Steve Ballmer Speech Transcript – CTIA Wireless 2001

Remarks by Steve Ballmer
CTIA Wireless 2001
Las Vegas
March 20, 2001

STEVE BALLMER: Its a pleasure for me to have a chance to be here today. Im really thrilled by this opportunity. The range and level of excitement about the evolution and change that we see in the Internet, as Craig said, is quite high. And the connection point between the computer industry, and particularly Microsoft, and what were trying to do and the cellular industry has never been higher.

What Id like to do is set a bit of a framework in terms of the evolution we see in the Internet, and then put in context the investments that were making into a broad set of mobile and wireless areas.

The Internet has really grown up as a set of islands. People can send email to people, but are largely otherwise unconnected. Web sites can sort of in some primitive ways talk to other Web sites, but theyre largely disconnected. If you want to write a Web site — call it MyVacation.com — that tells the travel agent what to do for you, that tells the post office to hold your mail, that pages the people that youre visiting when your flight is late, that is an impossible application to write in the context of todays Internet.

The Internet is not extensible enough. Web sites are not integratable enough. Theres not an appropriate security context. User information is not centrally stored, where multiple applications can appropriately access it.

And yet if you think about the world that we all will want, in which people, Web sites, people and businesses are all communicating in a rich fashion, we have a lot of work to do.

And I see really kind of a whole new wave of Internet revolution. It may not take one year or two years; it may take three, four, five, but its a revolution that will be even more powerful than the revolution weve seen in the Internet over the last five years.

Weve put together a little bit of video of what it might be like to live on this next generation Internet, and Id like to go ahead and show you that video now, because it blends nicely the different aspects of the Internet. So lets show the Internet.

(Video presentation.)

STEVE BALLMER: (Applause.) As Craig said, its one Internet, whether youre accessing those medical records via PC, via handheld tablet PC, whether youre giving authorization and permission via your cell phone. Its one Internet, one place in which we want applications and information to flow perfectly, seamlessly; one security model, one permission model, one application model, one Internet.

And were at a point in time where we have a technology thats really I think going to be the seminal technology for this next generation revolution in the Internet, and thats the XML set of protocols.

Now, its interesting because in some senses this word XML means a lot to many people and probably doesnt mean much to others, but I think the XML message format will really be a thing that unlocks the whole next generation of revolution just the way the PC did in the early 80s, the way graphical user interface did in the mid 80s, the way the Internet did in the mid 90s.

And XML is a message format that allows you to move data around the Internet. HTML, which is the standard on which the Internet grew up, is a description of how you present information. So youre just moving the picture of information around todays Internet. In this XML world, well actually move the real data, the real programs will flow across the Internet.

This is a protocol thats open. Its owned by standards bodies. Its very broadly adopted. In many senses, I think we all should think about it as the lingua franca of the Internet. Its the thing that allows any two devices or any two applications or any two people to seamlessly communicate in the new world.

As a very good example in the wireless world, instead of trying to send can HTML picture of content down to a small-screen device, as Craig said, well send scalable content. Well send you an XML data representation of a piece of information and then well ask the wireless phone or other device to go ahead and present that data in a way that makes sense in as rich and powerful a way as that device enables.

So whether were talking about devices or people or Web sites, this very simple yet powerful message format and some other protocols that are being standardized around it will really be the backbone of this next generation of the Internet, and were incredibly excited about it at Microsoft. Everything that were doing in the PC, in our development tools, in our applications and services, in the work that were doing designing wireless devices, everything centers on this notion of using XML to unlock the power of what is possible.

We launched, about nine months ago, a software platform to help people take advantage of the XML revolution. We called it .NET. And .NET is a set of software that we will put in Windows, we will put in Windows servers, we will run out in the Internet as a service for end users and carriers alike, and as software that we will embed in non-PC devices like the television, the cell phone and other handheld mobile devices. This set of technologies makes it easy to build XML-based applications. It provides a user interface thats been tailored to work with XML applications, and it lets the user have control of their information, whether its stored in the Internet or on their cell phone or in their PC. Theres one view of my state, my calendar, my time, my preferences, my health records. And we give you an infrastructure, an XML-based infrastructure to seamlessly manage that information.

We did an event yesterday in Seattle where we announced our so-called .NET building block services. This is essentially a service and a set of tools that we will operate in the cloud that allows the user and any application provider who has been given permission by the user to operate on the users data.

For example, if I want to let my doctor schedule his appointment with me, Ill just give him access to my schedule and let him put an appointment on my schedule. If, as we saw in the video, I want to let Dr. Waloo look at my orthopedic records, but maybe I dont want Dr. Waloo to see my psychiatric records, those will be stored in my preferences out in the Internet cloud. And theres a whole set of software that needs to go not only into services, but needs to be built into the PCs, the phones, the TVs that are going to participate in this XML revolution.

Im often asked why we are investing as heavily as we are in the mobility area. We have a very large team, almost a thousand folks focused in just in devices and servers to support mobile applications, but we have a broad range of additional work that were doing on Bluetooth and other wireless protocols for the PC that I dont even count in that.

We see it as fundamentally important to the vision that we have of .NET and the XML revolution that we participate working in partnership with the carriers and manufacturers to make sure that there are devices that can fully participate in a software sense in this next generation revolution, devices that can let you access your health records, your email, your calendar, and have that access be exactly the same access that you would get from a PC or perhaps even from your television set.

So our investment really goes on a variety of fronts. We’re investing in tools to build mobile applications. Were investing in software that can be embedded in phones and other next-generation wireless devices, and were investing in a set of applications for the enterprise and for the consumer space to try to really, if you will, showcase, from work we have going on, showcase what you can do in mobility.

So this is a job-one area of investment for Microsoft, and we will use the same long-term approach and patience and persistence in this market that we have in many others. And so as some of you may have seen, we didnt get version one of our Pocket PC right. We did a version 2 and we did a version 3 and were going to invest in the phones and the devices, and just keep on being patient, because the wireless scenario is just too important for our .NET platform and for this XML revolution.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the kinds of things were trying to do with mobility in the enterprise space. The first place to start is with the notion that we have about 68 million users using Microsoft Outlook against our Exchange email service today in enterprises. That doesnt count the number of people who use Outlook in the consumer space or Outlook Express. Just in the enterprise space today we have over 68 million email users.

We have a lot of people who use our platforms today to build applications, enterprise applications that they want to take offline, whether its for sales force automation or field service, logistics or distribution; many people building those kinds of applications on our platform.

In fact, today JD Edwards is announcing that for their field service and mobility application theyre going to standardize 100 percent on the Pocket PC as a device for enterprise access to their line of business ERP systems.

We build servers on which people have data today that they want to unlock to the mobile world, and were delivering a variety of products designed to exploit this space: Our Outlook Web Access, which lets you have access to your Outlook email in any Web browser, a set of tools to help support Outlook in mobile scenarios, whether its on your Pocket PC, phone and some additional tools that are important to people if theyre going to use Outlook and email well on a wireless device, as well as a new product thats in beta test, soon to be released, that we call the Mobile Information Server, which lets you take any enterprise application, including Microsoft Exchange, and immediately enable it to be accessed over a wireless link.

Im going to turn things over now to Brian Shafer. Brians going to do a little bit of a demonstration for you on how Outlook and Exchange can work in a wireless world. Brian?

BRIAN SHAFER: Thanks, Steve. Well, what were trying to do, as Steve was outlining, is figure out a way to federate all of this information amongst all these various devices. So the first thing were going to take a look at, if we can cut to the slides please, is this demo that Im going to run through for you.

First were going to take a look at, obviously, good old Outlook on the desktop. This is actually Outlook out of Office XP, but you can see its the same sort of familiar user interface that weve all grown to know and love, and here is our friend Peter Connolly. We’re going to visit Peter a couple of times during this demo today. And so you have the straight Outlook view there.

In addition, Steve also mentioned that we have Outlook Web Access. Now, here this is something that a lot of people arent familiar with. From a straight browser I can actually get into my Outlook-based data, and I can go ahead and make modifications or what have you. If I want to go and look at contacts against it, I can do that, or I can go and look at my email. And again I can pull up Peter Connolly. So if I was at a hotel or an Internet caf
é
or at an airport or something, I could get to this data in a reasonably high-fidelity way.

The next product that we have that I was hoping to show you today — unfortunately, the network is not cooperating. And just in case you are wondering, that was AT & T. (Laughter.) Youll see this is a PocketNet service, or a lack thereof, at this particular point in time.

So here you can see what we have here is this is actually a WAP-based phone, and what Mobile Information Server actually allows us to do, assuming obviously that you have connectivity, is to actually pull that information down. So I would be able to go after that same record with Peter Connolly, et cetera.

The good news is if we cut over to the camera here is you can see that I have a Pocket PC and one of the beauties of the Pocket PC is that it is a hybrid device that works just as well offline as it does online. And at the moment Im in an offline state. Here I have the reminder about the keynote. Thats fairly obvious. My little password. (Laughter.) Okay. So well go ahead and pop that up.

You can see Im looking at MSN Mobile. I was having a browse around before. But if I wanted to go into the Inbox, I could go up and see that those are the same emails that I had elsewhere. If I added one or deleted one, everything would be automatically federated amongst all these different devices. If I went into, say, contacts, theres my buddy Peter Connolly and all of his information.

So I have it available with me in an offline state or in an online state, assuming that I could get through.

So what were doing with Mobile Information Server — the way to think about it in the initial term is that its the glue that ties together and does all of the data migrating between these various different devices. So it says,
“Okay, Im being hit by a WAP browser,”
so it servers up data in that appropriate format. Im being hit by a normal browser, so it serves up data in that appropriate format.

And another critical piece of this is that because of the way weve architected Mobile Information Server, were actually able to have a full secure link, from end to end, right through the corporate firewall down into the actual device itself, and Ill show you that in a subsequent demo.

STEVE BALLMER: Its very important if were going to all succeed in providing devices and tools to enterprises to use for their wireless needs, this focus on end-to-end security is even more important than it might be in many other environments. And theres a lot of technology that goes into making these things really traverse the firewall in exactly the right way.

Thanks, Brian.

The second area I want to focus in on is the consumer area. In the consumer area weve put all of our energy behind our MSN online service. Its become the number one destination worldwide on the Internet. Were not number one here in the United States, but globally we are.

Hotmail is the number one free Web-based email service in the world. We have over 100 million now Hotmail customers worldwide, 100 million people who are regular users of email. If you dont use your Hotmail account within I think 60 days we kick you off the service. So these are people use their email, who want access to it in all ways. They want it on their PC. They want it on their TV. They want it when their offline. They want it when theyre on their phone.

Our instant messaging service last month became the number one instant messaging service in the world; again, not number one here in the United States, but on a global basis we have the largest user base for instant messaging now in the world.

And our mobility service is MSN Mobile, where we focus on taking the content, not only the content we produce but the content the user produces, their calendar, their instant messaging, their email, their rules, their health records; we focus in on taking that and rendering it and providing services to push it out to wireless phones is now on more Web-enabled phones in the US and Canada than any other major portal is.

We are announcing today a partnership with Motorola and with Arch Wireless to bring these MSN Mobile capabilities and the MSN Mobile messenger device to a small form factor device manufactured by Motorola, with service provision by Arch Wireless. You get access to your Hotmail email. You get access to your MSN instant messaging capabilities, all from a very small form factor device. Its part of a continuous thrust not only with the devices and in the enterprise, but in the consumer world we know we need to build out on top of MSN seminal applications that really demonstrate and deliver on the value of high bandwidth wireless access. So were very excited about the work weve done with Arch and with Motorola.

Were moving into a world of next-generation devices. The phones that people have today are not the phones that people are going to want to use in the world of the XML revolution. The software doesnt really do data. It doesnt do XML. It doesnt plug into the global Internet in as rich a way as other devices. Theres a lot of work to do to provide a rich runtime environment that runs in the phone, and that really connects the user up, that authenticates the user, lets the user give permission, gives him full access to the things that they need.

Youll notice in the little video I showed we didnt need a huge screen to do very important things from that wireless device.

In addition, were taking the Pocket PC, which is now ramping up nicely in the marketplace, youll see us introduce, with our partners, wireless capabilities to that device. About a year from now we will launch a new version of the PC that we call the Tablet PC, about 2.5 pounds. You hold it in your hand. You take notes on it directly. But its still a PC. Its got a big screen. It runs Windows XP. And kind of as we showed you in the video of the doctor servicing the patient, its a great wireless device, a great wireless device for a certain class of mobile professionals, either for campus wireless networking or for wide area wireless through the cellular telephone infrastructure. We have concrete activities going on in each of these areas.

Were going to show you in a minute the next generation wireless phone design that we call Stinger, which takes the same concept of Outlook and .NET and the ties to the XML world and literally embeds it down into a cellular phone. Its a real smart phone. It is a phone first and foremost. It wasnt designed to be a PC. And well show you the form factor. Its really quite small and nice, smaller than most of the phones people carry today. Its got Outlook access built into it. Its personalized. We broadcast your information, your .NET service information down to the device. It supports the Windows Media technologies, digital media support. And from a carrier perspective, it ties in and leverages off of the base of Exchange customers we have, of Hotmail customers, the development tools, which will let people build next generation applications that run down in the device, and its a device, of course, that a carrier can take and brand and differentiate and make their own.

This is a very important project for us, and its the first project where I can say squarely our success and the success of the wireless industry is completely intersected. And we need to be pioneers of this notion of phones that fully participate through .NET in the XML world and the XML infrastructure.

Im going to turn things over to Brian. Brians going to show you a little bit of a demonstration of the Stinger device. As I said, its a small form factor, a very nice device. Brian?

BRIAN SHAFER: Great, thanks. Well, were going to jump around a little bit. I wanted to give you a quick look at the actual pager that Steve just announced. This is the Motorola MSN T900 pager. As you can see, again its a great way to get instant messaging and then Hotmail information in an affordable way down to consumers. So its a great affordable wireless access and that will be out towards the end of the year.

Were going to take a look though at some of the smart wireless devices that are actually out there today, and in fact, most of our Pocket PCs are wireless. So Im going to look at a couple of them. We showed you the iPaq and here I have, this is actually Ricochets 128K wireless card. So I can just pop that in. The beauty of this is its the same technology that you use in your PC, so one account and then the individual user can actually use this in their PC or their Pocket PC or some other device.

STEVE BALLMER: Can I pop an 802.11 card in there if I just happened to be at the Microsoft corporate campus?

BRIAN SHAFER: You absolutely can. Theres an 802.11 card that weve popped in there and Im actually going to use that in a couple of minutes in the next presentation.

And here again we have Casios Cassiopeia E125 with the Pocket Spider Modem from Nextel. And here you can see that —

STEVE BALLMER: And you should expect to see built-in radios in these devices in the not-too-distant future.

BRIAN SHAFER: Yeah, Ive got some good news there.

So here we have this is an actual page that weve been working on with the Los Angeles Lakers. Theyre going to be making this available as an AvantGo channel, and they let us give you a little bit of a preview of it today.

So, you know, its really handy when you go down to the games because I have these friends who — as it were — who always want to know who the Laker Girls are. So while youre sitting in the stands you can sort of watch them down there doing their thing and you can decide that, oh yes, it was actually Britain; that was her name. I forgot. But nonetheless there you can see we have a little bit of wireless connectivity there. Its very handy.

The next wireless device I want to take a look at is actually you may recognize this as the HP Jornada and it is, in fact, a new model of the HP Jornada. Its their model 525, which theyre announcing this week in a combination of this event and also over at Cebit in Hanover, Germany, where theyre going to be selling this for around $359. So if you can take that and combine it with the Novatel Sled you now have the cheapest color Pocket PC available on the market, as well as a less than $500 solution for hardware to get into a fully blown wireless CDPD environment. So thats something that were very excited about. So thats a bit of news from HP.

Now, Ive got a couple of surprises for you as well. The folks from Intel stole my thunder a little bit, and thats fine, because were proud of the device, too. You can see that we actually have a couple of devices that are actually on the market now that are integrated. These are based on European GSM technologies, so they dont run on the spectrum thats here in the US. But it is very similar stuff. Theyre straight Pocket PCs that are available today, but theyve done and integrated their own applications into the devices.

So here we have the Mitsubishi Trium device and then also the Sagem device, and these are real phones. So if I was in Europe Id actually be able to make that call. So you can hold one of those things that weve announced today.

Another product were working on that you may not have heard about because it ships overseas is something called the Microsoft Mobile Explorer. And its the first dual mode browser — its actually a tri-mode browser. It supports WAP and the two flavors of HTML, and its shipping around the world at the moment in this Sony Zed-5 phone. I have to say
“Zed-5”
because it is shipping in Europe as opposed to
“Z-5.”
But here you can see its a nice little small phone. It includes the WAP browser, as well as the HTML and HDML browser.

And also I have the Samsung model that was recently announced at GSM World Congress about three weeks ago; again, another device, this one is mainly sold out of Korea and out of Europe.

And the piece of news that we have for today is that Mitsubishi, the folks who work on the Trium product, are actually announcing with us today that theyre going to be bringing two phones to market in the United States that use the Microsoft Mobile Explorer technology. So were very, very excited about that and were really looking forward to seeing those hit the markets here.

STEVE BALLMER: You know, its very important why I believe in Moores Law over time driving all phones to be smart phones. We recognize the need to hit price points with some of these hot technologies, lower price points, and thats why were all supporting the investment we do into the Mobile Explorer.

BRIAN SHAFER: Absolutely.

So lets transition over and well take a look at Stinger. Thats the next device that I want to actually drill down on for you. Here you have a shot and you may have seen us hold these up before. This is whats known as our Avenger prototype. This is something that weve built in-house here at Microsoft. And, you know, were not in the hardware business. Were trying to make the best phone possible and then were going out and in conjunction with our hardware partners to actually show them that hey, this is possible and then please go and make a better design; heres our schematics, go make a smaller, lighter phone. So this is very much a prototype but its a very real prototype. Were actually using these in house, and I want to show you a little bit more detail about that now.

STEVE BALLMER: And we do have hardware partners already adapting that design to different form factors, sizes, screen sizes, et cetera.

BRIAN SHAFER: Absolutely.

So here I have a naked phone. Now, one of the chief design criteria for the Stinger phone was to get up and running in five minutes or less. So what I want to do is show you that this phone is, in fact, an empty phone, as it I would have gotten it from the retail shop or what have you, or directly from my carrier. So you can see I have no appointments. If I back out, I have no contacts, et cetera. So its basically a naked phone.

So what Im going to do is try to provision that in less than five minutes. And to keep me honest, I have a little timer, so lets kick it off.

So here we have, Ive gone off and the first thing I need to do is maybe Im at the retail shop or at the carrier myself, and Im going to go ahead and get this phone provisioned. So Im going to go ahead and put in the phone number and my password, and then well go ahead and log onto the next phase.

Now Im setting up the actual dial-up configuration, the means with which to go ahead and connect up to the larger systems. So my password and my domain. Were all in one here. We made on especially for the show.

And now my Mobile Outlook information. Well go ahead and put that in, my password, and the domain again, the same one fortunately. Okay and the server would be show mail.

Now, Im going to select my home screen. Im going to go ahead and just pick this default one. So whats happening now is weve packaged up all this information actually —

STEVE BALLMER: But those screens look color. Do you suppose well be able to do color screens on these devices?

BRIAN SHAFER: I certainly hope so.

STEVE BALLMER: Okay. I hope so too.

BRIAN SHAFER: Watch this space.

So here we have the actual information that I put down to actually get this phone provisioned in the first place is actually being sent down to the phone as an SMS message, so thats going to take a couple of seconds, but were putting them in in order, so lets go ahead and see how were doing, and lets kick off the process of a full synch.

So Ive sent this information down to the phone and now were actually going to go out and execute a data call, which will go out, wake up the servers, authenticate me against all those different services that I type myself into and carry on and start loading information down into the phone. So its a very, very simple thing. It takes a little bit of time at the beginning, but again we said were shooting for less than five minutes and were up to two at this point.

So one of the things that I want you to take away today, because when we talk about Pocket PCs and then we talk about Stinger phones is people kind of think,
“Okay, well somehow Microsoft has taken the Pocket PC and ported it in some way down to the phone.”
And thats actually an about face. What weve really done is we started with the Stinger project from the ground up about two and a half years ago to try to really make a lean, mean device thats a great telephony device. Its a phone first and then any of the applications, such as the PDA functionality that it has, is a secondary function. And, in fact, youll see on the future versions of Pocket PC theyll have more akin to do with Stinger than they do actually of the existing products. So were very, very serious about that and its also very exciting and well get a lot of efficiencies in terms of battery life and performance, et cetera, by starting with a really lean, mean design.

So theyre still both based on Windows CE, so dont let that confuse you. Just think of them as Pocket PC and Stinger and leave the operating system to the actual person whos building the phone.

STEVE BALLMER: They both run all of the .NET infrastructure technologies, so-called .NET frameworks and theyll all support these .NET building block services that run out in the cloud and let you validate yourselves the way our friend did in the videotape.

BRIAN SHAFER: Right. So here I have my phone is actually commissioned here. Im up to three minutes and 16 seconds, if thats not up on the screen there, but youll have to take my word for it.

So here we have our phone and were all provisioned now. Everything is off and running. Lets go ahead and take a look then.

Obviously I could go off and start making voice calls but thats relatively boring in this environment, so lets go ahead and look, Ive got my calendar. Lets go ahead and take a look, Ive got my contacts.

STEVE BALLMER: Theres Peter Connolly again out of your Outlook address.

BRIAN SHAFER: It uses the same set of information that I had before, so again trying to federate things amongst our devices.

If I jump out I can go in and look in, lets say, some email. So here are some emails here. Oh, heres one from Steve. Lets see. Oh, yeah, give me a hard time about the Lakers, fine.

Lets go ahead and do something worthwhile in terms of getting some real information. Going out, Ive got an update from Expedia automatically on my itinerary. One of the things youll see is that we actually have hotlinks, just like you do within a Word document or what have you. Ill go up to Expedia Travel and it tells me okay, if I hit this link, thats who its going to send a mail off to, et cetera. I could go and fire off that phone number, that 1-800 number that Ive surrounded there, or in this case Im going to go off and actually hit the Web site, which should be the Web site thats associated with my itinerary, since Expedia sent it to me.

So were going out and were browsing out over the Internet, and again this is straight HTML. This isnt some cut down sort of WAP subset or what have you. This is full-blown HTML, in this case going out and checking my flight information.

STEVE BALLMER: Hes automatically logged in because he logged into the Internet using one of these .NET building block services. Thats how he gets automatically logged in again then to any Web site on the Internet that supports these .NET building block services.

BRIAN SHAFER: Exactly. So here you can see my itineraries, et cetera, and you can imagine what those are all about.

Additionally, weve done a lot of work with respect to actually getting the applications to have a full integrated environment. If I go back to my home area and then jump into email, you can see if I want to go ahead and say forward an email to someone, I can take this next email, for example, and perhaps I want to forward that to somebody, so Ill go ahead and hit
“reply.”
And in this case Ill just go ahead and add Peter Connolly to that mail and kick it off. So right there without a whole lot of intervention from me, I can go ahead and fire that email off and redirect it to somebody else.

Now, I want to take a minute and show you something else that is really important and that, you know, this is a phone. I went through a demonstration and I showed you some demo stuff, so you might be thinking,
“Fine, the guys get it out of the lab.”
But let me show you, this is my phone. This is my personal Avenger. This is the one I carry around that I take phone calls on, on a daily basis.

So this is my Stinger phone. And you can see that I have some information here. But, for example, my contacts, I have some 200 to 300-odd contacts, which are the ones that I actually have on my Outlook list.

Okay, if I want to find somebody, I can find anybody quickly. Lets say I want to look up, oh, Ive got a guy who works with me called Stan Smith. Ill just go ahead and punch in Stan, there he is. If I want to go and dial him, bang, Ive got him. So Ive found one of his ten phone numbers out of the 300 phone numbers in my phone in about two seconds. And all this information was squirted into the phone. It wasnt actually sent in. You know, I didnt exactly put it in using the alphanumeric keypad, which would drive us all crazy.

So the last thing were going to take a look at then is just see if theres any new press announcement that we might want to be looking at here today. So Ill go into my inbox, and Ive actually got this change notification. Now, this is actually a functionality thats part of Office XP at the moment called Team Services. And what that does is when somebody changes the Web site, it actually gives me notification that some information has come through that I might care about.

In this case, Ive asked it to let me know about all press announcements. So Im going to go off, and here I am, securely through the firewall going to a server within Microsoft, and Im actually hitting this Web page. And this Web page is actually the press announcement from HTC announcing that theyre producing the Stinger phones in conjunction with us, along with the work that theyve done so well on the iPaq and the Pocket PC range. So thats the HTC product. Well take a quick look at that.

And here we can see. Its going to take me a little adjusting of the lights here. There we go. So you can see that the glare in here on these lights, Im afraid, doesnt do the screen justice. But here you can see this is the Stinger phone from HTC, which is, in fact, a color device. Ive made a home screen, which is personalized, which actually is set up for the Lakers to go along with my interest in Laker basketball, and youll see that just like we had before, I had my programs available to me. Its a full color user interface. We have the same look and feel as Windows XP. Were trying to make sure that all these products marry together very, very well moving forward.

So thats a quick look at Stinger. Were very, very excited about it and were looking forward to bringing it to market in about a year.

STEVE BALLMER: Great. Thanks, Brian.

(Applause.)

From our perspective, the key to the XML revolution and the key to mobility intersect. The issue is how do you build great mobile applications. Is there a platform that allows for the development of great applications? Can you integrate easily with existing consumer and line of business applications? And weve really put our energy, as I said, in designing in the tools, the development tools and the services to support these devices.

Were joined in this crusade by a wide variety of partners, people like HP and Casio and Compaq, HTC, Omnisky, IBM, Wireless Knowledge and Qualcomm; many, many partners, systems integrators, who will really help us all build out the next generation of the Internet and particularly the mobile Internet.

One last thing wed like to show you before we break, where we actually take the notions of the consumer and the enterprise both to heart and say,
“What will it really mean in the future to stream rich media down to these devices?”
How do we provide an experience whether its audio, video, where we really can put on a handheld device or a wireless link securely with the right digital rights management information on these devices?

Weve worked hard with our Windows Media technologies to get the support of the content community. We have a partnership with NTT DoCoMo in Japan to bring Windows Media technology to a variety of their phones. And just before we wrap well do a short demonstration for you of Windows Media in the wireless Internet. Brian?

BRIAN SHAFER: So you saw that the folks from Intel did a quick look at the Pocket PC running Windows Media Streaming. Well, what I want to do is give you a quick view on what might happen looking forward into the phone space.

Here I have a prototype phone of a later version of Stinger, where we actually have a little audio clip running. So Im going to just go ahead and kick that off for you.

(Audio clip.)

So you can see that one of the advantages that we have with Windows Media technology is that our codecs are still efficient, that we can actually put twice the amount of music in the same amount of space as the technologies that we compete with. It may not be so important on a storage card, but when were talking about streaming that information over the airwaves and down into a phone moving forward, thats a huge advantage and its going to be great for customers and were really looking forward to bringing it to market.

STEVE BALLMER: Ill be excited when we get the moving picture clips. Thanks very much, Brian.

(Applause.)

I just want to wrap up with a key concept. I agree with Craig Barrett, the Internet is the Internet. It will be accessed via PC, via TV and via a variety of wireless devices. The XML revolution will change the way people interact with the Internet. The XML revolution requires software to live in these devices and out in the Internet cloud. We look forward to partnering with device manufacturers and carriers alike in the enterprise space and the consumer space to help you unlock the XML version of the Internet for your customers.

(Applause.)

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