Remarks by Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president, Operating Systems Group, on May 4, 2015.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore.
(Applause.)
JOE BELFIORE: Good morning. Hello. Hello, everybody. It’s a real pleasure for me to be here at Ignite. Of course, I’m going to talk about Windows 10, and as Satya said one of the areas that I’m going to focus on is more personal computing.
Now, I know many of you are familiar with Windows 10, and you know that Windows 10 has work in all three of these areas. It’s going to support the intelligent cloud. It’s going to help all of you to reinvent productivity within your businesses. But we’re are kind of focused on more personal computing.
And today I’m actually bringing with me a mission here to Chicago. It’s a mission that I am on, personally, and that I’m going to try to enlist all of you into as well. My mission is to convince you and to give you the tools to go back to your companies with the belief that your end users are going to love and desire Windows 10.
Windows 10 is a product that we’re focused on pulling together in a way that will work great for people at home, but also work great for people in business. And I want to focus on the end-user part of that message, and later on you’ll hear Brad Anderson talk about the IT management part of that.
Now there are three main ways that we’re focused on making sure that Windows 10 will be great for the end users in your business. But, first, we need to make it easy for those users to move from Windows 7, or Windows XP, or Windows 8, or whatever version of Windows they’re running and come to Windows 10 and immediately be productive. We need to deliver a familiar user experience that has exactly the right balance between things that are where you expect them and new features and benefits that unveil themselves at the right pace with help so that you can improve your productivity as time goes by.
Secondly, there is an amazing range of features in Windows 10 that deliver on the promise of more personal computing, everything from being able to speak in natural language to Cortana, and ask questions, even about your business data, being able to write with a pen or with your finger on the surface of the Web in the new Microsoft Edge browser. There are many of these things. And even the security of Windows 10 takes advantage of more personal computing to make that a delightful experience.
So I’m going to walk you through pretty much just demos of these three things and why end users are going to love Windows 10 in your companies. So let me come right over here and get started with a demo.
So the first thing I’m going to do is begin at the beginning. And I want you to imagine all those people out there who are familiar with Windows 7 coming to their Windows 10 PC for the first time. Down here on the taskbar they’re going to find the familiar Start button. This new editor control where they can ask anything, and then of course the taskbar that’s familiar.
When they bring up the Start Menu, the key idea that we’re aiming for here is the balance of familiarity with new features. And we’ve been doing a ton of user testing, and what you see here on the screen we think is very near the final design. It has many tweaks lately to get the last bit of Windows 7 user familiarity. So you see right up here the first thing we present is the Most Used list of apps that you’ve been using. And this will come forward if you do a Windows 7 Upgrade. Recently added apps here are available so when things are installed they’re very easy to find. And then common tasks like File Explorer, Settings, Power, are very handy.
We’ve also just added back the support that was in Windows 7 for jump lists within the Start Menu and the taskbar, so that important UI element will be present as people expect as they move forward from Windows 7.
And then, of course, over here we have the section that’s familiar to Windows 8 users, but also really easy for everyone to learn and get benefit from, which is our Live Tiles. And you saw we’ve been making some tweaks to the animations in these Live Tiles and so on.
So right off the bat, we want people to get into the experience in a way that’s familiar and natural. But then from there have features reveal themselves that make people more productive and effective as they’re using Windows 10. So now I’m going to start talking about things that begin easy and discoverable, but then branch into high productivity.
So I’m going to come down here to our task view. We’ve added a button on the taskbar, so this is really discoverable for people. In our telemetry we see that the use of Alt-Tab is around 5 to 8 percent of Windows users. Those people find it very powerful, but not that many people know it. So when I come to task view I can use this to switch between apps. Here I’ll go to my File Explorer. Here I’ll go to my Maps app. And, of course, here you see in the case of File Explorer, an older Win32 app; and in the case of Maps, a new Universal Windows App, both of which behave in the same way with restore state windows, and minimize/maximize. So there’s nothing new for people to learn if they’re coming from Windows 7.
But you might have also noticed there are some great new features here, too. We have multiple desktop support. So if I have a desktop where I’m working on my expense reporting spreadsheet here, and I have a desktop where I’m doing more of my sort of productivity stuff, it’s handy.
Now you’ve seen this before. I know a lot of you are Insiders and you’re been asking us for stuff and we’ve been putting new stuff in. So let me show you some delightful features you might like.
As power users if you hold down control and Windows and then right arrow you can flip over to your other desktop, control, Windows, left arrow will get you back there. Now imagine how productive this can make people. You’ve got your four Windows set up for your intense PowerPoint authoring on one desktop and you can flip back and forth between these.
Here’s another big Insider request, you want to be able to take an app and move it from one desktop to another, well now drag and drop works. It’s very easy to grab a window move it from one place — (applause.) Thank you. There are many, many tweaks that we’ve been putting in the build like that, listening to feedback in particular from folks like you and there are more coming. We’re going to really tune this to get that right balance between familiarity and productivity.
Now the next thing I want to talk about is Cortana. You’re all familiar with Cortana in general. You know that Cortana is the world’s only personal digital assistant, and we’re building right into Windows 10. And today I want to show you some new things that we’re working on for Cortana that can help in a business environment.
Now, of course Cortana is one of the features that we focused on for this notion of more personal computing and natural interaction so it works with voice. And so I can even be this far from my PC, it helps that I have this big mike on, and I can ask Cortana interesting questions that just help me be more sort of productive and informed. So, for example, I might say hey, Cortana, how tall is the Sears Tower?
CORTANA: 1,729 feet.
JOE BELFIORE: Thank you.
Now Cortana was especially helpful there, because she knew what I was talking about, even though the name of the Sears Tower has changed. I didn’t know that. Of course, there’s many, many things that I can ask and this is an example of the intelligent cloud backing up Windows 10. And Cortana will keep getting smarter and smarter.
Of course, we wanted Cortana to be good at PC tasks, too, not just Web queries. So I can say things like hey, Cortana, show me PowerPoint slides about the charity auction. And there we go. The indexing service on the client is able to look at local files, files in OneDrive, and OneDrive for business and give me a unified result across all those things.
Now, one of the things that we’ve been finding out through the Insider program is that people are asking Cortana to get help with how to use their PC. And so we’ve just begun teaching Cortana about things that she could be helpful in, in instructing people how to get more done with their PCs. So I’m going to show you an example of this work in progress. Now this is not exactly how the resulting content will look, but you’ll get a sense of this scenario.
Hey, Cortana, how do I project my screen?
CORTANA: The keyboard shortcut to project is Windows key plus P.
JOE BELFIORE: So again, one of these kinds of things that as we see what people are doing we’re able to tune the capability of Cortana in the service and make her smarter and better able to answer the questions that are actually getting asked.
So that’s a set of things that we’re sort of building right into Cortana as a general feature for everybody. But, one of the things I wanted to show to you all for the first time is some work that we’re doing in Cortana to enable her to connect to business-specific data. And when you think about the range of things that Microsoft is working on, a smart cloud that makes productivity work different and better, with more personal computing, this demo sort of outlines how these things can all come together.
So we’re going to switch machines, because we have a PC that’s configured and you’re going to actually see a slightly newer Cortana UI here. What I’ve done is we announced at BUILD last week that Cortana can connect to other applications. And Cortana’s intelligence and capability can be enhanced through other applications. Well what we have here is Cortana connected to Power BI. And this is done in an interesting way where any client PC that has Cortana if you sign into Azure Active Directory and are set up on Azure AD to have Power BI data, then Cortana can answer questions about your business data. And she does this in some pretty rich and interesting ways.
So what we did a week or so ago we took the then-current data about all of you Ignite attendees, it wasn’t complete yet, but it was close, and we put it into Power BI and now I can ask Cortana questions about all of you. So let’s try this.
Hey, Cortana, how many people are attending Ignite? And there you go, at the time we took the data there were 20,000 of you. (Applause.) Now actually there are 23,000 of you now, so that data is just a little bit old. Now, that’s like — asking that question like child’s play, right. Like you’re going to have an intelligent personal assistant that has this rich data, you should be able to ask some questions that start getting at the insight behind that data.
Hey, Cortana, what’s the number of people at Ignite by country? There we go. She found the countries that people are from and the number of them. And this one is kind of interesting, because right here in the canvas there’s interactivity. So you’ll notice that North America has a bigger circle than a bunch of other countries and some of these countries, as I zoom in they’re close together and hard to see, I can act interactively right there within Cortana’s canvas to get more insight about this question. We’ll do a couple more.
Hey, Cortana, what are the popular reasons for attending Ignite? And here you go. You all were interested in hearing about everything. That’s good. We like that. And then you were interested in new products, in beta products, in existing products and so on.
Okay one last one, just because if you could imagine people who are really trying to draw insights from data they want to ask questions in different ways, slice and dice, consider how powerful it is when you can simply ask your personal digital assistant something like hey, Cortana, show me the average number of PCs our attendee companies have by industries. And there you go. The top industry for Ignite attendees in terms of size of PCs is the defense industry averaging at over 20,000 PCs per company.
So that’s an example of bringing together an intelligent cloud, thinking about how to reinvent productivity through more personal computing and natural interactions, speak, being able to interact with Cortana right in that canvas, and an easy way to deploy it to lots and lots of people. And we love this as an example for how these things come together and why end users in your companies are going to love Windows 10.
Now the next thing I want to talk about is our new browsing experience in Windows 10, Microsoft Edge. We announced the name for Microsoft Edge at BUILD last week. And we’ve been talking about this for a while. I’m going to do a quick demo. I would encourage you to take a look at the videos of some of the other demos, because I’m not going to go into depth here. But I do want to show you one sort of scenario that brings together our key end-user benefits, which are enabling people to take notes directly on the Internet and share them with each other, being able to read effectively as you move from site to site and, of course, third, Cortana is built into the Edge browser to help you with your browsing tasks.
So I’m going to come right down here to the familiar “e” icon on the taskbar and open up Microsoft Edge. And as I get into the demo, you’ll notice one of the things we announced at BUILD last week is some performance benchmarks. Microsoft Edge is created as a Universal Windows App. It’s one of the many that we’re building and including as part of Windows 10. And because it’s a Universal App, it has protections and very high performance, some of which you can read about in an article like this.
But the demo that I want to do that we haven’t shown before is bringing together our new reading mode capabilities with Edge browser extensions. Last week at the Build conference, we announced extension support that will be coming this fall. And we showed a couple of those, but I’m going to show you one more here.
Imagine I’m browsing the Web, I’m interested in what people are talking about in Windows 10. I come across this Spanish language site and I’m going to read this. And so I’m going to take advantage of our reading mode. I’ll come right up here, the reading view icon is really handy. And when I go into reading mode, one extra special thing is going to happen, you’ll notice the site is translated into English. And that’s because I have the Microsoft Translator extension installed. It knows that my native language is English, and we’re providing a hook in the reading mode so that extensions can be invoked and enhance your reading mode experience when you switch into reading mode.
So immediately I get this content here, not just beautifully presented in a way that’s easy to read, but also translated to my native language. And, of course, at any time, even in reading mode, I can choose to make a Web note, and then I might use a stylus or my finger to just go ahead and mark right up on the screen. I can highlight things that are interesting. And then I could come up here, clip them, and then go right up here and save or share them. So this gives you a sense of how the Microsoft Edge browser is going to help people with their reading, note taking, and through extensions be added on all the time as developers write new code.
So Microsoft Edge is an example of a Universal App written for Windows 10 that we’re building in. And it’s interesting to think about this as one of the reasons that end users are going to love Windows 10. First, because we, Microsoft, are writing a range of terrific Universal Apps, and either building them right into Windows 10 or making them available for the store. So there’s a lot of great stuff that your users will be able to get.
Secondly, though, this is a platform we’re investing heavily in, and it’s a great opportunity for all of you to create updated apps for your businesses taking advantage of our cloud, distributing through our store, and giving end users a great experience across a wide range of devices.
So I’m going to give you a quick look at how some of these things work in the suite of apps that we’re building, and how they run across devices. So we have a phone and a PC on the screen here at the same time, and I’m just going to flip through some apps. The first one I’m going to do is Outlook Mail. So on my phone I’ve launched Outlook Mail, and on my PC I’ve launched Outlook Mail. And you’ll see I can scroll through the list of messages in my Inbox. I’ll choose this Continuum demo message on both. And you’ll notice they visually look and feel very similar.
If you’re a user going from phone to PC, it’s going to feel incredibly comfortable. And the real reason why it’s so familiar from device to device is it is literally the same code. This app will come with Windows 10 on the PC, on a tablet, on a phone. It is the identical app. And so users can really smoothly move from one to another.
Let me pick another example. On the phone I’m going to open Word Preview. On the PC here I’m going to open Word Preview. This is Word implemented as a Universal App, a Universal Windows App. And so you’ll see here as I scroll down I get the same presentation of my document, because it is, in fact, the same code. I’m getting great quality rendering of my Word documents. I’m getting an equivalent editing experience on both. It doesn’t matter whether I’m using a PC, an eight-inch tablet, a six-inch tablet, or a four-inch phone, the experience is the same, because in fact it’s the same code.
Now, of course, not only, as I said, is the Universal Windows Platform for apps that we write, of course it’s a great opportunity for all of you. So let me launch here the Fabrikam Home Builder. So this is an example of a line-of-business app that’s using the Azure Cloud to drive its intelligence in the backend, and then written to the Universal Windows Platform so that I get this consistent experience across devices.
In fact, you might be looking at that and at first glance you say well those look different. Well, that’s because this app is taking advantage of the automatic adaptive UI capabilities in the Universal Windows Platform, so that when it’s large it looks like this, but when it’s small it moves into this kind of layout, which in fact you’ll notice is identical to what happens on the phone. You write the app once; it can adapt to different screen sizes and different inputs, and if you would like you can tailor it, as well.
And that’s the magic that enables the Universal Windows Platform to get a single app from a small phone, to a small tablet, to a medium-sized PC, to a large PC, to the Surface Hub, to HoloLens, and to the Xbox One. So it’s certainly worthwhile for you all to learn about that and look into moving your apps to the Universal Windows Platform.
Now, one of the great benefits of this kind of approach to the Universal Windows Platform is in delivering that mobility of experience that Satya referenced. We want end users to be able to pick up a phone device and have the same app experience that they might have on their PC. Similarly, we want people to take a single device and be able to transform it and use it in more than one way. And we call that set of features Continuum. Continuum is about being able to transform your use of a device into mobile scenarios, but give up no compromises in your use of input device or screen size.
So that’s a little abstract way to talk about it. Instead of being abstract let me just give you a real demo. Now, I’m sure you’ve heard about this before, but I want to show you what our UI looks like now. So I’m going to bring — get some of my apps here upon the screen so you can see some Windows. I’m using this Surface Pro 3 like a normal PC with a mouse and keyboard, all my apps work in windowed mode, the way I would expect. But, what I’m going to do is tear off the keyboard. And when I do I want you to notice up on the screen I’m going to get a little popup, I don’t know if we’re going to get this on camera here, I’m going to tear off the keyboard, I get a popup, do you want to enter tablet mode. I’ll say yes and this is the Continuum feature in action.
My PC has now transformed into a tablet. And you’ll notice a few things have changed. My apps are now showing full screen and I can task switch between them using the task switcher. If I’m a Windows 8 user and I’m used to task switching being a swipe from the left that still works. Similarly, we do have an Action Center here, which is available through a button on the task bar, or through right swipe. So if I’m a Windows 8 user, and used to getting to my Wi-Fi settings from a right swipe, that’s still there and present. And you’ll also notice when I go to the Start menu now it expands to the full Start screen, taking advantage of all the screen real estate. So that’s Continuum on a two-in-one tablet.
The other thing that I have here is I want you to think about how this Continuum feature enables a wide range of device form factors. This is an eight-inch tablet. It’s a Lenovo ThinkPad. And in this case it makes sense for the default usage case of the device to be in tablet mode. And you’ll see this is actually a slightly more recent build where we’ve listened to feedback on making the default tablet start simpler. We’ve increased the size of these items and we’ve put the more dense list of things like File Explorer settings, power and so on just off to the left under this menu that you can get to by swiping around.
So here’s our simple tablet experience. I can use the same task switching button to switch between tasks. Here’s my Excel expense reporting spreadsheet. But, what I want to do is show you how we’ve integrated navigation among full-screen apps with a common systems back button. So here I am in the maps app, this is included with Windows 10 and I’m going to expand the menu here, choose my favorites, and we’re going to navigate first to New York City, you’ll see the map jump to New York City. But, I’m going to use the systemwide back button to go back and change my mind and navigate instead to Tampa. So this is an example of this app integrating with the system in a simple way, down there on the task bar, in a full-screen, tablet UI, which is what people are accustomed to.
Now the story gets even better, because this is a full PC and it can run Win32 apps, and it can do all those things that PC users expect from a full PC. So what I’m going to do to prove that is I’m going to take it over here and dock it and when I do you’ll notice we’ve got it automatically switching back into PC mode.
There’s my maps app and the maps app is now taking full advantage of the large screen size. And you’ll notice when I open up this menu and go to favorites it gets displayed over here on the left, because the app has been tailored to understand laying the UI out differently when it’s up on this big screen. And similarly, if I go to Excel there’s my Excel app. I can now use that small tablet in a full, no compromises, familiar way when it’s docked with a keyboard and mouse. When I’m a mobile worker it works naturally mobilely, and when I come back home and dock it, it works naturally and in a familiar way as a full PC. (Applause.)
Thank you.
Now a big part of the reason why this works so well is that the Universal Windows Platform has apps that were designed to shift and understand mouse and keyboard input, large screens, but also touch input and small screens. And because that’s true we’re able to create a feature called Continuum for Phones, which lets a tiny device like this little phone give the power of a PC experience when you connect it to a large screen and keyboard and mouse.
So I’m going to plug this in here. This is actually a simulation. We don’t have the final prototype hardware ready yet to connect to HDMI. So in this case I’ve taken my phone, I’ve plugged it in. You can see right here it says tap for mouse and keyboard controller. So right on that phone I could tap and then get like a mouse pad and use the phone screen as a mouse. But, I don’t need to do that, because I actually have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard that’s connected to the phone.
And when I plugged it in you see up here on this monitor through HDMI, I get the familiar Start menu coming from my phone. They’re the same tiles on my phone and the same layout, and I can do things that will feel very PC-like all driven by my phone. I’ll launch into PowerPoint. I could go here, create a new slide; I could use the ribbon to insert a picture or other things. I get a very rich, complete editing experience.
We’ll come back to the start menu. You might be wondering what does mail look like? You saw me show mail a little earlier. When I run the mail app on the phone using this large screen mouse and keyboard it looks and feels exactly like the mail app on the PC, because in fact it’s the same code. When I reply Word is invoked. I get the familiar Word ribbon. All of this is being driven from my phone.
In fact, the phone keeps working, here you can see I got a text while that was happening, Ann is asking me about this data in my expense report. I can follow the text and right here on my phone I’m going to press and hold, choose copy, there we go. I’ve now copied that text onto the clipboard and I can paste it right into my — the same Excel reporting spreadsheet. Remember you saw Excel earlier? Does it look familiar here? It should, because it’s the same code. But, here it is running on my phone. I’ll press control V to paste, very familiar, and now I’ve updated this spreadsheet. I’ll use the task switcher, you’ve seen that everywhere, I can switch back to e-mail, say done, and control enter to send, all of that on a phone. (Applause.)
Thank you.
So now I’ve got one more topic, one last topic, one more topic, a couple of demos and I’m going to wrap up. You saw when I started out I said I was coming here with a mission to convince you that end users are going to love Windows 10, and that you can bring that message back and you could explain why that’s true.
Now there’s a really great thing that end users are going to love that you’re going to love, too, which is that we’re making Windows 10 the most secure client platform we’ve ever delivered, the most secure client platform you can get, and you know what, users are going to love it. They’re going to love it. I know that’s a crazy thing to say. They’re going to love it, because this is a security system that’s going to smile and wink at them, take steps away, and give them a flexible way to move documents around while protecting your company’s data. So let me take a look more concretely at what I mean by that.
So I’m going to first do a demo of the combination of Windows Hello and Microsoft Passport. Microsoft Passport is a technology that enables the replacement of passwords. Think of Microsoft Passport as a cryptographically secure credential that’s stored on a device, it enables two-factor authentication. You could have a phone and a PC serving as the two factors, but when you combine it with Windows Hello biometrics let users serve as an authentication mechanism that’s incredibly fast and easy.
So I’m going to — you see how it’s looking around for me. I actually have the camera covered up with a black cloth. And I have to do that, because this technology is so good and so fast, and by the way it’s also so secure, that as soon as I take it off it’s going to recognize my face and sign me in. Now, I want you to think about the last time you’ve seen an end user get delighted by a security feature. Now watch, here I go. I’m going to take the cloth off. One, two, three, done. That’s it.
(Applause.)
Now that is natural interaction on a PC delivering better security. I didn’t have a password I had to write down somewhere, it’s not a password you have to store in your network that could get stolen, and it’s going to help with the problem of data leakage, and it’s going to delight end users.
Now the last thing I want to show is on that topic of data leakage. And Brad Anderson is going to come up and talk about this a little bit more from your perspective and the ways that you can manage it. But I want you to get an end-user perspective on it.
We’re building features into Windows 10 to enable enterprise data to be safe. And you might say, well, we’ve got BitLocker already. How are you improving that? Well, with BitLocker, the end user faces an all or nothing decision for the entire drive to be encrypted, and it doesn’t provide for very much flexibility in the way files move around. We’re solving those problems. And, furthermore, we’re going to give you policy to control how your enterprise data moves between applications.
So I’m going to give you a few scenarios. First, imagine I’m an employee at Contoso Electronics, and I’ve been writing this document, our secret Contoso Partnership Plan. Now, because I’m at work on my work PC, when I save this you’ll notice, I’m going to save it into my documents folder, right here by default there’s a lock that’s displayed because my default action is to save the document encrypted. We assume this is a work document, and when we save it encrypted in this case it’s going to be encrypted, imagine I’m a Microsoft employee in this case, it’s protected by the Microsoft Authentication Root. So I’ll click save, and now this file is encrypted.
Now you might have noticed in that Save As dialog, and I’m going to come back here to give you a little bit more detailed look, some of the documents here are in green because they are also encrypted, and some of them are in black. This is the system being smart enough to handle users being able to both do work-based documents but also do personal documents in a way that’s very simple and natural to manage. And in this case I was doing this with the new Word 2016 Preview, but this capability can work for all apps as well.
Now there’s a whole bunch of scenarios that you expect to work in ways that are natural and will enhance security. So as a first example, let’s say I have a bunch of old documents. I did an upgrade. Well, do I want these encrypted? You can decide that, yes, I do. I can simply right-click and encrypt those to Microsoft.com. And voila, now they’re encrypted.
And now you want to think about the way people will move these around. First, I might e-mail them to someone else. And if I e-mail one of these documents to someone else at my company who is under the same encryption authority, they’ll be able to open and read the document. Secondly, I might use things like USB drives. In Windows 7 it wasn’t possible to do this. But now, in Windows 8, if I want to take my Contoso Electronics Sales Proposal, put it on a USB drive and hand it to another employee, that employee will be able to open it, if they’re authorized to do so but that USB key is useless.
Think about the worst cases of data leakage being accidental loss things, or documents handed over by accident. This kind of thing is going to make the right thing happen by default so accidents are far less likely to happen.
And then the last thing I want to show, I’m going to go to a SharePoint site. Imagine you’re using SharePoint, users want to download a document. So we’ll go here to this Fabrikam end-of-year analysis document. I’m going to download a copy, save it into my documents directory, and when I do you’ll notice there’s that lock screen. Right down at the bottom, this document comes down and as encrypted.
So what we’re doing is we’re making the right things happen by default. And we’re giving you all the tools to set up the policies that are the right ones for individual employees within your organization so that natural things will happen within apps that they understand.
And one thing that’s important, although broadly we’re going to offer this kind of capability in Microsoft apps across platforms, within Windows 10 the platform itself understands this. So you can take unmodified applications, define the policy for those, and roll them out to your end users in a way that’s natural and makes the right defaults happen.
Okay. (Applause.) Thank you. That is my quick look at why your end users are going to love Windows 10. I’m going to now yield the stage with a last reminder to all of you that if you’re not signed up as Windows Insiders, please do now, download our builds, try them out. Join the 3.7 million other people who have already done that.
Thank you very much for your time. Next up will be Gurdeep Singh Pall.
(Applause.)
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