ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome General Manager, Lync, Microsoft Corporation, Giovanni Mezgec. (Music, applause.)
GIOVANNI MEZGEC: Hello San Diego! Welcome to San Diego. I know you wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s actually San Diego looking outside. Looks a little bit like Seattle. We have not brought the clouds with us, please believe us.
We have a packed agenda in the upcoming three days. We’re going to keep you inside all warm and cozy. I think it’s going to be great, no matter what happens outside.
So I want to kick things off and just give you a little bit of a quick sense of what you will see and hear today, as well as in the upcoming next few days.
First of all, and the most important thing, thank you on behalf of Microsoft and the entire team here for coming and spending three days with us. We know it’s a big, big commitment. Many of you have come from very distant places. You’ve dedicated the entire week to us. We take that as an important statement from your side on the interest that you have with you, we really take it seriously. So thank you for coming here.
Who is in the room? We have about 1,000 people at this conference. 1,000 people. Admittedly, we’re being really humbled by the interest of all of you coming. When we originally planned this conference, we were thinking more like 500, 600 people. We were sold out a month ago. Really, really pleased with that.
And who do we have here? We have 40 countries represented. Large majority of people from the U.S., but also many people from all over the world.
We have about 300 partners here at the conference with us. 27 analysts and press. 45 Microsoft Most Valued Professionals. Finally, 350 customers and about 43 sponsors. So we have a full, packed set of attendees coming from all over the world here with us.
I wanted to take a quick moment to thank the sponsors for joining us at this event. This is a small community. These are people that have worked with us for a long time, in particular HP, Polycom, Plantronics, and Verizon to be the platinum sponsors. (Applause.) There we go, please, come on. (Applause.) It’s my job to wake you up as well this morning.
Platinum sponsors, gold sponsors, silver sponsors, and bronze, you will hear from all of them in the next three days. We have the exhibit hall, which hopefully you have seen yesterday when we were at the party last night. They’re going to be here throughout the day. You’ll have sessions and opportunity for very deep discussions with these folks. So thanks to the sponsors.
Three tracks, in case you haven’t read the guide that we gave you yesterday as you registered. Over 70 sessions. Business tracks, partner tracks, and technical tracks. The technical track is, obviously, the one that is deepest and probably the one that has most insight from a product and technology perspective.
The partner ones, of course, will be more from the sense of the innovation that our partners are delivering on Lync and the work that they’ve done.
And the business track is the general track for the information on what we do with the product. You’ll hear from analysts, customers on their perceptions on the industry as a whole, as well as what they’ve done in their own deployment and their own adventures with Lync.
Four things I particularly like and I’m really proud of today: No. 1, My Lync, hopefully all of you have built your own agenda and have a packed set of meetings to go to for the next few days.
We have a hands-on lab that’s actually in the main garden area running all day long. You can actually even do the hands-on lab at night from the Web in case you guys have problems.
Ask the Experts is tonight at 5:30. For two hours, you have the opportunity to meet all the partners, be able to ask questions to the Microsoft employees that we have here with us as well. We have for five of you, one Microsoft employee. So we have a deep presence here to make sure that this conversation we do is as deep, meaningful as possible and that you get out of here excited about the commitment that we have for you, our product line, and our future.
And then we have the lounge. The lounge is actually a little far out from here. It’s downstairs. I do invite everybody to actually go there. Every session speaker at the end of their session will go there for about 20 to 30 minutes to take more questions from you on the content that they just delivered in the session. And in the lounge, there will also be the opportunity for you to see more details on our entire product line from consumer to the enterprise with Skype and Lync and have people there showing you demos and asking — you can ask any questions and we’ll be able to reply.
And then, of course, the party tomorrow night. I hear that there are three things that really count: No. 1, drink. No. 2, Shamu the whale doing a little presentation for us, and then third, a roller coaster ride, which I’m actually really excited to try it out. Hopefully, the weather will change by tomorrow night. That’s what the forecast said, so we will get overall some good time and good weather.
Now, let’s move on to the serious part before we actually jump in. I think it’s always very important for us to ground ourselves in the history and the past, to understand who we are and where we’re going in the future.
Our journey in communications started five years, a little bit over five years ago when we actually launched Office Communications Server 2007.
Gates, at the time, was speaking at the conference. He said what’s actually on the slide. “In the next decade, sweeping technology innovation driven by the power of software will transform communication.”
Since then, we released Office Communicator R2, Lync 2010, and now today Lync 2013.
This is a trampoline to the future. Today, tomorrow, and the next day you’ll hear all about Lync 2013 and our vision for the future of communication.
With that, please let me introduce Tony Bates, president of the Skype Division at Microsoft. (Music, applause.)
TONY BATES: Well, good morning, everybody, and even good afternoon and maybe even good evening, because we are webcasting this around the globe.
First, just before we start to really get into some of where we see things going, I still want to just echo the thanks for Gio for the update. Tremendous for our Lync Conference to have so many people here with us. We’re completely sold out. I won’t go through the numbers again, but it’s just tremendous to have people from so many parts of the world. We have our key partners here, of course our MVPs, and our customers as well as analysts. And we’re really excited to really give you a sense not only, as Gio talked about, of the journey so far, but where we think the journey will go in the future.
So what I’m going to try and share with you is a little bit about where we see the future of communications going. In many ways, this is an evolving journey, and we’re really just at the start of that. But there’s so much more we can do. I’m also very proud when you see some of the incredible products that we’re going to show you today. You’re going to see a number of firsts, things that just light up the way that I think the world wants communications to happen.
So when I think of the future of communications, I start with the very basics, almost as an ethos to the way communications is ingrained in everything we do. You know, communications is so fundamental to our lives that we need to actually make sure that it becomes more human. It becomes more natural and more part of the way that you think about each and every day of your life.
In many ways, communications is what defines us. It’s what creates people together. It’s what shapes ideas. It’s what our reality is all about.
And up to now, we’ve had a challenge that sometimes you don’t get to do those in the way that you want to, you have to do them in different silos, in different contexts, in different modalities. And our vision is that those things come together. Those things join so you don’t have to have an example where you might have to do something as a business context, and then something as a consumer context and they’re separate.
We have the conviction that organizations thrive when people communicate. And you see it happening each and every day, but as we’ve become more global, as we’ve had opportunities in organizations to be broader, sometimes it’s not as easy to communicate as it is around the water cooler, or when you’re a smaller company in a small office. But when you can get people to connect and you can do that in full fidelity and richness, amazing things can happen both inside an enterprise, across an enterprise, business to business, and all the way out to your customers and consumers.
So it’s very fundamental. And at Microsoft, we take this very, very seriously. This is why, in many ways, we come together as one organization under the Skype Division to really transform communications to the next level.
Now, when you step back and you think about communications, a lot of where this started was socially around things like town squares. People got together, they interacted, they came up with ideas, they invented things. Those things propagated. They went from the town to the city to the country and then across the globe. Many, many inventions happened this way.
And these town square communities really thrived, but as technology was formed, it made it rather easy for us not to get together, for us not to socialize, for us not to get in a room like this and share ideas, to have rich, meaningful conversation.
Technologies, in some ways, has made the world smaller, but it kind of pushed us apart. In many ways, telephony did that. Telephony actually made it all too easy for me not to go and meet someone maybe at the piazza or the pub where I come from in England. And actually socialize and interact in a deep, personal way.
And so we didn’t feel the need to meet. And if you think about social media, what it’s allowed people to do is not meet at all. In fact, it kind of transforms the town square into a series of voices, but not necessarily rich communications. It’s almost like the town crier. It’s easy for me to take a picture of all of you, post it on my blog, post it on Facebook, post it on Twitter, pick your favorite, and it’s a one-way conversation.
But what we want to do is take that notion of the town square and bring it back. Change from the town crier that we start to see, to this town square, but do it in a virtual way, an intimate way that creates more depth and more collaboration and more meaning.
That’s what makes businesses more productive, but I would argue it’s what makes humans more productive. And in many ways, what I’m describing is really the rehumanization of communication.
You know, for a while there, we almost became faceless. We used avatars as a way to kind of project what we get, because we actually want to feel comfortable with the communication modality. We believe that you can take that back to a very personal approach.
When I think about us as human beings, we’re not consumers, we’re not professionals, we’re not friends, we’re not families in each silo, we’re all of those. And we’re interacting in those each and every day. At one moment, I can be working with my family, then with a work colleague I could be taking a course, I could be doing something that’s just with my friends. And I need to make sure that my communication moves seamlessly through each of those. Not in silos, but with multiple devices in different applications across networks. Not with networks that have their own rules, not with networks that say, well, you can only do this at a certain time of day or a certain policy or certain amount of governance around it. There’s something that creates very rich and seamless communications. And it’s time to do that rehumanization of comms. We’ve got to put the needs of the people first and then let the technology follow.
We’ve had a great journey so far as Gio highlighted, but a lot of it has really been technology driven first, maybe it’s been to do with a productivity application or certain lack of capability in a technology, but it hasn’t really been about putting the people first.
And so we’re going to drive — and the way we think of the future of communication is really around four very important principles, and I want each and every one of you to get a sense of that and as our journey evolves, we will stick to these principles.
First, we need a common user experience that’s people centric. Got to be simple, it’s got to be convenient, it’s got to be natural, and it’s got to be friction free.
I would argue when you see what we’re about to show you, we’re in the first part of putting people first. And you’re going to see that evolve over time with the Lync technology and with the Skype technology.
We’ve also got to remove the barriers of communication. We’ve got to remove those for everyone. It’s got to be global. It’s got to be simple and it’s got to be easy to attach, whether it’s in a work context with a meeting, or whether it’s in a social context with a group of friends, or whether it’s just an easy connection between perhaps a son and their parents maybe when they’re away at school. It’s got to be that simple.
We’ve got to make sure that we’re designing services and devices that people want. That means we’re committed to multi-platform. We’ve got to have choice. We’ve got to be able to consume these communication services in the way that you want, when you want, where you want.
But we know that it’s absolutely critical that as people use communications and it becomes a bigger part of their life, it needs to be mission critical. So we must have the reliability and capability and security that you need. We know how critical that is in a business context, but that’s becoming increasingly critical in all tasks and aspects of people’s lives.
The most important thing when we think about communications is it’s one of the number-one enablers of doing things of value in your life. Whether it’s setting up your local PTA, whether it’s running the local soccer club, or whether it’s doing an incredibly advanced intellectual property project within the enterprise. You need that reliability, you need that security, you need to make sure you can get done what you want when you want in the security of making sure that it’s yours and it doesn’t leak out into the greater world.
That’s our vision. And we think this vision really transcends all of your lives. In many ways, it extends all the way from the living room to the boardroom. As I said earlier, people aren’t just one context. You’re not just a worker or you’re not just having fun with your friends, you’re transcending all of those. And you’re transcending those in a way that your whole daily life — this is just an example of one person going from the home on the go to work who needs to communicate, sometimes from a family experience, sometimes in a very deep boardroom type of experience.
Now, to do this, it requires unprecedented scale. You can’t do this at small scale and only satisfy one part of the world. We’ve got to do this on a broad scale. To me, that means billions. That means making sure that we can create capabilities that can access billions of users. Billions of rich communications, billions of experiences at work and at play done every day. Seamless in your life, something that is just so natural it just feels like it’s been part of the way we’ve socialized forever.
Now, when we brought Lync and Skype together as one division, we have the opportunity to really deliver this incredible communications experience that you’re going to see, but also do it at scale.
Only Microsoft has the assets to really make this vision a reality. You know, over a billion people already use Office as their prime productivity tool, and so we have incredible anchor points from the business point of view that extends all the way into small business, into student, all the way into home. We’re at 300 million-plus users of Skype, so we know how to scale the end point of communication. We know how to bring that across multiple end points.
And then you think about the assets of Xbox, the Windows platform, Windows Phone platform and where we’re moving as we bring those things together, we’re creating the future; we are the ones who can deliver from that living room scenario all the way across the mobile parts of your life into the boardroom. And we’re 100 percent committed to that.
Now, as I said, there are some key principles that we’re going to follow. No. 1 is very, very focused on people. Whenever my teams come together and we think about where the product is going to go, how we shape it, the first thing we’re going to do is say are we making it more or less people centric? Are we putting people at the center of the design and implementation?
I’m incredibly excited about what we’ve delivered. It’s very focused on people. It’s got to be experiences that are as simple, as I said, friction free that work across device and context. That’s what we think about when we think about people-centric design. It needs to be delightful to use, it needs to be very convenient and it needs to be consistent whether you’re at home or at work.
As I said, we’re transcending those things all the time. Now, yes, there are some different requirements potentially, but we believe you can cover those across these things seamlessly, and over time it will actually understand what context you’re in and make sure that we provide the communication tools, capability, services, and reliability you need.
You’re going to see it today. You’re going to see those elegant interfaces for both mobile and desktop in Lync 2013. When you see these products, it just delights. It just seems simple, it’s seamless and easy. And it’s what our customers have been asking for.
We’re taking that to the Lync room systems that will bring teams together. And you’ll see a window into what’s possible. These are products that we’re going to deliver this year. These are products that we’re delivering in the next few weeks, in fact. But I think it can transcend even beyond that. This image, to me, sums up where we could go.
This was a project that was started by Microsoft Research. And it’s known as the Magic Window. What you really have here is two children across the globe, one in Thailand, one in the U.S. who actually look like they’re working together on a shared white board, a translucent white board. In fact, what’s happening here is one person is writing in Thai, and on the other side, they’re seeing in English. This is where we can go. This is the future when I talk about seamless communications. And that’s what we’re committed to doing.
So my commitment really today is that Lync 2013 is the start of that. And our goal, our vision, and I believe our opportunity together working with you as our partners, working with you as our customers is to deliver the richest, most immersive connections for both work and play. And we’re committed to that. So people-centric design, No. 1.
Now, I mentioned scale. Now, if we’re going to do that, we’ve got to break down those barriers where you don’t have to switch from one path to another. And that’s why we’re so excited that Lync 2013 is connecting with Skype. And we’re bringing those things together to create tremendous access across all different types of networks and huge reach.
Connectivity is the first test. And that’s what we’re going to show you today and we’re really excited about that. But the end game of this is for universal global access and reach for everyone. Triggered out of whatever context you want and whatever area you are in the world. And I think that really is what realizes both personal and, frankly, what social networks really should be about. I think that is the broader social network that we’ve all been waiting for, and we’re very excited to drive that journey, and we think we have the right assets to do that.
When you think about it, once you have this access and reach, you have tremendous capabilities within your enterprise. Whether it’s connecting with a customer, whether it’s finding experts, B2B, for example, in one of your partners, but it’s really about even going further than that and empowering your organization to have the tools it needs to be more productive, more innovative, more connected, and frankly, drive the organization in a much faster and rapid way.
So our commitment here is not only to create people centricity, but it’s to really drive those networks of people with an organization to get done what they want to do when they want to do it.
A network of size and reach of this size, of this scale that we’re embarking on has tremendous technical strengths, but also we need to grow this over a period of time. And so we’re committed to join these things together and bring the technology, and this will be a key part of the journey you see from us over the next 12 to 18 months.
Once this is in place, you’ll have access any place, any time, home or work, to do what you want to do with communications and hopefully drive productivity and innovation on a much larger global scale.
Now, as I mentioned, to do this, clearly, we need to have end point device choice. It’s incredible to me to see the rapid growth of smartphones. In fact, many of you have probably seen that in China they just went over 300 million smartphones in a very short period of time, and they actually have more smartphones out there than in the U.S.
And there’s a lot of companies who talk about being mobile first. As though it’s just the beginning of that journey. But for us, building for mobile is a mandate. It’s a key part of what creates a superior communications experience, but it’s also so critical as we move forward because we can’t limit choice. If we limit end point choice, we fail in the vision that I laid out earlier. People choose their devices; they don’t choose the technology platforms. We understand that and we know how important that is within the communications context it is within the vision that we’re laying out. So our commitment to all of you is to empower that choice.
Skype had a long history of doing this. As you know, we’re available on the Mac; we’re available, obviously, on all the Windows platforms. Even Linux, iOS, Android, and Symbian. And you’re going to see how we extend that same capability across the major platforms for Lync 2013. I think we’ve done it in a beautiful way, we’ve done it in a way that’s easy to use, in a way that consumers get to choose, and even as we embark on bring your own device into the enterprise, they’ll have the choices they need at hand. Very, very excited about that and a key principle moving forward.
But as I mentioned, we can’t do this without security, reliability, and services. And so we need to remove some of those worries, some of those things that concern people, particularly in business that you hear about every day when you read the analyst conversations. So every call, every meeting, every conversation, every time needs to be delivered.
We’re so committed to that, that we’re willing to back that with financial commitment when we deliver either our on-prem. Or, over time, our online services. We have SLAs in place, and we want to make sure that we can deliver both on the reliability but also on the privacy and data ownership.
One of the key assets I think that we bring as Microsoft and as Lync is things like ERN, it’s things like IRM, so that you can feel comfortable that when you’re having a business conversation with proprietary information, it stays within the business. That you have secure access when you’re going over those public networks. So again, the organization can be empowered to not only kind of control, but manage and scale that quickly in a way that’s very effective.
Our commitment here is to deliver the most robust network, the most robust platform communications that you as our customers and as our partners can depend on. And we’re 100 percent committed to that.
Now, I’m incredibly excited about the vision, and we are kind of halfway through the journey. As you know, with technology, things are always changing, things are always moving. And so there’s probably never an end to this journey. But the work that’s been done with Lync 2013 makes me very proud. It makes me very proud to be part of the organization. It makes me very proud to work with incredibly talented and focused technology teams. And it makes me very proud to actually show you what we’re going to deliver.
So with that, I’d like to bring on stage Derek Burney, corporate vice president in the Skype Division to walk you through some of the most amazing technology you’ve ever seen in your life. Derek? (Music, applause.)
DEREK BURNEY: Good morning. You guys excited to be here just like I am? (Cheers.) Let’s try that again. Are you guys as excited to be here as I am? (Cheers, applause.) All right, wonderful.
So, hey, I’m going to be really delighted — in fact, I am delighted to show you the next generation Lync products. And in particular, you heard from Tony about the vision that we have about rehumanizing communications. And he touched on sort of four pillars, which was the people-centric design, end-point device choice, security, reliability, and services. And of course access and reach. So it’s my goal over the next 30 minutes or so to show you how we’ve delivered on all of those pillars. So you ready? Let’s go.
Good security features of the Windows Phone. So the first thing I’m going to show you right now is this Windows Phone. I guess you can see that up there perfectly. I think what you can see right way, though, is how responsive this is and it looks really slick. That’s why it’s my favorite phone, for sure.
This one isn’t my personal phone. I’m going to talk to you a little bit about that in a second, but for now, I just want you to know that this has all the interactive capabilities; it’s customized for the user. You can create the interface up front to make it look however you like. And that’s one of the exciting things about the Windows Phone.
Now, we built that as part of Office. We built Lync as part of Office for the simple reason that when people are being productive and they’re working together, the better they’re able to communicate with one another, the more productive they can be. So that’s one of the reasons why we still maintain really close ties with Office, to make sure that we’re doing a great job there.
The other thing I want to point out about the Windows Phone is that it’s designed not only for the consumer, but also for businesses. And that’s why it has things like Exchange and IRM and of course Office.
So let me fire up, speaking of Office, the Office Hub. And so here, you see a list of places on which you can store documents. Most of them are in the cloud, but in some cases, you can have it on the phone as well. So you see SkyDrive there and Office 365.
And when I swipe over, you can see the recent documents that have been worked on. What’s really interesting about this is that it’s not just the recent documents that you’ve worked on from this device; it’s just the recent documents you’ve worked on period for the docs that are stored in SkyDrive.
So it means that I can come and go, work on whatever device I want and my most recent documents are available to me at all times.
And I can just click on these, and right on the phone, I can open Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and edit them as well.
So now I want to go into SkyDrive because this is where we’re storing our documents. And so, for example, working on this keynote briefing, I’m going to open up OneNote. Here we go.
The reason why we’re paying a lot of attention to OneNote, of course, is because one of the value propositions we have with Lync is the ability for it to create great meeting experience. And what do you do at meetings typically? You take notes. And so we use OneNote as our digital note-taking tool.
Now let’s see. As I go through on this particular OneNote I have an action item here to take a photo onstage. So let me go ahead and do that. I think since the lighting is a bit odd, I’ll take this picture up here just to prove that we’re here. There we go. I’ll accept that.
And I’ll leave that for a second, but that’s going to go right into OneNote, because it’s an example of how all the Office products, including Lync, are aware of the device on which they sit and they leverage the capabilities of the device. So in this case OneNote knows that it’s running on a phone, which has a camera, so that capability is built right into the product.
All right. Time for Lync. So here you see one of my best profile pictures ever. (Laughter.) Actually, the story behind this is that I’m intending to show you a cross-section of devices. So I borrowed devices from the colleagues that I work with, and I’ll be giving them back to them after the show. So this one belongs to a Fernmarie, what you can see, though, is that her note right here, which we can just click on and edit that personal note directly from the phone. I can also go in and change my status, which is normally set to automatically update based on what your calendar says. And also I can change my call forwarding section, which is handy for when I want to work from home or something and I want to forward my calls if I don’t want to be near my device.
Swipe over, and I have my contacts groups. Now, these contact groups are the exact same ones I have on Lync on all the devices that I use. So it’s not a discrete one for each product, it’s the exact same one everywhere. Now, if I expand one, what’s happening is we’re going to query the server to get real-time presence information for the people on my contact list. And we’ve done this for a couple of reasons. One is, by clearing the server only when it’s needed, we eased the load on the back end. And the other thing is that it saves battery. So the battery performance on this thing is amazing. When Lync is running in the background, it consumes practically zero resources. So the team has done an incredible job there.
Next, if I click on an individual in that contact list, you see the four icons pop up. And that is the four communication modalities. One of the value propositions of Lync is that it is a single experience across all communication modalities. So you only have one application, but it can do all of the communication types with just a single click. And if I open up a People Card, here I get more information about that person, additional contact info if I need it, and of course the profile picture comes up in a very visible way, high-definition pictures, in fact, that we now store. And that’s because, as Tony said, we’re all about people-centric, and the experience being social. And so we’ve gone to a lot of trouble to really bring in that human element, a re-humanization, if you will.
Now, swipe in one more time, I get a list of conversation history. This is great. It stores all of the conversations I’ve had in the past, and I can click on any one of them and resume the conversation from where I left off. Also, any conversations that I may have missed show up as well, and allows me to call the person back and say, hey, I’m sorry I missed your call. But also if it was, let’s say, an IM, when I open that IM and re-engage with that person, I can then escalate it through audio or video if I want.
Now, for those of you who have seen the earlier version of Lync on the phone, you know that we have this great feature called One Click Meeting Join. How many of you have seen that? (Show of hands.) Lots of hands, not much noise, but OK. Why it’s pertinent to me is because I get so many calls on that one feature alone. It’s as if that’s the only thing we put in the product. Everyone loves the fact that you don’t have to dial an 800-number, and deal with conference IDs when you’re trying to join a meeting from the car, not that you should be doing that when you’re driving.
But with One Click Join, you just click from the calendar item and then instantly the meeting itself calls you back on your phone. So you don’t have to deal with any of that. People love that feature. What we’ve done with this next generation Lync, though, is brought that capability directly into Lync. So right here I have the meeting in the calendar right inside Lync, and I can just click on it and join the meeting just like that.
Wait a second, now of course this is a phone, so naturally it can make calls over the cellular network, but we’ve implemented voice. So now we can do audio calls over the cell and Wi-Fi, so you have maximum flexibility. I’m just going to turn my own video on, because as you can see we’ve implemented video as well. And there I have, hello there, you see it’s working, it’s all live. (Cheers and applause.)
The picture quality is phenomenal when you’re looking at the phone. I use it myself for meetings, and it’s just like I’m right there. The quality is absolutely amazing. I do want to point out, Tony mentioned a couple of firsts, well this is the very first public demonstration of VOIP and video on the Windows Phone. (Cheers and applause.) Now, I will return the phone to its rightful owner.
All right. Is that it? No, no, no. I showed you the awesome phone, so let me show you another one. Some of you may recognize this as an Android device. Well, let me show you Lync on Android. Let me show you Lync on Android. Speaking of firsts, let me show you Lync on Android with all its capability.
Here you go. See my information is up there. Again, that’s not me; it’s another phone that I’ve borrowed. But just like on the Windows Phone, I can adjust my personal note, I can change my status, and I can change the call forwarding sections. The idea is that Lync, as you can see by looking at this screen, it looks kind of like Lync but there’s something different about it compared to the one that I showed you with Windows Phone. And that’s because we’ve tried to preserve as much of what Lync is as possible, but still develop the product with a nod to the underlying platform on which it sits.
So, this one is on Android, so the application looks a little bit more like an Android device. That’s why you see those nav buttons across the top, but when I open them up, you can see we have the exact same capabilities. I’ve got my conversation history. And I’ve got my calendar which has the meeting, and I’ll go ahead and join the meeting, and I’ll start my video. And there you go, first public demonstration of VOIP and video on the Android device. (Applause.)
Now, one thing I do want to mention is, because we support now all of this capability on the phones, we have a data plan management settings that the user can adjust. So you can tell it not to do VOIP and video unless you have a Wi-Fi connection, and that way you can preserve your data plan, or you can just turn it all on so that you’re able to talk at all times. All right, let me hand this phone back.
Thank you, sir.
Another phone. Here is an iPhone, or as comedian Jimmy Kimmel calls them, iPod that you can talk on. Now, here the same capabilities I showed you on the other devices. But notice that the navigation icons are on the bottom. And, again, that’s because we got all the capabilities of Lync on these devices, but we have a nod to the underlying platform. So it has the same feel as the device.
And the benefit of that is pretty clear. People want to use Lync on any device. We heard that from Tony, and we heard that from you. So once you’re using Lync on those devices you don’t want to have to learn a whole new paradigm. If you’re accustomed to working with that device, it should look exactly like that device, and run just like it. And so the benefit is pretty clear that we like to think that it’s putting the R in the ROI, because people can get instantly productive using this.
Now, if you go to the calendar, join the meeting. You should be familiar with the process by now. We’ve joined the meeting. And then I’m going to go ahead start my video. All right. Another first, VOIP and video on the iPhone. (Applause.)
Here you go. Get yourself a Windows Phone next time. (Laughter.)
All of the devices have the same data plan management capabilities, as I mentioned, for maximum flexibility. Are we done yet? No, sirree bob. Here we go. This is the iPad, or as we’ve heard somebody say, the iPod, the gigantic iPod that you can’t talk on.
However, when you put Lync on this bad boy, you can talk on it, and you can do video, and you can be productive even in the business world. So let me fire it up.
Now, here’s one difference. You’ll see because the screen real estate is much bigger, we’ve been able to change the layout to maximize the productivity. So instead of having to click all over and open up new windows and swipe around, you get a lot more information up front. So I can look at my people. You can have all your settings there, your previous conversations that we’ve had.
Here’s the meetings. So you can see that we’re taking advantage of the fact that we have that extra screen real estate and I’ve been mentioning the data plan management for quite some time. So now, because it’s a bigger screen, I can show you. You can see that we’ve got video turned on, but voice is off, which means it will run over your data plan if you want to. But, if somebody tries to call on video it won’t work if you turn that feature on. So it’s a great capability.
Let me go into the meeting and there we are, full fidelity. What do you think of that quality of the video? (Cheers and applause.) I’ll go ahead and start my video. Now, we have this extra screen real estate. So now we can put more capabilities in this product. We can have PowerPoint. We can do application sharing, as well as screen sharing, so that on this device you can have the complete total meeting experience. So here’s my IM if I want to IM and I can swipe over. So he’s looking a little puzzled.
Anyway, on this device, like I said, you can have PowerPoint slides show up and then you can view them. You can also see when people share their desktop, or share an application. So just from this device you can now be a full participant in a meeting and you’ll see the animations show up on this deck, as well.
So, I can be a full-fledged meeting joiner with this device, so another first. (Cheers and applause.) Hand this off to the phone. There we go. All right. So I’ve shown you all of those devices, now it’s time for me to show you my favorite one, which is on the Windows 8 device right here. I’ve got it. OK, perfect. You may have seen the Lync Windows Store app before, because we released it in October. It runs both against 2010 and 2013, which is really cool. It benefits actually from all of the capabilities of Windows 8 and RT. So it has things like end-to-end security, power management, and lock screen updates so I can see if I’ve missed any calls.
We’ve also been able to move to a faster release cadence as a result of this being a store app. What that means is even though we released it in October, we’ve got the next version that will be coming out Friday. And that’s in response to the feedback that you’ve given us. So we’re going to be able to go on very quick iterations of the product and continue to incorporate the feedback that you’re giving us.
Let me fire it up. This is what it looks like, absolutely beautiful, Windows 8 touch, responsive, looks incredible. Here we go. If I press on me here, of course it’s not me like usual. None of these devices are actually mine. I can change all my status just like I’ve shown you before, the call forwarding sessions, and the status for where I am, whether I’m busy or available. And speaking of status, I wanted to say that we have a rich presence model now with Lync, so even if you’re on the phone we say that you’re on the phone. If you’re in a meeting, we say you’re in a meeting. If you’re in a conference call we say you’re in a conference call. And that rich status allows people to make the appropriate decision when it’s time to reach you, because they may decide if you’re on a conference call I won’t interrupt you, or things like that. So we have that incredible rich presence model.
You can see here in the favorites section that it’s kind of a there’s a live tile motif going on. It’s alternating between the picture and the personal note. And at all times you can see the presence information for everyone, as well. The idea is to give you as much information as possible, just at a glance. And when I click on one of them, or just press on one rather, I get those four communication modalities. Again, which is all about having that single experience of all the communication modalities at one time. And if I click on the People Card I get a much richer People Card that shows up on the left-hand side, more about that person’s current location, additional contact methods, and also those same buttons to initiate different types of communication.
The other one that I really like is if I press on this organization it allows me to see that person’s org chart, and this is handy because if that person I’m trying to reach isn’t available I can see what other team members there are, whether it’s her boss, or the people on her team or her colleagues, and then I can reach out to them and initiate the same set of communications in that way.
Let me show you the contact list now. So first it can be sorted by name, or you can sort your contacts by groups at a touch, and you can zoom out and see all of the groups, and how many members are in each, so it’s very touch responsive here. Now, I can also click on History and show you the conversation history. So these are the previous conversations that we have, and it’s very immersive, very rich and speedy. Also, voice mail. I can click on voice mail and get a list of all my voice mails that I have. So again, this is all about having all of your communication modalities in one place.
Now, the thing on the top left that you see: Lync Con Keynote, I’ve integrated the calendar and on my next Lync meeting is always there. So I can just click on that to instantly join the meeting. OK. We’ll just do that again. It’s telling me that we can’t start the call, because my mic is being used by another app. So that’s great. That’s one of the features that we have to prevent you from doing something that you don’t really want to do. (Laugher and applause.) All right. So we can see the folks are on the call there. So we apparently have this mic collision. Maybe we’ll do some more IMs.
Showing off the great communication capabilities, because we can use there we go. So we can have IMs and so on. I’m not sure why this microphone isn’t working on this one, though. We’re going to try and join the meeting one more time. All right. What we’ll do is switch machines, shall we? OK. We’re going to figure out this hardware issue and we’re going to move onto something larger.
So, I showed you the small screens, all the phone devices and I showed you some medium-size screens, but what about the large meetings? So, for example, most of the meetings sometimes still incorporate an actual room. And what do you do then? I imagine that many of you like me have walked into a conference room and seen some high-end conferencing equipment and not know how to join. So what would happen well, we’ll just go back here. All right. So we’ve had we’ll defer the conference for a second and we’ll get back to this one, this medium-sized screen. So here what you’re going to see is the video gallery. This is remember all the machines that I was handing off, all the phones that I had borrowed from people. This is them on that same meeting now. So you can get a sense of what the video is looking like. And also, if I swipe over I can see the PowerPoint deck here. So just like the other devices I can be a full participant in the meeting.
When I’m here I can double tap and Shelly has got to turn her video on. There we go. There is Shelly. So I’m going to double tap and it brings up in full screen. Her video is not on anymore, so it brought it up. So we’ll try it one more time. OK. So Stephane is having a laugh over there. He’s the server guy. What happens when you double tap that person is the active speaker shows up in full screen mode. And that’s really cool, because we use a new codec, an H.264 SVC. And the S is scalable, and why that’s important is because in our previous versions whenever a variety of media sources were joining the conference, we had to do a lot of transcoding to bring down the bandwidth to be the lowest common denominator. But, with H.264 SVC, all of the devices are sending all of their capabilities at once. So the conference mixing section on the back end can pick the one that makes the most sense, based on available bandwidth and device capabilities. And so that means that if you have an HD camera on your machine and you’re joining the meeting, then you will still have HD, even if the other people do not.
Now, one of the things that we have with the gallery view here is you’ll notice that there is one person who is a little bit smaller than the rest on the bottom, that gives me support for simultaneous video feeds, and they are the four people who spoke the most recently. So if Fernmarie on the bottom there decided to speak, then she would bump up to the top.
I can choose also just to pin somebody. So here is him on the top, and I can just take him and I can pin him to the top if there’s somebody that I want to stare at all the time even if they’re not talking. So you have maximum capabilities there.
I showed you IM. The other thing I want to show you now, I’ll put the conference on the side here. So now I’ve got the meeting going on on snap view on the side. And while the meeting is going on, I have very important work to do. And nobody in the conference can tell that I’m actually doing my very important work on the side. But you’ll notice actually that on that small little snap view on the side, I have all of the components of the meeting right in front of me. I have the IM window at the bottom. I have the deck that I’m looking at. So if somebody is advancing the slides, I can see that. And also I would have the video in the bottom right corner. So I can do my busy work on the side and still keep the meeting going.
Now, I’ll put it back. One of the things that I should do is start my own video. By the way, even if I did have my video going nobody would be able to tell that I was engaged in a nasty game of tab files.
So, I talked about earlier this notion of having a conference in a room. But there’s a challenge when you go and use the devices there, because people don’t necessarily know how to work the conferencing systems in these given boardrooms. So what if, let’s just imagine, what if you could just walk up to some display and press a button, and it automatically joins the meeting for you and does all the magic behind the scenes and makes it all work perfectly. Wouldn’t that be pretty cool? (Applause.)
Well, studies have shown that most meetings take an average of 12 minutes to get going by the time people are plugging their laptops in, figuring out who is supposed to be displaying the PowerPoint, figuring out what plug to use, what the display mode should be, and all that. And so, working with our partners, we’re delivering this Lync room system, which makes it super easy and intuitive. That button I pressed was the join meeting from a calendar item. So all you have to do is invite the meeting room into your meeting, and it’s as easy as that. You walk up and you press the button. How cool is that? (Applause.)
Now, it comes up in gallery view in here because of the real estate on the screen. We can have five video feeds at the same time, including the one that’s me on the far side. But meetings are more than people. Sometimes you want to have content as well, in particular a whiteboard. Most of the meetings I go to, I like to get up and draw on the whiteboard. And so now we have this capability here where I can walk up and draw things. So it acts like a regular whiteboard.
I never claimed to be an artist; I’m just showing you some cool things. This particular room system comes from Smart, and they’ve done a great job integrating the pen into this environment. And I have buttons here that just change the color. I just have to press the button to change the color. And then I have an eraser. So it works kind of like a regular whiteboard.
But there are a couple of differences. I can move content around, drag it around. I can move content around. And the other thing is, in the virtual world, remote participants can add content to the whiteboard. Is that something you can do in a real whiteboard experience? Hardly. So here is someone that’s added, can’t wait for the Sea World Party. So the content doesn’t necessarily have to be business related. People can have whatever content that they want.
The other thing is in addition to the whiteboard I can also present PowerPoint, of course, on this system. And so here you see the PowerPoint. By the way, I didn’t mention it, but I think you noticed that we automatically put all of the video feeds on the backside of the board as well so that we’re maximizing the real estate. And here I can advance the slides and present directly. So I’m excited to say, Questron, Life Size, Polycom and Smart Technologies have all announced plans to release the root system this year, some as early as this summer. (Applause.)
All right. So I’ve shown you small to super large, and I’ve shown you mobile and fixed. What I haven’t shown you yet is what the experience might be like on a standard laptop. So here is a standard laptop, and I’m just going to go ahead and join the meeting. And this time I’m going to join as a guest. You don’t always have to be an authenticated user to join the meeting. In fact, many of you probably have meetings in which you want your customers and partners to participate. And so, we support anonymous join, and you can adjust your settings so that they can join the meeting automatically, or they can be put into a lobby where you can determine whether or not they should be invited.
Now, what you can see here is that Lync has automatically given me the layout that makes the most sense given the content that’s there. So I have the video gallery across the top, and I have the PowerPoint in the bottom, and I can resize. So I can make the video gallery bigger if I want to. I have a variety of options.
Here, for example, I can change it so that it’s the speaker view. And what that does is it takes advantage of the real estate and makes the PowerPoint bigger, and puts the active speaker on the bottom right. I also have presentation view, which only gives me the PowerPoint, and that way I can focus exclusively on the content. So you can pick whichever layouts that you want.
While I’m here on the PowerPoint, I want to draw your attention to the little words at the bottom of the slide there. You see a couple of arrows. What I’m able to do is take a look at different slides in the deck. And if you just glance briefly at the meeting room, this room system is showing the meeting in progress. So I’ve changed the slides that I’m looking at, but the meeting itself hasn’t. This is kind of a slide preview feature that we lovingly call the Bill Gates feature. And that’s because he can consume content faster than anybody I’ve ever seen in my life. And so he always wants to drive ahead and look at what’s coming up in the presentations, as we tend to be displaying it a little bit slower. So this is the Bill Gates feature. In fact, he can click on thumbnails and look at all the decks right at the bottom, and pick the slide that he wants to see.
Now, I can return to the Presenter’s View at any moment so that I can see what the current presenter is doing. And there’s another feature that we have here. This one we lovingly call the SteveB feature. And this one is the one where you take over as presenter. (Laughter.) Steve, like Bill, has a great capacity to absorb content super, super fast, but maybe not the patience to just go privately, and he just wants to drive the entire meeting at a quicker pace, so he can take over.
Now, I say that in jest, but the reality is that when you’re participating in a meeting like that with PowerPoint in this way, you have maximum flexibility. Sometimes you might have joined the meeting late, and you want to be able to back up and see some of the content that you might have missed, or somebody gave a number, or a chart or something and you want to go back and look at it. In a conventional meeting, you don’t have the ability to do so, but with Lync you can.
So, let me advance the slide. This one says Lync Web App, and that’s interesting, I’m on this map. Well, some of you who may have been astute when I joined the meeting might have noticed that I actually joined the meeting on Safari. That’s because this entire experience that I’m showing you right now with the video gallery, and the PowerPoint slides, and all of that stuff, that is our Web App. It runs on a browser. So that means now because I showed you also the join of guests, when you add that all up, you have the capability of going to any machine, any PC, any Mac, and joining a meeting, and we will download this super-fast media plug-in and give you that full, full meeting capability directly on the browser. I think that’s pretty awesome. By the way, when Tony talks about access and reach, that’s it. (Applause.)
It’s really interesting, because you really have to look at the title bar to know that this is in the browser. There aren’t any features missing, just to give you an example of that, I can look at the whiteboard. So that was the whiteboard that we showed, and again, I’m still on the browser.
The other thing, though, is I can go up and remember I talked about OneNote and how we did a lot of integration with OneNote, because meetings are such an important part of the Lync experience. Well, let me open the OneNote that’s associated with this meeting. I will mention that if I was running the Lync native client, when I click on that it would open OneNote native, and show me the OneNote. But, because I’m running the Web App it fires up OneNote Web Apps.
So, again, we’re leveraging that maximum reach. I don’t have to have anything installed on my machine and I can easily see the content. Now, what Lync has done automatically with this is added all of the pertinent information that I like to have when I’m taking notes, like who attended the meeting, what the date was and so on. So as I scroll through here you can see the participants listed there with hyperlinks. I didn’t add that. Nobody added that manually. This is something that Lync does automatically when you associate a OneNote Notebook to the meeting. And also, if we were doing any kind of a deck or content, that would be injected into this OneNote, as well.
And the idea is that you can go back and explore the meeting later and see all of the content and all of the conversations that happened with it. It’s a pretty amazing feature. This, by the way, is that picture that I took from the Windows Phone at the beginning and it automatically put it into the meeting here, or into the OneNote, rather.
All right. So what have I shown you? I’ve shown you the meeting capabilities with voice and video that we’ve implemented. I’ve shown you the PowerPoint and the whiteboard and all of that. I am actually delighted to say that all of that runs on Lync server and on Lync Online, which will be released as part of Office 365 later this month. (Applause.)
I’m going to say that again, because we hear all the time from our customers that you want maximum choice, whether you deploy your software on-premises or in the cloud, you want maximum choice and that’s what we’ve delivered here, and so for the first time now we have Lync that runs in that capacity, both on the server and online. That’s why I’m really excited about it.
All right. Now, I’m going to spin over to the desktop, because I’ve shown you all the other devices that you would use to supplement your PC experience, but what about the desktop itself? So, here is Lync on the desktop. We’ve done some really cool innovations. I think the most important one, though, is a subtle one, which is that we’ve changed the UI to be much more Office-like. And again, that’s part of enabling people to be more productive faster. So a lot of the Office UI elements are incorporated into this desktop. But, I also have the same quick link capabilities. I can go into the People Card and it gives me the information, and again, the live tiles. I can see the status and the presence of that person.
I’ve got all those capabilities, just as before. But, there’s one that’s, I think, a real big time saver and that is if I open up an IM I actually have multiple IMs going on. I have three IMs in this session and what we’ve done is we’ve implemented tab chat, or tabbed IM. So it contains all of your IMs in one place much, much for easy navigation. And if one of these folks were to IM me, then one of those little tabs would flash and I would know which one. Also, when I minimize and I hover over you can see that the three IM conversations are there and one of them would be flashing if somebody were IM’ing me. So it’s a really, really cool feature.
The other thing that we have in the desktop is something called persistent chat. And you can think of that as like a persistent group, where people are invited to participate and it’s series of IMs that persist over time and so you can have topic-based groups and join them at any time and catch up on conversations that happened earlier. It’s a really, really powerful feature. You can add filters to it so that you can say if somebody mentions a particular word I want to be notified and then you’ll go to that chat and see what was going on. So that’s a really interesting capability, as well.
Now, if I go back to the IM here, with Shelly, one of the things that we like to talk about is the single client experience, where all of the modalities are there. So just from this IM I could escalate to a video, but one of the features that we added, which helped me out a great deal, is if I hover over I get a video preview, as you can see. What that does is gives me a last minute opportunity to pick the broccoli out of my teeth, or make sure I don’t have anything hanging out of my nose, or whatever, before I turn the camera on. This is an often-requested feature to prevent unnecessary embarrassment.
OK. That’s it for the desktop client. Now, what else did we talk about? Let’s see, before I go onto the final section I do want to do a bit of a recap. So I’ve talked a lot about the single client with consistent UI, but still, even though we’re on all of the platforms, they still maintain that certain platformness. We talked to you about the great use of screen real estate, quickly so you have access to those various modalities of communication at the fingertips, video preview, seamless mobile access with no VPN required, no white glove attendant to make sure the ISDN number is configured correctly, to connect the conference room, just walk up and press one button and join the meeting.
So, that I’m super, super proud of. But, Tony did talk about something else. What about those hundreds of millions of Skype users? And what about that B2C thing? Are you curious about that, because we have this vision of connecting the Lync user base with Skype’s? So, I’m going to show you a little bit of how that works. This is not yet final by any means. But, I’m going to show you now. You remember I showed you the tabbed chat earlier, well you can see I’ve got a new one added. I had three, now I have four. And one of them is highlighted. It’s from Tony and he’s on Skype. And what it says is, I hope you’re going to connectivity between Skype and Lync. Yes, I’m actually going to do that. I’ll be right with you, boss. I’m busy right now.
What I want to show you, though, is that Tony is actually on Skype. He IM’ed me and I’m on Lync. Now, for me as a Lync user, there was absolutely no difference between getting that communication from him and anyone else. And that seamless integration between the two is exactly what we’re shooting for. All of the things work the way I expect it to. Now, let me show you a little bit sort of under the covers what’s happening here. Let me fire up Skype.
So, if I look in Skype itself, here is my contact list and the one that I’ve highlighted says Lync Mobile Demo Three, that’s my fantastic user name. But, there’s a word right underneath it which says Lync. So in the context of Skype, that’s how you can identify the Lync contacts that you add, and so if you IM that person, which happens to be me. So I’m going to IM myself here. Now, I talk to myself a lot, but I don’t often IM myself. But, I’ll try that and see what it does.
So, although I started it in Skype and I IM’ed myself, it popped up in Lync. So there you see the interaction between Skype and Lync and the fact that it looks the same to both parties. So if you’re a Skype user it looks like Skype. If you’re a Lync user it looks like Lync. I shouldn’t be rude and ignore myself. I’m fine, how are you? It looks like I’ve got a Skype message and it’s from me. OK.
So, now you get a sense of what I’m taking about. But, let me go back to the message from Tony. I don’t want to keep him busy. Let’s do this thing. OK. So he’s getting anxious. Let me click on the phone icon here. I’m making a Lync call to Tony on Skype. He’s probably at the pool, because he thinks he’s done.
TONY BATES: Hey, Derek, what are you doing?
DEREK BURNEY: Hey, Tony, what am I doing? I’m here with a thousand of my closest friends finishing up this demo. But, you know what, we actually have a bit more time. It would be great if you could come up and join us and maybe close off the session.
TONY BATES: Really, you need me back?
DEREK BURNEY: Yes, come on up. I do need you back. I have no idea what you’re doing. I’m sorry if you’re at the pool, or whatever, but we do have time and I think the folks here would like to hear from you.
TONY BATES: OK. Awesome. Do your demo and I’ll be right there.
DEREK BURNEY: So, what did you just see? An audio call, I’m on Lync, Tony is on Skype. That was one of many firsts. You saw the first VOIP and video call on Windows Phone. You saw the first VOIP and video call on Android. You saw the first VOIP and video call on iPhone and iPad. It’s just been a lot of firsts.
TONY BATES: And this is a first for you, Derek, fantastic job, incredible demo.
DEREK BURNEY: Thank you.
TONY BATES: Take a rest, enjoy. (Cheers and applause.)
Isn’t that amazing? Unbelievable. First, first, first, first, first, delivering technology the way that we envision it to be for communications, incredibly seamless.
What we’ve really shown here is the beginning of us bringing things together in a seamless way, people-centric, across the devices that you want to use when you want to use them in the way that they should be used. No longer is it going to be about a dialogue, which is I’m creating something that is for my intra-business than B2B or business-to-education, or business-to-consumer, or business-to-investor. You pick your two silos. That’s gone. Lync 2013 is a dramatic step towards this vision. It’s that rich humanization of communications that we really believe in.
And I want you to think about what it means for you, what it means for you inside your businesses, in your own enterprise. Many of you run your own businesses, and what it can enable, whether it’s talking to your customers more seamlessly, whether it’s in healthcare, a healthcare provider talking to a patient, whether it’s a student taking courses, this easy flow, this ability to create appointments, meetings.
Keep the information, the integration that Derek showed with OneNote changes the game, because businesses don’t interact across businesses, people interact. It doesn’t matter what it is, we’re providing that capability in a much broader way. We think this is a new concept for the industry, for the unified communications industry. We’ve talked a lot about B2B. And when we brought Skype and came into Microsoft, we started to think about B2C. But I think it really goes way beyond this. And we call this B2X. You should have this in the way that you want, from business to any end-point device in any context to any modality.
The new currency of B2X is conversations, rich, deep conversations. You should think of the ability that Derek showed in terms of his meeting scenario. It’s transforming the way people work. This is the future. B2X will be flexible, it will be scalable. It’s going to make sense in a mobile world, as we showed you, and it’s going to be dynamic, fluid and always about human connections. That’s where we’re headed with Lync. That’s where we’re headed at the Skype Division. And we think that we’re at the beginning of that journey, but we’ve delivered on the promise that will start for the foundation of that.
Now, we’re not done there. You’ve seen some incredible products. You’ve seen some incredible things coming together around Lync 2013, but it’s just the start. And I wanted to give you a sense of the commitment we’re making as Microsoft to all of you, to our customers, to our partners, and to the industry at large, as we transform towards this B2X vision with the rich humanization of communications and a seamless in a unique way that drives a tremendous value proposition of people in their everyday life, as well as in work.
No. 1, I wanted to sort of layout the next 18 months for you. You’re going to see us go on a much faster cadence. Derek talked about it with the ability certainly within the store for us to release on a much more regular basis. We’re going to be doing quarterly updates for Lync Online. We’re also very committed to evolving the Lync Server product, and you’ll see a new release with new capabilities in Q2 of 2014. As part of that, we’re going to add structured meetings to Lync Online and Server. We’re going to make video rich and pervasive within that, as we showed you here, but also make the ability for you to moderate, curate, and have meetings done in the way that you want to on a much broader basis and a higher scale, a big commitment there.
We’re also obviously very committed to the Skype-Lync interoperability. You saw today IM. You saw today presence. And you saw today the world’s first-ever audio connection between Derek and myself. And he does deserve his tequila sunrise for putting it together. But it goes way beyond that. Video comes next, and then you’ll see us over a period of time start to add features and capabilities to bring those together even more.
We’re also very committed to making sure that you can connect to those video teleconferencing devices that you may already have in store in terms of rooms, and we’ll continue down the third-party interoperability that Lync has been committed to from the beginning.
We don’t think that’s the future. We think we’ve shown you the future today. I think Bill Gates got it right when he talked about a major disruption and transformation in communications through the power of software. If you take away anything from that today, that is what we put in front of you, what the power of software can do to change communications and make it more social and more people-centric in your lives.
We hope you enjoyed what you saw, but if I give you just a couple of takeaways in terms of calls to action. The first step is obviously take advantage of what we’re delivering to the marketplace. Deploy Lync 2013. When you see the capabilities that were shown here. It’s transformational for your business. It’s transformational for the way your businesses will interact with other businesses. It’s transformational for the way your business will interact with your customers, your partners. It’s transformational in the way that your people that come to work each and every day will start to consume communications in a way that they want to and a way that fits the mobile world that we’re moving towards.
Leverage the Skype-Lync connectivity capabilities that we’re putting into the marketplace. We’ve seen in Skype, as an example, that the way people use it is transformational. They use it to change the way they interact with their families. They use it to change things that happen in their daily lives. People tell me often that they love it because it changed their life. And I put it to you that the capabilities that we’ve shown you here, we have an opportunity to change hundreds of millions of people’s lives, whether at work, whether at play, whether in learning. And this will enrich not only the conversations they have, but drive organizations both inside and outside to connect in a better way, and I think increase innovation and productivity around the world.
I want to thank you again. Let me know what you discover on this journey, and keep giving us the feedback. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
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