Microsoft has made Windows 8 available to everyone, wanting to deploy and/or test drive it. Since, without this news, it’s a slow news week, Martin Broerse has, once again, invited me to join his ITbende podcast this morning.

I joined for the first 30 minutes of the 168th ITbende podcast and chatted with Martin Broerse and Bart van Klaveren on Windows 8 and Office 2013.

Topics in this half hour included:

• The most impressive new feature (to me) in Windows 8 (0m57)
• The 17th birthday of Internet Explorer (2m55) and the Do Not Track feature in the Windows 8 Express Settings and the implications of both the Dutch and UK cookie laws (3m10)
• The look and feel of the Office 2013 Customer Preview on Windows 8 in the context of the Metro design principles (8m01)
• Skydrive and Outlook.com as previews of Office 365 and its Outlook Web App, Office Web Apps and SharePoint (9m53)
• My interpretation of the Windows 8 Style (10m46)
• Description of Touch Mode in the Office 2013 Customer Preview (11m13)
• How tablets create rude people with curt answers in e-mail (12m33)
• How simple user interfaces help people focus on their tasks instead of having to meddle with the underlying technology (13m21)
• Is Microsoft right on focusing on interoperability with 3rd party vendors while older Internet Explorer version (might) get dropped? (15m22)
• The Windows 8 deployment project at my employer, where all company-owned desktops and laptops will be migrated before October 26th. (17m50)
• Why desktop migrations can be a risk for small to medium sized businesses (19m32) but old versions of Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe software are risks too (21m34)
• H.264 as the cornerstone of RemoteFX for WAN and how H.265 might bring even more advantages. (24m04)
• My role with Microsoft Netherlands as a virtual IT Pro evangelist (27m16)

About ITbende

ITbende is a non-commercial Dutch IT news website with a weekly podcast, where Martin Broerse, Dae Punt, Luc Sala and Bart van Klaveren discuss the latest IT-related news. Often they invite people into their podcast to discuss a trending topic in more depth.