Jon DeVaan: TechEd Europe 2013 Keynote

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Microsoft corporate vice president Jon DeVaan. (Applause.)

JON DEVAAN: Thank you. Thank you for that warm welcome and good morning.

As the person who has the honor of leading the team of talented and dedicated programmers that create Windows, I’m excited to be here with you this morning to talk about how the world of IT is changing and how the expectations on all of us are changing going forward.

Let’s talk about some of those trends for a moment. Our workforces are becoming increasingly mobile with 80 percent of people doing some amount of work outside of the Office and outside of regular business hours.

These people are now expecting that they can always connect to their corporate information, they can always access their corporate applications, and this is an important trend that we need to deal with as IT professionals.

These people also are expecting to use their personal devices, and they take pride in the devices that they’re given to do their work, and that’s why nearly two-thirds of companies have bring-your-own-device policies in place today.

When we think about outside our immediate workforce and we think about how the rest of the world interacts with our organizations, it’s important to see that the security landscape is also changing dramatically. We’ve been in an environment where we have to worry about malware and that kind of an attack on our organization. And increasingly the bad people are trying to use social engineering and other ways to compromise the credentials of people that work in our organizations, and use those pilfered credentials to do bad things against us.

And lastly, when you see that the power of cloud computing is really becoming real and we see that two-thirds of companies also have policies in place that take advantage of IT services delivered from the cloud, all of these things are impacting how we want to work with our people, how that impacts the devices that they carry, and how they access every aspect of their work across the corporation.

That leads us as people creating Windows to really think about two important areas. The first thing that we want to do is we want to enable a broad spectrum of devices and experiences that people will love, a set of devices that if they get them from their organization they’re going to be proud to carry those devices to do their work with that organization, or use their own device, but their own device that then comes with the enterprise features that are needed so that those devices can integrate seamlessly into your organization, that for all this, every single device in this spectrum, they have the enterprise-grade features that are necessary for the organization to be successful.

When you talk about Windows 8, Windows 8 started us down this journey of working on these two things, and people that have adopted Windows 8 to date are having great success.

Let’s take a look at a customer video that highlights some of those successes.

(Video segment.)

JON DEVAAN: All right, those are some amazing examples of companies that have taken Windows 8 and put it to work creating some outstanding business value for their organizations.

I’m very excited this morning to have two people here to talk to us in person about their experience at bringing Windows 8 into their organizations. First is Edwin MacGillavry, the deputy director of the Dutch Public Prosecution Service, and Joseph Houben, the vice president of IT for Mobility at SAP. Please join me in extending a very warm welcome to these gentlemen. (Applause.)

Thank you so much for being here.

So, Joseph, in your role as VP of SAP’s IT Mobility, can you talk about the mobility strategy for SAP and how Windows 8 fits in?

JOSEPH HOUBEN: Yes. Being at SAP and working in the IT department obviously we also have our internal customers, and that is the majority is sales and support. They all work with mobile devices, and they need a lot of support from us. But the most important is that they can work fluently, seamlessly. And that’s why we have a strong back-end in the SAP side providing all the data they need and the mobility platform.

Now, what we do at SAP is already we plan the Windows 8 rollout for the end of the year. So in Q4 we will start this rollout, and already people can order Windows Phone 8 devices in our internal shop. So everything is prepared, the Windows 8 image is ready, so we are ready to go, which is a good thing for an IT department to be that far already.

The next target we have is that we have in 2015 we decided to have all of our sales force working on tablets only. So we are moving away from laptops, notebooks, and move everything in the sales force on tablets only. So that’s a big step, 2015.

JON DEVAAN: Great, thank you very much, Joseph.

Edwin, can you tell us a little bit about the Dutch Public Prosecutor’s office?

EDWIN MACGILLAVRY: Yes. The Dutch Public Prosecutor’s office is an office with about 5,000 employees, of which 800 are public prosecutors, and we work from 20 offices in the Netherlands. We prosecute criminal offenses in the Netherlands, and that can range from petty crime like shoplifting to murder.

Actually the Public Prosecutor is a very mobile worker. He visits crime scenes, he works from police stations, he travels to our central conference center we have in the Netherlands, but he also works at home, and of course he works in court where he presents his cases.

JON DEVAAN: Right, that’s interesting, because when I think of attorneys I think of libraries and lots of books and legal pads. How does a mobile device help the people that work in your organization?

EDWIN MACGILLAVRY: Well, you’re right, I mean, it used to be all in libraries because legal knowledge is of primary importance to public prosecutors. And it used to be all in libraries, books, and also in handbooks in the office.

But times have changed and we have more also internally and within also the Public Prosecution Service we have a lot of digital information, which could be accessible to them, for instance information on how to act in certain cases. But there’s also a lot of external sources which you want to make available to them, for instance case law websites.

And the Public Prosecutor being that mobile, we wanted to go to a more mobile environment that suits their needs.

JON DEVAAN: Excellent. Thank you, Edwin.

So clearly worker mobility is top of mind. Would you share with us what SAP is doing today with its mobile initiatives and how that relates to what Microsoft is doing?

JOSEPH HOUBEN: OK, first of all, I would like to say that SAP and Microsoft share a lot of customers. So we are typically the companies that have a lot of customers in common, big-sized companies, and we work already I think it’s almost 40 years together on a close basis. Bill Gates, your founder, our founder, Hasso Plattner, they are really good friends, so there is a good relationship there.

And what we do with mobility right now is really serve first of all our internal force. So we want to make sure that our internal force can work mobile. That’s where we prove that it all works.

And, of course, at the same time with this proof we know and we show our customers that this is seamlessly integrated in from the front-end into our back-end, and this is a high performing, highly scalable platform.

So we have customers in the back-end with at least 500,000 employees. So, of course, when they are getting mobile, then we have a lot of traffic there, and I think that is the main thing that’s going on right now.

JON DEVAAN: Excellent. Thank you very much.

Edwin, how does Windows 8 help prosecutors with the need to be mobile?

EDWIN MACGILLAVRY: Well, as I said, legal information is of primary importance. And over the last few years we have been building a SharePoint environment where we developed several apps, and they were accessible from desktops. But now we wanted to make it more mobile and going to a touch device.

But we had more wishes on our list. It had to be very secure. It had to be remotely managed as a possibility. It had to seamlessly connect with the SharePoint environment. But also we wanted the full Office experience, so not only mail but also Word and access to their personal files.

But it was also very much important that it would be very intuitive and easy to use because a lot of our public prosecutors are technology shy.

And that’s why we’re now testing Windows 8 together with Atos, our sourcing partner, and Spark, who built the apps and a Microsoft partner.

JON DEVAAN: That’s excellent. You said that your people are somewhat technology shy. What did you do to overcome resistance to deploying Windows 8?

EDWIN MACGILLAVRY: What we did, we chose three apps which had content which was very valuable to them. The first app we developed was about procedures, how to proceed in certain cases, and they can use that information, for instance, when they are on 24/7 duty.

To give an example, they’re being called in the middle of the night by a police officer, and this person says, “Well, I’ve got somebody here. I arrested him or stopped him for speeding. And he also happens to be drunk, and the third part is he is also a foreigner. So what to do?” And the public prosecutor, he can look into his tablet and with his touch device very easily and very fast get that information, get the right answer, and get back to sleep. So that’s a very valuable app for them.

The second one we developed is a person’s app or people app. They can find their contacts from colleagues, but it’s more important they can also find what expertise they have. So, for instance, if you’re in a very difficult case on, for instance, money laundering, you can look on who has expertise on money laundering, and you can get the help from your colleagues.

The third one, which is probably the killer app, is an app which enables them to download case files on the tablet, and then with a stylus make notes directly in the case file. And that makes their work much more easy. They can work actually the same way as they used to do on paper, but then directly digital, and can easily present that in court.

So what we did to counterbalance the resistance is get content which is very valuable to them and make it easy to use.

JON DEVAAN: That’s terrific. So it’s really it’s the business value and the applications and the business applications that you’re providing which are the way to get people to really love the device. That’s terrific.

With your new mobile solution what benefits are you starting to see and what benefits do you expect to see in the future?

EDWIN MACGILLAVRY: Well, the benefits is first of all getting access to the legal information in a faster way, and that makes it more efficient at the crime scenes, at the police officers, but also at home and, of course, in court. So that’s one of the things.

But the other thing what we hope and we have to test out is whether we can replace the desktop with this device, because we have the full Office environment so we could make it possible that we’re not going to add a device which would add cost but replace a device and in that way save costs. So that’s what we hope for.

JON DEVAAN: Right, that’s exciting, that our vision of that spectrum of devices is exactly for that, you can actually spend less money on devices because you can do more with each one. Thank you very much.

Joseph, in closing, what can you tell us about the future of code development and innovation between SAP and Microsoft on the Windows platform?

JOSEPH HOUBEN: Well, I think there’s a lot going on still. We are continuously developing further Windows 8 apps on phone also. So this is moving continuously forward in the next years. There’s still a lot of business scenarios in the SAP back-end systems that we can mobilize. I’m not saying it will be thousands but it will be many.

So we do that not alone. There are also partners helping us doing that. Microsoft is helping us doing that.

The other thing we are doing also together with Microsoft is improving our middleware, our SAP mobile platform to connect from the back-end system to the mobile devices. So Microsoft obviously comes with new features that we have to then implement in our platform. That is what we’re working on and what we continue to work on.

JON DEVAAN: That’s terrific.

Gentlemen, thank you so much. I’m so glad we were able to have this chat today.

EDWIN MACGILLAVRY: Thank you very much, Jon.

JOSEPH HOUBEN: Thanks, Jon.

JON DEVAAN: Thank you. Good work. (Applause.)

So I’m struck by the stories we saw in the video and the stories that we just heard, that these trends that I started out talking to you about, they’re not just things happening to us, they’re real opportunities to unlock higher productivity and more business value in our workforces. And with the way that we’re trying to move Windows forward we really want all the work that we’ve done together for decades, talk about 40 years in the case of SAP, and use that work as a very strong foundation for moving forward and tackling these new challenges.

So let’s talk about Windows 8.1. We think that we had an amazing start with Windows 8. We’ve sold 100,000 — or 100 million, sorry, licenses. There are nearly 100,000 new Windows Store apps in the Windows Store. Those apps have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. We’re thrilled with the success that Windows 8 has had. And we believe with Windows 8.1 it’s only going to get better.

Last night in San Francisco we announced the availability of the preview version of Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 is a free update for everyone who has Windows 8. The full version of Windows 8.1 will be available later this year.

And when you look at what we are doing when we talk about that first strategy of having a broad spectrum of devices and experiences that end users will love, we see our ability to bring new value to market on a much more rapid cadence as an important part of being able to deliver on that strategy.

So when we talk about Windows 8 when it came out, we spent a lot of time about the changes to create that broad spectrum of devices, and we didn’t talk as much about the things that we did in Windows 8 for the enterprise.

With Windows 8.1 you’ll see that change, and in Windows 8.1 we did some specific investments to help Windows 8 in the enterprise. So we talk a lot about that broad spectrum of devices you see with features in Windows 8.1 to enable the features in those devices that make those devices work very well inside of an enterprise.

Also last night in San Francisco at the start of the Build Conference we announced all the new changes to the developer environment for Windows 8. We believe that there is a great opportunity, some of the apps that Edwin talked about with Windows 8, to make some apps with real business value. We believe that’s enhanced significantly by the new platform features delivered in Windows 8.1.

When we think about the change of the security landscape, new features in Windows 8.1 give you new tools to avoid credential theft and better secure the information and applications in your infrastructure.

With this amazing array of devices that are powered by Windows 8.1 we believe that we can really empower bring-your-own-device initiatives and give you better tools for managing those devices both on and off your network.

And, of course, with that mobile workforce the need to keep innovating and make it as easy and seamless as possible for someone on the go to have all that connectivity that they need is an important aspect of Windows 8.1.

Let’s talk about some of these things further. Let’s start with the user experience.

So Windows 8 was a big change, and as a big change necessitated by this explosion of new device form factors and the kind of things that people wanted to do, that broad spectrum of devices that will delight users.

But in the course of rolling out Windows 8 we also received a lot of feedback about that experience and how we could improve that experience to better deploy Windows 8 inside organizations.

A key feature, a key theme that we used in designing Windows 8.1 is that if you’re using the modern environment on a modern device you should be able to stay in that environment and go to the desktop only when you really need to. And if you’re using Windows 8 on a desktop-oriented device you should be able to stay in the desktop and really only go to the modern environment when you really want to.

Instead of talking more about these features, what we’d like to do now is demonstrate some of them, and I would like to invite Brad McCabe up to show us some of the new experience features of Windows 8.1. (Applause.)

BRAD MCCABE: Thanks so much, Jon.

So as Jon said, we’ve taken and we’ve really moved forward on that bold step that we started with Windows 8. But we’ve taken and we’ve enhanced on this. And I want to take you through some of the enhancements.

And you can see right up here that the enhancements start right at the lock screen. We’ve turned the lock screen into a beautiful, cloud-powered photo frame. So I’ve got all the pictures I love rotating through here. And these can be pictures from my PC, these can be pictures from my SkyDrive, these can be pictures from my phone, all right here.

I’ve still got a lot of useful information here on the lock screen, but it’s also gotten even more useful for me. Let’s say, for example, at my house grandma is calling, she wants to talk to the kids. Well, rather than having to log in and fumble with the password I could answer that Skype call right from the device.

Or let’s say I want to capture one of these moments and my device is locked. If I just slide my finger down, you can see I can go right to the camera here and I can see everyone. Kind of glad you sat in the front row today. And we can just touch right here, and I can snap some photos. And you can see it’s very easy for me to get back through the photos that I just took in this session but only these.

Now, if I want to unlock I can just tap here, and I’ll go ahead and log in here. And you can see my Start screen here.

Now, I’ve personalized this Start screen to me, and you can see some of the different tile sizes that I have up here, for example, the large tile. So as developers in the room think about all the rich canvas that gives you to share information with your end users. As end users think about what you can do there for the apps that you care about. In my case it’s the weather but maybe it’s multiple lines of email. Maybe it’s your full day of calendar appointments right there for you.

You can also see I’ve got some smaller tiles up there. I can create a very efficient experience.

You’ll also notice that I’ve got some applications out here, and you’ll notice this one Web app right here. So now Web apps can take advantage and be live tiles as well.

As Web developers in the room you can use HTML and RSS feeds to have live tiles right from your Web applications and share all that information with your users.

Now, another thing we enhanced was the all apps. If I just flip my finger up you can see it’s very easy for me to get down to the all apps view. And I can filter this or sort this however I choose to.

In my case you can see I’ve got most-used selected here, and here are all the different apps. And you’ll notice an app is an app. So if it’s a modern app, if it’s a desktop app, it’s sorted by how I use it.

Maybe I want them by name, maybe I want to see the apps that I just recently installed. Maybe I want to see them grouped by category. All of that is there for me how I want it.

Now, I can also customize things. So, for example, on my background here, if I come into the settings you can see now I have a rainbow of colors here to choose from. So I can make this match my favorite sports team or my favorite color.

Or you can also use some of these newer animated backgrounds that we have. So I love this one here. You’ll notice as I move my finger the dragon moves around there with me. You’ll also notice if I flip to the all apps screen, the tail even extends down into there.

Now, one of my personal favorites with Windows 8.1 is Search. And so if I come in here and we start searching, for example, I’m going to look for Marilyn Monroe. And you’ll see here it goes out and I get a curated, applike experience. I get the best Web results powered by Bing with the richest integration of everything on my PC.

In this hero experience you can see here I get information from the Web but I can also link right from here into apps. So if I want to click and go into the Wikipedia app I can deep link directly into that app.

You’ll also see here, for example, music, photos, but also Web results.

Now, the Web results, not only do I get all of the text about the Web results, but you can see I actually get a thumbnail of each and every one of these Web pages before I click on it.

Now, images are something we know people search for a lot. And if I come in here I can see all the different photos. If I swipe my finger up there’s lots of different ways I can filter it. But let’s say I want to put these in a PowerPoint and I only want blue images. I can choose the color and dynamically choose those.

Now, it’s not just people. So here we are in Madrid today, so let’s search for Madrid. And you’ll notice right away I get apps on my machine. So, on the left-hand side we can see the sponsor linked file that I have, but you’ll see I also get a hero experience for places, so I can see things like the weather, I can view maps, I can see different attractions, and I can also get all of those Web results.

Now if I search one more time, and I’ll start here, and we’ll just type SK, and you’ll see I can get all of my apps, so things like SkyDrive and Skype, settings, files I’ve got on my machine like photos and documents, as well as all of my Web results right there for me.

Now let’s go here into my mail. So if I open my mail up we’ll see that my colleague Chris here has sent me a mail with some photos of his recent trip. Now if I take and I open these photos, what you’ll notice is the two apps can live side by side right here. And I can adjust the size of these. So if I want 50 percent, maybe I want this a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, it’s up to me to determine that size.

But these are both running apps. So if I want to flip through the photos that Chris sent me I can do that. If I maybe want to use the photo app to do a little editing right from here, I can do all of that as well. And it’s very easy for me to move back and forth.

Now let’s send a new mail. So I’m going to type this, and you’ll see as I start to type it, I get very rich autocomplete and also correction here. So I’m going to say “Let’s go to the concert.” But now this isn’t a question, I don’t want to use a question mark, I want to be really firm about this. I’m excited about the concert, so I want an exclamation point. Now, normally here I’d switch the keyboard mode and go and put an exclamation point. But we wanted you to be fast when you were typing with your thumbs. And so what I can do is if I tap and hold on the question mark you’ll see I get lots of other available options. And I can move up very, very easy and choose the exclamation point.

But I can also do this in a gesture if I want to be very quick. So if I just go flicking my finger you’ll notice all the question marks I can put in.

If I want to do numbers, rather than switching the keyboard you’ll notice across the top there all the different numbers. And I can do the same gesture there to put my numbers in, very, very fast. Without flipping keyboards around I can still be efficient here as I’m typing.

Now, Jon talked about one of the things is if I’m in the modern experience I want to stay in the modern experience unless I have a reason to go to the desktop.

One of the things that drove a lot of people down there was settings. And you can see here we’ve brought PC settings up. So if I want to adjust things like time, if I want to adjust language or maybe I want to add one of the 109 languages of Windows, it’s all right here.

But I want to transition from my tablet over here to my laptop. And I’ve got the laptop, it’s powered off so you see the black screen, and I’m going to turn this on. And now you’ll see this is booting up.

Now, I’ve set my password to be blank so don’t tell the security guy when he comes out later. But you’ll see as soon as it boots up, it’s immediately gone directly to my desktop. So if I want to boot to the desktop I can boot to the desktop.

It’s very easy for me to configure this. If I go to properties, I go to navigation, and you’ll see there’s lots of options I can change here. The first one I’ve checked is to boot directly to my desktop.

You’ll also see I’ve checked the second one that says show my desktop background on Start. So if I’m here working on my desktop and I want to go to Start, there it is. I can stay right here within that same context as I move back and forth.

Now, there are some other enhancements out here. Since we’re IT pros let’s take a look at a couple of these. So for power users you had the Windows-X command or you could right-click down on the Start button. You’ll notice I get a lot of very common features that as IT pros I use. You’ll notice we’ve enhanced this with things like shutdown, all right here.

I can also take on my screen, for example, with a high resolution. If I move my mouse to the upper corner you’ll notice that the charms all come in very close so I don’t have to move that far. If I go down here to the bottom, they position down at the bottom. If I swipe my finger in they come in in the middle. So lots of little enhancements to make things more efficient for you.

Now, I want to switch to a machine that I’ve got in the back here and bring that up. And we were looking at windowing. So I’ve got a desktop back there and I’ve set this up with some multiple monitors that you can see up here.

So I’ve got a couple different things. I was listening to some music, watching some different social networking feeds. You can see that I’ve got my desktop here on both monitors. And if I want to drag one of these apps from one side to the other, it’s very easy to move them around, move between the apps, do what I need to do how I need to do it.

Now, I’ve got another machine up here that I want to show you, and I’ve taken my Surface Pro and I’ve docked this down here at my desk. And at my desk I’ve got a very large, high-DPI monitor. So Windows 8.1 supports all of those high-DPI monitors, and you can see I’ve got this laid out. In my case I’ve got four screens here. In the middle I’ve got my desktop. You can see here I’m working on a spreadsheet. But if you take a look down here at my Surface Pro you’ll notice I’ve got my Start screen up.

So even if I’m in here and I’m working on my spreadsheet on my main monitor, you can see I can leave my display down here always on Start, so I can always get all of that rich information from those live tiles. If I want to just reach over very quickly while I’m working here and tap an app to start it, I can do all of that.

So that was a very quick tour through a lot of the end-user features out there, and there’s lots more of them to look at in there as well.

But I want to talk a little bit about one of the features of many that we put in for IT pros. So I’ve got a machine up here, and you can see I’m logged in as Sarah. Sarah’s in my marketing department. Since we’re all amongst IT pros I can acknowledge marketing people, you know, you’ve got to be a little careful with them and technology sometimes. So, you know, we want to make sure that Sarah doesn’t do anything crazy like move her Start screen around, lose some of her tiles, all of those things, and we want to make sure she has the corporate standard image.

So I’ve got my machine over here, right? You can see it up on the screen. I am here as the IT pro. This could also be a VM that I’m doing. But I’ve laid out the Start screen how I want it for Sarah. I put some work apps there, I moved Office to the front, and I’ve taken this. And what I can do is come in here and run one quick PowerShell command, and I’m actually going to export that file out.

And if I take a look on the server, you’ll see I’ve got a lot of different group policies that can control my Start screen. I’m going to go into the Start screen layout, I’m going to enable this and we’ll set a link to that file that I just exported.

So I’ve put that out there. I’ve got that group policy set to go to the marketing group. And then now what’s going to happen is when Sarah logs in, that policy will be applied to Sarah’s machine.

So if we switch over here to Sarah, I will go ahead and sign her out, and we will swipe up. Now please don’t tell Sarah that I know her password, but we’ll go ahead and we’ll log in as Sarah. And you’ll see as soon as Sarah logs in here’s that Start screen layout I specified for Sarah.

And, in fact, if Sarah takes and tries to do any type of customization, you’ll notice that all of that is locked out. I can’t bring up the customization menu, I can’t tap and hold to move around the tiles; it’s all been locked out to the layout that I as IT defined.

And since this is group policy you can have multiple ones for different organizations, different people, targeting how you need to.

So you can see there with a very quick tour through a lot of the different enhancements and features that we talked about how we’ve continued to move that vision forward with Windows 8.1.

Now we’ll have Jon come back onto stage because it’s not just about great software, it’s also about great devices, and we have plenty of them out here to take a look at. (Applause.)

JON DEVAAN: Thanks, Brad, for the awesome demonstration of those features.

Let’s take a look at when we talk about having that broad array, that broad spectrum of different devices available, let’s take a look at some of these. We have some excellent devices up here. We’ll take a look at a few of these.

This is the Panasonic Magic Board. It’s a 20-inch IPS panel with four times the resolution of full HD, with 3840 x 2560 resolution. It’s beautiful. And when you take this and you put it in portrait, this is an A3-size piece of paper. So when you talk about having a device that’s great for design professionals or maybe engineers doing really complex diagraming, this is just an amazing machine. And it’s not locked to your desk anymore. You can certainly use it at your desk, but then you can take it and have all kinds of rich interactive experiences with it on the side. It’s an ideal machine for a variety of different use cases.

I love this machine here. This is one that I actually got for members of my family. It’s the Lenovo Yoga. And one of the things that’s really nice about it is when you pick it up and you look at it, it’s a laptop. It’s unambiguously a laptop. And, in fact, it’s a great laptop. It’s thin, it’s an excellent ultrabook. It has an SSD. But then it’s a laptop that has more. It has, of course, a nice touch screen. It has the ability to bend the screen all the way back so you can set it up in stand mode for consumption in multimedia experience. You can flip it over if you prefer for a little bit more stable consumptive experience. And it turns all the way around to be a tablet, so you can actually use it as a tablet just as is. So it’s an excellent machine, it’s an excellent laptop. It’s just been updated with some of the enterprise security features that would make it a great device in your organization.

This is another take. What you’re seeing here is a lot of interesting innovation in the form factors of all these devices. So this is the Lenovo Helix. It’s a blazingly fast Core i7-based computer. When you hold it like this it’s a laptop, and it has a great Lenovo keyboard, which a lot of people appreciate. But then it also does some very interesting things. I can just lift the display off and it’s a tablet. It’s a blazingly fast tablet with really good battery life.

And then this also has some interesting tricks in it as a form factor. So I can put the screen back this way, but I can put the screen back like this and now I can have that same kind of stand mode as we saw on the Yoga just a minute earlier. And it also folds down into that complete laptop.

Now, this has an extra battery in the base so you actually get amazing all-day battery life with this as a laptop or a tablet.

This is another interesting design here. So you look at this, this is the Dell XPS 18. And it’s a very good-looking all-in-one computer, isn’t it? It has a full-HD touch screen. It’s fabulous.

But this is actually another one where you can just lift the monitor off and now it’s a tablet. So that same kind of interaction model I was talking about with the machine down on the end is possible.

I just recommended this to a friend of mine who’s an interior designer, and she’s really excited to use this machine as a desktop, prepare her proposals, and then take it and sit down at the coffee table or sit down at the kitchen table and go through her proposals with her customers, because it just has this unique form factor that you can use it in all kinds of interesting ways. I’ll tip the screen to the top there.

So again another great example of an innovative new form factor that allow devices to be used in some really interesting new ways.

But if you’re a traditionalist this is a really hot machine here. This is the Toshiba KIRAbook, and it has a 2560 x 1440 high-resolution display that’s a full touch screen and has a feature of the touch screen to reduce fingerprints on the display. This is also an amazing laptop. Look at how thin that is. It’s a great ultrabook. So if you’re looking at people who they just want a traditional type of PC, they want a laptop, an awesome laptop that shows all the neat features and capabilities of Windows 8.

The last device we want to show is this one. This is the Acer Iconia W3. It’s the first 8-inch Windows device to be put out on the market, and it’s the first of a set of devices that are going to be this small form factor.

And what this is, is it’s an excellent consumption-type device designed for consuming different types of multimedia, can be used in portrait mode, it works terrific in portrait mode, but it’s a full Windows PC. You can install all kinds of applications on it. It comes with Office Home and Student preinstalled. It’s really an amazing device. And for people for whom lightweight and size are predominant factors in using the device, it’s an amazing experience for them.

So these are just a few of the machines. These are all available for Windows 8 today. There are going to be another set of amazing machines coming out with new chipsets this fall with the release of Windows 8.1. We think out of this entire spectrum it will be really easy to find an amazing device that can delight the end users in your organization. (Applause.)

So Brad highlighted a lot of the customizability aspects of Windows 8.1, and he also highlighted ways that you’ll be empowered to customize the experience for users in your organization. I want to highlight another kind of customization that we do, and that’s the customization of a fixed-purpose device inside your organization.

So I have here a Windows RT system, and I’m going to log in as the store manager, also known as the admin on this machine. And I’m now going to set up this device as a single-purpose-use device.

Now, this is becoming more and more popular, particularly in retail, where you see the sales associate being unchained, if you will, from the cash register location. They can go out and have a personal experience with their customers and do the entire retail transaction in a mobile manner inside the store.

So let me show you how easy it is to set up this as a single-purpose device. I’m going to go into the control panel here, and I’m going to go into the accounts area, and I’m going to pick the assigned access feature right here. And what I’ve done is I’ve set up two things on this device. One is a user account, which is the user account that will get used when the device is in single-purpose mode, and I’ve chosen one Windows Store style app, in this case the Microsoft Dynamics retail point-of-service application.

And so with those settings all I need to do is log in as that kiosk user, and you’ll see the Dynamics application start up, and I have the experience now of my fixed-purpose device.

Now, if I try and swipe in, showing you the system UI, do any Windows shortcut keys, those are all disabled. So all I can do on this device now are the features of this application. And I can do some interesting things. I can go into the customer database, I can look at a particular customer, I can get their history, their purpose history, things that they’ve expressed desires for, some intelligence in our back-end around suggested products, their order history, all kinds of information about this customer right at my fingertips.

Now, you’ll notice I can do the gestures to bring up the app UI. So I can’t use the gestures to get to the system UI but I can use the app completely and fully, all of its features. I can go in and I can look at the product database, examine some things in my product database. And, of course, it’s a point-of-sale application, so I can use it to do my point-of-sale activities.

This also gives me an opportunity to highlight some of the new hardware support we have in Windows 8.1. So this is a barcode reader, and I’m going to use it and I’m going to scan a couple items here to start a transaction. And when it’s time to pay I’ll use a credit card. Here’s a magnetic stripe reader, and I’ll just read the credit card and you’ll see it will enter the credit card in the app. And where’s my pen? I can have my customer sign, finalize the transaction. And we won’t print out the receipt this time.

So you see here taking an off-the-shelf device and setting it up for a very special purpose, specific use case, and this is a new set of tools available to you.

Now, I know also some people are interested in doing even more specific manufacturing, other kinds of customized devices, and Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry Edition allows yet more options for customizing and making special-purpose devices.

So last night in San Francisco we announced the new application platform improvements of Windows 8.1. Of course, they had a full 75 minutes to talk about all those things. We’re going to go through it here a lot faster. But know that there are 5,000 new APIs in Windows 8.1. We spent a lot of time on performance, particularly performance for app startup.

I just highlighted a couple of the new devices that get supported. There’s a broad spectrum of new devices that your enterprise applications can take advantage of. Web standards are going to be some interesting parts of that in the developer demo that we’ll do in a minute; multimedia enhancements; in general taking advantage of the accelerator hardware on all the new system-on-chip form factors that are coming out to be able to give the richest experience possible; and, of course, a new version of Visual Studio that comes out with Windows 8.1 that has some amazing new tools for debugging, doing performance work and designing your applications.

I’d like to invite Joe Stegman out to show you some of the new amazing developer features of Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio. Joe. (Applause.)

JOE STEGMAN: Thank you.

Hello. I’d like to start by showing a couple demonstrations of some of the leading work we’ve done in the Web platform in 8.1. And the work I want to show is around a couple standards that we’ve been investing in, and the first one I want to show is something called MPEG DASH.

I’m going to go ahead and go to a site here. And MPEG DASH, and really what DASH stands for is it’s Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. And you go, what does that mean, and exactly what does it really mean, and why is this important to have it built into the platform, and what it’s really about and what DASH really enables, it’s about providing the best-quality video experience to the device based on the device characteristics and network connection. That’s really what it enables. So if I have a better-quality device with better bandwidth connection, I’m going to get higher quality video. And if I have a lower bandwidth connection, then I’m going to get a lesser quality video.

And the great thing for a developer is that rather than having to build that themselves, have to build the logic that enables that or rely on a third-party technology or other technology to enable that in their Web experience, they can now rely directly on the platform for that support. So we’re really excited about having that as part of the platform.

So what I’m going to do is just show you a video, a trailer. And this is 1080p DASH content. And what you’ll see, I’m going to go ahead and go full screen. And since I do have a nice — this is a Surface Pro here with a nice bandwidth connection, you’ll see it quickly gets up to 1080p content. The experience really looks good.

And one thing you may have noticed is — I’m going to pause it so I’m not talking over the content there. For people paying close attention you may have noticed a couple things. One is that I went into full screen, and another new feature we have in the Web platform is the ability to take your media directly into full screen in 8.1.

And another thing is you do see it’s protected content. There’s a little lock down on the corner. And what that’s saying is that as part of the work we did in supporting DASH, plus the standards work we’ve done around supporting Web Crypto, now I can also deliver rights-protected content directly to the browser without the need of additional third-party technology or plug-ins.

So we really think this is going to help really boost the quality of video on Windows devices.

So let me go ahead and show you another demo. And this may look initially like this is a video playing but it’s not. This is a 3-D model rendered in WebGL. And as a 3-D model that’s really lighting on it and that’s really shading, and it’s really interactive.

So let me go ahead and just show you, and you can see when I do that the great response. And the reason I’m moving slowly is just so you can see the shadows in there. This is a real 3-D model being rendered in real time directly in the browser; so super powerful and super rich what you can do with this. And because we’ve built WebGL really fundamentally at a lower level in the platform, it’s really built right on top of the hardware and fully hardware-accelerated. So not only do you get these great experiences, great touch experiences like I just showed, but also it’s really great for battery life as well.

Now, not everybody may be building sites. I know many of you are building sites. But there’s also a set of folks that want to build apps as well. And apps are extremely important if you want to be able to leverage the power of the PC and the platform in general.

And so one of the key things we’ve done with our investments is I mentioned we’ve been investing in the Web platform. I didn’t say IE. And the reason I didn’t is because we have this core Web platform in the system, and that’s really what IE is built on top of, but it’s also what we’ve built our Web view control on top of as well. And when I say Web view control, that’s how you host Web content in an app in Windows.

And so what I can do is, I can show you I have a XAML app here, and this is a Windows 8.1 app. So what I’ve got now, let me go ahead and run my app here. So this is a XAML app, as I had mentioned, and now you’re looking at basically what looks like the same content that I had before. And it is the same content. And now what this content is doing is the content is being rendered, actually, in my app. And we did really a bunch of work to not only enable the exact same experience in your app, but really enabled a seamless content experience such that now you can have your Web content seamlessly hosted with your system or in this case XAML UI.

And this is something we did really a lot of work in this version of Windows on. We didn’t want end users or developers to be able to tell any difference between what was Web content in their app and what was system UI in the app. And so here you can see you’re transparent. The XAML UI is actually transparent, and you can see through it directly onto the website.

Let me show you something else, and this is a demo, same app, and what I’ve done here is I’ve gone ahead and now I’m showing that same interactive content as well as another WebGL model. And you can see I can interact with these at the same time I was trying to use two different fingers there. I’ve got two videos playing, 1080p videos, but this just shows you, and this is just on a Surface Pro, an i5. So the fact that we’ve done the work to really build in WebGL, build it right on top of the hardware, as well as build our media right on top of the hardware, the graphics layer, and hardware accelerate all of that means I can get these really great, rich experiences within my app that are very performant and also very good from a battery perspective.

So let me jump onto another topic, and the next topic that I want to talk about. And that’s devices. And when I say devices, I don’t mean devices in this context as a laptop or ultrabook or a tablet, I mean a device like something your app might talk to, like a USB device. And what we did in Windows 8.1 is we did a bunch of work to support a set of new industry standard protocols, including USB; Bluetooth; Bluetooth Smart, which is the low-power version of Bluetooth; Wi-Fi Direct; and we did a set of other devices as well. We’ve also done some of what I’ll say is vertical scenarios. So now we directly support, I think you saw a demo earlier of a mag strip reader. We also do document scanners and barcode scanners. And we really think that having this now part of the platform that it will enable developers to build much richer experiences that talk to their devices.

But the thing I’m actually most excited to talk about here is some of the work we’ve done in 3-D printing. And in Windows 8.1, you’ll find that it’s the only operating system that supports out-of-the-box 3-D printing. And this is also why I’m most excited to talk about it, and the reason why it’s the only operating system is until Microsoft went and worked with partners there were no standards for being able to print or have a 3-D printed format for sending to a printer. There were no standards for device drivers for 3-D printers. And so we had to go work with the partners to create standards around the printed format, the actual 3-D format, as well as the device driver standards.

So what I want to do now is I’m going to switch over to an app that I’ve got that is a 3-D printer app. And what you can see in this app is I’ve loaded up a model, and the model happens to be of this vase right here. And it also happens to be what’s currently printing right now on that MakerBot Replicator 2 printer. And one of the nice things, first I’ll talk about the app a little bit, is that what I can do is I can load up a model. You can see I can look around the model. I can zoom it, make it bigger, smaller. I can also pop up in this app, I pop up an app bar, and if I wanted to add some raised text to the model, I could add some raised text to it. I could scale it in case I wanted to print out something bigger or smaller.

But one of the nice things about what I just did there is I went ahead and hit load, one of the nice things about this app is it allows me to load 3-D models that are in a standard format today called OBJ format. And I can just go ahead and what I did is I just searched and I downloaded an existing 3-D model from the Internet, and this happens to be of a MINI Cooper, and this app will actually translate that into the format required by the printer.

But why I want to show this, and I think what’s exciting about this is that it really starts to demonstrate the opportunities for 3-D printing, and why we’re so excited about this. So you see a Cooper here, and I could be, let’s say, a MINI Cooper enthusiast. And what I would really like to do is, hey, I have a key chain. I would love to get a little MINI Cooper that I could 3-D print out, if you will, and attach it to my key chain.

But also maybe I want to print out an award for my son or my son’s baseball team; or I have a phone and I want a custom holder for my phone that’s specifically mated to my car or my car’s cup-holder. Well, that’s what 3-D printing enables. And when you start to think about all the consumer opportunities in this space, you get really excited about that. And that’s what we at Microsoft we’re really excited about those opportunities as well.

And so the last thing I do want to show is, I’m showing this app, and how would I actually go about printing it? Well, it’s the same as printing a 2-D model. So I go ahead and swipe in from the right, hit devices, hit print, and you see it has identified my MakerBot Replicator 2. It’s identified that as a 3-D printer. I select it just like printing a 2-D document, and then I could go ahead and select print. Since I am printing something now, I won’t go ahead and print that. But you see it’s really the same kind of experience as just doing 2-D document printing.

So overall I hope you’re as excited as we are about the opportunities in 3-D printing, and the opportunities in general for developers on 8.1. And with that, I’m going to turn it back over to Jon. Thanks.

(Applause.)

JON DEVAAN: Thank you, Joe.

So I hope you see that there are some amazing new features that can be taken advantage of in applications specific to your business, a very exciting set of developments in Windows 8.1.

What I would like to talk about with you now is managing this broad spectrum of devices in your organization. So I have a spectrum up here on the slide, and of course we’ve had a very rich management experience on PCs as we’ve traditionally known them for a long time with domain join, group policy, and all kinds of interesting things. And then with the introduction of Windows RT, and Windows on ARM, and of course the introduction of phones and other devices, we have the Exchange Active Sync end of the spectrum, which gives some degree of control over the devices. But we’ve clearly heard the feedback that you would like to have a richer, but still simpler, set of ways to control your devices.

And in Windows 8.1, we’re answering that request by adopting the OMADM, that’s the Open Mobile Device Management protocol. And what this allows is a standard management client that’s on every Windows 8.1 device, and it speaks the standard OMADM protocol to a variety of third-party management systems. So you’ll be able to use Windows Intune, or perhaps MobileIron, or AirWatch, and use that to do things to manage your devices such as app deployment, software update management, VPN and wireless configuration, compliance reporting and inventory, and also the very important remote data wipe in the case of devices getting lost or stolen.

So we’re very happy to be able to introduce this new way of giving you more power and control over this broad spectrum of devices inside your organization. As we’re talking about this device management, I think it’s important to talk about Windows on ARM. Windows 8.1 will be on ARM. We are actually very much behind Windows running on ARM. We think ARM is an important part of delivering on that broad spectrum of devices that are available to you to give you more choice in how you select devices inside your organization.

We also clearly heard from you that you would like more in Windows RT, to be more valuable inside your organizations. So in Windows 8.1 we’re including Outlook in the version of Office that comes on every Windows RT device. We’re including the third-party management through open standards that I talked about just recently. There are new features, like Workplace Join, and work folders that you heard about in the keynote on Tuesday with Brad Anderson. And we’ve improved the VPN capability of Windows RT and Windows 8.1 on Intel, as well, with the inclusion of popular proprietary VPN clients.

I talked in the set of trends about the changing, shifting state of security. And when you think about Windows over the past decade or so, we’ve spent a lot of time working on vulnerabilities and keeping malware  making your system malware resistant. And with Windows 8, really we’ve reached the culmination of that. Running Windows 8 on a UEFI secure boot device, with a first-launch anti-malware solution, it’s really difficult for someone to own a machine. Of course, it’s never impossible. There’s no guarantees in this arena.

And with Windows 8.1 we keep up our vigilance on malware resistance, but we also want to start working on delivering the tools and abilities that you can more effectively repel credential impersonation and credential theft, and give you new tools and ways to protect your corporate data, whether it’s at rest, or through different access methods. So the age of relying on passwords as authentication probably has passed for us and we want to make sure that we’re doing a good job of giving you the tools to be able to have a truly modern information access and control environment. And a key part of this is in that broad spectrum of devices, by making sure that devices have the right hardware. UEFI secure boot, and authentication devices, and other mechanisms to give you the power to really secure your corporate information.

I would like to ask Chris Hallum to come up and show some of the new security features of Windows 8.1.

Chris.

CHRIS HALLUM: Thank you, Jon. (Applause.)

All right. For those of you who have experienced biometrics in the past, you’ve almost certainly been underwhelmed by the experience. That’s all about to change. In Windows 8.1 we’re going to go all in on fingerprint-based biometrics. We’re going to deliver all of the user experiences that you’re used to getting from third parties right in the box. In addition, we’re working on the next generation of touch-based sensors that are easy to use, secure from spoofing, and will also be very affordable.

This device that we have right here was built for us by Validity, a biometrics company in the United States. It includes our latest touch-based sensor. It’s a prototype that we’re looking at here. And unlike a swipe-based sensor, where I might need to bring my finger across it several times to get it right, with a touch-based sensor I can put my finger down and in less than a second I’m already signed into Windows. So there’s almost no friction in this user experience. I’m going to be able to use my biometric identity anywhere that I need to use my domain credentials. Obviously we can use it in sign-in, but we can also use it in our VPN, as well as accessing a website, anywhere that our domain credentials are required.

There are a number of other scenarios that we can use, as well, in addition to authentication. One of the ones we’re very excited about is related to user consent. So today when you go into the Windows Store and you attempt to make a purchase, let’s say we’re going to buy “Angry Birds” in this case, and I select the buy button, what’s going to happen is you’re going to confirm and provide consent to the purchase, using a password. And because the password gives so much friction in the user experience what do all of you do? You select the checkbox that says, never, ever again bother me with my password, just make the purchase and go away.

But, with biometrics there’s no friction involved at all. I hit confirm, I put my finger down, and that purchase goes through, and I’ve provided consent in the easiest possible way. So this is an excellent improvement and it is going to create the condition where you’re going to use a security feature that typically you’ve kind of opted out of in the past.

Another way we can use biometrics is related to verifying user presence. So today when you log into your device there is an assumption that you’re still there. When you log into an application that has sensitive information, it just assumes that it’s still you. But, as we know, we hand our devices to other users, we walk away from our devices and sometimes we forget to lock it. So using biometrics to verify user presence on a critical application is quite interesting.

This application here is used by physicians and nurses to gain access to critical patient records. And we’ve added this capability here in 8.1 to verify the physicians’ biometric identity before giving them access to the chart of Jason here, and getting access to all his private information. So this is awesome. We have authentication. We also have user consent and we also have verification of user presence.

So a number of you are probably wondering, well, how much time is it going to take to implement this in my own applications? It’s going to be quite easy. So let me go ahead and open up the source code and I’ll show you the one line of code that’s required to do this work. You’re going to add some handling around it, of course, to handle the case where maybe a biometric device is not present, but if we look down here this line here is the line of interest. This is the namespace.

So for the developers in the audience, I think 25 percent of you are developers, this is what you want to go look up in MSDN. This gives you access to all the APIs. And with this one line I can now request biometric verification within an application. I think this is an incredibly powerful thing for the application I just showed you, but for those of you who are going to work on maybe a financial-related application, maybe a banking app, won’t it be nice to maybe gate transactions to trading shares, or moving money from one account to another using your biometric identity? And also think about the auditing capability. As I mentioned earlier there’s an assumption that it’s you in front of the PC. With biometric verification I know that it’s you in front of the PC and now I have a real, accurate, provable audit trail on who made that transaction.

So, Jon, what do you think about this new capability?

JON DEVAAN: I think it’s outstanding. It really impacts; it really hits home that new security threat model and gives an excellent tool to combat credential theft and intrusion that way.

CHRIS HALLUM: Absolutely. Thank you.

JON DEVAAN: Thank you very much. (Applause.)

So the last set of things that we want to show have to do around a mobile workforce. And we talked about how important it is that people are expecting to do their work any time, anywhere, from any place on any device. So let me just show you some of the mobility enhancements that we’ve done for Windows 8.1. I talked a little bit earlier about the ability of new VPN clients to access a wide array of popular VPNs. Another thing that we’ve done inside the API set is give the application developer the power to invoke a VPN directly from inside their app.

So on the screen here you see an enterprise app called Timeline. And I’m just going to run Timeline and Timeline knows I need a VPN and they put this Toast up, and I click on that Toast and I can see my VPN directly, and I can enter my PIN. This is a good example of another type of hardware. So this is a machine with a trusted platform module. So with a trusted platform module I can create a virtual smart card on the machine to make the machine itself be a second factor of authentication. I can enter my PIN, and I’m just on my way directly connected to my VPN, my corporate app, wherever I happen to be around the world and using it directly on the network.

So another important part of mobility, once the connectivity is all set, is access to local resources. So imagine now I’m a person, I’m going to a branch office, or I’m at a client location and I have my Windows 8.1 device with me. And I want to do some access to local resources. It could be a projector in a conference room. In this case what we’re going to do is a local printer, because I need to print something out.

So I have here my Windows 8.1 device, just to show I have the default printers installed. I don’t have any local printer. Now I might do things where I’d have to like get the URL for the printer, or go look up in the domain directory to find it. But, it might not be my organization. I might not have access to that. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to wave this over the printer and I’m going to get this Toast to say would you like to add that printer.

So what I did there was with this near-field communication device, I just moved the NFC area on the device over this tag, this tag was provisioned using a simple PowerShell script. So it would be easy to create a lot of these tags and attach to local resources. So you don’t have to have people typing in and getting the characters transposed, or any of those kind of things. I touched the screen here.

And just in the time that I’ve been talking to you, the new printer was added to my machine and associated. So I can go to my mail, and the very typical thing you get to do when you’re on the road is print out your boarding pass. I can just select print, and make sure I’m printing the right one. There we go. And so just with a quick wave of my device, I was able to associate to a local resource, and select print, and now we see the boarding passes coming out right here on the printer just like that. That easy to provide people access to local resources using Windows 8.1 and near-field communication.

I see our 3-D print job finished. So there’s the vase that we started printing just a few minutes ago in the developer demo.

So there’s another interesting thing when you have a mobile workforce is what the heck do people do with those devices anyway? On a personal note, I’ve been contributing to my kids’ school, where they have a laptop program, and you really cannot believe  I’m shocked by it, you’re all probably not shocked, you’re used to the strange things that happen to people’s devices.

So what I’m going to do now is I’m a mobile worker, I have my device. I have this device set up just the way I want it. I have a fabulous desktop picture. I’m using my desktop picture as the background for Start. I have a set of applications. I have it laid out just the way I want it. It’s terrific. I look at the documents I have on my device. I have a large set of documents. I’ve been working on this machine, and I love it. It’s been doing a great job for me in my work.

Unfortunately, however, this machine is about to meet an untimely demise. So maybe I’m working in the healthcare industry, I’m using that app that was just shown just a minute ago, and I’m out in the world. I’m in the doctor’s office all the time. And, oh my gosh, I dropped my device in the fish tank. This is a true disaster. (Applause.)

Now, IT Department, what are you going to do for me? And with Windows 8.1 it turns out you can do quite a lot for me. So I’m going to come over here and I’m going to go to this device. And we have it up on the display, it’s great. This is just a blank new Windows 8.1 device. And I’m going to come in and I’m going to add myself. So I go to accounts in the control panel, and I will add me just by typing in my Microsoft Account. I always have to double check typing in front of a crowd just to be safe.

So I’ve added my account and now I’m going to log in. I’ve never seen this machine before. It will take us a second to get the login started. And just to bridge back to the theme of a new security landscape, I have my Outlook.com account set up with two-factor authentication. And I’m going to get that second factor from my phone here, where I use what we call the Microsoft Authenticator app. And what it does is it gives me a time-based security code. You see that blue bar moving across the top of the phone there. That’s showing me how much time I have left that that code being displayed is going to be good. So of course it’s going to work out. I’m going to have to wait a second to make sure I have a good code. There we go.

So I will enter my security code and log into this machine for the first time. The first question I get asked is whether I want to actually directly copy an image from another machine I might have on my account. Let’s not do that this time. Let’s set this up as a brand new PC. I get prompted to accept using SkyDrive on the device. And I like using SkyDrive. And what we’re doing now, we get the login video, and the app setup that happens on every Windows device that comes with the first time that you log in. But it’s also doing some other interesting things for me.

While we’re waiting for that, I would like to announce a couple things. Right now, I’m synching all my settings and customizations from SkyDrive. But you could have set it up that I would be synching from the user experience virtualization. And we’re glad to announce today the beta of User Experience Virtualization Product Version 2 is available in conjunction with the Windows 8.1 Preview release. So you can check this out and give a great experience to your user community that their settings and personalizations will all roam seamlessly across all their devices.

Another beta that we’re announcing today is the App-V 5.0 SP2 beta, also in conjunction with the Windows 8.1 Preview. It’s really an outstanding way to deliver apps to your user community. The apps can always be up to date. It’s seamless. People can get them from anywhere. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox for managing application deployment to your people.

OK, in the short time that I logged in for the first time and talked about those great products, my account has synched. So you see on this machine, which I’ve logged in for the first time, I have my desktop picture. I have my Start background. I have all my apps on my Start screen. You’ll notice those down arrow icons on the app tile; that means the app or the settings haven’t quite downloaded yet. That’s going to take place in the background and that will happen over time. Actually you just saw Skype start downloading there with the thermometer.

I can go to the desktop. I can go to my documents before. I see my documents are all here. Similar to the Start screen with the arrows, some of these files might be placeholders until I’m ready to use them, and we’ll launch one. This shows it hadn’t been downloaded yet, but on demand it will download it. And here I am, I’m off and working. So just in a few minutes from dropping my device in the fish tank by accident that I’m back up and working off of a new blank device. So a really important capability to be able to provide your mobile workforce. (Applause.)

So just to recap quickly, we presented a set of new investments in Windows 8.1 designed to give you a lot easier time, and a lot of control that are addressing these new trends in the IT industry. And, again, these aren’t things that are happening to us. I really believe that these are great opportunities that you can deliver a more satisfying experience to your people, new applications that deliver new value and higher productivity inside your companies.

And I hope you agree with me that Windows 8.1 significantly moves the needle in giving you a lot of great tools to have an awesome Windows environment for your company.

And so I’d like to leave you with these calls to action today. Pick up your Windows 8.1 Preview. We actually have in Hall Two USB sticks with 64-bit ISOs for you to use immediately, 32-bit ISOs are available from MSDN and TechNet. You’ll be able to download them from there. The instructions for going and setting up the store to download from the Windows Store, onto Windows 8 devices, are also online, and you can look at those.

We’d like you to please look at this amazing array of devices and start evaluating some and prepare yourself to either use these directly, or evaluate also the devices that are coming out this fall. Check out on MSDN all the new information about the new APIs available to you in Windows 8.1, and get busy writing awesome enterprise apps. You saw from Edwin here, talking about really the value to the people in your organization is the value delivered through those enterprise apps. I think you have an awesome toolkit to go and get busy on doing that.

And of course, we ask everyone here to target deploying 8.1 broadly across all the PC form factors in your organization. It’s an exciting time in our industry. Things are changing so rapidly, but those changes are also amazing opportunities and I hope you’re as excited as I am to go out and tackle those challenges.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

END

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