Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, we have a special audio only crossover episode. I joined Randy Chapman on his podcast, UC Status, and Randy, Mark, Shawn, and myself all talked about the UC market, what happened in 2024, and what's coming for Teams in 2025. Really great conversation.
Really appreciate him having me on the show. So you'll hear the full pod on this feed and his intro to follow. And it's also getting published to his show as well. Hope you enjoy this crossover episode and really recommend you check out the UC Status podcast as well. On with the show.
Randy Chapman: Hey, starting a podcast is something I've been trying to do for a long time. So I called up some friends and said, can I record us having a chat about Teams? And they said, sure. So this is the UC Status Podcast.
Hello. Welcome to episode 65 of the UC Status Podcast. Randy, Mark, and Shawn, and today we've got a special guest he's been on Before you know him, you love him. He's called Tom Arbuthnot. Tom say hi.
Tom Arbuthnot: Hey everybody, nice to be on the show again. Excited to have a chat.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, that's all we do is chat. So
Tom Arbuthnot: I know I really enjoy the show.
I'm, , no, , no lies. I listen to it every week and, , love it when you go, , go suggesting new features and, , give lots of, , you know, objective feedback on the products. It's a really good show.
Mark Vale: Yeah, that's great. When those features, , Somehow make it to the Roadmap a few weeks later. It's all good.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can directly take credit when it comes within a month. It's probably Microsoft heard your pod scrambled and then release the feature. I'm sure that's how it works.
Mark Vale: Yeah, they have a UC status Tiger team.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah
Mark Vale: Something like that. Yeah.
Randy Chapman: Right. I have no idea what we're going to talk about, but I think you had some suggestions, Tom, of kind of looking at.
You know, last year and the kind of run up to now and kind of what the future is. I mean, obviously we talk about Teams on the pod, , and Teams features. And, you know, I usually grab some stuff from the Roadmap and, um, you know, , the Message Center, you know, those are the kinds of things that. Generally, listeners, if you're out there, watch those things, watch the Roadmap, watch, , , the, the actual Message Center.
If you don't have access to the Message Center, you know, have your, your team put it in as a, , Microsoft project feed. You can do all that. Obviously, follow the show, follow Tom's show, Empowering.Cloud. There's loads of briefings by some great experts, including everybody on this show.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, everybody on this show has been on the pod or a briefing, haven't they?
So, I appreciate all the community effort there.
Randy Chapman: So, there's tons of information out there. It's an
information overload, isn't it?
Mark Vale: He has his own AI pilot for change as well, don't you Tom?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, ChangePilot. Yeah, we scrape all the, all the Message Centers. That's part of how I stay, uh, secret of how I stay on top of all this stuff is, uh, we have a product where we look after change for a few customers.
We pull the Message Center, we summarize it. So yeah, that's, that's why you often, , see the changes coming through on my feed as well.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, that's,
that's really cool. So, so last year, do we know how many features actually landed in Teams?
Tom Arbuthnot: Well, there was over 2000 Message Center items across the entire M365.
Now, not every tenant gets every message and Teams was the biggest workload for messages. Um, and now it's getting eclipsed by Copilot. So like Copilot is just flying for number of messages and number of changes. But I mean, last year was interesting for, for Teams because I don't think we got any, Huge like huge huge end user facing stuff.
Lots of lots of additions. Obviously lots going on with AI. Actually, the Teams client change was probably arguably the biggest change next year. Last year, sorry, you know, swift flopping out the client for 320 million users and. And not having any huge issues I think is super impressive and it's laid a foundation for 2025, but it didn't give us net new features day one, it just swapped out the kind of architecture on the client side for a future innovation.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, and there's tons of change to the client as well. We've got the new calendar, you know, the new Outlook calendar. What do you want to call it in Teams? Yeah, I think it's still in preview now. Um, that's quite a big, uh, significant change. Obviously, that's going to lay the foundation for things like, you know, the, um, The Room Finder and, or Places Finder as it's going to be called in places and stuff.
Obviously, there's ancillary services like Places. I mean, Places was a huge thing. I mean, they announced it, what, three years ago?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, Places went gigantic last year. Yeah, that's a really big one.
That was, um,
yeah, it was announced, like, many, many years ago, wasn't it?
Mark Vale: They just put, uh, Unified Contacts into Preview, haven't they, as well?
With Exchange and Teams.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, Unified Contacts, yeah,
yeah.
Shawn Harry: Oh, is that back again? Yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's back again.
Mark Vale: Yeah, back again.
Tom Arbuthnot: I think they've done it this time.
Mark Vale: Tell a friend.
Randy Chapman: Do we have to normalize all the numbers and write a text file that actually normalizes things? Like we did in Lynk.
Tom Arbuthnot: But yeah, you're right, Places was a big one, um, like Teams Premium continued to push last year, so lots of the features that actually came that were super exciting were in that Premium SKU, which I know you guys have talked quite extensively about, kind of.
You know, Microsoft looking to more overtly monetize the Teams base and, you know, they're, they're a commercial company at the end of the day. So they're looking to make money out of the product.
Randy Chapman: I mean, my opinion of, of Premium and probably our opinion of premium has changed so many times. Um, you know, when it, when it first came out, what was it like six or eight things?
Shawn Harry: Yeah.
Randy Chapman: Half of it was marketing. The other half was security. And then they were trying to
Tom Arbuthnot: But it was advanced comms, wasn't it? Before it was premium. Yeah.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, it was advanced comms. They were trying to monetize things like, you know, call recording, you know, sort of, if you want to connect to a call recording to our contact center servers, uh, guess what?
You need this advanced comms SKU. That soon went away after all the complaints, but, um,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah,
Randy Chapman: for a little while it just floundered around the kind of marketing thing. It was like marketing and security and, you know, not everybody needs marketing. Everyone probably needs security, but then there was just, you know, what other kind of features were there.
But now, you know, the recap stuff, I mean. Say what you want about Copilot, Copilot, Copilot, , say it three times apparently, um, don't, as long as they don't look in a mirror in a bathroom, so that Beetlejuice doesn't show up suddenly, but, um, yeah, the whole recap thing, we get the recap after, you know, I've got a Copilot license.
And a Teams Premium License, actually. And I get the recap after we record this pod.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, Intelligent Recap is excellent value. Like, I think you could almost, if you're a heavy meetings user, you could probably justify Premium on Intelligent Recap because you're getting a big chunk of the AI value of Copilot for 7, $10
a list, you know, and you get all the other premium stuff on the side as well if you need it.
Branding's the other one that was a big surprise for me. I didn't think branding was as big a deal as it was, but
a lot of
companies. love having a meeting lobby branded, and that's particularly if they're in media or retail, or kind of B2C type scenarios, they love that stuff.
Shawn Harry: So question, Teams Premium, how have you guys found the uptake of that?
I know we talk about it a lot obviously in the industry and so on but in terms of customers what has the uptake been for I don't know, yourselves? Out of interest.
Tom Arbuthnot: I mean, we, look, we're a tiny company. We're only six people, but we all have it. But we, we would, right, because we were like, like, but I think for customers, um, it's still spotty.
They're like, we need the webinar features so we'll, we'll buy it for them. Or We need the brandings or buy it for them. Or Queues app. I'm now seeing, um, I'm not seeing many customers blanket it yet.
Shawn Harry: Yeah, same here. That's, that's been my general sort of experience. I haven't had a. I mean, I think the potential is definitely, like you said, the branding is definitely a big one.
That's a huge one. Um, I just wonder whether maybe there's
Randy Chapman: like a branded lobby or branding. Yeah, branding lobby. The actual M365 portal, that was another one.
Tom Arbuthnot: There's branding lobby, there's also control of the background, so you can do like, uh, these users get these brand backgrounds and even multiple brand backgrounds, so if you think about a company that does certain types of meetings, they can product brand for that meeting versus this meeting.
Randy Chapman: Yeah.
Mark Vale: I mean, when the Queues App actually gets useful and the Barge and Whisper listening comes in. By end of March, that will be a big catalyst for premium, so yeah,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, I saw a post on LinkedIn this morning, actually, where somebody was raving about the relative value of Queues and once you bring in Barge and Whisper, I mean, it's it's still not a full contact center, but it's starting to get,
Randy Chapman: well, that's another thing, then the Queues app.
I mean, that went. Kind of got launched last year and it's almost no fanfare and suddenly, you know, because we had the, what was it called? The voice enabled channels. Then the little hokey cokey around, oh, that's going to go because Queues app is going to replace it. And then we've got
Shawn Harry: Now it's back
Randy Chapman: Now it's back because there's so many companies out there that we're just building that as little contact centers.
There's a company we all know that actually have a customer that was using like 2000 voice enabled channels or something.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I mean, this is the challenge for Microsoft and I kind of I have some sympathy that they're trying to move fast and add things they're trying to monetize. But when you get to 320 million users.
Even things that aren't used, like a couple of million users are using them. And it's like, well, you keep everything forever because 1 percent of your base are using it, or do you take the pain? And it's, it's, it's easier in consumer land, I think, to take the pain. Cause you can just be like, chin up consumers.
We're changing it in business. And not unfairly, orgs might be living or dying based on these features. And you say you've got six months to go until this changes. That's not viable for an enterprise.
Randy Chapman: But Microsoft has always been kind of. Sorry, Mark. I was saying Mark, Microsoft has always had competing apps doing the same thing, you know, we had Skype and then we had, you know, so Lync and or Skype for Business and then we had, you know, Yammer, we had Kaizala, we had, you know, had, you know, five, six different things doing
Tom Arbuthnot: the same job
Did Kaizala actually finally get killed or is it still hanging around?
Shawn Harry: It's dead
it went down,
Tom Arbuthnot: but There's also, there's also GroupMe, isn't there? The like Skype spinoff that I think is still knocking around.
Mark Vale: But to your point as well, right? You know, 1 percent of your user base uses this feature. Let's kill it. It's not just, just that. It's the, it's the fallout from doing that action, right?
Because that, that customer could be a, you know, a 30, 000 user organization all subscribed to E5 and Azure credits. And
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, yeah.
Mark Vale: Yep. Annoy them. And they go right, well, I'll throw my toys at the pram, I'll take my entire business elsewhere.
Tom Arbuthnot: It's also about trust for the new things. So like, if you're trying to get customers to invest in the Places journey, and let's, let's be honest, it's a journey, right?
There's still no admin backend UI, there's still a lot coming. If you're at the same time shooting other features in the face because you decided you don't want that, you don't want this, it's like, well, Do I put my faith in Places? Is it going where it's going to go? Or is it going to be like some of these Viva calls where it's like, yeah, it didn't really be the goals.
It sounded good. We're over it now. Like, I think Microsoft got to be careful. I mean, Google has this reputation of you can't really trust it in enterprise because one minute it's this one minute it's that. I think Microsoft has to be careful. Mark's point is very strong. It's like the, you can't be doing that in enterprise customers.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, no, you know, particularly if you see the saturation, if you see a big customer, they must have the telemetry that shows them this, surely they can't just go, right, we're going to kill this feature based on some sort of finger in the air guesstimate or something. And then suddenly they get, you know, some of their biggest customers have 500, 000 or more e SKUs.
Tom Arbuthnot: I've seen working with some very big customers on that side of the fence, things happen with the very big customers where they get a direct line of like, hey guys, we're going on this journey or you get an extension. So there are there are conversations we don't see for the very big customers. You gotta remember what's big to Microsoft as well is is 30, 000 seats.
Big to a person who's responsible for a product that's generating billions across the entire base. It's, um, it's all relative, isn't it? I think if you're, um, you know, where Shawn and I cross paths, that kind of size company in the past, like you have a different level conversation with Microsoft, but if you're anything smaller than that, you're, you're, you're on the same trip and everybody else is, I think.
Randy Chapman: Well, you know, we, we hear that some of the PMs and some of the VPs and whatever they say, oh, I've had conversations with certain customers and this is the, you know, the thing they like, and they're, they're good with this. But when we've transitioned from the Teams room SKUs for standard and, and, um, premium and over to, um, you know, the, the kind of free one that doesn't do anything and, and, and pro, you know,
Tom Arbuthnot: I challenged the, I challenged
Randy Chapman: that conversations had been had.
Tom Arbuthnot: I think basic 25 seats is actually a real steal for SMB. But as soon as you're a big customer, it's a non starter. But if you want three rooms and you're a hundred people, it's quite a good value.
Randy Chapman: It's the problem. The problem isn't the features, the lack of features. It's the lack of management and the lack of security around it.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, three, three rooms and they auto update. So, I mean, you know, you guys, you guys know rooms better than me. So challenge me. But like, if you've got three and they auto update, is that bad?
Randy Chapman: Well, auto updates aren't always the, aren't always great.
Shawn Harry: Yeah, I mean, it depends on what you're defining as SMB, because, to be honest with you, in the SMB, at least in my experience, they don't tend to be looking at Microsoft for their room solution anyway.
It tends to be something else that's more agile, that's easier to deploy. Or maybe they're just even using their, you know, laptop. Yeah,
Tom Arbuthnot: BYOD, yeah.
Shawn Harry: Precisely, yeah. At which point, all those enterprise features and the dis benefits of. You know, free versus pro kind of almost become a little bit academic, but like you said, certainly in the enterprise, you know, basic is just a complete nonstarter.
It just doesn't have the enterprise features, the security and so on. So you've got, you've really got to look at pro, but obviously the enterprises are completely embedded in the M365 ecosystem, so it's a different discussion.
Randy Chapman: But then, and then BYOD. I mean, that's one of the biggest things, the surprise of last year. We had, we had Ilya, Greg, Sandhya on our podcast probably four years ago, something like that.
BYOD is never going to be, ever going to be a thing we want, you know, fumbling with remotes and cables and dongles. And, you know, the meeting starts 20 minutes late and all these excuses around BYOD. Yeah, they're, they're, they're valid excuses. That when the room is set up poorly and the environment is set up poorly.
And your users are thick and dumb, you know? Yeah, all that can happen. It can happen in a Teams room. I've seen Teams rooms, you know, or, or competing platform rooms that, uh, that people start late because they're fumbling around with something, but. You know,
Mark Vale: touch panel, let's just
push that to one side.
Randy Chapman: I need to charge my phone.
Let's just, you know,
Shawn Harry: but the reality is none of that matters. The fact is, in the enterprise, as well as SMB, I've seen it, you know, there as well, BYOD is as embedded as email. Remember all the debates around email? Email is going to go away, it's going to get replaced by Teams and chat and da da da. To me, it's almost like a religious debate.
The reality is
Mark Vale: Who was leading that charge, by the way.
Shawn Harry: Well it wasn't me. The thing is, it wasn't me, mate. It was someone on this podcast. Yeah.
Randy Chapman: But the fact that BYOD is, not only is it allowed, And you can monetize it. And Microsoft has got an admin story around it, you know, discovers the device, puts it in there, you assign it a room account.
So, you know, they figured out how to monetize it. That's the Cynic kind of approach. But the fact that they're actually putting features, features in BYOD I mean, how the hell does that happen?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, AR features as well, like premium tier features. I think that's Microsoft React, again, reacting to customers.
Shawn Harry: It is. Because at the end of the day, the customers want to use whatever they want to use, right? We walk into a room, if I want to use Zoom, or Meet, or whatever it might be, right? The meeting platform is the meeting platform. All they know is, they plug something in, and it just works. That's it.
Randy Chapman: Nobody can control what you get invited to. MTR with Direct Guest Join, we've talked about it at length. Direct Guest Join is a best endeavors, kind of join only experience. Exactly, yeah. The fact that you can now connect to people like Pexip and do the enhanced CVI stuff, that's all really good. I've been testing that for ages.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, the Pexip stuff is really legit, isn't it? The outbound on SIP, being able to dial to any other SIP service, and even things like Zoom via SIP, is actually pretty robust.
Randy Chapman: And Google, you get a Google
button now.
Shawn Harry: Anything. Anything that controls SIP, it
can do it.
Tom Arbuthnot: Hopefully we see that come to MTROA soon as well, so it kind of completes that story.
Randy Chapman: I've heard, yeah, that it's in the works, but yeah, with Android, you know, you never know how long it's going to take Microsoft to figure out how to do it, so.
Mark Vale: So what we do now is Teams chat to talk to Zoom chat and Google chat over Federation, right? Yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot: XMPP anybody?
Shawn Harry: Yeah, exactly. Remember, right, PIC? Who knows, maybe we'll see it again.
Remember the PIC Federation gateway? Maybe it's going to come back. You had Nextplane, you had AT&T, there was a whole bunch, right? Yahoo! Yeah, Yahoo, exactly. MSN.
Tom Arbuthnot: I mean, going back to your email comment, that's why chat hasn't overtaken email, is because it's not genuinely cross platform. We went through a phase where certainly all the RFIs and RFPs, particularly governmental ones, would say, It has to be open standards.
It has to be SIP. Do you remember when we were like ticking off RFCs? We're like, yeah, we're RFC this, we're RFC that. That all went away with the move to cloud, and it seems like customers didn't care enough to keep making that a mandate. They would take innovation over standardization, and that that's where we are now is it's, it's a nice to have, but nobody's pushed it.
And so, and it's not just Microsoft, all the cloud platforms are not really supporting like standards based cross interop, even SIP, they're kind of reluctant.
Randy Chapman: Yeah. Here's a question. Are there any other, uh, mail platforms out there? I mean, obviously we've got Google and we've got, um, you know, exchange, but are there any others that are really out there that people are using in anger?
Tom Arbuthnot: Not in en not in business, anything. I think Google sweeps up all the kind of low end and then Microsoft sweeps up all the enterprise and big market consumer
Randy Chapman: and even
the
home, you know, com, hotmail, and stuff like that.
Shawn Harry: Right. Yeah, you can't really
Randy Chapman: particularly make it sexy. I remember sending emails via the command line.
Shawn Harry: Well, yeah, that still works. But again, I mean, SIP's kind of similar. We can interwork with absolutely anything. I mean, I think the walled garden approach still works, but at the enterprise level, there is still the necessity to be able to collaborate between organizers and, and utilize your existing, you know, infrastructure, et cetera, to be able to, you know, access other meetings and so on.
So I think that's where the challenge is now. And I think Microsoft have a story for that. Um, as well as, as well as third parties.
Randy Chapman: I always thought it was a bit of a, I mean, I mean, it isn't the first time they did it. The fact that Teams doesn't speak SIP and you have to have things and gateways and whatever.
But it's not a new story since the OCS days. They didn't speak, you know, normal video codecs and stuff. They had, you know, RTL, RTL, RTL, RTL, RTL. And you needed gateways to do all the other interop, so it's not a new thing, but why can't they just figure out how to play along nicely with everybody else?
Tom Arbuthnot: What's the incentive though? I mean, being cynical about it, it's hard to innovate, because you have to match the standards, so you can't do anything smart, like, you can't do anything super unique, because it doesn't work cross platform, and then you're opening up the gateway to, you know, Your competitors to moves like the self interest is to keep it slightly walled, isn't it?
Because you keep your users in your boundaries better. Teams to Teams is better than Teams to any
Mark Vale: anybody who's who's using Microsoft Teams in the enterprise that they're both feet and arms and head in with Microsoft, right? They aren't just going to move to Google because
Tom Arbuthnot: No
Mark Vale: they can chat to guys on Google, right?
Um, it's probably more, it opens the doors, like anything when you have an idea to go, Oh, this is a great idea, you end up going down a massive rabbit hole. And then it's like security and compliance and all that type of stuff, and it comes as a massive thing on its own. But yeah, for relative what value to Microsoft, probably not much.
Not much, but. Value to to business communications? It's big. Probably. It's big, but it's big. It's big. You know, I guess their point will be is that, well, you can paste the email address in Teams. If it comes back with a presence, then send them a chat. If it doesn't, then send them an email. And that's just good enough.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Also, I mean, unfortunately I'm seeing a lot of orgs shut down, fed or make fed, um, closed and approval list because yeah. Of the recent, not so recent, but the phishing stuff, which is sad because Fed is more traceable with TLS than email ever was, but it's a new attack vector. And if I ran a big org, I would say, unfortunately, close Fed and have an approval process because it's just safer.
Shawn Harry: But that's what we did in Skype for Business, right? And Lynk.
Tom Arbuthnot: Well, way more people had it open, I think, in Lynk and Skype. Maybe they didn't understand it was the reality of it.
Shawn Harry: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, certainly my experience, you know, it was a lot of the organizations I worked with were all sort of closed fed because of the security implications.
But at least with Skype for Business, we had things like ethical walls, we had lots of third parties that could insert themselves in a SIP stack, and we could manage all that traffic.
Yeah. The
difference with, you know, M365 is that's still a very nascent space. There is stuff there. You've got information barriers.
Randy Chapman: There's new stuff coming now. There is, there is. The team was showing it at Ignite and some of that stuff. So I block a user because I don't want to speak to that. You know that that that person and that and the admin gets notified that somebody's blocked something and they can actually do a block companywide.
Tom Arbuthnot: They've got heuristic phishing detection coming in as well. People trying to say that IBM support and then on.
Mark Vale: So that's why you're not responding to my messages.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, sorry Mark.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, I mean, I think he's trying to send messages by the CDX tenant.
Shawn Harry: I think Microsoft have become a victim of their own success because Teams is now, you know, it's everywhere, right?
Everyone's got access to it. Anyone could spin up a tenant. I think Microsoft just have to. You know, maybe provide more controls around that because
Tom Arbuthnot: they have, they just recently have. So now you have to have a paid credit card aligned tenant to even do Fed, which is a really smart move because a lot of the, but then a bunch of the fishers are signing up tenants with a single user with a credit card, leaving them around for a year, doing artificial traffic.
They're, they're trying to game it, but the nice thing is, at least, yeah, probably, but at least, at least Microsoft own, you know, The entire visibility of the platform. So they're not, they have Exactly.
Shawn Harry: So they know where the attacks are coming from. I mean, what I would love to see, though, I think Microsoft can do a lot more around this in the standard sort of space and really innovate there with, you know, in email you've got things like DMARC and DKIM and SPF and all that other good stuff.
It's almost like Teams needs a sort of semi equivalent. And that's the kind of thing that security guys would absolutely love.
Tom Arbuthnot: I mean, I I call me supervised, but I'd happily be like, could you give me a policy for like it's only uh, e accounts above uh, 3, 000 seats that get open fed to me. Like, like by, by default, they're spending a lot of money with Microsoft on enterprise licenses.
The odds of it being abused are much lower. Not impossible, but relative risk. Um, like otherwise I'm, I'm whitelist for those below 3, 000 seats.
Shawn Harry: Yeah. Which is painful.
Mark Vale: The fix as well is, right, if you look at social and even LinkedIn, right, or you go in, like, apply for your bank account online these days, you've got to go and prove your identity with your photo and biometrics, and they take a video, and they take your tokens.
So, Microsoft could offer that type of service for company authentication. So they go through,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, you, you opt into an
Randy Chapman: SSL certificate, you know, having to,
Tom Arbuthnot: and you put it in Teams premium as well. So, you know,
Randy Chapman: it goes to an address and you have to kind of, Real offer code that gets sent in a physical envelope to your house to actually get a SIP, SIP number.
Mark Vale: Yeah, but then if you, if you validate that, then you could just have like, Oh, I federate with verified organizations and then that gets rid of all the scammers.
Shawn Harry: Yeah, I mean, that's why things like DNS authentication work.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, blue tick.
Tom Arbuthnot: Purple tick.
Shawn Harry: Yeah, if you standardize it, it becomes easier for others to.
Tom Arbuthnot: I've got a question for you guys, I don't know how much time we've got, but, um, like, we've just, as we're recording, CES has just gone. Last year, Microsoft did all the Copilot Plus PCs, which are really ARM, ARM based PCs. I've been loving my ARM laptop, like way less fan noise, snappy, obviously not perfect compatibility, but pretty, pretty close.
Yeah. We've got MTROA already, so we've got Android based rooms, and we've got MTROW, do we ever see MTROW on Android Compute? Like is it an MTR on ARM potentially?
Randy Chapman: MTR ARM, yeah. Um, I mean, I think it's a good idea. However, the fact that they're pushing their, um, their Mandroid or MDEP.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh yeah, we got MDEP as well coming.
That's such a good point.
Randy Chapman: And MDEP, you know, I originally thought it was just about rooms and stuff like that, but actually it's the new Windows CE, which was replaced with something else. Oh yeah. It's the fact that they want to put it on ATMs, they want to put it on fridges. Oh wow. It's the new IoT Lightweight Operating System.
That's what they're pitching it as.
Tom Arbuthnot: Because so many things run on Android, right? And most of those Android releases are not well maintained. So think printers, think access points. If those, uh, whichever enterprise access point vendor says, we're using Microsoft's enterprise trusted Android as our OS, that's a big tick box.
So, yeah, you're right, Randy. That's the aspiration is we're going to be the, Most enterprise trusted Android for digital signage, for BYOD devices, for printers.
Randy Chapman: But imagine having a Chromebook compete with running on a lightweight laptop, just running browser apps.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, now, now, now you're, you're treading on the sanctity of Windows.
Randy Chapman: Because we, because we, because we mentioned it, you know, the team.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh yeah, the Tiger team are on it now.
Mark Vale: They've already got that kind of, uh, anyway, um, What is it? Windows 11 in S mode or something. I think it's called when it, when you buy a Windows 11 in S mode, it's on the store apps.
Tom Arbuthnot: I think they killed that off in the end, but yeah, they had it for a long while.
It was like a lockdown. Yeah, because the store didn't really work. It wasn't really get successful, did it really?
Mark Vale: Well, I bought a HP laptop for £149, brand spanking new. I've had a decent spec with Windows 10 S on before, on November last year.
Tom Arbuthnot: Okay, so maybe it still does exist then. Yeah, it does exist. I turned it straight off.
Yeah, exactly, you immediately unlocked it. I mean, the store's got better because they let people wrap classic apps in the store. So actually the store has become not only UWP apps now, it's basically EXE wrappers, which is, it's gone full circle.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, problem is the reason you need so much horsepower on Windows is because Windows is just got so much legacy stuff that it's well.
Tom Arbuthnot: This is why this is why Windows on ARM excites me because essentially it's a. I mean, it is Windows, but it's a loss of the craft has been taken out. Those those ARM chips. The Qualcomm's are coming. They're very performant. ARM are going to do some. Um, sorry, ARM. AMD apparently going to do some chips.
There's two other vendors are going to do chips. So there will be PC.
Randy Chapman: NVIDIA probably as well. Yeah,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, yeah, they said it. Yeah, you're right. So, so there will be PC chipsets from multiple vendors. There are already, uh, C, the reason I referenced CES is there were a whole bunch of like NUC type devices announced on ARM and they run, they run light, they run low fan noise, they, they're robust.
So it's, uh, interesting, uh, in theory, they're an interesting room platform.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, well, they, you know, the Tiger team should, uh, should definitely get on that, you know, MTR for ARM, um, whether it runs embedded on a bar or a, or a codec or something, or whether it's a PC, I mean, they're Microsoft have got that PC, uh, that connects to, um, uh, the cloud link, the cloud link thing.
What does that run?
Shawn Harry: That's the uh, Windows. That's Windows 11. Yeah,
Randy Chapman: but it's still, but it's still Intel based. So yeah,
Shawn Harry: it is, it is, yeah.
Randy Chapman: You'd think if they were going to do it, that would be an ARM based thing as well.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think the timing probably just went well. I mean, you would have thought that would be an MDEP thing, really, if you wanted to hit a super aggressive price point, uh, like zero OS MDEP based or, you know, zero windows, but it's just windows in kiosk mode.
Randy Chapman: Whether or not that causes any issues with, um, you know, peripheral, uh,
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, yeah, true. Good, good point. Also enterprise, like they're going for, you know, You're moving off Windows 10, go to Windows 365 slash VDI. It's easier for enterprises to understand. I can drop ship these $300 boxes and off I go. Yeah, yeah, it's just a streaming desktop.
Randy Chapman: I mean, I still have a lot of conversations with, you know, obviously my job is mostly rooms and stuff like that, but I still have a lot of conversations on the Windows versus Android kind of approach. You know, trying to shoehorn Android into an environment, but, you know, good news is I've helped even, you know, sort of very security conscious kind of defense contractors, you know, into looking and completely switching to Android with all the security that's, uh, that's in it.
Yeah, and it's a lot simpler and all that kind of thing, and they can't look back.
Shawn Harry: This is an interesting play. I wasn't aware that Microsoft are pivoting that heavily to MDEP because I mean, if they are, this resolves a lot of problems in the security space. Um, but that is, it's kind of, what does that mean for Windows IOT?
Is that the way to go though? I mean, like you said, if it's CE.
Randy Chapman: Maybe we can get, um, Yoav on here. He's the
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, he's great.
Randy Chapman: He's actually met him for the first time in Chicago. I've known him for years. We've been conversing online, uh, through social old
surface team.
20 years basically. And yeah, we finally finally met in person.
I met, met his boss as well. Another 25 year plus Microsofty. Um, so yeah, it was, yeah, he was a super, super nice guy. We were talking about MDEP and he's yeah, he has no idea about any of the kind of the MTR use cases or that. He's just thinking MDEP is, It's an operating system, and we have grand plans to make it do anything. So, it'll be interesting.
Uh, what else is there? Uh, obviously, you know, we talked about Copilot. We always gloss over Copilot to some extent because it's such big news, it's like, how do we do it justice? But it's just everywhere. Ignite. Was just a Copilot conference, wasn't it?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting this year, the big pivot is to agents and agentic.
And I think Microsoft have a big adoption challenge on their hands. They're spending, you know, they've committed another 80 billion this year. Um, which is a crazy, um, Microsoft have got the money, so it's not like it's, they're not borrowing to do this, but they've got that and that's mostly an infrastructure, um, so DCs, chips, you know, they've got to show to.
The shareholder slash the market look at the adoption. So if you look at Copilot, a GitHub Copilot, great success story, but a niche audience like if they can convince everybody knowledge workers need it, then there's a much bigger base to go after. And I'm bullish on. We'll all be using AI. I think the time frames are just longer than Microsoft think they are.
Like it's not quarter to quarter.
Randy Chapman: There's too many Copilots. There's too many, um, things to try and adopt. I was talking to David Dungay, um, at, at Ignite, and it's like, how do you, how do you get it into an organization? You have to kind of. Take it down to bite sized chunks, uh, bite sized chunks and kind of try and train it into the, into the hands of the users and really like
Tom Arbuthnot: the tiger team must have been listening to you, Randy, because that's basically what they've done is that they're giving away.
M365, Copilot, Chat, and then Agents on Pay As You Go. So actually the chunk is now not $30 a user, it's starts free and pay per transaction for an agent. That's a way easier way to get into the game than how do I justify buying Copilot, a full, M365, Copilot, $30 a user, Year Commit. I don't really know what my use case is yet.
Mark Vale: The immediate value for free, right? It's a case of like, I want to write something and I want to write it in a particular way, but I struggle grammatically. So this is what I want to write, Copilot. Give me back something that sounds a bit more professional
or
what I mean. That's, that's instant free value.
I use that a lot. Um,
Tom Arbuthnot: I might, yeah, my use case is like primarily like, um, quick, quick questions, looking things up, meeting summaries. We talked about earlier is a huge one
Mark Vale: to to Randy's point. Like with so many Copilots out there, so many use cases, how do you get them in? I think that, I think where it will go, I know that, uh, Tamor and everybody else at Microsoft, they're bringing this theory in that we're going to move away from SaaS based portal platforms to just asking Copilot to do something and it handle the action and what have you.
Tom Arbuthnot: We're just going to have like an Alexa like Copilot. We'll come into talk
to it
and jobs a goodun.
Mark Vale: But, you're almost gonna need to set up like nested copilots, where you have one like, um, end user, uh, chat bot. The end user can say, I need to do this task. What do I need to use? Mm-hmm. And it then routes it to the appropriate LLM or or model that's, um, that's built for that particular task.
Randy Chapman: That's a good idea.
Tom Arbuthnot: The co the Copilot for Copilots, basically. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that's interesting there is, is there's two battles going on here. One is. We should embed AI into the individual app. So you have your AI in Word, your AI in Outlook, and the other one is a bit more where OpenAI and other third parties come from, and like, give us control of your desktop, we'll use Vision, and we'll drive whatever app in whatever way.
Now that is, Hard
Randy Chapman: because they don't have the hooks.
Tom Arbuthnot: Exactly. But, but if, which is better, if both work the same and Mark's in Mark's world, where you want an agent that can drive agents. If, if my, my Copilot of Copilots can see the desktop and Microsoft are doing vision and consumer as well, because they have the open AI code, right?
But if I, if I have a copilot in windows that can see everything I'm doing, it can go into paint to do the AI graphic stuff. Then it can jump into words, do the AI wordy stuff. So it can do both potentially.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, I mean there's other examples of that like IOs there was a Word app and an Excel app and a Powerpoint app and a this app and a that app. There's also an M365 app. SO you can actually go in there and create a new Word document, actually in that app. You don't even need Word anymore. So I guess spring boarding into Copilot I mean.
Tom Arbuthnot: The M365 the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Copilot app, yeah.
Mark Vale: But the use case is like, even if you just take an information worker, you might be in Excel, you might be in PowerPoint, and you might be in Word, all three at the same time, doing
different tasks in each of those apps, but broadly for the same purpose. You don't want to have to have different contextual conversations. Wouldn't it be great to have
it
traverse the apps?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, go grab this from Excel and not have to be like,
Randy Chapman: yeah, write your RFP, have your pricing and all your other kind of, you know, Moscow scores and everything in Excel and then embed it into a PowerPoint to summarize it for when you do the, you know, the dissertation.
Tom Arbuthnot: It can kind of do that if, right now, if they're all in a single folder or a single place in OneDrive or SharePoint, it can span over different document types, but it can't do it the way you're saying, Mark, which is I've got all three open, which is the way most people work today. It's like I'm flicking between my Excel, my Word document, my PowerPoint.
Shawn Harry: People's world is app centric. It kind of almost reminds me a bit of Teams, but obviously Teams brought everything together and the adoption journey of that was pretty significant. How is Microsoft looking at addressing that because obviously if you've got all these different LLMs and bots and agents and blah blah blah, you're fundamentally changing the way people work, the way people work from an app centric model to obviously this AI sort of copilot driven model.
What does that look like? How do you, how do you even fundamentally do that when people are quite siloed in the way they work?
Tom Arbuthnot: I think if we've learned anything from OCS and then Lynk and then Skype for Business and then Teams, it's quite hard to change the way people work. It's going to be the same with AI, like they want to work the way they want to work.
And I think that's, that's the biggest challenge is to get the value out of Copilot right now. You have to be proactive and drive it. And that's where I think Microsoft hope agentic will be like, Hey, value just appears for you because the agent's done this on your behalf.
Randy Chapman: Well, that's clippy, isn't it? I see you're trying to work.
Can I help you?
Shawn Harry: Okay. Interesting.
Randy Chapman: Yeah. And then another significant change of Teams actually quite recently was the change from, you know, individual Teams and, and channels to this kind of combined thing. I mean, I, I was very negative about it in the first place and I'm actually trying it out. Uh, uh, Microsoft to be, be happy about, they don't have to take my MVP away for, for complaining about it so much, but I'm actually trying it out and, and actually I've made it look like Skype for Business.
Sorry.
Tom Arbuthnot: With groupings.
Randy Chapman: With groupings, yeah, basically I've just pinned all the things, you know, third party chats here and internal chats there and regular chats there and, you know,
Tom Arbuthnot: I, I, I love it. Two people on my team don't love it at all.
Randy Chapman: And just filtering by unread, filtering
by
unread, anything that, you know, it takes away all the noise.
Tom Arbuthnot: It makes me use channels because I'm, I'm very often on mobile. I'm more on mobile than I am on desktop. And it's quicker to, when I'm in chat, I'm going to keep going in chat. So I end up, I end up being the problem in a lot of our, in a lot of our conversations for multiple reasons.
But like, because I'll start the thread in chat, and really it should be in the channel. But since this new UI, I've been much more diligent of going to the right channel. And it's so much better because your threads stay in the right place. I really struggled to do that on mobile before, but now it's, it's much better.
Randy Chapman: Didn't they talk about recently threaded replies are coming?
Tom Arbuthnot: To chat. Yeah. Yeah. So,
Randy Chapman: so that's huge.
Tom Arbuthnot: We'll, huge. Yeah. That'll be really nice. I, I, I, one of the frictions of Teams adoption is chat behaving differently in channels versus private channels versus fed chat, versus meeting chat, versus chat, chat.
They're all subtly different and it kills people. Like they, they're like, yeah, like, like internal chat, chat versus fed chat chat. So it's, I, I spend. A lot of my time on FedChat with various, you know, you guys and others and forever people are like, oh, I want to drag a file into chat, which I can do internally, but I can't do externally.
We know that as techies, but that's a really unfair expectation on the end user to be like, why can I, I was in this chat and I could drag a file in and now I'm in that chat and I can't drag a file in like what, why?
Randy Chapman: Yeah. So, so what's next?
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, that's a good question. What are your predictions? Go on, Mark.
What are you thinking?
Mark Vale: I mean, where do you take it without just saying get rid of Teams and move it all to Copilot? Well, if you, if you take, um, take what Microsoft's agentic world is supposed to be, right, that's what they're going to be pushing towards, where everything is fronted by Copilot. So I'd imagine that's what it's going to be like.
You tell Copilot you want to chat to Tom, and then it opens up a chat with Tom, you know.
Randy Chapman: That's probably all the context. Maybe it finds all the channels that you've got conversations started as well. So to actually drive you back to where the conversation maybe should be.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that'd be nice.
Mark Vale: You know, so that's probably the direction it'll go in.
Maybe not next year or this year, but, um, I imagine in the next five to 10.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, but if they've got Copilot in GitHub, they can just ask Copilot to code all that and be done with it.
Mark Vale: Yeah, well, wasn't it Zuckerberg who said that he's going to replace all mid level and low level developers with AI? All right.
This year.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, 5 to 10 years is an interesting time frame, isn't it? Because I mean we've all known each other for way too long. Like we were, we, we, you know, OCS 20, like Lynk 2010, and then all through OCS and Skype, and it took a pandemic to get to where we are now in UC. And it's still not radically different.
I mean, it's capabilities are obviously grown massively, but it's chat, video calls, bed calls.
Mark Vale: It'll change when we retire, right? Because we're the old guard going out.
Tom Arbuthnot: Are you saying as soon as we let go?
Mark Vale: Yeah, you know. Well, that's it. You know, if you look at how, how younger ones communicate, it's all.
Whatsapp chat?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah,
Mark Vale: so it's all asking questions, right? So that they're going to be more open to that
Tom Arbuthnot: and and there'll be a generation of people who are AI native that we know where we can't. We can't comprehend how they're going to work, but they're just going to like the we grew up with the Internet around us.
They're going to grow up with the AI around them. It'll just be. It'll be a given that they can ask any question and get any answer.
Randy Chapman: But if you're old like me, we grew up with telephones before we grew up with any of that stuff. So what's happening with voice? I mean, Mark is our, is our voice guy.
Obviously, you know, Shawn and I pretend to be now, now that we don't really do that, but, uh, what's happening with voice? I mean, you remember, remember, I remember scoping kind of, you know, um, E1 lines, you know, kind of four to one and, You know, or
Mark Vale: I mean, voice isn't going away, right? I know it's, it's not the primary, um, modality these days for a lot of businesses as they move towards.
Like chat based comms, but it's still out there. It's like email. It's never going to go away.
Randy Chapman: It's never going to go away.
It's just not used as much. As you said, the young ones like to do texts.
Mark Vale: Yeah, but you know, it's going to be a case of like, we've got the intelligent recap type stuff, the conversations task, which is all great.
Um, what
Randy Chapman: SMS in Teams?
Mark Vale: Yeah. Well, that's good. Yeah. There's a whole world of SMS pain around that, but nevermind. Um, but yeah, But where other vendors are going at the minute, especially call recording ones, are starting to go, well, actually, we're listening to the conversations. Yes, we can provide sentiment, and I'll say this is a good call, this is a bad call, and what have you.
But actually bring that transcript into Copilot, so it can be used across multiple, um, services. That's where they're looking to integrate now. Because, you know, if you think about the context of, um, of understanding your customer better so that you can serve them better with either the services or products.
Having that conversation data in text that's then giving you marketing recommendations.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, looking across all the calls is really interesting, isn't it? It's like, I can look at the last week's contact centre activity, and use AI to summarize it intelligibly. That was impossible before AI. It was just too much data, but now you can be like, what were the trends last week?
Bang, bang, bang. That's pretty amazing.
Randy Chapman: They're talking about support things. Were they actually buying? You know, were there, what was their upsell being discussed? And you know,
Mark Vale: what's uh, yeah, you know, what, what do customers love about us this week? What do they hate about us next, this week? That sort of stuff.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Are my, are my people talking about the new offer, the new product? Have, have they done this? Have they done that? Like contact center is shaping up to be, massively impacted
Randy Chapman: I'd love to see a summary like that. I think that would be, that would be really good because I remember, I mean, I started off doing telesales years ago where if you didn't do a hundred calls a day, you were like, you know, seen as a liability kind of thing and, you know, you're hammering the phone because if you, you know, hammering the phone meant you're actually, you know, talking to customers and potentially selling.
Tom Arbuthnot: It'll be the AI hammering the phone now.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, but they used to print out these reports and, you know, so literally every, every person was like, Oh, you did 103 today. Well done. You did 96. I'll do better next time kind of thing. Oh, you did 1000. How did you do that?
Tom Arbuthnot: But now the AI would be able to be able to look at the calls, look at the tone, look at the call rates and be like, this, this, this girl did 70.
But actually her calls have a way better outcome than the, the, yeah, the, the guy who did it 106, so it's like, yeah. The only metric they had was numbers and they were like ratio game, whereas they look at quality for the first time.
Mark Vale: Yeah. And, and the key in that is the why was the why. Did you know why? Why was her conversations?
Yeah. Closing up. Sales and the, the other guy, whatever. Yeah,
Randy Chapman: yeah. And use it as a training activity. You know, C calls are recorded for training and pur and quality purposes. Well, copilot is actually used for all that as well. Mm-hmm .
Mark Vale: And then you could say, right. Well actually when you're in a conversation on an outbound sales call, even inbound, you could have, I know Microsoft are bringing out.
Some more contextual integrations for the call window. You could have prompts in there to say, make sure you mention this, make sure you mention that, yes, you mentioned that, tick lists and what have you.
Tom Arbuthnot: Agent training type scenarios.
Mark Vale: Yeah, but it's in real time so they don't forget. So it's not just a case of, oh, yes, I missed that on that conversation.
Sorry, I'll try and do it better on the next call. Yeah. It'll actually could help them. In that particular call in the first place.
Randy Chapman: Copilot is actually making calls sexy again.
Tom Arbuthnot: I think that's what Mark wants.
Mark Vale: It's just the way it's going. I think, um, at the moment, you know, it's, it's not really been an observed focus for AI, but it, Has the potential to actually be just as impactful as putting AI in webcams in meeting rooms.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I'd put my neck on the line and say obviously development was the first area that got massively positively impacted, right?
And there's not many developers who aren't saying they're using Copilot or equivalent tools in development anymore. Like it's a That's the norm and you're a bit weird if you're not. I think contact center is the next one. Like I think there's going to be so much business value. It's so hard to hire good people for contact center.
Turnover is insane. Costs are a pain. It's an incredibly hard job like to be helpful and happy when you're on the front line. Mostly taking inbound is really tough.
Mark Vale: Yeah and I think they're kind of focusing on Maybe the wrong area is probably the strongest, too strong a term, but they're focusing on AI agents replacing human people.
But I think that's a, that's a bad move.
Randy Chapman: Replacing is, is definitely a bad move. Yeah.
Mark Vale: Because when you, when a customer calls up and they realize they're talking to a bot, They'll get instantly hacked off with that company
Tom Arbuthnot: unless
Mark Vale: I want to talk to a human unless the bot unless the bot's excellent.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, exactly.
Which we're probably not there yet, but I kind of agree with you. Coaching is the low hanging fruit is like real time coaching of have you considered telling them this, do they know about the warranty that that's a. A relatively lower risk than putting it in front of a, a human, isn't it?
Randy Chapman: I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, a really hard thing to do to, to do a, a voice bot that actually is useful.
Chat bots, you can make them pretty, pretty, uh, handy for self-service, but you want to rely on deep face.
Tom Arbuthnot: But have you guys trouble, have you guys played with like the open AI. Advanced voice stuff. It's pretty good now. Like, like, obviously it's as good as the data in a contact centre scenario it'll as good as the data, but in terms of you can fluently talk to it and interrupt it and jump in, you know, you're talking to a, an AI, but it's not bad.
Mark Vale: You can call a toll free number and speak to a chat GPT.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh yeah, they've got, they've got, they've got a WhatsApp number, haven't they as well?
Mark Vale: Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, you can actually phone them up and it speaks to you in a girl language and you can. Accent, sorry. And then you can go and ask it whatever you want.
Who's Tom Arbuthnot? Tom Arbuthnot is an actor, procrastinator.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, never heard of him.
Randy Chapman: Right. I think we've exhausted all these conversations. We've kind of taken a look ahead. There was a few things for the UC Status Tiger team to pull away and start coding. Checks in the mail, of course.
Mark Vale: Our way, right? Right.
Randy Chapman: Our way, of course. Yeah, of course. It all spread the wealth. Um, thank you very much, Tom Arbuthnot, for joining us.
As, as always, we need to do these crossover things a little more often. Um, we're doing this one a little bit different. Obviously, this is the UC Status Podcast, but we're actually recording it and giving it to Tom so we can share it in his community. So, yeah, we're definitely gonna do a lot more of these.
Tom Arbuthnot: Always fun to catch up with you guys and, uh, yeah, uh, do it on the record for a change as well, which is fun.
Randy Chapman: Yeah, sounds good. Cool. Alright, thanks guys, and, uh, thank you for listening. Catch you next time. Thanks for listening to the UC Status Podcast. I've been Randy Chapman, and on behalf of Mark and Shawn, we just want to say thank you for listening.