 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Good morning everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. 26,000 people from around the world have descended onto the Orlando, here in Orlando for Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Christina Warren. She is the Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about your work as a Senior Cloud Advocate, and you are responsible for a lot of the video strategy of Channel 9. Yeah, I am. So we have a Cloud Advocacy team within Developer Relations, and most of our advocates are focused on either kind of a specific technology area or a specific audience. I'm a little bit different in that I am kind of a, I call myself kind of a jack-of-all-trades master of none, so I go across a lot of different technology areas, but I look at our video content and our video strategy, so we have Channel 9 and our YouTube channel, Microsoft Developer, and some of our other channels, and I think about what are the types of stories we want to tell, what content do we want to create for our audience, and how can we bring new developers into our ecosystem as well? So what are those stories? I mean, what are you hearing from customers, and what are you hearing also from colleagues at Microsoft that say, here's something that we need to tell the world about? Yeah, so it's really interesting. I think there are a lot of things. One, we were talking a little bit before at the show, there's kind of an insatiable, I think, need for a lot of people how to get started, whether it's getting started coding, if you're running to learn Python or learn JavaScript or something else, or even if you're just wanting to, you're starting to get into infrastructure and you're wanting to learn, okay, how do I spend things up on the cloud? How do I set things up? And having some of that base fundamentals content is really important, but I also think sometimes it's about troubleshooting, and it's about figuring out what are the new services, what can this do for me? And I think a lot of times when I think about the stories we want to tell, it's not, oh, look at how great our service or our product is, but it's, this is designed to ease my pain points and make my life as a developer or an ops person easier. Christina, in the early days, everybody thought that the promise of cloud was it was supposed to be simple and inexpensive, and unfortunately we learned it is neither of those things by default. So, how do we help people to go from, it's only 20% of applications today are in the cloud. Really simplicity is something we need to attack, and education is one of those areas that we need. Give us some examples of some of the things that your team's doing to try to help us get to the majority of environments and workloads. Yeah, so a great example is, .NET Core 3.0 launched a couple of months ago, and there's been a big push there with cloud native apps and cloud native applications. And so we have like a new video series, the cloud native show that my colleague Shane Boyer heads up, where they go through kind of all the steps of cloud native development. And what's great about this, is that you have existing .NET developers who have not, to your point, 80% of applications are still not on the cloud. So they're going from that older environment. And this is saying, you can take the skills you already have, but this is how you think about these things in this new environment. And for a lot of things when it comes to tech, if you're, the way I always think about things is the next generation of developers, they don't know a non-cloud world. They're literally cloud first. And I think that's an important thing for all of us to consider, is that the next generation of developers, the kids who are in high school now, the kids who are in college, they don't know the pain of having to provision and deal with their own servers or data centers. They've only known the cloud. And so, but that's an interesting opportunity both to create cloud first content for them, but for the people who have been using things to say, okay, what you've already been doing, there are changes, but you're not starting from zero. And you can take some of the things you already know and just move that into the new world. One of the interesting things we found this week is that when we talk about engaging with Microsoft, it's not just .NET, it's not just Windows or Azure. We talked yesterday with Donovan Brown and Scott Hanselman and it's any app, any language, your tools pulling those off together, that's really challenging from creating content out there because you're not going to recreate the entire internet there. So how do you tie in what you're doing with other resources and have that communication collaboration out there in the industry? So a lot of what I think, from what I do and what a lot of us do, I used to be a journalist. So I look at what's interesting to me and what stories I would want to tell and what things I would want to know more about. And so, Visual Studio Online, which was announced this week, massive announcement, I'm super excited about that. I'm super excited about what that means and I know that the audience is going to be excited about that. So I look at an announcement like that, I'm like, okay, what kind of content can we work with those product teams to do? What sort of tutorials would I like to build? What things would I want to know more about if I were really experienced or just getting started? And I think some other areas are, for instance, Windows subsystem for Linux too. WSL2 will be coming out in the future. That's a great opportunity for people who are both familiar with Linux and might not be familiar with Linux to kind of get started in using Windows as their development platform. And so when I see trends like that happening or things around containers, Kubernetes, containerize all the things, I start thinking about, okay, what are the opportunities? What are cool examples? What would I want to see as somebody who's tuning in? That's what I always try to think about is, what would, I try to think about it like a journalist. What would an interesting story be to tell from my perspective? What would I want to know more about? And then we can go from there and work with the product groups and work with some of the other teams to make sure that we can tell those stories. So I'm curious, as a former journalist, you spent a decade as a digital editor and reporter and commentator. What made you want to make the leap to big tech? You know, okay, so media is not in a great place right now. So that's number one. Number two, you know, I was very technical as a journalist and it was interesting because when I made that transition, I then had to really actually shore up my tech skills. And I said, okay, I have some of the basics but I really need to like double down and invest in myself and invest in learning more. But I always, even when I was a journalist, I loved telling developer stories and I loved advocating for developers. Even when I was working at really mainstream places like Mashable where, you know, they would send me to developer conferences and I wouldn't just go to the press things, I would want to go to the sessions and talk to the developers and find out, okay, what are you excited about? What are the opportunities you see to build things? What's coming around that has you excited? I've always loved that. And so when the opportunity presented itself for me to be able to do that at Microsoft, I was like, oh, you know, I'd never considered that before but that's really interesting and that would be an interesting way of maybe seeing if I can do something else. One of the skills that is common between what you do now and work as a journalist is breaking down this technical language and making it accessible for a wider audience, particularly at more mainstream publications. What is your advice for people in terms of how to do that? Because on this show, we have a lot of technically minded people who can really go deep in the technology. But how do you then make it accessible? What is your advice? I always try to think of who is your muse, of someone who might not know what all intricacies that are going on but is an intelligent person that can understand. So for me, I always use my mom. Now, this was easier when I was a tech journalist than it is what I do now because she understands even less what I do now but I try to think about, okay, how would I explain this to her? She doesn't need to know all of the intricacies in nitty gritty but how could I explain something to her that would be technically accurate but would get the basic idea? And I think a lot of times when it comes to breaking down content, it's just getting to the essence of what problem is this solving? What is this doing that's better or worse and how does it do it? And starting from there. And a lot of times it just takes a lot of work and you figure out as you go along what getting feedback from users, frankly, based on they might be asking more clarifying questions or maybe they'll want to know more about something or less about something else. This is confusing for me and just modulating that as you go along. Yeah, Christina, it makes me laugh actually. When I started blogging, my mother was one of the people that would read and she would say, oh yes, I heard about this cloud thing before I watched it on NPR. It's a nuanced and complicated message. I actually, I roll my eyes a little bit back at the old Microsoft to the cloud videos there because it was like it didn't resonate. It's the stories that you're telling these days. How do you balance there's the outcomes yes, we want to solve some of the great challenges and help healthcare, but underneath there's some nitty gritty developer and infrastructure things that get solved. How do you make sure there's the connections between what the products do and the outcomes? Yeah, that's really interesting. You're right, it is a challenge. I think the important thing here is not every message has to have all of those components. So you can tell different stories. You can tell one story that's just more focused on the outcome and it's just more focused on the opportunity and what's happening in healthcare. And you can have another story that might be about this is what's going on underneath that is allowing those things to happen. Yeah, do you have any favorite outcome stories from Microsoft? Gosh, you know, yesterday during Scott Hanselman's developer keynote, he was, I didn't even know about the Chipotle case study. That was so interesting to me in seeing what they're doing with the different technology. That's just the first one that comes to mind. I thought was really, really cool. I'm really excited about the opportunities we have in quantum. And I'm really excited about the opportunities in healthcare because I think we've all been to the doctor and we've seen how much IT and how much tech infrastructure could help. Not just the process of diagnosing and helping things, but just even just the minutiae of data entry and record delivery and keeping track of everything. So there are a lot of the things we've done there have been really interesting. One of the things you said is you love telling developer stories. And I'm a journalist too and I cover entrepreneurs and I feel the same way about telling entrepreneur stories. Talk about some of the common characteristics you've seen. I mean, we can't obviously generalize an entire population of people, but talk about what you have seen as sort of the common elements of their personalities and their approach to solving problems. Right, so I think it's interesting when I think about indie developers, which are a little bit different than enterprise devs, although there are some similarities. You know, you start with, and I know for me, when I first started coding, when I first started building websites and the other things, it was like for me I wanted to either solve a problem or I wanted to create something that other people could see. And so a lot of times that probably one of the more commonalities is, you know, developers, they are in many ways wanting to scratch their own itch. I wanted to do something, I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I built this myself. Found out other people were using it too and I added features to it. I mean, I think that's what's so great about open source is that people have the opportunity to collaborate either contributing code or even doing bug reports or sharing ideas. And so one of the common elements is, I wanted to do something or I had a really interesting idea and I didn't see anyone else doing it. And so I just decided to build it myself. It's not that different from entrepreneurs, right? Like I see a business opportunity, I see a business I want to do, so I'm going to build it. And that's wanting to build things is probably the most common thing I see. Christina, any common conversations or things that are coming up that people that are in that show you'd like to share? Oh gosh, I mean, I think there's been so much good stuff. I mentioned Visual Studio online, which I think is really exciting because I'm really excited about being able to be on my iPad and also code. Like that's going to be really great. Also, I think the Arc stuff, the Azure Arc stuff is really interesting. The idea of being able to not just be focused on one platform, be able to control all of your infrastructure, no matter where it is, is really, really, that's a really compelling story. That's something that makes me really excited because I love to just automate and simplify things so anything that can make the life easier I think is great. As a former journalist, I'd love your thoughts on the state of news today. I know you said you got out of it because it's not a great career path, but the overreach of social media, the spread of fake news, the real and perceived media biases, I'm interested in your thoughts about where we are today, particularly as it relates to coverage of technology. It's interesting. I think in some ways, technology, for a really long time, most technology coverage was almost cheerleader-ish. You could even look back, even 20 years when the dot-com crash happened and I was in high school then, but I was following all that avidly. The after flow of that, the business press was maybe a little bit burned, but the technology press was still very much gung-ho and was still very much cheerleading. That's changed a little bit as we've started to have to grapple with some of the consequences, good and bad that happen with tech and with the internet. Right now, I almost feel like maybe we've gone a little bit over the edge a little bit more and some of the critiques are there and some of them maybe are just, it's popular to kind of be more negative, so that's been an interesting change, I think, to see. You're right though, when it comes to the spreading of misinformation or people just reading things in headlines, it's really difficult, I think, for people to find authoritative voices and things they can trust. Weirdly though, I do actually think this is an opportunity for the big tech companies to help. This is things that AI could really play a big role in. These are things that could really kind of help recognize patterns of spambots and of other things that aren't there and filter that out. But I think even when I still feel good about journalism as a medium and I still think that the press is one of the most important assets we have and even when we are going through shakier times, there are opportunities. I think that it'll find its way and honestly, I really do think that technology is one of those things that will help get the real things and the important stories out there. All right, so Christina, I guess final word is, how should people think of Microsoft in 2019? We're here to help. I think that we are a technology company that is creating the tools so that you can build and solve the problems that you need to solve. All right, that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Christina. Thank you so much for having me. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.