Yusuf Mehdi: Worldwide Partner Conference 2016

Remarks by Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President, Windows and Devices Group, in Toronto, Canada, July 12, 2016.

VICKI COELHO:  I’m Vicki Coelho, chairman of Fireminds, based in Hamilton, Bermuda.  We’re honored to be the Bermuda Microsoft Country partner of the year.

We are passionate about innovating and implementing customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

WPC is a key component of our corporate game plan.  We gear every experience and interaction at WPC to help us better understand Microsoft’s strategy and direction which helps us develop our long-range plans for our customers and for our organization.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to introduce Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Windows and Devices Group, Yusuf Mehdi.  (Applause, music.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  Hello.  How are you guys doing?  Are you hanging in there?  Let’s bring it home.  All right.

It is an honor and a privilege to be here with you, our very best partners, at this important time in the history of our industry.

As you heard over the last day and a half, we’re in the middle of a digital revolution that’s changing business.

The real question I have is:  What does that mean when it comes to you, when it comes to your devices.  What does that experience look like?  What does that mean for you as you build businesses for your customers?

We’re starting to think about that.  For us, it’s really one simple idea.  It’s how do you get that breakthrough to more-personal computing?  And we created a little video just to give you a flavor of that.  Let’s run that video.

(Video:  MPC Manifesto.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  (Applause.)  So we’re inspired about the opportunity to create more-personal computing.  But there are some real challenges to make that happen, and these become great business opportunities for each of us as we try and push them forward.

The first is going to be the fact that we live in a new world of modern security threats.  It’s unbelievable, but if you just blinked your eyes in the last years, it has changed dramatically, and it’s an imperative for our customers.

The second is to really harness the power of this digital transformation, we’re going to have to have new technologies that make it easier for our customers to be able to interact with the data, not just keyboard and mouse, but you have to be able to talk to your devices and use the pen.

And, finally, we have been confined to these 2D screens.  And we really have to be able to have the opportunity to break free of that and get to a new world, a world of mixed reality.

What’s the opportunity on that?  Clearly, the No. 1 thing that we’ll talk about with Windows 10 is getting that security nailed down for all of our customers or getting to new forms of interaction with the pen and voice, Microsoft Surface and some of the devices that we’re going to show you are really building in that regard.

And, finally, to break through on the world of mixed reality, HoloLens and some of the work we have that we’re going to show you an incredible demo today is going to be a big part of making that happen.

So let’s start with the first challenge, which is on Windows 10 and security.  Now, in less than a year, and thanks to your great support, we have over 350 monthly active devices running on Windows 10.  But more amazingly, yeah, thanks very much.  (Applause.)

More amazingly, 96 percent of our enterprise accounts are already in pilots.  This is fantastic because this year they want to deploy broadly and they’re going to need help to get that deployment.

And there are a lot of great features about Windows 10 which I’ll show you, but the No. 1 has to do with security.  And it has to do with because of this great challenge we’ve got with modern security threats.  And I want to give you a look at that right here.  So let’s go ahead and roll that video.

(Video:  Modern Security Threats:  ATP 2.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  It’s incredible, but that quote from the FBI director is absolutely true.  There really are two types of companies, and it’s just incredible.  We live in this world where you have increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals that are attacking networks every day.

Let’s make it real for a second, painfully real.  In the last couple years, you take some of our best customers.  Target had over 100 million customer records compromised and hacked.  Home Depot, 56 million credit cards were stolen then sold online.  And at Sony Pictures, over 100 terabytes of data, including confidential employee information as well as unreleased pictures were compromised.

Three major accounts.  And it’s not just the financial impact, it’s an issue of brand, it’s an issue of customer trust.  And you know what the toughest thing of all that was for us?  If we had had Windows 10 at that time, we could have prevented all of those attacks.

So that is really our commitment is to put a huge amount of technical change into Windows 10.  And there’s a long list of things here.  Everything from when you boot the PC to how you log in to securing your credentials, the device, to even Advanced Threat Protection.

Rather than talk about them, I’d like to give you a demo.  I’m going to come over here and show you a couple of these that will become great opportunities for you to help move customers over.

Let’s start with one of the biggest problems.  What’s one of the biggest problems people have?  Passwords, right?

Let me give you a couple of pieces of data on passwords.  One in nine people have actually gone to a website and then not used it because they couldn’t remember the password.  Most people, of course, write them down, they put them on their networks.

We took a crack at this with Windows Hello where you could log in.  But imagine if you could use Windows Hello to log into your websites or to log into apps.

All right, let me show you what’s coming in three and a half weeks with the Anniversary Update.

This is the USAA website, where the military goes to do banking.  Now I can come in and say, hey, log in with Windows Hello.  I’ll go ahead and touch that.  It says, hey, do you want to use a fingerprint scanner?  I put my fingerprint, and I’m now logged in.  Isn’t that incredible?  Ease of use, and incredible security.  (Applause.)

Imagine logging into all your websites just with your finger with your biometrics.

Second thing I’d like to talk to you about is Credential Guard.  So you know when we talked about some of those attacks that happened with Home Depot and Target?  They used a sophisticated attack called “pass the hatch.”  This is a common attack.

And what they do is they get one password for the network for one user, and then they can just leapfrog throughout your network.

Let me show you.  On the left here in the red is Windows 7 and on the right is Windows 10.

So I’m a hacker now.  I’ve got my hacker hat on.  And I come in here and I say, hey, logon passwords.  And I’ll run the script.  And what you’ll see now is I’m able to come in and here’s my username and my password.  Likewise, I get all of the usernames.  So in this one simple hack, a hacker can get all of that data.

But if I go over here to Windows 10 and I run the same command, what happens is the hacker can actually figure out the users, but you see null now for the password, for all the passwords, can’t get access to the passwords because we’ve virtualized those.  So you keep that safe.  This would have saved all of those attacks and compromises that we showed before.

Let me give you a third example that we’ve got.  Device Guard.  Device Guard is a way to harden the system so that malware can’t run on the device.

So let me tell you what I’ve got on my screen here.  On the right, just for illustrative purposes, I’ve pulled up the Windows Defender control panel and then the control panel for firewall.  And you can see we’re green.  On the left here, it’s just a website or an e-mail, you can imagine.

And I’ll go ahead, this looks very friendly.  It could be for my company, click on the Contoso app.  I come in and click run.  And when I run it, watch what happens here on the right.  Immediately, Defender has now stopped working and this program has turned off my firewall.  I didn’t know what happened, but now hackers have access to my machine because they’ve turned off security and you don’t see it as a user.

We’ll go to Windows 10.  Here in the Windows 10 example, same thing, firewall and Defender.  But now when I run the program, Windows 10 realizes that this is a malware app, and as you can see, we get this dialog here that says, hey, this was blocked by Device Guard so that you can’t actually use it.

So another way to really protect the operating system in a profoundly, much more secure way.

Now, finally, one of the things that’s really tough is that as you saw before with the director of the FBI, there are accounts that are getting hacked all the time.  And what happens is when they’re getting hacked, they don’t sort of blow your machine up, they’re just quietly mining data and you don’t really see what’s going on.

I’m going to show you how we’re going to tackle that with a new capability that will ship in two and a half weeks with Advanced Threat Protection for Windows 10.

So we’re going to run here a little experience.  And on the left, what you’re going to see is a user, Liz Beam, and she’s just kind of using her e-mail.

And then on the right, you can see actually a hacker.  And the hacker is able to just quietly start to probe the machine, find information, mine information, and the whole time the user doesn’t know.

And if I come to the dashboard now, we’ll go up to the screen, I’m going to pop up a dashboard.  This is the Advanced Threat Protection dashboard.  This is now for a chief information officer or a chief security officer.  And what they can do is they can see, oh, I can see on my network what machines are being probed, what machines are being kind of pinged, who’s showing suspicious activity.

I can see the type of attacks that are being dropped on my network.  And even have kind of a cool Minority Report feature where you can go back in time and see how hackers are infiltrating your network and finding those out.

So super advanced, incredible capabilities here to improve security in Windows 10.  (Applause.)

And this is going to be an incredible opportunity for you as you go out and help customers migrate to Windows 10 and to bring that security expertise.

Now, the second topic that I want to talk to you about is how we’re helping bring the next level of capability, as we talked about, to solve the problem of how do I interact with data with my voice, with pen in a more robust, profound way?

And I’d like to do that by talking a little bit about how we do it with our Anniversary Update.

So in two and a half weeks on August 2nd, the next major release for Windows 10 is coming.  We call it the Anniversary Update, and this is going to bring all of the security features I showed you just there, plus enhancements to Cortana, enhancements to the pen, support for Xbox gaming, HoloLens, a huge amount of things.  And to really kind of make that shine for you and to show you how you as a partner can take advantage, I’d like to bring out Brian Roper, who is going to give you a great demo here of how we do it.

Please give some noise because Brian works off of noise.  Let’s have some noise for Brian Roper.  (Cheers, applause.)

BRIAN ROPER:  Thank you, Yusuf.

YUSUF MEHDI:  Yeah, baby.  Show them.

BRIAN ROPER:  Good morning, partners!  How y’all doing?  (Crowd responds.)  I said how y’all doing?  (Crowd responds.)  There, now you woke up.

I want to talk to you about three words:  More-personal computing.  And, specifically, how those three words can lead to tons of more partner opportunity.  Y’all want to see some opportunity?  All right.

Now, make some noise if you’re a Windows Insider.  (Cheers, applause.)

So those of you who are Insiders would have experienced Windows Ink, the power of the pen and the PC coming together for a natural experience that lets you do more.

You probably have seen some of the cool stuff in Cortana.  You saw Windows Hello.

What I want to talk about is how all of these features are extensible to you, they’re kind of like their own little platforms for you to go build experiences that we never even imagined for your customers.

All right, so real quick, I just want to show you.  Windows Ink.  Beyond being a really cool end-user feature for taking notes and all that kind of stuff, I mean, it’s also a platform.  The Windows Ink platform can actually make your apps ink enabled with just a couple lines of code on the UI side.

I actually just want to show you in Visual Studio really quick.  Check this out.  On the UI side, that’s how much code is required to Ink enable your app.  And that’s going to give you the Ink toolbar that you’re going to see in the app.  I’m going to show you in a second.

All kind of cool colors, even rulers.  Does that sound cool?  Yeah?  All right.

Now, I want to talk about a real app that’s built by a real company that’s solving real problems today for their organization.  But first, I think I need to switch gears a little bit, and I have a confession, I’ve been a mechanic this whole time.  I even brought a different hat, which was up here.  I’ll just rock my fedora.

And the reason why I’m dressed this way is I want to talk about Bridgestone.  Bridgestone does over a million tire inspections a year, a million.  That’s over 35,000 registered accounts.  So they’re very serious about inspection.

But with that type of scale, they faced a real challenge:  Different installations of their across the country were actually — you found my hat, Yusuf?

YUSUF MEHDI:  Keep going, baby, but you need that hat, though.

BRIAN ROPER:  Cool, man.  Yeah.  So they face a challenge with all these different folks doing it different ways.

Yusuf, you’re the man.  Make some noise for him, man.  (Cheers, applause.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  He needs a hat.

BRIAN ROPER:  Gotta have the hat, man.  What a guy.

So, yeah, folks, we’re tracking these in different ways from Excel to even pen and paper.  So they’ve built an app that actually enables their technicians to track these inspections one unified way, and I’m going to show it to you now.

So imagine I want to get into this app.  I just normally have to click through some different menus.  Because they enabled Cortana, you’re going to see me actually get right to my inspection with voice.  And because I’m a technician, my hands are busy, right?  I’m going to log in with my face using Windows Hello.

So all I’ve got to do is come over and say, hey Cortana, what’s my next Bridgestone inspection?

CORTANA:  Sure thing.  Looking for your next inspection.

BRIAN ROPER:  So it’s going to go right to my next page.  You’re going to see it log me in with my face.  It’s making sure it’s me.  Just like that, I hit OK, and boom.  I’m in this app just like that.  So imagine.  (Applause.)

Yeah, now let me show you the fun part, how you actually go inspect with Windows Ink.

I do want to call out, this a really cool, rugged Surface case.  You can actually see it’s super rugged.  It’s got a strap for my hand.

I’m going to set it down here, but it would be hard to show you how to inspect a tire without a tire, wouldn’t it?  Wouldn’t it?  Do you all think I got one?  We’ve got a tire right here.  (Applause.)

But, you know, when I’m looking at this thing — it’s kind of perfect, it’s a Bridgestone tire, it’s in great shape.  So I can probably mess it up a little bit to be able to inspect something.  Do you all think I should do that?  Should I mess up the tire?  (Cheers, applause.)

Well, I just so happen to have a toolbox here.  And I just so happen to have some tools.

So let’s imagine that this driver is not being too safe.  He actually goes and accidentally drives through a hardware store.  (Laughter.)  Like you do.

But that one thing is not going to stop a Bridgestone tire.  You can run through nails.  Should I go a little bit bigger?

Well, fortunately, I just so happen to have brought bigger.  (Laughter.)  Oh, I brought bigger.

So now we’re going to need to go ahead and put a hole in this tire.  Good lord, what are you guys doing to these tires?  Really, make a hole.  Like, that’s something you’d want to catch in an inspection.  Right?  (Laughter.)  You’d want to know about that.

Should we go even bigger than that?  Well, it’s a good thing I never leave home without my reciprocating saw.  Because, you know, that happens to tires.

I’m going to cut a big, long streak right in the side of this tire.  And there’s actually a reason why I’m doing this.  Is that cool?  Did you guys like that?

I want you guys to see how I can now use Windows Ink and Touch to actually inspect this tire.  This is the unified way that this company built this.

So, first of all, I can go and use touch to pick what kind of casing is on the tire, life of the tire.  Let’s just call it two years old.  Look how I write the number two, it jumps right in as text.  That’s the Ink canvas overlaying this actual app.  I think it’s safe to say the tire pressure is zero, there are holes in it.  And the condition is probably definitely considered bad.

And, good lord, the valve cap is missing.  That’s a really big problem there.

But check this out.  Watch how I can now use my device to come in and actually take a photo of this tire.  So I’m going to come in and take a picture.  Oops, my bad, hit the wrong button.  There, I got my photo.

And now I can actually crop and adjust to the specific area.  And this is where it gets amazing.  Check this out.  This is the Ink toolbar.  That’s what’s implemented with a few lines of code.  I get all kind of cool colors.

So I can come over here and be, like, dude, there’s a screw in the tire.  And, like, what’s happening?  (Laughter.)  Is this a bullet hole?  Is this tire borrowing money from the wrong people?  What’s going on here?

And then, check this out, this is the ruler that’s in Windows Ink.  If you guys haven’t seen this, it’s pretty cool.  I can line that up with that gash and be, like, you know, man, what’s going on?  Come on.

And now this gets pushed up to all the data systems so they can track this.  One unified way leveraging more-personal computing.  There are a ton of different features from that to create new experiences for that company that’s solving their problems.  How do you feel about that?  (Cheers, applause.)

So, ladies and gentlemen, more-personal computing means more partner opportunity.  You guys are going to go build stuff we never imagined.  Are you ready to go build stuff?  (Cheers, applause.)

Well, thank you so much.  I’m Brian, that’s my time.  I hope you enjoyed it.  (Cheers, applause.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  Thank you, Brian.  Brian will be available to help upgrade any customers with his power tools if you need it.

All right, so in addition to the great value that we have got with the products themselves, we also, I’m pleased to announce two new programs today for you to help migrate your customers.  We’re really excited about that.

The first one is a new program that we’re announcing that is the Windows 10 Enterprise E3.

Now, just like you’d imagine from the name, we’re bringing Windows 10 to the cloud.  We’re very excited about this.

So now starting in the fall — yes — starting in the fall, small to midsize businesses can now get the latest Windows 10 enterprise security opportunities like we demoed just a little bit ago all on their business, all for the price of $7 a seat a month.  For the price of a cup of coffee and doughnut a day, you can now get enterprise-class security on a per-user subscription basis.

If you’re a cloud service provider, this is now phenomenal because now you can offer our intelligent cloud, Office 365, and Windows 10 on a subscription service, and then bring to bear your value-add in terms of the management and consulting capabilities.  So we’re very, very excited to offer that program to you.  (Applause.)

The second one that we’re excited to build on is with Microsoft Surface.  So in the same way that we just did there with the Microsoft offering for Enterprise Windows 10, we’re excited to announce the Microsoft Surface as a Service program.  Say that fast 10 times.  (Cheers, applause.)

What this is is we’re enabling partners to now offer Surface devices through a managed offering on a lease basis.  This will then complete your ability to offer subscription services for cloud, for Windows 10, for Office 365, and for Surface.  So now you can have one end-to-end, holistic offering for your customers.

We’re really excited about that opportunity.  (Cheers, applause.)

And this new program is an extension of our Surface Enterprise Initiative.  So one of the things that we announced last year was an effort to try and bring our Windows 10 and Surface devices in a more mobile fashion and to more broad accounts.

Last year, we announced that Dell was going to be the first partner.  Today, I’m pleased to announce that more folks are joining on board, IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton have now also signed up to do their deep vertical experiences.

And we’re excited to bring those on.  So between all of this great work and what you can bring, we feel that we’re going to have an awesome opportunity this year to get Surface and Windows 10 deployed broadly on tens of millions of devices, huge business opportunity for you.

All right, final thing we’d like to talk about is this coming world of mixed reality and what we’re trying to drive here with HoloLens.

Now, let’s pause for a second.  This always blows my mind.  In this time of massive technical innovation, isn’t it amazing that we’re confined to working on 2D screens?

Never in the history of mankind have we been so relegated to these monitors.  In fact, most of us are on a 5.5-inch screen.  Even the cavemen used to used sticks and rocks to design and draw.

So we’ve been in that situation.  That’s going to change.  That is absolutely going to change.  We are going to get broken free of the 2D world to a world of mixed reality.

And a big part of what’s going to happen is in the next three to four years, you’re going to see this accelerate between virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality.  Our experts are assuming now that we’ll get upwards of 80 million devices moving in that direction.

In fact, we’ve taken a big step about a month ago to bring Windows Holographic and open it up for partners.  So now anyone who’s building devices, VR devices or MR devices, can use our Windows Holographic experience to really kind of broaden out the ecosystem.

And, in fact, earlier this year we announced Microsoft HoloLens, as most of you know.  And we’ve been just inspired by the companies and the partners that are bringing HoloLens in and deploying and building incredible mixed-reality experiences.

Just as an example, Volvo is changing the way that they build cars with their engineers and they sell cars to consumers with the virtual showroom.

Case Western is changing the way that they teach medicine using holograms of the human body to be able to show students the way the body works.

And even NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are literally exploring the surface of Mars in their offices in three dimensions.

Mixed reality and HoloLens is going to change all sorts of industries.  But one of the industries that I think we’re really excited about is what it can do for sporting for both not just players and coaches and fans, but for everybody in the industry.

And one exciting part that we’ve been working with that we’ve invited to come share with us is the PGA Tour, an incredible organization.  And to tell you a little bit about what they’ve been doing with Microsoft HoloLens, I’d like to welcome to the stage Steve Evans, the CIO, and Scott Gutterman, vice president of digital operations.  Please welcome Steve and Scott.  (Applause, music.)  Hey, guys.

DEMOER:  Hey, thanks for having us.

YUSUF MEHDI:  Good to see you.  Good to see you.

DEMOER:  Great, thank you.

YUSUF MEHDI:  So, Steve, maybe we could start with you.  I know you’ve been working a lot with different Microsoft products.  How have they been sort of impacting the way that you sort of run your business with your players, with your fans?

STEVE EVANS:  Sure.  Well, we’re really excited to be working with Microsoft.  And we’re focused right now in two areas.  We’re focused on our fans and how we can bring new, exciting experiences to our fans.

And then we’re also working to make our business run more productively by deploying Microsoft tools.

YUSUF MEHDI:  Yeah.

STEVE EVANS:  On the business side, what we’re focused on is completing our rollout of Windows 10.  So we’re 800 units into the deployment, and by the end of the summer, we’ll complete that job throughout our organization.

Then on the fan side, we’re really changing the way we look at collecting data and sharing that data with our fans and our staff.

On the collection side, we’re deploying new applications that leverage the Windows Universal Platform that makes our volunteers who do all this data collection, makes them more proficient and really helps us do a better job of getting the data out of our systems.

On the output side, we’ve deployed a Windows 10 companion application that monitors all the live data, gives deeper insights to our fans, and it doesn’t really matter if that fan’s at the tournament venue or if they’re at their home, that application works in both venues.

YUSUF MEHDI:  That’s fantastic.  That’s fantastic.  Thanks very much for that.  Scott, I know we’ve also been working — in addition to these great Windows 10 apps, we’ve been working with the Microsoft HoloLens.  I know you guys have done some special work.  Scott, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about that?

SCOTT GUTTERMAN:  Well, like most people, we were amazed by the HoloLens when we first saw it.  And we started thinking about how we could use it in our business.

We worked with a company called Tactile, and they helped us put together a solution for our fans and our players that will bring a whole new experience to our events.

So Tactile is here today, and we’d like to show you what they have.

YUSUF MEHDI:  Great.  Would you guys like to see a 16-foot hologram brought to the stage by Tactile?  Let’s welcome up Kelly Malone from Tactile to show us.  Welcome, Kelly.  (Applause.)

KELLY MALONE:  Hey, thanks guys.  Tactile is a software and services company that has traditionally built enterprise and mobile consumer applications.

Over the past 24 months, we’ve really focused more on Microsoft technologies and have pivoted our company towards the University Windows Platform vision.

More specifically, in the last 12 months, we’ve targeted the HoloLens and we’ve created some holographic experiences.

I’m excited to show you this holographic experience that was created by a small team in just eight weeks.

With that, let me take you through it.

This is the TPC Sawgrass Golf Course in Ponte Vedra, Florida, where the Players Championship is played.  It is one of the world’s most iconic and challenging golf courses.

Much of the 3D geometry that you’re seeing here is provided by Bing Maps.

I can zoom into the holographic map using menu controls or by using voice commands.

Go to clubhouse.  Using intuitive gestures, I can manipulate the map view.  For example, I can easily pan the view using a simple tap-and-hold gesture.

I have a number of other tools and commands available to me to manipulate the map, for example, zoom, rotation, but I can also annotate over the geometry.

Now let’s take a look at how we can overlay some useful information over the top of the holographic map.  Go to hole 16.

So here we’ll check out hole 16, which is a long par 5.  We’ve integrated the PGA Tour’s shot length data that tracks every player’s shot for tour events.

Let’s look at a heat map which shows where all the players’ shots landed during round one.  Show heat map.

So the red areas indicate places where many balls landed.  But you’ll also notice the shots that landed off into the water as well as those shots that landed in the trees.

Hide heat map.  That would be my shot.

We can also view the individual shots from every player across all the rounds overlaid on the course.  Show shot art.

So here we can see how Jonas Blixt eagled on hole 16 during round one of TPC this year.  We can see his scorecard as well as his shot art overlaid on the map.

Go to round three.  As I switch between rounds, not only do the shot arts update, but the pin positions and the tee-off points also update to the official locations for the round.

It looks like Jonas birdied on round three.

Let’s move over to the famous hole 17.  Go to hole 17.

This par-three hole is one of the toughest of the tour, and it features an island green that makes or breaks many a pro’s golf round.

Looks like Jonas did all right.  However, on round three, Jonas was joined by Jason Day and Shane Lowry.  Let’s see how Shane and Jason measure up.

Set player to Jason Day.  All right, so here I can see Jason’s shots on hole 17, but I can also compare player shots together.

Show comparison mode.  Set bottom player to Shane Lowry.

So now we can see Shane’s scorecard added to the banner there, and we also see his shot art overlaid on the map in blue adjacent to Jason Day’s shots shown in yellow.

Comparing their shots on round three, you can see they both made par.  But let’s go back a round.  Go to round two.

As we compare them on round two, you’ll see that Jason made par, however Shane’s tee shot landed in the water.  That would also be my shot.

Go to overview.  So, finally, we see how Jason and Shane compare across the entire course, for this round anyway.

Nobody could touch Jason Day this year at TPC, so he went away with it.  And I really appreciate the opportunity to show our experience here at WPC.  Yusuf, guys, back to you.  (Cheers, applause.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  Thanks, Kelly.  That was super impressive.  Incredible results.  So, tell us a little bit, Steve and Scott, what are you going to do with that kind of tech in terms of how you’re going to run your business?

STEVE EVANS:  Yeah, we’re looking at three areas in the golf world.  The first one is really around golf course design and golf course setup.

Just imagine being able to use HoloLens to figure out how to configure and place your grandstands and your hospitality locations and figure out traffic flow for the fans who are going to traverse the venue.

SCOTT GUTTERMAN:  We think it will be great for player/caddy pairs.  They can look at how they’re going to attack the course, they can look at landing areas and hazards, they can really figure out how they want to attack different scenarios.

We also think it will be a great shared HoloLens experience for instructors where they can take a class through different course scenarios as well.

YUSUF MEHDI:  Fantastic.  I think there’s probably no better example of business transformation through technology.  If only we could get physical transformation of my golf game with this, we’d be set.  Thank you, Scott.  Thank you, Steve.

STEVE EVANS:  Thank you.

SCOTT GUTTERMAN:  Thank you.  (Applause.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  All right, so Tactile is one of the many great agencies working with some of the biggest brands to create these mixed-reality experiences.

There are a few others.  I want to show you a short video that captures some of the other great work that’s going on with HoloLens.  Let’s run that video.

(Video:  HoloLens.)

YUSUF MEHDI:  Great.  So to summarize the morning.  What you saw from Scott, Kirk, and myself is that through the power of the intelligent cloud, Office 365, Windows 10, and Surface, we can make a positive change on our customers’ businesses and their transformation to the digital world.

I want to close by thanking you from the bottom of our hearts from everyone at Microsoft for everything that you have done on behalf of our customers to drive them to the great successes that we’ve had.

Thanks very much, and enjoy the rest of your conference.

(Cheers, applause.)

END