Nick Parker: Computex 2015

Remarks by Nick Parker, Corporate Vice President, OEM Division; Tony Prophet, Corporate Vice President, Windows and Search Marketing; and Roanne Sones, General Manager, Operating Systems Group, on June 3, 2015.

ANNOUNCER:  Please welcome Corporate Vice President of OEM Division, Nick Parker.  (Applause.)

NICK PARKER:  Thank you.  Thank you.  Well, hello and welcome to Computex.  Thank you, everyone, for being here.

We live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and that’s how we see the context of the world we live in.  And it’s that world where we live and it’s actually the mobility of us, the user, that we consider the core of our mobile dream and our mobile aspiration.

As we move around in our lives, we may pass many devices every single day, and it’s about taking our information and our data with us and connecting to the things that matter to us most from the cloud that really inform our vision.

And Microsoft’s mission in that world context is to empower every person and every organization in the world to achieve more.

And so with that mission in mind we see three clear ambitions.  And you can almost think of these as platforms.  Building the intelligent cloud, how do we bring the power of the cloud and its intelligence to new capabilities in that mobile-first, cloud-first world?

Reinventing productivity and business process, whether it’s the productivity of me on my way to work looking after my children on the way to school, or whether it’s the productivity of whole organizations or nations, and how do we change business process to enable it to seize new opportunities because of the capabilities of our technology?

And then finally, creating more personal computing, how are our experiences immersive, how do they work how we live rather than we have to force ourselves to live how the technology works?  And this is the third of our ambitions and really our core platform powered by Windows.

The intelligent cloud, our first ambition, as you saw as part of our mission, in the sense of us as device manufacturers, us as the hardware ecosystem, is about bringing the power of these Internet of Things devices running Windows and connecting them with the power of Azure, our cloud.

Whether it’s an ATM and the ability for Azure and machine learning to provide predictive maintenance or better servicing or real-time capabilities to those ATMs, whether it’s a gas pump, whether it’s a fluid monitoring sensor, or it could be a kiosk with incredible capability, or it could be a medical device, or even a wearable in the consumer sense of the word, but it’s bringing these Windows IoT devices running one of our Windows operating systems that scales all the way down to the sensors, powered by incredible services and capabilities delivered by the cloud, whether it’s machine learning or intelligent systems.

And I’ll give you an example of one, and, in fact I’m very pleased to announce with one of our incredible partners, Toshiba, today for the first time the Toshiba and Microsoft partnership around the Internet of Things.  And this is, in fact, the first solution we’re launching, which is the Transportation and Logistics Monitoring Solution from Toshiba.

This environmental data logging device is a very small device, and I’ll demonstrate it later, with a battery life up to six months that can be in a very hardened, harsh environment that can track data logistics and give full power and capability, coupled with the Azure services, to someone in a large supply chain, whether it’s a high value cargo or whether it’s monitoring a fleet of containers across the world or the seas.  It’s an incredible solution that’s ready for customers to buy and trial now, built on Windows as an operating system in that device, as well as leveraging the power of Azure, and all of that rich unique capability that Toshiba brings both the hardware as well as the business solution.

The second example I would like to share with you today is something I’d like to talk about from Crestron.  And this is more kind of in the consumer world, and it really starts to highlight the ambition of the intelligent cloud where we have Windows running on the Crestron hub, and it’s a home hub that enables smart home management.  We have full Windows running on that hub that enables that hub to connect to all of the various devices in your home and provide analytics and services using the My Crestron Cloud and Microsoft Azure Unit to bring all those sensors, all of the data together through hubs and gateways, and then provide a Web front-end, either to a user or to a service provider looking after that system.

So two very real examples of two incredible partnerships, showing how we think about that in terms of the intelligent cloud and the opportunity it can deliver to you, the hardware ecosystem.

I’d like to really just cover very quickly this last slide and, in fact, last month we made a series of announcements on our Azure IoT partnerships here in Taipei.  And this is again recognizing these partners, and these are a new set of partners who are building these IoT solutions with us.  And so thank you again for their engagement, and you’ll see more and more from us as we take these packaged solutions with deep hardware capability running Windows, connected to individual device capabilities or solution capabilities from ISVs or partners to Azure to market in the coming months.

The second of our ambitions is reinventing productivity and business process to help anybody make the most of any moment.

And you can clearly see here if we kind of look at the focus areas within that mission, within that ambition the areas where there’s immediate hardware opportunity.  And these are the three core platforms that Microsoft will go to market with and build solutions with you.

Obviously, mobile we clearly understand has been a huge growth area for all of us together, but as we start thinking about social productivity and what are the device, what are the hardware extensions to social productivity?  Is it the capability to do Skype on any device anywhere you want?  Is it voice over IP?

What are the various capabilities that we will extend our hardware?  Is it hardware that changes from being in a productive type mode to being in a casual tablet mode, or two facing cameras doing conference calls casually in a coffee shop, moving into doing very rich business dialogue in a multiperson conference room?  These are the kinds of hardware extensions that you’ll start to see built into our product.

Or maybe it’s just how we use ink and touch and gesture on our devices, and what are the hardware extensions and capabilities that will leverage the power of the investments that we make in our platforms?

And so the core software assets that make that up, clearly Office is right at the center.  But then as you think about Skype or OneDrive and OneNote you really start to see how we bring that together.

Now, Office, whether it’s touch Office or the modern Office product, you know, clearly has a capability and clearly enables you to monetize your investments in touch and tablets and two-in-ones and detachables, as well as all-in-ones.  But as you start to really experience Windows 10 and you see the touching and the typing and these two working together you can really see the value that Office brings across devices and extensions to the hardware.

As much it is a capability for ink, OneNote, note-taking, the ability to pick up your stylus and click the button and you start writing immediately, as that device recognizes you want to take casual notes.

These are the kinds of extensions and capabilities we’re building into these software platforms into reinventing productivity that provide very discrete, very tangible, unique hardware business opportunity for us together.

And the final of the three ambitions that I want to discuss, which is really part of the main focus for us today, is create more personal computing and Windows 10, how Windows and the operating system becomes part of our everyday life, how it’s immersive, how it simulates so much more of the analog-digital interface, how I want to live my life and how we as the hardware ecosystem and industry need to build our devices and inspire unique experiences that enable people to do more and be more in their lives.

There are three things that are different about Windows 10 that have been different than any time I’ve stood up here before you in the last six or seven years, but also in our 40-year history.

The first is that we have a single application platform experience and store across all of our devices.  So whether it’s an IoT device, a phone, a phablet, a tablet, a PC, an all-in-one, an Xbox or a large format device such as a large whiteboard, we have a single universal application platform, giving predictability to developers, giving the ability to target unique applications and experiences for our customers that work across all devices, having a single target that everyone, both for you as a hardware manufacturer or you as an independent hardware vendor or a silicon provider, as well as just enabling our customers to have a level of capability that they can expect to rely on, with a single new experience across all of the devices in your life, and of course a single store within which to buy what our customers want at the time and place they need it, without having to think across different platforms or think across different capabilities.

The second is ongoing operating system updates.  This is huge.  This is rapidly becoming known as the evergreen operating system, the operating system that through its lifecycle continues to provide value.  You don’t have that lifecycle where we’re all waiting multiple months, even years for all the new value.  This will continue to bring new capabilities and new agility to our operating system, to Windows during its life, and during the life of the device rather than that sort of momentous change that we’ve gone with the previous versions.

And finally, we made a very significant decision to invest in the free upgrade.

These are three very different things about Windows 10 and our investment in the ecosystem.

Now, clearly we’ve done that to stimulate demand firstly within that 1.5 billion people who are using Windows today so they can try Windows 10 and see the experiences they can get on new hardware, as well as bring everyone to the new application platform so we generate huge demand in the developer ecosystem for a single targeted platform where they can build applications and generate demand, because obviously we know the greatest applications bring user demand to our platform and to our devices.

And so let me tell you some of the things that we’ve been hearing in terms of feedback from the ecosystem, from yourselves and from our customers that give me great confidence and, in fact give the market and us great confidence that we’re on the right path with Windows 10 and the device business opportunity that we all face and that we’re all looking straight down that last few weeks before we launch this operating system.

Six hundred million of those PCs of that 1.5 billion installed base of Windows users are over four years old.  We know what those PCs are like over four years old.  That is real opportunity for us to build solid business and solid new growth for us.

Four million Windows Insiders, that’s people trying Windows 10, pushing hard and giving us feedback.

And clearly lots of new designs in the pipeline, and many new devices already running Windows 10, ready for launch.

And the press have given us phenomenal feedback, too.  You know, I’m so proud of what we’ve done as an ecosystem when the press are pushing on you and they’re pushing on us, tell us more about it, tell us what are the things that are inspiring people, tell us what’s cool and different about Windows 10.  And we’ve just got such great feedback.

So without any further ado, I would like to introduce you to Tony and Windows.  Thank you.

(Video segment.)

ANNOUNCER:  Please welcome Tony Prophet.  (Applause.)

TONY PROPHET:  From needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows.

Good afternoon, everyone.  Hey, it is great to be with you all here at Computex, and it’s great to see so many old friends.  We are thrilled to be here with all of you, our incredible ecosystem partners.  Hey, this is we’re at the dawn of a great time in the history of Windows, because Windows 10 is coming, and it’s going to be amazing.

Now, Nick talked earlier about the Microsoft vision, to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Now, we’re pursuing this mission through three bold ambitions:  first, reinventing productivity and business process; second, building the intelligent cloud; and third, creating more personal computing, where interacting with technology should be as natural as interacting with a person, where voice, pen, ink, gesture, gaze all help you achieve more in a way that’s additive, natural, and intuitive.

And Windows 10 will be the embodiment of more personal computing.  Before we wrote a single line of code, we imagined the world that we wanted to create, and we distilled it down to two images, images to guide us and to inspire us.

First, we envisioned the workplace, a workplace where experiences move seamlessly across devices, scaled for each but familiar to all, where it’s easy to put down one device and pick up the same experience on another device, effortlessly, where apps aren’t constrained by the screen size or the input modality or the touch modality of the device that they’re on, a workplace where large screen collaboration experiences are a direct extension of your business processes, your business processes for communication, for calendaring, and for file sharing, where businesses can trust that their data is secure and protected as the data moves between devices and apps, as it moves between the cloud and on-premises.

And then we envisioned a home, a home where the PC, tablets, phones, interoperate seamlessly with gaming consoles and TVs, a home where the lines between the digital and the analog world are blurred and eventually erased, a home where the dream of holographic computing becomes reality.

Our Windows 10 journey has been guided and inspired by these images, and the heart of our strategy is creating a single converged platform for all of these experiences, one platform, one platform from the headless IoT device to phones to tablets to PCs to the 84-inch Surface Hub, and beyond to the world of holograms, one platform, one kernel, one device driver model, one development model, one store, one deployment and management approach, one platform powered by Windows Universal Apps, Windows Universal Apps with a guaranteed core API layer common across all devices, write an app once and run it across all Windows 10 devices, with a UI seamlessly scaling across the screen sizes and across the input modalities, buy an app once and use it on up to 10 Windows 10 devices.

And we’ve got some spectacular new experiences coming to Windows 10.  We’re working together with a lot of great partners to embrace the new Windows Universal Platform.  We’re delighted to have companies like Tencent, Disney, Netflix, Line and so many more working with us building amazing Windows 10 applications.  We’re going to help these partners do things that can only be done on Windows 10.

Now, we’re confident that building native Universal Windows apps is the best way to deliver a really unique, a really compelling experience that scales across device sizes.  But we’re also enabling developers to reuse code to create Windows apps, the apps that can call native Windows APIs and get access to features like store search discoverability, Live Tiles, notification, locations, in-app purchases, even Cortana, and get broad access to the Windows 10 installed base as it grows through our store.

And we’re doing this through bridges, bridges to the Universal Windows Platform.

The first bridge brings website technology over apps.  This is available today in a public SDK build.  For websites the intent is simple:  Take advantage of native Windows APIs opportunistically from your website, distributed through our store, and invoke the website as an app.

Second, there are literally millions of programs out there that leverage longstanding Windows technologies like Win32, .NET.  We’re bringing technology that allows existing Windows applications to be distributed through the store, giving them access to the store promise and generally allowing them to reuse code.  Now, this bridge is also coming soon.

Third, we’re working to help developers reuse code from Android apps.  This bridge is also coming soon, and for now we want to be clear, apps developed in this way will only work on Windows 10 mobile.

And finally, tools are coming to help reuse code from iOS apps to create Windows apps.

So what should be clear is that we intend to make it much, much easier to reuse code, a broad range of code, and bring that content to the Windows 10 platform, and distribute it through the Windows Store, one store with apps, games, music, movies, TV shows, and soon desktop software and much more.

We’re supporting the widest array of payment instruments, of course credit cards, but PayPal, Alipay, Bitcoin, and importantly and we think in a differentiated way is mobile operator billing, including soon PC mobile operator billing without a SIM card.  We’ve got more than 90 mobile operators signed up in more than 50 locations around the world.  We’re also going to offer a store specifically for business.

Now, our goal in the midterm is a simple one, getting 1 billion users highly engaged on the Windows 10 platform, over the midterm.  So think about three years.

A critical first step is upgrading our installed base.

Today, there’s about 1.5 billion Windows devices operating around the world.  Now, some are running XP, a few run Vista, a lot of them are on 7, a growing number on Windows 8 and 8.1.

And our strategy is simple:  upgrade as many as possible of these devices through a free upgrade to Windows 10.  The offer is going to be open for one year, and the upgrade is free for the serviceable life of the device.

Eligible devices include those running genuine, I underline genuine, versions of Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 update and Windows Phone 8.1.

So this Monday, Monday of this week we began accepting reservations for the free upgrade. Around the world, a new Windows icon began appearing in system trays of tens of millions of PCs, the Get Windows app.  And this app will make it really easy to take advantage of this limited time offer to reserve your free upgrade to Windows 10.

Clicking on the Windows icon or the notification will open the Get Windows 10 application, launching the app.  The app is a great way to learn more about Windows 10.  It’s a great way, has great tools to check the compatibility of your machine with Windows 10, and it’s an easy way to reserve your free upgrade.

If you don’t see the app, go to Windows.com and click on Reserve Upgrade. You’ll be taken to the upgrade page, which will explain how to discover and activate the app.

Alternately, it will explain why the app might not be present, for example, the version not being eligible like XP or the machine is domain joined, or the device doesn’t have a genuine — we cannot detect a genuine Windows operating system.  So this reservation process was engineered for our install base of genuine machines.

Now, what about the machines that are currently being sold today?  We’re working super hard with our partners — that’s you, all of you — to ensure that machines being sold today will upgrade smoothly to Windows 10, so consumers can buy one and get 10 free.

And all of this is in anticipation of the big day, and that day is July 29th, 2015, the dawn of Windows 10 around the world.

On that day those who reserve Windows 10 will begin getting their free upgrades.  New 8.1 devices will have access out of the box to the upgrade.  New devices preinstalled with Windows 10 will begin being sold.

So here’s a short video to remind you of some of the incredible, amazing features of Windows 10.

(Video segment.)

TONY PROPHET:  So together we are going to build amazing new devices that are going to empower people to create, discover, learn, share and play in incredible new ways.

We’re building Windows 10 to deliver on four consumer promises, first, deliver on the fundamentals, what people expect out of a powerful operating system, like performance, compatibility, of course security and reliability.

Second, making Windows 10 feel tailored to you, personalized, delivering the most personal and natural experiences like Cortana, which introduces natural language interaction to a broad range of devices, from the phone all the way up to the PC, including features like contextual search and reminders and cool things like proactive suggestions based on your needs, the context, or anticipating your intent.

Third, lighting up an amazing range of devices, embracing all the devices that people have, from the technologies like Continuum, which can sense whether you’re in a mouse and keyboard input mode or a touch-first input mode, and adjust the UI accordingly.

It’s also why we’re improving things like the gaming technology performance, bringing things like DX12 and then bringing Xbox content and Xbox features to the PC, enabling gameplay streaming and Xbox Live services on the PC.

And finally, Windows 10 promises to give users new tools to simply be more productive, like our new browser, Microsoft Edge, designed for the modern Web, with great features like writing directly on a Web page, annotating or typing on a Web page, and being able to share those annotations, or having Cortana right there whenever you need her.

For businesses we’re investing in these four promises, first, protecting businesses against modern security threats, with features like Device Guard to protect against malware, and Enterprise Data Protection that protects your data not just when it’s on the device but when it travels in or outside of the protected domain, as well as breaking new ground in multifactor authentication and bringing features like Windows Hello to help eliminate the need for passwords.

Second, we’re enabling businesses to manage continuous innovation.  We’re calling this Windows as a Service.  And the intent is to keep all of your devices up to date with the latest features and the latest security fixes.

Third, it’s all about reinventing productivity, starting from the gold standard, and that’s Office.

And finally, we’re going to light up these innovations on an unprecedented portfolio of devices, unmatched in the industry.  You’re going to hear a lot more about that from Nick in the time coming ahead of me.

So our priorities are clear:  We are going to usher in the era of more personal computing.  We’re going to bring one platform across our entire device family.  And our priority is to get 1 billion people highly engaged on the Windows 10 platform over three years.

So I hope you agree, we’re on an incredible journey with Windows 10, and we’re thrilled that you’re our partners in this journey.

Now, I’d like to invite Roanne Sones, she’s a general manager on our engineering team, to show you some of the amazing, exciting features of Windows 10 in action.  Roanne, please join us.  (Applause.)

ROANNE SONES:  Hi, everybody.  My name is Roanne Sones.  I’m part of the Windows engineering team.  And I’m specifically responsible for managing our partner and customer ecosystem and input into the Windows 10 product.

I’ve been on this journey with many of you since the start of Windows 7, carrying that on into Windows 8, into Windows 8.1 update, and now ultimately with Windows 10.

It’s something that I’m very excited about.  I’m bullish about what we’ve done together with Windows 10.  I’m bullish about the fact that no customer experiences Windows 10 on their own.  It’s lit up by the power of this room and the innovation that you’re putting into your products.

And I’m excited to actually spend a little bit of time demoing our Windows 10 release.

So I’m going to go ahead and get started here.  I’m going to just get started on this device right here.  As you can see, what we’re looking at actually is the Windows 10 desktop.

Now, this should hopefully look really, really familiar.  Lots of our customers are on Windows 7.  We learned, potentially a hard way in Windows 8, the importance of familiarity and keeping a number of concepts familiar to people as they move through the journey of their Windows operating system.

So let’s go ahead and look at this.  You can see here I’ve got my familiar desktop.  My recycle bin is where it should be.  You’ve got your system tray items over here.  I can pin a number of things to my taskbar.  I can right click.  I can have jump list support, you know, something that a number of Windows 7 customers use.  I can unpin this program from the taskbar and really personalize it and customize it.

And probably most importantly, you know, the thing that jumps out the most to everybody here is the addition of the Start button and a Start Menu back to Windows 10. I’ve actually been using Windows 10 for so long that I don’t actually even remember a world in Windows 8 where I no longer have a Start Menu.

So I’m excited when you go ahead and you click the Start Menu here, you can see here again continuing what’s familiar.

You can look here and see your most used items.

We’ve got a number of experiences here that we dock and are really quick access and available to you.  Power is one that stands out to me.  This is something that again in a customer’s journey from Windows 7 to Windows 8 all of a sudden power was kind of buried behind three clicks in the charms bar.  So we listened to our customers.  We’re incorporating that into the development of Windows 10, and we’re really thinking about how that customer journeys through the product to have something that is familiar.

Now, one of the stats that surprises me and I think will surprise a number of folks in this room here today is the most satisfied customer that we have for Windows is actually a Windows 8.1 customer with touch.  That to me tells me that there’s a number of concepts we introduced in Windows 8 that we want to bring forward in a familiar and fresh way for our customers.

We started that by bringing together what is the Windows 7 Start Menu and bringing in Live Tiles, so you can go here and see a set of Live Tiles.  They’re at-a-glance information.  You don’t have to open the application, and you can instantly see and get information at your fingertips.

What’s great about this here is you’re actually seeing a mashup.  There’s a set of Win32 applications here and there’s a set of new Universal Windows Applications that are all mixed in together.

One of the other lessons that we’ve really learned through this journey of developing the operating system is the importance of Microsoft first-party applications actually taking advantage of the operating system.

So what’s exciting about this, you can see here as part of this experience as I scroll up, you can see here I’ve got my traditional Win32 applications, but what’s great about this is we’re also investing in a set of Universal Windows Applications with Office that are going to be touch-first, that are going to be optimized for a more mobile experience, touch-first experience, and scale great down into not just your PC experiences but into your two-in-ones and into your tablets.

That really does kind of help land I think the message that Tony was talking about in terms of our Universal Windows Applications.  These are applications that a developer writes once, scales across all of their devices.  It’s one store.  You submit it once and it literally scales to everything.  That flywheel, that motion, that efficiency for a developer, that’s something that only Windows has to offer, and that we’re excited to see the developer flywheel get started.

So maybe what I’ll go ahead and do here is there’s a set of Universal Windows Applications that come preinstalled and for free as part of Windows.  You can see a few of them here today.  I’m going to go ahead and click on maps.

You’ll see that maps, as you would expect, it loads full screen.  I’ll go ahead and I’m just going to click on our location, so you can see exactly where we are here in the TICC.  This is something that is as expected.  As a Windows 8 customer they gave us feedback, it loaded full screen, but what you can now see is that we’ve kept the taskbar.  There was a challenging moment when customers are transitioning from Windows 7 to Windows 8 where all of a sudden they felt like they lost their controls, they lost their way on how to navigate.  It no longer kind of felt familiar.  So we’re making sure that we continue some of that heritage from Windows 7 forward into this experience.

What’s also great, I’m just going to go ahead here and click on the left-hand side, you’ll see favorites, Din Tai Fung.  So this is sort of interesting.  So Din Tai Fung is actually a restaurant that we have in Bellevue, Washington, in the USA.  It’s renowned for having epic lines.  It’s a hugely, hugely popular restaurant.  And it was actually the home of Din Tai Fung here in Taipei.

And so when I was asking my friends, you know, ultimately where should I go, what restaurant recommendations should I have for my Computex 2015 visit, they recommended to me that I should go to the original Din Tai Fung.

What’s interesting about that is I actually had that favorite on my phone.  I saved that favorite on my phone, and now here I am using my PC, and because of the synching that we have with the Universal Application Platform up to the cloud, that’s now accessible and available to me here on my PC, automatically happened, everything done in the background.

Another interesting thing here that we’ve done with our Universal Windows Applications is we’ve made them a lot more like your traditional Win32 apps.  So I’m going to go ahead and drag to app bar, and now all of a sudden you can see that it’s windowed.  Now there’s really not that big of a difference in terms of how a customer would interact with a Universal Windows App versus a Win32 app.  You see that it’s also pinned down here on my lower taskbar, so it really is interactive and familiar to those Windows 7 customers.

I’m going to go ahead and snap the app here on the left-hand side.  What’s great about this is looking at some of the resizing that we can do here as I go ahead and narrow this application up.  You can see here that this is a lot more like a traditional phone view and phone application.  I’ve got a phone here right now with the exact same Universal Windows App, again one app that the developer put in the store that I’ve got available here both on a phone and on my PC.  And you can see that the view is exactly the same on what I’m seeing on my PC and what I’m seeing on my phone.

What’s interesting about that is the developer just has to submit one set of assets and Windows takes on all the work to dynamically scale that application based off of the screen resolution and the screen size that you’re actually using on those specific devices.

So probably what I’ll do next is most folks don’t actually use their PC with only one app open.  So let me just go ahead and open a few other applications.

I’m going to open our insider hub here, and I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to open File Explorer, and let’s go ahead and open documents.

What’s interesting to me is I actually never shut down my PC anymore.  I just keep adding apps and apps and apps.  I’ve got literally tens, if not potentially at times hundreds, of things open on my desktop.  Alt-tab is my friend.  You know, I use alt-tab all the time to navigate between the different files and folders that I have available.

The telemetry data that we actually had in terms of how customers, not Roannes of the world, are using Windows is that only 6 percent of customers actually knew about the alt-tab shortcut.  That is just astounding to me when I think about the efficiency that it makes for me and how I’m using my device, and the inefficiency that we now have in Windows where customers are spending lots of time minimizing, maximizing in order to navigate the different applications that they would have open on their PC.

So what we’ve added in Windows 10 is this Task View.  You go ahead and click on the Task View button on your Taskbar you can instantly see a new view where we visually describe all of the applications that a user has open on their device.  Single click you can go in and instantly access and bring an application to the forefront of focus for that specific activity that you’re completing.

Now I’m actually going to stay here on the Insider Hub.  I think this is a pretty interesting app.  And I’ll actually just take a minute to talk about that, the Windows Insiders.  So if I think about my personal journey within the Windows group, from Windows 7, Windows 8 and into 8.1 and now Windows 10, there’s two things that stand out to me which are pretty starkly different in terms of the development approach that we’ve been taking for Windows 10.  And that’s the creation of our Windows Insider Program, and it’s also the creation of our approach to flighting in-development builds of Windows.  We are being more transparent and more collaborative than ever before in how Windows 10 is being developed.

We have over 4 million Windows Insiders that are actually helping us get prerelease builds.  They’re testing out those builds.  They’re making feature recommendations on what they want to see changed.  And this is all happening while we’re actually in development.

I felt previously you’d develop it and keep your fingers crossed that you had the right customer input in mind, release it to the world, and then you’d kind of wait and see.  Now they can be involved, those customers can actually be involved while we’re developing the product.  Think about the confidence that the Redmond view is actually a view that the rest of the world is looking for in how they use Windows on devices.

So let’s go ahead and look at this specific Insider Hub app.  This app is actually one of the ways, and hopefully there’s a lot of Insiders in here, I can’t quite see all the hands in the air, but the Insider Hub app is one of the ways that we actually communicate to our Windows Insiders.  You can see here we’ve got some Quests.  You can see some interesting things here in terms of announcements.  We highlight a number of folks within Windows who are actually helping us and part of the engineering team.  You can see alerts and specific things that would be available as part of the product.  And then you can see your insider profile.

This is actually a demo account, because I look at this and I see that it says that I’ve provided zero Windows feedback, and zero up votes, and I have to attest that I’m a much better Windows employee than what my demo test account says here.

So let’s go ahead and look at the quest.  I talked a little bit about Task View as a way of actually bringing that alt-tab functionality to the masses for people who aren’t comfortable and familiar with keyboard shortcuts.  I’m actually going to go ahead and click in the Snap Quest.  Quests are things or guidance we give to our Insiders to help direct them to new things that we’ve put into each one of the subsequent builds.  And so in particular I want to talk a little bit about the Snap feature, because this is another way that customers really resonated in Windows 7 and Windows 8 in terms of how they actually accessed and interact with applications.

So Snap is a feature where you can put windows side-by-side.  You’ll see here I’m full screen.  It tells me to open a few windows.  I’m reading kind of steps here as a Windows Insider would.  We’ve already completed that.  So let’s go ahead and Snap the window by selecting it.  I’m going to take it from the top of the app bar, snap it to the left-hand side, and you’ll see that Windows 10 automatically suggests, because we can tell that you’re trying to compare two applications side-by-side, to say what is it that you want of the applications you have open you want to compare to.

I’m going to go ahead and click documents.  Now what’s interesting here is I actually think it’s common to have two versions of File Explorer open.  So I’m going to go ahead and go to my File Explorer view here.  I’m going to dock this to the corner this time.  You’ll see it snap in the lower right-hand quadrant.  So we have quadrant support.  This is an innovation in addition to what we started in Windows 8.  I’m going to go ahead and click document.  So now you can see it’s super easy to essentially drag and drop and move files back and forth between my two file folder views.  So this kind of gives you a snapshot, I think, in terms of just how to interact with your applications.

Now, to me, the Windows Insider Program only really works if we actually have proof points of things that we’ve done differently, feature changes that we’ve made as a result of their input.  So I want to actually spend a little bit of time going back to Task View here, and I’ll talk specifically about some of the changes that we’ve made in our implementation based off of the customer feedback we’ve been getting throughout the development.

You’ll see here, in addition to seeing the applications I have available, you also have a view of two desktops.  So I’m going to go ahead and click my second desktop.  What’s interesting here is this is actually my personal desktop.  At Microsoft, your work device is kind of your personal device.  You take it home with you every night.  It’s something I actually use in the evenings as I’m multitasking between work and personal.

And I always used to have those awkward moments, where I’d bring the device back in, and take that back in to work with me the next morning.  My day commonly starts with a meeting, as I’m sure many of yours do as well.  I’d project up, and then all of a sudden the history of whatever it was I happened to be doing yesterday evening at my home was on display for everybody in my meeting to see.

And so what I’ve actually got here, and what I’ve actually done is here is to separate that out now in Windows 10.  I can have my personal view.  So whether I’ve got my photos of my kids, whether I’ve got games that I’m actually searching for them, it’s a richer way of basically separating out what I’ve specifically done here versus what I can do on my work desktop.  Now that’s how I’ve chosen to work with multiple desktops, but I’m sure that customers are all going to basically create their own way.

So I want to go back specifically to what we’ve — I want to go back to my first desktop here and talk a little bit about some of the feedback that the Windows Insiders have asked us about.  They gave us feedback that they wanted to be able to easily navigate between desktops.  And so what they specifically talked about was let’s go ahead and I want to be able to take an application that I’ve got here, I want to be able to drop it in a desktop, I can go back to my desktop here and now you can instantly see that the File Explorer has now navigated from my first desktop into my second desktop.

They also gave us feedback that they wanted to be able to instantly create a brand new third desktop.  So I’m going to go ahead and click File Explorer here, go into the new desktop, drag and drop and you’ll see here that I now instantly have created a brand new third desktop by just dragging and dropping my files.  I’m going to go to my keyboard here, control-Windows-arrow, and you’ll see that we can now quickly and easily navigate across the various desktops that you would have open and available.

So one of the interesting things that I mentioned in terms of the volume of Insiders I’ve had with 4 million people is our ability to actually run experiments.  So one of the interesting things that we did was we weren’t quite sure how to think about the Taskbar, should the Taskbar show you all the applications that you have available across all of your desktops, should it really be that global view, or should your Taskbar really be specific to a specific desktop that you’re using?

And so what we actually did was we ran an A/B test.  We literally created two builds.  We sent one build out to half of the Insiders where the Taskbar was global.  We sent another build out to the other half of the insiders where we said the Taskbar was local.  And then we actually understood telemetry on how they were using it.  We surveyed them, asked them for their feedback.  We asked them how satisfied they were with the experience.  And then we added up all of that feedback to then inform right when we were developing the feature what decision we should make.  And it was actually interesting.  It was resoundingly strong to call out specifically the way people wanted Taskbar to interact was within your local desktop and not show everything that was globally relevant.

We then took that feedback; we also applied it to alt-tab.  So when you are alt-tabbing that’s now a localized view within that desktop as opposed to the breadth of what you have available across all of your desktops.  So that’s just a snapshot in my mind of a few of the things that we’ve done based off of Insider feedback and a few of the things that we’ve done to really take familiar experiences, bring them forward into Windows 10 and freshen them up in new ways.

I kind of go back to the quote that we actually heard Satya say where he said we need to take customers from needing Windows, to choosing Windows, to loving Windows.  I think about the things that I’ve really kind of highlighted and shown here.  To me that’s about the transition from needing Windows to choosing Windows.  I think people get excited.  They see this they get excited about Windows 10.  They want to use Windows 10.  The reality, though, is that going from choosing Windows to loving Windows needs to be something more.  It needs to be something more personal.

I think about when I use the love word, both in my personal life as well as around devices, it needs to be something that gets me really energized, really excited.  I believe our strategy and how we are working with you to enable that is through more personal computing.  It’s empowering people in new and different ways to actually interact with their devices and basically really pushing the technology in ways that they hadn’t even envisioned and thought that was possible.  So it’s the surprise moments that really get people excited and energized and in love with the devices and wanting to tell their friends and family to go out and buy the latest and greatest.

So where I wanted to spend my time for the second half of talking about some of the highlights that we’ll do for Windows 10 is talking through some of those places where I think we’re really pushing the initial boundaries on making computing more personal.  So I’m going to start here.  I’m going to move to a two-in-one device.  You can see here that it’s set up in a traditional desktop environment.  I’ve got multiple windows open.  It’s a more high-precision interaction here in terms of mouse and keyboard input.

What I’m going to go ahead and do is show how you can through Continuum transition this into a tablet experience.  So let’s go ahead, I’m going to open the device here, flip this back, and you can see here now — essentially you’ll see a toast happening in the lower right-hand corner where I like to go into tablet mode, I’m going to click yes and you’ll see a couple of things that have just happened when that took place.

First off, Maps went full screen.  Personally I love that.  A map to me is something that I want to interact with touch on.  I want to be able to zoom in.  It’s a much more natural way for me to interact with a map in a touch-first way.  The other thing that scaled is the start menu.  So I can click the start button, you can see here that my start menu is now gone forward into a full touch mode, we’re kind of embracing what was great about the Windows 8.1 experience where our highest satisfied customers were experiencing with touch.

Then the other thing that’s interesting is basically at your fingertips we really thought about our edge gestures.  We introduced the charm, which was a swipe in from the right- hand side in Windows 8.  And we’ve continued that, but in a little bit more familiar way.  So if we swipe in from the right hand side you see the Action Center.  For those of you who are using Windows Phone this is actually going to look very familiar.  That’s because it’s the exact same code.  As we thought about getting that kernel, that core of Windows down into a really tight, small, unit that scale across all devices, there’s a bunch of things that can be shared in that core.

The notifications and Action Center is one example of those.  What’s also great about this is if I dismiss a notification on my PC then when I go to my Windows Phone that notification is also dismissed.  I don’t get asked a second time about that same event.  We’ve got awareness of you as the user and your identity as it’s scaled across your devices.  If I go ahead and swipe from the left-hand side this is, again, another gesture that we’ve added.  You’ll see here that we’ve basically gone into that passkey, that alt-tab mode so you can see all of the applications that you have open and available to you.  Alt-tab is a pretty hard thing to do in a touch-first mode where you don’t have a keyboard and so it’s now a very quick and easy way of empowering customers to get a more empowered and personal experience.

So I’m going to go ahead and go back to my map here.  I’m going to go and toggle back from my more touch-first and immersive experience.  You’re going to see the same toast or notification on whether I want to exit tablet mode.  I click yes to that.  That toast is something that the customer can actually choose to automate so that it automatically navigates between the two modes of Windows.  Windows as an operating system is really the only operating system in the world to actually dynamically change our user experience and application experience based off of the state that you’re in the device.

I’m thrilled about the collaboration that we’ve had with you in terms of bringing this experience to life.  Your existing 8.1 devices are going to light up with this experience in Windows 10.  And then when I think about the new devices for Windows 10 the push to adopt touch into more form factors, the innovation we’re seeing in hinge designs, as well as the software work that you’re actually doing to really key in and trigger off that hardware event so that that dynamic transition from a more precise input method to a touch and immersive input method is handled on behalf of the user.  So thank you for the hard work that we’ve got to really make Continuum a great experience across a range of devices.

The second more personal experience that I wanted to talk about here actually teed off of some of the work that we’ve been doing with our new browser for Windows 10, which is Microsoft Edge.  There’s a set of features, first off, the Microsoft Edge browser is something that needs to be blazing fast.  It’s compatible with the Web as we know it today.  But there are three things that I think it does that really empowers the way customer would want to interact with a browser.

The first is Reading Mode; this is your ability to take any Web page and with the click of a button in the upper right-hand corner stream that down into a much cleaner way of actually consuming and reading the content.

The second thing is contextual interaction with Cortana.  I’m actually going to talk about Cortana in a little bit, so I won’t demo that in detail right now.

And then the third piece that I think is interesting here is the concept of pen and touch and inking and annotating on the Web and sharing that with others.

So what you’re actually looking at here today, this is our Windows.com home page.  You can see that it’s highlighting Windows 10.  The thing that I love about the highlight here is the first thing it’s doing is saying “Shop Now,” go ahead and get that device, that 8.1 device, to have confidence that that’s going to work for you.

I’m actually going to get started on this using mouse and keyboard, because I think that’s the opening price point experience for how many people are going to go ahead and experience Microsoft Edge.  So I’m going to go ahead and click on “Shop Now.”  You can see here that it highlights a great set of 8.1 devices that we’re all excited and ready to have capable for Windows 10.

I’m going to go ahead here and go ahead and make an annotation.  So I clicked in the upper right-hand corner.  You can see here now that you have commenting on Web pages.  So I can click on the comment and I can talk about how, check out this great line up.  Directly on the Web page, you can now annotate, make comments, share those with friends and customers.

The other thing I’m going to do is, this is sort of your opening price point good experience, is you can actually have a better and best experience by incorporating touch and by incorporating both active as well as EM-based pen into the experience.

So what I’m going to go ahead and do, you can go ahead and touch here in the upper left-hand corner. Let’s make sure that’s happening there.  And then I can go ahead and write just with my finger, we love you.  There we go.  Thank you partners for all the great work here.  So you can see just with my finger, I’m actually now able to go ahead and write directly on the webpage.  This gets even better if you’re using Active pen solutions or EM-based solutions, because you can take even more advantage of our Windows 10 Direct Ink APIs.  We support things like pressure sensitivity, so you can go from fine point to really thick point; tilt, latency.  There’s a number of really great innovations there.

So I’m really looking on the breadth of devices that you’re building to think about those options where you want to bring pen to the forefront and really explore some of the great investment that we’ve got for Windows 10.  I know we’ve been doing that so far today, and I’m excited about the breadth of devices that Nick is going to talk about that are going to take advantage of some of these technologies.

So we’ve talked a bit about — we’ve talked a little bit about Continuum.  We’ve talked a little bit about Edge.  The next thing that I maybe wanted to talk about here is Windows Hello.

So this is an interesting scenario.  If I think about one thing that everybody commonly does on their device, it’s the need to login.  On phones, lots of these devices in your phones are not password protected in any way.  On PCs, most PCs are password protected, but it’s actually one of the No. 1 support and call drivers, education institutions.  Thirteen-year-olds don’t exactly remember their passwords all the time, so they’re routinely forgetting their passwords.

Within an enterprise, the same thing, you’ve got customers who have been traveling for a while.  They’ve not logged in.  They’ve not refreshed their password, and it becomes a sort of problematic thing for really requiring an IT staff to help you navigate and move across these things.

So with Windows Hello, we’re really moving to a password free world.  I’ve gone ahead and logged in my profile.  It was actually a very quick and easy thing to do.  I’m going to go stand in front of my device here and sit down at my desk, make sure I’m looking at the camera.  It instantly senses me and logs me directly into my desktop, purely based off of my face.  Pretty exciting.  (Applause.)

So I’m going to go ahead and lock this.  What’s great about this is this is using our biometrics framework for Windows 10.  So this happens to be an Intel RealSense IR-based camera.  It also has 3-D capabilities.  But you can also use fingerprint, iris, a number of things.  So there’s a real opportunity here, I think, to innovate in terms of the different designs that you guys can think about putting directly into your hardware.

I’m going to go ahead and do that one more time.  I come and sit down, log into my device, it see me.  Excellent.

What I’m actually going to show here is an application.  Let me just pick the source, pick our camera.  So you can go ahead and see me.  I look super eerie, kind of alien-like right now.  What this is actually showing you is this is the infrared.  It’s basically picking up the heat of my skin.  We can see here, let’s go ahead and dim the lights.  And you’ll see when we dim the lights it changes nothing about how I look, nothing at all.

So that’s great, because the reality is when we think about how people are going to interact and use this they’re going to be in all kinds of ambient light settings, whether they’re inside, whether you’re outside, whether you’re getting ready to watch a movie in your home, we need to be able to support that across a whole bunch of ambient light scenarios.  So that gives me really great confidence when we think about these IR-based solutions.

Another interesting thing here, again, is the importance of actually having enterprise- grade authentication.  This is so that people can’t spoof you.  And so I have, again, same thing, I look like a creepy alien when you look at me through an infrared camera.  I have a super-sized headshot of Roanne.  I don’t encourage you to actually print like super-sized faces of yourself.  It’s sort of strange to look at yourself kind of in the third person.

So I’m going to go ahead and be Roanne.  I’m going to stand in front of the device here.  And you can see that — it can tell it’s as sheet of paper.  It can tell that this piece of paper doesn’t have blood running through it and warmth and sensitivity here.  I’m going to go ahead, throw out the picture, choose me and again it instantly logs me back into the experience.  (Applause.)

So it’s more secure.  It’s exciting.  It’s more secure.  It is so thrilling to see people use this for the very first time.  It truly is one of those experiences that I think elicit that kind of emotion, gets people excited and wanting to tell their friends to go out and get the latest and greatest hardware on Windows 10.

So the next area that I wanted to spend, in terms of things we’re doing together for more personal computing, was to talk a little bit about Cortana.  You’ve seen this in some of the videos.  I’m just going got go ahead and show you here Cortana is actually — she is familiar probably to you if you’re using a Windows Phone.  She is truly the first personal digital assistant.

We’re going to be bringing her from the phone and into the PC.  Again, that’s that concept of the Universal Windows Platform and being able to have a whole range of experiences shared across your devices.  But, she’s also familiar.  In Windows 7 we had a search window here in the Taskbar.  Now we have Cortana who is this mash-up of search if you’re using a mouse and keyboard, but something richer if you’ve really invested in the appropriate audio technology to really light her up.  So you can go ahead and see here she is pulling results from the Web.  I can customize this if there’s specific things, if I like entertainment, or I like sports, or whatnot.  I can tell her what I like.  She’ll do a better job of actually surfacing things up to me as part of this.

She’s powered by our Bing search engine.  So what’s interesting here, let’s go ahead and ask her a question.  Let’s see how she does here.  How high is Taipei 101?  Does anybody know?

CORTANA:  1,671 feet.

ROANNE SONES:  Pretty exciting, I have to say I was floored when I actually saw this desktop experience and desktop wallpaper there.  So let’s go ahead, let’s try something else.  So she’s just proven to us how she can search the Web, pull results from the Web and make those front and center in her responses back to you.  Let’s see how she does with something locally on my device.  Show me PowerPoint slides about the charity auction.  Let me try one more time, because it’s charity versus charity, I need to pronounce my T’s a little bit better here.  Show me PowerPoint slides about the charity auction.

Oh no, I’m Canadian, so maybe it’s my Canadian accent.  I’m going to try one more time, one more time, let’s see.  Show me PowerPoint slides about the charity auction.  There you go.  (Applause.)  So what you can see here, in addition to how she’s picking up three ways that Roanne can say charity, is pulling information that I have locally stored on my device, but she’s also pulling information from OneDrive.  And so you can see that she’s pulling from the Web, she’s pulling locally and she’s bringing a bunch of relevant information and content to you.

So those are all great examples of how she can help you aggregate, help you find, help you search in more efficient ways.  But any great truly digital assistant also needs to be able to help you do new things.  So I’m going to go ahead and try one more thing here.  Remind me to pick up my daughter tomorrow at 5:00 p.m.

CORTANA:  OK.  I can remind you to pick up my daughter at 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, sound good?

ROANNE SONES:  Yes.

CORTANA:  Great.  I’ll remind you.  You can also see it in your reminders list any time.

ROANNE SONES:  And so let’s go ahead and just look at the reminders list here.  And you’ll see the reminder pop up.  It’s interesting, apparently I’ve also just given Cortana a new daughter, which I don’t think she knew that she had.

So let’s just go ahead and shut that down for now.  But, this is an experience that I think is, again, one of those things that really gets people to have an emotional connection to the things that they’re doing.  It really gets people excited.  I’m thrilled about some of the work that we’ve had collaborating with a number of you as you think about the sort of audio quality, the microphone arrays that we’re putting into these systems and these devices.  I think we’re going to have a really great lineup in Windows 10 that’s Cortana ready, across a range of devices.

CORTANA:  Sorry, I didn’t get that.

ROANNE SONES:  That was a lot for you to get, Cortana.  That was a lot for you to get.

So the last area that I want to talk a little bit about is DirectX 12 and gaming investments that we’re making for Windows 10.  So when we actually — from a Microsoft history perspective we pulled all of the operating system divisions together to start Windows 10 development.  In doing so we pulled the Xbox team and the Xbox operating system team into the same team.  What’s been great about that is that we’ve now been able to take all the horsepower, all the assets, all the great work that the Xbox OS team has done and we’re now able to bring that into the work that we’re doing from an overall PC perspective.

So you’re going to see some really compelling things.  You’ve got first-party titles, again, because of our Universal App Platform.  First-party titles that are actually coming from Xbox are now going to be available on your PC.  We can preserve your state so you can be playing an Xbox game, pause it, you can go to your tablet or to your other device, get started on that same game and we’ll know where you are.  We have the context from when you paused it on one device, your console, and got started using that on your PC.

We’re sharing entitlement; we’re sharing basically your profile across your Xbox into your PC environment.  We’re even making it possible to use your Xbox peripherals with your PC.  And we’re even doing work to stream in-home, over the Wi-Fi network your Xbox games onto your tablets and tablet devices, which is great, because you can now have a more — less, I would say, capable tablet, but being powered by the horsepower of your Xbox.

So those are a set of things that we’re doing.  What really lights that up in Windows 10 is DirectX 12.  This is a fairly low-level platform technology for us, as I mentioned.  This is a set of graphics APIs.  I constantly actually hound our team for where we’re doing a bunch of low-level hardware work and if you don’t have a very visual way of presenting this to the customer then I really push on, OK, well why are we doing this work?

So I have a pretty compelling video here from one of our Chinese development partners.  And there’s three things I really want you to look for in this video.  The first is how quickly this developer was able to take their DirectX 11 app and get it ready for DirectX 12.  The second thing is I want you to look at the visual experience.  It’s going to be smoother.  There’s going to be more opponents.  There will be a lot of different things when you’re comparing the DirectX 11 and the DirectX 12 experience.  And then the third thing I want you to look at is the actual CPU and GPU usage.  We’re seeing up to 50 percent less CPU time and up to 20 percent less GPU time for essentially performing the exact same task between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12.

What that means and what that translates to for the customer is that they’re now going to be able to get way much more battery life on a single charge, because we’re not having to actually intensely use the processor as we were previously having to do on DirectX 11.  So take a look at those three things.  Let’s go ahead and roll the video.

(Video segment.)

ROANNE SONES:  Excellent.  So with that, you know, I want to say thank you.  I really, deeply believe that our ability to go from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows is something that only we can do together.  It’s going to take a marriage of our software and hardware to truly make that happen.  Thank you for your commitment to Windows 10, getting ready for July 29th, this is a big deal for us to accelerate getting these devices out into the hands of customers.

And I would like to, with that, bring Nick Parker out on stage, and he’s actually going to walk you through some of the hardware that you’ll see this holiday season.  (Applause.)

NICK PARKER:  Thank you.

So as Roanne left off, with our very unique position that we have together with Windows 10 and gaming where, quite frankly, we’re unparalleled in what we can actually do together in the gaming world with an incredible group of fans and a gaming which really has been something that Windows and Microsoft have continued to lead in with you, our hardware partners.

What I’m going to do is just kind of take you through some of that incredible technology, and I’m going to start with gaming.  What you see here, we have the Razr Blade, and this is, in fact, the 14-inch.  Now this device is available today running Intel Core i7.  Not only is this a really powerful gaming rig running Windows 10, which of course will be part of the upgrade, but this is also a great notebook, thin, light, incredible battery, stylish design, available today, but of course it will be a great Windows 10 device, taking all of that capability that we’ve got with Windows 10 in that unique world to gaming on that notebook from Razr.

The second device I’ll show you here is this MSI GT72 Dominator PC.  The reason why I love this PC so much is it’s clearly customizable.  You can see the LED lights, but also the innovation you see here.  This is an infrared set of sensors that enable eye-tracking.  So on this device you can actually track your eyes, and you can see it’s working there on Windows 10, a great piece of innovation from MSI.

This device we can see here is the Origin Millennium, a really awesome powerhouse of a gaming rig here.  And you see it’s running the new NVidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which will give you that DX12 capability that Roanne just displayed there, but massively customizable.  You can change the orientation of the motherboard here so you can set that device up how you’d like it along with the customization on the LED.

The Dell Alienware Area 51, again, liquid cooled box, very, very exciting rig, massive extensibility.

Again, all of these running the Intel Core Processor i7 in all of these.  But gaming is somewhere where we’re very differentiated, and Windows 10 just brings even more capabilities to gaming that’s unique, particularly as you start thinking about those Xbox scenarios on the PC.

The next category, and this is a category that we’ve all enjoyed so much growth in the last year, growing at over 50 percent, and that growth is not stopping.  So any of us who partner together on Windows devices in the two-in-one category, we’ve seen growth of some of that tablet volume moving to two-in-ones, as well as two-in-ones really bringing touch and type to the PC notebook experience as well.  That incredible hinge design on the Aspire R13 from Acer.  That beautiful Gorilla Glass surface there, you can see the metallic finish on that.  The ASUS T300t Chi running Core M from Intel, again, this is just such a beautiful device you cannot fail to be wowed by the thinness and the beauty of this device.  I never get tired of showing this device off.  But it’s a beautiful Windows 10 experience you can see running here.  Now all of these device are available today and will continue to give you that great upgraded experience.

Here we have the Lenovo Think Pad Yoga 14, the S3 version.  And, again, this fully converts, the 360 hinge that Lenovo have brought which will really bring Continuum to life, so you can go out and buy this today, and Windows 8.1 update, upgrade it free for Windows 10, use continuum, and then these various other capabilities, and obviously things like Skype with the multiarray mikes.  This also has pen and stylus, so it will work very well in that model.

This is the celebrated HP Spectre X360, beautiful design.  Again, you can see the very high-resolution glass, very thin, great battery life.  This is in fact the Core i7 model.  Beautiful design with that incredibly nicely machined C&C aluminum casing.  Very beautiful design, winning lots of awards, beautiful PC.

So this is the two-in-one category.  And then just to finish here with the Toshiba Z20t, and this actually has a huge battery life in terms of this device here, over 15 hours, and a pen.  A great horsepower machine and two-in-one.  So it’s detachable as well.

This is a growth category.  It will keep growing.  You’ll see more and more announcements from us and our partners.  But, again, these are phenomenal Windows 10 experiences.

Now this kind of mixed area that we’ve got here is showing you some of the growth that we have in new partnerships.  This device is actually from an OEM called Cube, and this is the Cube I7, an OEM, this is a detachable device here.  As you can see, very nice, nice design, but it starts to show where you start seeing growth in the ecosystem as people realize the business opportunity from our growing capabilities in terms of enabling and working with partners such as Intel or NVidia, you really start to see the breadth in partnerships, and people building their businesses on Windows.

This is the Emdoor 8.9-inch again, really nice tablet.  We’ve seen some great success in these devices, and well-celebrated.  We have some very, very aggressive Windows and Office pricing and licensing programs for people who are building these devices.  That’s the Emdoor 8.9.

And then another device here, we have the Lengda H200, really nice notebook, again, in that 11.6 form factor, beautiful design.  You kind of have this brushed metallic finish.

Two more devices, again, that we’ve seen announced very recently, this is a K Touch L9301 Windows Mobile Phone.  And, again, as you saw, that Windows 8.1 phones will get the free upgrade to Windows 10.  A nice design, this is the China Mobile 4G LTE device.  And, again, these are super partnerships.  These are new partners that have come to the Windows ecosystem in the last year.

The is the Q Mobile and the RW 1, again nice Windows Phone, very portable in this size, and people bringing new phones to market and building their businesses on Windows.  So that’s our new partnerships since last year.

This area is new devices, new form factors.  And this is kind of some of the early IoT wins that we’ve got where you see new partners bringing these new devices powered by services from Azure.  In fact, this first one here is the Foxconn device here, the Kangaroo device.  And that’s, in fact, a complete device, a complete PC here, with various different designs you have here.  And this is your full PC with a set of ports and peripherals that you can then plug in and it’s actually got this incredible capability where it’s added battery backup, so as you take it with you, and you can hot swap plug and play into your various peripherals as you can see there, running Windows 10 straight back up on screen.

This I talked about earlier as we announced that unique partnership with the incredible IP that Toshiba has across the Internet of Things solutions.  And this is, in fact, their driver recorder.  So this device would be mounted in a vehicle and will record everything that’s going on as well as back up to the cloud where Toshiba has built some solutions obviously with maps and data using Azure Services, and some of that unique Toshiba capability in both the hardware as well as the cloud solutions as we build that partnership together.  That’s a phenomenal device there.

And you can see really the Internet of Things devices becoming very real, very practical and using that power of Azure to actually be able to bring these solutions to market very fast.

This is the device I talked about earlier, the Environmental Data Logger from Toshiba.  And this is the ruggedized device that could have a battery life from two to six months depending on how it’s used, and this is what will actually be embedded within the cargo container, or within your high-value package or your high-value cargo that contains all of the sensors and all of the capability.  And, of course, it’s going up to the cloud through a hub or through a network, and then all of that data is then being read by Azure, being applied machine learning services to it, and then smart decisions being able to make from a logistics perspective, because all of that data from all of those sensors on that cargo, whether it’s on the high seas or in the air, is being processed.

This is the range of devices that we talked about from Crestron and, again, these are going through the Crestron cloud that sits as an Azure solution.  This is just a good example of the Crestron hub, and some of the connectivity.  And this is, of course, for these home automation solutions or home management solutions.  And they’re a good example of one of the sensors.

So this is, again, in market, come to market, very key devices powered by Azure and the cloud.

This is the most exciting of our areas now.  These are new devices not announced before that will be for Windows 10 devices.  And I’m going to start here with the Acer Z2310 all-in-one.  This is from Acer.  It’s a very, very nice portable all-in-one, obviously running Windows 10.  This is unannounced, so thank you our friends at Acer for enabling us to show this today.  As you can see, very nice portable all-in-one running Windows 10, and a super addition to any living room, or in fact a great desktop.  And these portable all-in-ones, particularly with the mobile battery technology, are getting more and more popular.

This is the new ASUS 100HA.  Again, a very nice device here, a super popular device, we saw incredible success together with ASUS as we took this to market in the last year.  Again, the detachable running Windows 10, Continuum will really bring these devices to life, particularly if you start thinking about also their use with Skype and so on.

Now this device here is certainly one or my favorites today, the ASUS Zen all-in-one 240.  And I just wonder if the camera can come in close here, because this really does start to show how you, our hardware ecosystem partners, really do a phenomenal job about putting some of that technology.  You can see these infrared 3-D cameras here in the bezel of the glass really bringing the power of Windows Hello in three dimensions to your PC.  So obviously running Windows 10 their beautiful design has six speakers.  The team at ASUS just do such a great job.

The next couple of devices I want to show, this one I think you’ve seen before.  This is the Dell XPS 13.  In fact, when this one went through the Forbes editorial team they said they would let go of their Macs for that device.  But, the thing I really want to show you apart from that wonderful glass and the carbon fiber surround and this is new, this is the Dell XPS 15.  So this is the bigger version of that product and it has this incredible infinity edge display from Dell.  That’s a beautiful design.  Look how thin that is, carbon fiber, but a tremendous notebook, particularly in that very, very popular 15-inch size.

The next two new announcements that I’d like to make in terms of this momentum of Windows 10 hardware are these two devices from HP.  This is a new device and this is really a sneak preview, so you’re getting an incredible treat here today form our friends at HP.  But, this is one of the new HP tablets, as you can see a full size keyboard.  It has a pen and you can see here we’ll just move that tablet out of the case, really beautiful.  Look at that stylish design on that nine-inch tablet, very, very cool design for HP.  Another design here and this is the new X2 from HP, with Bang and Olufsen speakers you can, again, see speakers side-by-side the glass, this really nice metal color.  It’s obviously a two-in-one, very good notebook and in that award-winning X2 chassis.

So the final of the new announcements, and it’s great to be able to show this from our friends Toshiba, it’s the new Toshiba two-in-one.  Again, this is a sneak preview, incredible glass here.  This enables Windows Hello with the latest biometric security technology, including face authentication camera, and it’s got an ultra-high-def 4K screen, as well.  And it’s optimized for Cortana.  So when this comes out this is all of our capability of Windows 10 in the hardware and I think it really goes to show that when you start thinking about Windows Hello, Continuum, Cortana, these are software innovations that really enable you to monetize the very best of your hardware innovation, whether it’s the 3-D cameras, whether it’s the incredible engineering you have in the hinges, multiarray microphones that enable high-fidelity Cortana experiences.

These are all ways that you can take that monetization that before we did a great job with touch and ink, but it really takes it to the next generation of you being able to design that hardware extension for some incredibly compelling features.  I mean how cool was that when Roanne was able to open up that PC with enterprise-grade security, through the infrared image of Roanne and her face.

So let’s just talk about the numbers.  What are the most important numbers that we really care about, 7-29-2015?  That is a couple of weeks away.  And I know we are all putting the finishing touches on our products, as we go through that final round of testing and feedback.  There are those of you who are writing drivers and capabilities and this is your opportunity to make sure that we all do that very last piece of quality work, as when we hit 7-29 the world is waiting for us together, whether it’s that last piece of finished manufacturing in the hardware lines, or as I said the driver of that final tuning of our software experience, we’re all counting on each other to get that done, to have the most monumental and wonderful launch together as we take in for the next generation of Windows computing.

We have 1.5 billion people who are using Windows today, of which 600 million of them are using four-year-old PCs.  That is real business revenue share and margin opportunity for everyone together in this room.  And with those capabilities that rely on hardware innovation that you’ve seen in Windows 10 today, we have a clear opportunity ahead of us, and a clear call to action as we execute together for brilliance.

There’s never been an opportunity like this as we launch Windows 10 when we’ve done so many things differently, designed from the ground up with your feedback.  And I just want to say thank you as we go forward together to launch Windows 10 on 7-29-2015.

And before I sign off, let me just leave you with a glimpse of what our partnerships will be like coming forward in the future, looking at how digital and analog are moving together and the lines between them are blurred as we start thinking about immersive experiences and building the hardware and software and services capability together in the world of holographics.

Thank you very much.  I appreciate your partnership.  See you at launch.  (Applause.)

END