TalkingHeadz Chatz with Ilya on MDEP.

Microsoft has a new operating system, it's based on open source Android, will appear first in Teams meeting rooms, and it's called MDEP. 

The latest TalkingHeadz podcast has Dave Michels and David Danto chatting with with Microsoft’s Ilya Bukshteyn exploring the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP.) This will be a customized Android distribution aimed at enhancing device interoperability and security through centralized updates and rigorous standards. It addresses challenges like inconsistent Android versions across OEMs, emphasizing long-term benefits such as improved stability and reduced maintenance. While MDEP is poised to become integral to Microsoft Teams device certification, ensuring a cohesive ecosystem for users and partners alike, it has questions and challenges.  These include some confusing aspects and some industry reluctance. These factors - both exciting and challenging - are thoroughly explored in this extensive conversation.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:21

Welcome to Talking Heads, the informative, entertaining and brilliant podcast on enterprise communications from the team at talking points. Hi, this. Dave Michels, welcome to another talking points chat. I'm here with Dave Danto, my colleague, and we have a special guest today. We have Billy of Bookstein. I said, Right. Oh, yeah. Is that okay? It you know what? I gave up so long ago? Carrie, how people, every time, every time I see you, two things are true. One is you are smaller. Congratulations on that. And two is your title is longer, and so we got a brand new title here. You're still a vice president. Congratulations on that. Now it's teams, calling devices, events and premium. Does that? Does that imply that calling devices and events are not premium? It's look, I will take all suggestions for a better title. So teams calling is, in fact, part of it's basically listing what we sell as our licenses. Teams calling is known to our customers as teams phone. That's the license devices is teams, rooms, plus other devices, events, teams, live events, town hall, webinar that is actually part of the team's premium license. And so those teams are ones that I have the privilege of leading events. And teams premium just moved into my team a few weeks ago. I've known you a long time, and all those things are new, but devices, you've been the devices guy for a long, long time. I don't know. Let's see. I can, I can remember you with the LCS days. I don't wait. What were you involved even at Microsoft? It's 30 years in September, so it's a long time, way longer than I thought I would be, but I keep having fun in different roles. So yeah. And so to put that in context, Microsoft was selling what 30 years ago, when you were brand new. So I joined just before we launched Windows 95 I had actually about a year before I joined in September, 94 we launched Windows 95 in August, 95 so that was the big thing where, you know, if I wore a Microsoft piece of swag, actually on the street, people would stop me and ask me about Windows 95 which was amazing, and I'm one of the few people I'm sure you'll relate to this. I'm one of the few people that when I hear the Rolling Stones start me up, I immediately think of Windows 95 and so Steve Ballmer dancing again my brain before we have a conversation, we have a conversation today around the purpose of this podcast is to talk about mdep is what I call it. Maybe you call it mdep, who knows? And I know what MDF is. I know David knows what MDF is. I'm sure you know what mdep is, but this is so you know it is, it is kind of alleged. I mean, it doesn't really, it's like the, it's like the Loch Ness monsters. No one's really ever seen this thing. So, oh my god, maybe so let's see. So I'm gonna, so the first question is, Ilia, why don't you explain or introduce MDF, and what it is, sure. So I'm gonna give you the really simple explanation, and then, if you'll indulge me, I want to give a little context. So mdep stands for Microsoft device ecosystem platform. It is an AOSP Android Open Systems distribution that Microsoft puts together and works with OEMs to put on devices. Here's the context, so you harken back to the LCS days, live communication server. So way back when, when we first said that Microsoft is going to have software that does Unified Communications, which at that time was really chat calling, video meetings, one of the things we didn't really tackle very well is what happens in meeting rooms. So very initially, we looked at the landscape and said, not a lot of rooms have video video systems, and they're big and expensive. So our initial take was, hey, how about we enable people to use their laptop plugged into something? And that initial something was the round table. And. Little little bit of trivia at the event that we did that introduced unified communications. Jeff rakes did that keynote. I was behind the scenes. I helped write a bunch of that content and arrange the demos. And we hired Rainn Wilson of The Office fame, Dwight Schultz in the office. That was his first ever corporate gig. He actually went out and bought a suit to look like Dwight, because he didn't, you know, have that from office. And so he was in that event, and he helped introduce roundtable. And so roundtable was a USB device, which, back then, was cheap relative to video systems. It was about 5k and so that was interesting, but if I remember right, sold at most about 10, maybe 15,000 units. So didn't get super broad adoption. We licensed it out to Polycom at the time. And you know, one of the things very quickly was it, it was expensive for a USB device, cheap relative to video systems, but laptops not the same as video systems. So then we took a second shot with something called link room systems. And link Room Systems tried to, if, with all respect to everybody. It tried to duplicate what Cisco and Polycom were doing. So it said, Hey, there's going to be a codec. It's running an embedded OS Windows, embedded, highly customized, and it'll be cheaper than what we thought other VTCs were at the time, but still in the several 10s of 1000s of dollars. And that sold about 10 to 15,000 hard to have an exact number, because on premise, so it wasn't tracked as closely as we can with cloud connected. So still not a big hit. That was when I was asked to take over what was rooms, and we it was an interesting time, because Google had just launched Chromebox for Meetings at 999, Bill Gates sent a memo saying, oh my god, this is going to be incredibly disruptive. You guys got to do something. And so I was actually originally asked to do a sub $1,000 product. It was going to be called Mbox. It was going to be done with Polycom, and I was super unpopular with my higher ups, because I actually came back and said, That's not the right product. I don't think Google's going to sell a lot because they don't have any IT controls, and there's no price sensitivity at least to two grand. And really what we should do is something that it will love and buy. And so I came up with what was known as Project Rigel. It since has become teams rooms. And the whole idea of that was using commodity PC hardware and software. So it's a Windows device with an app that we build we control the user experience so it's consistent in every room. And, you know, $2,000 and up, and that has done pretty well. We announced, I know you guys had questions, so let me sort of try to clarify. We announced that over a million teams rooms have been sold. I know I'm adding a little bit of language, so maybe someone internally will hunt me down for this, but that that was the announcement, have been sold. We previously announced that there was over half a million monthly active teams rooms. We'll keep announcing as we hit big milestones. But you know, you can, you can get the factor of growth over our previous efforts. It is resonating in that journey. And by the way, I was super I was still super nervous about Chromebox like that. That could have cost me my job if that was the wrong decision when they raised their price to two grand and added a console, was when actually a coworker of mine sent my higher ups an email saying, Okay, I think Ilya might have been right. So that was what saved me, which is what they ended up doing that. But you know, we've been very successful thanks to our customers adopting this along the way, we did make a pretty big decision, which is to have Android based systems as well as Windows. And really initially, I will say this was pushed heavily by OEMs, because when you look at our partners, Lenovo and HP now, HP poly clearly have a ton of experience with Windows. They make a lot of Windows devices. Crestron has ended up gaining a ton of experience with Windows, lesser degree a link, but you know, they still do okay? Everybody else has no experience with Windows. Logy, you know, I'm gonna miss somebody. So you guys all have to keep me honest, because we have such a big ecosystem now. Was the big one because they were the first guys, and they don't buy Windows from us, so they were doing all this stuff about meeting the channel blah, blah, blah, Jabra, EPOS, everybody else, like Windows was was more work, more cost. And so our OEMs came to us and said, Look, we're going to do Android based systems. We will make them work with Windows like we'll have a switch in them to say, hey, it's a USB device, but it's still got Android inside. You guys should consider doing an Android app. We did one that was pretty limited early on and only did kind of these bar form factors and lots of customers bought them. So we ended up saying, Okay, we are going to have to fully support the Android platform. Right now, Windows still has a lot more installed devices, but our run rate's about half and half. Some people would say lots more Android devices being sold? Not true. It's about half and half, which is, in a way, great because lots of growth. In a way, it's the toughest place for me to be as a person who has to build the two different platforms. I swear I'm coming back to m depth now. So where we find ourselves is but like I said, we have about 10 questions here. So it's gonna be 100 minute. Just want to be clear, 100 minute podcast. Minute podcast. Go ahead. You take your time. I'll be faster. On the other part out, don't worry about sounds good. So Windows, we write once we have an app, we do it once we get a bunch of stuff from windows, like plug and play. So any certified peripheral works with any Windows system, Android, we found ourselves in this really tough spot where meet Android was different than logy Android was different than Yealink Android was different than Cisco Android, and we were effectively having to write and especially test multiple times, and so we were going a lot slower on Android. You know, I feel really horrible for our customers there, because rightfully, they were saying, hey, we'd like these to be equal. And we have to say, Well, no, you really need to look at feature sets and like, because I can't stop Windows development so that Android catches up. Have more devs on Android than I than I do on Windows, and at the same time, Microsoft, elsewhere in the company, in our OS company, was looking at some other devices, first party and third party, that made a lot of sense to run Android, and we're looking around at the AOSP ecosystem, and basically made a decision that that We think as a company would make sense from Microsoft to do our Android and I would say there are three key reasons for us to do that, and that is what has become amateur one, and this is no particular order one. Upgradeability with Windows. It is up to us to say there's a new Windows version. We're going to test it on the hardware that's out there. We're going to make sure the software works. We're going to put it out with Android. When there's a, you know, Android 1213, it's up to each OEM, and it costs them a bunch of money. Just being very honest, they have to go to the chip manufacturer and say, Hey, can you make us what's called a BSP abort support package to support this new Android chip manufacturer says, Sure, pay us, as you know, millions of dollars, and the OEM has to pay that with no real new revenue coming into them. So we were facing a situation where some of the devices would be stuck on older Android, which really is difficult for us, as we have cloud connected systems that you know may take advantage of newer capabilities. That's one, but also two is security right when, when we went to our internal IT and security organization and said we'd like to have some of these devices deployed internally. We got a hard No. We actually just deployed the first 100 Android devices internally, room devices. It took, like, three years of work, and frankly, the only reason we were able to do that is because those devices will upgrade to mdep. So security's number two, and they're very tightly connected upgradability and security. So a Microsoft team will now be responsible for making sure that Android platform stays up to date, stays as secure as we can. I know we'll come back to security too. And then three is value added, or sort of additional capability to help AOSP catch up to Windows. The one I use all the time is plug and play. Android doesn't have a concept of plug and play, so of course, you know, logic will say, hey, we did this stuff that makes it work with, you know, these USB peripherals. But Cisco did some other stuff. Well, you know who's who's still. Stuff do we go with? So mdep kind of aims to address go back to the original question here. What is m depth? So let me just see if I can make this shorter for you. It's a version of Android. It's a version of Android Microsoft has is controlling or releasing and specifying for teams rooms, is that? Is that accurate? Is that a the last part is not quite accurate. It is a version of Android, specifically AOSP. There's two flavors of Android. There's Google Android with a bunch of Google services. There's Android open systems that anyone can pick up that does not have Google services. So this is a flavor of AOSP that Microsoft builds, releases to OEMs we work with, and it actually will be applicable to rooms, teams, phones, teams, panels, all teams, Android devices, we have not today specified it for our existing partners. We have said any new partners and new Android devices should be using mdep, and today we have Jabra committed a version of Android that partners will get from Microsoft, is that accurate and Okay? All right, I think we got question one down. All right. Question two, Dave, well, you've kind of answered a lot of the questions in what you talked about. You know, I do want to give if you would do, if you would indulge us again, because there's a lot of I will indulge you all you want. There's a lot of lot of terms here that people don't really realize. Microsoft came out with an announcement last month about having to switch to AOSP, and what is the difference between mdep and AOSP, and is this two switches or one switch? Or what was Microsoft asking the partners to do? So that switch, this is a little more technical, so it's not switching to AOSP, it's switching to AOSP management. So what happens with these Android devices is to be acceptable in corporations, they have to support what's called MDM and MAM mobile device management and mobile app management. Different organizations mandate different levels of this. I would say about half of our customers, Microsoft included, specify MDM, meaning the device has to be fully corporate managed. The agent that allows intune to do that is today called Company Portal. It uses a set of APIs that Google and the AOSP community have deprecated so going away will not work. The new agent is called Intune AOSP, and it uses a set of newer, better APIs. Don't ask me the details, because I'll have to get someone else to tell you. But it is a new agent that, in many, many ways, is better, smaller, faster, less memory footprint, etc. So these are 100% two different things, device management, and one is the platform that it's on, right? Okay, one other clarification question here again, because you went through a lot of this journey, um, you had announced, um, mdep Initially, I think was Enterprise Connect in 23 and I don't, I'm not really still 100% sure if there's anything out using it today. So I'm not going to blame you for the delay. You know, obviously you talked about a whole journey that went on over there, and there's a lot going on, but, but cannot, can we use it? I mean, it was, it was, I took the selfie with it on the show floor, but they said they weren't shipping it. So what is the status of it? Is it out? Is it not gonna be out? Yeah. So the two partners who've announced going all in on MD, abdep, but that mdep are Jabra and yay. Link. So Jabra have one Android device out today. That's, I think they call it the VSB video system bar. It's the panic as 50 with VSP, yes, V Thank you. So that internally is running on mdep. I will tell you I am blanking on whether it's already out with MDP. I believe the way Jabra was going to do, going back to your earlier question, the device management transition, is just by going to MD like so MDP has the new agent built in the Intune AOSP engine. So agent, so it's either out or it's going to be out very. Soon that Jabra device will be the first mdep device. And I can circle back with you guys, or you guys can ask our friends a jobber, but that'll be the first one. Yay. Link. Have said that all of their team's Android devices, all of them rooms, phones, panels, will be m depth based. They but it's an upgrade. So they haven't yet come out with that, but we'll see more coming out. The other curveball, for clarification, is that, when you announced this and we were looking at it, we were all thinking, oh, all the Android video bars. A lot of questions around that. And then Barco comes out at Infocom and explains that they're using m depth things that aren't video bars. So has it expanded, or was that the original view all along? Yeah. So I guess it's important for me to highlight again that it's two different teams of Microsoft with slightly different goals. My goal, of course, is to get teams devices out, you know, as in as great a shape as possible. The m depth team is part of the operating system group, and of course, what they want to do is have OEMs use their OSS as broadly as possible. So Barco is a bit of a joint announcement. So Barco is going to do their Android devices on MDP. They have also said that in the future they will have teams devices, but no more details shared at this point. Okay, okay, but the room control box that isn't necessarily a device, because it's running Android, is going to have MDP on it. That's the thing that's there. So it's not just for the video devices. It's anything in the meeting room running Android. It's actually anything running Android, period, right? MDP is an Android distribution. Any Android device, probably a business device, because it's definitely sort of business focused in terms of enterprise manageability and so forth. Any Android business device could consumer could consider MDP, quite frankly, you know, you may see other devices, even for the consumer space, run amdep. It's, it's a Microsoft Android platform that where Microsoft adds value in that at least the three areas Microsoft making that freely available to the public as well, and anybody can download it. Or is it only going to be restricted to your approved partners. It's up to the mdep team at this point. It's only with partners that we have an agreement for. And the reason being that Android is still not windows. You can't, like grab Android on a stick easily as a consumer, and install it, you do have to have a board support package for the chip and so forth and so on. Just clarify for our audience, that the way Google makes Android available is they have a free open source project, and people can do things with that, and then they have a license version, which has the Google Play Store and has a bunch of other stuff and and that is not a free, open source product, that is a product that you have to buy. And so, so when you buy a cell phone with Android and it's got all that stuff on there, that device maker probably paid for that version of Android, where, if you buy maybe a phone in China that doesn't have to play store and doesn't have all that stuff on there, they probably downloaded a free version of Android. So you're basically downloading the free version of Android, not just any version. You're taking the Android, open source projects, version of Android, modifying it and making it a Microsoft magical device or operating system, and then making that available to your partners. I think is that, is that a fair? They get that right? Yeah, that is fair. Yep, all right. One interesting tidbit I've heard is that Google licensing prohibits the same OEM from both buying the paid version and doing AOSP devices without explicit approval from Google. So all kinds of fun complications in the Android spot. Okay, so, so let's talk a little bit about some of your existing partners and the position that they're in. You obviously had Jabra and Yealink, as you mentioned, and now Barco that are that, are, you know, interested in joining and getting all the benefits from this? But you've got other partners out there now that have been using these bars on Android, and as you point out, selling a lot of them for three years. So it's an interesting why do we want to why would they change Why do you want to change that? Why do they want to change that? And will they have to change that? Yeah. So for us, we want to make sure, I'll start with the customer. We want to make sure our customers have a consistent experience, not in terms of the UX, but in terms of the manageability, security and upgradability and this, all three of those are things our customers have asked, slash, really pushed us on and today, the answer is, go talk to the OEM. You. I, you know, I have no ability to say, XYZ device will be supported for however many years, because in the Android space, because it is up to the OEM to say, will they spend the time and money and energy on a new Android version when that comes out? Will how easy or hard will that upgrade be? I have no ability to say is the platform going to stay secure. I trust our OEMs are great companies, but, but I you know, we as Microsoft can't say that, because they are responsible for those upgrades. And last, but certainly not least, I'm super limited. Maybe it's not the right word, but it's super hard to catch up on Android without getting more consistent value added services, not splintered by each OEM. So that's that's what we're trying to address. The last point you know, is both for customers and ourselves. So for us, we're really trying to streamline what we do so that we can move faster on both platforms. So it is, I think, an interesting value proposition to OEMs, where, frankly, we take on the cost, which is significant, of upgrades, security updates, enhancing the OS. There is a trade off, because, like you said, there's some OEMs that have invested years in their own flavor. The mdap team is working with each of those OEMs to kind of try and find the right balance. To say, hey, you can bring over your value add and AI, audio, video code that's running on the OS while still getting the benefit of our platform at this point. Like I said, any new devices, new partners on Android will need to be mdap. Can I envision at some point saying we're only going to do certification for mdap devices? Yeah, absolutely. We're not there yet, but I'd certainly say for all the reasons I just listed, I think it'd be a great benefit to both customers. So So Dave was asking. So you didn't use an acronym, Dave, you have to use acronyms when you ask questions. But Dave was asking about, I think it was called MTR OA, right? That was meeting teams rooms on Android. And when you introduced that, I believe you kind of diverged what Android had these features and Windows based meeting rooms had other features. You've kind of brought them mostly back together. I think, okay, so I guess with MD, my question is, are they going to come back together more with the windows and the that's, that's, that's the goal. So today, Windows is a superset. We for a while, I would say Windows was mostly a superset, but there were a couple of features on Android, like start whiteboard from MTR, that were unique. Within this next quarter to two quarters, it's going to become Windows as a pure superset. And the question is, When can it be equal, right? When does Android catch up today without mdap? I don't have a plan that would do that. I can't stop windows. I can't keep adding more and more devs to Android. So it's going to keep going as a superset with some amount of delay. The hope with MDP is that if we can get one everybody onto MDP, so we reduce our amount of work on Android and two, then the ebdep team could keep adding value to the platform. The hope is that we get to a place where, yeah, the two platforms would be kind of equal, by the way, yeah, I can't ever promise that, because, man, the pace of innovation and change in terms of, you know, we announced copilot running on teams rooms. That's one of the things we talked about at our recent Build Conference. That has all kinds of interesting implications. It's going to come out first on Windows. We would need, you know, there's probably some hardware dependency to even bring that on Android, so all kinds of stuff, but the goal would be to get a lot closer. You talked a minute ago about certification and how you foresee only m depth based Android platforms being certified for Microsoft Teams. How will that work? Will companies lose their certification? Or will it be an upgrade to it, or how do you envision that happening? Yeah, great clarification. It's the latter. So our certification is not infinite. Our certification has a specific time frame, and then we say the device could be recertified with future Android versions. I think at some point what we'll say is that future. Android version to go for recertification would need to be m depth based. That's now, I don't have a time frame in mind. I don't have an Android version in mind. Yeah, I would say that's a desire for all the reasons I listed earlier, both for us and our customers. So no one's at risk of losing certification in the near term, couple of years that's going on based on mdep? Well, you know, when you say couple of years, there are devices that were certified three years ago that will expire their certification in the next couple of years anyway, right? So, and then the way it works now is it's up to the OEM to say, OK, we are going to spend the money to do Android version XYZ and resubmit for certification. So I don't want to say the couple of years or any time frame part. All I'm saying is there's definitely a desire for us at some point to make that recertification requirement. BM, depth based. Well, that was a tough question, but now I have even a tougher one, and and I, I got to tell you, you know, you know, I respect you and your employer. They're greatly respect you and your employer, but I think it's legitimate question here. So are you ready for this one? Hold on. So I already mentioned a few times that mdep is really about a security. Really about security. Some of your partners have said this as well. We were listening to Jabra. They were talking about the key benefits of mdap, and that they and they said, you know, Microsoft takes full responsibility for the security of the meeting room, which is kind of what you touched on as well. Now some may, some people may have concerns about that lucky timing, I guess, because just last month, I'm sure you know, the Homeland Security issued a scathing report on Microsoft. They were investigating a email hack and so nothing to do with teams, but they were investigating an email hack, and they wrote this report that went public, and they identified operational and strategic decisions at Microsoft that quote collectively pointed to a corporate culture That deprioritized enterprise security. Unquote. Wow. Now, so how can you come and tell people in the enterprise that don't worry about your meeting rooms, Microsoft's Got Your Back on security and so help us understand that? Well, I'll start by saying I've read that report as I think have, frankly, the majority of our 200,000 some employees at this point, it is humbling. I don't you know. Think I can put it better than our vice chairman Brad Smith, in terms of his testimony to Congress, where, to paraphrase, he said, we take full responsibility and we're going to make the changes necessary to make sure we address all those issues. What I can tell you is, since then, security is it's beyond job one, the word Satya, used in a communication to everybody, is when it comes to a choice between security and anything else, security wins. We are currently delaying roadmap items because we are going back and addressing a very significant list of things that aren't necessarily, quote, unquote broken, but we believe could be better. So yes, absolutely, a humbling moment for us? Yes, absolutely, we take full responsibility. You know, in my 30 years of Microsoft, unfortunately, this isn't the first time that technology changes and kind of cultural changes impact the company. I don't know if you guys remember back to Windows XP Service Pack two, but that was basically where we said, oh my gosh, we put out Windows XP, and it turns out that all these computers that are connected to each other are a great target for hackers. And we'd said security had to be a feature of the OS, and so we built antivirus, and, you know, a bunch of stuff into the OS before that, I happened to be working on SQL Server when there was a pretty significant issue where there was a embeddable, small version of SQL Server that was used in a lot of apps, and it shipped with a default Two letter username and a default two letter password, so not secure by default. And it turned out that that was a easy vector. You know, the only thing I could say is, in my experience, every time something happens, we learn and we get better. In this case. Way the environment has changed. They're state sponsored. It's not the same hacker as it used to be. It's groups with effectively boundless resources. It's cloud services and cloud tenants. We have to do better. So all I could tell you is, like I said in such as words, when it comes to a choice between security and anything else, security is going to win, and we're going to address those operational culture decisions that the report mentions are not going to we are addressing them. Okay, all right, I did read, I did read a report just the other day that Microsoft employees in China where I asked to get rid of their Android phones and switch over to iPhone for security, and there are a few other things like that, so you see the little pieces of that. Moving on. Yeah, I fun story. Was it last week? No, the week before, for a whole day, I lost all access to corporate resources. We keep upping the bar. You know, for Microsoft employees to log in, we used to have to use authenticator with a two digit code. We don't choose we actually type it in that was deemed not secure enough. We moved to a passkey based system. And, yeah, we we take security very seriously internally as well, and that's coming back to mdep. One reason that I'm that I believe that mdep will up the bar in security and manageability is because it has to pass our own security organization that, as you can imagine now, is extremely high bar, you know, highly focused. So mdep is working super closely with our CISO organization to just get those devices to be internally acceptable. So when do we see it? I mean, let's come back to that for a second. You know, you mentioned that we've seen it on, I personally have seen it on the job or bar, although they said they weren't releasing it. When does it get out in the wild? Or if I'm one of your partners, when do I put it out at jobra bar on amdap was going to be out? You know? Now I'll circle back right after this and ask, I It's very soon for that. I think yay. Link has the first set of devices coming by end of this calendar year. So the way they're doing it is, of course, new devices first, right? So anything new that comes out, they're putting MDP on it, going back and trying to upgrade devices. They're going to do that based on the cycle of recertification and so forth. Barco, I don't remember the schedule. I thought it was also by end of this calendar year for the first set of devices. And then you're going to see additional partners get announced. For sure, the benefit of having room collaboration on Android as a choice. And as you point out, for even your own customers, about 50% of the choice, as opposed to that, is that it was a platform that you could very easily, if not immediately, switch to another vendor. You can use it with Zoom, you can use it with Tencent. You use it with Google. It's meant to be an open platform, and I'm just wondering if anyone in Microsoft, or if you, or if you've heard about if there's any consideration about how this might upset customers or partners, or how this might change the strategy, if one of the platforms that may or may not be competing with you now needs to use a piece of software that you're generating, as opposed to something that's open source. So So couple of things. One, you may not know this, but as far as I know, there are still more zoom rooms on windows out there than there are zoom rooms on Android. So zoom has a good history of picking up windows, which is also an open platform right zoom, if you even look at desktop, I think more zoom runs on Windows than any other OS. I think just looking at share of Macs versus PCs. So Windows is, of course, an open platform, and there are OEMs who you know basically say, Hey, you want to switch. There's an image you can re image your devices on Windows. So we know customers that have gone I'll just do the case I'm most interested in, from zoom rooms to teams rooms by reimaging devices on Android. There's multiple ways of doing that. There could be a reimaging. There can be a reset to out of box. Basically, you have two images on the device. You reset the out of box, you choose us or zoom. None of that changes when mdep. So first of all, the mdep team would love to have zoom devices running on mdep. There is nothing. There are no teams, pieces that are in. Currently part of mdep. There's the Intune manageability, there's, you know, some other Microsoft security and manageability components. Nothing about teams. So we would love, and I believe the mdep team has and will continue, talking to zoom. We would love to have OEMs use mdap for zoom devices also, and therefore they can have, as we said, two images on the device. They can switch. The OEM can choose not to do that. They can choose to do m depth for teams and not m depth for zoom and switch. Now, since we brought up security and upgradability. The only thing Microsoft will stand behind in those cases is the mdep part of the device. So if there is a partition, you know, on the device with a non mdep image, we can't say how or whether that's going to be updated or presents a security attack vector. We're going to focus on the m depth piece of that device. Did that answer your question? I think so. I mean, I it's a it's a complicated situation, and I'm speaking on behalf of like, three or four different manufacturers that that wouldn't want to be named, they wouldn't want to say this, but I've heard this, you know, privately and in backrooms. It's like, why would we want to re engineer our piece with a lot of manpower and a lot of work to just bring it to where we are already today and give up where we were going in the future? So it's going to be a tough call for a company like, like HP poly, that's got all or neat that's got a lot of features, or or even Cisco, which is kind of doing it a little bit differently, but they're in their partitions on mdep. It's going to be a lot of work for them to bring that to where it needs to be. And I don't know if the incentive is there to do that quickly. Maybe it is, I don't know. I hear you. I think what we would say is, hey, the payback is around the cost of every new major Android version, plus the Upgradeability and so forth. And I'm not even really hearing much of a conflict, because if I, if I understand what Ilya is saying, it's still Android. It's just a Microsoft version of Android. So if they have a lot of expertise and skills that they've developed over the past few years on Android that should be mostly applicable as they move over and and, and they should still be able to reboot with different applications running and things like that. So as far as I can tell, you haven't said anything that would be a problem. Everything you said, Dave is correct. But also, in fairness, I've heard some of the concerns that David's talked about. I'll say, with all respect to our OEM partners, primarily, I think the concerns are competitive between them. So you know, a vendor that has a big install base in Android would say, well, now anyone can come in, pick up mdep and sort of be where I am pretty quickly, maybe not with the internal expertise, but with the platform and with the ability to keep that platform upgraded so much like Windows does kind of bring a level playing field, if you will, to to PC makers having an Android distribution for Microsoft does sort of level the playing field. Where before OEMs, you know, kind of were building their own OS and have that advantage so that that is real, I would say again, with all due respect to our OEMs, our focus is on the customers versus necessarily, how the OEMs position against each other. So for us, again, it's about saying, look, the OEM is the customer for mdef, for the OS, and so there we're going to deliver a set of benefits, lower cost for Android, major version upgrades, keeping them secure, more added value in the platform. We have to be flexible enough that they can take code that they've already written and bring it to the platform. But, you know, there's a choice that OEMs will have to make, and so it's up to us to have a really good value proposition. So I want to wrap this up with but I got an important question, and it actually is going to use that other part of your title we haven't gotten into yet, about calling. You know, I'm thinking about this. It's interesting that you you've got calling and devices, because Cisco snoring. I know, I know, you know, he used to only do the new devices, and he ended up with phones as well. And so I guess that's kind of emerged. And then, you know, Cisco's obviously expanded into desktop devices in their device portfolio, which borderline on phones. D 10 has their pro. You've got zoom, you got neat with their frame, you've got a number of kind of companies kind of moving into the desktop realm, and now that you've got calling, and you assume are responsible somehow with phones out there, which we haven't heard a lot of updates on the phones in a while. Do you envision this m depth story? Because I've heard, I've heard crazy accusations that Android actually works on phones too. So do you envision that you'll see a new generation of phones, slash video devices designed for the desktop, running mbip. So actually, let me catch you up. Every team's native phone. Desk phone is an Android device. Yay. Link audio codes poly, they're Android devices. We do have a sip gateway audio only that lets us work with other you know, older phones zoom, by the way, takes exactly the same approach. I don't remember the their names, but they have like, a SIP phone support, and then they have a phones running a zoom app, and those are Android. So yeah, the yay link announcement covered every Android device that's video and desk phones they're going to be using m depth for desk phones as well. And Cisco under snore is one of the largest, I don't know the exact ranking, but largest sellers of phones in the world. I'm going to guess it's them. Yay, link and poly in some order that I don't remember, but you guys could look it up. So yeah, like, it's complicated, because obviously, WebEx has a calling service, and that's a great business for Cisco. But I'll just say, from my perspective, since you brought it up, why would I love to have Cisco do more teams native devices in every category. So really seeing the convergence of video and voice, we've been talking about it for years in terms of the apps, apps like teams, but now we're really seeing it around the devices as well. That's fantastic. All right. Well, I want to thank you so much for doing this podcast with us. And I know you're very, very busy and we and I think this is really informative. So thank you so much for participating. I want to thank you guys for having me on. I follow both of you. I think you guys have a great insight into the industry, and I am happy to come back and cover other topics. I think it's great for customers to have this podcast as a information source. You.