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Last month, Microsoft quietly introduced Kaizala, a free work chat app for Android phones and tablets that, honestly, looks a lot like a competitor to $3.7 billion startup Slack.

It's the latest Android app from Microsoft Garage, the company's secretive skunkworks for experimental apps.

The Google Play store description promises that Kaizala "helps you get your work done by tracking bills, jobs, location and much more - and, it's as simple as chat."

In other words, it's designed to bring all of your important information straight into a chat room with colleagues and customers alike. That's a huge part of the vision behind Slack and other work chat apps like Atlassian HipChat, and it's an area where Microsoft's existing tools are lagging.

Kaizala's existence is not especially surprising, though. It was recently reported that Bill Gates talked Microsoft out of bidding $8 billion for Slack, urging the company to instead build out its existing Skype chat and voice calling tools. 

The purpose of Microsoft Garage apps is to have a consequence-free sandbox for testing new ideas on iOS and Android. The app features that work well may find their way back into the products Microsoft actually sells, like Windows and Office 365. The ones that don't are discarded without foisting unwanted changes onto users.

It's certainly possible that Microsoft sees Kaizala as being important to the all-important Office 365 business in the future. And the early reviews from the Google Play app store are largely positive. 

But a more likely future for Kaizala involves taking whatever feedback Microsoft gathers and integrating it with Skype, as it works to stave off the threat presented by upstarts like Slack.

SEE ALSO: Bill Gates reportedly talked Microsoft out of bidding $8 billion for Slack

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We can't say it enough: Smartphone photography has gotten amazing. In fact, the little cameras on the backs of our phones have reached a point where they may not be able to get any better without a serious redesign of the whole phone.

But not all devices are created equal, and it's our mission to help you choose the best one. 

You may notice that our list differs significantly from some of the sites the purport to do scientific rankings; these results weren't gathered in a lab. Instead, we went out our front door to figure out exactly how these cameras perform against one another in real world conditions. Their success or failure depended on three things: the quality of their lenses, the quality of their sensors, and the smarts locked up in their autofocusing/exposing brains.

Here are the best smartphone cameras in the world.

5. Sony Xperia Z5

The Sony Xperia Z5 was the first new Android flagship released in 2016, and it has its fans. Sony has a good reputation in the smartphone camera business, and DXOMark claims this one's among the best in the world.

When it came out in early February, ahead of the other 2016 flagships, it was among the better Android cameras yet released. However, we strongly disagree with the high ratings from DXOMark and other sites.

The Sony Xperia Z5 wants very badly to be an excellent smartphone camera. Sony can boast some impressive specs for its flagship device: 23 megapixels and a 0.03-second autofocus sound pretty impressive. Sony calls them "revolutionary" in its advertising.

But in reality, this is the most disappointing of all this year's flagship phones. Chasing unnecessarily high megapixel counts off a cliff can ruin a device; the more pixels you squeeze onto a sensor of the exact same size, the more you risk degrading their quality. The Xperia Z5 tends to overexpose shots and blow out highlights and shadows. Its f/2.3-aperture lens lets in less light than any other camera on this list, and the autofocus time wasn't even close to 0.03 seconds in our experience.

(Aperture refers to the width of the hole in the lens through which light can pass. Lower numbers mean bigger holes, more light, and nice blurry backgrounds.)

The Z5 is a fine phone, and it's better than most older phones when it comes to photography. But there's better options out there.

$468

4. LG G5

LG seems to love running with good ideas before it's thought them all the way through.

The G5 is the first smartphone to feature two cameras for different focal lengths, putting it at the front of an inevitable trend. It also offers modular accessories like the Cam Plus to improve your shooting. If smartphone cameras are going to leep getting better, they're going to need to function more like DSLRs, with several sensors and lenses for different situations. So conceptually, the G5 is a little bit brilliant.

But in practice it doesn't quite get there. LG's decision to make the second lens extra-wide turns it into a bit of a gimmick, the 16-megapixel, f/1.8 main camera can't stand up to other smartphones in our tests, and the Cam Plus didn't work when we tried it.

$650

3. HTC 10

Any other year, the brand-new HTC 10 would have had a good run at the top of this list. Its f/1.8-aperture lens produces an excellent look and texture. The 12.1-megapixel sensor has a great dynamic range (the range of highlight and shadow detail it can capture in one shot). And the autofocus is fairly zippy. In fact, on a pure hardware level it outclasses the No. 2 camera on our list.

However, this is the year of truly astonishing smartphone cameras. And the HTC's minor flaws keep it locked in the third spot on this list: Its dynamic range doesn't quite match the best smartphone on this list, and left to its own devices it tends to overexpose images more than our top two picks.

That said, if you're the kind of photographer who adjusts the exposure before each shot, this may be a better option than No. 2 on account of its superior glass and sensor.

$700 (pre-order)

A security update at BT Internet backfired on Tuesday — redirecting many customers' emails to a random inbox belonging to someone called Steve.

A BT Internet customer got in touch with Business Insider to let us know that this afternoon half a dozen emails she sent came back with an "undeliverable" error message. The emails were being mistakenly redirected to the inbox of "stevewebb2@btinternet.com" rather than reaching their intended recipients.

The inbox — apparently overflowing with misdirected messages — automatically responded with an "mailbox full" error.

The customer we spoke to was told by a customer service rep that the problem was "system-wide." We called up BT Internet's customer service line, and while they didn't know exactly how many email accounts were affected, they said "quite a few customers" had called up to complain — all of their emails being sent to the same Steve Webb inbox. There are also a number of complaints on Twitter about the same issue.

In short: The inbox of "Steve Webb" has been accidentally sent so many BT Internet customers' emails that his inbox is full. Oops.

The customer service rep told us the company believes the issue was caused by a security update on Tuesday afternoon that was attempting to cut down on spam. BT Internet has since rolled the update back in an attempt to fix the problem, and one customer we spoke to was able to send an email successfully after this (but get in touch if it still doesn't work).

A company spokesperson told Business Insider that "a small number of customers reported an issue sending emails earlier. Sorry about this, it's fixed now." 

They also said that the Steve was just a test account: "The mailbox in the delivery failure notification was for internal/test use and appeared in error." 

However, a years-old forum account on a Gary Numan website lists a very similar "steve.webb2@btinernet.com" email acount and says the account owner is a "broadband engineer." This suggests there definitely is a real Steve Webb.

There's also a Steve Webb on LinkedIn who is a technical product support specialist, and his work involves "supporting Email Platforms for O2 and BT, looking after the mail gateway, the backend servers containing the mailboxes, calendars and address books and other servers in the platform" — particularly relating to spam. It sounds like he might be our man, and we've reached out to him for comment. 

In the meantime, let's hope his inbox is okay.

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We can do better.

In 2012, when I started this blog, I had only 3 WebRTC related posts in mind. One of them was about the room system of the future. While this has never materialized in the 4 years since, things have definitely changed in the video conferencing space.

Let’s see what video conferencing vendors have done about WebRTC so far (vendors are listed in alphabetical order).

Avaya

Avaya’s assets in video conferencing comes from its acquisition of RADVISION.

A quick glance at the current website specs for its video conferencing line of products (mainly SCOPIA) shows a rather sad story. SCOPIA offers the best money can get, assuming we were 4 years after 2012 and WebRTC didn’t exist.

As the website states, you can “Experience crisp, smooth video quality with resolutions up to 1080p/60fps, stellar bandwidth efficiency, and error resiliency with H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Scalable Video Coding (SVC).”

Bolded tech words are my own.

Some things to note:

• 1080p is great, and the “de facto” thing these days – if you have the juice and the bandwidth for it. 60fps is more than 30fps, but I wonder if it is worth the additional effort to get there
• H.265 is betting the farm on the wrong codec
• SVC is where we’re headed. Getting one out of 3 main bullet points correct is a good start

Cynicism aside, I have it from good sources that Avaya is working on adding WebRTC support to its gear. Where exactly does it fit in its bigger picture, and why so late is a different story altogether.

What bugs me the most here is that in the last 4 years, any advancement in the SCOPIA video conferencing product line was reliant solely on hardware capabilities. You can’t leapfrog in this way over competitors – especially when something like WebRTC comes into the scene.

It is sad, especially since Avaya does work and promote WebRTC in contact centers already. At least on the press release level.

Cisco

Cisco is a large and confusing company. If you look at its telepresence products, they resemble the ones coming from Avaya. Same highlights about speeds and feeds.

On the other hand, Cisco has thrown its weight behind a new product/service called Cisco Spark.

Cisco Spark is a Slack lookalike with a focus on voice and video communications by connecting to the massive line of products Cisco has in this domain. Cisco Spark uses WebRTC to drive its calling capabilities in browsers. What Spark enables is connectivity from web browsers using WebRTC to Cisco video conferencing products.

Cisco took the approach of using H.264, making it work only on Firefox and in future Chrome versions (unless you run the new Chrome 50 from command line with the necessary parameter to enable H.264).

Cisco has also been heavily investing in acquiring and nurturing its WebRTC chops:

• Tropo acquisition, to get an API and a developer ecosystem for Spark
• Acano acquisition, which fits perfectly well in offering native browser access to its existing infrastructure
• Spark fund, with $150M to entice developers to use its APIs

Cisco has a huge ship to steer away from hardware and it is pouring the money necessary to take it there.

Google Hangouts

WebRTC. Chrome. Hangouts. Google. All connected.

Google invested in WebRTC partly for its Hangouts service.

Today, Hangouts is using WebRTC natively in Chrome and uses a plugin elsewhere – until the specific support it needs is available on other browsers.

Google also introduced its Chromebox, its take on the room system. I am not sure how successful Chromebox is, but is refreshing to see it with all the high end systems out there that don’t know a word in WebRTC. It would have been nicer still if it could use any WebRTC service and not be tied to Hangouts.

The problem with Hangouts is its identity. Is it a consumer product or an enterprise product? This is hurting Hangouts adoption.

Lifesize

Lifesize was a Logitech division. It was focused on selling hardware room systems.

In 2014, Lifesize launched its own cloud service, starting to break from the traditional path of only selling on premise equipment and actually offering a video conferencing service.

In 2015, it introduced its WebRTC support, by enabling browsers to join its service via WebRTC – and connect to any room system while doing so.

2016 started with Lifesize leaving from the Logitech mothership and becoming an independent company.

Microsoft Skype

Skype has done nothing interesting until 2015. At least not when it comes to WebRTC. And then things changed.

Skype for Business, Skype for Web and the Skype SDK were all introduced recently.

Skype for Web started off as a plugin, which now runs natively on Microsoft Edge – the same initial steps Google took with Hangouts.

My own take here:

• Skype is investing in switching its backend and modernize it to fit something like WebRTC
• This process is taking too long, and probably isn’t coordinated properly
• It is coming, and it will give Skype a lot of flexibility in where to go and what to do next

Polycom

Or should I say Mitel?

Polycom added WebRTC support in its launch of RealPresence Web Suite. In traditional enterprise video conferencing fashion, it seems like a gateway that connects the browser to its existing set of products and tools.

At almost the same time, Polycom shed its Israel office, responsible for its MCU. This is telling as to how transformative is WebRTC in this market.

Vidyo

Vidyo had a love-hate relationship with WebRTC throughout the years but has done a lot of work in this space:

• In 2013, it announced collaborating with Google to bring SVC to WebRTC
• In 2014, it joined Google’s Chromebox release with its own VidyoH2O gateway
• In 2015 they launched a WebRTC server enabling application developers to integrate WebRTC calls into the Vidyo infrastructure
• In 2015, the company has also gone through management changes, replacing its CEO Ofer Shapiro (now a vice chairman) with Eran Westman. This brought with it new thinking
• 2016 started with Video launchng their VCaaS and PaaS cloud offerings

2016? Two things already happened this year with WebRTC:

1. VP9 is now in Chrome and Firefox for WebRTC, with plans of adding SVC to it. This is something that Google and Vidyo are working on together
2. Vidyo launched their VCaaS and PaaS cloud offerings

In a way, Vidyo is well positioned with its SVC partnership with Google to offer the best quality service the moment Chrome supports VP9/SVC. They also seem to be the only video conferencing vendor actively working on and with VP9 as well as supporting both VP8 and H.264. Others seem to be happy with H.264/VP8 or running after H.265 at the moment.

The New Entrants

There are also some new entrants into this field. Ones that started at the time WebRTC came to being or later. The ones I am interested in here are those that connect to enterprise video conferencing systems.

These include Unify, Highfive, Pexip, Videxio and many others.

What defines them is their reliance on the cloud, and in many cases the use of WebRTC.

They also don’t “do” room systems. They are connecting to existing ones from other vendors, focusing on building the backend – and yes – offering software connectivity through browsers, plugins and applications.

My room system dreams

I’ll have to wait for my WebRTC room system for a few more years.

Until then, it is good to see progress.

The post How Video Conferencing Vendors Adapt to WebRTC? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Amazon's Echo speakers can now give you health advice, The Verge reports.

Boston Children's Hospital has developed an app for the Echo speaker that can field questions about illnesses.

Parents could ask their Echo speaker questions like "My child has a fever of 101. Should I be concerned?" and the Amazon Echo could let parents know whether that's normal when a child has a cold or something to be worried about.

The Amazon Echo speaker can be loaded with a variety of applications, known as "skills," that give it extra features. Another example is a news function that reads out the latest headlines.

The Echo has been a hit for Amazon, and it recently announced two new models of the device. One of the models, the Echo Dot, was only able to order through an Amazon Echo.

Join the conversation about this story »

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If you need help at the office, you'll improve your odds of finding a willing coworker if you refer to the organizational chart. Researchers from Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business found that people are most likely to help colleagues that are moderately distant in status, both up and down the corporate ladder.

The findings, which are published in Academy of Management Discoveries, offer a new way to think about how status affects workplace relationships, says Sarah Doyle, a doctoral student at the Fisher College of Business and co-author of the study. Previous studies have focused on the direction of the relationship, but status distance may be more important in some circumstances, she says.

In the first of two experiments, undergraduate students were asked to imagine that they were part of a 15-person sales team. Participants were told that one of their group members was close to securing a large account and was running short on time; they were asked if they would be willing to provide help. Some participants were told that the person asking for help was either similar to them in status, others were told that the person had a moderate status difference, and others were told there was a larger status difference. Participants were most likely to say they would help a team member who was moderately different from them in status.

The second experiment was conducted with employees of a large call center. Each employee received a detailed sales report and could compare their own results to other members of their team. While they worked separately in cubicles, they were encouraged to help each other and answer questions. Researchers found that workers were most helpful to teammates who had a moderate distance in sales.

"People who are closest to you in status pose the greatest threat," says Doyle. "If you help these individuals perform better or do better, they could potentially surpass you or widen the gap between your positions, making it more difficult for you to pass them. On the other side, people who are far above or below you in status could require a lot more time and effort to help, which could hurt your own job performance."

The sweet spot is people who are far enough away where cooperative work is possible and the potential threat is low, says Doyle. "Those colleagues who are moderately distant don't pose much of a threat and offer the best opportunity for workers to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate with their teammates," she says.

The results of the study don't suggest that most people regularly refuse requests for assistance from their coworkers, said Robert Lount, OSU associate professor of management and human resources and co-author of the study. "We found that people are generally willing to lend a hand. It is not a story of withholding assistance. It is more about who are you most likely to go out of your way to help," he writes.

What This Means for Leaders

If you are assigning people to train others or to work in pairs, Doyle says the study findings could be helpful. "It's important to recognize where the pairs fall in the hierarchy," she says. "You want to group people who aren't too close in status, managing the distance between people so it encourages them to work together."

For example, avoid assigning the most recently hired employee to train the newcomer. "If that relative newcomer is worried about his or her status in the organization, they may be less than helpful with this new person who could surpass them," writes Lount. "Someone who is moderately successful, but not the top performer on the team, might be the most willing to help."

The study could also be helpful to organizations that view hierarchy as a negative, says Doyle. "A lot of companies are moving to a flatter structure, but this research speaks to the idea that maybe hierarchy is not a black and white concept," she says. "The study suggests that hierarchy might be more complex than assumed. Managers have to consider how status distance plays a role in how well their corporate hierarchies work."

The G5 is LG's latest flagship premium smartphone, and it's very good.

It has a fresh design with new materials, as well as some interesting features that other phones don't have.

At the same time, it failed to impress in certain key areas.

You can buy the G5 now for about $650, but pricing will vary depending on your carrier.

Here's everything you need to know about the G5:

SEE ALSO: REVIEW: Apple pulled off something amazing with its newest iPhone

The LG G5 looks and feels more premium than previous "G" models, but it still doesn't compete with the other top smartphones out there.

The G5 is LG's first all-metal smartphone, save for the bottom front panel, which is made of plastic.

It's a welcome move away from the plastic smartphones that LG released in the last few years while other companies like Samsung, Apple, and HTC were releasing smartphones with premium materials, like metal and glass.

But the G5's metal build still doesn't quite match the premium feel of Samsung's Galaxy S7, the iPhone 6s, or HTC's new 10. 

It's the only premium smartphone that lets you replace the battery.

No other premium smartphone lets you swap out the battery.

LG will give you a free second battery and charging cradle that acts like an external battery if you buy the G5 before May 2.

Fast charging is a welcome feature.

The G5 features the new USB-C standard for charging and connecting to computers. The new plug also lets it charge faster than the previous standard, microUSB.

That means you can give the G5 quick charging boosts throughout your day so you don't run out of battery.

With charging combined with the removable battery, there's no way you could possibly run out of juice on a typical day. The G5 is the longest lasting smartphone out of all its competitors. 

Expedia, the online travel company, has compiled data on the key lessons marketers can learn about how millennials travel.

It compared millennials (defined as people born between 1982 and 1999) to generation x (1961-1981) and baby-boomers (1945-1960.)

Some of the findings do not reflect very well on youthful travelers.

Millennial backpackers are getting less adventurous and more vain.

Almost half (43%) of millennials said that whether people comment on their vacation photos is as important or more important than experiencing the authentic culture of the destination. This compares with just 16% of baby-boomers.

While 43% of millennials are intimidated by the prospect of solo travel, just 32% of baby-boomers say they feel the same.

Expedia compiled the report with the help of the Future Foundation — a global consumer trends and forecasting consultancy. A sample of 1,000 consumers per country aged between 18 – 64 in the UK, Germany, France, USA, China, Australia, Brazil and South Korea answered the questionnaire in March of this year.

We spoke to Gary Morrison, senior vice president and head of retail at Expedia, who explained what the results of the report mean for marketers trying to reach millennials.

Millennials are afraid to take risks:

Solo-travel has forever been the ultimate travel experience. Without friends, partners, or family to hold you back, you are able to more fully-immerse yourself in a foreign culture. But we're doing it a lot less, according to Expedia's research. Does this mean we are getting less adventurous?

Morrison explained: "I think it’s not that we’re getting less adventurous but a sense of risk aversion is growing. The sense that 'I need to know that it’s going to be authentic, I need to know that people are going to look favorably on it.'"

He added: "A lot of people enjoy travel as an experience of discovery. It's really the not knowing, the exploration, the finding on the fly [that for them makes traveling enjoyable,] but this particular cohort [millennials] seem to be different. It seems to be wanting to be as informed as possible before they go the destination."

Morrison said that this is why Expedia is investing in virtual reality (VR.) In this way, consumers are able to experience the destination before they travel and they can make the ultimate informed decision. Here's one way Expedia is using VR:

The Expedia VP dismissed the idea that VR may one day replace travel altogether: "People will always want to have the experience. The sensation of warm sun on my flesh cannot be replicated by virtual reality."

Millennials are much happier to give away data in return for convenience:

Morrison explained that millennials look for help in overcoming "choice paralysis" when looking at where to go on vacation. This means they are willing to give up personal data in return for "relevant" and "accurate" advice.

Carmen, a millennial respondent to the Expedia study from the UK, said: "I am interested in personalized travel ... however what they are offering needs to be so unique and not doable from my own research into the country...”

Many Millennials are more interested in curating a positive online image than in having an "authentic" experience:

Social media is obviously very important to millennials, so much so that it is greatly influencing are vacation choices.

Morrison talked about the importance of being a part of every conversation online.

"We are starting to invest in content creation, getting travel journalists to write informative, authoritative, fresh, relevant articles from different locations around the world. The more we are able to do that, the more they trust the content," Morrison said.

Out of the findings in the report Morrison was most surprised by was "the degree to which my choice of where I want to go and what I want to do is informed by how other people will rate it."

But he said travel companies are adapting as millennials become more fearful of the unknown, and more concerned with their online image.

SEE ALSO: Inside the happiest office in London — where some employees get a $14,000 travel allowance

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Airbnb has become so normalized among certain segments of the population that we rarely stop to think about the enormous feat the company has performed in getting its customers to trust complete strangers — on one side, the guests who stay in random homes, and on the other, the hosts who open up their abodes to people who they have never met.

This is no accident. Airbnb has figured out how to design for trust. Or, as cofounder Joe Gebbia put it in a recent TED talk, "We bet our whole company on the hope that with the right design, people would be able to overcome the stranger danger bias."

It's the little things in Airbnb's interface that make all the difference, Alex Schleifer, head of design at Airbnb, tells Tech Insider.

 "Across everything, even from the brand side, it ends up being a little softer and more human than most traditional marketplaces. Everything from the onboarding process to the transactions, we communicate subtly at different points," he says.

Phrasing is a big part of how Airbnb gets customers to trust its interface. "The voice and tone is relatively curious, and it asks questions that feel a little more human than filling in a field. This generates empathy and trust between parties," says Schleifer.

For example, instead of saying "Here's a pulldown menu, select a destination type," Airbnb will ask a user, "Would you prefer doing x or y?"

Airbnb also spent a significant amount of time figuring out how to communicate a sense of urgency with popular listings without making customers feel rushed. The company initially tried an alert for users saying "This listing is very popular and it might not be around in a week." People responded well to it and clicked the "book" button often. But once Airbnb followed up, the company found that the phrasing made users feel anxious.  

"We want people to feel like it’s advice, like they they have the option not to book," says Schleifer.

Here's how the phrasing looks now:

Hosts also have to be able to trust that they are offering a fair price for their listings. As Schleifer points out, "People might be great hosts, but they might not have the time or inclination to understand the complexities of dealing with pricing on a day to day basis." 

Airbnb recently introduced a Smart Pricing feature to make those decisions easier. The feature guides hosts through a pricing recommendation system that takes into account over 50 factors, like seasonality and location. But it's only a recommendation. Hosts still have the power to set their own prices.

"We knew the solution was between an overly automated and dry pricing setting and the other, which was just setting all the pricing by yourself. We wanted to make sure we could give you advice," says Schleifer.

The most obvious way that Airbnb gets users to trust its interface is with reviews. Hosts and guests are asked to leave reviews after a stay, but they can't see what the other party said until both have left a review. This ensures that people don't leave overly positive reviews in the hopes of getting good reviews in return.

Still, if you poke around Airbnb long enough, you'll notice that most reviews are positive. Part of creating trust is ensuring that people can't hide behind anonymous reviews, but people are often reluctant to leave bad reviews under their own name, as Business Insider has pointed out.

Sometimes, the trust system fails outright, as evidenced by the high-profile Airbnb horror stories that have popped up over the years (Thrillist has a whole list, including sex and meth parties at host properties).

But these horror stories are few and far between.

Overall, Airbnb's system works. People feel like they can trust the company with their homes and vacations. For the most part, that trust is warranted.

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NOW WATCH: Consumer Reports just rated Samsung's new Galaxy phone better than the iPhone

As Facebook gears up to announce a bunch of new video and messaging products at its developers conference this week, a common question has come up among industry insiders: "Where's Google?"

Facebook seems to be leaving Google in the dust in certain areas where the search giant should have dominated. Beyond giving Facebook bragging rights, the company's aggressive development of some of these new technologies has the potential to shake up the business landscape.

Take Facebook's recent, dramatic push into video live-streaming.

Sure, YouTube has broadcasting capabilities. Individuals can do it through its gaming app and the company has live-streamed huge events, like the US president's State of the Union address and several debates. But Facebook has opened up its streaming capabilities to the public, put discovery front and center, and already proved the virality of its approach as nearly a million people simultaneously tuned in to watch a watermelon explode.

One Facebook partner that Business Insider spoke to put it this way:

Part of the appeal of Facebook's Live product is that broadcasters can pull in people who were already just hanging out on Facebook anyway. Google may get the same amount of people or more to watch one of their live YouTube streams, but in the majority of cases, those people will be seeking out that video, not discovering it because they were already hanging out on YouTube.

And succeeding at Live video — the closest equivalent to broadcast TV — comes with huge advertising potential.

Right now, advertisers like YouTube because it has higher-quality content and brands can attach themselves to professional creators who have a following, says Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research. Facebook, on the other hand, doesn't have the same quantity of high-quality video for advertisers to latch on to.

"This could change if Facebook more aggressively licenses or otherwise helps to develop professional video content that runs on its platform," Wieser notes.

And new tools to encourage high-quality streaming content on Facebook is one of the things that the company is expected to talk about at its conference this week.

Rise of the bots

The other area you'd expect Google to have succeeded already is messaging, but Facebook's chat app, Messenger, looks miles beyond anything the search giant offers.

Google has Hangouts, a chat app that contains elements of live video — you can do video calls between groups of users — as well as messaging, though it's primarily a conversational tool.

But Facebook is widely expected to release new tools for businesses to incorporate automated artificial-intelligence-driven messaging — through "chatbots" — likely with new integrations with its own smart virtual assistant, M.

Facebook's vision of the future is that users can get a wide variety of information and services from chat, like buying a shirt, ordering an Uber, making a dinner reservation, buying tickets to a show, checking their flight status, and more. Meanwhile, this "conversational" search would keep people on Messenger and off of Google search.

The search threat

Imagine users being able to message a Tide detergent bot about the best way to get a coffee stain out of a white T-shirt, and receiving a video response right in the chat app. Goodbye, advertisement-laden Google query.

Entrepreneur Alex Iskold prophetically described this future early last year in the blog post "I've seen the new face of search and it ain't Google."

"Once this new world order is in place, you will quickly forget how Google worked. Phrase based search and 10 links will become the things of the past. You will quickly get used to, and will love, the human way to search. Via a text message," Iskold wrote.

Or, in this case, a Messenger chat.

If users can get all the information they need through asking bots in Messenger, they'll be less likely to want to open up a different search product. Of course, Google does have an intelligent assistant already in Google Now, but the more advanced version, Google Now on Tap, is available only on its latest Android operating system — which is available only on a small percentage of Android phones.

The Wall Street Journal reported last December that Google plans to release a smarter, bot-focused, platform-agnostic, messenger app, but we've yet to see any real sign of that product.

"Google has made many entries in social and YouTube is still its greatest social asset," Jan Rezab, founder of social-media analytics company Socialbakers, tells Business Insider. "But it has not succeeded to see the trend in social messaging, live video, and hasn't made substantial acquisitions in the space — which in the long run is very bad for Google."

Google holds its own developers conference next month, and we're sure to get a whole host of new announcements from the search giant, too. But even if it does make major announcements in live video or smart chat, it will end up looking like second fiddle to Facebook.

SEE ALSO: What to expect from Facebook's biggest event of the year

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WhatsApp, the world’s most popular chat app, announced Tuesday that it now supports end-to-end encryption across mobile devices and platforms. This means that message encryption, which was already the default setting service on Android devices, will be the default setting for all WhatsApp users, globally.  

As a market leader, WhatsApp’s decision to deploy complete end-to-end encryption marks the turning of the tide for secure messaging. While it's not the first messaging service to offer end-to-end encryption, the chat app wields substantial clout in the messaging app market, where it boasts more than 1 billion monthly active users (MAU). It’s likely therefore that other messaging apps will soon follow suit to stay in favor of users. Apps that lag behind the competition could see themselves falling off the radar as users turn to a service that will protect their private data.

The feature comes amid a growing furor over encrypted messaging practices. The shift to end-to-end encryption means that providers of communications are unable to access messages, creating a more secure environment for messaging and pre-empting the company from being forced (or even able to) provide messages to third parties.

• Law enforcement authorities have argued that backdoor access to encrypted messages is integral to national security. Law enforcement officials claim that today's encryption tech prevents them from accessing key evidence that could forestall an impending terrorist attack.
• But tech companies, such as Apple and Facebook, believe that handing over backdoor encryption keys — even to the government — would leave users’ data vulnerable. A master key, if stolen, would give malicious actors unimpeded access to any device secured by the algorithm, according to Stratechery.

If more mobile platforms and apps adopt end-to-end encryption it will be increasingly difficult for government authorities to access consumer mobile data by requesting the data from the companies that own the apps or platforms. But it could also help catalyze the adoption of more mobile services that have sensitive data. And as mobile and connected devices increasingly collect sensitive user data, including banking information and personal health stats, it's likely that more companies will adopt more stringent security measures, namely end-to-end encryption. 

Given the public battles over security, such as the one between Apple and the FBI, it's no surprise that companies are more worried than ever about the looming threat of hackers penetrating their networks. In the last year, the number of records exposed in data breaches rose 97%, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.

The frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks are at an all-time high, and the costs associated with data breaches continue to rise. While companies are investing more in cybersecurity to ward off attacks, they know they won’t be able to spend their way to absolute security. A cybersecurity team of more than 1,000 staffers with a budget of $250 million wasn’t enough to save JPMorgan Chase from getting hacked in 2014. As a result, companies are turning to cyber insurance to help mitigate the costs of a potential breach.

However, insurers have been slow to extend cyber insurance to many businesses, as they have yet to develop proven tools to help them assess the risks and costs associated with cyber attacks. Cyber insurance policies also often have high premiums and low coverage limits to help protect insurers from incurring too much exposure to a cyber attack.

Jonathan Camhi, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on cyber insurance that examines the growth of this market and identifies the key factors driving that growth. It also identifies the commercial sectors that are underserved in the cyber insurance market, which present a unique opportunity to insurers. Finally, it explains how insurers can find creative ways to cover these underserved markets while still limiting their overall exposure.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Cyber insurance plans cover a variety of costs related to cyber attacks, including revenue lost from downtime, notifying customers impacted by a data breach, and providing identity theft protection for such customers.
• Annual cyber insurance premiums will more than double over the next four years, growing from to ~$8 billion in 2020.
• However, many insurance companies have been hesitant to offer cyber insurance because of the high frequency of cyber attacks and their steep costs. For example, Target’s notorious data breach cost the company more than $260 million.
• Insurers also don’t have enough historical data about cyber attacks to help them fully understand their risks and exposures.
• There are large underserved markets with very low cyber insurance adoption rates such as the manufacturing sector, where less than 5% of businesses have cyber insurance coverage.

In full, the report:

• Projects the growing demand and premiums for cyber insurance in comparison to other common forms of commercial insurance.
• Illustrates how cyber attacks are growing more sophisticated and more costly, which is driving more companies to consider cyber insurance.
• Explains the obstacles that insurers face in extending cyber insurance coverage to different types of businesses.
• Provides insights on how insurers can overcome these challenges to grow their cyber insurance business without incurring too much risk.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide to cyber insurance, choose one of these options:

1. Purchase an ALL-ACCESS Membership that entitles you to immediate access to not only this report, but also dozens of other research reports, subscriptions to all 5 of the BI Intelligence daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of cybersecurity.

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Living in a world of only Chinese apps—no Google, Facebook, Twitter!—made me appreciate how remarkable the country's Internet actually is.

Last year, the Chinese government made me open a Yahoo account. Well, sort of. I was headed to China for the first time in four years, and I knew I would have a difficult time accessing Gmail and Google and Facebook and the numerous other sites that are blocked in China but essential to my digital life in the U.S. I asked around, and somebody told me that Astrill, one of the better-known VPNs out there, no longer worked on iPhone. The government had managed to squash it, too.

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More than a quarter of a century ago, Microsoft put a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation package, and an email client into one box and called it Microsoft Office. In doing so, it created the productivity suite as the world came to know it. And for all that's since changed about Office, the devices it runs on, and the competitive landscape, the basic defining idea—lumping together a handful of feature-laden apps, each of which handles a different sweeping category of business tasks—has hardly changed at all.

At last week's Build conference in San Francisco, however, Microsoft articulated a new vision for its venerable productivity offering, which now has 1.2 billion users around the world. It involves breaking down Office down into its component parts, letting users and third-party developers mix and match capabilities in new ways, and layering on conversational interfaces which are far, far afield from the suite's keyboard-and-mouse origins. At the conference, I caught up with Qi Lu and Julie Larson-Green—the executive vice president and chief experience officer, respectively, of Microsoft's Applications and Services Group—to talk about where Office is going.

The fact that Office will grow only more mobile and cloud-based is not exactly a shocker: Microsoft has been positioning itself as a company that is simultaneously mobile-first and cloud-first ever since Satya Nadella became its CEO in February 2014. But there's another core element to Office's future vision: understanding what matters to people and companies by analyzing the voluminous amounts of data they create within Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and other Office apps.

"Even though mobile and the cloud can be viewed as the big two tidal waves, intelligence is the single biggest driver of innovation," says Lu, whose original responsibilities when he joined Microsoft in 2009 included spearheading its search-engine operations. "We see a world where we'll be able to use data to fundamentally understand how work gets done, how people collaborate."

Not Just Sci-Fi

Imagine a busy businesswoman barking instructions about an urgent project into her watch as she races through an airport terminal. As she does, a software agent understands every request, efficiently collecting necessary data from disparate sources and then alerting the relevant people—even though she never called upon specific apps or mentioned any colleague in particular. That's the sort of scenario that Office's future vision, in its most out-there form, intends to enable. It might seem tempting to write the whole thing off as the sort of glitzy futurism that Microsoft has often pitched in keynote addresses and in videos such as this:

But even though much remains to be done, Office's new vision isn't just, well, a vision—it's a work that's already in progress. "For our groups, Julie and I working together, the current vision is the culmination of work over the past two-plus years," says Lu.

In retrospect, Microsoft has been pulling together the necessary ingredients for a lot longer than that. Last year, it introduced the Microsoft Graph, a set of hooks that let third-party developers build apps and services that have access to big data from within Office, such as the users within an organization, their calendars, and the documents they've created. In 2014, it launched Office for the iPad—not the first modern version of the suite for a non-Microsoft platform, but the first that didn't give off a vibe that Microsoft was concerned about it being too good. Three years before that, it announced Office 365, which turned Office from a box of software for a particular computer into a service that entitled you to run the latest versions of all its apps on multiple devices.

And hey, the concept of "conversational interfaces," which was a major theme at Build, is an exceptionally long-term Microsoft dream, dating back to the mid-1990s and the company's Microsoft Bob and "Clippy" Office Assistant—both of which, though famously irritating and unsuccessful, were forward-looking in their own idiosyncratic way. They're clear precursors to Cortana, the voice-enabled assistant that originated as a Windows Phone feature in 2014, is now part of Windows 10, and is in the works for iOS and Android.

Microsoft has also been prepping itself to build a new kind of Office by learning how to just plain move faster than it did in the era when the suite's primary means of delivery was as software in a box. "Today, our ability to ship code is night-and-day different than two years ago," says Lu. "We used to ship every one year, sometimes two years, sometimes three years. Now our teams ship every week, sometimes, and at least once a month. It's a massive change. Having that velocity is so critical for us."

Tasks, Not Tools

The future of Office involves all of the above elements. "We're moving from having people think about the tool to thinking about the task," says Larson-Green. "Instead of saying 'I need to make a PowerPoint,' we think about 'I have ideas to communicate.' If we're going to have a meeting together and then I'm going to follow up with you with the notes and the PowerPoint and the other things that came from the meeting, today there's a lot of steps you take. You think 'I need to go to email, figure out who was in that meeting, compose a mail, attach a PowerPoint.' In the future, using the intelligence of the machine that knows all these things and all these connections between things, you can just say 'Send the notes and the PowerPoints from my last meeting.' Without having to give it more information than that."

In this future scenario, precisely how you interact with Office will depend on what sort of device you're using. Larson-Green speculates that Office could someday be available in purely voice-enabled form on some type of device that doesn't have a screen at all. But she stresses that a conversational interface isn't synonymous with Siri-style speech recognition and synthesis. "It could be voice," she says. "It could be voice plus gesture. It could be text and typing. It could be a combination of different inputs. You tell it 'No, more like this, no, more like that.' And two-way conversations and disambiguating things by you being asked questions."

For decades now, people who use Office have been used to loading up Word, Excel, and other apps and shuttling between them as a project demands. In the future, you might hand off a sizable chunk of this work to agents and bots—and yes, Microsoft draws a distinction between them. Agents are working on your behalf and—with your permission—can aim to piece together a deep understanding of your work by analyzing your documents, email, calendar, and collaborative acts within Office. By contrast, a bot may be operating as a representative of a third party, such as a retailer, an airline, or a hotel chain; it's an expert on the tasks it's been programmed to perform, but doesn't have unfettered access to your personal information.

"Starbucks' bot probably knows all the coffees," explains Lu. "If you're a frequent shopper and it makes sense in context, it may even know that oh, you tend to order this type of latte. But that bot won't know your birthday."

Office Inside-Out

Speaking of Starbucks, its CTO, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, was onstage during one of Build's keynotes to show off an add-in that lets you order gift cards to bestow upon deserving coworkers and friends from within Outlook—an example of how Microsoft is thinking in terms of specific tasks, and letting third parties build functionality to let Office do new things.

"At work, Starbucks gift cards have become a bit of a thank-you currency," Martin-Flickinger told me after the keynote. "And it's kind of a pain if you want to go online and buy a gift card—it's nice, and it's beautiful, but you have to stop your brain from what you're doing and go to the website and buy a card. Or walk into a Starbucks and buy a card at the counter. And so we were just brainstorming ideas and said 'Wow, it would be really cool if Starbucks could be more integrated in that workflow process that knowledge workers have.' And one of the places they live all day long, for good or bad, is email."

Building Starbucks commerce into Outlook, though an entertaining and unexpected idea, is an example of Office's long-standing ability to be a container for third-party functionality. But now Microsoft is also flipping that notion on its head. With the Microsoft Graph, developers can pull data from Office 365—sometimes enhanced by deep-learning technology—into their own standalone apps. At Build, for instance, Microsoft demoed how the DocuSign digital-signature service uses a few lines of code to let users send files to coworkers.

The Graph isn't just serving as a mundane address book: Thanks to its deep understanding of the data generated by an organization that uses Office 365, it understands which people are involved in specific projects and even knows if a particular person is out of the office and therefore likely unavailable to sign a document. By calling on the Graph, DocuSign can make its own service more useful while also giving organizations that use Office 365 one more reason to keep paying Microsoft for the service.

Beyond Windows

In its current versions for iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web, Office is appealing in part because it's comfortably reminiscent of the Windows version. But Microsoft is keenly aware that the further the suite ventures from its PC origins, the less its past formula is a template for future versions.

"We grew up in the era of, you add more features—'here's the eight new things we added,'" says Larson-Green of Microsoft's classic product-development strategy. "In the mobile world, it's not about fidelity or features or pixel-perfect layouts, or all these things that were really important on the desktop, and will continue to be important."

She points to the Apple Watch version of Office's OneNote note-taking app. "It's a completely different interface, because you can't actually put a [conventional Windows] user interface on a watch. We had to rethink the input, and we use a combination of voice, tiny keyboard, and gestures."

For users, the incentive to use OneNote on an Apple Watch has nothing to do with its interface being familiar, and everything to do with the fact it shares the same repository of notes you create using other versions of OneNote. That's a big part of how Microsoft sees Office staying core to how organizations work regardless of whether they're working in Windows. It's going to be about the ever-expanding corpus of corporate intelligence that a company creates as everyone within it uses Office.

"In the next five years or 10 years, it's hard to image that as an individual user, as a team, you're going to use devices that all come from the same company," says Lu. "It's going to be a mixture of devices. The power in many ways is going to be the data. The contents, the information about you, how you work."

Which is not to say that Microsoft has lost interest in leveraging its operating system when it can. With Windows devices such as Microsoft's own Surface and its pen, Larson-Green says, "we have much more control and a complete end-to-end experience, with integration into the [interface] and even influence on the hardware, which is why you'll see some great things coming up in the inking world. We're able to talk directly to the hardware team about what we want to see with ink."

Paradigms Old And New

When Microsoft introduced the newfangled toolbar known as the Ribbon in Office 2007, it was quickly embraced by some users while others grumbled and clung onto earlier versions of the suite for as long as possible. Today, the Ribbon is among the most long-established and familiar interfaces in software, and it's the idea of interacting with Office through voice, chat, and gestures that sounds like a journey to a brave new world. Convincing 1.2 billion people to come along is the sort of challenge that will occupy Microsoft for many years.

"Any new experience paradigm tends not to replace the previous ones."

This time, however, it's not an either/or situation. Unlike the Ribbon, which replaced Office's previous interface, everything that Microsoft is talking about introducing is incremental to the current Office experience. And the company says that Office as we already know it will to continue to evolve. "I think the Ribbon interface has been great and will continue to be great for the mouse-and-keyboard world, and we'll augment that," says Larson-Green.

"Historically, any new experience paradigm tends not to replace the previous ones," adds Lu. "They tend to coexist. What usually happens is the new paradigms tend to grow a lot faster."

Lu, who says that Satya Nadella "has done a truly incredible job since he took over the company leadership," also credits another notable Microsoft honcho for influencing the company to rethink Office from the ground up. "Even without the level of clarity we have today, we knew we had to revamp our platform," he says. "One thing I learned from Bill Gates: He would tell me, 'Any time things are moving forward, when there's a new era, you have to make sure you have the right platform. Because the platform will prepare you. It pushes you to the new height.'"

In case you haven’t heard of them, A Cloud Guru is the social learning platform for cloud professionals that helps engineers prepare for AWS certification exams. In this post on Medium, founder and CTO Sam Kroonenburg explained the startup’s decision to employ a serverless architecture on AWS.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has reshaped the company since taking over two years ago.

Windows is still important, but it's no longer the only platform that matters: Microsoft is releasing software and supporting app development for Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and even its old enemy Linux. The infighting and aggressive dismissal of competitors is mostly gone. And Nadella has embraced "cloud computing" — the idea that some customers don't want to run their own technology, but would prefer to outsource it — turning Microsoft into the clear number two in the category after Amazon.

We caught up with Nadella fresh off the company's Build conference for developers last week in San Francisco, and ahead of the new Envision conference for business leaders, which kicks off today in New Orleans. Edited for clarity and length.

Rosoff:  There was a lot of talk last week at Build about chat bots and artificial agents, and "conversation as a platform." That idea is not new, right?  I think I heard Bill Gates talking about it 15 years ago. Why do you think now is the right time to make that push and make that play? 

Nadella: The thing that has fundamentally changed is the ubiquity of computing that's there for us to take advantage of. At the core what we're doing is reasoning over large amounts of data continuously.  First, we have that data, data about you, your preferences, your organization, and the world.  And to do that on a continuous basis, you need lots and lots of computing power.  That's what we get through the cloud.

Then you also need it in the devices, and they're not limited just to PCs on your desk, but you have devices from sensors to HoloLens. And the combination of that device proliferation and ubiquity as well as the compute power in the cloud are making it possible for us now to deliver that kind of experiences that we're talking about.

Rosoff: Can you give me one sort of concrete example why I should be excited about this, one particular type of thing that these kinds of artificial agents will help me with?

Nadella:  Take Cortana, the fact that you have a personal digital assistant that knows you, knows your preferences, has the ability, in a privacy protecting way, to go and look at your information and your organization's information, and help you with your tasks.

First of all, it's not just in one operating system, because that's not what we believe in. It's available on all your devices and all your experiences.

So I'm running late to a meeting. The personal assistant realizes that, automatically on my behalf reschedules or notifies the person because it knows my calendar. I'm not doing some texting and driving. That's one trivial example.

The ability for Cortana to proactively look at events that are happening in the real world, like whenever I look at it, every morning I look to see that Cortana is highlighting any particular meetings that are coming up, or any news articles that are relevant to the meetings that I even have, and it flags them to me.

Every day before going home, if I want to check traffic, instead of issuing another query I just say, "Cortana, what's the traffic home?" And it knows because it knows where exactly my home is, and can issue that query.

So those are everyday things that I think an intelligent agent or a personal assistant can help you with.

(On the business side), customer support is a great one — any data source that was previously available now can be brought to you. Instead of you going to 20 apps and having to do all of this in your own head, what if all the apps came to you, whether they be through bots in a conversational canvas like Skype or through a personal digital assistant?

Rosoff:  A lot of other companies are starting down this same path. On the consumer side you have Facebook and Google, and Apple has been trying as well. IBM has been talking about this with Watson for a few years. Why Microsoft?  What do you have that will make you succeed that some of the other companies maybe don't have?

Nadella:  I go back to our core focus as a company. Whenever somebody asks me, are you a consumer company, are you an enterprise company?  I say, hey, we are a company that's centered around users who both have a professional role as well as happen to be consumers.  That's where our strength lies.

So I think of Cortana, its uniqueness will come because it can take your personal data, your Office 365 data, and be available across all platforms.  No one else, at least as far as I can tell, is taking that unbounded approach to something like personal digital assistants. Anyone else who has a personal digital assistant, it's mostly a personal digital assistant that just sits and resides in either their software or their device or what-have-you.

Take bots — no one else is talking about bots that can be built using all the rich cognitive cloud services we have. How did one teach a bot how to have a conversation with a human? That requires conversational understanding, dialogue understanding. We have APIs for doing all of that in our cloud in Azure. And you can, in fact, build a Slack bot, or you can build a bot for Line, or you can build a bot even for Facebook.  We don't know yet exactly what Facebook does, but our back-end is independent.  And you can just use your backend to build bots, like building mobile apps or building websites in the past.

Then we have our own set of conversational canvases like Skype that they're opening up for these bots.  So the approach we're taking is much more of a platform company approach, much more of an approach that says that it's both your personal and professional data.  And if I take those two dimensions I don't think anyone else comes at it that way.

Rosoff:  The meaning of platform to Microsoft seems to have changed pretty dramatically. When I heard "platform," I used to think "operating system."  And this sounds like it's a platform as a particular type of computing function, regardless of operating system.

Nadella:  Correct.

Rosoff: That seems to tie in with the purchase of Xamarin [a company that Microsoft bought in February which makes it easy for Windows programmers to build iOS and Android apps]. Explain the strategy there.

Nadella: One of the things that I think a lot about is what is the technology we are doing, and what is the job to be done. In the case of Xamarin and Visual Studio the job to be done is straightforward. It's about empowering developers so that they can build applications. We have one of the most popular tools for developers in Visual Studio. And then we look at what are Visual Studio developers and .NET developers, and C# developers doing?  They're writing applications for mobile devices. It's a real pain.

Think about the number of configurations of Android and iOS, plus Windows that you may want to build for....We now have the best tool chain for it, sitting on Windows, with the Xamarin toolkit all now fundamentally integrated into Visual Studio. You have all the tools you need in order to build native clients for iOS, Android, and Windows.

Rosoff: So you talked a little bit about the challenge that developers have creating applications for multiple platforms.  Flipping that around, there wasn't a whole lot of talk about Microsoft's own mobile platform at Build.  What does Microsoft get by continuing to have and develop a mobile platform?

Nadella: First of all, I don't think of Windows for mobile differently than Windows for HoloLens, or Windows for Xbox now. We have only one Windows. We don't have multiple Windows. They run across multiple form factors, but it's one developer platform, one store, one tool chain for developers. And you adapt it for different screen sizes and different input and output. 

But what we get....I'm not trying to be another phone guy with the other person's rules. What is unique about our phones is this Continuum feature. [Continuum lets you take the screen of your Windows phone and connect it to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and use it like a computer].

If anything we will want to continue to build that capability out. 

Just like how with Surface we were able to create a category. Three years ago most people would have said "what is a two-in-one"? And now even Apple has a two-in-one. And so three years from now, I hope that people will look and say, "oh wow, that's right, this is a phone that can also be a PC."

Take emerging markets. India for sure is a mobile-first country. But I don't think it will be a mobile-only country for all time. An emerging market will have more computing in their lives, not less computing, as there is more GDP and there is more need.  As they grow they will also want computers that grow from their phone.  What's the most logical thing? I would claim it's a Continuum phone, which means that it can have other forms of input beyond touch.

Matt Rosoff: Build was last week. You guys are kicking off a brand new show for business leaders this week, Envision. Why now?

Satya Nadella: As I spent tons of time with customers, not just in the United States, but in emerging markets, in Europe, in Latin America, top of mind for everybody is how do they drive growth for their business going forward?  And any time any business leader asks that question in any industry in any part of the world, they look at it and say, well, I've got to have digital content. I've got to use digital technology to transform myself so that I'm more successful going forward. 

It's no longer keep my employees with some new devices and some software and they're done. Now information technology is at the core of how you do your business and how your business model itself evolves.  And that's why I think this is the time to be having that conversation very, very broadly.

Rosoff:  We recently wrote a story noting that Netflix, Intuit, and Juniper have all gone 100 percent cloud. Over the next 10 years what percentage of workloads do you think are going to move to the cloud and who is still going to be doing stuff on premises and why?

Nadella:  This thing about cloud as one destination, that everybody is going to go from on-premise to the cloud; I just don't view it that way.

I think distributed computing is going to remain distributed, but there is a new way of compute, storage, and network to come together. There are a couple of mega-scale providers — we are definitely one of them — who are going to be operating these mega-scale clouds and people are going to use them.

But look at the other side. What is happening with the IoT [Internet of things]?  You know, a new car is going to be like a data center. You're going to have so much GPU, CPU in the car, because it's going to see, it's going to respond.

I'm making an extreme case here, but the point is there's going to be an edge to the cloud.  It's not like all compute is going to be only in the cloud and there is no edge compute.  It's not even just the device.  It's not that I have a phone and that's the only edge device. That's just so narrow a view of the richness of compute in our lives.

So take our servers, I don't view them as a legacy.  Take SQL [Microsoft's database, which competes with Oracle.] We are building our SQL Server as the edge of the Azure Cloud.  This thing called Azure Stack, where we are now getting so much traction, is because of IoT needs — not just the current needs that some enterprise customers may have for hybrid, where they want to have a private cloud for security, regulation, or what have you, those are also temporal, because over time they will change.  It will be for other reasons, where for sources of energy, because of the service level agreements, because they are putting custom ASICs [integrated circuits, a type of hardware] and running things faster.

And you can see it, even the fact that Dropbox has to get out of Amazon.  What is happening among the elite developers in Silicon Valley, where they checked into the cloud and are checking out now, will be happening even broadly, because distributed computing never will get locked up in a few data centers run by a few multinationals on the West Coast of the United States.  That's just too narrow a view.

Rosoff:  There's been a lot of technical innovation from you guys in terms of moving to the cloud. What about innovation on the sales and licensing side to go along with it? It doesn't seem like there's been a lot of change there.

Nadella: Our fundamental value proposition to customers and the way we sell and the way we think about the value to customers has completely changed.  An enterprise agreement today is a much more consumption-led, both with Office and Office 365, as well as with Azure. Software licensing will still continue to be a big part of what we do, because as I said customers are going to still consume licenses with their own on-premise deployments. But we're increasingly motivating and moving people into annuities, which was a different form of subscription. And we are moving them to the cloud.

The other thing that I'm also very focused on is there's no more of this, okay, we sell something and then we forget about it

There's no more of this, okay, we sell something and then we forget about it

, or we're blind to what you do with our license. If anything we are very, very focused on how are you using it, how are you consuming it. Because if you look at all the leading indicators, or metrics, even my field compensation is no longer just tied to revenue numbers. It's tied to usage and usage growth.

So we have made fairly big changes in the sales, compensation, sales incentives, and the structure of the field.

We're putting a lot more architectural expertise right at the customer-facing side. You'll see us not only put more architects for our enterprise accounts, who can really help them with their digital transformation at the technology level, but also business architects who can talk about, how do you change your customer engagement, how do you empower your employees, or how do you optimize your operations, or how do you fundamentally transform your products?

These are the digital transformation stories that we will talk a lot about next week.

Rosoff:  I was just in India for the first time, in New Delhi mostly, and it was fascinating. India has had a strong IT services industry for a long time, but a lot of people were talking about the entrepreneurial scene there and how it's coming into its own. What do you think needs to be done to continue to encourage entrepreneurialism in India and in other developing countries?

Nadella: I was recently in Turkey, before that I was in Latin America and Chile, and in Brazil. Even in Egypt I met with a bunch of entrepreneurs doing very fascinating work and I asked myself, what is it that they're able to now do? 

What is true now is, the access to computing and the friction associated with it has come down.

We opened two data centers in India recently to tap into this and in order to enable the local entrepreneurial energy in India to be able to create companies. Not just large companies, but public sector, small business. Pretty much anyone who never bought a server from Microsoft because it required so much IT competence in order to be able to run essentially your own IT plant, can now simply sign up for Azure or Office 365 and have the same sophistication that large multinationals in the West had. It's now available to even a small business in India.

And now that you have access, then it comes down to what is the ambition level and the talent level of the local populations. And that is where I think it's exciting for all over the world.

Rosoff:  Is Microsoft looking to do more partnerships in developing countries? 

Nadella:  We've been doing a lot. I was just going over some e-mail a month ago or so where I get this mail from someone in Cuba who says, hey, I am a Windows reseller in Cuba, and we have a huge Windows community here.  We have lots of servers that are Windows Server. I want to sign up now as a partner. 

I got the same thing as soon as our circumstances changed in Iran. Iran is a complete Windows country when it comes to the Office automation side. "We really need you guys to get in here."

Every country I go to there are local partners, local ISVs [software makers], people in healthcare, people in education, people in transportation.  These are all systems built on the backbone of our technology.  

One thing that I think about is the number of people that are certified around Microsoft technologies, the amount of local employment we create in all of these countries, those are all huge areas of focus now shifting more to this world of cloud.
 
Beyond that, take something like connectivity. My ambition with connectivity is not to fly balloons in the national airspace of other countries but my dream is to be able to enable the local entrepreneurs to have low cost connectivity solutions. So we're doing some very innovative work with TV whitespace. It's spectrum that every country can license using their own rules and regulations to their own entrepreneurs, so that those entrepreneurs can solve their own last-mile problems versus waiting for the largess of some other company.

My ambition with connectivity is not to fly balloons in the national airspace of other countries.

And to me that is a more sustainable way for the world to get connected. We are great proponents of this TV whitespace, and we are doing pilots in India, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, in Africa, and I think that will be a fantastic idea.

Rosoff:  I want to talk about something a little bit different. There has been a strong strain in business for the last few years that companies exist primarily to serve shareholders. How do you see Microsoft's mission in serving shareholders versus or in addition to some other stakeholders, like employees, society, and so on?

Nadella: I absolutely think that Microsoft's mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more cannot be met if we do not view our fundamental responsibility as being multi-constituent.  Investors are important, but at the same time if we fundamentally do not contribute to the world economic growth because of digital technology, then long-term we won't have a business.

That means when we think about whitespace solutions in Kenya, it's important for us if we ever are going to be long-term relevant in Kenya with technology that successful businesses are going to be using.

As a multinational that means I think a lot about what's the employment we are creating, what is the opportunity we are creating in every country we participate in, versus just the rents we are collecting. Because I think that any company that thinks that their success is just measured by revenue and profit, then it may last for a while, but it's not long-term stable.

Rosoff: What has been the biggest change to your life and your lifestyle since you became the CEO of Microsoft?  We have a lot of readers who struggle to manage work-life balance, they're always busy, everybody is working all the time. How do you do it?  Do you have any rules you've set for yourself or any tips you can pass along to somebody who is trying to figure out how to manage that better?

Nadella: Maybe I have to reframe it...there's no such thing as balance.  It's how do I harmonize my work and my life. 

One of the things I've been thinking quite a bit, in fact I talked about it even internally, is a long time ago I used to work with this guy called Doug Burgum. And he had said this to me, and it's increasingly becoming much more part of my consciousness: we all spend far too much time at work for it not to be something more than work, for it not to have deeper meaning, whether it be Microsoft or any one of us in any role.

Because if we look at it, I would have spent more time at Microsoft than living together with my kids.

Because if we look at it, I would have spent more time at Microsoft than living together with my kids, because they'll all grow and they'll go into colleges and have their own lives.  And I think about time spent, then my work had better be something that's nourishing to my soul and my personal philosophy, and so on. 

And in terms of tips, I would say I am trying to get much more disciplined.  When I'm with my family, doing something say even this weekend, tomorrow when I'm there with my daughter, I'm present. What does that presence mean? A lot of us have the residual effect of the last e-mail, the last thing.  You've got to get very, very good, I think, in modern life to not have that residual effect spoil your presence.

I see people over a dinner table all on their cell phone, that's when I say, wow, that's tragic. In fact, I think about it even in our software design, quite frankly, how do we help?  There's information anxiety, all of us have it, it's just natural. So therefore how do we help them be more present?

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The latest iPad Pro is the same size as previous iPads, but users who are upgrading will discover that their old Apple Smart Covers won't work with their new iPad.

In fact, Apple is selling two different versions of the Smart Cover — one designed for the iPad Air 2 for $39, and another for the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro for $49.

The two covers look to be largely the same. But according to a video posted by Nick Rodriguez, and spotted by Mac Kung Fu, if you try to use the less expensive iPad Air 2 cover on a new iPad Pro, Apple has moved the cover's built-in magnets so the old smart cover will float above the tablet's screen.

It looks as if Apple has swapped the polarity of the magnets that affix the Smart Cover to the iPad's screen, swapping the "north pole" magnet for a magnet with "south pole" polarization, which renders the old Smart Covers useless with new iPads.

As Rodriguez asks in the video, really Apple?

However, the change might not be completely because of planned obsolescence — it's possible that Apple had to move the placement of the magnets inside the new iPad Pro because of engineering reasons. We've reached out to Apple and will update this post when we hear back.

SEE ALSO: Am I going to buy an Apple Watch? Sure — in 3 years

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NOW WATCH: We tested the ‘Keurig of food’ that claims it can replace everything in your kitchen

Slack just confirmed that it's raised $200 million at a $3.8 billion valuation, confirming what Business Insider had previously reported.

The new round was led by Thrive Capital with participation by GGV, Comcast Ventures, and Slack’s existing investors, including Accel and Social Capital.

Slack has raised $540 million in total so far.

The business messaging app officially launched a little over two years ago.

Slack is often called the fastest growing business app ever. It now has 2.7 million daily active users, of which 800,000 of them are paid users. It has 430 employees in total.

“As has always been the case, we are taking this opportunity to further secure our leadership position as we continue to execute on our ambitious growth plans. This capital adds to our existing reserves and increases our ability to focus on an uncompromising long-term, strategic view," Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said in a statement.

Story developing...

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NOW WATCH: This 7-minute fitness routine is all you need to get in shape

New lighting plans on airlines are helping passengers adjust to new schedules. But how close are we to eliminating jet lag altogether?

When flight attendants start wheeling out dinner service on certain Singapore Airlines flights headed east, the cabin lighting dims to mimic candlelight. During dessert—though it's still light outside—the cabin lights up to look like sunset. By the next morning, a few hours before passengers have to wake up, the lights simulate sunrise.

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