Nick Parker, Tami Reller, Antoine Leblond and Steve Guggenheimer: COMPUTEX 2013 Keynote

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome corporate vice president of OEM division, Nick Parker. (Applause.)

NICK PARKER: Good afternoon. Hi. My name is Nick Parker. I run the OEM division at Microsoft. Firstly, thank you all for being here.

We are an industry in transformation. In the last year we’ve seen incredible change together as we look across the new capabilities our technology has, whether it’s touch, whether it’s new centers, whether it’s new hinge designs. We see complete new categories of products, whether it’s convertibles, detachables, two-in-ones, whether it’s mobile, all-in-ones. It’s incredible change and new business models.

And at the same time, Microsoft has launched all of its platforms this year: Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Server, Windows Embedded, and of course Office.

And so what this really means is there’s a huge amount that we’ve done together in the last year, and I want to say sincerely on behalf of Microsoft, thank you for all that you’ve done with us and been part of that incredible journey. So thank you. (Applause.)

That partnership ranges from our component partners, our silicon partners, our ODM partners, our OEM partners, and our channel partners. We’ve done immense amounts of things in terms of change. And as we start to think about what we’re going to look at today, I will be showing you the Microsoft concrete commitments to how we’d like to continue to partner together and realize that opportunity across devices in our ecosystem, and give you a clear guide of how we want to work with you to continue to further and grow our joint businesses.

Joining me will be three Microsoft executives you know well: Tami Reller, who runs our Windows business, Antoine is going to show us the new products, and Steve Guggenheimer is going to talk about our application ecosystem. And that will leave you with the confidence and inspiring vision of how we’ll continue to partner together and realize the business opportunity and seize those new capabilities across devices for all of us.

The partner opportunity has never been greater than it is today on Windows. In terms of servers we believe there’s a huge opportunity as we start to think of the new capabilities we’re building with our services, whether it’s the cloud data centers and new opportunities for us to design and build servers that respond to the rapidly increasing demand on our cloud infrastructure or the demand on the servers from the explosion in devices.

And intelligent systems, our embedded business has grown very well this year together with you. And with Windows Embedded 8 we see new features and capabilities that we can really bring to market together for our vertical devices.

And, of course, on phone we continue to innovate across price points on the high-end as well as the midrange, and we’ve taken share together this year.

These are very strong businesses that we continue to enjoy the partnership, and you drive the innovation forward with us in this space.

And then finally, PCs and tablets, the heart of our business together. And Windows really does offer the best of work and play across all of the devices we want to work on.

As we think about server and going a little deeper there, we’ve seen the huge explosion of devices that are generating more and more needs for our server businesses, and we’ve seen very good growth with you in this space. Windows Server 2012 delivers breakthrough capabilities in terms of bringing new enterprise-grade capability to smaller businesses, as well as bringing new cloud data center and cloud infrastructure capabilities.

From a hardware perspective we partner with many of you, our OEMs, to deliver new enterprise-facing platforms such as cluster in a box and hyper-scale platforms.

Features that were previously only accessible by large-scale enterprises have been available to our small and medium businesses through our server platforms and working with you.

And finally, we announced at TechEd this week the next round of enhancements coming in Q4 of this calendar year with Windows Server 2012 R2.

In intelligent systems we’ve seen great growth with Windows Embedded 8. You know, we have a very aggressive target of 2 billion units by 2016. We already have a billion units running Windows Embedded today, and that’s as a result of our great partnerships, and we have a leadership position, and that’s double digit growth for us.

IDC forecasts the intelligent systems market will exceed 2 billion units. In two of the most well-known classes of intelligent systems Microsoft has nearly 86 percent of the handheld device market, and we power 88 percent of all the point-of-sale devices worldwide. That is huge business opportunity in intelligent systems and embedded devices together.

On Windows Phone we’re seeing tremendous growth. According to IDC, Windows Phone posted the largest year-on-year gain among leading smart phone operating systems in Q1 2013.

More than 145,000 apps and the Windows Phone store continues to grow with hundreds of apps added daily. We have more than 90 percent of the apps people want.

Fifty languages, access to apps in 191 markets, representing over 90 percent increase in the addressable market for developers’ apps.

So we have a value proposition for you and we have a value proposition for our developers, and it’s paying off with us taking share.

So in PCs and tablets this has really been the core of the devices market, and we’ve seen explosive growth, just phenomenal growth in tablets together. And this is where we’re going to spend a bit more time and share how we continue to enhance Windows and continue to drive a fast pace of innovation with you.

So I’d like to bring to the stage Tami Reller, who looks after the Windows business, to take us through this. Thank you. (Applause.)

TAMI RELLER: Nick, thank you very much.

Well, it really is an honor to be here in Taipei with all of you. I too want to extend a very warm and sincere thank you. We are so grateful for all the innovation and all the hard work, these past couple of years especially.

Well, as Nick noted, I’m going to talk about our Windows 8 journey, and for the first time on a main stage we will have one of the senior engineering leaders from Windows give us a tour of Windows 8.1.

Taking a step back just for a moment, Windows 8 represented an ambitious change, no doubt about that. We made a collective set of big bets, all needed to set up for this next generation, an entire generation of mobile computing.

And these bets, they started with support for mobile silicon platforms, platforms from Intel, platforms from AMD, from ARM partners, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA.

We introduced a new app development platform that allows developers to quite easily build modern, beautiful apps using the languages that they know best; and, of course, an app store to bring those apps to a global audience.

With Windows 8 we introduced a fully reimagined user experience that was designed for touch and for mobility, and yet it was scalable and is scalable from the smallest tablets to the world’s most powerful PCs.

We had a point of view that personal devices, whether you have one or whether you have many, should be able to do not only what you want to do but what you need to do wherever you are, and Windows is the platform that can deliver on that vision.

So with this Windows vision that we set out with Windows 8 our goal was to really bring a set of opportunities for the ecosystem, new opportunities, and this started with the ability to bring touch to a full range of devices.

With touch and the capabilities of Windows 8 we enabled OEMs to build the broadest range of PC form factors. And as Intel has done such a brilliant job doing here at COMPUTEX this year, they’ve really outlined the customer interest in these two-in-one devices, convertibles and detachables. The interest is very high, and the number of amazing devices that are both in market today as well as coming very soon should make this whole room very proud.

Bringing the power of Windows to tablets is a really big part of the vision of Windows 8 and of Windows RT, really a new class of tablets that offers more value and capability than today’s tablets.

And for developers, Windows 8 gave us a reason to engage with developers and give them something new to focus on.

And really from the start we wanted to make sure that enterprise value as well as compatibility, both important, were a part of the vision of Windows 8.

Windows 8 was a big change, and so we knew that continuous improvement and really responding to both partners and customers was a key part of what we needed to do when we released the product.

We have made 900 product updates and hundreds of updates to the in-box app experience so far. That’s rapid innovation, and has resulted in higher levels of compatibility, higher levels of quality, as well as better performance on the system through these 900 updates.

We’ve also been quick to respond in market, updating our marketing, updating our retail experience, to engage more effectively with customers and really better represent the innovation from our partners.

And as you’ll see from Guggs later on in the keynote, we’re rapidly filling out the third-party app catalogue as well.

We’re proud of where we are with Windows 8. Earlier in May we gave an updated number for where we are with licenses, and that’s 100 million. This is a tremendous accomplishment that we obviously couldn’t have done without all of your support. We’re early in this bold vision and there’s much more to come.

Eighty thousand apps in the store, that’s about 8X from where we were at launch. It’s the fastest start of any app store, and we’re just getting started, more and new interesting apps coming into the store every day.

One of the goals of the developer platform was to make sure that as an app was built by a developer, that app would run on both x86 and ARM. And I’m pleased to say that 94 percent of those 80,000 apps run on both ARM and x86. That’s a great value prop to be able to deliver to customers.

And with our services these are amazing momentum numbers: 250 million people using SkyDrive actively. We have 400 million Outlook.com customers, and that’s a new service for us. Seven hundred million Microsoft Accounts, and that’s an important part of how you get value from Windows 8 is through Microsoft Account, and, in fact, really allows you to show the value across all Windows and Microsoft devices.

Certified systems. At launch back in October we talked about having about a thousand devices. We updated that several months later, and we were up to 2,000. The number continues to grow. And I think there’s no better place than at COMPUTEX just to see how much innovation is coming from the ecosystem and so quickly: 3,200 certified Windows devices.

And if we look at the number of touch devices in that lineup, we’re up six-fold since launch. So a lot of innovation and more and more touch coming to the lineup as we move forward. So congratulations for a tremendous amount of progress that couldn’t be more visible than in these numbers.

So as I noted earlier, Windows tablets are an important part of the Windows 8 vision, and Windows tablets do more.

Completing that promise of do more, I’m pleased to announce that starting with the back-to-school lineup, and in some cases even earlier, Windows x86 tablets will come with Office. That’s Word, that’s Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote in the box. We’re making that possible through new OEM offerings that were introduced earlier this spring.

Even with the value of Office built-in to these Windows tablets, these new offerings are going to allow our partners to build opening price point tablets, as well as great premium tablets.

Additionally, we’ve opened up support for small tablets with Windows 8, and we’ll do more with Windows 8.1. You’ve seen the first of those tablets here at COMPUTEX. Congratulations to Acer on their announcements earlier this week.

And coming with 8.1, building on our support for small tablets, we’re really committed to completing the scenario, including full portrait support.

One of the top requests from Windows RT customers has been Outlook. I’m very pleased to announce that with the Windows RT 8.1 update Microsoft Outlook will be in-box.

With 8.1 we’re again embracing the very latest technology, and the very latest on the silicon roadmap. Specifically this includes Bay Trail-T, Qualcomm 8974, and NVIDIA T40.

And we’re expanding our ARM program to provide more component flexibility, creating more opportunities for partners to build competitive ARM tablets running Windows.

I want to talk a little bit about the enterprise, and, in fact, at TechEd in the U.S. earlier this week we talked about the opportunities for enterprise with Windows 8 and increasing and growing with Windows 8.1.

From the start of Windows 8 we talked to our enterprise customers about the benefits specifically of Windows 8 tablets and in building modern line-of-business apps. Well, with Windows 8.1 enterprises can deploy and should feel even more confident deploying Windows 8 more broadly.

Windows 8 brings mobile productivity, which is so critical for today’s workforce, and absolutely the best business tablets.

And with Windows 8.1, and we showed a bit of this earlier this week, we bring new management capabilities and some great advancements in security, management, which is key, mobility, as well as networking.

And whether enterprises are deploying Windows 7 or Windows 8, we now have — you have built a robust set of commercial-class touch laptops, convertibles, and of course tablets for customers.

And whether our enterprise customers are deploying Windows 7 or deploying Windows 8, we are recommending touch devices so that they’re ready for Windows 8 when they’re ready.

I want to introduce Windows 8.1. It really is designed for the way that you live, and I think you’ll see that in just a few short moments.

There are a few significant things that I wanted to say about Windows 8.1 before we actually show you the product. Windows 8.1 is easy for our customers to get. It’s free to Windows RT and Windows 8 customers so that whether a customer has Windows 8 today or is buying a PC or a tablet or any other device in the near future, it will be one click away and very easy to get Windows 8.1. We’ll deliver it through the Windows Store, including the preview, which will come at the end of June. And the final product will be available later this calendar year.

Windows 8.1, it is an update, and yet I think you’ll see when you see the product that we’re covering some important ground with this release.

Windows 8 was a big release and there were some areas where we knew we wanted to do even more to really advance that vision of mobility and the next generation of computing. And so that’s what Windows 8.1 does, it advances the vision, not only bringing even more to tablets but making all PCs even better.

We’ve listened, we’ve learned, and we’ve responded, and you’ll see that, I believe, when you see the product. Windows 8.1 is made better, it is better, based on customer feedback.

And lastly, complete and compelling out-of-the-box experiences is such an important part of the Windows 8 vision, and we’ve done even more of that with Windows 8.1. We believe we now have the widest range of in-box experiences on the market, a key part of what we’re delivering with Windows 8.1.

So now I’m pleased to introduce — my most important job here on the stage is to introduce Antoine Leblond. Antoine runs key functions in Windows engineering, and, in fact, he’s spent the past 20-plus years designing and building Office and now Windows. I’m thrilled he could join us here in Taipei to bring Windows 8.1 to this audience first. Please help me welcome Antoine. (Applause.)

ANTOINE LEBLOND: Thanks, Tami.

TAMI RELLER: Thank you and welcome.

ANTOINE LEBLOND: So thanks to all of you for being here this afternoon. It’s actually a huge privilege to get to do the first public demo of Windows 8.1 right here at COMPUTEX.

As we show you the product you’ll see, and I think you’ve heard this from Tami also, that Windows 8.1 is very much a continuation of what we started with Windows 8. It reflects a belief and a confidence in the path that we’re on. And then it’s really a refinement based on the things that we’ve learned from the tens of millions of people who are using Windows 8 today, and some great innovation that we’re actually really, really excited to bring to our customers.

So we’re going to jump right into the demo, and show you what this product is all about.

It starts right here at the Windows 8.1 lock screen. We’ve always meant the lock screen of Windows to be the personalized face of your device, and sure enough if you look at a Windows 8 device people put their pictures, their kids, photos of loved ones, maybe photos of some trips or something like that that they’ve really loved. And it makes your device beautiful and makes it their own.

Well, the Windows 8 lock screen takes this a step further by being the world’s best cloud-connected photo frame. So I can select photos from my local device, maybe from SkyDrive, maybe even photos that I took with my phone and they got uploaded to SkyDrive from there, and have them show up in this beautiful photo frame on my device, so just a great way to make my device even more personal and more beautiful.

The next thing that we’ve done on the lock screen in Windows 8 has to do with notifications. If I get a Skype call, in Windows 8 I’ll get a notification that a Skype call is coming in, but I have to swipe up to unlock my device, type in my password, then go start the Skype app to actually answer the call.

In Windows 8.1 all I have to do is actually just tap on the notification and right there Skype will come up, I can do my call, and when I hang up I’ll be right back at the lock screen, so just a much better way to do that kind of thing.

And then another one that I really love is this is just based on an observation that we have where we’ve seen people use — people tend to use tablets a lot to take photos, right, and it’s a great big viewfinder and it’s actually a great device for taking photos with. But photography is very much an in-the-moment thing. When you see a moment that you want, when you see something that you want to take a photo of, you don’t want to have to unlock your device and again type in your password, go to the camera app. So right from the lock screen in Windows 8.1 instead of swiping up to unlock I can just swipe down, and that actually just goes straight to the camera app, right. And you can see so right here we can take a little photo of my friend. Here we go. And just like that I can take a photo, so just one step away, and then I’ll just go right back to the lock screen.

Now, let’s unlock our device here and go have a look at the Windows 8.1 Start screen.

So right here you’ll notice something that looks a little bit different. We have two new tile sizes on the Start screen in Windows 8.1. If you look at the weather app down in the middle here, and I’ll just show it to you with the mouse, we actually have these really big tiles now.

And those are really great for showing a lot of information at a glance. So, for example, the weather app can show me weather from three different cities or maybe weather for today, tomorrow and the day after or something like that. It can show me three or four unread email messages, or the calendar can show me my next three appointments instead of just my next one. So just a great way for developers to actually show you a lot more information right there on the Start screen.

The other thing is if you look in the top right corner over here where the mouse cursor is, we have these new tiny tiles. And these actually come from feedback that we’ve gotten from some power users who really wanted to be able to pack tons and tons of apps and pinned sites and things like that right on their Start screen. So literally with this smaller tile size they can have hundreds of apps right there up on the Start screen.

Now let’s have a look at the Start screen. You can see here actually this reflects a pretty typical Start screen from someone who’s actually been using the product for a while.

What you see at the left tends to be things that are people’s favorite apps, favorite pinned sites and things like that. And what we see over at the right tends to be apps that people have just installed. And when you install an app from the Windows Store in Windows 8 it gets installed at the end of your Start screen. And in the middle what we tend to see is a bunch of apps that people have installed and tried out and then decided not really to use anymore.

Now, we’ve always wanted the Start screen to actually be the place where you keep just your favorite things. So in Windows 8.1 we’ve changed where apps go when you install them from the Windows Store. Instead of going straight to the Start screen, they go to the All Apps section, and then you get to decide what actually gets pinned up on the Start screen.

So to make that work well we actually had to make it easier to go to the All Apps section. So in Windows 8.1 all I need to do is actually swipe up from the Start screen and then I’m right there in All Apps. So I can swipe back down and I’m back at the Start screen.

I could do this with the mouse just as easily. The second I move the mouse you see there’s a little arrow down here. I can just click on it, it takes me to All Apps. Click back to come back out.

Now, in All Apps you tend to actually have a lot of things in there. So we’ve added some tools for organizing your apps. So right there they’re sorted by name, but I can sort them, for example, by most used, which is a really useful way to actually look at things. Or I can sort them by category, which is actually really neat. The apps come from the store. They’re categorized in the store, so we actually know what category they are when they show up on your machine, and we can organize them that way. And then, of course, there’s sorting them by date installed, which just makes it really easy for me to find the app that I just installed from the store if I want to go pin it up on the Start screen.

So I’m going to pick an app here. Let’s pick this Audible app. And I’m just going to tap on it, I’m just going to press on it and hold it down. And I can just tap Pin to Start here down at the bottom, and it gets added to my Start screen just like that.

Now, we know that people love to customize their Start screen, but we’ve also gotten some feedback from folks that the customization model for the Start screen in Windows 8 was a little hard to use sometimes. To gesture where you would drag down on a tile to select it sometimes caused people to actually rearrange tiles accidentally and things like that.

So in 8.1 we now use the more familiar press-and-hold gesture. So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to press down on this Netflix tile, and that just puts me in a customize mode, and now I can just go tap other tiles.

And that makes it really easy to actually do batch operations as well. So now I can uninstall a bunch of apps at the same time or maybe unpin them or I can change the size of their tile just like that.

I can grab these and move them around. You see there’s a little badge up at the top corner that says I’m actually moving three tiles. And I can just drop them here, for example, and create a new group, and I can name my group Media Apps or something like that. So just a much easier way to actually customize the Start screen.

Another thing that people really love to do with their Start screen is actually just personalize it. So we’ve added some great new personalization options. I’m going to go over here to Settings, tap on Personalize.

And one of the things I really love is we have these new backgrounds that are much richer than just being static backgrounds. This is the dragon one, which I really love. We call these Motion Tattoos.

So I’m going to switch to this, and you’ll see what happens when I start moving around on the Start screen you see how it moves in the background and actually kind of follows my finger. That’s kind of neat. It also goes down into All Apps. So just a nice and beautiful way to personalize your Start screen. I can change the colors. I have options for hundreds or actually thousands of different colors I can use.

And one of the great things is because Windows 8.1 has services baked directly into it and through the power of the Microsoft Account we can actually roam all of these personalizations and all these customizations from one machine to the next transparently. So I can spend some time setting up my Start screen exactly the way I want, and then that will get reflected on all of my machines just like that.

So let’s talk about something different now. One of the most common things that we do on our devices is search. We search the Web for information, we search for files on the machine, we search inside apps for content that’s actually inside those applications, we search for settings and things like that. In fact, we know from our telemetry that one of the most used commands in Windows 8 is actually the search charm when you swipe to the right and tap on the little magnifying glass.

The problem with search is that it’s very disaggregated. You go to different places to find different kinds of information. If you want to go search the Web you go to the browser, you bring up a search engine like Bing and you type in the search box. If you want to search for files you go to the search charm. If you want to search inside an app you have to go to that app and do search inside there.

In Windows 8.1 we’ve brought all of those things together into one search system that is incredibly powerful. So let’s have a look at this.

I’m going to tap on Search here, and I’m going to start typing. And the first thing you’re going to notice as I start typing is we actually get search completion just like you get in a search item, in a search box on a search engine.

Now I’m just going to tap Marilyn Monroe here. And let me explain what you’re seeing here. This is something we call a Search Hero. So this is basically think of this as a mash-up of information that comes back from the Web through Bing, that comes from apps that are on my machine, that comes from the machine itself, files and things like that that are available there, and they’re all presented to you in this beautiful rich way. It’s almost like a rich app got created on the fly for you to actually show you the search results from your query.

So what you see here is this beautiful photo of Marilyn Monroe. To the right you’ll notice over here there’s some more information. These are actions, these are things I can go do. So I can go read more about Marilyn, for example. If I tap on here it will go into Wikipedia. It will go into Wikipedia to find me some information about Marilyn.

This is actually not going over the Web to the Wikipedia website. It actually is going into the Wikipedia app that’s installed on my machine, so I have a much richer experience than I would on the website.

So, for example, things like semantic zoom let me navigate the article more easily. I can do things, for example, like I can actually go change the language of the text. So maybe we can switch it into traditional Chinese, and I will have to trust you that that’s actually what we’re looking at here. But just again a great way to actually go navigate and find more information.

I’ll go back, let’s switch back to the page, and I’ll show some more things. What you’re seeing here actually in this blue section in the middle is you’re actually seeing some stuff that comes from Xbox services, so movies and things like that starring Marilyn Monroe. You see some songs here to the right that come from Xbox Music.

You see in the middle a photo gallery. So one of the most common things that people actually do when they do Web searches is they actually search for photos.

Now, again I’m going to go tap on the photo gallery, but what you’re going to see here is not just a Web-based photo searching experience. This is much richer than that. I get all these photos and I can do things like filter them, for example. Like if I want one that’s blue because I’m putting it into a report and my report happens to have a blue theme, then it’s going to actually go find only blue photos of Marilyn. It can do even smarter things. For example, for people it can find me photos that are just faces, things like that. So again a much richer way of interacting with the search results for the query I’m doing.

Let’s go have a look at another one. I’m going to type Taipei here.

Now, what happens here is something different. Bing actually looks at the entity I’m searching for and actually recognizes it as a city in this case. And because it knows it’s a city, it knows that it can actually go do some smart things. Like, for example, it can give me the current weather for Taipei, it can give me the population. It can actually show me local attractions here, like Taipei 101, and I can go click on this and go do another search based on it.

You look to the right, this is actually showing me right here some apps that I can go download from the store that are about Taipei.

And then if I keep going to the right here what you’ll see are just normal Web results, normal Web search results. But this is actually a richer version of that. You see I actually get thumbnails of the Web search results, so just again a great way to actually search for information and navigate across all the kinds of sources of information that I wanted to find information about stuff.

So that’s search, and let me show you one more thing about search. Search is actually available everywhere in the system. Simply by hitting Windows I can bring up the search box and I could just start typing.

Now, one of the things I mentioned earlier is that it actually brings everything together. So if you look at the search results here on the right for a second, you’ll see I just typed SK and what it’s showing me is it’s showing me some apps on my system, the SkyDrive app, the Skype app. It’s showing me some music that I have in Xbox Music. It’s showing me settings that I can go to. It’s showing me a file here that’s on my device. It’s showing me another file down here that’s a video. And then it’s showing meW searches. So all of those things together, brought together in this really, really easy to navigate search results experience.

Now, speaking of SkyDrive let’s jump to SkyDrive here.

So one of the things that we’ve changed in Windows 8.1 is SkyDrive is actually built into the platform now. So in Windows 8 you actually have to go install some components and things like that to actually bring cloud-based open and save to the system. This is now built right in so that every app that gets installed to the system immediately is capable of actually saving to the cloud and opening to the cloud, which is a really, really powerful thing.

By default files in Windows 8.1 will actually live in the cloud, and what that lets us do is actually roam your files seamlessly from device to device.

And, in fact, we can do more than that. Because of the power of the Microsoft Account and of SkyDrive we can roam not just your data but we can roam settings, we can roam the apps themselves. In fact, we can roam enough things so that if you go to a store and you buy a second device, when you set up that device you could tell it, just make it exactly like my first one, and everything will come across, my apps, my data, my customizations, my settings, and all those things. So a really, really powerful way and a really, really great example of what happens when you connect services deeply into a device.

Now, let’s talk about devices for a second here. In Windows 8 the tablet experience was really optimized around sort of 10- or 11-inch things, right, 10- or 11-inch devices. And, of course, we recognize that there’s been a huge amount of innovation and a huge amount of energy behind smaller devices like this one.

So this one is an Acer 8-inch device, right? And it’s a beautiful little machine but we didn’t do all the work we needed in Windows 8 to make this work really well.

These devices obviously want to be held in portrait mode. They’re much more comfortable to hold that way.

And so we did some work in Windows 8.1 to have portrait-specific Start screen layouts that work much better. All of the apps that are in the box actually work just as well in portrait mode as they work in landscape. We did some work at the device interface level around edge detection and things like that to make it easier to have smaller bezels on these devices so that OEMs and folks who build devices like this could build exactly the kinds of devices they want, and Windows 8.1 will be great on them.

Now, one of the things that’s interesting about a small device like this is that it’s actually the kind of device where you really want to be able to stay inside what we call the modern experience. The desktop on a device that small is actually really, really hard to navigate. So things that force you to go into the desktop are really problematic.

In Windows 8 one of the things that actually forced you to use the desktop sometimes was settings. So we created a modern setting experience but we only ported about 10 percent of the settings for the device for Windows into that new experience. Well, in Windows 8.1 we’ve brought hundreds more over so that we now have a complete modern settings experience that you can use. Let’s go have a look at that really quickly.

I’m going to tap on Change PC Devices here. And you’ll see things that tend to be buried in control panels in the desktop, so for example, changing my display resolution or something like that. We can go look at another great example that I love is actually changing languages and installing support for new languages. Windows supports 109 languages. So adding support for new languages is all available in this new modern control panel experience, which is really great.

So now let’s talk about windowing for a second. We’ve talked about small devices; let’s talk about big ones.

One of the things that Windows has always been great at is actually doing productivity work. And on a larger device you really want to be able to do a lot of different things at the same time. In fact, Windows is a multitasking operating system, and one of the best ways to take advantage of that multitasking operating system is to have multiple apps up on the screen at the same time.

Now, we did some work in Windows 8 to let that work, to make that happen, but what we had is what we called this snap state. You could have a small app on the left side or on the right side of the screen, and then the rest of the screen would be taken up by a second app. And that worked really well for apps that had feeds and things like that, so an app like Twitter or maybe a mail app or something like that, that works well in this narrow band. But if you want to do something like watch a video and browse the Web at the same time, that’s not really a great experience.

So let’s have a look at this. I’m going to start the email app here, and I’m going to open this message.

Now, if you look down here in this message just below where I have a word highlighted, there’s a link. Now, I’m going to tap on this link and what’s going to happen is it’s going to open the corresponding page in the browser.

In Windows 8 what that would do is actually bring the browser full screen to the front, and then the mail app would go to the background and you sort of lose context of where you were.

But what this is going to do in Windows 8.1 is actually it splits the screen in two into what we call a 50/50 view. And now on the left I still have my mail app and on the right I have the browser that I can navigate into.

Now this gives me full control over the windowing. I can grab this, I can move it around, I can put the split in a different place, and I can set this up exactly the way I want.

We can go back to the Start screen. Maybe I’ll start the weather app here.

And you see what it’s doing here. We call this teetering. So this is Windows asking me where do I want to put that app. So it’s not trying to guess for me, it’s not going to surprise me by putting it to the right or the left or the wrong place, but I can just grab it now and just drop it in the window that I want it to be in, and there you go. So just a great to organize things on this 10-inch tablet. I can have two windows side by side.

So that’s a 10-inch device. What about on a big screen? Well, let’s go have a look at this guy over here.

So this is a 27-inch, 2560 x 1440 display. So it’s actually a pretty high res display, and it’s the kind of thing that you would have on your desktop that you would actually use to do real work with.

And what you can see here actually is that I have three different windows. I have two little ones on the side, and I have a big one in the middle, right? So this is actually a nice great configuration for doing some work.

Maybe I actually want more here. Maybe I want to add a fourth window. So let’s go start OneNote so I can take some notes. And you see it do the teetering thing here. And I’m just going to drag this over here and I’m just going to drop it right here. And maybe I can rearrange it to make it — and here we go, four windows now on the screen.

So this is the kind of thing that people really, really love the desktop for is just the ability to actually organize and arrange their work that way. And so now you have that same rich productivity experience available to you right here in the modern experience.

One other little thing I want to show you at the same time, because one of the things that we keep working on is just making the experience as good as we can for mouse and keyboard. By moving my mouse up to the top right corner, this is the gesture we use for bringing the charms out. You’ll notice that we’ve actually done some work — whoops, it just disappeared here. You’ll notice that the charms here actually show up near the top of the screen where the mouse was, so that I don’t need to actually just slide the mouse all the way down now to actually go find the charms. So just another great example, just another great touch that makes using larger screens and things like that easier with mouse and keyboard.

So let’s go back over here and we’re going to go look at this device again.

Now, I want to talk about the desktop a little bit. We love the desktop. The desktop is such an important part of what makes Windows Windows. The desktop is where you get to run the millions of Win32 apps that are out there. And it’s a strong part of the value proposition of Windows. And there are many folks who with Windows 8 they spend their days actually working in desktop apps. If you’re a Photoshop user or an AutoCAD user or something like that, you spend your day on the desktop.

So we’ve done some work in Windows 8.1 to make it a better experience. The first thing you’ll notice here on the desktop is down at the bottom left, the start tip is actually down there on the task bar, and it stays there at all times. So this actually provides just a familiar landmark that people are used to. People are used to actually having a control down there that they can go to and actually navigate the start. So just leaving it there is actually a really nice and easy different thing for us to do.

I’ll show you some other options we actually had for desktop users also. If I go into this navigation panel, and I’ll show you my favorite one here. This allows me to actually use the desktop background as the background for Start. So one of the things that happens if you’re a desktop user is that when you’re using a desktop app and you go to Start, you feel like you get transported into this whole other world, because the whole desktop goes away, now you’re in start, you pick an app, you’re back on the desktop. Well, simply by doing this, you’ll see how seamless the experience feels now. When I go to Start all it feels like is that now the tiles are just floating into the front of the desktop. So a much more pleasant experience, and much more seamless and less jarring than what we had before.

I’ll show you another one that I like as well. And this is a power user thing that a lot of folks have asked us for, and it’s the ability to actually when you hit Start instead of going to big Tiles to go to the All Apps section. So, again, for people who use a lot of apps or want to be able to sort their apps in specific ways, this is actually a really nice feature. So if I tap on Start now  so if I go over here, now I start in the All Apps view. In fact, if I sort this, and they’ll remember the sort order, then you get this really, really effective way, and really efficient way to just go back to the apps you use the most often.

Let’s switch back here. I’m just going to untap these and hit OK, and we’re going to keep going from here. Now let’s talk about the piping. I’m sure everyone in this room has used a tablet, and you use a soft keyboard on a tablet, and you all know how hard these can be to use. It’s easy to mistype things. It’s easy to miss-key. It’s easy to just make mistakes or get words wrong. And we’ve done a lot of work in 8.1 to make the soft keyboard much better than it was in Windows 8. And what powers the soft keyboard is a thing called a language model, it’s just a language engine that sits behind the keyboard and does a lot of work behind the scenes to actually correct things automatically for you, to try to guess at what you’re trying to type so we can do good suggestions and good corrections and things like that.

The language model we had in Windows 8 was probably about 60 percent accurate at doing auto corrections. The language model we have now is over 90, 93 to 94 percent correct at doing auto correct. It’s also updated every day in the background where the new trending words show up as they actually show up in our culture.

Let’s have a look at that. What I’m going to do here is actually I’m going to undock the device from the keyboard so that I can actually have the soft keyboard come up. And I’m going to bring up the Twitter app, which is such a great app, and we’re going to do a new tweet here. Let’s bring up the keyboard, here we go. So I’m going to start typing here, and the first thing you’re going to notice is that I actually get these suggestions up there at the top. So this is, again, our language model trying to predict what it is that we’re typing. And it’s very smart about how it does this. It knows about frequency of word. It knows about frequency of combinations of words, and things like that. It knows about the words I use more, things like that, so it tends to learn on the fly from me.

And one of the great things now is, of course, I can just go tap on one of these words and just keep going where I was before. But the problem with this is that on a tablet your fingers tend to be at the bottom where the keyboard is. Your eyes are up top looking at what you’re typing. It’s the right place for the suggestion to be because that’s where you’re looking, but actually going and tapping on it to select it is really awkward because you have to move your fingers all the way up to the top.

So one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve actually added a gesture to the soft keyboard that lets me select these. So just by swiping down on this spacebar here at the bottom, so all I’m doing is I’m swiping left to right on the space bar, what it’s doing is it’s actually going through the words in the suggestions, right, and I can go back and forth. And then just by tapping space it just selects a word for me. So it’s a really, really efficient way to actually go through these different suggestions, and an easy way to actually type with a soft keyboard.

Another thing that’s interesting is every soft keyboard on the planet has a mode like this where it has symbols and numbers and things like that instead of letters, which is fine, but it’s not a very convenient way to do things like type passwords, for example, where you have letters and you have numbers. So one of the things we’ve done in our keyboard for 8.1 is I’m going to hold down the question mark here, and what you’re going to see is a set of alternate characters that I can type from there. So, of course, now I get to swipe up and get my exclamation point, which is really easy.

But what I can do even better is now that I know that the exclamation point is just above the question mark, I can just swipe up from there. I can just tap on the question mark, and all I’m doing is tapping on it and swiping up. So a really, really easy way to get to these characters. And, of course, if you look at the top row of the screen there, you can see I’ve got the numbers there also. So I could do three, four, five, six, just by swiping up on the keyboard like that. So a great, great way to type.

Tami mentioned that one of our goals for Windows 8.1 is to have the most complete and rich out-of-the-box experience of any device you can buy. And a lot of that has to do with the apps that are installed on the system. So I want to talk about apps a little bit. Now I’ve got way too many apps to talk about. We’ve done a lot of work in the apps that were already in Windows 8, so the mail app, and calendar, and all those things. And we also have some really neat new ones, and I want to try to focus a little bit on the new ones that I want to show you.

The first one is the reading list app. One of the most common things, or one very common thing that people actually do with Windows 8 is they use a command we call “share.” So if I go to a Web page and I see something that’s really interesting to me that I want to share with someone, I can just swipe from the right, bring up the Share Charm, and what people would typically do there is share it to email. So what that does is that creates a link to that page and actually sends it to the person I’m interested in sharing it with. But people have asked us, I would love to share it with myself, I’d love to actually be able to create essentially a stash of things for me to go look at later.

So you can imagine during the day you’re browsing the Web, you see some interesting things. Maybe you’re in a finance app and see some stuff you want to look at later on, and you want to actually collect all that stuff up so that maybe when you’re on your way home, on the train or on the bus or something like that, you can use your smaller device and just be reading through those things that you stashed up during the day. So that’s what the reading list is about.

Here what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this Web page and instead of sharing to email, I’m just going to share it to my reading list. And I’m just going to hit Send. And now let’s go look at the reading list now. So the Reading List app, what this is showing me is basically a timeline based view of all the stuff that I stashed away in this reading list.

So any of these things now, I can just go, let’s pick this one, for example, I can just go tap on it, and what you see is actually another great example of the windowing support. The reading list has moved itself to the left into a smaller view, and then here what I have on the right is actually my finance app and I can go read my article in there. I can go, for example, I’ll tap on this next one here, and it will open this page in the browser.

So just a great way to aggregate information from all the different apps that I actually have installed on my system to go actually read them later. So a neat little app that I think people are really going to love.

The next one I want to talk about is actually not a new app. It’s photos. So we had a Photos app in Windows 8 and it was actually just a great app for doing slideshows and for actually browsing through your photos and for looking for things. But one of the things we’ve actually done and added to the Photos app here in Windows 8.1 is support for editing. So I’m going to tap on this little photo here so we can open it up, and what I’m going to do is bring up the editing tool. So you’ll see here that now we have some great editing presets, the kinds of things that you would expect to find. But we also have some really, really interesting new tools for doing things.

For example, I want to show you this one, because if you look up on the right now, you’ll see that these new circular controls are really, really great when you’re holding a device like this, because you can just grab it with your thumb, and I can just spin it around really, really easily. So now I can do vignetting like this. That’s actually a nice addition to the photo.

Let me show you another one that I really like, color enhance. I’m going to grab this little marker down here, and I’m going to move it over to the grass. And now what I can do is I can dial up the color on the grass and make the grass really, really bright. So a lot of really neat, really smart photo editing tools that let me really adjust my photos the way I need them, right there in the photos experience on Windows 8.

Let me talk to you about another one that I think is really fun. One of the things that we’ve noticed is that people use tablets when they’re cooking a lot. So it’s great to use a tablet to actually follow a recipe along or something like that. And so we’ve added a food and drink app in Windows 8.1. So this app is sort of what you’d expect. It collects a lot of recipes from lots of different sources on the Web. We actually have some original recipes from some famous chefs that have actually been created just for this app. And then we have some great tools in there.

For example, we have a meal planner that basically lets me plan in advance my meals for the week. We have things like a shopping list, which is really neat. So I can go to any recipe and then I can add, from that recipe I can automatically add all of the ingredients to my shopping list, and then roam the shopping list to my phone so I can take it to the store and actually buy the things I need.

But, one of the favorite features that I really love is I’m going to go tap on a recipe here and one of the things that we’ve noticed form people using these things is that people actually sometimes put like a plastic bag over their tablets on their counter when they’re cooking, because their fingers are full of food and of course you go tap on the thing to go scroll through a recipe or something like that. And you make this mess on your device. So we’ve added something here that we call hands-free mode.

So here simply by actually waving my hand in front of the device, all I’m doing here is I’m not touching it, I’m just waving my hand in front. The light here is really hard. I can actually advance through my recipes. And all it’s doing is it’s actually using the front-facing camera on the device actually to detect what I’m doing here. So a very  so just kind of a neat little touch that makes the app a lot of fun.

The last one I want to show you is probably one of the most important apps on the system and that’s the Store. Now Tami mentioned that we started when we released Windows 8 we quickly went to about 10,000 apps, now we’re up to about 80,000 apps, so lots of apps in the Store. We’re really excited about the momentum and that’s all really great for the platform. But, part of the problem is, as the number of apps in the Store grows it becomes harder and harder to find apps that are interesting to you. And as a developer it becomes harder and harder for people to find your apps.

So we’ve done a lot of work to basically overhaul the Store user experience here and what you see is at the beginning you’ll see picks for you, and I’ll talk about those in a second, then what you tend to see are lists that have been exploded out. So it used to be lists are a great way to go find things, right, the favorite apps, the most downloaded apps and things like that. But, in the Windows 8 Store you have to navigate through a set of tiles to actually get down to those lists. So the lists are actually expanded for you right here, right at the home screen of the Store. I can navigate to any section I want from anywhere in the Store simply by tapping down on it like this.

Then the most important part probably, and the most interesting part, is what we call the recommendation engine. So we have this recommendation engine that sits behind the Store and basically takes these aggregate data feeds from all sorts of different places. So it looks, for example, at what apps get downloaded when another one gets downloaded. It looks at the way you rate apps. It looks at how you use apps and all these different data feeds and then comes up with recommendations for you that make it really easy for you to find other apps that are interesting to you.

So if we go back here you’ll see them. So here are my picks. So these are apps that have actually been picked for me. These are specific to me and they’re based on the patterns of the things I do and the things I use and the apps that I’ve downloaded before. So it’s just a great way to discover new apps in the Store. So that is my quick, quick 26-minute view of Windows 8.1. We’ve only really scratched the surface. There’s a lot more in the product. And for us it’s incredibly exciting, because this represents only one year’s worth of work. We’re using to doing much more stuff in a given release, but we feel really great about everything we’re delivering with Windows 8.1. And I hope you really enjoyed it.

I’m going to ask Steve Guggenheimer to come to the stage now and show us some great apps that come from our partners.

Steve.

STEVEN GUGGENHEIMER: Thank you, Antoine, phenomenal job.

I’ve got to say a big thank you to Antoine. I think that’s the most comprehensive demo we’ve seen of 8.1. And so having him do it here at COMPUTEX, along with Tami, I think is a statement to the importance of our hardware partners here and the ecosystem overall in Taiwan. So that was quite a treat.

I’m going to talk a little bit about third-party apps. Obviously there’s a ton of momentum out there between Tami and Nick they mentioned, there’s over 220,000 apps across the Windows and Windows Phone store. There’s over 1 billion downloads. I can only show a few of them.

I have the opportunity to talk with developers just about every day. And there’s a number of things about the Windows platform that are really energizing and sort of things that really engage people in those dialogues. The first is the platform symmetry. It started actually back with Windows client and Windows Server, where when we made the core the same a lot of things got easier, same identity, same management, same security and for developers same development model. Well that stretched over time.

Now there’s obviously symmetry across all the Windows devices, but it also stretches on the client side to Windows Embedded, and even Windows Phone. While it’s not the complete API set, the core is the same. So as developers start thinking about writing apps, having that symmetry across those devices makes it much easier and we’ve got more symmetry in our platform there than any other platform provider out there. It also applies to the cloud.

There was a lot of discussion at Windows TechEd, or at TechEd this week about both the server side of the family and Azure and there’s that same symmetry, whether I write an application or service that works on-premise, or it works in the cloud, or I want to split across the two, I can transfer or move that app back and forth seamlessly, because of the symmetry. So there’s a phenomenal amount of symmetry around the Windows ecosystem, which is very powerful for developers.

The second thing, of course, is developer choice, whether I’m a Web developer starting in HTML 5 and JavaScript, I can write natively on the Windows platform to that. If I’m a C#, XAML, I write line-of-business, managed code apps, I can do that natively in Windows. If I’m a game developer, C++, DirectX, we support all of those models. And that, again, is a big benefit for developers. The third, of course, is the incredible experiences. We’ve seen them on Windows 8 and with what Antoine showed here and more coming, it’s a whole new palette, and that palette continues to get richer for our partners.

Then last, but not least, monetization. It turns out today that sort of the traditional sort of big, complicated commercial apps are still about 10, 15 times more profitable than the Store apps. So we’ve got to work on helping make Store apps more profitable. And part of the way we do that is give the most flexibility. On our commerce platform we provide the best terms for partners to start with, but in addition if partners want to bring their own commerce platform they can, and the same with ad platforms. If you want to use our ad engine you can, if you want to use your own ad engine you can use your own ad engine. So trying to bring that flexibility in to give partners the choices they want, that’s part of the value proposition. So all these things together provide really good energy.

Let’s take a few minutes and look at a couple of things. We can’t show all 220,000-plus apps, so we’ll pick a few. I’m going to do a couple of categories. I want to make sure I do that. I want to make sure I cover sort of both global and local and then mostly spend time on that symmetry and that marriage of hardware and software. (Applause.)

So let’s start with a game. Many of you obviously like Temple Run. It’s popular. I turned the sound down here. Two things here, one is the use of the hardware, I’m using the keyboard right now. But if I want to switch and I want to use touch I can do that just as easily. So that nice ability to use all of the mechanisms I have is a great choice for developers. The second thing is from a monetization standpoint. This is an app that has good brand to it. It’s well known. So they can charge right from the beginning.

Now let me go and pick a different app, a different game here. I’m going to switch over to an app that’s maybe a little less known. So this is going to use a premium model, give away some for free, and then charge later. And here I start using the keyboard. This is a drifting race game, so pretty good. But the nice thing about the Windows platform, again, for developers is I’m not just limited to the keyboard and the screen here. I can take advantage of peripherals. So if I want to plug in an Xbox controller, pick right up with the same game, very easy for the developer to take advantage of all of the resources, including all of the hardware peripherals. So that’s a nice benefit for the developer side. Now I’ll shut that one down.

Let me switch over to this machine on my right here and I’m going to pick up a simple game here, pinball. A couple of things on this one, first off this is when I talked about symmetry, I’ve moved off of an x86 or a Windows 8 to a Windows RT machine. And the nice thing for the developer is this runs on both. I didn’t go quick enough there. The second thing, business model wise this is just an extension of the Xbox Live platform. So here for the Xbox team they can basically have my profile roam, my points, all of my scores, and it’s part of how they make their service stickier. So again, a third business model and again symmetry where this app, like I think Tami mentioned, 98 percent run across all of the devices.

All right. Let me shut this down. Let’s switch out of games real quick. Let’s switch over to social and keep going on that symmetry theme. I’m going to pick up on Twitter. Now what Antoine showed was the next generation of search and part of what search does and what the Windows operating system does, is let users work from within the OS directly with that and actually app to app. So I’m actually going to start off with a search. I’m going to search for COMPUTEX, even where we are and what day it is, and I’m going to go ahead and search within Twitter. So Twitter will come up. I’ll hit the search. And there it will go. It will be searching for results. Give it a second here and let us hope the Internet has stayed up for us. All right. I’m going to assume that it might not have. So we’ll keep going on that.

We’ve had a couple of issues on and off with Internet today. The next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to take that same app, so part of the symmetry point is the ability to move across devices. And I’m going to pull up Twitter on the phone this time. I’ll shut that down, since it’s not going to cooperate, and I’m going to go home here and I’m going to do the same search. I’m going to go to people and I’m going to pull up, start searching for COMPUTEX. And I’m going to go ahead and do the search. And we’ll see if we’ve got Internet at all now. And I think the answer to that conversation is going to be, no, we have lost the Internet on this one. So I’ll go ahead and hit home here. But the key for this is for the partner, they’ve had the ability to build the app and let it run across both of the devices very seamlessly. And that’s been pretty important for them.

The next one of course I’d pull up would be Foursquare, I think if the Internet is down this one is going to be a little more difficult. But, I’m going to pull it up real quick. One of the things that you get now is that marriage of hardware and software. What it’s going to do is it’s going to be able to take a GPS signal, normally it would take all the data that’s available from the Internet and mix it with a camera and I’d be able to search around and get information. We’ll see a wheel come up here, and get all the information about things that are close by; again, without the Internet that one is not going to quite come through. So I’ll put that one back.

What I want to do now is switch over to a local social network, right. So one of the things about the apps overall is the abilities that are quite global in nature, right. So I have a number of the ones that are global I showed here, but also local. LINE is a local, local to the Far East, started in Korea, popular in Japan, again a social networking app. It runs symmetrically both on the phone and on the PC platform and it’s a great way to get going and take advantage of sort of local capability.

Now, building on that I was in Japan last two days, two days ago. I see a lot of apps in every country we go to. So I could pick up, assuming I’m coming out of the keynote, I talked to a couple of friends on line, so I want to go make a restaurant reservation, I could pull up a local app here Easy Table. In the U.S. I might use something called Open Table. Here I use Easy Table. I pick a restaurant. I’d go and make a reservation at the restaurant, and it will pull up a time and allow me to go have access to and make dinner reservations for whatever time might be appropriate. So that is, again, taking advantage of global capability and local knowledge. There are apps, obviously, all over the world.

Let’s keep going on that theme for local. Let’s shut this one down. After dinner, you might want to go do something. Obviously local norms are different everywhere. One of the things that’s quite popular here is karaoke. So can bring up a local karaoke app. I can bring up a song that I’ve heard is all about hope, and quite popular now. I can’t do this one very well. The only part here, I can do the “oh.” There’s an “oh yeah” coming. So you can help me, but when I get here, I can do “oh yeah,” and that’s about it. That’s why they don’t take me out for karaoke very often. I was going to have Nick join me, but that’s all he can do as well.

So let me go and shut that down. The last thing I want to do is sort of pick up on that marriage of hardware and software theme. There’s a couple of things I want to do there. I want to start with the phone again. I’m going to turn this on. There’s a lot of great work going on today with cameras. So I’m going to bring up the camera on this device. I’m actually going to switch around to the other side. We’ve got a lot of great hardware I want to be able to show off. And there’s a notion of lenses.

So I’m going to click on the button here, and what these do is these allow me to basically take software to complement the hardware. So I’m going to choose one called Photosynth. What this is going to allow me to do, it’s going to allow me to create a 3D model. Come back here, click it again, and again, and I’m going to go up, again, and again. That’s probably enough. And what I’m going to get out of this, it’s going to stitch this together. If you’ve ever been on a website where you can do a 360 view, or you can do a panorama around a room, I’ve just created one of those using this phone. Very simply right here I can scroll down and scroll up. And you can start to see the power of that hardware and software coming together, in this case with the camera and the phone, and we’ll see that across all the devices.

Now let me go to the next one here. I’m going to pull up a tablet. In this case, one of the other things that we talked about was the fact that there are over 700,000 apps out there today for Windows, existing apps. Beyond the new apps that Tami talked about, the modern apps, there are over 700,000. We want to make sure that those can also take advantage of the new hardware capabilities. So here I have Adobe Illustrator, a great application for doing drawings, technical specs, et cetera. Now one of the things that happens today is if you wanted to use a stylus with this, most of the time you plug in a Wacom tablet, you have your stylus over here, and you’d be writing while you’re looking at the screen here. But with the new hardware capabilities, I can simply take advantage of the pen here, and write directly on here using the stylus as is.

So now I’m taking an existing application and modern hardware and bringing those together. And that’s a very powerful statement for all the applications that are out there, for all the hardware you guys are building and working on in terms of new capabilities and new opportunities.

I’ll go ahead and put that one back. I’ve got quite the wiring going on here. The last one I want to pull up, I want to mix a couple of things together. We built this one just for the show, sort of for fun. I’ve got two, assume two kids in a school, or after school, and they’re working on a project together connected characters. And what’s going to happen is the student on the left is going to work on the background. So they’re going to make that beautiful drawing. They’re going to work on that. And the child on the right is going to work on making a character here.

So I’m going to come in here and draw the head. I’m not going to use the pen for speed, and you can see I’m a great artist. Give him some legs, or her some legs, add some arms. You can see I was very good at finger painting as a kid, maybe even some hair, pull all that in there. And the thing I’m going to do is I’m going to animate our character here. So our character here is now going to walk across the screen, and that’s good stuff for kids.

Now what’s nice is this machine has NFC in it, and this machine has NFC in it. And we can use Wide Eye Direct. Let’s give this a try, and you see the door opened, and if we stick this right here what’s going to happen is it’s going to walk across my screen and then on to the other screens.

(Applause.)

I should probably add there, given the fact that that one worked really well, and it sort of makes the point. We’ve got phenomenal opportunities. The work you guys are doing on hardware and the magic of software in terms of bringing those together, that kind of cool capability is what’s coming. The symmetry of the Windows platform, that magic of hardware and software together, that ability to work globally with more opportunities is really driving very positive energy into the software ecosystem, and with the development partners.

So I look forward to a great year as we go forward together. Two weeks from now we’re going to get a couple thousand developers together in San Francisco at a show called BUILD. We’re going to go through Windows 8.1, a lot of the other capabilities on the platform side and have a great time. So with that I’m going to invite Nick Parker out to sort of take it to the next step on the hardware side. I don’t know where Nick is coming from, there he’s coming from over here. And thank you very much.

NICK PARKER: Thank you. (Applause.)

So we talked about a lot of the opportunity, and you saw from Tami and Antoine and Guggs presentations such incredible momentum. So let’s talk about some of that hardware, and let’s actually talk through some of the great innovation that you, our partners, and we’re starting to see get huge customer traction in the industry.

First I’m going to talk about server. Clearly there’s a lot of momentum in the cloud data centers and the cloud infrastructures, but also in terms of compact server, here’s a 16-terabyte server from Western Digital. This is a Sentinel. A very compact product, and something you really start to see as we see this proliferation of devices generating huge amounts of data, particularly for small businesses, you’ll see this is a great business opportunity that we’re working on with our partners.

Here we now see Windows Embedded 8. This is a great, ruggedized design by ARBOR. And as you can see there are task-specific functions form factor here running Windows Embedded 8, and the capabilities of touch with all of the design you’d expect from a nice, ruggedized device like that from ARBOR in a very, very compact package.

Here we have this visual display from IEI. Again using Windows Embedded 8, and you start to see the extensibility that Windows Embedded 8 offers. Here you have a hardware form factor that you’re able to program the logic and the software to actually do things like maybe light this monitor up on green. We’re running a cardio monitor graph here. And so this is able to actually monitor a patient. This is in the healthcare scenario. And then depending on what’s going on can light up other features on the hardware such as this bezel lit there green.

One of the things we did talk about was Microsoft’s leadership position with our partners in the embedded a space with over a billion existing embedded products in use. You start to see some of the great traction we have in products like this point-of-sale device. Things are getting more and more powerful and more and more compact. And here’s a good example of an embedded device here running Windows Embedded 8 with a printer, credit card reader, and a lot of traction in these devices particularly as they start moving out to the end points of the Internet, or branch office solutions, very, very good business opportunity we see in these. And some really, really stylish, innovative designs from our customers and partners.

Phones. We’re gaining share in phones. Phone has got great traction for us. You saw the incredible pull we’ve got in our application ecosystem, 191 countries, and we’ve got great variety across the phones from the Samsung to the HTC 8X, I just love this device, very, very nice stylish device, small design, all the way through different colors, different sizes. The incredible Nokia range, award winning. With new OEMs this year, like Huawei here using the new Qualcomm reference device really showing that people are betting on Windows Phone, developers are betting on the Store, and that’s how we’re gaining share together.

So what I would like to do is to show some of the latest and greatest phones is invite OEM gadget girl Leigha Anderson up on stage to show us the latest an greatest in two of our very new phones. Leigha, show us what we’ve got in some of the new phones.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Thanks, Nick.

Thanks everyone for being here today. (Applause.) For the first time I would like to show you the phone that’s currently in market, and this is the HTC 8X. It’s a beautiful phone, and a very slim profile design. Now if you’re into a phone that comes in other colors besides black and white, this phone is going to be perfect for you because it comes in a stunning California Blue.

Now, if you notice this little logo right here, it means that this phone has Beats Audio. So I love Beats Audio. When I go to the gym I like to rock out to Beyonce or Maroon 5. Nick, you might like U2 or Madonna, that ’80s rock stuff. But no matter what music you like, it’s going to sound great with the 8X from HTC.

NICK PARKER: That’s cool.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: So that’s one Windows Phone. And then the one I would like to show you now was just announced last month by Nokia, and it’s the Lumia 925. So I think the first feature that I think is spectacular with this phone is the fact that it has a clock right on the Start screen when the phone is asleep, because it’s the information that you really want to know.

So when you swipe up, sorry, turn it on, there we go you get the lock screen, which is fabulous. It has a beautiful 4.5-inch AMOLED display and it also is made out of aluminum, which makes this phone incredibly light. Now Nokia is a huge fan of their camera and so are we. This phone has a fantastic lens from Carl Zeiss and this phone is especially spectacular in low-light images. So when I’m out with my friends on a Friday night, this phone is great to take pictures of with them and this when you’re working late on a Friday night and they shut off the lights at Microsoft, you can still capture your brainstorming on the whiteboard. So an awesome phone from our friends at Nokia, there you go.

NICK PARKER: Thank you. That’s awesome. So one of the categories we talked about and certainly our friends at Intel talked about, as well, is the growth we’ve seen in all-in-ones and the innovation that really is something that’s unique to Microsoft and our OEM partners. The Sony Tap 20 is an absolutely beautiful design that you’d expect from Sony and the hinged design, and the kind of thinking that’s gone into these all-in-one devices really do show you why this is a great growing category. We’re seeing huge momentum, particularly in the mobile all-in-ones where you can unplug them and you get great battery life on the go.

So why don’t you show us another one of the all-in-ones, Leigha, and something that’s making news at the moment.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Absolutely. So here’s a Dell XPS 18 and Dell has taken a different approach with their all-in-ones. So theirs is on a stand and then you can easily unplug it and remove it. So look at how amazingly thin this PC is. It is absolutely phenomenal. It has a beautiful 18.4 HD display, weighs under five pounds and gets an amazing seven hours of battery life. So you pretty much can take this with you anywhere you want to go and the charge lasts all day. Now on the backside you can see these nice little feedbacks come up. So if you also want to use it in a tablet, as a tablet propped up, you can easily do that, so great innovation and style and design coming from Dell.

NICK PARKER: You know, we all talk about notebooks and notebooks is that category that’s been so tremendously good for us. And the innovation we still keep rolling, the notebook is absolutely not dead, whether we saw that innovation in terms of ultrabook, whether we see these just phenomenal designs, this Samsung Series 7 Ultra, a beautiful design, getting thinner, getting lighter, and of course touch, bringing complete new scenarios to the notebook and really furthering our touch and type in this kind of multi-mode use that we see bringing so many new experiences and richness of people interacting with their PCs.

This is a wonderful new device that’s been launched recently. This is the Toshiba KIRAbook. Look at the incredible screen. There are 220 PPI, very, very high resolution, nice screen, super profile. These are beautiful designs. These are wonderful touch notebooks that really do inspire our industry and our customers.

So why don’t you tell us about some very late breaking news here from one of our favorite partners.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Absolutely. So I’m pleased to show you guys a PC that was just launched three hours ago. And it’s the Sony VAIO Pro 11. Take a look at how amazing and slim this PC is. It weighs just a hair over two pounds and has a beautiful 11-inch touch display, has a wonderful backlit keyboard and also on the side HDMI and USB 3.0 ports. Now this Sony is running Intel’s fourth generation core processor. So the latest and greatest from Intel. It enables things like longer battery life, innovative designs, and increased mobility on PCs and other devices.

NICK PARKER: And I have to say, congratulations to the Sony and Intel teams for getting that out the door, in terms of with the fourth-generation core processors, and we’re going to see many more designs on that processor technology coming soon, so very, very exciting for the category. Now we kind of move to the category and Tami talked about this earlier, which is the two-in-ones, the detachables, and the convertibles. In these we start with convertibles, and we start here with the Lenovo Yoga 11 running the NVIDIA processor. And this is where we really have to take our hats off to the incredible innovation the industry has done in hinge design.

You know, we’ve seen this before standard laptop mode, tent mode, and then full tablet mode. But this is something that is unique to Windows and our partners here in this room, which is the ability to have everything you’d want from a PC and everything you’d want from a tablet, very, very good engineering that’s enabling this in terms of hinged design. The HP EliteBook Revolve, again, is a very good form factor, completely revolving screen, full tablet mode, as well as PC mode.

Something that we’ve seen the Acer team do this week, and they’ve had some great announcements this week, is the R7. So why don’t you wow us with the new R7. I just love this device. Great job Acer team.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Yes, absolutely. So Acer did a ton of consumer research to really understand how consumers are using Windows 8 and they came up with the R7. So here it is in Notebook mode. There’s four modes and ways to use the R7. So notebook mode, the keyboard is right here and the track pad is up top, so definitely a unique design coming from Acer. And then the second mode if you’re like me and like to go seamlessly from using the keyboard to screen, you’re typing up an email, closing Outlook, or scrolling through a Web page, you can move it forward and have a seamless experience back and forth between keyboard and screen.

The third mode is stand mode. So imagine you are on an airplane and you want to watch a movie on a 15-inch display instead of a four-inch display, stand mode is going to be your best friend. And then finally, tablet mode, so you can lay it flat and if you want a rich and immersive experience that is similar to pen and paper, you can definitely achieve that with the R7, because it has optional pen input. So, great job friends at Acer.

NICK PARKER: That’s an incredible device. Now we’re going to move to the detachable category and we’ve really seen advances here, again, from our partners. And whether it’s the Dell XPS here running the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the ASUS Vivo Tab RT, that’s the product you saw in the TVS at the beginning. These are wonderful designs, incredibly thin, beautiful designs. Let’s see if we can get it on the camera. I mean, this is phenomenal engineering and, again, the full power of Windows. And all of these devices come with Windows and as Tami said, Office pre-installed.

Now the next one here, this looks very interesting, and I know it’s new news, Leigha, so why don’t you take us away with some of the new news on this device.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: This is absolutely new news, Nick. And this is an Envy X2 split from our partners at HP. It has a beautiful 13-inch display, which is a little bit unique for a two-in-one. It’s also running an Intel core I processor, so it’s going to be super-powerful. This PC, like the HTC, Windows Phone has Beats Audio, so imagine a 13-inch display with Beats Audio. It’s going to be excellent for watching videos, or listening to music. And then if your boss emails you, maybe you have to work on a PowerPoint presentation or a Word doc, you can easily put it back in the keyboard dock and start typing away, so consumption and productivity all in one device, awesome from HP.

NICK PARKER: So pure tablets is where a lot of the energy is. And now where are we seeing some real traction and some real customer interest? This is the HP ElitePad 900, great device. You can see we’ve got a nice dock there. And we’re seeing a lot of traction earlier on in our business and our commercial customers. And you see here it has a set of optional removable jackets that just take your tablet, maybe add a battery, maybe use specific ports, and it’s these kind of engineering innovations that drive the choice across Windows, but also really bring that Windows and Office experience to many more broad scenarios than you’d expect from a kind of consumer device.

The Lenovo Think Pad Tablet 2, great award-winning device here, and this design never gets tired, but what incredible handwriting. This is just really, really showing the best of work, play and ink. It’s something that between Windows, and Office, and then you take an application like OneNote, it’s unbeatable in the value that you get in that product.

Finally here you see the Panasonic Toughpad, world-renowned brand for these incredible ruggedized PCs, and the FZ-G1 doesn’t disappoint, dust proof, waterproof, ingress proof, great product running Intel Core i5 processor on this particular model. A very, very sturdy good design, and there’s a tablet in a dock there with the pen in the dock here, you see, you get again all of that sense of work and play and ink as well.

Now this device looks very interesting here, Leigha, tell me about that.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Yes. So this is definitely an interesting device. This device is excellent for gaming. So whether you’re a casual gamer, or a hard core gamer, want to play games like Diablo or Civilization, this Razer Edge Pro tablet can totally handle it.

So the game that we have on it right here is Bioshock Infinite. And this is a game that requires a tremendous amount of graphic and processing power. So this PC is running an Intel Core i7 processor, and it’s able to handle the graphics no problem. So we can look around. We can figure out where we want to go. I’m not a huge gamer, as you probably can tell by my skills, but nonetheless this is super impressive.

It also has an optional dock that comes with it. So let’s say you’re gaming on the go, and you want to go plug into a larger screen. When you get home you can easily hook it up to the dock here, and within seconds your game will be on the big screen.

NICK PARKER: That’s a jacket that fits on that tablet?

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Yes, exactly. So you can pop out the tablet, and you can use it for whatever you want to do with Windows, Office, apps, or you can put on the gamer controls, and it really is an immersive experience with the rumbling that you get in the controllers, and also the sound. And this is really a tablet that you can only get on the Windows platform.

NICK PARKER: This is tremendous innovation. We haven’t shown you all of them. We see some great ones. You’ll see the ones at the back there from LG, Fujitsu and MSI. We’ve got some really good devices. We’re just trying to pack it all in the time we’ve got here today.

Now, of course, small is beautiful when it comes to Windows. Tami showed, Antoine showed some incredible demos of how Windows works on a small device, and Guggs, too, on apps. And this is the Acer W3. I know that people have seen it before and it’s gotten a lot of press in the last couple of days. But this is a beautiful device. Look at this, the Acer W3, very nice device. Something that we’re very proud to partner with Acer on in terms of selling into our channel partners right now and really promoting it as we see the first customers will be able to get this soon at some very, very attractive and competitive price points. A very nice device from Acer there.

The next one here is an AMD Temash device, eight-inch device. You can see there, a nice device, again. A slightly different screen ratio, and this is, again, the power and the diversity that you can get in the Windows ecosystem. You can build the device that your customers want.

And then, finally, the Inventex seven-inch. A nice device, you can see here the anodized screen surround, super thin, all of the power of Windows and Office at your fingertips. And with the new capabilities in Windows 8.1, you’re really going to see that portrait mode really pop, and see new incredible scenarios on Windows.

So what have you got here. I know you’re desperate to tell us about some news that’s been breaking in the tablet space.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: I know. I’m all about latest and greatest.

NICK PARKER: So show us something else.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: OK. I would like to show you a new sneak peek of an eight-inch device coming from our friends at Lenovo. Here is the Mix 8. It’s got a beautiful, beautiful screen, and look at the back and the design language on this. The profile is just incredibly slim. It’s incredibly light.

Now I have small hands and this fits easily and comfortably in it. This eight-inch device is going to have 3G connectivity, and a lot of accessories like a folio and pen just to give it more value than ever.

NICK PARKER: These are incredible, exciting form factors. So, Leigha, thank you very much.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Thank you, Nick.

NICK PARKER: Thank you.

LEIGHA ANDERSON: Thank you everyone. (Applause.)

NICK PARKER: So thank you to you. You’ve seen today we’ve talked about the huge opportunity we have to address the 2.9 billion devices with Windows. And Windows enables you to do that across all your platforms, whether it’s embedded or server or phone or Windows on tablets and PCs and monitors and so on. How Windows 8.1 delivers new enhancements in key areas for both touch and non-touch and on new small tablets coming to market. We’ve seen how the Windows application market continues to grow and provide opportunity for developers in building consumer and business apps, and the incredible hardware innovation from the ecosystem that continues to deliver richer and richer experiences for customers.

This is a transformational time for us with you in the industry. Hopefully you will feel and be inspired by the commitment we have to you and your future business success. You will see the areas of opportunity that we do and what we’re doing to invest, as Tami said, in the marketing alliance, Antoine showed you in the products, and Guggs for applications to make sure that you are successful, and together we share in mutual business results.

Thank you for your partnership. We’re committed to your success. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

END