Remarks by Satya Nadella, chief executive officer, in Orlando, Florida, on July 13, 2015.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella.
(Applause.)
SATYA NADELLA: Good morning. Good morning and welcome to WPC in Orlando. It’s fantastic to be back at WPC. As Cortana just reminded us, it’s been a tremendous year, a tremendous year of progress, a tremendous year of transformation. So I want to first start off by expressing my deepest gratitude and to thank you to each one of you for driving our collective success, but more importantly driving success of our customers.
What makes Microsoft unique is the people in this room, this partner ecosystem. (Applause.) Many technologies have come and gone, many business models have changed, customer expectations have changed. But what has remained constant is our commitment to this partnership, and WPC is where we come each year to celebrate the success we have together and also reaffirm that commitment. So thank you again and it’s fantastic to be back at WPC.
(Applause.)
I want to start the keynote off by anchoring us on our ambition. I want to talk about our mission and strategy, but I want to anchor it on what is the ambition that we collectively share, share for ourselves, but more importantly for our customers.
I want to start with our mission. In fact it was at WPC last year when I talked about this for the very first time, empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This has deep meaning for us. In fact, the way we got to this is by going back into our history and rediscovering that core sense of purpose, that soul that drove many a success in our past, a PC on every desk and every home, inventing desktop productivity, democratizing client-server computing, these are all things that we achieved together.
And now we move forward to a mobile-first, cloud-first world. There are many things unique about this mission. That is what I want us to center in, in everything that we do with every product, with every customer interaction. We care about empowerment. There is no other ecosystem that is primarily and solely built to help customers achieve greatness.
It is not about our products. We’re not definitely trying to convert our customers into products. We are focused on helping our customers achieve greatness through digital technology. We care about both individuals and organizations. In fact, that intersection of people and organizations is what is the cornerstone of what we represent as excellence and especially if you look around, WPC is where each year it hits me, is we’re a global company. We want to make sure that the power of technology reaches every country, every vertical, every organization irrespective of size.
These are all unique attributes. I want to keep going back to these. There will be many goals like the bold ones that we have achieved, many ambitions like the ones we have achieved. But what remains constant is this sense of purpose for why, the reason why we as an ecosystem exist, that sensibility is what we’ve got to keep coming back to.
And this is now a mission that we go and exercise in a cloud-first, mobile-first world. There are a couple of key attributes of what we mean by cloud-first mobile-first that I think are important for us to key in on. When we talk about mobile-first we are taking about the mobility of the experience. What do we mean by that? As we look out the computing that we are going to interface with in our lives, at home and at work, is going to be ubiquitous. We’re going to have sensors that recognize us. We’re going to have computers that we’re going to wear on us. We’re going to have computers that we touch, computers that we talk to, the computers that we interact with as holograms. There’s going to be computing everywhere.
But, what we need across all of this computing is our experiences, our applications, our data. And what enables that is, in fact, the cloud acting as a control plane that allows us to have that capability to move from device to device on any given day at any given meeting. So that core attribute of thinking of mobility, not being bound to a particular device, but it’s about human mobility, is very core to our vision.
Second, when we think about our cloud we think distributed computing will remain distributed. In fact, we think of our servers as the edge of our cloud. And this is important, because there are going to be many legitimate reasons where people will want digital sovereignty, people will want data residency. There is going to be regulation that we can’t anticipate today. And so we have to think about a distributed cloud infrastructure.
We are definitely going to be one of the key hyper-scale providers, but we are also going to think about how do we get computing infrastructure, the core compute storage network, to be distributed throughout the world. These may seem like technical attributes, but they’re key to how we drive business success for our customers, business transformation for our customers, because all of what we do collectively is centered on this core goal of ours, which is to help our customers transform.
When you think about any customer of ours they are being transformed to the power of digital technology and in particular software. There isn’t a company out there that isn’t a software company. And our goal is to help them differentiate using digital technology. We want to democratize the use of digital technology to drive core differentiation. It’s no longer just about helping them operate their business; it is about them excelling at their business using software, using digital technology.
It is about our collective ability to drive agility for our customers, because if there is one truth that we are all faced with and our customers are faced with it’s things are changing rapidly. And they need to be able to adjust to that. And so everything we do has to support that goal. How do they move faster? How do they interpret data quicker? How are they taking advantage of that to taking intelligent action?
And of course cost, but we keep coming back to this theme of business transformation throughout this keynote and throughout WPC, because that’s where I want us to center in on, what’s the value we are adding to the core of our customers and their ability to compete, their ability to create innovation. And anchored on that goal is our technical ambition, is our product ambition.
We have three bold ambitions that I want to talk about. I want to start off by talking about reinvention of productivity and business process. Central to this ambition is the reinvention of even the category definition of both business process and productivity. We don’t think of these things as separate things anymore. We want to bring together everything that is related to the core creation, communication, collaboration and business process and blend them together. So what Office 365 represents, what Dynamics represents, we want to bring these different products today into one set of services, which are extensible. And we want to do this in a way that all the other business application vendors, all the other productivity vendors, can also integrate this.
That is very important. It’s unique about the approach we are taking. And the reason why we want to do that is we believe the various category definitions have led to a bunch of impedance mismatches inside of our customers and how they achieve their greatness, their differentiation. And we need to break down those walls.
In fact, one of the other attributes that’s unique to how we approach things is that our tools are things that you can use both in your life and at work. What we are going to do with Wonderlist, what we are doing with Sunrise, and Outlook, and OneNote, and Sway and all of Office, these are tools that we want you to use in your life and at work, there’s no dissonance between the two.
We also want to build all of these applications, all of these tools knowing that we collaborate at the core. It can be a small team, it can be a startup, it can be a large network, which is not even bound to your own organization. This is where what we’re doing with social and Yammer, what we’re doing with Outlook Groups, what we’re doing with Active Directory, these are core to how we achieve a more dynamic, network-driven workplace.
We are not only building the tools, but we are bringing insight. Everything that we’re doing across Cortana, Delve and Power BI personally for me has been the thing that’s changed how I interact with Office 365 over the course of the last year. I start by talking to Cortana about my schedule. I look at Power BI every day for the leading indicators of our success. I look at Delve to discover. In fact, it’s the best visualization of what is happening inside of Microsoft. It is not about any reports that are sent to me. It is about exploration of the work being done inside of your organization.
And, of course, one of the attributes that I think is perhaps most salient, but most important, is how we harmonize the interest of friction-free adoption by users and consumers of our product and IT. This notion of people-centric security and management and identity is so central to what we are trying to do when we reinvent productivity in this process.
One of the dreams that I’ve had for a couple of years now is to really question what is the frontier of it? You’re going to see a lot of good, straight demos today of what is here and now and what we are going to do in the next year. But what is possible as we look out?
Just like last year when I was here I talked about how we can change how people communicate using Skype Translate and cross the language boundaries. What is the equal bold ambition for breaking free of any of the boundaries that we have today between how people come together, how applications come together and how devices come together, especially when you deeply introspect on the nature of our work?
We work to deal with exceptions. It’s not the happy path. It’s not like you get up in the morning and just get to work and everything just is automated. It is all about us bringing our ingenuity to solve problems that happen, challenges that appear, opportunities that we want to grab on to, and that requires us to be able to get more people involved. It ought to drive us to bring different applications together. It requires us to work across devices.
And so we’ve got a project started to say what’s that nature of work? How would we go about it doing something like that, where you’re trying to handle a task as opposed to going to each application? You’re trying to deal, let’s say, with how you’re going to overcome some churn issue in your customer base, you want to make some pricing changes, some offer changes. These are the kinds of real issues that we deal with on an everyday basis. But how will software and applications come together to support you in that?
So I want to first start off by showing you the first demo of what this frontier looks like by introducing Project GigJam and Julia White.
Julia.
(Applause.)
JULIA WHITE: Thanks, Satya.
Now Satya talked about exceptions, in this case customers at risk. And many of us here have faced that exact situation. And we appreciate the need to engage with multiple people, get the right information, take action, and move with urgency. So this type of exception happens across all different businesses all the time. This is just one example.
And I’m going to show you what it looks like to deal with this exception using GigJam. So for this demo I am a business manager at a construction equipment company. And I just got word that a customer of mine might be at risk. This is a real problem. I need to take action right away. I need to get the right information. I need to bring people together and make sure everyone is on the same page.
So I called this impromptu meeting with all of us here today to deal with this situation. And I’ve also invited Steve, who is going to play the role of the sales manager. And he’s on his way. I think he’s busy picking out his shoes. That’s all right. In the meantime, we need to get started.
So let me go over here to my Windows PC, and I’m going to open GigJam. And you see GigJam, it’s an empty canvas. So I can fill it up with exactly the information I need. Now Cortana is also integrated with GigJam, so I can just use Cortana to summon the information. So first I need to get my customer information.
Hey, Cortana, show me my customers.
Now GigJam in this case is pulling this information from Dynamics, all of my customer information, but GigJam works with many, many different line of business and SaaS applications as well. So now that I have my customer that I’m worried about, North Wind here, I need a bit more context. So I’m going to get my orders as well.
Hey, Cortana, show me open orders.
Again GigJam is pulling this information from Dynamics as well, but these are two different data sets, they’re not actually linked. But I can do that in GigJam very simply, all I need to do is circle the information that I want to link, and at the bottom I’m given options to link right here. And based on the information here, the data set, it’s actually suggesting what the linkage might be. So I’m going to go ahead and filter orders by customer. And just like that you see that all of my orders map with my customers even though these are different data sets in Dynamics.
So I see back here that North Wind has not placed as many orders as they normally would. So that’s a sign there might be a problem. So I need a bit more context. So I’m going to grab my emails, too.
Hey, Cortana, show me my emails.
In this case pulling my email from Office 365 where this is all of my email, and I just want what’s related to my customer. So let me filter that down.
Hey, Cortana, filter email by customer.
And there it did it. Again, automatically it linked as well. So as I flip through my customers, you see my email is linked. Incredibly simply I’m getting just what I need.
Now I see from my email that North Wind has been having some delivery issues. So no wonder they might be at risk. So now I have the information I need, but I need to share it out here in this meeting with Steve who is on his way. Again, I can use GigJam to share with whomever I want. Again, I’m just going to circle here the information that I want to share.
Now in this case there are two confidential orders. They’re the ones that start with the letter Z. I don’t want to share those, so all I have to do is just cross those out, and you see it’s grayed out, and that means it won’t be shared. And I have complete control. So I’m going to go ahead and share this with Steve, who is on his way, as well as the hub here in the room.
Now I have the option just to show the information, but I actually want us all to work together. So I’m going to choose work with me and share that out. Now, when I do that you’ll see here on the hub those confidential orders don’t show up. Again, I have complete control over exactly what’s shown, and what I see on my machine is more, what I share in the room is less. Clearly this is not just screen share. This is something very different.
What’s happening is GigJam is actually creating a mini-app, a unique mini-app, with exactly the elements I’ve described. What I want, it could be UI, it could be data, it could be anything. It creates that mini-app and then it sends it to each of the devices that I’ve shared. But I have complete control over what everyone sees, which is so essential to be willing to share in this way.
All right. Hopefully Steve is on his way so we can get started in the room as well.
STEVE: Hey, Julia.
JULIA WHITE: Hey, Steve.
STEVE: I’m sorry I’m late. I knew you would sort of get started without me, but I was taking a look at some of the information that you shared with me on my iPhone on the way over here. So I’m right here on my iPhone with GigJam, as you can see. And I was kind of taking a look at this top order here, and it’s the top order that is giving me a challenge. It looks like I haven’t —
JULIA WHITE: Actually, let me try and reshare that with you. Luckily with GigJam it’s very easy. I’m going to go ahead and hide those things again, and I’ll share with you.
STEVE: Let me just log back in here on GigJam on my iPhone, see if that’s shared out with me. And it looks like it hasn’t. So do you want to try and share that one more time.
JULIA WHITE: I’ll share it one more time here, just in case.
STEVE: Let me just login here, Julia, on the phone. OK, let’s try that share one more time.
JULIA WHITE: OK.
STEVE: OK, there we go. So it’s up on the iPhone.
JULIA WHITE: All right.
(Applause.)
STEVE: I love my iPhone, third time is the charm. So it’s this top order that’s giving me some concerns, Julia. I think on this one we really need to consider our discounting strategy with North Wind here. We need to keep this customer loyal, so I think that’s one where we need to think about a real discount.
JULIA WHITE: A discount makes sense to me. What percentage do you want to do?
STEVE: Well, we could flip a coin here and we can come up with a discount. But I was thinking we should probably involve Katie, she’s the account manager for North Wind. She’s actually on site with them today. So why don’t we get Katie involved real time. She can talk to the customer, get a sense of what we think the discount will be that will keep them loyal.
JULIA WHITE: Makes sense. Again, I’m just going to use GigJam to share with Katie. In this case, she just needs that order information in the middle. But, again, I don’t want Katie to see those confidential orders this time, so I’m going to cross those out again. And I’m going to share with Katie.
In this case, we know that she’s with North Wind right now, so she’s not available to work with us real time. So I’m going to have her work on my behalf, which essentially means I can delegate this part of the task out to her, and she can work on it while we keep meeting in the room. So let me just leave her a quick note what to do. And I’m going to send that off, and we can continue on with the meeting.
STEVE: So as you and I both know that a discount is not a strategy. We need to get this customer committed long term. So what GigJam is able to do for me is it calls out into our product database that’s held inside of Infomatica, and it knows the context of the customer that we’re currently working with. So if I take a look at the products inside of our customer database it automatically knows which customer that we’re working with and these are the products that North Wind is currently using, currently purchased.
So what I think we need to do is think about how do we get them solved on the road map. So I know that you don’t have access to Infomatica, you have Dynamics. I’m going to share this out for a temporary amount of time. I’m going to stream it over to you and to the hub. So let me in the same way I’m just going to circle. This particular product I don’t think we need to share on the road map with them. I’ll share this out to the hub. And in the same way I’m going to choose to send this over to you. So let me circle then —
JULIA WHITE: Let me work with you on it when you do it.
STEVE: Sure, let me share that out. And you’re going to choose to work with me on it.
JULIA WHITE: Perfect, all right. Now I’m in the way for just a second because something really important just happened. What you see here is actually Steve’s iPhone, the Hub, and my Surface PC all have a unique view. What GigJam has done is, again, created those unique mini-apps and each one for each device you see they’re each a unique view. And when Steve streamed more it updated that mini-app. And so now what’s on the hub is actually a composite app of both information I shared from Dynamics and what Steve shared from Informatica. It’s simply not possible before now. But it actually goes farther; it’s actually linked the information, as well. So if I go and I switch customers you see even down to the products it pulls all the way through absolutely amazing.
All right, go back to the issue at hand, of course.
STEVE: So we got KT involved to help us with the discount, and I think we need to get the engineering team involved to help us with the product road map, figure out who are the right guys we should send out to the customer and talk about these new products.
JULIA WHITE: All right, well, Talon is the engineering manager so let me share this product with him, pull that up here and circle there. You know what, you did it so it works with me, or you didn’t let me work with it. So share it one more time.
STEVE: OK. Let me just share this out with you one more time.
JULIA WHITE: There we go, try work with me; there we go, see if that works. All right. Let’s try this. It’s not going to work this time. That’s all right. We won’t be able to get Talon in this one.
STEVE: OK. So why don’t we just start, we’ll continue on through I think we wanted to get Talon involved, but on Skype. He’s not available to us. Maybe I can just try and share that out with you one more time. So Talon was going to get involved with this. He’s on Skype. We could have him involved, talk about the product road map.
JULIA WHITE: Maybe I could just share the orders with him and he could do it that way, because he can look at the products and the orders, let’s do that. I know I can share that with Talon. All right. And you see actually Talon is available on Skype. I see him right there. So when I send this to him it’s actually going to prompt an automatic voice call, as well, so we can have a conversation about the information I just shared.
Hey, Talon.
TALON: Hey, Julie, how are you doing?
JULIA WHITE: Well, we’re good, but we have an urgent customer situation. And I need some people from your team to help out. I sent you some of the orders you can see the products I’m talking about. Can you recommend which people should go talk to North Wind?
TALON: Yes, so those products are definitely Antole (ph) and Bau (ph), so let me make a quick note for you so you can follow up with them later.
JULIA WHITE: Great, just put their names in GigJam, I’ll be all set. Thanks for your help.
TALON: No problem.
JULIA WHITE: Bye.
All right, we know it was incredibly efficient, right. I only needed Talon for that one part of the meeting. He didn’t have to be here for the whole meeting. And of course Talon is happy, because engineers hate meetings. And we can just keep going, as well. We’ve already got that done.
Now, Katie has gotten back to us, which is great. So let me go ahead and see what she’s done. Remember I had her work on my behalf. So I delegated this part of the task to her. But, because she’s working on my behalf I want to review that before I approve it in the system. So here in GigJam I can just go ahead and play that back and I can see exactly the changes she’s making, all of the edits here. So, Steve, it looks like she’s recommending going from 14 percent to 25 percent discount. What do you think?
STEVE: Well 25 percent is a pretty steep discount but I think we should say that to keep this customer loyal we’ll make that a one-time only discount. So I would approve that from sales.
JULIA WHITE: All right. I’ll go ahead and accept that. And in real time based on that mini-apps update, everywhere I’ve shared, and Steve can see them as well as on the Hub.
STEVE: I think we’re done. We’ve got this customer loyal. It’s great working with you, Julia.
JULIA WHITE: All right. Thank you. I appreciate the fast work. (Applause.)
Then normally a customer at risk situation like this would have cost me half of my day, chasing after the right people, getting the right information and making sure everyone is on the same page, but now with GigJam I was able to summon the information from across all my different systems, link that information incredibly seamlessly and then divvy up the work, not the communications about the work, the actual work tasks themselves. And I had complete control of exactly who got what information and how it got approved in the system.
So with that back to Satya. (Applause.)
SATYA NADELLA: Thank you, Julia.
That gives you a glimpse of what is possible when we break down the walls between devices, applications and people, and how we can bring them together. What you saw was not some fancy screen sharing. It was effectively creation of an application for a specific task that spanned many apps, many devices and many people on the fly and distributing that app to all of those devices. That’s what we think is the future of business process and communications in productivity.
So I want to move on to the next ambition we have, which is about building an intelligent cloud. With Azure and our servers they form the core of this distributed computing fabric, the richness, that is required from truly supporting hybrid computing, to rich data services, application developer services, in fact, one of the core attributes or the core differentiators is productivity of developers in IT. These higher-level capabilities that we have from our enterprise mobility suite, or the operations management suite, our Visual Studio online capabilities, they all come together so that you can with agility drive those application development projects and IT projects for your customers.
We are the only vendor that’s going to bring together from an infrastructure level three key attributes of hyper-scale public cloud, hybrid as well as the enterprise readiness. And we’re going to do this with the openness and flexibility. You can write .NET apps and Java apps. You can run Windows and you can run Linux. You can support the back end for any application across Windows Phone, Android and iOS. You can manage the identities; you can manage data, and protect that across all of those platforms. That level of flexibility and openness is what we want our backend infrastructure, our developer tools to stand for.
But the thing that I perhaps want to talk most about today is data. The key challenge or the key opportunity for any organization is to be able to convert data into intelligent action. In fact, the core intellectual property of any business going forward, the core currency of any business going forward is their data. And the way to take advantage of it, of course, is to convert it into intelligence and more importantly intelligent action. And to do that you have to work through a series of stages. In fact, there are multiple questions that need to be asked and answered. You want to be able to find out what just happened, why it happened. You want to be able to predict things that may happen and you want to get to automatically doing things because of your predictions.
So we have taken all of the technology that we have underneath a lot of our own applications that we have built, that exhibit these core analytics capabilities, Cortana, Bing and its Web understanding, what we have done with vision and speech, and we took all of the big data infrastructure, machine learning, and all of that capability and we’re bringing it together in one suite called Cortana analytics.
This capability is what will help each one of you take very sophisticated technology and enable any business to transform themselves through the power of data. It’s going to have core information management capability. That means you can harness all the data inside of your organization. It’s going to have capabilities to store all this data in its native format, so it can be big data, it can be non-SQL data, SQL data. You want to be able to practice this using a variety of different mechanisms, stream analytics, machine learning, SQL, Map Reduce, and then ultimately you want to be able to interface all of that through something like Cortana, or to automating of business processes.
And one of the key things that we are trying to do, in fact, the way I think about this is when we were at the beginning of client-server, what really democratized client-server was innovation like Visual Basic. What is the modern equivalent of democratizing big data and advanced analytics? That’s what led us to Cortana Analytics.
And I want to talk about one organization, because this I think speaks to what’s the potential. This is a small group that has a dream and they want to use data to pursue that dream. Let’s play the video.
(Video segment.)
SATYA NADELLA: All right. So I’m sitting here with Brandyn Bayes from North American Eagle.
Brandyn, in fact, this all got started a year ago when you sent me a piece of email. So tell me a little bit about North American Eagle?
BRANDYN BAYES: Well, North American Eagle, it was originally a Cold War era F-104 Starfighter, and what we did is we took it and we took the wings off, and with this we are going to go out and break the world land speed record of 763 miles per hour.
SATYA NADELLA: Amazing. How did you get involved in all of this?
BRANDYN BAYES: Well, I actually got involved with this about four years ago. Keith, one of the project owners, he was mentoring for another robotics team, and they held off on software a little too long, and that too long was 30 minutes before the game starts, by the way. So someone says, hey, go grab that kid from over there. And they brought me over, and we got the robot coded. And Keith was really impressed, and he said to me, hey, I’ve got this special project, might you be interested in joining? What he did not tell me was that this special project of his was a 56-foot long jet car that breathes fire.
SATYA NADELLA: That’s so cool. So what’s the role of technology and Cortana Analytics in everything that you’re doing?
BRANDYN BAYES: Well, with a vehicle as complex as this, we’re trying to go 800 miles an hour. And when you’re going that fast, you want to have as much data as you possibly can to know that you’re doing what you should be as safe as you possibly can. So at any given point during the run, we’re collecting a total of 60,000 points of data from across the car. And with Cortana Analytics, we’re able to take all of that data at the end of the run and actually make sense out of it. And instead of a person trying to sort through 30 million points of data, Cortana Analytics actually tells us where we need to be looking at this information.
SATYA NADELLA: It’s amazing. So with each run you’re essentially collecting all this deep data, reasoning over all of it, figuring it out, and then going for the next run with modifications.
BRANDYN BAYES: That’s exactly what we’re doing. And something important to understand about land speed racing. We get exactly one hour in which to turn the car around, refuel it, and run it the other direction to validate our speed.
SATYA NADELLA: So you’re using all this power of the cloud to keep the car on the ground.
BRANDYN BAYES: That’s exactly what we’re doing. But we’re not just looking at what’s going on now. We’re also looking to what’s going to happen next. And with machine learning, we’re actually able to take all the data that we’ve collected so far and predict what’s going to happen.
SATYA NADELLA: That’s awesome. So what’s next?
BRANDYN BAYES: Well, in September we’re going to take the car down to Southeast Oregon to the Alvord Desert. We’re going to run it up to 650 miles an hour. Jessi Combs is going to set the women’s land speed record. Ed Shadle, our driver, is going to add another record of his own. We need about $100,000 to make that possible, so we welcome any help through our Kickstarter page. And early next year, we plan to go set the world land speed record.
SATYA NADELLA: Thank you, Brandyn, so much.
BRANDYN BAYES: Thank you, Satya.
(Applause.)
SATYA NADELLA: I’m pretty positive that there are going to be a lot of people willing to help you on that. And the reason why I wanted to stress what Brandyn and team are doing is because it shows the power of something like Cortana Analytics being accessible to any organization across the planet irrespective of their size, because that’s really what we as an ecosystem stand for, especially when at WPC I know there are many of you who deal with small businesses in particular, and when we talk about capabilities like machine learning, they’re going to transform not just large enterprises but even small businesses and their pursuit of their dreams and their business.
So I want to move to the last ambition, personal computing, the very core of our company. In fact, in January we started talking about Windows 10 and how it’s going to usher in this new era of more personal computing. We couldn’t be more excited. We are three weeks away from launch, and it’s not just the technology, but what Windows means for this ecosystem is what’s humbling and is what’s driving us.
And when you think about the core innovation going forward in personal computing it starts with the very nature of input and output. Windows 10 is going to run on everything from a Raspberry Pi to phones to tablets to PCs to Surface Hubs and to even the HoloLens. We’re going to have this one unified platform, one unified experience, and that to me is a key differentiator of what Windows stands for. You’re going to be able to interact with it in the most natural of ways. You’re going to be able to speak to it like you interact with Cortana. You’re going to be able to touch. You’re going to be able to ink. You’re going to be able to do mouse and keyboard. You’re going to have the ability to do things like the holographic output. That natural interaction is going to be a unique capability of this one operating system that spans all these device types.
It’s going to be built for that very notion of mobility of experience across all of these devices. The feature that I’m most excited about in Windows 10 is this Continuum. It’s going to transform how we use devices in different modes. The notion of multimodal input is something that we make possible with innovation like Surface and Windows coming together. That’s one of the core goals we have in terms of first-party hardware, creating new categories, stimulating demand for the entire ecosystem, and driving innovation.
Trust, the more we talk about personal trust becomes even more important, because at the core of Cortana is the ability to collect all the personal data, your calendar information, your email information, your likes, your history, and reason over it, so that it can help you with your attention, your time, which is the scarce commodity.
And in order to be able to do that you have to build trust into the core. It can’t be conflated with other business models. It has to be built for you. And to us, Windows 10 and what we’re doing in terms of building that trust, that notebook capability of Cortana, that’s very, very important. It’s just not a feature. In fact, it is everything as we think about more personal computing.
We will, of course, lead the way when it comes to management and security of Windows devices. And management and security, Terry Myerson will come talk more about this, matters even more now not just on your computing end points, like the desktop or the tablet or even the phone, but even in your sensors, because the attack vectors of the day today come from all these places.
But when we think about more personal computing, the history of personal computing is punctuated by changes in input/output. And in this context, I’m very excited about what holographic computing and HoloLens represent for the Windows ecosystem, what it means for us as partners. In fact, this morning I want to show you how holographic computing and HoloLens can fundamentally change one of the core applications that is run on the desktop, Maya from Autodesk, which is a 3D app or 3D modeling app, which will fundamentally change how people think of what is possible with computing.
And to show you that, let me introduce Lorraine from our HoloLens team. Lorraine.
(Applause.)
LORRAINE: Thank you, Satya.
Together with partners, we can redefine how people work using existing software and tools in combination with Microsoft HoloLens. Specifically today we’ll take a look at using HoloLens with Autodesk Maya to rethink how we design in 3D.
Maya’s 3D modeling and rendering software offers a comprehensive creative toolkit. And with HoloLens Autodesk can extend their existing software to provide new value to their customers. First you’ll see that we’re using a special camera today. With this camera we create a display technique that’s like putting a HoloLens right on the camera itself so that the entire audience can see what my colleague Dan is seeing.
DAN: Thank you, Lorraine.
Using HoloLens we have shown that it can revolutionize the way people work, play, communicate, learn and create. Today I want to show you another example of how holograms can change the way you work and create. Creating 3D scenes using 2D tools require a lot of training and practice. Sometimes to test a design I create physical 3D prints of the model to make it easier to understand its relation to the real world. But, 3D prints are time consuming and expensive to do frequently. Today I’m going to be using Maya by Autodesk and I will show you how HoloLens doesn’t need to replace the workflow I have mastered, which would be very costly, but instead can extend my existing tools and add spatial understanding to help me visualize my work better and improve my productivity. So let me put on my HoloLens and show you what I’m working on.
So right here in Maya I have my motorcycle that I’ve been working on. And to the right I have a holographic representation of the bike and everything you see, the stage, the motorcycle and the toolbar can all be seen on my HoloLens. And everything I do in Maya instantaneously updates on the hologram.
LORRAINE: In addition to that Dan can go beyond his monitor. He can manipulate the model directly, which will make real-time updates in Maya. To do that is really simple. Dan just takes his mouse; he drags the cursor off the screen onto the hologram.
DAN: So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to rotate the bike, so you can see it from all sides. I can also scale it. I’m going to make it small and real big so I can see all of the details. (Applause.) I can also move it and place it wherever I want on my desktop. And if I had a 3D print I could put them side-by-side and compare them.
LORRAINE: Dan is still doing all of this work in Maya. He’s leveraging his experience as an industrial designer. Now one of the great things about HoloLens is that you can still see the real world and all of the objects in it. And you can overlay them with precise holograms.
DAN: So let me show you what we mean, real-life mode. (Applause.)
So what this allows us to do is make changes directly on the motorcycle and see them in real time. Load orange. That looks pretty nice. I think I like the blue one a little bit better. Load blue. Another thing I can do is add interaction points directly on the motorcycle and make changes to it. So let me update this mirror real fast. OK, that looks pretty good, let’s bring it back just a little bit. All right, that’s nice.
LORRAINE: You can see how Dan can lean over the bike, exactly where the rider’s head would be, so that he can evaluate if those mirrors are in the right position for the rider. Now this is something you just couldn’t do with a 2-D display. So we’ve talked a lot about how modeling 3D in 3D delivers faster iteration. Let’s take a look at how HoloLens can improve collaboration.
The mechanical engineering team for this project is located in Barcelona, which is a significant time difference away, but the ability to effectively communicate across time zones is critical to the success of this project.
DAN: All right, let’s see if the Barcelona team has left us any notes. Show comments. One of the things that HoloLens can do is it knows exactly where you’re standing and where you’re looking when you leave a note, so you’ll see that when I play Carlos’ note.
CARLOS: Hey, guys. We updated the wiring plans. Can we move the turn signal stocks from down here to up here?
LORRAINE: This kind of additional context, seeing exactly what Carlos was looking at, adds further meaning to any note or communication that you leave behind, and clear communication improves collaboration, which leads to faster results and much higher confidence decision making.
As you can imagine we are incredibly excited to help partners extend their existing tools with HoloLens. This was just a glimpse at how designing in 3D is changing. We cannot wait to see what all of you do.
Now back to you, Satya.
SATYA NADELLA: Thank you.
(Applause.)
Each time I see it it just gets even more exciting. It’s really truly mind-blowing. Up to now we have thought about computing mostly as these mirror worlds where we have tried to model in digital form what you see in the real world. And for the very first time we’re going to have a computer which is going to allow us to mix the digital and the real, these mixed reality worlds.
And ever since we announced this in January, we have been getting a tremendous amount of interest from developers of all kinds and enterprise customers and businesses, because we think that many of the business processes, many of the things that we do today using computers can be fundamentally changed like the industrial design example you just saw. So we’re excited about bringing HoloLens to developers and enterprises, and you’ll hear more about it even in Terry’s talk.
So I want to close out, hopefully you got a glimpse of what that sense of mission and purpose that drives us collectively to help our customers transform, both as individuals and as organization, that notion of empowerment. It starts with this high ambition that we have for reinvention of productivity and business process, what cloud and analytics can mean in ushering in the era of intelligence, and more personal computing.
Thank you very, very much. Have a great WPC.
(Applause.)
END
