WW 686: The Impression of Fairness

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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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@Leo, there are a couple of reasons for the Teams displays:

  • you use Teams as a telephone system, so normal calls are coming in as well, not everybody has a PC, but they do traditionally have a telephone.
  • your users have normal PCs, so you need a decent camera, speakers and microphone or headset for each, that is a lot of USB ports and additional cables - we have been rolling Teams out and users are having to wait, because we are waiting up to 6 weeks for a headset and the webcams we ordered in March turned up Monday this week!
  • You don’t have to have your PC on to take a call. If you are just arriving or just leaving and your PC is powered down, booting, rebooting etc. you can take the call.
  • Added security, if you are using the Teams app on the PC and there is a security hole, they can get access to the whole PC, with the display, they just get access to the display, they might be able to use it as a bridgehead, but you have more time to react.
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It’s pretty rare for me to be on a Teams call and not end up sharing my screen at some point. I guess I’m not in the target demo for the device, but I could totally see this thing sitting on some executive’s desk. The tidy hardware package and manageability would be nice from an administrator’s perspective.

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All excellent points, as usual. :+1:t4: I think @Leo did a surprisingly good job in the segment as well.

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Paul drives me a little nuts with his “What’s the point?” mantra for Surface Duo. He keeps saying that Panos and MS have never bothered to explain why this device makes sense, but I’ve seen a lot of demonstrated use cases in their videos and many more ideas in comments to Paul’s articles. They have a theory that there is something to the idea of a pocketable, occasionally penabled, dual screen productivity device. The Surface Duo was built specifically to test that theory-- not to compete with mainstream flagship smartphones-- and every design consideration and trade-off was made in service to evaluating the core concept. Being extremely thin and light is core; things like the camera, wireless charging, NFC are not.

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The (seemingly) first longer hands-on overview of a the Surface Duo. Dave2D states it’s an engineering sample. It was posted an hour ago.

Thank you all for the excellent podcast this week.

On what to call these devices (i.e., the “phablet” discussion): I think foldables is the most common name today. We’ll see if that remains popular like “flip phones” or dies a slow death like “phablet”.