ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft corporate vice president, Windows Consumer Marketing, Brad Brooks. (Cheers, applause.)
BRAD BROOKS: Good morning, Microsoft partners. How is everybody doing this morning? (Cheers, applause.) Good! Love it, love it.
As you just saw, people are getting very, very excited about the new things coming from Microsoft. And today, I’m going to spend a few minutes talking about how we think about consumers. Then I’m going to switch hats and talk a little bit about some of the new things that are going to be coming this fall from Windows.
But we can’t talk about consumers without talking about phones and games, and so Andy Lees will follow me, and complete the story, talking about Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360.
So I hope you are excited, because I am, and we have a great lineup of products to talk to you about, but more importantly show you.
So, let’s first start talking about Xbox, and Xbox 360. Xbox is on a roll. They’ve got new hardware coming out, we’ve got new franchise titles with things like Halo Reach, and we’ve got a new experience with Kinect, which you’re going to see in a little bit, that is going to totally change how people think about home experiences and home entertainment. Very cool. (Applause.) Yeah, you can clap; it’s good stuff.
Now, Bing, Bing our decision engine, has added over 21 million users in a year, growing share every month since its launch: Amazing when you think about it.
And Office, as you saw from the video and heard yesterday, over 9 million downloads of the beta. That meant 2 million downloads happening somewhere every second, which translates into a super high quality product, and it will be coming soon to Windows 7 PCs and Windows Phone 7 near you.
Now, speaking of the Windows Phones, the Windows Phone 7 buzz and what it’s generating right now is awesome. And this, this is my favorite quote: “If you’re not excited about Windows Phone 7 yet, you might want to have your head bone checked out.” Now, I have no idea what a head bone is, but I certainly agree with the sentiment in the sense that we are on a roll with this product.
And then there’s Windows 7, a hit by any measure. You heard the stats from Steve yesterday and from Tami, 150 million copies sold as of June. That translates into seven copies of Windows 7 every second. (Cheers.) And it’s just getting started.
We’ve got millions — well, I guess now 100 million of satisfied customers working the way they want, simplifying their lives, doing things that they never thought possible with technology today.
And we are excited. We see a world where over a billion and a half people will use the products and services that we collectively in this stadium deliver every day. And as you can see from the stats, that number keeps growing every second. That’s opportunity for all of us, and for that I can only say thank you to everybody in this stadium. (Applause.)
But we can’t rest. We can’t rest. We all know that customers are important, but consumers are important to all of us. The things that we use at home are now the things that are being asked for at work. The line between what do we do at home and what do we do at work is becoming more and more blurred. The distinction between what is a consumer product or what is a commercial product, well, that line, that line between those two, it’s disappearing. It’s about how things fit with both my home life and my work life that defines what are great products and great product experiences.
This means that we’re going to have to raise our game. Technology is supposed to make us more connected, more creative and more productive. But too often these connections, well, they actually equal e-mails and texting. Creativity gets drowned out by clutter and by noise, and the productivity that we strive for becomes sending things back and forth, many times to ourselves.
And we end up with stuff all over the place. It’s scattered across PCs, across phones, across flash drives and social networks, the Internet. Many times our stuff is everywhere but where we need it when we need it.
And the result for our consumers, our customers, many times for you, is confusion.
Here’s the trick: There’s not a particular, specific solution. There are as many solutions as there are people in this room. Everybody needs choice, everybody wants choice, but they still want the end result.
And because you do a lot of different things with the technology, you create, you write, you edit, you play, you code. There are different Windows PCs to help you do just that.
And you want to connect. You want to connect to the people that you care about. You want to collaborate, you want to share together, you want to play together. No better technology around playing together and connecting than Xbox Live. Technology is there to put you in touch with who matters to you most.
And, of course, you want to consume, consume that content. You want to read it, you want to watch it, you want to listen to it. And sometimes you want to do it on a small screen on a train, other times you want to do it on a big screen, the best screen in the house, that big, high-definition TV sitting in that living room or that main room.
When this all comes together, when it all starts working across all the screens in your life, the seamless experiences, that’s when technology starts working for you, and that is our goal. That is our goal with consumers.
So, with that in mind and that framework, I want to switch hats and I want to talk a little bit more about that thing that we call a PC, because, yes, I am a PC.
And some say — some say that the PC is not the future, that it’s a static device, that it’s reached the limit. Well, I think those people need to have their head bone checked out, because last time I looked is that it looks like there’s going to be 370 million PCs shipping over the course of the next 12 months: not over by a long shot. And we are just seeing an amazing breadth of innovation in form factors and hardware coming from our PC manufacturers, and applications from our ISVs on top of those.
So, what I’m going to do is I’m here to give you a little peek at what’s coming this holiday and beyond where Windows 7 takes PC to a whole new level, the cloud, the personal cloud. PC: It’s personal cloud, so you can connect anywhere with what’s important. You can do what you want, when you want, where you want, with who you want, safely. You are now free to create, to consume, and to accomplish more with what we are going to bring, because Windows 7 is now going to be much, much more. It’s going to be Windows 7 plus your personal cloud, your PC.
And what’s our promise? Well, our promise is going to be whatever is important to you wherever you go.
So, now that I’ve set the stage, let me show you how this is all going to work with a series of demos. And I’ve got some hardware lineup here. Tami showed you a lot of different choices around PCs, and I’ve got a few of them up here. The first thing that you’re going to notice around these PCs that I have up here is that PCs are no longer just around a beige box, they come in many different shapes and sizes. As you saw from the all-in-ones yesterday and the laptops, I’ve got a Lenovo netbook up here that is a full touch screen.
I’ve also got some devices scattered round the stage here, and these are different types of PCs like a Media Center PC there from Dell. I’ve also got Windows 7 Connect devices that connect back into through your personal cloud to your Windows 7 PC, an Onkyo receiver, I’ve got an Xbox set up, I’ve got a Western Digital digital receiver box that all connect into your home network that are really going to take away and create a seamless experience for customers.
So, to start off with, I want to start in with the decision engine for your personal cloud, and that, of course, is Bing. Here I’ve got the new Bing beta up, and you’re going to quickly see that they’ve added some new features to make things even more relevant for how you search the Web, and that’s this new entertainment feature.
Here with Bing is I click on the entertainment tab, and what I’ve got across the Web is a highly visual, highly relevant contextual system that’s gone out and searched the Web, and brought back all the different choices around what’s going on with music or movies or what might be happening on TV.
Now, what they’ve also done with Bing is with music if I go ahead and type in one of my favorite artists, ZZ Top, I think I’ve shared a little bit too much information already about what some of my artists are, but you can see that I’ve got information now that comes back on my search experience. I can see ZZ Top’s home site, I can see where their next concerts are at. I see they’ve got something going on in Sturgis on August 9th. I’m sure that’s going to be at the Buffalo Chip. That’s going to be an outrageous event I’m sure.
I can also go to songs, and here I get a list of all the latest — or actually all the hit songs from ZZ Top over the past years.
Now, I can go ahead and buy it off of one of my favorite services or I can go ahead and play it. And what pops up is the Zune service. So, now I get a preview through the Zune service, and with one touch I can go ahead and buy that MP3.
But when I go ahead and buy that MP3, if I go ahead and buy that MP3 and bring it down, it not only downloads to my Windows 7 PC, but it also enters into my personal cloud, and that’s where the magic really starts to begin. Because when I’ve got it into my personal cloud, one of the first things that it does is it synchs with my new Windows Phone 7 automatically. I don’t have to do a thing. It moves over into the music hub on my Windows Phone 7, and now it actually plays back over my Windows Phone.
Now, it’s not that it’s also a great player of music on the new Windows Phone 7, it’s also a great phone, and it’s also a great camera.
Here I’ve taken some pictures with my Windows Phone 7, and what these pictures are is the group that actually helped me set up and prepare for this event. As you can see, four guys, and one of the things that we’re going to go do is see a Sounders’ game later this week in reward for helping me set up for this. And you can see I took several pictures on this phone.
Now, this phone is connected to my personal cloud, and as soon as I took these pictures, the first thing that happened, without any additional work by me, is it sent a Web-optimized version of this picture right out to my SkyDrive on my personal cloud.
And when I take this Windows Phone 7 home — (applause) — yeah, that’s pretty cool. It is very cool. And when I take this Windows Phone 7 home as soon as I put it in its charging cradle, it synchs wirelessly over my home network to my Windows 7 PC without any work by me.
And once I have those pictures on my Windows 7 PC, I can start doing some new amazing things.
Here this is some of the new technology that will be coming out this holiday, is the new Photo Gallery. And here you can see I’ve got my pictures that have synched from my phone. I swipe through them here. You can see that none of the pictures are perfect. In some Augusto and Thorsten are looking away, and here Peter has got the ball in front of Ryan. And now I can go ahead though and select all these pictures, because none of them were perfect, and now with the magic of Windows 7 and the new Photo Gallery I can start making the perfect picture.
So, I selected those three pictures, it fused them together, and now I can go through and select Augusto’s face and find one where his eyes are open and he’s smiling, choose it. I can highlight Ryan, and let’s see, I’ll choose that. (Applause.)
So, I didn’t take the perfect picture, I just made the perfect picture. (Cheers, applause.)
So, I go ahead and save that. Now let me bring the power of the cloud in. I’ve just made this perfect picture. With one touch I hit SkyDrive, save it to my team building share, hit publish, and that quickly now every one of my team members can get this new perfect picture instantly that I’ve created on my Windows 7 PC, plus my personal cloud. (Applause.)
But we don’t stop there. Now, as you might guess is I have a lot of OEM partners that I go visit. And my job is to be on the road and go out there and talk to them. Now, it would be pretty rude if I brought in a competitor’s PC when I was talking to a particular OEM. So, I’ve got a PC for all of my favorite partners. (Laughter.) But that’s been a little bit of a problem in the past because I couldn’t always keep them in synch. Now we’ve got a new capability with my personal cloud called Windows Sync. And here you can see all the different PCs. I can select one folder off those PCs or I can select all of those folders, hit synch, and automatically every time they connect to the Internet, they automatically synch and keep updated with each other in the background, all the information constantly updating in the background. Pretty cool, huh? (Applause.)
But it gets better. If somebody has a Windows Live ID, I can select a particular folder and choose to synch it with their PC. In this case I’ve got Thorsten’s desktop. And Thorsten is one of that gang of four. So, if I go ahead and bring up Photo Gallery, we’ll take it over here and snap it, and why don’t I go ahead and bring up a folder that I’ve chosen to synch on my PC here. So, here I’ve got a folder on my PC, and you’ll see on the split screen up there you’ll see another PC screen, and what that other PC screen is, is that’s Thorsten’s PC that’s actually connected to the Internet. If I actually take the photo and hold onto it here, move it over, there you go, it synchs that fast right in the background, right at Thorsten’s PC, right over the Internet. (Applause.) That’s real time, folks. That’s happening live right here on the code.
So, that easily I can now keep all of my content across my personal cloud and across my devices in synch, and I can synch it with people that matter to me.
But I can also be highly productive across my personal cloud. If I go ahead and open up OneNote here, the thing about the new Office 2010 and my personal cloud is I’ve now got apps in the cloud. I’ve now got OneNote, PowerPoint, Word, Excel that are all part of my SkyDrive, and they’re actually Web-based apps.
So, here I’ve created a notebook with the team in OneNote, and I can go ahead and say, OK, who’s coming, add names. Well, rather than add names, why don’t I go ahead and insert that picture that we created, and now that easily I’ve taken that picture, I’ve pushed it right up to this OneNote, and it instantaneously updates across all the team there: real time collaboration happening now with Office 2010 in the cloud, and my Windows Live services, apps in the cloud, productivity in my personal cloud, very cool. (Applause.)
So, the other thing about the cloud is I want to stay in touch. I want to touch my cloud, and I want to be in touch with my cloud.
So, that’s what we have coming out in the new Messenger. Messenger has changed a lot, it’s not your old Messenger. Messenger is the No. 1 IM client in the world, and it’s a great communicator, but it’s taking communications across your personal cloud and to the people that matter to you most to a whole new level.
So, this is the new Messenger, and what you quickly see happening here is Messenger has now become an integration point for all my social networks. I’ve got highlights, and these are highlight feeds that are actually coming in from Twitter, from Facebook, from Flickr. I now can integrate all of those status updates right into my Messenger content. So I can see what’s recently going on, I can prioritize which feeds I want from which people. If I go to me, I can see that the photo that I just updated is up here and showing what’s recently happened. I can go ahead and say update that, and as you can see, it updates my link, and now it goes out to my Facebook page, now it goes out to a Twitter feed, and updates those real time, one common dashboard where I can bring all my social networks together across Messenger, taking how I communicate across the personal cloud to a whole new level.
Now, Messenger is also not just a great way to manage your social networks, it’s also a great communications client. So, I’ll go over here to this Windows 7 PC and sign in, and show you how things are changing about how we communicate with Messenger.
I’m going to go ahead and call up Ryan, who’s a part of that picture team, and I’m going to go ahead and start a video call, because this PC has got a video camera and a mic on it.
Ryan, are you there?
RYAN: Hey, Brad.
BRAD BROOKS: Hey, Ryan. How are you doing?
RYAN: Good, good.
BRAD BROOKS: Good. Everybody remember Ryan from yesterday?
RYAN: Hey, hey.
BRAD BROOKS: Hey.
RYAN: Good to see you guys.
BRAD BROOKS: Ryan, remember those pictures we took the other day out on the soccer field in preparation for the game?
RYAN: I do. I can’t wait.
BRAD BROOKS: Well, you know what, none of those pictures was actually perfect.
RYAN: Oh, we were screwing around a bit.
BRAD BROOKS: Yeah. So, I went ahead and used Photo Fuse and created the perfect picture. How would you like to see them?
RYAN: I’d love to.
BRAD BROOKS: All right. Now look what I can do with the new Messenger. I go ahead and hit share, and I go to my online photo album that was up there in the SkyDrive, click on the pictures, add them to the conversation. There you go, beta code working in action. Try that again. There we go, add it to the conversation, and there.
RYAN: Ah yeah, there we go.
BRAD BROOKS: So, now the pictures are showing up right into my video chat conversation. (Applause.) And as you can see, Ryan now has the capability to thumb through them.
Think about how this is going to change family communications, friends communications. Not only can I insert pictures from my personal cloud, I can insert Flash videos, I can insert home videos, I can insert YouTube videos from a URL off a website. All that I can now integrate directly into my video conversations with the new Messenger. What do you think?
RYAN: That’s awesome. (Applause.)
BRAD BROOKS: Thank you, Ryan.
RYAN: Thanks, Brad.
BRAD BROOKS: I’m going to go ahead now and open up a new application that we have here, and this is about how a Windows 7 PC can also be a great remote control device for how I consume content across my personal cloud.
Here we’ve created a little concept touch app that can run across any Windows 7 touch-enabled PC, that really takes to light the capabilities of Windows 7 and the Play To technology and the personal cloud.
And I’m going to go ahead and go into my music library, and open up down under Zs. Remember that song that I downloaded from the Zune service into my personal cloud? Because I brought it into my personal cloud, it immediately synchs across all those PCs and is available wherever I want it when I want it.
I can go ahead and take this song now and I can go ahead and move it up to the Onkyo receiver that’s a Windows 7-compatible device that’s in part of my home network, and now when I move it over there, I can start having music playback off my Windows 7 device.
So, think about this in the home scenario is I’ve got multiple PCs through the house, and they’re now constantly in synch across my personal cloud, and I can take a portable PC and I can start controlling those experiences.
Let’s say I’ve got a PC in the kitchen that I want to go ahead and show some experiences or I want to go ahead and start a video clip that plays for my kids. And I can go ahead and take that video clip and I can move it over to the Media Center PC, and now they can start watching it in the kitchen. So, right off of my Windows 7 PC I’ve got this control device.
Now let’s go ahead and say I want to go ahead and start a Hawaiian vacation video, and send it off to my wife in the living room, so she can start planning for that Hawaiian vacation to get jazzed up. Now off of one Windows 7 PC I’ve got the control to go over and put that experience over in a different part of the house. Very cool, huh? (Applause.)
But wait, there’s more. I’ve got a recording of the last Sounders’ game on my Media Center PC. I want to take that and I want to play it off to the Xbox 360 in the living room.
So, that easily I’ve now got four different experiences going across my entire house. (Applause.) I’ve got my Windows 7 PC that is controlling those experiences across my different connected devices, and taking content from my personal cloud and sharing it around.
So, I want to say, all right, kids, it’s time to go to bed, shut these things down, and I can go ahead and take the Sounders’ game off, and my wife and I want to go see it together, I can switch rooms and move it right over to the Xbox 360 that simply. Now you’re seeing the true power of a Windows 7 PC, plus a personal cloud, coming together this holiday.
What do you think? (Cheers, applause.)
Well, I tell you what is, that is just a taste of what’s to come, but there is so much more that is happening around this story with the personal cloud. This is the first chapter. We’ve got two more chapters to show you, one around the Windows Phone 7 and another around Xbox 360. And to show you more about those chapters I’d like to invite up Andy Lees to talk to you about that. Come on, Andy. (Applause.)
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