Which leak China? China could be. Yeah, so that so it's six days ago, it's even on the verge. And it was first published on the Chinese side called Baidu. So I mean, it's they've they've censored the the stock menu, so that I was up in the middle of the screen is 11 minute videos, links, I can compete, we can share the link. And you can always revert it back. So it looks like Windows 10, to be honest, with a level of facelift. So

Heather Bicknell  16:52  
yeah, I'd seen that the centered Start Menu, but the ability to easily revert that if you don't want to change.

Ryan Purvis  17:03  
The other thing that they've never really gone. Clear is the store the Windows Store, because you have a Windows Store, which is like your public stuff. And then I know as a company with an application store as well. Another as mentioned, and hirth have an Android store as well inside there to run Android apps. But I haven't really understood how that's gonna work. So let me just see as well. Lots of questions. Not many answered at this point. Yeah. Would you get the came out now would you upgrade?

Heather Bicknell  17:40  
Well, I only use Windows at work. So if I yeah, I mean, if I if I had the option to be in the first ring, or whatnot of test systems. For that, I probably would just to see what it's all about. I mean, I haven't had the best luck with Windows 10. So I'm not really, you know, I've already, I guess experienced the pain from a stability perspective on 10. So I'd almost rather try 11, then go through another windows 10 update. Actually, I was going to edit last night and a Windows Update had, I couldn't launch my editing software. So I had to do some had to kind of troubleshoot that and look into the issue which was related to a Windows Update. So experienced that in just a few really a few hours ago. So Scylla keenly aware of that pain.

Ryan Purvis  18:52  
Yeah, you know, it's, it's, I mean, what I found frustrating about it is that the, you know, you like I leave my laptop running overnight and stuff, it's running, usually. And you come in the next morning, and your machines just restarted and it's what's either all foods restarted, depending on your setting, though. And it's not a planned update for you. It's just happened. And that that's something that, you know, you can dig around, you can turn that off. That's like the worst user experience you could have. Because imagine you had, you know, Excel spreadsheets, open PowerPoints, whatever it is that you haven't saved, we saved it, but for some reason it didn't save the latest changes or corrupted it because it restarted while you're busy working on you know that and it's there's no sort of accountability on that, which I always find frustrating not to say that Apple would do anything either. But it just, you know, I don't I don't have that problem of wearable devices. So they stay on all the time. Until you restart them. Even if it's an update, they tell you that I'm Data now, but they'll schedule it with you. But it's just that it's handled so well. That it's expectation that everyone should be the same at that minimum level. And I just hope this upgrade from from Microsoft is, is really an upgrade, and not just lipstick on a pig. We call it the episode lipstick on a pig. And

Heather Bicknell  20:25  
we'll see ya. And I'll be more optimistic than that, you know, just hold out to see what happens with the announcement. But yeah, I think that if it's a business version of Windows 10, you can change that auto upgrade, but I think the consumer versions, I don't think you can turn that off, right, you just and auto updates for you, when it does,

Ryan Purvis  20:51  
you can do something in the registry, but you gotta go, and you've got to know what to change. In fact, I think Steve Gibson wrote, eternity, that doesn't, the other thing you can do is when you license your windows, you can go on the long upgrade paths, which basically means you don't get new features, or you get security updates. But how effective that is, I think it's almost less is more for me with Windows, they need to do less things well, and do more things better. And

Heather Bicknell  21:34  
hopefully, the next one does is a good one. So

Ryan Purvis  21:40  
you have a very positive, I mean, very negative

Heather Bicknell  21:42  
now. You know, it's so, you know, for its its flaws, it's still the most widely used operating system. And one that I know, our audience will, you know, perhaps a lot of them will be involved in rolling out in some capacity or using in their work environment. So and you know, I'll probably have to use it. So I guess, I want to be optimistic as a user, that'll be a good experience.

Ryan Purvis  22:15  
I'm in the same boat as you unfortunately, I'm one of the two users that uses Mac in the whole business. So everyone else uses windows, so I have no choice but to run a Windows device. So I know all the you know if anything goes wrong, I know exactly how it feels. So unfortunately, I'm not I'm not completely divorced from it. But that's and that's why I hope it's been level of listening to the customer, as opposed to doing what they wanted. And that's probably the problem is, is he having a support, he says, in another way, Mike's got some great stuff. I mean, I think Azure works really well. There's some really good things inside of Azure that we use all the time which are great and very impressive. The problem that Photoshop is so disjointed that you can have such a good experience on one side and in such a poor experience on another side. And there's almost no one pulling that all together to give the ultimate you know, seamless experience and maybe that's because they try to do too much as i said we're looking at the sort of Apple world they already do what they do you know, they haven't launched a new product really in a long time. I mean everything is its same product over and over again, I mean probably going to see in the future some sort of eyewear or some other wearable that will actually be the next product but it'll just fit into all the other products they won't be a completely you know the whole cloud cloud business to top right they focus on the consumer slash enterprise hardware etc for the customer going back to Microsoft Azure which is which is really you know, a strong offering and they got the windows will do the Xbox will the gods say there's another business line of code takeover known it is but all those things are very different businesses that are either at the hardware business with surface one of those should be complementary they should all tie together but doesn't feel like anyone's actually tied them together. Which observation at least

Heather Bicknell  24:29  
maybe we can tie up on this subject but I don't know if you saw the the next Mac OS version that will be coming out we'll have some features that you that you only get if you have the hardware with an M one chip. Had you seen them?

Ryan Purvis  24:50  
No. hadn't seen that. Let me see.

Heather Bicknell  24:54  
That's That's all I know about it. I don't know if it's kind of been revealed yet. What features Won't be supported for other hardware. But I thought that kind of piqued my interest because I do have Apple devices without that chip. And I was like, oh, how long until I get aged out? Because of that? That's kind of a new thing.

Ryan Purvis  25:18  
Yeah, look, I think that's gonna be quick. So I don't ality machines all but, you know, when it when the budget allows, I would I would be trading in a movie on purely because I would expect that all the new stuff I would even even the iPads and stuff, I think those would also switch to in one of some sort. But it's, again, it sets it up for a whole lot of new things that are useful, as opposed to, you know, not useful. Which is a really great way of saying it, but you know, every time there's been a major update, you've ended up with more power, more stuff you could do. And being able to do it, whereas and with with the investment show, but you can still operate I mean, I know guys are bad ones are being very badly and very slowly. But they you know, for reading books and what they are browsing the web, it still works. It's only what you want to do when you want to do the more interesting stuff like using handle for like writing on my iPad, and it appears on my screen, I'm on my Mac, you need to do just

Heather Bicknell  26:36  
that. Yeah, thankfully, I none of my devices are new. So I don't, I'm not I'm sure there are people out there who, you know, bought newer hardware not too long ago, and we'll have sort of a harder time with you know, being aged out as fast that

Ryan Purvis  27:00  
you know, I was really wanting to buy a Mac last year. And thankfully, I remember the one chipping away didn't know waited the way that we just got a good deal here. So I did it. But the things that I'm looking at now, which which is why I think it's going to be useful to get the get the newest hardware, I mean, my iPad Pro give another two years before probably replace that. Although, you know, having now used as a sidecar screen, you know, so now I had my Mac and I've had my appendix, I've worked between the two, I would probably go for a bigger screen next time, because it actually worked really well. But I will see the new chip, they want to be in the base for more machine learning more voice recognition, more sort of those sort of applications, which is, which is really useful stuff is about edge computing. So being able to interact with your device to write emails using dictation. I mean, you could do that now is not great. But I would think with with better chips that they got. And some of the stuff they've been saying here are they voice and video analysis that will get better, which will open the door to more smart things. So back to the integration of services, controlling the house be able to work more efficiently. So that's that's interesting stuff. But I think that's very early days. I mean, even you know, we're talking probably two years from now you'll see real benefit to that. The other thing, which I found interesting, when you mentioned the new is, is it bringing shortcuts to the Mac OS. Now that's that's pretty, that's probably been rd on the tablet, and iPhone. But that's pretty useful stuff. I mean, be able to write shortcuts that you know automate stuff in your desktop. I think that's also quite a quite a big thing. And that doesn't exist in that in the market, the market will that already Gopal automate, and how to make desktop but those are very techie kind of tools. To write a simple shortcut to move a file from here to here, every time it happens, that almost is too complicated. It's almost too simple to use the tools for but it's too complicated actually delivering the tools, if that makes sense.

Heather Bicknell  29:24  
Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you know, one of Apple's strengths is that they make some complex things easier for the masses, and maybe they're not as customizable or they have a limitation that, you know, if you did it in Windows, you wouldn't have but they're easier to adopt.

Ryan Purvis  29:46  
Yeah, so it's gonna be interesting to watch how this all developers over the next couple of months.

Heather Bicknell  29:50  
Yeah, well, we can touch base later this week after the announcement and see how how right we were wrong. We were

Ryan Purvis  30:00  
I don't know if you saw the article I sent you this morning by nuance that Microsoft's finally completed the deal to buy nuance, nuances as the holding company for dragon speak. So this is another one where there's obviously natural language processing is a big nut to crack at the moment if you can, if you can figure out how to turn people's voice into actual data, that drives a whole lot of things. And no one's really specialized in the healthcare space. So doctors do any dictation when they're doing surgeries or patient activities. But they're also called the healthcare cloud. So the article kind of mentioned that Marshall was looking at buying them for two reasons. One was the natural language AI. And the other one is for what's in that healthcare cloud, to strengthen the healthcare offering.

Heather Bicknell  30:57  
That's what are the two things related the NLP and the health cloud? Are they? Yeah, so

Ryan Purvis  31:02  
So what some new ones have been doing for years is they both dragon speak to dragon speakers, that's probably the de facto dictation software. So if you want to, if you want to talk him or her make it right to dragon speed was the one. And I don't know the space that well. But I remember, you know, sort of talking to various people who use dictation a lot. And I'm not one of them mentioned anyone else. The dragon speaker they've tried so many others dragon speak was the gut was the one to go with. It was expensive. But it did the job. And what to what the article is saying is that the macros be taught by them since April, and they finally got the antitrust approval to finish the deal. And it's cost them I was $19 billion of $16 billion. And that's just, you know, 4 billion below what they paid for LinkedIn. directly the second biggest acquisition, I think. And that's, as I said, it's AI engine that does NLP, which having done colonnade, LP based solutions, that's a very difficult space to I mean, text you can get away with, because, you know, it's not the spoken word spoken word with accents. And all that sort of stuff is very difficult. And your key to breaking that problem down is context. You need to know what the frame when this person says the phrase, what context are they in when they say it, because it can mean a lot of different things. So the thinking this article is that they bought it for the age, but they also bought it for the healthcare cloud, the new ones has been building, because that gives you context, which which really gives them not only a stronger play in the healthcare space, but it gives them a blueprint to take it to other spaces where you know, something like insurance, for example, which ties in quite closely with health care in some respects. But it's also one of those it's very jargon based and very acronym heavy. And the other one, which I would see would be in the transport logistics, aviation shipping. In rail, again, where there's this, there's lots of jargon and lots of context is key. Interesting acquisition. Yeah. takes it off the menu for other for other big companies. So, you know, your likes of Amazon or Apple even. Although, I mean, there's probably many very many vendors building various solutions in the space that are good. But maybe not as recognized as Australian and nuance.

Heather Bicknell  33:49  
Yeah, maybe not as enterprise ready, because I think as you as you point out, a lot of them, you know, at least in my experience are decent with, you know, smart speakers and stuff are decent with sort of simple phrases. But I imagine if you're, yeah, as you mentioned, in healthcare and insurance in an industry where there's jargon or just terms that, you know, the systems might not be as good as picking up on, you know, that matters a lot in, you know, the enterprise environment. So, and we really haven't seen a ton of penetration of this kind of technology yet in the enterprise. It's been IoT has sort of been discussed. But yeah.

Ryan Purvis  34:39  
So we were doing some stuff taught us many years ago, probably talking 2012 2013 with using voice biometrics to identify call calling from a different user. And I've just done something now with With a health provider, where they're using it to validate that the claimant calling in is you, they say that, so you can set it up and whatever. And you do see in the banks where it's a way of authorizing the jewelry that you are, you say you are. But that's pretty much where it's, it's limited at this point. And it's really saying, you know, you know, my name is Ryan, and this is my password is the phrase and that gets you in, there's no, there's no nothing else to it. The next step is that you basically phone in to say, I'm calling in to do an authorization for a tooth implant, I'd like to have it done at center hospital by so and so Doctor, can you confirm authorization, please. And any any conditions, you know, just just a problem of sentence or sentence. And then in theory, what would happen is the the mechanism would process all of their contract would know who you are, by identifying you buy a biometric. And it also tells you what you've available to get from your plan, all that sort of processing that, that right now requires, you know, if you call an agent or to a person who's an advisor, and they would have to go through your plan and do the sort of matching all that kind of stuff, it all takes time. And it takes humans to to do and in theory, you could get away with doing it this other way, using the technology, and you probably cut away a good 20% year course that, of course, was a, you know, high volume. The other problem is that if you try and call in right now, there's only so many advisors you can talk to. So your time spent on the call is wasted, because you're not be waiting for your interview turn. Whereas if you could just call in, say your bloom and have this thing process and respond to you could do the call in two minutes, put the phone down to get an email, you know, 15 minutes later with, here's your information, his authorization code, his exclusions, inclusions, blardy, blardy blar. From an end user experience point of view, that'd be awesome. Because, you know, nothing, nothing makes me cringe more. And I've had to do you know, my daughter twice this last two weeks, I myself want to waste like four hours trying to get hold of someone. And it's not because they're not good or not professional, actually very good. It's just as a guy who said to me, you know, the money, he puts the phone down his phone rings again, because there's one other person in the queue waiting to talk to him. And then he doesn't even get a chance. If he has to take a break. Yes, that book is breaking 40 minutes before he wants his break. Because the causes get queued on him. So I think that caffeine and LP voice thing is a huge problem to solve and a very good one because it'll save so much time and have a great return. kind of gone on a different tangent, but

Heather Bicknell  37:49  
also Microsoft related and, you know, some new news to watch, but awesome. Well, I probably should tie up here for now. And then we can come back and talk about the windows announcement. Once that happens. Sounds good. Sounds good. So yeah, we're here, once again to talk about our impressions of the windows 11 launch. Now that we've already talked through it, you know, we can meet even more. We've got it together, got it down. So you know, I guess the the major impression, the the big change for Windows 11 seem to be a lot of the look and feel elements. So things like centering the taskbar, rounded corners, transparent overlays, a lot of design elements. So what was your impression of the new sort of face of Windows Ryan?

Ryan Purvis  38:56  
Yeah, so I think I think they went the Mac route, as much as as much as they could without directly copying. It doesn't look very pretty, it doesn't look very Mac esque, in the sense of application image now where you got the right hand side notification panel that comes over me that's been in Windows 10. But it was really first in the Mac ecosystem that they've tried to clean up the look and feel to have curved corners. Makes it look like the Mac thing. And I think largely This is driven by them trying to generate good emotions about the platform because the Windows platform for a long time and cannot been until recently a very big Windows user now I can hardly use Windows. There was a lot of frustration flying around. And largely because it just it was just a clunky heavy over complicated in some cases platform. To use, whereas the Mac ecosystem is a lot simpler because they control a lot more. And I guess there's lots you can unpack around that. That one of the things that I thought was a good move with Batavia besides curved corners, and that kind of stuff is moving away from a twice the release cycle of big, big updates to a once a year, which thing makes more sense. It also means they're getting provide a much more stable product, as opposed to rushing out, you know, the sort of every couple of months releases that basic break everything for everyone and frustrates everyone, as well. So

Heather Bicknell  40:40  
yeah, so that manageability element is something we talked about in our our predictions going into it, or at least, like what were the historic problems with Windows 10 that they could potentially address with Windows 11. And it does seem like they made a few nods to performance and stability and security in the announcement. So one of those items was a 40% reduction in update size. And also updates running in the background. So no longer coming in and having your machine has started without restarted, to install the updates and kind of lumped you in a bad spot there. They also said things to be faster, just across the board. So yeah, those two things, performance.

Ryan Purvis  41:38  
It's funny, you mentioned that point, I was actually trying to do something quickly yesterday. And I had my Windows laptop, downstairs food. So I was gonna hold this low and quickly, it'll just do something. And of course, when I booted it up, we went straight into an update cycle. And the time it took me to go upstairs, get my Mac, come downstairs do I want to do and come and put it back upstairs. The Windows Update cycle finished. Another thought, how do you? How do you allow the stuff out in the world? This is ridiculous. And I am planning to move away move away from that to oversee the silent background downloads that are installing in the background. Because that's how it should be you know, for most users, I don't care which what the update is, I just so make sure they got a secure platform they can use

Heather Bicknell  42:25  
it Yeah, I think that's definitely the way to go as well. I mean, you kind of have to strike a balance between knowing that if you give users choice on updates, that they tend to delay them, I would say most consumers do, because you don't want that interruption. But then, of course, if people delay their updates forever, they get, you know, security vulnerabilities and performance degrades. And it's just not a good experience. So I understand they're kind of in a pickle, they're, you know, finding the right way to push updates out, especially for the consumer versions without being disruptive.

Ryan Purvis  43:13  
You know, and I think there was, there was another piece of this, which I thought was also a good move is that is they didn't continue or they haven't seen to be continued with the Windows Store or level of Microsoft Store per se, and almost outsource that to Amazon to cheaper deliver not only good store experience, but also the Emperor the Android apps will run on Windows 11. That was a good mood because they've never really been in a bind on occasion if you've ever installed an app from the store, but they've never really done it to the level that Apple does it. And the only other store that really competes with Apple is the Amazon store. I mean, I don't use Android at all. So I don't know what the Google Play stores like. But I use Amazon. And that's a pretty good store. So

Heather Bicknell  44:02  
yeah, I was gonna ask, even though I know you're an iPhone user, let's say you were an Android user, or you're counseling one, they're just thinking about it. And you would what phone apps do you envision you'd want to use, you know, on your desktop?

Ryan Purvis  44:21  
Well, it's funny, I've experienced that anyway. With the with the M one chip. You can now run iPad apps and Android and iPhone apps on your desktop. And I can honestly say there isn't one that I would use. Because usually if the if the app exists for a phone, you'd want to work on a website. Because the real benefit of having a native app isn't just going to be doing something that's native on the phone. It's going to have a lot of this is my opinion at least it's going to have the gap. As coordinates, it's going to have all your GPS capabilities, at least, it's going to have the gyro capabilities, all that sort of stuff. Other than that, it's going to be some sort of information management app. You know, even even do my workouts, for example. That's just information in order task management, just the same, the service or website would be fine. And I'd probably look more at a pw a app. You know, the next year mobile app being put on the on device. Then if I think about some of the applications that I do use that are criminate are multi platform multi-platform, in the sense that they have a tablet, they have a phone and they have a desktop app. It's they are designed that way. So by journaling tool, which is called day one, my writing app, which is Scrivener that does have specific apps for each platform. Maybe over time, it becomes easier for developers just to build one app and have it delivered in different places. But I still think you have to have some level of control on what's going to build the UI. So I still think you have to build the UI. So I think in a push like a like an urgent situation, like you break your phone and you can't see the screen, then you might want to deploy an Android app to your laptop to do something. Or as an interim, like Scrivener, for example, that's a writing app, you know, potentially you could use the mobile version of that on your on your laptop while you wait for them to build a native one. I personally don't see the value, but but someone must have done some research that said that there was value in that.

Heather Bicknell  46:43  
I too, am curious about sort of how the UI and resizing will work for that I saw. I was reading The Verge live reporting that was happening during the windows 11 event. And one of the reporters called out that, you know, this is something you can do on Chrome OS. But the experience isn't great, because a lot of the apps to start, you know, made to run on desktop sets. It's not. They're not optimized for it. It's you can't really read things. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis  47:17  
Well, that's what I mean, if you wanted to do it, you just go to emulate you run an emulator nude and deploy that and you'll just see how bad it is. Because the app or if it's, if it's an app for your phone, it's designed for it's designed for use with your thumbs. Which is a completely different experience to having a keyboard and a mouse, and even a touchscreen, if you got a touchscreen to work with. I can't see the value for the apps unless like I said, it's an emergency situation. However, if you're deploying to one app store, and the App Store is containing the three different faces, will you eyes? Yeah, that makes sense. Within one delivery mechanism, that will make sense three,

Heather Bicknell  47:59  
I saw a lot of people excited about it. And I wonder if it was more from the the developer side of Yes, we can, you know, there's less need to develop for all those different platforms.

Ryan Purvis  48:10  
I mean, we got to the stage but but I'm looking at a new framework or a new, it's been around for a little bit called flutter, which which has got the ability to write once deploy, on any platform, which is selectable, I still think you have to build the screens per platform. But least your call our reads or your core development code is centralized and common across. But you know, I remember when, when Xamarin was being put together assembler, yes, when Xamarin was was was bought by Microsoft. And then it was one of the first sort of multi platform multi delivery things. There was still guys that was saying that this might cut down your dev time, because you can share the code between Android and iOS. But you also show you how much stuff you don't need to share. Because you've basically got common libraries that are just huge, huge in relative terms, that if you just wrote the native app, so it's great for them to prototype. But your production app would still be written in a native thing to get the best performance and reduce the size of the application, that kind of stuff. So I still see, you know, problems in that in that space. One of the things that I did like about Windows 11, which I'm curious if it'll make it across to the Mac is the incorporation of some of the team's features. And I was chatting with with Tom Coburn off by email, because he said he will say that teams will be half the memory usage and half resource usage. And I'll ask him, do you think it'll get to the Mac he wasn't sure because one of the reasons why teams is so heavy, is is built in electron, which is another framework. And that's where the the memory utilization problem comes from. So now the new version which is based on sort of an inside of Microsoft age, info age, view. is much closer to Marshal's control. So they can control the performance, which, which will be great. Because if you can cut down the overhead of teams, which we spend most of our lives in, that seems that's great for experience of us. And that's what we want.

Heather Bicknell  50:15  
That's one of the features I'm looking forward to, as well. And something we haven't really even touched on at all in our predictions. But I guess two things there. So also really excited to see the team's client rebuilt or, you know, however optimized on the new platform so that it's not so memory hungry. And it was interesting reading Tom's article, because he's talking about how this is just a problem for sort of chromium things in general, which makes sense. I mean, I use Chrome as my primary browser without super memory hungry. I use teams all the time. So my memories just constantly being crushed. And as you know, I have the software to be able to look and see what are the top things that are impacting my system. And I see teams hogging memory all the time. So I am like interested to watch that change. And really see how big of a difference

Ryan Purvis  51:13  
I found switching from Chrome to brave do quite a good move for performance point of view. Even a helicopter fly, and whilst I found brave has made a big difference, maybe utilization. And I found that if you use teams to not use pop out chats, that seems to help reduce the memory load and

Heather Bicknell  51:41  
already don't do that, so can't be there. But well, yeah, I think, you know, I might actually try out the new edge that they were showing. Once that's out because of the I'm excited about the vertical tabs as someone who tends to have tab explosion, because I'm often writing, I write a lot of things so and work out and a lot of just content. So I'll have I tend to have the desktop versions of the office 365 apps open, because I am not such a fan of the online versions. So I'll have those all open at once generally. And then I'll have maybe, maybe I'll use the word online or something like that, if I'm reviewing someone else's document. And then I'm researching all these different topics, I'll bring up news articles, if I see my company mentioned in things, we'll have those up to read later. So I tend to just, you know, the tabs just explode before you know it. And then one of the things that's really ridiculous about that, that I've noticed is that once you have too many, and you can't tell what they are anymore, you might have Well, at least I will have the same thing open multiple times, because I didn't remember that I still had it open and then the fastest way is just to search for it. So perhaps by organizing the vertically and so being able to read the top of the tab can help my tab explosion a little bit, which in turn could drive down the memory. And then I'm just gonna have great performance. But before we, before we entirely move off teams, I didn't want to go back to the sort of integrated nature of teams for Windows 11, and how they're like fully, you know, replacing Skype at this point, it seems with this new teams that will have the ability to do more simple. Just one on one chats and calling and the experience that they showed in the demo. looks really cool. I thought more of like a FaceTime.

Ryan Purvis  53:51  
Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what it looks like. It looks like they are finally getting the the basics which are getting the Mac OS now, which is iMessage, FaceTime. And again, a good stable simple operating system. I think they're getting that part right. There's a lot of there's a great model to copy. I think there was a couple other things around around the gaming side with auto HDR, which look quite good. The only thing that I heard there was some issues with from a gaming point of view was this need to have a TPM version to chip in your motherboard. Some chips have that as has as optional feature you can turn on which will probably be fine for them. But it does seem to push people down a new new PC route whichever that's by design or just a case of they want to meet a certain level of minimum standard and TPM two is one of those minimums.

Heather Bicknell  54:48  
My my partner's affected by this so he built his gaming PC last year and he's like you can still buy this exact same build and now it's not you know, Windows 11 ready or whatnot. But yeah, he's gonna see if he can do the thing that just enable it because

Ryan Purvis  55:08  
yeah, I think I think it's the Intel's that you can't I think Intel's you need it's a new chip. And I think I think if I remember correctly, the amds. You can enable it's called started an F. I think it's if TPM or something like that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think the manufacturers of those motherboards will have to come up with something some sort of firmware upgrade might be software version of a TPM. But there might be the way to say those those those devices.

Heather Bicknell  55:41  
Yeah, I think he has an Intel chip. So little analog out of luck there, perhaps.

Ryan Purvis  55:49  
Yeah, I must admit, I haven't bought Intel for a long time. And one of the reasons it has been, they almost slowed down on innovation.

Yeah, I think that was all we had for retirement, what we spoke about on Friday, so frustrated, because yeah, obviously we prepared for the meeting, I had listened to a whole bunch of other people's thoughts as well. So I had all that information in my head.

Heather Bicknell  56:18  
Yeah, I'm looking over my notes. I mean, those were definitely the highlights of the thing is,

Ryan Purvis  56:29  
the other thing is that they are expecting it to start rolling out in October, probably for the Christmas holidays, which, which kind of means again, to try to try to push for a new PC purchase. Not that people didn't buy a lot of pieces during the pandemic. But maybe that's that's why it's what it's tied to.

Heather Bicknell  56:49  
Yeah, which is interesting. I mean, now that you mentioned, you know, button PCs during the pandemic, I know, we're still there's still a chip shortage, right. So yeah, I wonder from that angle, how much hardware sales can? Yeah, how that's going? And what will happen there? So you'd ask me in the predictions call if I would run Windows 11? If I could today, if I would try it out. So I'm going to turn that question over. To back to you, Ryan, would you now that we know what it looks like? Would you try it out?

Ryan Purvis  57:31  
Well, I'm kind of stuck that I have to because most of my users are Windows users. So I still have to look at this kind of stuff. But from a personal point of view, Not a chance. I find the the app of the apple ecosystem just so good. And this is probably one of the things is driven by actually catching a wake up and fixing while improving windows 10 to Windows 11. You know, nowadays, you can get the apps you need on the Mac ecosystem that we used that used to only be windows on available. Now, that's not to say that I would come across an app and the feature that I want to be like, Oh, damn, this is my actual project that only works on Windows device, or Microsoft Visio. That only works, I can actually download that sort of browser now as well. But there used to only work on Windows. And at least with the old Macs, you know, the Intel based ones, you could do a dual boot and you could have a Windows build and you can do the stuff. You were able to do that. Now, if I had to have a Windows machine, it would be hosted in a Windows machine. So we're looking quite heavily at Azure virtual desktop, finally, so that's what I would have and only use it if I had to, like some specific thing. And there are tools like sequels sequel client tools that are quite, you know, that's quite a good experience to work in. But other than that the the cons are just greater than the pros of staying on in America. Might be pretty good. It's still

Heather Bicknell  59:12  
gonna bring it back. That'll be the third time that's in this episode. All right. Well, I think we've captured most of what we have most of the interesting observations we've captured the first time around. Health hopefully it was entertaining for folks. And you know, yeah, I'm excited to try it out. You know, especially the new teams really looking forward to seeing my experience. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis  59:45  
You want to cover I think for a curiosity point if you don't definitely give it a look. But But my you know, they are maybe becoming old and gray and concerned that there's a phrase I follow the phrases Gotcha, gotcha.

Heather Bicknell  1:00:05  
can match any?

Ryan Purvis  1:00:07  
Yeah, but but the you know, I've seen this movie before we have a new windows, we're all excited that we get it and we're like, oh, well, this is, you know, three weeks into using it, things start breaking again or things aren't stable. So I think I think we'll see, I think we'll see. Weight loss is going to be laptops now. So they'll be my test case.

Heather Bicknell  1:00:30  
Yeah, we'll definitely see for the one of those performance and stability and mother the update changes kind of. Yeah, move on from the major complaints people had with Windows 10.

Ryan Purvis  1:00:46  
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Goals. We ended up there. I think that's good. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Big Nose our producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. for your hard work for this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW w podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website, www dot digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends and colleagues.

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