Windows Insider podcast Episode 28: Troubleshooting Technology Tomorrow and Today Transcript (Music) JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast, where leaders from Microsoft and Windows Insiders discuss tech trends, careers, and innovation. I'm your host, Jason Howard. This is Episode 28, Troubleshooting Technology Tomorrow and Today. But first, if you're not yet a Windows Insider, head over to our website, insider.windows.com, and register for free. Insiders get access to upcoming Windows features before they're released to the public, plus exclusive opportunities to experience all Microsoft has to offer. All right, on to the show! This month, we're digging into how you can take a deep dive into troubleshooting and we'll also look at how Microsoft is doing some troubleshooting of its own in the space of journalism. First up, we'll be joined by Ben Rudolph, the director of Microsoft News Labs, to take a look at how Microsoft is focused on driving solutions through technology to empower journalists, publishers, and consumers. From tech training to data journalism to AI innovations, his team is working hard to support and transform the field of journalism. Then, we'll be joined by Christopher Caulfield and Emma Saboureau to dig into how we're troubleshooting within Windows and how you as Windows Insiders can make the most of the tools available to start troubleshooting your own devices. Without further delay, let's get on with the show. First up on this month's episode, we're welcoming Ben Rudolph. Welcome to the podcast, Ben. Thank you so much for being here. BEN RUDOLPH: Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me. JASON HOWARD: So, for the listeners out there who may not know who you are, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do here at Microsoft? BEN RUDOLPH: Yeah, sure, so my name is Ben Rudolph. A lot of you know me as Ben the PC guy on Twitter. I think I connect with a number of you already. And I'm currently the managing director for Microsoft News Labs. News Labs is a relatively new part of the company, and our job is to help build solutions using the Microsoft stack that can help advance the art, science, and business of journalism. 1 Windows Insider podcast Episode 28: Troubleshooting Technology Tomorrow and Today Transcript I've been at the company for 12 years. Started in 2008 as the enterprise PR lead for Windows Vista, which was a pretty tough job. JASON HOWARD: I'm about to say, you're stretching back there a little bit. BEN RUDOLPH: Exactly, a little bit, dating myself. I worked on the feature device program, which is really about, like how we bring our best PCs to market and really showcase the world of Windows PCs, which is where I got the nickname, Ben the PC guy stuff. A lot of you know me from the work I did on Windows Phone on the Smoked by Windows Phone campaign and the Windows Phone challenge, which feels like yesterday, it was actually a number of years ago. And then after I left phone, I went over to what's called CDS, consumer and device sales, where I led our worldwide retail experience team. If you think about anything that you see, hear, do, or touch while you're shopping for or selling Microsoft technology in a store, like a Best Buy or a Dixon's or a Fnac or Yodobashi, my team designed it and built it. And then about two years ago, I came over to take on this challenge. JASON HOWARD: Wow. That is quite the storied history you've got. BEN RUDOLPH: Yeah, I've-I’ve been around. I've got a lot of miles on the odometer here at Microsoft. JASON HOWARD: And it seems almost like you've reinvented yourself a couple times. BEN RUDOLPH: A little bit. You know, I don't think I could have done any of the subsequent jobs without the previous jobs, and I've loved every single one of them. And being in coms is really interesting, because you get to really think about deep storytelling in a multitude of different altitudes, right? How you can convince people that we have the best position in the market, that we have the best products, why it's going to make their life better. You can really start thinking about these big issues, how you wrap a story around it. Windows Phone was a blast, because we built a thing that turned into this global experiential marketing platform. It-it kind of—I loved it, because it gave everybody who was a Windows Phone fan like me a set of demos that they could use at—what I call the “backyard barbeque” conversation. You're standing around, and you had your Windows Phone, and all your friends had iPhones or Androids. And you could say, “No, no, this thing is great, let me show you why.” And it was like that, taking that idea, that mission of empowerment and really bringing it down to every single consumer that had a phone in their pocket. 2 Windows Insider podcast Episode 28: Troubleshooting Technology Tomorrow and Today Transcript Retail was a blast because I got to do it at scale. It wasn't just the one-to-one conversation, we were selling in tens of thousands of stores around the world, hundreds of thousands of retail pros, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of customers. So, you got to take that empowerment and that idea of helping people connect with technology to fundamentally make their day and their life better, and you just got to do it, you know, in 190 countries around the world and hundreds of languages. It was—it was a blast. And here, we get to—my role in News Labs, we get to work on something that's critical to all of us, which is empowering journalists to tell the stories that move the world forward. JASON HOWARD: So, kind of like taking a leg up from there, right? So MSN.com, right, no doubt some of our listeners are familiar with that page. Back in 2014, it was redesigned to become powered by Microsoft News, which essentially was leveraging existing content from partners and trusted organizations. So, can you tell us a little bit more about Microsoft News, why it's a priority for the company, and then what it represents in our broader set of Microsoft goals? BEN RUDOLPH: Yeah, sure, so Microsoft News is really a superset of all of the news experiences that show up across the company. So, if you think about the newsfeed, for example, if you have an Android phone, you use the Microsoft Launcher, you have that ability to add a news pane, like a panel. That's Microsoft News. MSN is Microsoft News. If you think about the work we're doing with Bing News, that's all tied together as part of the same kind of macro-level thing. And then you think about some of the distribution partners we have, you actually get Microsoft News in places that you didn't even know you get Microsoft News. So for example, if you have an Amazon Fire device—an Amazon, like Fire tablet—and you open up their Silk browser, you get news. It's actually Microsoft News. JASON HOWARD: Really? Okay. BEN RUDOLPH: Yeah, it's powered by us. If you are riding on a train in Switzerland, they have little seatback entertainment things, and you get news feeds—it's actually Microsoft News. If you go into Pan Cafe, it's an internet cafe chain in southeast Asia, when you log onto the browser, you get a news feed. That's Microsoft News. So, we're actually in a lot of places, but the Microsoft News brand is not a brand that people are deeply familiar with. They're very deeply familiar with MSN, which is kind of the core—the core product and really like the-the center of gravity for everything we do for news. But between all of those channels, we actually reach about 500 million people 3 Windows Insider podcast Episode 28: Troubleshooting Technology Tomorrow and Today Transcript in, I want to say about 140 countries we have meaningful market share, and about 35 different languages. So we're actually, according to ComScore, which takes a look at relevance and trustworthiness of news and all those things, kind of like ranks news sites, according to ComScore, Microsoft News is actually the number one news provider in the world, which is kind of like this really interesting secret because we talk a lot about Windows, and about Office, and about Surface, and Xbox, we don't really talk a lot about Microsoft News, but it's an incredibly influential part of the business that literally hundreds of millions of people in almost every country in the world are looking at every single day. JASON HOWARD: Like, as you're sitting here saying this, right, the-the scale of it is kind of sinking in. It's easy for me to think about the scale of the Insider population from those out there that are participating in the Windows Insider Program, because we are in every country around the world. Yes, we have Insiders in Antarctica. It's crazy, but it actually happened. I’m super awesomely excited about that. But when you start getting into numbers like this and you think about the scale and the relationships that have to be built to enable something like this, and then the scale at which is required to deliver this type of thing, like it’s-it's a bit mind-boggling.