Steve Ballmer and Kirk Koenigsbauer: Microsoft Office Press Conference

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, CEO for Microsoft, Steve Ballmer. (Applause, music.)

STEVE BALLMER: Well, thanks. I want to welcome everybody and thank you very much for joining us and taking the time here today. To the folks here in the room in San Francisco, welcome. To those participating via Webcast, we also welcome you virtually. It’s a pleasure to have a chance to spend some time with you today and talk about, frankly, one of the most exciting products at Microsoft, and yet one that hasn’t been quite as much in the news lately. So, we want to have a chance to share a little bit with you here for the first time today some information about Microsoft Office.

These are certainly exciting times. You know, the industry continues to move and change and advance dramatically. Certainly, our pace of innovation and new product introduction has been at an unprecedented rate. Windows 8 coming to the fore here over the course of the next several months. We announced recently our Surface hardware, which is really a new type of computing for work and for play, which I think we’ll see a lot of enthusiasm for.

Windows Phone 8 will emerge here over the course of the fall. We had a chance to share a lot about it over the course of the last few weeks. Some of the work we’re doing around Xbox and bringing Internet Explorer and SmartGlass to our Xbox environment has some people kind of “reverberating” if you will with excitement and enthusiasm.

We bought a couple companies in the last few months, Yammer and PPI. We’ll talk a little bit more about both of those and where they sit today.

We introduced a new version of Bing, a version of Bing which really takes us in a very different direction and says, “How do we turn Bing from a search/decision engine really into an engine that does what you want done?” It will show you what the Web knows, but it will also help you achieve tasks by showing you what Bing knows and how your friends may be able to help you.

We have a new wave of server products, Windows Server 2012, our System Management Server products are being updated. We released a new version of our SQL product. We’ve moved new capabilities or information — our infrastructure as a service into our Azure service. And on top of all of that, you see our entire product line being updated, Bing, the Bing applications and others, to really get ready for Windows 8.

So, it’s an exciting, exciting time. But the flagship application from Microsoft, our highest-volume application, the most important application we sell in the lives of most of our customers, in fact, is Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Office is a tool for productivity for people at work and for people at home. For people who work in small businesses and people who work in large businesses. For people who work out of their home, and people who are simply trying to be productive and creative at home.

Certainly, Microsoft Office is the number-one tool for students worldwide. Over a third of the users we have for Microsoft Office are actually students, who turn out to be some of the most active and vital users of information-worker tools on the planet.

So, today we’re here to talk about a new version, new generation really, of Microsoft Office. And the preview for this will be available today. I’m going to talk about it, but what we’ll show you today brings some of the same boldness and beauty that we showed you in Windows 8 and Windows Phone, in some of the other new products, into the Office family of products.

We’ll talk today about this new generation of Office where Office is a service first. We’ll continue to make Office available as an application in traditional ways, but the Office that we’ll talk about and show you today and really explain is the first round of Office that’s been designed from the get go for Office to be a service. And you can see a little bit of what that means.

We’ve transformed in this process Office also to embrace some of the same design concepts and principles that we’ve showed you in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and in Metro.

I would tell you this is the most ambitious release of Microsoft Office that we’ve ever done. We continue to do a product, and yet we’re clearly focused, starting today, with Office as a service. And you’ll see that over the course of the demonstration.

We continue to support our enterprise customers, but in this session today, we’re going to show you all of the things that are there in Office for consumers and end users in their homes and what people want to do every day. We’ll have separate breakout sessions to talk about Office and its new capabilities, specifically in the enterprise environment.

We’ll talk about how Office is transforming because of the platform, the new systems and operating systems and hardware that it can support, but we’ll also have a focus today on new application capabilities, new scenarios, new things people can accomplish with Microsoft Office.

The fact that we’re changing all of this at the same time, moving to Windows 8, embracing service first, driving new scenarios, and really doing first-class job for consumer and enterprise, that’s what makes this wave of Office the biggest, most ambitious we’ve ever done in our history.

Starting, essentially, immediately — for those of you on the Webcast literally immediately — you can go and start trying the preview edition of Office. The one that we encourage you really to take a look at is the Office 365 Preview, which is available at Office.com, and I’ll come back and give you some particulars later. But this is available for testing, for trial, et cetera, beginning immediately as I speak.

What are the characteristics of this new wave of Office products? What we really would tell you is Office 365, the new wave of Office products, are designed to be your modern Office. You say what does it take to really support people when they’re trying to be productive, when they’re trying to communicate, when they’re trying to collaborate? What does it really take to support people in a modern way?

No. 1, got to focus in on the most modern devices. And so we’ve really thought through and designed this new wave of Office with Windows 8 in mind.

We’ll run on other releases of Windows, but what you’ll see today really focuses in on being designed with and taking best advantage of Microsoft Windows 8. That means supporting touch; that means supporting inking. That supports the new Windows 8 visual style. That means running on ARM architecture devices, which is an important thing. We started talking about it about a year and a half ago, and you’ll see coming to fruition.

It means, for some of the Office modules, it means embracing the new Windows application mode, not just the desktop mode that everybody’s grown up on, but starting to embrace for certain experiences the new Windows RT Surface.

It certainly means embracing the new Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8. And so Office is really designed with those things in mind.

Your modern Office thinks cloud first. Cloud first. That’s what it means to say Office is designed as a service. You can just click and start running Office immediately from the service. Office uses the cloud to remember what you were doing and where you were and what your preferences and favorites are, your documents and how you’re working together with other people to collaborate on those things. And we need to support that for people in their individual lives, their private lives, in addition to supporting enterprises in their business persona.

We’ve made social a first-class part of the modern Office. One of the things that is certainly true is the way people work today is dramatically different than the way people worked when I started at Microsoft.

I got to Microsoft, one of the things we did that was big to differentiate ourselves in 1980 was to give everybody a private Office. I think that’s a great concept, but it’s not a uniform concept. Certainly, people today work — whether it’s the style of their physical office or their virtual office, people work in much more social and collaborative ways than ever before. And you see that reflected in this wave of Office.

The embrace of Skype. The ability to work on projects and collaborate together, whether you’re people in an enterprise or a PTA group that wants to come together and iterate on a project. We need to facilitate that kind of work.

We need to let individuals in an organization band together and then work together, where appropriate, under the administrative control of the enterprise. That was the key kind of concept for us in terms of the acquisition of Yammer and embracing Yammer as a social infrastructure for people to work much more collaboratively, and hopefully you see that today.

The last thing that I’ll emphasize in a modern Office, and this wave of Office is certainly modern, is that there are scenarios that have become more and more important and more and more able to be attacked with digital technologies today than ever before.

Meetings. Today, meetings are still largely done with physical techniques. Sometimes people will have a Skype or go get a big, fancy, expensive kind of teleconference room. We think the opportunity to use digital techniques to automate meetings is amazing. The modern Office really takes great strides down that path, and you’ll see that today.

Notes. Outside of journalists, most people still take notes on pencils and paper. That is not the most digital of approaches. And no matter how many documents get distributed digitally to how many people in how many organizations, the record and the markup and the annotation on those things are still done largely in nondigital forms. The modern Office embraces annotation as a first-class activity, and you’ll see that in the demonstration today, particularly through the embrace of this next generation of hardware.

In the modern Office, not only do you take notes and mark things up and draw digitally, but you consume most of what you consume also digitally. We all know that viscerally with Web pages, and yet the amount of documents and PowerPoint presentations, et cetera, that still get printed out is quite high. And so facilitating the online consumption of information is a very important thread for the modern Office.

So, that’s what we want to talk to you about today. We’re going to show you a little bit of this modern version of Office, Office as a service, and then I want to come back and we’ll talk a little bit about how customers are using it and what you can do to get started.

So, with that, please join me in welcoming to stage Kirk Koenigsbauer from our Office Division, who will show you a little bit of your modern Office. Kirk. (Applause.)

KIRK KOENIGSBAUER: Thanks very much. Hello, everybody.

So, I want to walk through a couple different scenarios here. First, I want to say I’m absolutely thrilled to give you all a first look at the new Office here. There’s a lot that we’re going to go through in the demo, so I want to take you through a couple of different scenarios first around what Steve talked about as reimagining the experience on Windows 8 devices for things like touch, using ink and stylus, and some of the new experiences that you’ll see.

I’m going to start in Microsoft PowerPoint. This is a great example of an application that we can use to show some of the experience that we’ve got on this device.

Now, first, I’m running this demo on a Samsung tablet. You can see it here; I’ll hold it up briefly. It’s connected to a couple of cords for this demonstration. All of you here in the room will get one of these devices at the end of the session here, so you can play around and do exactly the kinds of things that I’m doing. And so hopefully we’ll use the same device here.

Now, when I’ve got PowerPoint up and running here, the first thing you’ll notice, it’s a very sleek, a very clean, beautiful user experience. I can use my fingers to navigate as I’m on this touch-based device. So, I can just go ahead and tap and go through my different slides that are here. Maybe I’ll drop into the slide sorter mode. I can do things, as you would expect, like pinch and zoom. So, I can zoom out or I can zoom into my presentations. I’ll go back to that first one that’s there.

Now, you see at the very top, the ribbon is there, but it’s hidden. So, when I want to interact with the ribbon, when I want to use commands, I can do that. I just simply tap on it, and that will bring up the ribbon. Now, if I want to do a lot of editing and so forth, maybe I’ll actually pin it like I’ll do right here. So, I can have all my commands at my fingertips.

Now, using the ribbon is as simple as it’s ever been on a tablet device. I can go ahead — let’s say I want to add some animations or transition effects. I’ll start here, we’ll use the cut animation effect. I’ll go to this next one, maybe switch. I’ll go to this third one here. I’ll show you a new one, this is called drape. It’s a new one that will come in the new Office.

Now, once I’ve got my presentation ready to go, I’ll go ahead and I’ll present the presentation for everybody to see here. Now, PowerPoint has always been a great application for helping you create your ideas, and then going and presenting them.

One of the scenarios that Steve talked about that we want to focus on in this release is how presenters can be more confident while they’re delivering the presentation itself.

So, here I’ll go through and I’ll just use my finger to navigate through my slides. I’ve got my tablet here and I can just swipe if I want, or I can tap if I’d like to go from slide to slide to slide.

I can double tap if I want to zoom in as the presenter. So, let’s say I want to zoom in here to North America. I can do that just by tapping. And of course as Steve mentioned, I can annotate. I can mark up using a digital pen or a stylus. And so here I’ll show you how that can work.

I’ll go ahead and turn on a pen here. And let’s say instead of 25 percent profits going to charity, I want to cross that out, I want 30 percent going to charity. I can underline, of course, I can highlight. Some people like to use a pen as a laser pointer when they’re giving presentations. So, we have a laser pointer option as well, I’ll change that there. You can see as I hover over, you can see the laser pointer appear on the slide. If I want to highlight things during my presentation.

So, I’ll drop out of that for a quick second. What you’re looking at is the final presentation, of course. What I’m looking at as the presenter is something that’s different. And it’s a new experience that we’ve created call Presentation Mode. So, what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to switch the display here for a moment so you see what I’ve been working on. It’s very easy in Windows 8. I can go ahead and just switch those monitors. And take a look at this screen. This is, effectively, a cockpit for me as the presenter to help me be more confident when I deliver the presentation.

You can see here, this is the slide that everybody’s been looking at. If you go over on the far right here, you can see the next slide in the presentation, so I know what’s coming. I’ve got all my notes, my cheat sheets right here for me. So, as I’m looking, holding up that tablet device, you know, I can have the confidence of what points I want to make next.

Here’s the drawing pen that I was using. I tapped on this. You guys couldn’t see that, but it’s what I use for the stylus. Zooming in, zooming out. There’s even a clock and a timer so I can make sure that I stay on time during my presentation.

So, a number of different capabilities here. I’m going to tap and get out of this for a quick second. But a number of different capabilities here that show you what we can do with Windows 8, with touch, with our fingers, with a stylus on these beautiful new devices.

Now, it’s not just Outlook that’s gotten a makeover here in the new Office. We’ve extended this user experience across all the Office applications. So, for example, I’m going to drop into Outlook and give you a quick look at what we’ve done in Outlook.

Now, again, just like in PowerPoint, the first thing that you’ll notice is a very, very clean, fluid user experience. Like in PowerPoint, the ribbon is there, but it’s hidden. So, if I need it, I just tap on it, bring it up, I can get rid of it when I’m done.

I can do the same thing with folders. So, if I want to pull up my folders and maybe drag and drop items into my folders, I can go ahead and do that.

I can navigate through my mail messages just easily with my finger. See, I can just tap through them here. In fact, we’ve added a new tool — it’s called the quick action tab on the far right of the screen. And what I can do with that is I’m going through my mail and, say, triaging it, if I want to flag a mail message, I can do that. Just touch. If I want to move an item, I can go ahead and do that. If I want to delete, a very, very quick delete key there. Again, all using my finger.

Now, for that matter, one of my favorite new capabilities that’s here is inline reply. So, in the past, when you would reply to messages and maybe you got lots of mail, you’d have all kinds of Windows open on the screen, and that could be hard to manage through. Here, I can just respond to this message in line, and it’s a much, much cleaner experience. And you notice I did that, I didn’t even have to use the keyboard, I used the Windows 8 keyboard here on the machine itself.

Now, there’s another new user interface element that I want to mention to you. I showed you that we have the quick actions tab on the far right. We’ve cleaned up the space there and we’ve removed the calendar and the task view that was there before, so you can really have the full experience of reading your mail.

We’ve created a new capability called Peeks. So, if I hover over calendar at the bottom, people at the bottom, you can see that I get a quick peek of all my people, my calendar, my tasks, and so forth. And these are fully interactive. So, I can go through here, say, on the calendar, I can tap the different days, click through here, double click if I want to go right into the calendar itself. In fact, let’s go ahead and do that. I’ll just drop in.

Now, as you’d expect, here’s the calendar. Again, it’s fully enabled for touch. I can just go ahead and swipe from week to week. I can zoom in and zoom out as you would expect. Go to this particular day, and get the idea here.

Now, as Steve talked about, there’s a lot more to come over the coming months as we talk more about Office. I wanted to introduce you to the new Office developer model that we have in the new Office itself here.

This is a model where developers will be able to build Web-based applications in the cloud that can be then consumed in the Office experience itself. Say right here in Outlook.

Now, these applications can be built on Azure, on AWS, on GoDaddy, on a partner-hosted or a private cloud infrastructure, but the user experience of those applications get consumed right here inside of Office.

Let me give you a quick example of what that might look like. There’s two apps for Office that are installed here. One is called Bing Maps, and another is called Suggested Appointments. So, if you look at this mail message, you’ll see part of the sentence says, “The address is 2230 First Avenue, Seattle.” I’ll go ahead and just click on Bing — or tap on Bing Maps. And what that does is it scans the email, it identifies that there’s an address there, and it puts this map in place. Pretty cool.

It’s also interactive, though. So, I can go navigate through it, I can tap if I want to go deeper. You get the idea here. I can zoom right in if I’d like. Just a simple example, but a great one of how we can harness the power of the cloud here inside the Office applications.

There’s another one I’ll show you just real quickly, suggested appointments. Similar concept, looks at the email message, you see someone suggesting maybe we should get together at a particular time. I can just go ahead and click “save to calendar” here and just to the calendar itself. So, a whole new Office experience really taking advantage of the power of Windows 8.

Now, when we talk about Windows 8, Steve mentioned that there’s a whole new design style for applications. Formally known as Metro applications, we’re talking about Windows 8-style applications here. And we’ve got two that we’re starting with for Office in this release.

We picked Lync and OneNote for communication scenarios and note-taking experiences because they’re perfect for these tablet types of devices where you want an immersive experience for people that are on the go.

Let me give you a look at what the OneNote application will look like. Now, for folks who aren’t familiar with OneNote, let me first just talk a little bit about what it is. It’s our digital note-taking application. As you can see here, you can keep all kinds of different content in OneNote. I’ve got things like text, of course, pictures, Steve referenced inking is available here, there’s content from the Web. You can see you have things like task lists.

Students love OneNote. I’ll go to a student page, as an example. You can see that you can keep all kinds of lecture information or your classroom notes, you can do inking and so forth.

Businesses love it. Lots of scenarios in business environments where people want to be able to take notes. Maybe insert PowerPoint presentations into OneNote, you can easily mark them up that way. People can have collaborative authoring sessions on this page itself.

And then consumers use it for all sorts of different things, for grocery lists, for task lists, for vacation planning. In this case, even things for recipes.

Now, with OneNote, we tried to make it easy to consume content in this new Windows 8 style of applications. If I want to go ahead and use my finger to navigate through all my notebooks, it’s just really easy. As you saw, I was able to go up and down with my notebook.

If I want to enter content, there’s a bunch of different ways to do that. Of course, I can use mouse and keyboard, but we also, of course, enable the pen and stylus. So, I can go ahead and write anywhere I want to over my notes. If I say, hey, you know, this 9:30 is wrong, I’ll just cross that out, say let’s get together at 10:00. My handwriting is terrible here. Little nervous.

I can circle things that I think are important. I can annotate on the map itself if we want to meet down here at those particular points. I can do those sorts of things. You get the idea.

Now, of course if I need to be able to format or edit my notes, we made that simple too, and there’s a great new capability that we have here called the radial menu. And with the radial menu, which I’ll pop up right here, I have all the commands that I need at my fingertips.

So, if I want to go ahead and, say, bold “Saturday’s walking tour” I just tap bold. If I want to change the color, I’ll tap on the color wheel and I can pick a color. Who knew there were so many shades of blue or purple?

My favorite control here is the font size one. It looks like a speedometer. If I want to increase the font size, make it big, 36 points. Real simple to do using the new radial menu.

Now, talked a little bit about touch, talked a little bit about using my fingers. What’s also great about these modern devices is that oftentimes they’ll have integrated cameras with them. And so people will typically use OneNote and often will capture an image, maybe on a white board, maybe something that they’ve seen as they’re walking down the street if they’re vacation planning, lots of different types of scenarios.

One I want to show you is let’s say I wanted to go grab some content. I’ve got a quick helicopter tour here for San Francisco. I’ll show you how easy this will be and how we’ve integrated OneNote with the Windows 8 experience and the camera in this device.

I’ll bring up that radial menu again. I’ll tap “camera.” And let’s go ahead and just minimize this. And you can see I’ve got this on my desk here. I’ll go ahead and just tap it. That will take a quick picture of it. I can go ahead and crop it. Let’s say I just want to capture this part here, I want to remember the San Francisco helicopter piece. Tap OK. And I can just drop that right into my notebook, real simple.

And then if I want to move it around and resize it, I can just go pick it up with my finger, drag and drop, put it where I want it to be.

So, a great example here of the immersive style of applications that we can deliver with Office, taking advantage of what Windows 8 can provide for us.

Now, for the next part of this demonstration, I want to show you a couple of things about how we talk about Office being in the cloud. This is a hugely important part of the release that Steve talked about. We’re transitioning the Office business as a cloud service.

And to highlight this, I want to show you a couple of examples using the new Microsoft Word. The scenario here is that I want to show you how we can do some sharing scenarios from device to device.

Now, I’ve just opened up Word for the first time here, and you’ll see the user experience, very similar to PowerPoint in the sense that it’s clean and it’s fluid. When you first open up the Office applications, you’ll notice that you will sign into them. If you look in the upper-right corner of the screen, I’m signed in as Kirk, it’s got my picture here. And when I’m signed in, you get access to things like your settings. You get access to things like your most recently used documents. You can see them on the far left up there.

You get access to things like all of your templates. Your templates will roam with you from device to device to device.

Even things like custom dictionaries. You have a name like Koenigsbauer, that’s a custom dictionary entry you want to have with you no matter what machine you’re on, and that will roam with me as I move from device to device.

Now, by default, the Office applications will store content in the cloud. Of course, you can store them locally as well, but by default, we’re storing content in the cloud using our SkyDrive service.

So, I’ll open up a document that I’ve got here that’s stored up in SkyDrive. We’ll talk a bunch about SkyDrive in the next couple of minutes, but first let me point out this new view that you’re seeing in Word. This is the Word Reading Mode. And this is a new experience that we’ve created that takes advantage, again, of what these Windows 8 devices can deliver for us running Office.

The idea with Reading Mode is Word has always been a fantastic tool for authoring. We want to make it a first-class tool for reading. So because it’s, of course, a tablet, touch enabled, I can just go ahead and tap from page to page.

What’s great about Reading Mode is independent of what device you have, Word will resize for the size of that device. So, if I’m on a phone, it will render in a different way, if I’m on a tablet that’s landscape mode, that’s a different view. It will give me the view that’s best for that particular experience.

There’s also some great capabilities here, too, where let’s say you’re in an environment where you want to change the lighting. Let’s say I’m on an airplane and it’s dark and the white contrast is a little bit too rough for my eyes. I can go to page color, go to inverse for a moment, and have a black background with white text if I want, or sepia. You get the idea here.

In this Reading Mode, oftentimes people may want to comment. Or you may want to see comments that have been added to documents. You can see here I can go ahead and tap on the comment tab and that shows that a comment’s been entered here in this part of the document.

You’ll also see that there’s presence enabled in that comment. So, I could do a quick IM with someone, I could do a quick phone call, a video chat if I’d like, all here right in the experience itself.

I can collapse sections when I’m done reading with them if I’d like, or expand them to help me navigate through the document.

I’m just going to go ahead and swipe through here. Look at different parts of the page. When we think about this new Reading Mode, we’re trying to create new scenarios, too, for modern documents and modern authoring. And one of the things that we’re integrating is multimedia into these kinds of documents.

So, for example, if you look towards the lower right, you’ll see that there’s an image here and it’s got a play button. It’s actually a video that’s embedded into, as a link, into the Reading Mode Word itself here. So, I can go ahead and just play that right from my reading experience. Great.

Now, I want to drop out of Reading Mode for a quick moment. Make a quick edit to this document so you guys can see what we mean by moving content from device to device if I sign in across my devices themselves.

I’m going to scroll up a bit here and show you how simple it is just to go ahead and add a — use my finger — go ahead and add an image.

I’ll click on insert and this is where I would go ahead if I wanted to insert another online video like you just saw. I can go ahead and add online pictures. We’ll just do that now. It’s a great example of how Office is cloud connected. We’re looking up into our Office.com service for clip art, I can search the Web for, say, an image. I’ll go ahead and type “coho” here, let’s look for a picture of a fish. Great. And I’ll find the one I want. I’ll just tap on it, insert it into the document.

Now, there’s a great new feature called Live Layout that I want to show you. This picture is a little bit big for my document right now. I just want to go ahead and use my finger. I can go and use what’s called Live Layout, and watch as I just use my finger to resize this. And I can move it and drag it anywhere on the page, and watch how the text wraps. Really nice, fast, fluid text.

I’ve got these green guidelines and I can go ahead and get it exactly where I want, let it go, that looks pretty good right there.

OK. Next what I want to do is save the document and then we can look at some of the different sharing scenarios. I’m going to go to the backstage here and click on share. And there’s a number of different ways that I can share this document. One is that I can use the SkyDrive service directly. Save the document to the cloud and invite anyone to come and access this document or co-author or co-edit that document.

I could go ahead and tap on social networks. I could post it to Facebook if I wanted to share it with people. I could scroll down and publish it as a blog if I would like. There are lots of different choices. For now, I’m just going to go ahead and save it, saved up to SkyDrive, and I’ll close Word, and I’m going to switch machines.

I’ve left work for the day, say that’s the scenario, and I’m coming back to my house. I’ll move to this second machine here at my home. This device is a laptop, a notebook, from Samsung. It’s running Windows 8. And I want to show you how easy it is for me to sign into Office and get access to that same content.

Now, here I’ll be using a keyboard and mouse. And I want to start by just giving you a quick look at SkyDrive. SkyDrive is incredibly fundamental to this release of Office. It is where we’ll be storing our content in the cloud. SkyDrive, as many of you may know, it’s a big service, 60 million active users a month, and 10 billion documents stored in the cloud with SkyDrive. And with SkyDrive, I can keep track of all kinds of content, documents, music, pictures of my family, videos. You get the idea. I can drop into documents, where I have all my documents stored. And as I move over to the far right here, I can hover over and I can see that this particular document was just recently updated.

I’m going to go ahead and open it up here, and this will open Word on this device. Now, I’m signed into Word. All my most recent documents, all my settings, all my profiles follow me across devices. One thing that’s interesting, too, if you look to the lower right, you’ll see that there’s a small toast here, it says Welcome Back! Pick up where you left off. This is the last location feature in Office, where I can just click here and this takes me to the last spot that I was on the document where I was working on it in my other environment.

I’m going to close this, and show you that these experiences, if we could flip to the phone, extend beyond just PCs and tablets, of course, to mobile devices as well. This is a Windows Phone, a Nokia phone, a Lumia. And I’ve got my Office Hub here, you can see it. I can just tap on it. And I have access to SkyDrive. I have access to documents that are stored here locally, my notes, other documents. I’ll just go ahead and type on SkyDrive. There’s the same folder structure that you saw before in SkyDrive in the cloud. I’ll go into the document folder, scroll down here to the bottom. It’s refreshing my view at this point, updating to make sure I’ve got the most recent documents. I’ll go down and there is that fly-fishing document one more time, and I can open it on this device.

So, no matter where I am, no matter what device I’m working with, Office in the cloud with SkyDrive to help me share documents, and to have access to all the content that I need no matter where I need it.

OK. We’ve taken a look at how Office is best on Windows 8. We’ve talked a little bit about how Office can roam with you in the cloud. I want to talk a little bit more about what Steve said around Office being social in this release, and the investments we’ve made there.

Now, we’ve modernized SharePoint in this release to have a complete set of business or enterprise social networking features. And, of course, we’re really, really excited about what’s going to happen with Yammer, and how it can accelerate our position in the social networking space.

I want to give you a quick look at what we’ve done with the new SharePoint, and some of the social capabilities there. So, I’m going to go to the desktop, and I’ll bring up a browser. Now, SharePoint does a lot of different things, document management, content management, enterprise search, workflow. What I want to show you here is the work we’ve done around social. Now, like the rest of the Office applications, SharePoint has a new user interface as well, much cleaner, simpler. It’s a design that’s easy and intuitive for people to get access to the tools that they need.

Now, with SharePoint and social, you can follow, you can keep track of anything, all kinds of different content. Over on the right here, you can see the listing of the people I’m following, the documents I’m following, the sites I’m following, the tags I’m following. I can go ahead and just click and go into all the documents and see the ones that I’m looking at. SharePoint will also suggest documents that I should be following based on the documents themselves and the things that I’ve followed in the past. It’s a great way to make sure that I stay connected with what’s happening in the org.

Now, you see in the center of the screen a news feed, or an activity feed, and this has all the kinds of social networking capabilities that you would come to expect, the ability to do things like like, reply, as I go through here, you can see these micro-blogging threaded discussions that are here. I can insert links. You see there’s a document that’s been posted. I can preview that right in line. So, without leaving the context of SharePoint, I can say, hey, is this a document maybe I want to go ahead and take a look at. Similarly, if I scroll down a bit further, you can see someone has posted a video here. Once again, I can just go ahead, simply click in that and play that video in context of the SharePoint social experience.

Posting is a snap. Let me go ahead and scroll up a bit here so you can see this. If I want to do a quick @ mention, I can easily go ahead and start typing here. SharePoint will fill that out for me. It looks at my favorite people, and I can go ahead and do that simply. If I want to do a quick hashtag, I can go and say #office. I can create a new tag here if I’d like, or one is already suggested, the post setup I want. I can insert a picture, I can insert a link. It’s a very, very straightforward, very intuitive experience.

Now, as we think about social, we’re taking a very broad view. And we think hard about integration communications scenarios into the social experience. For example, if you look at this news feed, you’ll see that there are a number of people with pictures that are here. And I have their presence in line with the news feed. So, instead of posting to someone, maybe I want to do a quick phone call, or a video call, or an IM. I get to pick which mode of communication that works best for me.

This is enabled by what we refer to as the People Card. So, I’ll hover over here for a quick sec. And I’ll pin this so you all can see it in a larger mode. I can just simply click here to do an instant message, a Lync call, a video call. I get, in this case, all this person’s contact information here automatically for me in one place. I can view notes. I can view where this person sits in the organizational hierarchy of the company. I can navigate up and navigate down.

And one thing I think is super exciting is we can aggregate all of your social networking feeds into this People Card. And right now, I’m in SharePoint, this People Card is showing here, but I could be in Outlook, I could be in Word, I could be in Excel, this same experience will be everywhere. And I can get access to my Facebook feeds, my LinkedIn feeds, my SharePoint feeds, my Yammer feeds, all in one place, which is a great way, again, to make sure I’m keeping track of what’s happening.

Now, that’s a simple example. One that I’m incredibly excited to talk a little bit about today is how we’re going to communications-enable the billion Office users that are out there with the hundreds and hundreds of millions of Skype users, too. Let me give you an example of what I mean by that. I’m going to jump over to Outlook. Now, in Outlook you can see that we have presence here. Now, we’ve always had presence for our business and enterprise customers through our Lync service, which is our real-time communications service for businesses.

We’re now excited to be able to have Skype integrated directly into Office. So, when I hover over these people, this presence that you see here is actually coming from the Skype service. Here’s my friend Tal, I can see he’s available. Again, I get that same People Card. So, if I wanted to, I could do a quick IM, I could do a phone call, I could do a Skype call, all right here from this experience.

In fact, that’s what I want to show you. I could just click here, I’ll start a video call. This will start a Skype call with my friend Tal. Hey, Tal. How are you doing? You’re officially famous. OK, great. So, simple, intuitive, exactly what people would expect for integration with the Skype service.

Now, Steve talked about a number of different scenarios that we have in the new Office. We talked about Reading Mode. We talked about the Presenter Mode. We talked about these new social experiences. We talked about experiences here around communications. I want to show you an experience in Excel, one of the ways that we’re trying to make every user in Excel a power user. Now, Excel has always been a pretty rich app with lots of capability in it. Sometimes some of the things that are more advanced are a bit out of reach for some people. We want to make everyone have the capability to do that.

The scenario I want to go through here is a relatively common one for people that are taking content from the Web and wanting to do some analysis on it. This is a spreadsheet. It’s got content that in this middle column here, this D column you can see all the fields are concatenated together. This is something that happens, you copy it from the browser and you put it into something like Excel and it’s not quite in the right format that you may want it to be.

We have a new feature in Excel that can help break apart that content so you can go and do analysis on it. Now, historically people would literally rekey that content, or if they were more advanced they might write macros to go ahead and do that. I want to show you with a new feature called Flash Fill how simple it can be in the new Excel. I’m going to go ahead and pull out a field. Let’s say I want to pull out the names of people. I’ll just go type John then I’ll type Jenny. And watch as I hit enter, that will fill that entire column all the way down with that name.

I’ll show it to you one more time here. I’ll type in advertising, I’ll pick a different word and then event, and again, fill that all the way down. Notice Excel is pretty smart here. It gets that digital marketing is two words. It smartly pulls that out into the right column. You can also use this to combine columns. So, for example, let’s say I want a column that’s got everybody’s name and then the amount of money that they’re spending. I’ll just start typing John and I’ll type 1,300 here, start typing Jenny and watch, it will just fill that out for me automatically.

So, again, the idea here is to create this kind of simple experience that everybody can have at their fingertips. Now, once I’ve got the data that I want maybe I want to do some analysis on it. I’m going to show you a new feature that we have called Quick Analysis. This idea here is that this will take some of the magic, the mystery out of how to set formatting, create charts and do things like PivotTables.

For example, if I hover over data bars it gives me a nice preview of what that experience might look like, or if I hover over charts this will suggest for me the best type of chart for this kind of data that’s here. Tables is a great example, too. If I want to format this content as a table then maybe pick a PivotTable. Lots of people love working with PivotTables and have to work with PivotTables in business. Very few people know actually how to create them. This is a way in one quick click that I can create a PivotTable out of that content. Again, I can go ahead and just use the PivotTable fields on the right and make it more expansive. So, again, our goal here is to really make it easy for anyone to take advantage of some of the higher-end capabilities that are in Excel.

Now, for the last demo I want to touch on one final experience that I think is particularly exciting, as we think about Windows 8, as we think about a new class of devices in Office. Steve referenced that we acquired a company PPI, Perceptive Pixel. That was announced just about a week or so ago. I want to move over to this device here. This is a Perceptive Pixel device, a PPI device. It’s an 82-inch, multitouch, high-definition display unit connected to a PC running Windows 8, a beautiful, beautiful display. I want to go ahead and sign in. I’ll use my picture password, how about that. All right. I’ll take that. And it’s running Windows 8. It’s an absolutely beautiful experience here. I can use my finger back and forth. It comes with a stylus, as well. I can use the stylus.

I’ll show you a couple of quick examples here of how Windows 8 looks great on these devices. I’ll pull up the weather application. This is Bing weather for San Francisco. I could do a little Al Roker here, sort of slide across. Let’s look at the hourly forecast, things like maps, temperature and so forth.

Let me pick a different app quickly. We’ll pick the Bing sports app, absolutely stunning, absolutely stunning display here, again all high-definition video. I can use my finger to move across. I can see the schedule, my favorite teams, you get the idea. I can zoom in and zoom out using my fingers, very clean experience.

Now, this is great not just for Windows 8 style applications, but it opens up a whole new experience for Office and modern productivity. And one of the scenarios I want to talk to you about is one Steve alluded to around meetings. The world today is one where people are always having to come together in real time for a meeting, and people are roaming, they’re on the road, they’re traveling, they may be in different geographies, different continents. We think that there’s many new experiences that we could create with a device like this and meetings.

I want to go ahead and join a meeting that’s in progress, this Lync meeting, I’ll go ahead and start that. And this is going to start a high-definition, multiparty videoconference, just in one click.

Brian, are you there?

BRIAN: I’m there. How are you, Kirk.

KIRK KOENIGSBAUER: Brian, you sound great. I’m going to go ahead and start my video. Now, let’s say we’ve got this video started and I want to add somebody. Let’s go down the list here and we’ll go ahead and add Sandhya. I can just drag and drop her with my finger. That’s all it takes and I can go ahead and add Sandhya to the meeting itself. She’ll pop up in a quick second there, absolutely beautiful experience.

Hey, Brian, do you want to go ahead and add a PowerPoint presentation for us to collaborate on?

BRIAN
: Absolutely. Here it is.

KIRK KOENIGSBAUER: Great. So, we’ve got our multiparty HD video session going here at the top and I’ve just asked Brian to go ahead and load a PowerPoint presentation that we can all view and collaborate on. I showed you PowerPoint a couple of minutes ago. It’s fully touch-interactive, as well. I can go ahead and just move through these slides. We can all be looking at different content if we want, or make sure we stay together there. You see Brian has already started to annotate slides. I didn’t do anything there. That’s happening from one of the folks here on the list. But, of course, I have full capability here to do markup, as well. I’ll go ahead and pick a I can use my stylus. I can even just use my finger to go across here and highlight different things that I want in the meeting itself.

So, we have our multiparty HD video session. We’ve got a PowerPoint going. We’re collaborating on it together all at the same time. One thing that might be great is to add a common note-taking session, as well. Oftentimes we want to make sure people are on the same page and we can collectively take notes together. I want to show you a scenario here where we’ve enabled that using OneNote. I showed you OneNote earlier, but I’ll go ahead and bring OneNote up here we can do a common share.

You can share all kinds of content in this Lync session. I could share my desktop, programs, other PowerPoints if I want, white boards, polls. I’m going to go ahead and tap on OneNote for a second here. I could share an existing notebook, one of my own personal notebooks. I’m going to go ahead and just tap this one here. This is the notebook that the team has set up already. Now, what Office does, since this is a shared notebook, is it goes ahead and inserts here the meeting details into the OneNote itself.

So, for example, the content that we’re all sharing and collaborating on is listed here in this table and here are all the participants. That’s done for me automatically. If I don’t want to see that right now I can just tap those and collapse them and then we can all be collaboratively taking notes here on the page.

Now, what I’m going to do is actually pin this so that I can see not just my note-taking session here on the right, but my collaborative meeting session over on the left, as well. And again, it’s all fully touch-enabled where I can just tap here. One more time, there we go there’s my line. So, hopefully this gives you a sense of some of the things that we can do let me just shut this down for a quick second, some of the things we can do with the new Office running on these Windows 8 devices. It’s a great time for Office. There are a number of new scenarios here that we’re able to enable, taking advantage of Windows 8, taking advantage of these great devices, the tablet, the PC, these large multitouch monitors, for modernizing collaborative and productivity scenarios, whether I’m at work, whether I’m at home, whether I’m in the classroom.

Steve. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: The modern Office, Kirk only had a chance really to show you a smidge. When you think Office you think about all the new features in Word and Excel and PowerPoint. We showed you a little smattering of those. What we really tried to do thematically was bring alive some of the big directions. The move to Windows 8, you saw us change the fundamental Office UI to be fast and fluid and touchable, which is certainly required in this world of the modern Office.

Ink, not just handwriting recognition, but really ink becomes a first-class citizen with this next generation of device, replacing the pen and paper, the markup that people do with digital notes and drawings and annotations that really roam with you, that you can look at across multiple devices, from the very large screen on down, is fundamental.

You see that we’re embracing the next generation of Windows, with applications that are native to the new Windows experience. Kirk had a chance to show you a little bit of OneNote, but just a little bit, really, of OneNote in that new mode, with OneNote and Lync.

The support on ARM, and you’ll see this as we and our partners shipped PCs and Surface devices with ARM chips in them, full Word, full PowerPoint, full Excel. You give up nothing of the rich capabilities of Microsoft Office when you embrace the Windows 8 ARM device. That wasn’t the junior version. That was full Office available to you with full capabilities on this next generation of device.

The cloud, when you go and try the preview you’ll sign up for a service and that service will utilize SkyDrive and Skype, and roaming capabilities. It will enable people who want to subscribe to a service, as opposed to buy a piece of software, and get services and upgrades that come with that automatically.

Social, we showed you a little bit from a business and enterprise point of view, but the ability to go in new directions, particularly with the Yammer acquisition, is really quite high. The People Card, we showed you just a little bit, a touch of what we’re doing with the People Card and Skype. But, the ability to go from an activity in which you are by yourself to an activity in which you’re working with people collaboratively is really quite high.

You saw annotations with the pen. You saw some of the new reading capabilities, some of the new meeting capabilities. We didn’t show you as much of the sort of fundamental new productivity capabilities, but Kirk gave you just a little glimpse, for example, of what we’re doing with Excel, because as I said earlier, it’s about Windows 8, it’s about the cloud and it’s about new capabilities. That’s what we bring together and Kirk had a chance to show you a little bit in the modern Office.

Now, there are a number of customers who I’m going to reference who have been using this new wave of Office product in trials. I’ll start with Mike Riess. Mike is a student at Baylor University. I’ll just read the quote to you. “The new Office and Windows 8 are everything I love about tablets, portable and fun to use, but with the full functionality of Windows and the powerful Office Suite.” When we talked about Surface and launched it, we said you can have a no-compromise experience, a new class of computing that’s all that we love, work and play, tablet and PC. And certainly Mike seems to agree.

Now, Mike is a student at Baylor. He runs a Web development company on the side. He’s an avid volunteer at his church. And he’s constantly on the move with really a lot to do.

I’m going to give you a second example. These will all be, if you will, from the consumer area. Second example is Susan Driever, who I think we would best characterize as a super mom. I see Susan smiling over there. She’s mom to two energetic boys, lives in Houston. She’s the fundraising chair on the PTA board. She uses OneNote to organize fundraisers. She uses Excel to track Cub Scout badges and awards, a very important productivity exercise; Outlook to manage their family schedule; and SkyDrive to keep it all connected. Susan said SkyDrive is a lifesaver. “I was on vacation, and I could access my special tooth fairy letter to get it under my son’s pillow.” I think that’s kind of a telling productivity example, not from somebody trying to manage the next-generation enterprise, but to manage the most important organization in most of our lives, which is our families.

Third case I want to reference is Mike Kaminsky. Mike is a band manager. He runs a small business that manages bands in Los Angeles. He’s constantly either on the road or in the studio. He wants all of his books, all of his games, all of his music, all of his Office docs, everything on a tablet. Mike says, “I can basically travel with nothing and work as if I were in my office,” which may be ultimately the ultimate compliment.

I don’t have a quote from the last user I want to reference, but that would be me. Of all the great things we’re working on, the product that really has just come together and been transformative in the way I work is the modern Office on Windows 8; the fluid user interface; the snappiness of the feel; the ability to go from touch mode to keyboard and mouse mode; the ability to use one of these displays. We’ve got a lot of work to do to get the cost down, but I’ll tell you it transforms the way you work. I have no phone. I have no paper. I have no whiteboard. My entire life now lives on Office 15 and Windows 8. I use it for videoconferencing, I use it for phone calls, I use it for notes, I use it for meetings. I have everything roaming through the cloud, roaming with me with appropriate security and protection that will be for the enterprise section of the meeting.

But it is absolutely  it’s almost a visceral response you have when you see the new Windows 8 user interface with the new generation of Office working as a service in these new ways and on these new scenarios. The reaction is really phenomenal. And I really do encourage everybody to join those of us who have tried the product, those we had a chance to hear from. You just go to the Office.com/preview site, and you can try Office 365.

What we will encourage you to do is to try Office 365 the service. The service you’ll try is called the Home Premium service. It’s the one that’s featured when you go to the Office.com/preview. If you’re interested in other parts of the product line, you’ll be able to find them. But this is the premiere consumer experience. There is an equivalent experience also available for trial for our business customers online today as well.

You can still buy software and install it. That will be part of this family of Microsoft products that ships. That’s not going away, at least certainly not at this stage in the game. And yet I think the bulk of customers who move with us to Windows 8 and the modern Office will want to move with us with this service-based infrastructure. So, I encourage you all to get out and at least give that a try today.

It is an amazing time. It’s certainly an amazing time to be at Microsoft. The Windows 8 launch is right around the corner. We have a lot to do, but it’s right around the corner with availability coming as we announced in October. And in a sense it feels to a lot like 1995. We have the most vibrant, exciting, new version of Windows in years. We complement it with the most vibrant, exciting new release of Office in years. Office that’s designed for the new Windows. Office that’s designed for the new world of cloud service. And while individually I think they’re quite remarkable, together I think they’re quite magical.

And in this case, we took the extra step. We said, we need a piece of hardware, which really shows off this uncompromised experience between work and play. And so with the Microsoft Surface, and the full range of Office productivity available on that device and on the full range of Windows 8 devices from our partners, I think you almost go beyond magical in a way that is just incredibly, incredibly exciting.

You put that together with new versions of Bing, and Skype, and everything else that have been designed for Windows 8, and for those of us who want to be productive, who want to communicate, and who want to collaborate, I will tell you this shapes up to be the most exciting, fun, productive year that I think any of us has had for quite a long time.

So, please get out and try the preview. I thank you all very much for spending your time with us today. We look forward to seeing all of you as Office 365 users and subscribers, and we, again, appreciate very, very much your time and energy and interest.

Thanks and have a good day.

(Applause.)

END