>> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2019 here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Donovan Brown. He is the Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Methods and Practices Organizations at Microsoft. (laughing) A mouthful of a title. >> Yes. >> Rebecca: We are thrilled to welcome you on. >> Thank you so much. >> You are the man in the black shirt. >> I have been dubbed the man in the black shirt. >> So tell us what that's all about. You're absolutely famous. Whenever we were saying Donovan Brown's going to be here. "The man in the black shirt?" >> Yes. >> So what's that about? >> So it was interesting. The first time I ever got to keynote in an event was in New York in 2015 for Scott Guthrie, the guy who only wears a red shirt. And I remember, I was literally, and this is no exaggeration, wearing this exact black shirt, right, because I bring it with me and I can tell because the tag in the back is worn more than the other black shirts I have just like this one. And I bring this one out for big events because I was in a keynote yesterday and I knew I was going to be on your show today. And I wore it and it looked good on camera. I felt really good. I'm an ex-athlete. We're very superstitious. I'm like I have to wear that shirt in every keynote that I do from now on because if you look further back, you'll see me in blue shirts and all other colored shirts. But from that day forward, it's going to be hard pressed for you to find me on camera on stage without this black shirt on or a black shirt of some type. And there's a really cool story about the black shirt that was. This is what\ I knew it was a thing. So I pack about six or seven black shirts in every luggage. I'm flying overseas to Germany to go Kampf to do a keynote for, I think it was Azure Saturday. Flights were really messed up. they had to check my bag which makes me very uncomfortable because they lose stuff. I'm not too worried about it, it'll be okay. Check my bag, get to Europe. They've been advertising that the black shirt is coming for months and they lose my luggage. And I am now, heart's pounding out of my chest. (laughing) We go to the airport. I'm shopping in the airport because I don't even have luggage. I cannot find a black shirt and I am just thinking this is devastating. How am I going to go to a conference who's been promoting "the black shirt's coming" not wearing a black shirt? And my luggage does not show up. I show up at the event I'm thinking okay, maybe I'll get lucky and the actual conference shirt will be black and then we're all good. I walk in and all I see are white shirts. I'm like this could not be worse. And then now the speakers show up. They're wearing blue shirts, I'm like this cannot be happening. So I'm depressed, I'm walking to the back and everyone's starts saying, "Donovan's here, Donovan's here." And I'm looking to find my polo, my blue polo I'm going to put on. They're like no, no, no, no Donovan. They printed one black shirt just for me. I was like oh my goodness, this is so awesome. So I put the black shirt on, then I put a jacket on over it and I go out and I tell the story of how hard it was to get here, that they lost my luggage, I'm not myself without a black shirt. But this team had my back. And when I unzipped my shirt, the whole place just starts clapping 'cause I'm wearing >> Oh, I love it. >> a black shirt. >> Exactly. So now to be seen without a black shirt is weird. Jessica Dean works for me. We were in Singapore together and it was an off day. So I just wore a normal shirt. She had to take a double take, "Oh no, is that Donovan, my manager "'cause he's not wearing a black shirt?" I don't wear them all the time but if I'm on camera, on stage you're going to see me in a black shirt. >> Rebecca: All right, I like it. >> Well, Donovan, great story. Your team, Methods and Practices makes up a broad spectrum of activities and was relatively recently rebranded. >> Yeah. >> We've talked to some of your team members on theCUBE before, so tell our audience a little bit about the bridges Microsoft's building to help the people. >> Great. No, so that's been great. Originally, I built a team called The League. Right, there's a really small group of just DevOps focused diehards. And we still exist. A matter of fact, we're doing a meet and greet tonight at 4:30 where you can come and meet all five of the original League members. Eventually, I got tasked with a much bigger team. I tell the story. I was in Norway, I went to sleep, I had four direct reports. I literally woke up and I had 20 people reporting to me and I'm like what just happened? And the team's spanned out a lot more than just DevOps. So having it branded as the DevOps Guy doesn't really yield very well for people who aren't diehard DevOps people. And what we feared was, "Donovan there's people who are afraid of DevOps "who now report to you." You can't be that DevOps guy anymore. You have to broaden what you do so that you can actually focus on the IT pros in the world, the modern operations people, the lift and shift with Jeremy, with what Jeramiah's doing for me right, with the lift and shift of workloads . And you still have to own DevOps. So what I did is I pulled back, reduced my direct reports to four and now I have teams underneath me. Abel Wang now runs DevOps. He's going to be the new DevOps guy for me. Jeramiah runs our lift and shift. Rick Klaus or you know the Hat, he runs all my IT Pro and then Emily who's just an amazing speaker for us, runs all of my modern operations. So we span those four big areas right. Modern operations which is sort of like the ops side of DevOps, IT pros which are the low level infrastructure, diehard Windows server admins and then we have DevOps run by Abel which is still, the majority of The League is over there. And then we have obviously the IT pros, modern ops, DevOps and then the left and shift with Jeramiah. >> I'd like to speak a little bit as to why you've got these different groups? How do you share information across the teams but you know really meet customers where they are and help them along 'cause my background's infrastructure. >> Donovan: Sure. >> And that DevOps, was like that religion pounding at you, that absolutely, I mean, I've got a closet full of hoodies but I'm not a developer. Understand? >> Understood. (laughs) It's interesting because when you look at where our customers are today, getting into the cloud is not something you do overnight. It takes lots of steps. You might start with a lift and shift, right? You might start with just adding some Azure in a hybrid scenario to your on-prem scenario. So my IT pros are looking after that group of people that they're still on prem majority, they're trying to dip those toes into the cloud. They want to start using things like file shares or backups or something that they can have, disaster recovery offsite while they're still running the majority of what they're doing on-prem. So there's always an Azure pool to all four of the teams that I actually run. But I need them to take care of where our customers are today and it's not just force them to be where we want them tomorrow and they're not ready to go there. So it's kind of interesting that my team's kind of have every one of those stages of migration from I'm on-prem, do I need to lift and shift do I need to do modern operations, do I need to be doing full-blown DevOps pull all up? So, I think it's a nice group of people that kind of fit the spectrum of where our customers are going to be taking that journey from where they are to enter the cloud. So I love it. >> One of the things you said was getting to the cloud doesn't happen overnight. >> No, it does not. >> Well, you can say that again because there is still a lot of skepticism and reluctance and nervousness. How do you, we talked so much about this digital transformation and technology is not the hard part. It's the people that pose the biggest challenges to actually making it happen. >> Donovan: Right. >> So we're talking about meeting customers where they are in terms of the tools they need. But where do you meet them in terms of where they are just in their approach and their mindset, in terms of their cloud readiness? >> You listen. Believe it or not, you can't just go and tell people something. You need to listen to them, find out what hurts and then start with that one thing is what I tell people. Focus on what hurts the most first. Don't do a big bang change of any type. I think that's a recipe for disaster. There's too many variables that could go wrong. But when I sit down with a customer is like tell me where you are, tell me what hurts, like what are you afraid of? Is it a compliancies? Let me go get you in contact with someone who can tell you about all the comp. We have over 90 certifications on Azure. Let me. whatever your fear is, I bet you I can get you in touch with someone that's going to help you get past that fear. But I don't say just lift, shift, move it all like stop wasting, like no. Let's focus on that one thing. And what you're going to do is you're going to start to build confidence and trust with that customer. And they know that I'm not there just trying to rip and replace you and get out high levels of ACR. I'm trying to succeed with you, right, empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. You do that by teaching them first, by helping them first. You can sell them last, right? You shouldn't have to sell them at all once they trust that what we we're trying to do together is partner with you. I look at every customer more as a partner than a customer, like how can I come with you and we do better things together than either one of us could have done apart. >> You're a cloud psychologist? Almost, right because I always put myself in their position. If I was a customer, what would I want that vendor to do for me? How would they make me feel comfortable and that's the way that I lead. Right, I don't want you going in there selling anything right. We're here to educate them and if we're doing our job on the product side, the answer is going to be obvious that you need to be coming with us to Azure. >> All right. So Donovan, you mentioned you used to be an athlete? >> Donovan: Yes. >> According to your bio, you're still a bit of an athlete. >> Donovan: A little bit, a little bit. >> So there's the professional air hockey thing which has a tie to something going on with the field. Give us a little bit of background. I've got an air hockey table in my basement. Any tips for those of us that aren't, you know? You were ranked 11th in the world. >> At one point, yeah, though I went to the World Championships. It was interesting because that World Championships I wasn't prepared. My wife plays as well. We were like we're just going to go, we're going to support the tournament. We had no expectations whatsoever. Next thing you know, I'm in the round playing for the top 10 in the world. And that's when it got too serious for me and I lost, because I started taking it too serious. I put too much pressure on myself. But professionally, air hockey's like professional foosball or pool. It's grown men taking this sport way too seriously. It's the way I'd describe it. It is not what you see at Chuck E. Cheese. And what was interesting is Damien Brady who works for me found that there is an AI operated air hockey table here on this floor. And my wife was like, oh my gosh, we have to find this machine. Someone tape Donovan playing it. Six seconds later, my first shot I scored it. And I just looked at the poor people who built it and I'm like yeah, I'm a professional air hockey player. This thing is so not ready for professional time but they took down all my information and said we'd love to consult with you. I said I'd love to consult with you too because this could be a lot of fun. Maybe also a great way for professionals to practice, right, because you don't always have someone who's willing to play hours and hours which it takes to get at the professional level. But to have an AI system that I could even teach up my attack, forcing me to play outside of my comfort zone, to try something other than a left wall under or right well over but have to do more cuts because it knows to search for that. I can see a lot of great applications for the professionalized player with this type of AI. It would actually get a lot better. Literally, someone behind me started laughing. "That didn't take long" because it in six seconds I had scored on it already. I'm like okay, I was hoping it was going to be harder than this. >> I'm thinking back to our Dave Cahill interview of AI for everyone, and this is AI for professional air hockey players. >> It is and in one of my demos, Kendra Havens showed AI inside of your IDE. And I remember I tell the story that I remember I started writing software back in the 90s. I remember driving to a software store. You remember we used to have to drive and you'd buy a box and the box would be really heavy because the manuals are in there, and not to mention a stack of floppy discs that you're going to spend hours putting in your computer. And I bought visual C++ 1.52 was my first compiler. I remember going home so excited. And it had like syntax highlighting and that was like this cool new thing and you had all these great breakpoints and line numbers. And now Kendra's on stage typing this repetitives task and then the editor stops her and says, "It looks like you need to do this a little bit more. "You want me to do this for you?" And I'm like what just happened? This is not syntax highlighting. This is literally watching what you do, identifying a repetitive task, seeing the pattern in your code and suggesting that I can finish writing this code for you. It's unbelievable. >> You bring up a great point. Back when I used to write, it was programming. >> Yes. >> And we said programming was you learn the structure, you learn the logic and you write all the lines of what's going to be there. Coding on the other hand usually is taking something that is there, pulling in the pieces, making the modification. >> Right. >> It sounds like we're talking about even the next generation where the intelligence is going to take over. >> It's built right inside of your IDE which is amazing. You were talking about artificial intelligence, not only for the air hockey. But I love the fact that in Azure, we have so many cognitive services and you just like pick these off the shelf. When I wanted to learn artificial intelligence when I was in the university, you had to go for another language called Lisp. That scared half of us away from artificial intelligence because you have to learn another language just to go do this cool thing that back then was very difficult to do and you could barely get it to play chess, let alone play air hockey. But today, cognitive services search, decision-making, chat bots, they're so easy. Anyone, even a non developer, can start adding the power of AI into their products thanks to the stuff that we're doing in Azure. And this is just lighting up all these new possibilities for us, air hockey, drones that are able to put out fires. I've just seen amazing stuff where they're able to use AI and they add it with as little as two lines of code. And all of a sudden, your app is so much more powerful than it was before. >> Donovan, one of the things that really struck me over the last couple years, looking at Microsoft, is it used to be, you'd think about the Microsoft stack. When I think about developers it's like, oh wait are you a .NET person? Well, you're going to be there. The keynote this morning, one of your team members was on stage with Scott Hanselman and was you know choose your language, choose your tools and you're going to have all of them out there. So talk to us a little bit about that transition inside Microsoft. >> Sure. One of the mantras that I've been saying for a while is "any language, any platform". No one believes me . So I had to start proving it. I'm like so I got on stage one year. It was interesting and this is a really rough year because I flew with three laptops. One had Mac OS on it, one of them had Linux on it and one of them had Windows. And what I did is I created a voting app and what I would do is I'd get on stage and say okay everyone that's in this session, go to this URL and start voting. They got to pick what computer I use, they got to pick what language I programmed in and they got to pick where in Azure-eyed I deployed it to. Was it to an app service was it to Docker? I'm like I'm going to prove to you I can do any language in any platform. So I honestly did not know what demo I was going to do. 20 minutes later, after showing them some slides, I would go back to the app and say what did you pick? And I would move that computer in front of me and right there on stage completely create a complete CI/CD pipeline for the language that that audience chose to whatever resources that they wanted on whatever platform that they wanted me. Was like, have I proven this to you enough or not? And I did that demo for an entire year. Any language that you want me to program in and any platform you want me to target, I'm going to do that right now and I don't even know what it's going to be. You're going to choose it for me. I can't remember the last time I did a .NET demo on stage. I did Python this week when I was on stage with Jason Zander. I saw a lot of Python and Go and other demos this year. We love .NET. Don't get us wrong but everyone knows we can .NET. What we're trying to prove right now is that we can do a lot of other things. It does not matter what language you program in. It does not matter where you want to deploy. Microsoft is here to help you. It's a company created by developers and we're still obsessed with developers, not just .NET developers, all developers even the citizen developer which is a developer which is a developer who doesn't have to see the code anymore but wants to be able to add that value to what they're doing in their organization. So if you're a developer, Microsoft is here to help full-stop. It's a powerful mission and a powerful message that you are really empowering everyone here. >> Donovan: Right. >> Excellent. >> And how many developers only program in one language now, right? I thought I remember I used to be a C++ programmer and I thought that was it, right. I knew the best language, I knew the fastest language. And then all of a sudden, I knew CSharp and I knew Java and I knew JavaScript and I brought a lot of PowerShell right now and I write it on and noticed like wow, no one knows one language. But I never leave Visual Studio code. I deploy all my workloads into Azure. I didn't have to change my infrastructure or my tools to switch languages. I just switched languages that fit whatever the problem was that I was trying to solve. So I live the mantra that we tell our customers. I don't just do .NET development. Although I love .NET and it's my go-to language if I'm starting from scratch but sometimes I'm going to go help in an open source project that's written in some other language and I want to be able to help them. With Visual Studio online, we made that extremely easy. I don't even have to set up my development machine anymore. I can only click a link in a GitHub repository and the environment I need will be provisioned for me. I'll use it, check in my commits and then throw it away when I'm done. It's the world of being a developer now and I always giggle 'cause I'm thinking I had to drive to a store and buy my first compiler and now I can have an entire environment in minutes that is ready to rock and roll. It's just I wish I would learn how to program now and not when I was on bulletin boards asking for help and waiting three days for someone to respond. I didn't have Stack Overflow or search engines and things like that. It's just an amazing time to be a developer. >> Yes, indeed. Indeed it is Donovan Brown, the man in the black shirt. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. Thank you for having me. >> It was really fun. Thank you. >> Take care. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. 26,000 people from around the world have descended onto the Orlando, here in Orlando, for Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Christina Warren. She is the senior cloud advocate at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about your work as a senior cloud advocate. And you are responsible for a lot of the video strategy of Channel 9. >> Yeah, I am. So we have a cloud advocacy scene within developer relations, and most of our advocates are focused on either kind of a specific technology area or a specific audience. I'm a little bit different in that I am kind of of a, I call myself, I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. So I go across a lot of different technology areas, but I look at our video content and our video strategies that we have at Channel 9 and our YouTube channel, Microsoft Developer, and some of our other channels, and I think about what are they types of stories we want to tell, what's content do we want to create for our audience, and how can we bring new developers into our ecosystem, as well. >> So what are those stories? I mean, what do you, what are you hearing from customers and what are you hearing also from colleagues at Microsoft that say, "Here's something that we need to tell the world about"? >> Yeah, so I think it's really interesting. I think there are a lot of things. One, there, we were talking a little bit before the show. There's kind of an insatiable, I think, need for a lot of people how to get started, whether it's getting started coding, if you're wanting to learn Python or learn JavaScript or something else, or even if you're just wanting to, you're starting to get into infrastructure, and you're wanting to learn, okay, how do I, you know, spin things up on the cloud. How do I set things up? And having some of that base fundamentals content is really important, but I also think sometimes it's about troubleshooting, and it's about figuring out what are the new services. What can this do for me? And I think a lot of times, when I think about the stories we want to tell, it's not, oh look at how great our service or our product is but it's this is designed to ease my pain points and make my life as a developer or an ops person easier. >> Christina, in the early days, everybody thought that, you know, the promise of cloud was it, it was supposed to be simple and inexpensive, and unfortunately, we learned it is neither of those things by default, so, you know, how do we help people to go from, you know, it's only 20% of applications today are in the cloud. You know, really simplicity is something we need to attack, and education is one of those areas that we need, you know. Give us some examples of some of the things that your team's doing to try to help us get to the majority of environments and work loads. >> Yeah, so a great example is, you know, .NET Core 3.0 launched a couple of months ago, and there's been a big push there with cloud-native apps and cloud-native applications, and so we have like a new video series, The Cloud Native Show, that my colleague Shane Boyer heads up, where they go through kind of all the steps of cloud-native development. And what's great about this is that you have existing .NET developers who have not, to your point, you know, 80% of applications are still not on the cloud, so they're going from that older environment. And then this is saying, you can take the skills you already have, but this is how you think about these things in this new environment. And for a lot of things when it comes to tech, if you're, the way I can always think about things is the next generation of developers, they don't know a non-cloud world. They're literally cloud-first, and I think that's an important thing for all of us to consider is that the next generation developers, the kids who are in high school now, the kids who are in college, they don't know, you know, the pain of having to provision and deal with their own, you know, servers or data centers. They've only known the cloud. And so, but that's an interesting opportunity both to create cloud-first content for them, but for the people who have been using things to say, okay, what you've already been doing, there are changes, but you're not starting from zero, and you can take some of the things you already know and just move that into, into the new world. >> Yeah, well, one of the interesting things we've found this week is that when we talk about engaging with Microsoft, it's not just .NET, it's not just Windows, or Azure. We talked yesterday with Donovan Brown and Scott Hanselman, and it's you know, any app, any language, your tools, pulling those off together. That's really challenging from, you know, creating content out there, because, you know, you're not going to recreate the entire internet there. So how do you tie in what you're doing with other resources and have that, you know, communication, collaboration out there in the industry? >> So a lot of it I think from what I do and what a lot of us do, I look, I used to be a journalist, so I look at what's interesting to me and what stories I would want to tell and what things I would want to know more about. And so, you know, Visual Studio Online, which was announced this week, massive announcement. I'm super excited about that. I am super excited about what that means, and I know that the audience is going to be excited about that. So I look at an announcement like that, and I'm like okay, what kind of content can we work with with those product teams to do? What sort of tutorials would I like to build? What things would I want to know more about if, if I were, you know, really experienced or just getting started? And I think some other areas are, for instance, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, WSL 2 will be coming out in the future. That's a great opportunity for people who are both familiar with Linux and might not be familiar with Linux to kind of get started and using Windows as their development platform. And so when I see trends like that happening or things around, you know, containers, you know, Kubernetes, you know, containerize all the things, start thinking about, okay, what are the opportunities? What are cool examples? What would I want to see as somebody who, who's tuning in? That's what I always try to think about is what would. I just try to think about it like a journalist. You know, what would an interesting story be to tell from my perspective? What would I want to know more about? And then we can go from there and work with the product groups and work with some of the other teams to make sure that we can tell those stories. >> So, I'm curious. As a former journalist, you spent a decade as a digital editor and reporter and commentator. What made you want to make the leap to big tech? >> You know, okay, so media is not a great place right now. So that's number one. Number two, you know, I was very technical as a journalist, and it was interesting because when I made that transition, I then had to really actually shore up my tech skills. And I said, okay, I have some of the basics, but I really need to like double down and invest in myself and invest in learning more. But I always, even when I was a journalist, I loved telling developer stories, and I loved advocating for developers. Even when I was, I was working at really mainstream places like Mashable, where, you know, they would send me to developer conferences, and I wouldn't just go to the press things. I would want to go to the sessions and talk to the developers and find out, okay, what are you excited about? What are the opportunities you see to build things? What's coming around that has you excited? I've always loved that. And so when the opportunity presented itself for me to be able to do that at Microsoft, I was like, oh, you know, I'd never considered that before, but that's really interesting, and that would be a interesting way of maybe seeing if I can do something else. >> One of the skills that you, that you, is common between what you do now and as work as a journalist is breaking down this technical language and making it accessible for a wider audience, particularly at more mainstream publications. What is your advice for people in terms of how to do that? Because on this show, we have a lot of technically-minded people who can really go deep into technology. But how do you then make it accessible? What is, what is your advice? >> I always try to think of who is your muse as someone who might not know what's, all the intricacies that are going on but is an intelligent person that can understand. So for me, I always use my mom. Now this was easier when I was a tech journalist than it is what I do now because she understands even less what I do now, but I try to think about, okay, how would I explain this to her? She doesn't need to know all of the intricacies, the nitty-gritty. But how could I explain something to her that would be technically accurate but would get the basic idea? And I think a lot of times when it comes to breaking down content, it's just getting to the essence of what problem is this solving, what is this doing that's better or worse, and how does it do it and in starting from there. And it, a lot of times it just takes a lot of work, and you figure out as you go along what getting feedback from users, frankly, based on they might be asking more clarifying questions, or maybe they'll want to know more about something or less about something else. This is confusing for me. And just modulating that as you go along. >> Yeah, Christina, it makes me laugh, actually. When I started blogging, my mother was one of the people that would read, and she would say, "Oh, yes, I heard about this cloud thing before. "I watched it on NPR." It's a nuanced and complicated message. I actually, I roll my eyes a little bit back at the old Microsoft to the cloud videos there, because it was like it didn't resonate. It's the stories that you're telling these days. How do you balance there's the outcomes is, yes, we want to, you know, solve, you know, some of the great challenges and help healthcare, but, you know, underneath, there's some nitty-gritty developer and infrastructure things that get solved. How do you make sure there's the connections between, you know, what the products do and the outcomes? >> Yeah, that's really interesting. You're right, it is a challenge. I think the, the important thing here is not every message has to have all of those components. So you can tell different stories. You could tell one story that's just more focused on the outcome and is just more focused on the opportunity and what's happening in healthcare, and you could have another story that might be about this is what's going on underneath that is allowing those things to happen. >> Yeah, do you, do you have any favorite, you know, outcome stories from Microsoft? >> Gosh, you know, yesterday, during Scott Hanselman's developer keynote, he was, he was, I didn't even know about the Chipotle case study. That was so interesting to me and seeing what they're doing with the different technology. That's, that was a really, that's just the first one that comes to mind I thought was really cool. I'm really excited about the opportunities we have in Quantum, and I'm really excited about opportunities in healthcare because, you know, I think we've all been to the doctor, and we've seen how much IT and how much tech infrastructure could help not just the process of diagnosing and helping things but just, even just the minutia of data entry and record delivery and keeping track of everything. So there, a lot of the things we've done there have been really interesting. >> One of the things you said is you love telling developer stories, and I'm a journalist, too. And I cover entrepreneurs, and I feel the same way about telling entrepreneur stories. Talk about some of the common characteristics you've seen. I mean, we can't obviously generalize an entire population of people, but talk about what you have seen as sort of the common elements of their personalities and their approach to solving problems. >> Right, so I think it's interesting. When I think about any developers, which are a little bit different than enterprise devs, although there are some similarities, you know, you start with, and I know for me when I start first started coding and when I first started building websites and then other things, like, for me, I wanted to either solve a problem, or I wanted to create something that other people could, could see. And so a lot of times that probably one of the more commonalities is, you know, developers, they're in many ways wanting to scratch their own itch. I wanted to do something, I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I built this myself, found out other people were using it, too, and I added features to it. I mean, I think that's what's so great about open-source is that people have the opportunity to collaborate either contributing code or even, you know, doing bug reports and or sharing ideas. And so I, one of the more common elements is I wanted to do something, or I had a really interesting idea, and I didn't see anyone else doing it, and so I just decided to build it myself. It's not that different from entrepreneurs, right. Like it's I see, I see a business opportunity, I see a business I want to do, so I'm going to build it. And that's, wanting to build things is probably the most common thing I see. >> Yeah, Christina, any common conversations or things that are coming up that, you know, people that aren't at this show, you'd like to share? >> Oh, gosh, I mean, I think there's been so much good stuff. I mentioned Visual Studio Online, which I think is really exciting because I'm really excited about being able to like be on my iPad and also code. Like, that's going to be really great. Also, I think the Arc stuff, the Azure Arc stuff is really interesting, the idea of being able to not just be focused on, you know, one platform, but being able to control all of your infrastructure no matter where it is is really, really, that's a really compelling story. That's something that makes me really excited because I love to just automate and simplify things, so anything that can make, you know, the life easier, I think is great. >> As a former journalist, I'd love your thoughts on the state of news today. I know you said you got out of it because it's not a great career path, but the overreach of social media, the spread of fake news, the real and perceived media biases. I'm interested in your thoughts about where we are today, particularly as it relates to coverage of technology. >> It's interesting. I think in some ways technology. For a really long time, most technology coverage was almost cheerleaderish. You could even look back even 20 years when the dot-com crash happened, and I was in high school then, but I was following all of that avidly. The after flow of that, the business press was maybe a little bit burned, but the technology press was still very much gung ho and was still very much cheerleading. That's changed a little bit as we've started to have to grapple with some of the consequences, good and bad, that happened with tech and with the internet. Right now, I almost feel like maybe we've gone a little bit over the edge a little bit more, and some of the critiques are fair, and some of them maybe are just, you know, it's popular to kind of be more negative. So that's been an interesting change, I think to see. You're right, though, when it comes to the spreading of kind of misinformation or people just reading things in headlines, it's really difficult I think, for people to find authoritative voices and things they can trust. Weirdly, though, I do actually think this is an opportunity for the big tech companies to help. This is things that AI could really play a big role in. These are things that could really kind of help, you know, recognize patterns of scan bots and of other things that aren't there and filter that out. But I think even when, I still feel good about journalism as a medium. I still think that the press is one of the most important assets we have, and even when we are going through shakier times, there are opportunities. I think that we will, it'll find it's way. And honestly, I really do think that technology is one of those things that will help get the real things, the important stories out there. >> All right, so, Christina, I guess final word is how should people think of Microsoft in 2019? >> We're here to help. You know, I think that we are, we are a technology company that is, that is creating the tools so that you can build and solve the problems that you need to solve. >> All right, that's a, that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Christina. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat instrumental music)