Episode 191 – Fortnite, Foldables, and Azure AD, Oh My!

- Welcome to episode 191 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast, recorded live on August 14th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben completely derail Scott from our plan topics, by bringing up things such as lawsuits in the technology space, the Microsoft duo and the DataFlex rename. Then we wrap up the show by talking about the newly released public preview feature, assigning groups to Azure AD roles. Record, recording all the things.

- All of them, all the time,

- Including Scott in his Batman shirt.

- That's right.

- Hey Scott, should we start doing video? Should we start actually putting the video of this out on YouTube?

- We could.

- Or should we start live streaming this to YouTube? We've talked about this in the past, but I don't know that we've ever talked about it publicly and I just kind of suckered you in out of the blue.

- We can do whatever you want Ben, I'm here to support you.

- Yeah, you're here to support me. I don't know, we should come up with something to do. We should do, maybe we should start by just posting the videos. And then if we get ambitious stream because streaming always brings complications.

- Yeah, we know how that goes.

- Yeah. And then we can add it, although to be fair, neither one of us are probably gonna edit video. We'll just throw like an intro out on there and an outro on there and say, "Here, YouTube have fun with this."

- Something like that. How better would it be, if we, could we embed a video in a video.

- We could have the inception of podcasts, right?

- Yeah.

- I have a TV back here, maybe I can put the video of us. Oh, there, there's the TV. I could raise it up, put a video of us on there and have the whole inception effect.

- I mean, most of it's gonna be just me with a coffee cup in front of my face.

- Whatever, man makes it that way every once in a while too. So I have a question for you, Scott, the junior you can confuse pear logos and Apple logos.

- Well, yes, if you've ever watched Nickelodeon show, you would know this.

- Yeah, my kids aren't, we haven't introduced them to Nickelodeon yet.

- No, it would have been like Nickelodeon when you were a kid.

- Oh. And you're expecting me to remember that. I didn't have Nickelodeon when I was a kid either we didn't pay for cable. My parents are Dutch, aka cheap. So we never had cable.

- Well, we played outside.

- In the way back when in all Nickelodeon shows, all Apple products would have a pear logo on them.

- Got it. Yeah, I don't remember that. But this is not related to Nickelodeon's pear, Apple is actually suing a company of five employees because they're green, obviously pear logo can get confused with Apple's black Apple logo. I mean we can throw a link to like the image in the screenshots. They look absolutely nothing alike and people are furious at Apple, which understandably so this is a little bit of a ridiculous lawsuit.

- Yeah, I gotta pick the brands.

- You gotta protect the fruit. I've actually heard Apple have sued several companies whenever somebody comes out with another fruit logo, they just sue them. I think Apple thinks they own all the fruit or something, who knows, that's my random news for the day.

- That is fairly random.

- We could talk about lawsuits all day long today, cause there's another interesting one that hit yesterday, that you had mentioned.

- That I had mentioned?

- That you had mentioned wasn't it yesterday? with Epic games is suing Apple.

- Well, Epic is suing everybody. So there's a little bit of a, if you play Fortnite and lots and lots and lots of people, play Fortnite, I am very bad at Fortnite. I don't play it every day. I'm very bad at it. And you know generally go in and die quickly and then go with, this is not the game for me, but occasionally I come back to it because it's on all the devices and you know, it's a little bit of a time waster. So if you play Fortnite you're probably, you're probably aware of this, but if you don't play Fortnite, Fortnite is a super duper big game, right? It's hugely popular and it's available on all sorts of platforms, on certainly Apple's app store, it's available in Google play, it's on PC, it's on Mac. If there's a device out there with a screen that can run it, it's basically on it and ready to go. Within Fortnite, like many other games today, it's a free game to play, but you can buy virtual items within it, using virtual dollars or Vbox. And Fortnite came out with an update where they were giving a 20% discount off of Vbox, if you bought them through basically Fortnite's payment processing engine or Epic's payment processing engine over your app store of choice, so normally on both Google and Apple for in app purchases within games, you pay that 30% overhead to the app store provider. And they act as the payment processor and any kind of subscriptions or things would go through them. And ultimately not back to kind of the, you know, the company that was perhaps making the product like Epic in this case. Well, Epic, like I said, they pushed an update, which they did in a very interesting way. It wasn't an actually an update to the app. So it wasn't like you went into your app store of choice and you saw, Oh, there's new version of Fortnite, and it comes with these features. They basically shadow pushed it. So it kinda didn't go through the regular review process on either side for Apple or Google and it presented two prices. It said, "Hey, here's the price you pay in the app store, "$10 or come and buy your Vbox from us at a 20% discount." And they had both buttons in the app, so effectively you could do an online purchase through their own payment processing engine. And you know, they would still take their overhead and kind of do whatever they needed to do there. So long and short of it is that skirts a bunch of rules, whether those rules are right and wrong is kind of a whole different thing that, you know, they're not paying that 30% cut to the app store that is providing that payment processing functionality to them. So Apple removed them very quickly. So if you already have the app on your device, you still have the app on your device, but if you delete the app or if you were a new user coming in, you cannot delete the app right now. There's kind of like if you think about like Apple being able to remove things from, or kind of control distribution of apps, there's really three levers they could pull here, they could say, "Okay, I'm not gonna do anything, "and we're gonna let Epic continue forward with Fortnite "with this model that probably wasn't gonna happen." There's this second method where they can effectively remove it from the app store and remove it from search, so if somebody new is coming in, they can't download it. And now Epic cannot push any updates to the binaries for that application as well. There also would've been a third option, which is nuclear option, which would have been revoke Epic's developers certificate and then make Fortnite stop working on everyone's devices. And Apple kind of chose the middle of the road one there, Google also a couple of hours after Apple, went ahead and pulled Epic out of their store as well. So now Epic, who makes Fortnite, has filed lawsuits against both Apple and Google, that they are by all accounts, not very likely to win at all. You know, they're choosing to take this stand, which, you know, whatever you think of that, the 30% cut and everything else, you know, Epic's got a little bit of money to play with and, you know, they're willing to roll the dice on some lawsuits and things.

- Yeah, it'll be interesting because Apple's also getting sued in the EU for that same 30% cut policy.

- There's arguments to be made there, if you go, I don't know if you've had a chance to read through any of the, kind of the briefs around what Epic has going on, but effectively their argument in the Apple lawsuit at least boils down to the app store is anti-competitive. And they're kind of making the argument that they should be able to have their own app store on Apple devices and not just for their game. Like they don't want to just push their game out, they want to host another app store on Apple devices and make all that stuff work and come through. So obviously if Epic was able to do that, they would probably stand to make on the order of, you know, billions of dollars, if they were large enough and had enough developers, pushing apps into their store, but that also requires a bunch of platform support from someone like Apple. Like I don't think it would be possible today to just make an alternative app store without Apple's blessing, cause how would you get the app store onto your Apple device? You'd either have to download it from Apple's app store to begin with, which then it's subject called the you know, sand boxing and restrictions, or it would have to be preloaded and that just ain't gonna happen.

- Yeah, it's all really interesting because it's all geared around the anti-competitive stuff, and I mean, it gets that applicant has some monopoly, but if you're going to choose to put it on iOS devices, like if you're going to choose to put something on my website or my platform, you're kind of going to have to adhere to the policies that I have for my platform. And again, you can't do another app store. You can't do in app purchases, maybe 30% is a big cut, but then just don't put it on there, I guess. I don't know.

- There's a line in here where, you know, certainly you can be idealistic and you know, your feelings about these things can fall one way or the other right? Does Epic, should they be paying this 30% cut? Does Apple or Google deserve 30%, is 15% a better number, is 0% a better number? Like what is that? And what does that look like? But ultimately like as presented and with what's going on by most analysis I've seen, anti competitive in this case does not equal illegal. You know, it's not monopolistic or kind of anything else which some of the EU stuff with Apple and some of the recent, you know, senate inquiries and committee hearings and things they've had here in the US have been more along the kind of anti anti-monopoly train.

- Yeah, who knows it'll be interesting to watch.

- Well, I mean like most things, this will probably be over in like two weeks.

- And reach some kind of settlement.

- Well, Epic will realize they're losing millions of dollars because their app isn't in the store.

- So that's what happened last time this happened, cause this has gone through kind of in the past and a similar motion where Epic pulled itself out of Google Play and opted to just do side loading or distribution through alternative app stores on Android. So like Samsung's app store or things like that. And ultimately like within like a couple of weeks, they came right back into the Google fold and the Google store.

- Yeah, which is interesting so if they've tried it on Google and it didn't work, why do they want to try to do it again on Apple?

- I don't think its about

- You always wanna try and do it, right? Like that is a capitalist, that's a capitalistic behavior to want to earn more, earn a better share of revenue and not have to pay a cut to somebody else. So it's not about not wanting to try it, you always want to try it. It's about timing when you try it. So there's this confluence of things going on in Europe and particularly those committee hearings that happened in the US, cause one of the most interesting things to come out of those committee hearings wasn't necessarily the testimony of, you know, Jeff Bezos and Tim cook and Mark Zuckerberg. The most interesting thing to come out of those committee hearings was probably all the evidentiary things. So all the emails and PowerPoint presentations and things at the house committees released. And now you've had folks like Epic going through and saying like, "Ooh, there might be some tidbits "in here that in some certain lenses or, you know, "with the right judge, could be construed to go this way."

- And they figured it's worth the money to try.

- Why not try? Yeah, I mean, Epic's hugely successful and they can sit probably for a couple of weeks and ride it out.

- Right, well, cause like you said, they're probably still getting money in from everybody that's already playing it on other platforms that has installed, they're just not gonna get their influx of new users is probably gonna slow down some.

- Yeah, wow. Well, I suppose we'll see where it goes. I think it's certainly part of that moment too, so to kind of make it, not just an Epic thing, there's also this current and kind of change going on right now, where there's a decent pushback against app store policies, particularly from Apple around things like gaming services. So Microsoft, they have their project X cloud service, effectively being able to stream games from the cloud and know very similar to Stadia from Google and things like that. At least like, like an operating principle. So Apple bans and pertinent don't ban them, but per current app store guidelines and the rules that they abide by for developers to build against, you can't release an alternative thing like X cloud or Stadia on the app store. So Apple's really kind of like standing out there as a just a loner kind of with that policy, which is why you see Microsoft and Google, both pushing so heavily like Google, obviously for Android, right, they make it, but even Microsoft kind of pitching in and you know, you want the best experience for X cloud, come over to Android.

- Yes. Speaking of Android and Microsoft, I forgot this news. Well, should we pivot into Microsoft related stuff now? Well, non gaming related stuff?

- Sure.

- Microsoft has a new device out there Scott, the Microsoft duo that--

- They do.

- It was announced over a year ago now. I remember when they made the announcement, everybody was like, it's crazy that they're pre announcing it this far in advance. And I think there were a bunch of leaks, and they kind of had to. And it finally became available for pre order a day or two ago. And I went and looked at it and I said, "Nope, not gonna pre order that." It's interesting. It's an Android device. It is and we'll put links to it so you can go look at it. It's foldable. So it's too, I mean, it's kind of like, was it the galaxy fold, where you have two different screens you can fold them, collapse them together. It's two, 5.8 at screens and when it's fully unfolded, it can act as a single 8.3 inch screen I believe. Or the multiple five inch screens. So realistically, when it's folded up, it's about the size of an iPhone, when it's unfolded, it's roughly the size of an iPad mini. And it is a phone. So it's available on all your major, at least US carriers, AT and T Verizon, T-Mobile, the price is what got me on this one. So they have 128 gigabyte model and a 256 gigabyte model for it's like 1400 and 1500 respectively, which is more than iPhones and iPads and frankly a lot of laptops. So I don't know a lot of, I don't know, I don't know what the market is. I'm guessing they're shooting for execs or want something bigger, but still want a phone that they can put in their pocket. I can tell you the market is not me.

- Well, I, so certainly it's an Android device, right. So there is that out there, compared to other foldables that have come out for over the last year, it is not like other foldables that are out there. So it's specifically in, in context to like screen and folding. So if you think about like maybe like the Samsung galaxy fold, or even some of the smaller phone devices, like the Z flip Motorola razor, things like that, they are continuous screens. And in this case it is two separate screens. So that does mean that you have bezels in between them. So when you say like open it up and it's the size of an iPad mini. Yes, but it's got the kind of bezel going down the center of it. So you'll never have a, you know, you wouldn't pull up like a YouTube video or a movie or something like that across both screens at the same time and it kind of like full screen. So what Microsoft has done is they've got kind of a custom, custom launcher and running through on this device where they've got a design paradigm, a paradigm where they talk about things like if you watch the press briefing and they go through quite a bit, you know, when you take some apps, you should be able to like snap them side to side, or if you take an app and you go and snap it to like both screens at once. So you take like Outlook as an app and you snap it. Well, I should have the pain of my folders over on the left hand side. And over on the right hand side, I should have the reading pane now. Or if I snap it to just one side, I should have a pane of folders and then, you know, I would select or touch and drill into that next level and then have a breadcrumb to go ahead and get me out and back to back to the top. It's interesting from maybe like a phone multitasking perspective, it'll probably be a little bit more solid. Like it looks to just be more solid being that it's, you know, metal chassis and everything, than potentially something like a galaxy fold, but who knows until it comes out and lands in people's hands. As you said, the price is high. I don't know who's out there and saying, I'm going to spend $1,400 on the 128 gig and not just boot in the extra a hundred dollars and get the 256, like, yeah, it does take you up to 1500.

- If you're spending that much money already, what's an extra hundred bucks to have storage?

- So I would just say that, like, when you say that's expensive and out of line with current pricing, it's not at all for what people are releasing today. Like Samsung had their unpacked event last week, and some of the new hero devices from Samsung are made out of plastic and they cost upwards of a thousand dollars. Like that's just, it's where phones are at. And like that's where flip devices are at. Like, if you were going to go buy a clamshell phone, like a Samsung Galaxy Z flip, that's a $1,500 device. So would you rather have one that's more business oriented or consumer oriented? That's a little bit of a rationalization point that you as a consumer have to make. I would also like the thing that stuck out to me about the duo was yes they announced it a year ago. Over the course of that year, you know, there wasn't like a hard line spec for what was gonna be in it for processor, RAM, screen resolution, all those kinds of things. Now that it's out and it's released and it's running in manufacturing and you can pre order it and, you know, theoretically have it in your hands on September 10th. It's to a certain degree last year specs, for this year's prices. And that's kind of a tough pill to swallow, especially if you're in like that high end Android device where specs matter right. Certain consumers may buy based on a refresh rate on a screen and the amount of RAM on that device, the ability to maybe have removable storage, you know, whatever it happens to be and certainly processor as well is a big driving factor there.

- Yeah. Yeah. I'm really curious to see once people get their hands on it and how long it goes out there and it's yeah, from the price, I probably just not devices I tend to look at. compared to the iPhone.

- And you could say was the trio for you? What's the black Jack for you, right? Like, like what, what was that like business oriented that, or was a Blackberry for you? You know, like I never thought I was going to be a person who would like Blackberries until I had a corporate job where my business phone that I was provided by my employer was a Blackberry and I loved that thing. Like that was a great little awesome device. And it got me into some of more of those corporate oriented devices. Like I bought a trio just to buy a trio and try it out, cause I was enamored, you know, with having a stylist on the thing and being able to write and jot notes and things like that. So it might find a niche. Is it gonna be like the thing that crushes Samsung Galaxy notes or, you know, gets rid of iPads?

- No, probably not.

- Right. I think I probably see it's play probably more than that executive space, because look at the number of executives that do 90% of the work from their phone, because frankly they're never actually at their desk or at a computer because they're running from meeting to meeting, to meeting. This gives you the ability to quickly throw it in your pocket and have a little bit more real estate for, like you said, going through out emails. Or I think some of the marketing videos even had teams calls where you can have the video on one screen and you can kind of have it, hold it sideways, flip it up in a laptop clamshell like look and still have your video and then have some meeting notes or something on the bottom screen. So I think that would be my guess as why they're targeting. Is executives not necessarily your consumer device market. That's what I see. I don't know, we'll see, once it comes out.

- Yeah, and I would encourage you, like if you're into technology, whether you think you're like gonna be into this device or not, Microsoft published their press briefing, it's out on YouTube. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's 30, 35 minutes, you know, skip the first five minutes and kind of the raw, maybe start a little bit in understand and take a look at where they're going with kind of that UI paradigm for some of those things on there, because that's always interesting. Just kind of see where companies are going in that lens. And they have a really cool kind of hardware segment at the end about how they designed the hinge and some of the internals. And if you're into kind of the machinations of how these things come together from an industrial design perspective, that that's all pretty cool to see as well.

- Nifty, other Microsoft news, Scott we were wrong a week or two ago or the last two weeks when we talked about DataFlex and DataFlex Pro okay.

- Well, I was not wrong. We were not wrong. Potentially somebody at Microsoft was wrong.

- So DataFlex is no more, DataFlex has died and been resurrected as Project Oakdale, shortest name ever, except not really because I think Project Cortex technically had a shorter name than Project Oakdale because I think Project Cortex is official name only slipped out once or twice, but it was announced publicly as Project Cortex. This one at least had DataFlex for like a week before they got sued over trademarks and it had to go to Project Oakdale. Yeah, interesting, so if you have listened to our previous episodes, and you're going to show notes or links that had DataFlex in the URL, or you're searching for DataFlex, those are all broken. Microsoft didn't even redirect the DataFlex URLs. They just renamed them all to Project Oakdale URLs. So all of those get four fours go search for Project Oakdale or replace certain words in the URL with Project Oakdale instead of DataFlex or DataFlex Pro. And you can go find all the blog posts and all the information about what was formerly known as DataFlex Pro.

- Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes. There was a post on the power apps blog on August 11th where they, you know, at that point it was kind of post DataFlex to Oakdale kerfuffle. And it walks through kind of some of those and on all the links are updated in there because it's officially on the Oakdale train.

- Yup, and the product is still coming. You're still gonna get, it sounds like nothing has changed. They'll still get your pro version, CDS is going to end up being something you'll have the free version that works with teams. They just have to go back and find a name that they aren't going get sued about.

- The joy of naming products.

- Yes, that is always fun. Anything else you want to talk about? That was kind of anticlimactic wasn't it?

- There's always more to talk about. So outside of like all the lawsuits and things like that, that are happening

- This seems like the last episode.

- Yeah, thanks for turning it into that. I would take a look just to kind of at least bring in one interesting thing that's out there to kind of look at this week. If you're playing in a M 365, kind of Azure land is Microsoft is in preview releasing the capability to assign groups to you, Azure AD roles. So this is currently available for Azure AD groups. So specifically cloud groups and only for Azure AD built in roles, not for custom roles. So if you have an on premises security group and you're performing directory synchronization, you cannot assign that security group to an Azure AD role, nor can you create a custom role and then assign that to a group. But if you've got built in roles like, you know, help desk administrators.

- Global admins, sharepoint admin.

- Yup, those all apply. Which is like, man, this has been a long time coming to have some of this stuff ready to go, but it should greatly simplify that landscape of kind of principle to elevation management and maybe simplify workloads through things like privileged identity management, or if you don't have access to PIM, cause it's all in Azure AD EP2 then, you know, here's a way to go ahead and make that happen. It is a gated feature right now, so it is gated to Azure AD premium P1 licensing. So you do have an entitlement requirement in there to make that happen and kind of set it up. But it certainly, if you have Azure AD P1 and you manage things like this today, cause if you have P1 you don't have P2, so you don't have PIM and you're managing these things as kind of like one offs and you'd like to have a better way to do it. I would go take a look at this one, and follow it.

- It like a preview. I have nothing official on this. I feel like this is one that would like stick in P1 for preview, just to limit everybody from trying it. And then maybe once it hits GA, I could see this kind of being downgraded to everybody, having it because they did that with, was it group based licensing or dynamic groups? There was another group related feature that started as a premium license. And then later rolled into that. Everybody kind of wants to hit GA.

- Yeah, you've seen things like that with, with group based licensing. And you know, again, this is preview, so there's potentially limitations there and you might go like, "Oh, I really needed it to do X, Y, or Z, "and it doesn't do that." Well, it's a preview. Give your feedback. And enroll in that program and make that happen. Like one thing that I could see being super beneficial would be having Azure AD roll assignments, be applicable to not only custom groups or Azure AD cloud groups, but specifically things that can only be in the cloud, like cloud dynamic groups. But unfortunately these are only available to user assigned groups right now.

- Yeah, I am in one thing they don't say, and I see a question in here and it's related to it is how this would work, if you have nested AD groups too, like if you assign it at the top level group, will it trickle down to all the nested AD groups? Or how will that work? So things to go play with and test out while it's in preview.

- Well because it's gated too, and it only works with, with Azure AD groups today and not with a synchronized group from on premises. There's no concept of nesting in those anyway.

- Why was that thing that you could do nested, security groups and Azure AD?

- Unless they added something at some point, I totally missed it.

- Or I just haven't paid that close attention and most of mine are all synced.

- That could be it. And I don't know what that'll look like, you know, when that rolls up and you know, it might be something that's always gated to, always gated to custom cloud groups and quite frankly, like that might be okay cause it's still giving you a capability that you didn't have before.

- Yep. Exactly. Very cool. That is a nice new feature. I'm glad we stuck some news in at the end, although technically some of those other lawsuit ones towards the end were fun news too. I dunno. But with that--

- You gotta work on your definition of fun,

- My definition of fun is being a nerd. I have no definition of fun. No, I don't know I'm gonna quit. I'm just going to stop talking. I think it's, I'm still on vacation. I've struggled this week, coming back from being, I mean, kind of on vacation for three weeks, I worked a little bit, but kind of getting back into the swing of it and getting motivated to dive into stuff has been a challenge the last week.

- Yeah. It's definitely a thing it's starting to drag out a little bit, you know, vacation or no vacation.

- Yes, I would say that is probably part of it too, is the whole, we can say the word, the whole COVID thing. Just never seeming to end.

- Someday.

- Yes. So with that go enjoy the rest of your Friday Scott, work hard.

- It's Friday, I'm gonna try not to work hard.

- Okay, don't work hard. Enjoy the rest of your Friday and enjoy your weekend.

- Thanks, Ben.

- All right, we'll talk to you later.