Terry Myerson: Build 2014

CORTANA: You guys are killing it. But keep in mind everything I was saying was recorded two weeks ago. (Laughter.)

TERRY MYERSON: All right, so we’ve been at this two hours. You guys ready for the good stuff now? (Cheers, applause.) All right.

Well, what Joe and Dave just spent that time talking about was a bunch of software that we are going to make available within days or maybe even a few weeks. But the No. 1 feedback we’ve gotten from you for the last many years at Build is will you please share your road map with us, will you please tell us what’s coming. We’re investing with you; we want to arrive at a great place with you, and to do that we need to know where you’re going.

So everything I’m going to talk about for the rest of this talk is not coming within the next few days or the next few weeks, but we wanted to share with you, our most important partners, so we can make those investments and build great things for our customers together when the software arrives.

So with that in mind, what David talked about was bringing these universal Windows applications to the PC, the phone and the tablet. But there’s one screen he didn’t talk about and that’s the television.

There’s no better TV experience out there than Xbox. (Cheers, applause.) I mean, Xbox right now is being actively used on 80 million televisions in living rooms all over the world. The engagement with Xbox is just phenomenal. With our new Xbox One platform the average user is using it five hours per day. And what we are going to enable is your universal Windows applications running on the Xbox. (Cheers, applause.)

So to demonstrate that, I want to use Kahn Academy. Kahn Academy is just a phenomenal organization that distributed educational content, videos to students all over the world, a whole variety of subjects.

Their experience starts here with their website. Last year, at Build we showed how easy it was to take this website and turn it into this Windows web application. With Windows Phone 8.1 Dave just demonstrated how straightforward for Kahn Academy to create this Windows Phone application. But as we bring the universal Windows apps to the Xbox, we’re working with Kahn Academy to now bring their application to the Xbox.

So here it is, Kahn Academy.

Xbox, stop listening. (Laughter.)

So you can see here is the Kahn Academy application, the same application on the Xbox.

And so let’s go over here and see what this looks like in Visual Studio. Here it is, Kahn Academy projects, the unique code for the Windows application, the unique code for the Windows Phone application, the unique code for the Xbox, when most of the code all of the assets, all of the business logic, and a lot of the layout is down here in the shared common part of the project.

And so I can come here, here’s the homepage, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to comment out this new pane in our application, the knowledge map. And then I’m going to press play in Visual Studio, and what it’s going to do is it’s going to recompile this application for each of these targets, for Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. It’s then going to automatically deploy to each of those targets, and we can watch our application come to life with this new pane on each of these targets.

So first we’ll see the Xbox. The app was deleted. It’s reloading on the Xbox and coming back up. The phone’s restarting, Windows restarted, and you can see on each of these we now have this knowledge map that’s showed up on all three of these devices from that one project in Visual Studio. That’s pretty cool. (Applause.) There it is on the phone.

Now, if you’re going to put an application on the Xbox, you can’t just make it work with a controller. You really need to think about how you’re going to take advantage of Kinect.

And so in that same project here I am using Kinect to control the Kahn Academy application from that Visual Studio project, shared source, one interaction model across platforms. That’s pretty cool. (Applause.)

So we should talk about Kinect. Kinect was introduced a few years ago, and I’m sure many of you had an experience like myself. When I first saw it, I thought, hey, that’s pretty neat. But then I took it home and played Kinect Sports with my son or my daughter for some reason really likes playing Dance Central with me, which is just truly ugly to watch, but there’s just something magical about this Kinect experience. It’s a whole new way of interacting with the computer. You have this feeling that this is the future.

And so it’s so important to us to bring Kinect to the PC, and that is why a few years ago we introduced Kinect for Windows. And the response from all of you was pretty phenomenal, over 1 million SDK downloads, 400,000 active developers with Kinect. I mean, it’s just terrific work you all are doing.

And so I’m pretty excited today to announce Kinect v.2 for Windows. Now, the version 2 Kinect for Windows builds off of the sensors that ship with the new Xbox One. This is a 1080p camera with an incredibly wide field of view, so you can now build applications with a subject that’s much closer to the camera or works in a much smaller room.

The SDK has greatly improved skeletal tracking, facial tracking, gesture recognition, and really works well in low light.

And the applications that are being built with Kinect for Windows, it’s not just games. We’re seeing work done that’s incredibly creative.

I want to highlight two companies that are in a video I’m about to show. The first one Reflexion Health, is trying to revolutionize physical therapy. And Freakin’ Genius, which really is the company name and it’s a pretty cool company name, but Freakin’ Genius is trying to bring the art of animation to everyone, all with Kinect.

(Video segment.)

(Applause.)

TERRY MYERSON: So let’s go back to that same Kahn Academy application in Visual Studio, and here I am using the same gesture on the PC that I was using on the Xbox to navigate in this app.

And so let me just close talking about Kinect to say I really think you should explore this. We think this is the future. We think this is the way that we will all be interacting with our computers in some time. These cameras are going to become pervasive, and I would encourage all of us to really be creative about how we can take advantage of them.

Now, I can’t talk about Xbox technology without talking about graphics. The graphics that are on the new Xbox One are really phenomenal. I mean, this is a live action shot of someone playing “Forza” from Turn 10 Studios backstage. I mean, the photorealism in these games is just phenomenal. I mean, it’s magical when you see this take place on the Xbox.

And what makes this possible on the Xbox is that the Xbox graphics platform has an amazing level of low-level control and efficiency, which allows these artists to really envision what’s possible and then make it take place in front of the user.

So we want this graphics technology to be available for everyone on every platform, whether it be for medical imaging applications, computer-aided design, or any application that would want this same immersive experience.

And so we’re going to do that by bringing the magic of the Xbox graphics platform into DirectX 12, and bring DirectX 12 across all of our devices. Windows Phone, Windows and Xbox will all have the same graphics platform in DirectX 12. That’s pretty good; come on. (Applause.)

And DirectX 12, I mean, it really is phenomenal technology. We’re talking about a graphics technology that scales from our lowest and most inexpensive Nokia Windows Phone to our PCs to Xbox to these big honking graphics cards that have these jet turbine engines to cool them off to support this amazing gameplay from our most hardcore gamers, one graphic technology that scales, one API surface that efficiently takes advantage of all the GPU horsepower you can throw at, without taxing the CPU.

And so to see what’s possible, we asked Turn 10 Studios, the makers of “Forza,” to work with NVIDIA, who has the really early DX 12 driver, to say, hey, what’s possible, what will it be like when we bring DX 12 to the PC. And so I’m going to try and play and show you that, and I’m not going to be able to drive as well as the people backstage.

But you can see here this is the PC, this is a PC running DX 12, with some of the same photorealism you saw on the Xbox. The different graphics cards will have different capabilities, but there are not PC games like this. This is just phenomenal, this is so cool just to see this level of artistry, this level of graphics on the PC. (Applause.)

All right, I should stop playing now.

And so we’ve talked about the PC, we’ve talked about the phone, we’ve talked about the tablet, we’ve talked about the Xbox. But there’s a whole class of devices our industry is abuzz with right now that are broadly called the Internet of Things.

And what’s making these new devices possible I really think are these phenomenal breakthroughs in the silicon ecosystem. Where we used to have these large motherboards, we now have these incredibly small, incredibly powerful chips.

We’ve ported Windows to ARM, but one company that’s really done some incredible work lately is Intel.

You know, I have here Intel’s Galileo development board, and right in the center of it is this tiny little chip, their Quark chip. That chip, which is the size of a pencil eraser or your mouse cursor, this is a full X86 system-on-a-chip. This is a PC chip right there.

And then so you have to ask yourself, what’s possible, what kind of devices are possible when a PC runs on something the size of an eraser?

And so Intel’s shipped this development board, this Galileo board, and we have this great garage community at Microsoft who asked themselves, what should we do with it? So they decided to build a piano.

This piano is powered by that tiny little chip. Is this a piano, is this a PC, is this a — it’s a piano. It’s a piano that runs Windows. I think it’s the first ever piano that runs Windows. (Laughter, applause.)

And so this piano was built leveraging — this was a Windows developer that started with what’s possible, they leveraged all their skills, all the tools they know and asked themselves, what can we create? Just love the creativity.

And to show you this really is Windows, here we’re going to telnet into the piano. You can see that it’s running the Windows 8.1 kernel. We can go and see is David’s ancillary function driver there for us to use. There it is. (Laughter.) And it can run Windows apps.

[Music plays.] (Applause.)

So let me invite Joe up onstage, who’s a lot more musical than myself, and what I’m going to do now is I am going to — here’s the Windows — oh, I guess we won’t do that. So what I’ll do is — where’s the debugger? Here I’m going to attach the debugger to our piano.

JOE BELFIORE: Always ready to be here to act as a human foil for a demo.

TERRY MYERSON: Yes, all right. (Laughter.)

And so as Joe, who plays the piano now — go for it, Joe — we can all enjoy the debug spew from this Windows piano.

JOE BELFIORE: My career as a tester begins. [Music plays.] (Laughter, applause.)

TERRY MYERSON: So using the Windows tools that we know how to use and we have so much experience with, we can debug our piano or maybe even debug our musicians. (Laughter.)

But what’s so great about this Internet of Things is that it’s not just about the thing, it’s also about the fact that they’re connected to the Internet. And so this Windows application on the device is feeding all of this telemetry and data back to an Azure data service.

So here I’m going to show you a portal into that Azure data service, which is connected to the piano, and ask Joe to play it again, Sam.

JOE BELFIORE: How about for the Internet this time the melody? [Music plays.] That’s good enough. (Applause.) It’s nice to be the more childlike smaller version of you for this demo.

TERRY MYERSON: So we don’t share this with you today because we expect many of you to be building pianos, but we are at a time where the devices that we are programming to are going to change. And leveraging all the skills and tools that we have, and leveraging all of the creativity that we have in this room, we should be making some amazing devices that do amazing things that connect to the cloud. So let’s make it happen. (Applause.)

OK, so now we’ve talked about the PC, the phone, the tablet, the Xbox, and the Internet of Things. But one thing which I have not talked about is the Windows desktop.

One-point-five billion PC users out there, hundreds of millions of new PCs a year, and this is the primary interface they’re interacting with.

Now, Joe shared some amazing work the team’s doing to make that a great experience for every user on the PC, and I’m not here to announce the next version of Windows. But I am going to share that we are going all in with this desktop experience to make sure your applications can be accessed and loved by people that love the Windows desktop.

So for starters we are going to enable your universal Windows applications to run in a window. (Cheers, applause.)

And we’re going to enable your users to find, discover and run your Windows applications with the new Start menu. (Cheers, applause.)

You can see here we have Live Tiles coming together with the familiar experience customers are looking for, some customers are looking for to start and run their applications, and we will be making this available to all Windows 8.1 users as an update. So I think there will be a lot of happy people out there. (Applause.)

So something that now we want to share is we really want to get this platform out there. We want to remove all the friction between you and creating these devices, remove any hesitation you have to apply that creativity to creating new Internet of Things devices. So I want to announce today that when we have this new Windows for the Internet of Things available, Windows will be available for zero dollars. (Cheers, applause.)

But we’re not stopping there. Again, to drive adoption of your applications and get your applications out there for more customers, on phones and tablets with screen sizes less than nine inches we are making Windows available now for zero dollars. (Cheers, applause.) All about getting your apps out there.

So we’ve talked about a lot today now. We’ve talked about Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Internet of Things, the Windows desktop, removing friction to getting your applications out to our customers. But a concern that we all have is that some of this technology really is rooted in the Xbox experience. I mean, you really have to appreciate this immersive gaming on the Xbox, and Kinect, to really appreciate some of the stuff we’ve talked about. And we’re also concerned some of you just aren’t having as much fun as all of us at Microsoft with the Xbox One.

So I want to announce today that we’re giving a free Xbox One to everyone in the audience here at Build. (Extended cheers, applause.)

But let’s not stop there. We also want to make sure that everyone here has the opportunity to really appreciate the great work being done by our OEM partners, by Nokia, by our Surface team. So we also want to give everyone in the audience a $500 gift card to the Microsoft Store to choose a new device to do your best work on. (Cheers, applause.)

So let me just leave you with a few beliefs that really do guide us as we plan our platform road map.

We really do believe in this natural user interface. We believe in these gestures, we believe in voice, and we believe the applications of the future are really going to interact with humans using these techniques.

We really do believe in the Internet of Things. We think as the screens get smaller and the devices get smaller, the cloud gets bigger, and we’re going to make some incredibly new things possible.

And last but not least, we believe in all of you. We believe in our OEMs and device diversity, we believe in our developers and the best is yet to come, and we’re here to help you guys do it.

Thank you. (Applause.)

So with that, let me introduce our next speaker. His company has created over 80 percent of the Windows Phones that are being used by all of you. When we finish the acquisition of the Nokia Devices Group, we’ll be able to invest even more in his team and their ability to drive Windows Phone success. So please join me in welcoming Stephen Elop. (Cheers, applause.)

END

Related Posts