 So, I was at the Microsoft Build 2017 conference, and I'll talk a little bit about how this occurred. So, I do another show called a podcast with a couple co-hosts called SMLR for Sunday Morning Linux Review. So, now you gotta ask a deeper question of why is a guy who's really a big fan of Linux, which I am if you watch any of my videos and maybe I bash on Microsoft a little, doing at a build conference. Well, they invited us out there because Microsoft's actually looking to expand into new audiences. And like, this article here, Microsoft was the top open source contributor on GitHub. Are one of the biggest singular open source contributors, but they really are open sourcing a lot of things. But I was a skeptic, and as a lot of us Linux folks are. So Microsoft reached out and had us come out there for the conference, and wanted us to interview, and they set us up with some really cool people to interview. And that's all gonna be really sunny as SMLR and everything else, I'm not gonna get all the details interviews, we're gonna be releasing the full interview and we asked them some hard questions. But Microsoft really is a change company. People were joking, are they gonna change you, Tom? The other way around, I have a different view of that company. Maybe some people are saying it's extend extinguish, I don't really feel that way. The people are really passionate there. And I'll even talk a little bit about our interview with Mr. Jeffrey Snowver, who from the time he designed PowerShell wanted it to be open source. Management at the time didn't, but with San Diego taking over, there's a new manager in town. But we're talking about some of the things I see now, like their cognitive services was really cool. This actually lets you see some of the reactions of people, and it measures anger, contempt, disgust, fear. They have so many demos like this of different tools that were able to do real time. Now the bigger thing is you notice I see this Azure up here. But Microsoft's really shifting towards is not an extinguish model. They didn't give it away open source. Once you've done that, you can't just, oh no, I don't want it to be open source. Matter of fact, we even talk to developers that were talking about how some of their projects they post on GitHub were then forked by other open source. Matter of fact, some of the .NET Core was forked by Red Hat. So they open sourced it and got it all forked over. But their real goal is running on our servers, was we built these APIs right in Azure. Now if I understood correctly, they said that as much as 25% of Microsoft's revenue is starting to come from Azure. So they're really doubling down on being a code house that produces all kinds of stuff and they did decide it's going to be open source and their goal is to get you to use Azure services. And they have pricing details on how all these systems work, of course. So here's your free look at the Emotion API. Here's the Emotion API basic and Emotion API standard. It's some really neat stuff. Now Microsoft also had a lot of announcements, I'm not getting into detail on those. I mean, you can find plenty out there where you can actually open up a bash shell on Azure directly in the web interface. Pretty cool. I mean, these are things exciting for Azure because they're generally considered a Microsoft house versus this is stuff that you're going to kind of be used to with other data centers that are primarily hosting Linux. So back to a little bit of the interview with Jeffrey Snowver. He talked to us about the IoT edge and some of the stuff going on there. So it's just really neat and what this is is duplicating the Azure data center in there. Once again, I'm an open source guy and not everything Azure is open source, but Azure is running some of these open source platforms. So it was still really cool to be there and really neat seeing and learning about how all this stuff worked. And like I said, it's all going to be, we get down to hour long interviews where we dig into some of the real details that you can find in the podcast. Now this is where we take a look at like Microsoft's GitHub, but they have a massive amount of contributions here. And so what's really cool about being on the floor there was going through and seeing that, oh yeah, here's this project we're doing or this project we're doing. And then seeing that the project is on GitHub. And you're like, oh wow. So not like I can actually download and use this. And granted, they're compiling a lot of it to run for Microsoft. But I mean, the code is open source. So there are things in here you can just take and start borrowing from the code. As I understand, like the Microsoft project for .NET Core, as that was open source, that greatly helped the Mono project, which was like an open source implementation of some of the .NET. So that was really cool. And I was just comparing to like even Google. My understanding they've surpassed Google, who's looked at is seem more favorable by a lot of open source people. Reality is Google's not exactly an open source company. They're a company who does leverage a lot of open source. But based on just submission sizes, you see a lot of activity with Microsoft even more so than Google and some other companies. This was kind of a cool thing we've seen, which was their new design. I will say it looks cool. This was not as much open source, but it was still neat to see. This was their whole, we're going to design the interface differently and make Windows 10 look really fancy and cool. It's nice to see where they're going with this, with all this 3D technology. And like it just creating better interfaces with this. Pretty neat stuff. Not a Windows 10 user, don't plan on becoming a Windows 10 user ever. But it's kind of neat to see because I'm used to this with even like KDE, Neon Project and how cool some of that stuff looks. And Microsoft's finally kind of to me catching up to some of it. There was also a lot of demos of things that Google's been doing for a while like their translation. Their enhancement to translation was, we can do it real time in PowerPoint. So you can now have a PowerPoint with multiple languages. I'm kind of like, cool, I guess, I don't know. Can we kill PowerPoint? Can we make things more interactive and video and more human? But I guess if there's businesses out there and they want to communicate multiple languages PowerPoint, you can do that now. Now, I did think this story remix system was kind of novel. This is Microsoft's system that they're introducing with the fall creators update that allows for kind of video editing crowd source. So each person can capture different things and then it can be reassembled. So each person can contribute and it's kind of fluid like this. I mean, I didn't try this. They were showing these, of course, polished demos. But the concept is it's going to use their intelligence system to be able to make editing easier. I mean, we know how to cut all the pixels around an object, but having a system that doesn't automatically, it takes all the tasking out of it. So that was interesting. The other one was their introduction of some of these new VR headsets, optical tracking, and these are the new VR controllers, trigger controllers. Now I got to demo some of the VR stuff there with the HoloLens. And it's pretty cool. I mean, they really have come a long way with a lot of that. And it was real fun to play with. And they've changed it. I mean, it's all about being called mixed reality now. They aren't really referring to it as AI, but it's all, I'm sorry, not AI, but augmented reality, AR. They're everything they're going, it's mixed reality. That's the term that Terry Meyerson was using when he was up on the stage. But it was a really fun experience at there. And talking to the employees, being on the floor and interviewing them and stuff, I was like, wow. I mean, there is a noted feeling I got from them. They're really excited about the open source things. The emotion from them was like, especially, man, he was great with Jeff Stover. I mean, the guys like, look, from day one, I wanted this to be an open source. And so seeing that was really wild. He was really passionate about it. So he was nervous about it being open source. He's like, good, this is what I've been doing since day one. So let's open source all this and bring this, bring PowerShell to the masses. And all of the other stuff they do. So they're really changed at Microsoft. It's not that they changed me. I really feel a strong change came from the company, which is really impressive. I'm not switching to Windows because they're not open sourcing that. But it doesn't mean that seeing all the stuff that they've contributed on GitHub and a lot of the things they're pushing isn't highly relevant. I mean, this is really good stuff here. I love to see the change in the company. It's not like there was the OS war of us versus them. Now it's more, they realize data center services. Someone's got to run the AI systems on some type of high end server. Well, Microsoft's making sure that their goal is to be the platform to do that. But then they're going to be more of a code house that keeps putting out all these cool things. Oh yeah, by the way, they also run great on Azure. But they're open source and you can do what you want with them. So it's interesting. It's definitely got change in dynamic of how I pictured the company. But the interviews were awesome. The people were great. We did ask them hard questions. Like, hey, remember when Bill Gates hated all types of free software? And oh, yeah, do you remember when Balmer said Linux was cancer? How's that going? We didn't really pull them up on it. We're always polite to people. But we really want to know these questions like, what was the dynamic? What was the feeling of the company that changed over time like this? And that impression I walked away with was that it was great. Like, things came back so much better. I feel better about the company. Like, wow, they're not trying to extend, extinguish, they're changing their business model. The dynamic there seems to be changing. That doesn't mean that I still don't have my reservations. It doesn't mean that, hey, is Microsoft actively pursuing maybe some action against something in the open source community? Probably. I'm hoping all that just kind of fades away. You do have people who have been there for 20 years. And just because you changed management, doesn't mean 100% of the people go, I agree with the new guy. Some are going, well, when Bill was here, I'm sure that's kind of a conversation that goes, he would have not allowed this. So you probably have some of those people given pushback. But the overall company and everyone we interviewed, just randomly wandering on the floor there, they were people really dedicated to this open source. They really liked it. They have this new generation developers. And that's what the feeling was. So that's just kind of a quick summary of my experience to build. You'll be able to check out the interviews. We're going to release them over the next few weeks on smlr.us, which is Sunday Morning Lennox Review. And thanks. If you like the content here, like and subscribe.