It should be a word. It is. You know, another good word would be performant. Microsoft has used that word forever. Is that a Microsoft word? Yeah. Microsoft, people infect their mouths with Microsoft-isms. Did you notice that? Microsoft people say so at the beginning of every sentence. So... No, actually, I don't think that's Microsoftism, though. You don't think so? I feel like there's infected Microsoft...
like, thought words that get stuck into people's heads. I mean, performant is something from the last 15 years at Microsoft. Do you think we did that? I don't know. It's interesting to see how language changes in that way. I mean, I first heard it here. Could your mechanical keyboard be louder? It's really annoying because you can hear me type.
What's your favorite technical conference? It was TechReady. Really? TechReady, the internal TechReady conference? Yeah. The reason that I liked it is because everybody was there. They were motivated partly because of... partly because of paycheck. So it was a very enthusiastic audience. And I got to be unfiltered.
That is so true. So TechReady is now given another name. TechReady is Microsoft's internal conference. We all go to Seattle, and we're talking to ourselves, but we're talking about strategy in the future. And I have a talk that I'm doing, and I did it at... at tech ready last week and you were you and i were there and it was that we're selling copilot wrong and it was so freeing because i could talk about how we're doing things internally and i felt very open and the audience
was picking up on it. And the vibe was... So I'm like, why am I not saying that more publicly? So it's actually causing me to talk more publicly about stuff like that. Well, there's something like I would give an Azure strategy talk. Yeah. And I did that for up until basically the conference died with COVID. And I even did it for the first couple of recordings. But what I would do is I would just give my opinion about the hyperscaler landscape.
how momentum, technology trends. And that's a talk that I can't give externally for obvious reasons. Just because it's like business strategy and future strategies. And opinions, you know, Microsoft exec. bashes whatever competitor or says competitor has advantages in certain areas, you know. I see. I see. That is challenging.
I try to be the same person internally as I'm out externally, but we talked about it on the last podcast about knowing your audience and speaking to, you know, as you become senior, you need to know what you can say. I am learning more and more about that. I have said random stuff and had articles like Microsoft VP says. And I'm like, really? Because I'm thinking about what a random guy said.
Yeah, yeah. And the New York Times emailed me yesterday, and I said no because they saw something I said on Blue Sky, and I was like, you can use the Blue Sky thing, but we don't need any more color. Yeah. That must happen to you a lot. Do you have a press person that calls you and says, stop talking? No. Really? You know, I actually was at the, I gave a keynote at Rust Nation in UK last week.
And I was invited to give it because I developed, speaking of reputations, a reputation in the Rust community. Because I've been outspoken. The first time that I spoke out about Rust. in any meaningful way was on Twitter in 2022. Some survey had just come out about programming languages. It showed how TypeScript had just jumped up in the rankings. And I'd been just in the...
previous week or two, reviewing vulnerability trends and the fact that 70% of vulnerabilities that we'd been seeing were memory safety problems. And I'd already kind of started to push Rust inside of Azure. But then I'm like, Rust is really ready now. Why are we even doing any more CC++? We should just declare as an industry that it's a deprecated language and start the shift to memory safety. Yeah.
That's a thing where, you know, Microsoft exec says this. I didn't get press clearance for it. And I felt that it was a technical opinion. But who would that come from? Would Kevin Scott say that? Would Microsoft TFs and DEs sit around and talk about whether we should say that? I don't know if we would without deciding we should say it and then having a campaign to say it in different places. But I just decided to say it.
because I felt strongly about it. And the next morning, I got a Teams call from Saka. It's like, do you really believe that? Are you convinced about that? And I'm like, I explained that I was, and the momentum that we had on Rust inside of Microsoft. And he's like, oh, okay. Okay, so it wasn't like you weren't in trouble, because I got a Teams call from him on a Sunday once. Yeah, I know. I got that same call from him, too.
Yeah, but that was different. There's different technologies. If we like or dislike a competitive technology or a technology that someone's excited about and we're not excited about it, that's the part. Microsoft, of all the companies, In tech, I'm just thinking about all the fang and manga, Google and Apple. They are very chill about us being on social media. We were first in blogging and first in social. I couldn't tell you...
more than one or two Apple engineers that I see on social media just yapping. It's amazing that we don't get into more trouble saying stuff. I totally agree. Microsoft's always been that way. which I really appreciate about the culture. It would be very challenging. I actually have had friends tell me that like, hey, I just got a job at Google or Apple and they're telling me I need to stop on my blog or I can't run my YouTube anymore.
Because it's not in line with their thing. I mean, part of it is, too, trusting your employees to have what we were talking about last podcast we recorded, which was about maturity. And by the way, I've had people on my team tweet things that I've gone to them and said, social media is not the place to have that discussion or raise those points. There's other places to do it.
In Microsoft-related activities, not their personal activities. Yeah, yeah. And I viewed it as lack of professional discretion to voice their opinion. in that forum when that's not the right place to do it. Yeah, we have a rule on my team that says you don't get to dunk on other teams. And the rule is for me screwing up. Because years ago, I complained about the printers on Windows 10.
And I went to bed and I woke up with three different VPs that apparently all owned printers as a group and were mad at me. Or printers all the time. But you know what I'm saying, though? They were mad, and they wanted me to talk to HP, and they wanted the driver dumps. And we ended up fixing the bug, but that whole thing needed to not be on Twitter. I could have just asked internally.
By the way, printers are just horrible. As a concept. You're not dunking on printers right now. You're dunking on the product line. I'm dunking on the quality. One of the problems is we didn't have a... really a universal printer driver for Windows. I remember that, yeah. Now we do. And all the printer manufacturers have been moving over to them. But without them, just constant, like, every, you know, I haven't...
print it in like two weeks. I need to print some random thing for some stupid reason because some stupid agency requires it to be printed. And so I go, you're doing email. Janan is saying that this topic has no plan or any guidance or there's nothing here. So this is Scott and Mark learned to yap. I think we deserve an off week. It's okay.
Yeah, it's fine. Printer's sucking. My favorite printer is the... I thought we were recording this. Oh, we're recording this whole thing. I thought it was going to be a show. This is a show. Oh, okay. It's Scott and Mark learning to yap. It has no actual plan. It's not really an off week. Well, touche. It's an off week in that it has no actual value. Let me finish my rant here because I haven't printed in two or three weeks. I go to print and I get the printer error dialog box.
What the hell? And then I try to troubleshoot it, nothing. Turn on and turn off the printer. Then uninstall and restart this full or certain... All the things. and then finally like i need to go reinst uninstall and reinstall the printer driver and then finally it works again yeah that is the greatest problem in computer science the pain the pain is fresh Well, why is that complicated? Because we solved...
Blue screens in video drivers. Like I said, we finally solved it. This printer, if you go get a new printer now, chances are it's going to have the universal printer driver support. Okay, so universal printer driver, that's the thing. It's the AirPrint for Windows. It just works. That's the win.
That's the one. Yes, we're going to get an email from the printer people, whoever they are. But here's the cool thing, too, is that I can be like, hey, printer people in the printing team in Windows ran into this problem. They're like... We're on it. That is true. So I really, that's one of the great things about being on the inside is the finding the person and fixing it. So like, do you know that we fixed Zoom on Windows 11?
Yeah, I know. I think you've told me like five times. This is the sixth. There was an ACL issue with the Zune. We fixed it for Guardians of the Galaxy 3. And you're like, I need to get this to work again. Why are you such a hater, man? I'm not. I said that with utmost respect. That's a lie. Because my next thing I need to fix is the Microsoft BAM. Because we're on YouTube, I feel like this is the, we need to change our thumbnails.
Rob, podcast producer, because there's not enough thumbnails of me holding up Zunes. You did that for Guardians of the Galaxy, right? Yeah, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, I got to work with Marvel to load the Zunes up so that's when Star-Lord does like a shot over his shoulder. and he's got like the Michael Jackson EP. So I'm like, okay, we'll do that. So I plugged it in. I couldn't get it to work because we had had a regression in how USB devices ACL for the INF file got set. So we fixed that.
And that's rolled out, and you should just plug your Zoom in. It should just work. But at the time— I know your video quality is all blocky. What's that? Your video quality is blocky. This is probably because of you. It's probably your fault. Where are you? Is this a new room? Yeah, I'm in Arizona. Oh, you're in Arizona. Probably on Wi-Fi. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so it's your fault. All right. Yeah. So here's some blocky Zunes for…
I'll clean the screen. What did your shirt say? University of Chicago. My son wanted to go there. We got the free shirt, but he didn't get in. Now that makes it sound like I'm wearing the shirt to call him and he feels bad because he's in another school. People feel bad for not getting in. No, it's very comfy. All right.
We have to go. We don't know what this one's called yet. What is this called? Mark and Scott Learn to Rent. Well, we were managing up. There was a managing up thing there, but there's professionalism, there's social media. Just learn to print. Learn to print. I said to you, but I've learned to print. I actually learned Folkigan title for this. Do you remember? I don't know. Yankee, you probably do remember because you're incredibly old. You remember when you would get a printer? Wow.
So here's how old I am. Do you remember buying a printer? And this is where I can't remember like what day it is. or what my to-do list is, but now I'm going into the archives. Remember when you would buy an Epson FX80 printer and they would give you a manual of all the control codes and you would open up Paperclip or whatever and you would enter in, here's the control code to turn...
turn on bold and turn off bold. So your printer driver was you typing control codes manually for three pages. If the printer didn't work, it was your fault. I was bold enough to like my first. article published in a computer magazine was how to dump your Apple II high-res screen image onto an Epson dot matrix printer. Oh my god. I can hear it going like ding. So good. Yeah. Those were the days, man. They were. You wrote your own printer drivers. Using assembly language. Sigh.
That's the end. And you just walked off. I hope my Zoom's back.