Episode 191 – Fortnite, Foldables, and Azure AD, Oh My!

In Episode 191, Ben and Scott get distracted and talk about how good Fortnite is when lawsuits are involved, new exciting world of foldables with the Surface Duo, and the preview of Azure AD role-assignments to cloud-based Azure AD groups. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 191 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast, recorded live on August 14th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben completely derail Scott from our plan topics, by bringing up things such as lawsuits in the technology space, the Microsoft duo and the DataFlex rename. Then we wrap up the show by talking about the newly released public preview feature, assigning groups to Azure AD roles. Record, recording all the things. - All of them, all the time, - Including Scott in his Batman shirt. - That's right. - Hey Scott, should we start doing video? Should we start actually putting the video of this out on YouTube? - We could. - Or should we start live streaming this to YouTube? We've talked about this in the past, but I don't know that we've ever talked about it publicly and I just kind of suckered you in out of the blue. - We can do whatever you want Ben, I'm here to support you. - Yeah, you're here to support me. I don't know, we should come up with something to do. We should do, maybe we should start by just posting the videos. And then if we get ambitious stream because streaming always brings complications. - Yeah, we know how that goes. - Yeah. And then we can add it, although to be fair, neither one of us are probably gonna edit video. We'll just throw like an intro out on there and an outro on there and say, "Here, YouTube have fun with this." - Something like that. How better would it be, if we, could we embed a video in a video. - We could have the inception of podcasts, right? - Yeah. - I have a TV back here, maybe I can put the video of us. Oh, there, there's the TV. I could raise it up, put a video of us on there and have the whole inception effect. - I mean, most of it's gonna be just me with a coffee cup in front of my face. - Whatever, man makes it that way every once in a while too. So I have a question for you, Scott, the junior you can confuse pear logos and Apple logos. - Well, yes, if you've ever watched Nickelodeon show, you would know this. - Yeah, my kids aren't, we haven't introduced them to Nickelodeon yet. - No, it would have been like Nickelodeon when you were a kid. - Oh. And you're expecting me to remember that. I didn't have Nickelodeon when I was a kid either we didn't pay for cable. My parents are Dutch, aka cheap. So we never had cable. - Well, we played outside. - In the way back when in all Nickelodeon shows, all Apple products would have a pear logo on them. - Got it. Yeah, I don't remember that. But this is not related to Nickelodeon's pear, Apple is actually suing a company of five employees because they're green, obviously pear logo can get confused with Apple's black Apple logo. I mean we can throw a link to like the image in the screenshots. They look absolutely nothing alike and people are furious at Apple, which understandably so this is a little bit of a ridiculous lawsuit. - Yeah, I gotta pick the brands. - You gotta protect the fruit. I've actually heard Apple have sued several companies whenever somebody comes out with another fruit logo, they just sue them. I think Apple thinks they own all the fruit or something, who knows, that's my random news for the day. - That is fairly random. - We could talk about lawsuits all day long today, cause there's another interesting one that hit yesterday, that you had mentioned. - That I had mentioned? - That you had mentioned wasn't it yesterday? with Epic games is suing Apple. - Well, Epic is suing everybody. So there's a little bit of a, if you play Fortnite and lots and lots and lots of people, play Fortnite, I am very bad at Fortnite. I don't play it every day. I'm very bad at it. And you know generally go in and die quickly and then go with, this is not the game for me, but occasionally I come back to it because it's on all the devices and you know, it's a little bit of a time waster. So if you play Fortnite you're probably, you're probably aware of this, but if you don't play Fortnite, Fortnite is a super duper big game, right? It's hugely popular and it's available on all sorts of platforms, on certainly Apple's app store, it's available in Google play, it's on PC, it's on Mac. If there's a device out there with a screen that can run it, it's basically on it and ready to go. Within Fortnite, like many other games today, it's a free game to play, but you can buy virtual items within it, using virtual dollars or Vbox. And Fortnite came out with an update where they were giving a 20% discount off of Vbox, if you bought them through basically Fortnite's payment processing engine or Epic's payment processing engine over your app store of choice, so normally on both Google and Apple for in app purchases within games, you pay that 30% overhead to the app store provider. And they act as the payment processor and any kind of subscriptions or things would go through them. And ultimately not back to kind of the, you know, the company that was perhaps making the product like Epic in this case. Well, Epic, like I said, they pushed an update, which they did in a very interesting way. It wasn't an actually an update to the app. So it wasn't like you went into your app store of choice and you saw, Oh, there's new version of Fortnite, and it comes with these features. They basically shadow pushed it. So it kinda didn't go through the regular review process on either side for Apple or Google and it presented two prices. It said, "Hey, here's the price you pay in the app store, "$10 or come and buy your Vbox from us at a 20% discount." And they had both buttons in the app, so effectively you could do an online purchase through their own payment processing engine. And you know, they would still take their overhead and kind of do whatever they needed to do there. So long and short of it is that skirts a bunch of rules, whether those rules are right and wrong is kind of a whole different thing that, you know, they're not paying that 30% cut to the app store that is providing that payment processing functionality to them. So Apple removed them very quickly. So if you already have the app on your device, you still have the app on your device, but if you delete the app or if you were a new user coming in, you cannot delete the app right now. There's kind of like if you think about like Apple being able to remove things from, or kind of control distribution of apps, there's really three levers they could pull here, they could say, "Okay, I'm not gonna do anything, "and we're gonna let Epic continue forward with Fortnite "with this model that probably wasn't gonna happen." There's this second method where they can effectively remove it from the app store and remove it from search, so if somebody new is coming in, they can't download it. And now Epic cannot push any updates to the binaries for that application as well. There also would've been a third option, which is nuclear option, which would have been revoke Epic's developers certificate and then make Fortnite stop working on everyone's devices. And Apple kind of chose the middle of the road one there, Google also a couple of hours after Apple, went ahead and pulled Epic out of their store as well. So now Epic, who makes Fortnite, has filed lawsuits against both Apple and Google, that they are by all accounts, not very likely to win at all. You know, they're choosing to take this stand, which, you know, whatever you think of that, the 30% cut and everything else, you know, Epic's got a little bit of money to play with and, you know, they're willing to roll the dice on some lawsuits and things. - Yeah, it'll be interesting because Apple's also getting sued in the EU for that same 30% cut policy. - There's arguments to be made there, if you go, I don't know if you've had a chance to read through any of the, kind of the briefs around what Epic has going on, but effectively their argument in the Apple lawsuit at least boils down to the app store is anti-competitive. And they're kind of making the argument that they should be able to have their own app store on Apple devices and not just for their game. Like they don't want to just push their game out, they want to host another app store on Apple devices and make all that stuff work and come through. So obviously if Epic was able to do that, they would probably stand to make on the order of, you know, billions of dollars, if they were large enough and had enough developers, pushing apps into their store, but that also requires a bunch of platform support from someone like Apple. Like I don't think it would be possible today to just make an alternative app store without Apple's blessing, cause how would you get the app store onto your Apple device? You'd either have to download it from Apple's app store to begin with, which then it's subject called the you know, sand boxing and restrictions, or it would have to be preloaded and that just ain't gonna happen. - Yeah, it's all really interesting because it's all geared around the anti-competitive stuff, and I mean, it gets that applicant has some monopoly, but if you're going to choose to put it on iOS devices, like if you're going to choose to put something on my website or my platform, you're kind of going to have to adhere to the policies that I have for my platform. And again, you can't do another app store. You can't do in app purchases, maybe 30% is a big cut, but then just don't put it on there, I guess....