TAMI RELLER: Good afternoon. Good afternoon and welcome. We are pleased and grateful to have you here this afternoon at this beautiful site here in Barcelona. It’s just a great pleasure to be here. It is an important day for Windows and it’s an important day for Microsoft, and we’re just pleased that you were able to spend time with us.

I do want to extend a special welcome to all our partners who are here with us at this event. We have many of our hardware ecosystem partners, we have developers who have been busy writing Metro style apps for Windows 8, and we also have a number of our go-to-market partners, all of whom will be so critical for Windows 8 going to market and Windows 8’s success. So, thank you for being part of this release, part of this project, and being with us here today.

I certainly also want to extend a warm welcome to the press and the analysts community. We appreciate you prioritizing our event here today, and making the trip up here. I know there’s been some transportation challenges, so we’ll have people coming in as buses arrive, so welcome, and we will get started here momentarily.

I do want to extend a special bravery welcome to this group. This group is actually sitting on top of the pool. I don’t know if you noticed that when you came in, but you’re actually over the pool. So, no sudden movements on this side of the room.

Before we get started, I just wanted to do a couple of housekeeping items. Please no full session recording of the event today, and do try to keep flash photography to somewhat of a minimum. I know that can be challenging, but just in respect of those around you try to keep that to a minimum.

We will have press materials which will post shortly, and then we’ll also have physical copies for you, if that’s helpful, at the end of the event as well.

So, let’s get started. Please help me welcome Steven Sinofsky. (Applause.)

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Thanks, Tami.

Wow, we are really excited to be here. And, you know, I’m supposed to say we’re super excited to be here, because that’s our Microsoft thing, but really this is a day that’s been long in coming for many members of the Windows team. Folks back home are very, very excited. I actually just got a picture of the operations center where we’re getting ready to staff the downloads as they begin. And folks have been up since 3:00 a.m. in Seattle, and they are very, very excited.

So, we’re here today to talk about the consumer preview of Windows 8. You know, we started this project as we wound down the Windows 7 project, Windows 7, you know, the most successful release of Windows, the most successful operating system of all time.

And when we set out to do this we set out to do nothing short of a bold reimagination of Windows, from the chipset through the experience. And doing that was a big and bold goal, and what we did is we challenged ourselves to bring the best of mobility and the best of PCs, and to bring those together in an experience where you don’t have to compromise, where you can do the things that you want to do because you’re working with a PC, a Windows PC.

And so let’s talk about where we are today, because today is not there yet. You know, there are amazing devices everywhere. This show represents some of the most amazing work that the mobile industry has brought. But as exciting as all these devices are, as exciting as these innovations are, we all face a little bit of a yearning, we all desire something a little bit better.

You know, in our day-to-day lives with all of these devices we face too many choices where we have to choose between things, this or that: We’re choosing between consumption or productivity, we’re choosing between more battery life or more functionality, we’re choosing between form factors, a tablet or a laptop. You know, even something very simple, we have to choose, do you want a touch interface or do you want keyboard and mouse. And even when you try to mix those, it’s complicated and it’s not yet natural.

I think what the challenge is, is that our industry has made you make this choice based on the capabilities of the operating system, and really you should get to make this choice, the choice that you want of a form factor, based on the form factor: what is it you want to get done, what is it you want to carry with you, how do you want to be mobile, how do you want your desktop to work. And you want to have these capabilities no matter where you are and how you’re working, and the goal should really be that the operating system scales with you, and you just get done the work that you want to get done. And that’s what we mean by a no-compromise experience.

And even today we see all these things coming together with phones and laptops and desktops and tablets, and the hardware capabilities, the OS capabilities, the user interface, even the apps are all coming together, but there are still these seams in the experience, whether you try to add a keyboard to a tablet and it’s not quite right or the capabilities you want in power management or travel weight or thinness with tablets when you still want all the capabilities of using those devices.

And so our goal with Windows 8 is to deliver PCs without compromise, and the way that we want to talk about that is the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

And to realize this dream of a no-compromise experience we took a new approach to building Windows 8, and we looked across three key elements that we want to demonstrate today. We looked across the operating system, the apps and the developer platform, and the hardware itself, and we thought about all of these and how can we engineer them better and more efficiently and with greater and deeper thought end-to-end across that whole experience. So, we had a new level of engagement with our partners and a new level of engagement across the entire ecosystem.

But it was very important to us from the very outset of the project to maintain what we think is the hallmark of the PC ecosystem, and that is to enable a broad array of choice for consumers, to allow the creativity of many partners around the world, to contribute to deliver a huge array of devices, capabilities, form factors, but to do it all with a unified operating system experience across those devices.

And this project all started in a way with the Developer Preview. So, many people in the room have had experience with the Windows 8 Developer Preview. It was, of course, focused on the development platform for new apps that deliver a new kind of customer experience, one that’s a fast and fluid user interface, one that is much, much better at power management, new levels of safety, security, reliability, and even totally new things for Windows, from being powered by the cloud to logging in to the whole experience.

We knew, of course, when we did this, the developer preview, that the user interface was not done yet. Lots of the product wasn’t done. The goal was to get the APIs, the tools, the platform out there for people to really start to understand what we were trying to accomplish with Windows 8.

And today we’re very, very excited to bring a whole new level of functionality in the next milestone of Windows. Every subsystem from the user interface all the way through the kernel, all the way through all the device drivers, the models, the peripherals, have all been touched — no pun intended — and improved as we developed the consumer preview of Windows 8. So, we’ve been making a broad set of changes with a lot of depth.

How many changes have we been making? Well, since the developer preview in September, we have made over 100,000 code changes to Windows 8. So, the consumer preview in some ways for many of you is going to represent a whole new product. It’s much more polished, much more refined. We think of it as complete all the way through from the low levels all the way through the user experience.

So, we really want to look at these today, and the best way to look at these is to start with the experience, the experience of apps and the experience of the OS. We really think of these as working together in a harmonious and seamless experience.

The first thing you’re going to see with Windows 8 is that the whole operating system and the apps working together, it’s beautiful, it’s modern, it’s fast, it’s fluid. Windows 8 is a generational change in the Windows operating system. It’s a generational change in how we design the product, it’s a generational change in the capabilities, the functionality and the implementation.

We made Windows 8 from a user point of view easy for everyone. On the other hand, we know there’s been a huge amount of change in the product, but things are different than they were a long time ago, the last time we made a generational change in Windows, which was with Windows 95. Back then, we had to actually label the start menu with an arrow, click here to start, and some of you might remember that. That was because at that time, computing was new to most of the customers of Windows.

But today, interfaces, computing, touching devices, interacting with mice and keyboard, a huge number of distinct user models and user interfaces are an everyday experience just browsing the Web.

So, the work that we’ve done to make Windows 8 easy to use we think is going to be a super fun experience and it will come naturally to people.

We also wanted to make sure that Windows 8 brought together a lot of the elements that people struggle with today in all of their computing devices, the ability to just find out what’s going on by looking at your device at a glance. So, in Windows 8 you’re going to see that the applications bring to life the operating system and it’s alive at a glance.

We wanted to make sure that we scaled across many dimensions. We wanted to scale across skill levels from casual users all the way through the hardest core, multimonitor, high-end desktop professionals. We wanted to make sure that we scale across different screen sizes, as you can see behind me. We wanted to scale across scenarios, consumption or productivity.

And for us these scales all represent continuums. You know, the world we talked about where we are today, there’s too many hard stops in between phones and tablets and PCs and laptops and desktops, and we wanted to bring things and make them much more harmonious and seamless.

And we want apps in that environment to work together.

So, today, apps are another part of those either/or scenarios: you get to use this app or that app. If the operating system lets you connect to that service, then they give you an app to connect to that service.

But that’s just not the right way, these islands of apps. You should really be able to get the apps that you want, that connect to the services you want, and that everything gets better. So, you add this app and then all the other apps get richer, this notion that adding one app plus another app really kind of feels like three apps, and you can do all of this under your control, that you can be in charge of when things are shared, when things are hitting Web Services and sites, and that’s all part of your control, but yet you benefit and apps coming together just gets better and better.

Of course, everything is cloud connected. So, starting from the moment that you logon with Windows 8 through the usage of all the apps, through the ability to roam your files, your settings, even the apps that you have installed, these connection through the cloud is a very important part of how we thought about Windows 8 from the very beginning.

And, you know, of course, everything in Windows 8 gets brought together by this Metro style design language. And this is a design language you’ve seen from Microsoft, evolving from way back with Media Center through today where you see it in Windows 8, in Windows Phone, and in our consoles.

This together is a new design language from Microsoft. It’s designed to scale with the capabilities of the device, so whether you’re working on a very small form factor with a limited surface area for the UI through all sorts of PC form factors, through a console that you might interact with, with Kinect. The Metro design language is a new modern, fast, fluid, beautiful language that allows you to scale across a family of devices.

So, we want to start by showing you the Windows 8 app and OS experience, and the very best way to do that is to bring out two folks. Julie Larson-Green is the corporate vice president for Windows Program Management, and so she’s responsible for the design, the feature selection, the user experience, and the overall vision for Windows 8. Antoine Leblond is the corporate vice president for Windows Web Services. He’s bringing to life as the leader of the Windows Store Group, so the place you get apps, and it runs on the backbone of Windows Update, Microsoft Update, which coincidentally are some of the largest services on the Internet, servicing nearly every PC in the Internet.

So, the two of them are going to take us through the Windows 8 app experience and the Windows 8 operating system experience. So, let me bring out Julie and have her have a go at some demonstrations.

JULIE LARSON-GREEN: Thanks, Steven.

Hi. So, we’re going to show you Windows 8 across a variety of different PCs today, and I’m going to show you here on this touch tablet. We worked on this machine with Samsung for our developer preview. We worked with them on how it was going to work, what the screen was like, what the sensors were inside of it, and we made it so that developers could start taking advantage of the things we were going to be doing in Windows 8.

But when we started planning Windows 8, it was before Windows 7 shipped, and there was no device like that. The closest thing that was out there was like an eReader. So, when we started imagining how the new operating system would work on these kind of devices there was nothing to do but make a piece of cardboard that kind of represented what we wanted it to be like. So, as a team we made these cardboard cutouts, and we’d walk around in the hallways holding this, turning it in portrait and landscape. We’d sit in chairs, on the couch, sit at your desk, and try to get really a good feel for the ergonomics of that kind of device, and we learned that the edges of the device are super important, and that when you’re holding it in this position it’s the most relaxed place to be, uses the fewest amount of muscles, and you can actually hold it for quite a long time.

And the thumbs became important. So, your thumbs were free when you were holding the device in this relaxed way.

So, I’m going to sit down in this chair and show you how it works.

So, one of the other things about this device is that you want it to be personal, and you want to know that it’s yours when you pick it up. So, this is my daughter in Barcelona a couple of years ago, and I know it’s mine as soon as I see it. I also see the calendar items, the messages, what my battery looks like, everything right here.

To get started I just simply slide up from the bottom using the edges, and I come to a new way to log into my PC. Now, I can use a traditional password or even a PIN to log in, but with touch we can do some things differently. We can draw circles, we can touch points, you can draw lines, things you can’t really do with a mouse. Like try repeating a circle with a mouse; it’s pretty hard. But here it’s really easy to logon. So, press on the nose of my husband, my son, again in Barcelona, and draw a line, and I get right into the Start screen.

So, the Start screen is a place, it’s kind of your home place for Windows. It’s the place you’re going to go to find all the apps that you have on your system. And I’ve been using this for a while and it’s adapted to me with a bunch of apps that I’ve installed, and I’ve organized them and arranged them the way I want to make it easy for me to get to the things that I want to do.

Now, Windows 7 had a good way to start applications, it had the Start menu and the taskbar, and it was very good for dozens of apps, but with Windows 8 you’re going to have hundreds of apps and you’re going to want much more flexibility in how you move around and arrange things.

So, you could pin things before to the Start menu, but it was only a few things. Here I have my favorite friends and co-workers pinned right to the front, I have websites, and I can have as many as I want.

Now, a couple words that we used a lot in the team when we were designing were what Steven already said, fast and fluid. And so we’d test all of our features on whether we felt that they were fast and fluid, because we want it to be a fun experience as well as a super functional experience.

So, here I am flicking through, and it’s pretty fast and fluid. If I want to see everything all at once, I just pinch, I can see everything. I can name these groups, find one that I want. I can rearrange them in a very fast and fluid way, too, and then drag down and select this whole group, move it over to where I want it to go, right here next to people. And I can click to zoom right in to wherever I want to go. I can grab an item, and it will automatically zoom out for me as I come down to find a new place to put it. And it’s all very — you know, holds true to that saying that we had, fast and fluid.

So, we applied those same principles to the applications that are built into the consumer preview as well. Here’s Internet Explorer, and right away it comes up, and you can see the HTML5 rendering engine and our fish. You’ve probably seen the fish before. Here it is with the HTML5 standards-based browser.

And again I’m going to use the edge and go up from the side and I get right to the address bar. And clicking into the address bar brings up my frequent sites, my pinned sites, and makes it easy to get back to where I want to go.

I’m going to bring up a site where you can surf, and show you a little bit more about how fast and fluid it is. So, here I am clicking around links, flick up, flick down. I can flick to go back. It’s all very easy and actually fun, maybe sitting on your couch kind of browsing the Web, clicker in one hand, watching the TV, doing whatever I want to do while I’m looking at the Web.

Now, to get back to Start it’s right under my thumb. So, I come out from the right-hand side, slide out the charms bar, and it takes me right back to Start.

Now, there’s a few apps — well, actually quite a few apps that come preinstalled on your consumer preview, and one of those is Xbox games.

Now, you might have seen this kind of application before. It is on the Windows Phone, and it’s also on your Xbox console, and it’s a place where I go to find games, purchase games for my Xbox on Windows, go through and — oops, try again — I can manage my avatar, I can see my friends and family, see my achievements, and go and find all the things that I want to do.

We might have lost our Internet connection here; let me check. Looks like it’s working.

So, Windows has always had a strong background in graphics, and gaming has always been super important on the Windows device, and you can make really super highly rendered 3-D games with graphics.

But we’ve also made it so Windows 8 is easy to create casual games. Here’s one you probably know. It’s Cut the Rope by ZeptoLab, and about a year ago they wrote this game in HTML5, and last September they took it, the HTML5 version of the game, and in a couple months they turned it into a Windows 8 game. So, it’s really easy to take HTML5 games and turn them into full Windows apps.

I’m going to play it here for a second. Let’s see if I can do another one of those. Uh, very good. Almost forgot I was here; I was going to keep playing.

So, when you get your consumer preview and you’re walking around with your tablet device, you probably are going to watch some videos or listen to music, and Windows 8 Consumer Preview comes with built-in video and music stores.

I’m going to click on video, and here we go.

If I don’t sign in, that means we lost the Internet, and we’re going to have to figure that out.

So, here I am, I can buy, rent first run movies and TV.

Oh, good, we’re signed in.

I can manage my collection of music, and I can play video right from inside here.

So, another application I like to use is a really good Metro style application that’s iCookbook, and it’s just a beautiful app and takes really a lot of advantage of the Metro style application model.

So, here I am, I’m picking a theme, going to see all these recipes, and just browse through and see everything all in one place. I can go back and continue browsing. I’m kind of hungry.

So, Windows has always been about launching but also switching between applications, and today you do that with alt-tab. A lot of people do it with alt-tab, which is fast, but it’s not all that fluid. So, we needed a new way to do that where it worked really well with touch. So, I’m going to use my left thumb and I’m going to slide through the applications out from the left.

So, just with a little flick we can slide through here, and if I don’t want to slide through to find the one that I want, I can also just bring my thumb in a little bit and back a little bit, and it will give me the full list of applications that I have running, and I can quickly choose the one that I want to go to, and just out of the list.

Another fast and fluid motion that we have is to close an app — you don’t really need to close apps in Windows 8, and we’ll talk about that a little later, but if you do want to close it, you just take your finger from the top, drag it down, and right off the screen.

So, here I am back in Start, and if you’re like me, you belong to a lot of different social networks, and you have friends that are on Facebook and Google, in your Exchange contact list, and we have a people app that brings together all the different things, all the different places.

So, right now I have Facebook and Windows Live already connected, but I could also do Twitter, Google, and Exchange, and then all the people, my friends and co-workers, are all listed her, and it makes it really easy for me to stay in touch with them.

I actually can pin people back to the Start screen and so I get one-click access where the Start screen kind of becomes a sort of dashboard of things that are going on in your life.

So, here I’m going to press on Chris, and we’ll look at his contact information, and the photos that he has across the various social networks, and his “What’s New” feed. We were IMing early, so I’m going to go ahead back to IM. And here is our new instant messaging client for Metro style applications.

But I very, very rarely do IM full screen. I’m usually doing something else at the same time. And Windows has always been really good at letting you do the more than one thing at a time. So, I’m going to go ahead and pull out my list, and find that video, and pull it out, and dock it right next to my instant message.

Now, I probably want the instant message small and the video big, or maybe I want it on the other side. I can pull it right back to the other side.

So, I’m going to do that for you again. So, we’re going to take the video off, I’m going to slide it out, dock it here on the side, make the video big, move it down, bring it over, and it’s really fast and fluid, that notion of fast and fluid. So, down and back again.

One of the nice things about this automatic snapping between two windows is that I don’t have to manage the windows, they don’t overlap on top of each other. So, when I do something like click a link, it’s going to go right to Internet Explorer without me having to manage where that went.

A lot of times when I’m in Internet Explorer I do like to send links to people, and today you’d use copy and paste. So, you copy and paste your link, you bring up e-mail, paste in the link, you type in the e-mail, and there’s a lot of steps between that. What I really want to do is I just want to give this page to my friend or this document to another application, and without all those steps in between.

So, in Windows 8 we have a systemwide sharing concept. So, I go up here and I can use the charms bar and go to share, and all the apps that I use are right here, and all the people that I’ve been e-mailing with in a frequently used place are right here. So, apps don’t need to know anything about each other in order for this to work.

So, I’m going to press e-mail for Shannon, and it’s going to automatically bring in that link, it’s going to fill out her address, and right away I can send something to her really quickly.

So, that is a quick peek at Windows 8 running on this Tablet PC, and now we’re going to have Antoine come out and show you how it works on a laptop. Thank you. (Applause.)

ANTOINE LEBLOND: Thanks, Julie.

So, of course, Windows 8 isn’t just about tablets and touch-enabled devices. One of the hallmarks of Windows has always been just the variety and the diversity of hardware that it works on, and Windows 8 is no different.

That device that Julie is using over there is a great example of just one type of PC that PC manufacturers will be making for Windows 8.

When you go back home or back to your office or your hotel at the end of the day, and you install the consumer preview and you download it, you’ll probably be installing it on a machine that’s more like this one.

So, this is a laptop. It’s just like the hundreds of millions of existing Windows 7 laptops that will be able to run Windows 8 and run the consumer preview.

This one actually is a Lenovo U300S. So, this is one of these latest generation ultrabooks that we love so much. They’re wonderful machines; they’re light, they’re small, they’re thin, they have great battery life, they’re powerful. It’s a mouse and keyboard machine. It doesn’t have a touch screen.

In Julie’s demo you saw how much attention we paid to just how the touch interactions worked with Windows 8. I’m going to show you how we paid just as much attention to using Windows 8 with a mouse and a keyboard. So, let’s have a look.

I’m going to put this machine here so we can actually project it, and here we go.

So, I am at the lock screen here. I’m going to just hit enter to unlock. So, this is no more ctrl-alt-delete, I just hit enter, which is really nice.

I protect my machine and my computer with a password just the same way Julie did. Now, hers doesn’t have a mouse and keyboard, so she did a picture password, which works great for a tablet like that. I have a keyboard, so I chose to just use a PIN. I’m going to unlock using my PIN, and I’m just going to start by showing you how easy it is to navigate around the Start screen using the mouse.

Now, this works just as you would expect. I can grab the scroll bar and move it around. I can use the wheel on the mouse to scroll around. I can use page up, page down, any of those things. It’s exactly as you would expect.

You might notice my computer right now looks probably like yours will after a couple weeks of using the consumer preview. I’ve got dozens of apps installed here. So, the Start screen has quite a bit of stuff on it, but it’s really easy to navigate around here.

Starting an app is exactly what you would expect. I am just going to go click, we’re going to start the weather app here. This is actually a really wonderful Metro style app; it’s beautiful, it’s immersive, it’s full screen, and it gives me a lot of really, really neat information.

Now, if I want to go back to the Start screen, let’s say I want to go start another app here, and I want to go back to the Start screen. If I had a tablet, what Julie showed us is I would swipe from the right, pull out the charms, push on the Start charm.

Now, let me talk a little bit about the difference between the mouse and your fingers for a second. Your fingers are a terrific pointing device, they’re great for pointing at fairly large targets. They’re also great for gesturing or for moving things around. The mouse, on the other hand, is also a great pointing device, in fact it’s a very, very precise pointing device, but it’s not great for gesturing, right? If we just emulated those gesturing command with the mouse, it wouldn’t be a very usable thing.

Now, the mouse, one thing we do know about the mouse, however, is that there are four spots on the screen that are actually really, really easy to get to with the mouse, and those are the four corners. It’s really easy to just move your mouse to the top left corner or the top right corner; you can do it with your eyes closed. So, what you’re going to see here is how much we use those corners to just navigate through the UI in Windows 8.

So, the first example of this I’m going to show you is if I just — this is actually going to feel very natural. If I just want to go back to the Start screen to start an app, I’m just going to move the mouse to the bottom left corner. So, this feels natural because this is what you do in Windows today, right? If you want to start an app, you go to the Start button, and the Start button is just down at the bottom left corner. So, I just move down there and I click and I’m back at the Start screen.

Here let’s start another app. This is my calendar. Go back down to the left, same thing, I’ll start another one here. See how easy this all is? It’s incredibly fast and fluid to just navigate this UI and go back to the Start screen this way, right?

So, one of the things that Julie showed was zooming. Zoom actually is really, really convenient with the mouse as well. So, I can go down to the bottom right corner where that little magnifying glass is, click, and I zoom out. Now, I can scroll around my Start screen to see what I’m interested in. Here’s the Kindle app from Amazon. This is also a great Metro style app. We’re really excited to have this one. And again back to the Start screen incredibly easily.

Zoom is actually great also for rearranging the Start screen. So, if I want to take, for example, this newsgroup and just drag it around and bring it over here, incredibly easy to do.

Rearranging individual tiles is really easy. I can just tear them off, move them around; this works exactly as you’d expect.

Actually watch what happens here as I move it down. The Start screen zooms out automatically, and then I can just go where I want to drop it, and really, really easily move it over there, right? So, very, very easy to do.

Now, I’ve started something like four or five apps here. Obviously we’ve got a multitasking operating system. One of the things that you might want to do is just switch between apps that you have running in the background. So, watch how we’re going to do this. I’m going to take the mouse, I’m going to move it to the top left corner, and just by clicking I switch to my previous app that I had up, right. I can switch to the next one. See how easy this is, just super fast and fluid. I can cycle through my apps, go back to the Start screen, go back to the app I was at; it’s all incredibly, incredibly easy. These corners make it really, really easy to just move around the UI like that.

I’ll show you another thing. If I move the mouse up to that top left corner and just drag it down, now I get that switch list that Julie showed you. Now I’ve got all my running apps here, I can just pick the one that I’m interested in switching to, and there I am. Bang, I’m back where I was, back at the Start screen, so fast, fluid, easy to move around.

Let’s start another app here. So, this is a finance app here. So, this actually uses the power of Bing to aggregate a whole bunch of financial and economic information and present it in this very beautiful and full screen, easy to read way.

Let’s scroll over a little bit. I just want to give you a sense of how easy these kinds of apps are to navigate with a mouse. So, again I can just pan around, we can go see maybe a monthly view here, and that’s actually not a bad view of the market. And I can just go click, I can hover over this, for example, and get individual data points. So, this works exactly as you would expect it to. It’s just as easy to navigate these apps and navigate the system with the mouse as it is to do with your fingers.

Let’s go back here, I’m going to start one other app. Actually I’m going to do this. Let’s go back here, I’m going to go back to the Start screen, but I’m going to this a little bit differently. I didn’t do it with the mouse, I just hit the Windows key on the keyboard, which, of course, does exactly what you would expect it to do, it goes back to the Start screen.

One of the things that power users love to do, you see this a lot with people using Windows 7, the power users. Instead of clicking around to go start apps, they’ll just hit the Windows key, which brings up the Start menu, they’ll type the name of the app or start typing the name of the app, and hit enter and the app will run. Same thing works here.

One of the things I love in the consumer preview when you go to the Windows Store to look at the apps we have, we have a whole bunch of news apps from all over the world, right? I’m going to go start the USA Today. Yeah, I live in the U.S., I want to go see the news back home, I’m going to go start the USA Today app. But instead of going and clicking on the tile, since I know the name of it, I’m just going to start typing. See, as soon as I start typing, you go into apps search, it finds the app that I want, and I just need to hit enter to run it. See how easy that was? I’ll show you again. So, I just type USA — actually I should type USA, not USDA. So, I’ll just type USA, hit enter, and there it is, incredibly easy to do.

This is another beautiful app. Let’s go drill into one of these articles, maybe this one.

One of the cool things that Julie showed you on that machine also is sharing, right? She brought out the charms, and there was the share charm. Let’s show you how you do that with the mouse.

If I take the mouse and I move it to the top right corner now, out come the charms, I can just go click on share.

Now, Julie shared from IE into e-mail. One of the apps that I have installed on this machine here is WordPress. So, WordPress is this really cool blogging app that lets you author blogs and read blogs. Just by choosing the share to WordPress here, what it’s going to do is it’s basically going to post a link to this article on my blog.

So, again these apps don’t know anything about each other, right? USA Today does not know how to post to a blog through WordPress, but both of them implemented the share contract and the second they both end up on the same machine they can share data between each of them.

So, that’s a little bit of a view or a little bit of a look at just navigating your way around the UI in Windows 8: super easy, super fast and fluid, no compromises.

Let’s talk about something else. Now, Windows 8 is Windows. In fact, one of the things that we like to say is that Windows 8 is an even better Windows than Windows 7. All of the things that you know and love around Windows, things like the hundreds of thousands of desktop apps that are out there, they still run, the desktop is still there. The things that you do every day with Windows, things like copying files around, you do this stuff on the desktop, connecting to devices and all sorts of stuff like that, that’s all there. And, in fact, in a lot of cases not only is it still in Windows 8 but we’ve actually improved on a lot of those basic everyday, day-to-day things. So, let’s have a look at that.

I’m going to zoom back out here. Let’s go over to my workgroup and Start screen, and you’ll notice some apps that probably look familiar here. This is Office. Here’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, apps that a lot of us use every day that we know and love.

Let’s start Word. Now, here’s Word running on the desktop, just as you would expect it to, just as it does in Windows 7, no surprises there. Maybe I can open up a document here.

One of the things that the desktop — so this just looks all exactly like you would expect it to. One of the things that the desktop’s always been great at actually is working with multiple apps at the same time, so that you can do this, too.

So, let’s fire up PowerPoint here maybe, and I’m going to dock it to the right. I’ve got Word — I’m going to dock it to the right. I’ve got Word docked to the left. Now maybe I can drag and drop between the two documents. Just as I’ve always been able to, this works all the same, this works just the same, super fast and fluid again, easy to use.

I showed you — I talked a minute ago about some of the basic day-to-day things that you do. Copying files is one, right? We move files around from one computer to another to give them to people and things like that. Let’s have a look at that.

I’m just going to start the Windows explorer. So, in this computer right now I have just a USB thumb drive connected into it. So, imagine I have these big video files here. Imagine I just want to copy them to my thumb drive and actually give them to one of my friends.

So, what you’re going to see here actually is the new copy experience in Windows 8. So, this is a really neat view of — this actually gives you all this graphical, visual information about what’s going on with your copy, how far along you are, how fast things are going, and things like that.

Let’s copy another one here for fun. Let’s select it, and now what you’ll see is actually both of them show up there. So, we aggregate these copies at the same time. It’s not just prettier and more informative, I can do things, for example, I can pause this one, like let’s say I want the second one to finish first and go faster, I can pause the top one and now it lets the bottom one go first.

It’s also smarter in other ways. For example, one of the things that happens sometimes, you start copying these large files and maybe you close the lid on your machine and it goes to sleep, right? One of the things that copy knows how to do now is to actually recover properly from that and resume copying if it needs to.

Now, that’s the desktop, it’s still there, it’s great, it’s improved in a lot of ways, and it’s completely integrated with Windows 8, and it’s completely integrated with the rest of the system. In fact, the way I want you to think about the desktop is it’s just like another full screen Metro style app.

So, for example, I can go over here, I can grab, for example, one of my — let’s see, let’s grab my messaging app, and I can just go snap it over here in the corner. And now I’ve got a Metro style app on the right snapped next to the desktop, right? In fact, right here it says I’m having an exchange with someone, trying to figure out an appointment. Let’s go look at my — actually I don’t have my calendar running anymore. Let’s go look at my calendar right now. I can switch over to it now. I’ve got the calendar on the left and I’ve got Messenger on the right. I can switch back to the desktop. All works together seamlessly, as you would expect it to.

Julie actually showed you just on the tablet over there just rearranging these things. This works exactly as you would — the same way. I can just grab things and move them around. I can just drag this down and tear it off, and now I’m back at the desktop. Go back down in the bottom left corner, and I’m back at the Start screen.

So, that’s the desktop on Windows 8, again, part of this no-compromise design approach that we have, all of the things that you know and love about Windows and Windows 7, they’re all still there, and in a lot of cases they’re even better than they were in Windows 7.

So, what I’ve shown you here is a machine that has a keyboard and mouse, Julie showed you a machine that has only touch. Now Julie is going to come back and show you sort of a neat one that has all three. Thanks. (Applause.)

JULIE LARSON-GREEN: Thanks, Antoine.

Okay, so like Antoine said, this machine is both touch and mouse and keyboard. So, right away what I want you to know that it’s not an either/or. You can use all these input mechanisms together, and you don’t have to learn how to do it, it just becomes natural. Sometimes you’ll want to touch the screen, sometimes you’ll want to use the keyboard, sometimes you’ll want to use the mouse. And as you get used to doing it, you’re going to find yourself touching every screen you see. I walk into people’s office, because this is the kind of system I have at work, and I’m constantly trying to — oh, it’s easier when I touch, and other times it’s easier when I do mouse and keyboard. And so you’re going to want to install the consumer preview on a number of different machines and give it a try.

Another reason you’re going to want to install it on a bunch of different machines is because it makes it really easy to do so with our services that we have for Windows 8. We have a set of services that help you move your data, your settings and your personalization around.

When I was on this machine before, we had the same picture up on the screen. That’s because these two machines are signed in as me, and I’ve roamed all this data across.

So, I’m going to swipe to come in, use the keyboard to log in, and I get right back to the Start screen. I’m going to start Internet Explorer, and when I click in here in the start, you see those same frequent and pinned sites that I had right on that machine.

So, it kind of seems magical the first time you install a machine, you sign in with your Microsoft ID, and it just populates with everything that you are used to using right away.

So, of course, we also have a SkyDrive hard drive in the sky. You probably know about SkyDrive, where we can store all kinds of documents and data, but we also have a SkyDrive app. The SkyDrive app — I mean, apps are better than Web pages, and the SkyDrive app makes it really easy for me to find everything that I’m looking for, especially on a touch system.

So, I’m going to go into my documents, see my Excel, Word, PowerPoint files, go back, and go into my family’s trip to Barcelona and see all the pictures in there. And it’s super easy for me to go wherever I am and hook right up to my SkyDrive and get access to my documents.

But SkyDrive is even better integrated than that. So, I’m going to go back to Start and go to my user profile picture and we’re going to change it. So, here I am, my user profile picture, and it’s a fine picture, but I’m going to change it to something else.

So, normally I’d click browse, and you’d get into a file picker, and you’d see all of your local file system things. But in Windows 8 any application that has your stuff will show up here and you can get access to it wherever it is.

So, here I’m going to go back to SkyDrive and back into those Barcelona pictures and take this picture of my son and make it my new profile picture. And now that picture has been roamed over to this machine, and when I go and log in I’ll see the same thing.

Now let me show you that again using e-mail. Bring up e-mail, going to create a new message, and we’re going to add some attachments to this message. And it’s back at the SkyDrive, the last place I was at. I’m going to go get pictures from my local drive, select a couple here, but then I’m going to go back and get some more out of my SkyDrive. So, I can do multiple places at one time. So, instead of traveling around to all the different places where all my photos are, copying them locally and then attaching them, I can browse right from wherever I am and wherever I need those documents to be and get them. So, I’ll attach that one, too, and you can attach them from multiple places at the same time.

So, I showed you how you can share between two apps, and I showed you how you can browse inside of apps, and you can also search inside of apps directly without having to go through a Web browser.

So, typically what you would do is you’d go up into Internet Explorer and you want to go and type in a search. So, I’m going to search for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In Windows 8 you can search from anywhere using the charms.

So, let me sit here and just click search, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and up comes that flat list of links that takes me to different places.

But if you’re like me, you probably know what you’re searching for and you probably know where you can get that information and data most quickly. So, I can be in here and just click to video and it’s going to search the video store inside of Windows 8. I can search for games and see the games. I can search on Flixster and look at their Rotten Tomato scores. And I can search any app that’s installed on this system, so I can go and find everything that I want throughout here.

So, the more apps you put on Windows 8, the more powerful and richer your experience gets. We come with a set preinstalled but you’re going to want to go out to the store and install a lot more and play around with them.

Antoine is going to come back out and talk to us about the store.

ANTOINE LEBLOND: Thanks, Julie.

So, as Julie said, the Windows Store is the place where you’re going to go and get your Metro style apps.

So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a tour of the store here, so we can have a look at how that works.

So, we designed the store with one main goal in mind, and that’s just to make it easy to find and discover applications. So, whether you know what you’re looking for, you know which app you’re looking for, or you’re just browsing around looking for something that might be interesting to you, we designed the store to make those things really, really easy to do.

So, what you see here is the landing page of the store. The section here on the left is something we call the spotlight. So, this is a place where we get to highlight some apps we think might be interesting to you. This is where you’ll find lists like the top apps and the new apps and things like that. And then the rest of the store is organized in a very simple way. We have everything just categorized with categories that you would expect. So, you can just pan across here, and you see the different categories that we have.

I can drill into one of these. For example, let’s drill into the games category, and then I’ll see the games that are in the store; very simple.

I can look through here and if I see an app that’s interesting to me, for example, Pirates Love Daisies, that sounds like kind of an interesting one. Let’s click on it, and this is the listing page for that application. So, the listing page gives you this really, really rich information, detailed information about the app. So, for example, I could just click through here and see some screenshots, I get details, I get ratings, I get reviews and things like that.

And if I look at this app and I think I like it and I want it, I can just, of course, go hit the install button, and the app will get downloaded and installed on my machine, just as you would expect it to.

So, let’s go back to the Start screen here. Now, during the consumer preview period all of the apps in the store are free. So, I really want to encourage you when you install the consumer preview, go to the store, go install tons of apps, play around with them. They’re great, get a feel for what they’re like.

And actually as we go through the consumer preview period you’re going to see we’re just going to keep adding more apps to the store. We have a bunch of them in there now, and we’re just going to keep adding more. So, keep coming back and looking, because there’s always going to be some great new ones to play with in there.

Now, one of the fun things about working on the consumer preview is we’ve really started talking with developers a lot about building apps for the Windows Store and for Windows 8. And it’s been really fun to see just how excited they are. They’re really, really happy about the transparency and the clarity in the process for adding apps to the store. They really, really appreciate that we have the best economics of any major app store out there.

And, of course, one of the things they recognize is that by building for Windows 8 they get to participate in the unprecedented reach of Windows, which means unprecedented distribution for their applications. So, it’s been really fun to work on those things with them.

Throughout these demos you’ve probably recognized the names of a lot of the makers of some of these apps that we’ve shown you. You know, we’ve worked a lot and had a lot of enthusiasm from a lot of these large software developers, from content companies, from media companies, and things like that.

But, of course, one of the things that we really believe in is that Windows 8, the platform, and the Windows Store is going to be a great opportunity for some of the smaller developers as well, right? So, maybe someone at home, some guy at home who has a great idea, maybe has experience developing using Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript, the platform is designed to make it easy for those folks to write apps, and the store makes it really easy for them to distribute their apps and make money off of them.

So, one of the things that we did when we announced — we had an event to announce the store and launch the store back in December, and one of the things is that we announced something we called our First Apps contest, and the First Apps contest was really all about giving some of these smaller developers a chance to be in the store on day one with some of the bigger guys.

So, one of the things that’s fun for us today is that we get to announce the eight winners of the First Apps contest. So, let’s have a look at that.

(Video segment.)

STEVEN SINOFSKY: So, those are the winners of the app contest, and I did want to just call them out and recognize them, because they really had quite an adventure. You know, as you saw, many of them only had a couple of weeks to work on their apps. In the middle of it we gave them all a quick update of some of the APIs based on their feedback. And so we’re very excited to see their contribution but also their excitement and enthusiasm for the work that they’ve gotten done. We’re at just the beginning, the very, very beginning of an amazing opportunity for developers. And so these guys really deserve a lot of credit, and I do want to encourage you to have a look at these apps in particular when you start to use the consumer preview.

The Windows 8 experience demonstrations that you just saw, apps and the OS, it was just a brief overview for all that you saw. And I think what you saw was that Windows 8 is fast, it’s fluid, it’s beautiful. It really, really is an OS for a new generation. It’s Windows reimagined.

You know, we built Windows 8 so that you don’t have to compromise across form factors, across types of input, you get to work the way that you want to work.

The Windows operating system is there to make this all possible for you. It’s the one and only operating system that you can use that spans all of these capabilities and so that you can truly pick the form factor that you want to use without compromising.

We showed you a bunch of apps in these demonstrations. These are the preview apps. I do want to kind of say what that means to us. The apps are sort of a milestone behind the operating system. So, the operating system at this point is definitely at the consumer preview level, the apps sort of at the app preview level. And that collection of apps that you saw, the ones that are shipping with the download, all subject to a little bit of change, they’re all going to be updated along the way, new apps will come into the store. So, it’s just early. I would probably not think now is a good time to start reviewing the apps or listing the apps or categorizing them and things like that. It’s just a little bit early.

But we did show you some of the essential apps: mail, calendar, people, messaging, SkyDrive, photos, reader. There’s a lot of apps that really are a very important part of the Windows 8 experience.

You know, it’s also a no compromise for apps. What you saw from Julie was that you can use one app and then another app, and the apps can pull information from each other. So, the ability to use SkyDrive, use local files, connect that up with e-mail, all of this is an extremely important part of both the platform, the experience, and also the opportunity for developers.

And so when you use one app, all the other apps get better. The more apps you have, the better the overall system experience is.

You can almost think of the contracts that Julie showed, the ability to search, the ability to share, the ability to connect between applications as a super fancy modern cloud connected clipboard, and it’s a way of really bringing a rich new level of experience that only can happen with a new level of platform and new types of applications.

And so you don’t have to compromise when you use your apps, you don’t have to wait for the app to integrate with one place, that place already does the work for you. So, it’s a very exciting new development, and it’s a huge opportunity for developers.

The Windows Store that Antoine showed is a place that provides a marketplace, it’s a marketplace for apps, it’s a marketplace for a new opportunity for developers. You’ll be able to see personalized suggestions, a rich presentation of a fast, fluid, beautiful, modern presentation.

And, you know, everything from the apps, the OS, and the store are all connected by the cloud.

And together this apps and OS experience really does represent an unprecedented opportunity for developers. The terms, the conditions, the opportunity, the economics, all of this is really working in developers’ favor as they begin their journey with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

But, you know, the software and the OS and the apps is one part of the experience; the other part of the experience is the hardware world.

We have many of our amazing hardware partners are here with us today, and we’re working in new ways to bring new levels of capabilities, industrial design, form factors, creativity and differentiation across the broad range of hardware that Windows can support.

And so we want to preview some of the capabilities that our partners have been working on. We did a blog post on Windows on ARM. It was about 650 tweets. So, what we wanted to do was really show reimagining Windows for SOCs or system-on-a-chip, the power efficiency of modern mobile devices comes together with the capabilities of a Windows PC, no compromise across ARM and with Office, apps and devices, and we wanted to make sure you see some of the progress in the hardware ecosystem and for developers.

You know, you can access from anywhere on the best mobile platforms that have ever existed. The work that our partners have done, the work that Intel has really led on ultrabooks is simply incredible. It’s some of the best hardware engineering and industrial design that our PC partners have ever done, with the support of Intel, and so we wanted to make sure to talk about the choices and the creativity going on there.

You know, from the very start of the Windows 8 project we designed it to meet the needs of a broad range of customers, and in particular the role of professionals, people who live in front of a PC, multiple monitors, desktop; that scaling out, scaling up of the Windows platform is an integral part of the design of Windows 8.

We want to show how the enterprise flexibility and control are an important part of how we designed Windows 8 from the ground up, the performance, reliability fundamentals, and the flexibility all of that brings across sizes, along with extensibility where you want it.

You know, you don’t really have to compromise because of the form factor you use. One OS is going to span the smallest tablets through multiple screens to the biggest desktop machines, extensible all the way through.

And so the best way to really see this preview of hardware capabilities is to invite up Michael Angiulo. Michael is the corporate vice president for the Windows Client and Ecosystem Team, and he’s going to takes us through some of the preview work in the hardware world.

MIKE ANGIULO: Thank you very much, Steven.

I’m going to start by showing a little bit of the Windows on ARM that you were talking about. So, 13 months ago, so CES last year, we did a demo of Windows 8 running on ARM for the first time. There are a lot of pictures. It’s kind of exciting. At that point, we were just launching the Windows desktop on motherboards that were running phone processors. So, processors like Tegra 2 and Medfield, and that was a really important demonstration. It was short, but it was important because what it said is that we’re going to have  it’s better late  we are going to have a new generation of PCs that have a power profile more like a phone.

So, they’ll run in what’s called connected standby. In connected standby, your PC not only starts up fast and shuts down fast, and stays in standby for a long time on one charge, while it’s in standby it’s synching all the time. So, you turn your PC on, and you have your mail. You turn your PC on, and you have the text messages, or the other kinds of communications that came in while your PC was asleep.

These PCs are the same Windows. That’s what’s making this so cool. I’m going to show you some of the things that Julie did, and you will see that it’s the same. So, here’s my lock screen. You see that up on the screen. When I swipe up, I have a picture password of my daughter. One, two, three steps to login. And you can see that what I get to is the same Start screen. It’s fast. It’s fluid. It works well with touch. And it’s running a lot of the same apps that you saw Julie using.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Just really quick, I want to make sure you see some of the hardware that we have on display here. Mike is holding the Nvidia Tegra 3, which we’re really excited, it’s quad-core. We have the next-generation Snapdragon from Qualcomm. And we also have the next generation of Omap from TI as well.

And over here we have the Intel SOC Clovertrail, and all of these are showing the same progress that we’re showing in the x86 software as well.

MIKE ANGIULO: These are the chips we’re going to go to market with. These are the chips we’re going to support. And all four of these platforms, and the PCs built on these platforms, will be able to do this connected standby. The reason that this is really the same UI as Windows is because it’s the same code.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Yes, we built this  one of the unique points of view that we had in developing our approach on ARM was that we wanted to use the same kernel, the same OS software across all of the different ARM platforms, and that really benefits the breadth of the ecosystem, and it allows customers to just very easily stay up to date, keep all of their PCs running with the latest and greatest of the apps, and the OS.

MIKE ANGIULO: And they’ll work and they’ll feel the same, too. That shared code goes all the way through to include Internet Explorer, for example. So, here’s IE. You can see it’s the same kind of fast and fluid browsing. I can swipe here. I can get to my tabs. This is that short blog post you were talking about, the 8,000 words, and in it I have an HTML5 video.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Six hundred tweets.

MIKE ANGIULO: Six hundred tweets. You can kind of see that video is playing in frame. It’s fast and it’s fluid. It is, of course, hardware-accelerated graphics. So, it’s not only the best for browsing the Web, it’s also great for apps.

So, I’m going to launch the USA Today app, and what you’ll see is it looks the same as the app on Antoine’s system because it’s the same app. It’s the same code. So, a developer that writes a Windows app, and they write it and put it up in the store, can ship it to customers of ARM systems as well as on x86 systems with the same code.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: And the store will handle that, and you’ll just be able to pick the right apps at the right time for ARM or x86.

MIKE ANGIULO: That’s right. The compatibility is going to be really easy on hardware, too, for example. So, things like some of these are connected to printers, keyboards, and mice.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Yes. So, one of the biggest innovations that we did to help to deliver this is, we developed a new level of class driver we call it. A class driver allows something like 80 or 90 percent of all the printers to just work by plugging them into this device, and the driver will download automatically, or the driver will install automatically.

MIKE ANGIULO: There’s no driver, yes.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: It’s just right there. It works. And it works for a broad range of devices. So, when you pop in a keyboard, or a mouse, or a printer, or USB storage, or external storage of any kind, it just works, just like you would expect. And there’s no extra work, no extra hunting around for drivers or things like that.

MIKE ANGIULO: And then that becomes really useful when you’ve like docked one of these systems, and you have a keyboard and a mouse, and you go to the desktop, because you want to be able to manage your files directly. In this case, I’m showing Office. So, this is Office 15. So, this is PowerPoint. I’m switching slides. You can see that it’s live, it’s editing. I can switch over to Word. So, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote all running natively here, which gets really useful as a PC when you’re sitting down to do work.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Right. And those are the full versions of those applications, and the same document format compatibility, same feature set as their x86 counterparts. And it really shows the power of just having the operating system there to support all those scenarios. And, as we mentioned in the blog, those have been tuned in a very significant way for touch capabilities as well, but they inherit all of the keyboard and mouse and the precision so that you can just choose.

MIKE ANGIULO: That’s true. We’re making the same kind of progress like you mentioned on all of these platforms. So, here on the Omap system, I can start one of the games that you saw in the movie. And I can play with my joystick here, and you can see asteroids flying around.

This is the Intel system I was talking about. So, you can see how fast connected standby works. So, the PC is off, the PC is on. It’s just that fast. It’s responsive. It’s running the same apps that you saw Julie show. So, there’s a Windows app, the iCookbook app. And when I go back to Start you realize that this can also run all of the desktop software that already exists for Windows PCs. So, on the Intel platform it’s really everything.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Right. So, for the enterprise, then it’s line of business, or if you’re a professional and you have dedicated utilities, or devices, all of that runs completely on that x86 Clovertrail machine, but at the same time it brings with it the next generation of a mobile platform.

MIKE ANGIULO: And those mobile platforms are super power efficient. So, it took us work, some pretty significant engineering work, in Windows 8 to be able to run on, in essence, phone platforms. Windows 8 had to be smaller. It uses less CPU. It uses less memory. The disk footprint here is smaller. There are fewer services running, fewer processes, fewer threads running. And we’ve done a bunch of work to make sure that features like uploading and downloading files, or synching via USB, or getting e-mail, all of these kinds of background tasks are now really heavily resource managed so that they never block the user experience. So, all of this plus of course the DX hardware- accelerated graphics are what’s making it possible for Windows to run really well, at the same experience, on this class of device.

Now, these are not PCs that you’ll buy. These are developer reference devices. So, just like the PC that Julie was talking about that we customized with Samsung, these are devices that partners get to develop either PCs or applications. And we’re going to have a special seeding program, and I thank the partners here a lot, including AT&T who is providing mobile broadband on these. It’s going to be a great program. It’s for a specific set of hardware and software developers, and that will be starting soon.

So, I’m going to move on now to some ultra book stuff. So, you mentioned the ultra books before, and I’m going to start with the ultra book reference design from Intel.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Yes, it’s just incredible work by Intel. And so, this is a next generation ultra book that Mike is holding. And so it builds on the success of the first one, and it really shows how when the ecosystem works together and gets a great look at some of the capabilities, that you can really drive a broad array of innovation, and differentiation across devices.

MIKE ANGIULO: These were kind of the star of the show at CES this year. There were so many cool product announcements of some of the best PCs that have ever shipped. You describe some of their attributes, thin, and light, and powerful, and fast. What I kind of liked the most is the creativity that our partners are showing in executing on these.

So, at BUILD, I remember we were holding up the ASUS and the Toshiba ultrabook, they were super light. And those are really beautiful. I’ve got five more examples here of some PCs that are either just now shipping or soon to ship, and what Intel is doing, this is a second-generation ultrabook reference design, so there are new things in it. It’s got the ID Bridge processor. It has a touch screen as well as all the Windows 8 sensors, and mobile broadband, and that good stuff. So, our partners take these and then they make great PCs.

I’m going to start with this Acer, and what I’m going to do is, I’m going to shut it down. And I’m going to show you how fast it boots. I have to wait for it to completely shut down.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: This is a cold start.

MIKE ANGIULO: Yes, cold start. So, I push the button, and what you’re going to see is, the PC will boot in about eight seconds. That’s the kind of performance that was formerly relegated to big enthusiast PCs. At //build/ we showed some of the first UEFI work. So, this fast boot, secure boot is the kind of thing that you’re going to see across the board on ultrabooks.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: And it’s a great example of when we drive together as a collaborating set of partners, we can deliver this in a broad way across everybody’s PCs, and everybody benefits, and the whole experience gets richer across all of your PCs.

MIKE ANGIULO: And these PCs, get a load of how thin this is. Can you see how thin that PC is? These PCs are getting so thin our partners are getting creative in things like how to put full-size ports on a PC that’s smaller than a full-size port. So, I’m going to push a button, and you see a little motorized door comes out. Can you see that on the screen? I think it’s kind of cool.

It’s really neat to be able to take a PC like this on the road and not have compromised on being able to connect when you’re using it.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Yes, this is the kind of thing that I think is really interesting about how all the partners differentiate and create unique value across all of these. If you travel a lot, and you give presentations, you connect to external devices, ports aren’t an option, like you really, really need them. And so having a model you can choose from that has those capabilities allows you to be a professional road warrior to get done the things that you need to get done.

MIKE ANGIULO: Here’s another example of the differentiation you were talking about. HP has built this ENVY system. It’s really cool. It’s got Beats Audio. They’ve done some pretty cool new work with using new materials. So, this is a gorilla glass cover that’s integrated into the PC. Did you see how quickly the HP logo turned off? That’s how quickly the PC went to sleep. Ultrabooks go to sleep and resume really fast. So, as I open the lid the logo is on and you can see that this PC is already resumed from sleep. So, this is the kind of on/off performance that you’ll see across this entire line.

The next one I’m going to show you is a second generation of the Samsung Series 9. Now, this was a really popular PC when it first came out. It’s beautiful. It’s really thin. And it’s really, really powerful. So, I’m going to use Windows Tab here, which is another one of the keyboard shortcuts to bring up a bunch of apps all at the same time, and I’m just kind of cycling through apps that I had launched before. And I have to do this next step fast, because of how fast that happens. I’m going to go to the desktop and I’m looking at task manager. And if you zoom in here you can see suspended, suspended, suspended, zero CPU. That’s how quickly we know that you’re not using an app and we just park it.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Right. This is a very important part of the Windows runtime in Windows 8. And developers sort of pick up on getting this as just part of building a Windows 8 application. By using the capabilities of the OS to solve these power management problems, you get this great experience. And Julie showed you how you could close apps if you want. Here’s the reason you don’t really need to, because they’re not actually consuming any resources, while you’re using your PC, because we kind of put them in this state of sleep at the app level.

MIKE ANGIULO: That’s right. And they resume just as quickly as you saw me bring them back. So, this is the PC that you showed Internet Explorer 9 first, on the first generation of it.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Yes, so when we first showed this it was one of the earliest ones with really great industrial design and the new Intel. It’s hardware-accelerated graphics in combination with Internet Explorer. I walked out of the talk carrying it and I just got mobbed by people wanting to see it. It was really great. And this is the second generation of that. And it’s great to see that rapid improvement in the product.

MIKE ANGIULO: Here’s another PC that’s really brand new. This was just announced last month. I think it started shipping within the last couple of days. It’s the Dell XPS 13. And one of my favorite features on this one, it’s made out of carbon fiber, it’s really light. It’s got a 13-inch screen in a 12-inch chassis. That’s as much computer as you could possibly fit you can see how think the bezel is around the side.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: These bezels are an important part of kind of the new design language for all the ultrabooks. You’re going to see much thinner bezels in terms of how narrow they are, but also you won’t see those ridges any more, which becomes important for the touch interface and being able to really have the sleekest thinnest PC.

MIKE ANGIULO: As that PC gets so thin and so sleek you start traveling with it more. You start using it in more places. And so in Windows 8 we’ve done some significant work to make networking better. Networking is easier, so it’s easier to connect to mobile broadband network and it’s faster. Our network switching and our network connectivity can happen in many cases in under a second. So, in this case I have a Vodafone mobile broadband connector. You see this little square here; we’re connected and roaming. I can pull this out and I will come off of this network. I’m going to go into my UI and show you how that works.

So, if I go to settings and I go to our connection UI, you’ll see all the networks that are available. You’ll see our new airplane modes so you can manage multiple radios. And we’re doing cost-aware network switching so what happens now is when you move from a network that you’re paying for bandwidth into a Wi-Fi zone that you’ve used before, or a Wi-Fi zone that your mobile operator provides then you will switch over to that so that you’re going to save money.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Right. So, we have the same user experience for metro or desktop applications, but this notion of building in this very agile networking is critically important for the world of mobile computing, where you carry these around more. And it’s really amazing, one of the things that you see when you see the consumer preview is when you open up your machine and it resumes you’re going to see the lock screen that you’ve seen and you’re going to be able to see the network status indicator. And most times it will reconnect before you can finish typing in your password if you’re near by the network that you routinely connect to. And all that happens, it’s not just magic, it’s a lot of great work with our partners. We’re working on it all the way up from the silicon all the way through the drivers and the user model.

MIKE ANGIULO: And part of what makes that possible is that we have class driver support for mobile broadband, so just like plugging in a printer it becomes immediately available. The reason that the mobile broadband can fire up and be connected, even before Windows is running, is because you don’t have to install any additional software, you don’t have to go and install and pull down a driver if you’re not even connected to the network yet, which is a really important scenario.

Here’s a look at a next-generation ultrabook that’s coming. This is the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga. It’s called the Yoga. And this PC is a touch PC. And so you’re going to start seeing touch screens coming on ultrabooks really soon. Of course, it’s the Yoga, because of its ability to do this and fold itself back around kind of more like a tablet. So, in this case I’m going to go to Internet Explorer. I’m going to run this little performance demo. This performance demo is running in Internet Explorer 10 and it’s running with no script.

We’ve got no script running on the page. We have only HTML 5. We have CSS and we have SVG. So, as I’m using this I can use it like a tablet. I can flip it back around, use it like a PC, and you can kind of see how our partners are re-imagining what the standard categories are.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: I think that it’s really fascinating that today, because we’re in this world where tablets are about touch and then PCs and laptops are about a keyboard and a folding hinge. What happens when you revisit all of those assumptions, and all of a sudden new categories emerge? It is a new form factor. Even if you don’t have the keyboard attached, what does it mean if you can attach a keyboard and a mouse to a device, and it becomes a fully capable PC? All of the precision of the mouse is there. All of your keyboard shortcuts are there. Your productivity is there. It’s more than just being able to type faster. You can do the broad range of capabilities of the software in a much richer and deeper way. So, we’re going to see touch making sense in a whole bunch of new form factors.

MIKE ANGIULO: And I think you’ll see the form factors start adapting as people are using them with touch. So, an example here, this is an all-in-one. This is a Windows 8-style touch sensor. So, this is flat capacitive glass with no bezel. It’s really pretty. It’s very responsive. I can be playing a game like this. But, what’s neat is like with surface we learned especially when using it with multiple people, you can just pull it down like this and now we can be working together side-by-side.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: So, we basically just turned this productivity-looking desktop into a multiplayer gaming station, just by flipping the hinge

MIKE ANGIULO: Or a drafting table.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Or a drafting table for a professional architect, or a student.

MIKE ANGIULO: That’s right.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: And this is the fascinating thing. When the mouse first came out, the Microsoft Mouse, by the way, this week turns 30 years old. So, it’s very exciting to think about the history of the mouse and Microsoft’s contribution to that. But, it’s hard to imagine not having a mouse. And yet when mice first came out they were relatively controversial, and more importantly, you couldn’t find a place to put it on your desk. If you were a computer user then you remember your return, if you remember that word, on your desk, didn’t have room for a mouse. And what happened was that your whole work environment changed. So, it’s not a static view of the world. So, when you see a PC like this, don’t think about it fitting into the world you have now. I’m never going to sit here and hold my arm straight out.

MIKE ANGIULO: Bring the PC to you, tilt it down, and build new furniture that allows new capabilities. All of this creativity is going to come, because the PC you’re using is changing the kind of work, the work style, and the way you can interact with a PC. So, it’s a fascinating stage in evolution where all of a sudden this direct manipulation becomes a critical part.

Now, in reality what’s so neat about this is, if you have a keyboard and a mouse and touch, you’re just going to use them seamlessly like by magic. And whichever one seems to work you’ll just use. And it’s weird when we do studies and watch people, it just works and they don’t think, I’m now going to touch. You’re not leaning on your arm reading the Web like this, and then something perks you up and you start banging away on email, and that kind of interaction is going to be to all natural. And that’s why when you first touch a PC you’re going to want every PC to be touchable.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: And picture that kind of interaction in like a collaborative environment. So, check this out, this is not just a monitor here in the back, this is a Windows 8 PC. This is a perceptive pixel incorporated PC and it’s running real Windows 8. Go ahead and pull out the charm.

MIKE ANGIULO: So, I’m going to just swipe on the side and get the charms up, and there it is, just like you expect.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Here’s us. That’s the pool. This is where we are. So, here’s maps, you can pull this map around I can zoom myself way out. You can pull out the charm again, and get right back to the desktop. What makes this PC cool is 10 people could be using this PC at the same time. It’s supporting 100 fingers on touch. It’s got a subpixel accuracy pen. It’s 82-inch diagonal piece of optically bonded gorilla glass. That’s the biggest one in the world. That title was held by Surface as recently as last year, Surface V2 at 40 inches. So, you can see how quickly this is changing and how quickly you’re going to see you already see touch like this on television all the time. And one of the things that’s so neat about this is there’s no parallax because of the bonding. So, there’s really no gap between where my finger is and where I feel like the pixels are. So, I actually feel like I’m moving this tile directly by hand and that’s what makes this all so natural.

MIKE ANGIULO: This is like; it’s stick to your finger touch, like the size of a wall. It’s a wild experience to come up here and touch this and really experience what it’s like. And Mike was talking about the parallax. Well, that matters a great deal when you start to use a pen on this, if this was a whiteboard or a different kind of application or scenario.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Now, what’s really impressive about this is, this is really just the touch screen. Any Windows PC can run this; in fact, the Windows 8 PCs that are powerful enough for this experience are starting to come in some of the most unbelievably small packages. So, this PC was so small that it got hung up in customs, because they didn’t actually believe it was a full PC. This was only released like a couple of days ago. And it’s a dual-core AMD system. It’s a full-power system. It’s got dual digital outputs. It’s got all of the ports that you want, and this little PC can run this size experience.

MIKE ANGIULO: And you could mount it behind it, and that kind of flexibility, where over time you could change out the PC, change the display, all of that is just an important part of being able to build really flexible designs.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: I’m going to show some of the flexibility and design. So, I’ve got one of these PCs here that’s already connected. This PC is actually connected to these two show screens. So, what you’re looking at here is this PC driving these two screens in multiple monitor mode. So, this is the Windows desktop spanning two screens. And we’ve done a few features.

This is kind of an enthusiast feature where you want to be able to have different backgrounds on different screens, or run different slide shows, or in this case I’m going to launch the explorer here and as I drag it to that screen, watch that task bar, that’s empty right now. You could see the taskbar icon for Explorer follows the Window depending on which screen it is. So, these are just some of the ways that you can have enthusiast size power in an unbelievably small package.

MIKE ANGIULO: So, this is the kind of work that we’ve done to help professionals who really do rely on two or four, or six, monitors. And so we’ve engineered an improved taskbar for that desktop experience spanning all of those monitors in a very high-caliber professional setting.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: So, being flexible with a form factor is really important for a business PC. So, if your business grows, you want your PC to be able to expand with it. So, there are three little steps I’m going to show here to show how you would expand to new hardware devices. How you can expand your storage. How you can expand the graphics computing capability of the PC at the same time.

So, the first thing I’m going to do is start playing audio and you will not hear it, because I don’t have any speakers connected to the PC. I’m going to pair this Bluetooth speaker using NFC. So, we hear a lot about NFC at conferences like this around phones and payment, but it’s a really useful, general-purpose technology for just connecting any two devices. So, I’ve held it here. I’m going to get an invite here in the upper-right hand corner. You can wait and a tile comes in. So, when I click on that what you’ll see is the Bluetooth light is going to turn on and turn blue, and the PC is going to start playing.

So, that’s always fun. It’s always exciting to do wireless demos at Mobile World Congress and have them work.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: So, that’s NFC pairing. Here is another place where I’m going to show you some of the expandability power of the PC. I’m turning on one of these big new digital cameras that shoots super high-definition pictures.

MIKE ANGIULO: At CES I’m kind of a little bit of a cameraperson and I was looking at some of the new digital cameras. It’s really amazing the capabilities that they’re bringing. The latest digital camera from Nikon takes 75-megabyte raw images. So, imagine if you just shoot for a fairly short period of time. How much storage you’re going to start to consume. Of course, as a professional photographer you need reliability, redundancy and that’s your livelihood. So, that capability is super critical and the ability to quickly grow your storage and have that grow with you.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: That capability is what I’m going to demonstrate over here quickly, so I’ve got an array of hard drives. So, this is just a 12 terabyte physical array, but I know that I’m going to be capturing more and more pictures. At 11 frames a second, you’re putting down a gig every couple of seconds. I mean, the numbers are just enormous. And so, I have Windows acting like I have a 50 terabyte drive. And, as a result, I can add drives to a feature called Storage Spaces. Windows will treat all of the drives I connect like one big extended drive.

So, in this case, imagine that those are full and I wanted to copy these files. I take a USB 2 drive, so a drive that I have laying around, a portable one. And I plug it into USB, and what you’ll see is the drive will open and it gets recognized immediately here where it says “add drive.” So, you see this drive just popped up. I pick it, and I’m going to add it to the space. I now have it added to the drive pool that fast. Different speed drives, different size drives, different buses, it doesn’t matter. Windows just keeps expanding like I have one disk.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: And that one disk is really fast, and it’s reliable, it’s redundant, and it’s a professional-caliber solution. What’s really neat about it is, because we’re running one operating system across all of these, while you can have the disk plugged into your professional Windows 8 workstation, you can also unplug the array and pop it into one of these devices, and see the same storage. And so you can either bring it with you, you can move the device around to different locations where you have the storage, and it’s that professional flexibility that’s incredibly important to the foundation of Windows.

MIKE ANGIULO: Here’s another way that you can expand your PC as you go, and this is by adding more graphics horsepower. This is a Radeon 6990 card from AMD.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: Card.

MIKE ANGIULO: Yes, card. It’s actually two GPUs in a crossfire arrangement. It’s fan-cooled, and it’s super powerful supporting DirectX 11. So, normally when I would show something like this, I would immediately load a game, some game with super realistic colors and textures, and physics, and show ray tracing and light.

But, what I’m going to show here is how you can apply the power of DirectX 11 to professional use. So, let’s say that I’m editing some video. I have a video here that was taken by hand, and you can see it’s very shaky. It’s moving around. Well, I’m going to go here and pick an effect called video stabilization. And what’s happening is, in real time, every single frame is being analyzed, tracked, and matched up to smooth out the video. That’s happening in real time because of the parallel computing capability you can do with DirectX 11.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: So, 60 frames a second being rendered, and corrected for that kind of display. It’s just unbelievable the computational power that’s extensible and expandable.

MIKE ANGIULO: So, you’ve seen this full-power PC, but what you don’t realize is this PC actually does not have Windows 8 installed on it. I did that entire demo from one USB key. Windows was installed here with a new feature called Windows To Go. Let me show you how that works. If I put that USB key in this PC, and I reboot this one, what you’re going to see is that this is really a Windows 7 PC, and I’ve moved my entire Windows environment, so all of my apps, all of my data, everything to here. No business runs on just one PC. You might want to be able to manage a desktop around shared PCs. And this is all possible now with Windows To Go. And, of course, Windows 8 wins the boot race.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: So, you see, Windows 8 is already on the Start screen, and Windows 7 is still booting. And it’s this killer machine down here.

MIKE ANGIULO: Yes. That’s Windows To Go running on my Sony VAIO Z. So, I can take my def PC with me, and I can go.

STEVEN SINOFSKY: And that’s a really cool enterprise feature, Windows To Go, and we’ll be talking more about our enterprise capabilities of Windows 8 at CBIT.

Thanks a lot, Mike. (Applause.)

That’s a preview of the Windows 8 PC experience that really our partners are just doing a great job with early examples of the kind of capabilities that they are going to be able to take advantage of in Windows 8.

The SOC PCs will enable a next generation in PC designs, thinner, lighter, longer battery life. It’s an awesome opportunity for us. The ARM reference designs that we showed up here, those are in testing and making the same progress as our x86 and 64 Windows 8.

The Intel ultrabooks that have been worked on with the partners have just been unbelievably cool. And I really congratulate the work there, definitely some of the best industrial design, the clearest differentiation, just a terrific win for customers.

You know, touch PCs are on the way in all shapes and sizes. All the way from the smallest tablets all the way up to this giant screen behind. And we really want to emphasize that touch is just another point in Windows 8 where you get to have and. You don’t have to pick “or.” Do I want touch “or” a keyboard and a mouse? You get the full capabilities of the keyboard and a mouse operating system when you need it, and it’s just right there. Not only the operating system, but all of the apps, everything in the system is fully aware of the precision, and the kind of input that you can do, or using touch and being aware of the touch capabilities. And so, you can have a first-class experience based on what you want to use. And our PC partners are already starting to deliver on this new level of integrated touch across a broad range of PCs.

And the no-compromise approach to building Windows 8 applies to our professional and enthusiasts as well. You don’t need to choose your OS, or how much power and extensibility you need. You choose the form factor, and the Windows 8 operating system will follow you. It will do that without compromising. Everything on Windows 8 will do what you think it should do simply because it is a Windows 8 PC.

So, today’s demonstrations were all done on the consumer preview. To say we’re excited about reaching this milestone is probably an understatement. Some of the highlights that have changed from the developer preview are, we’ve made a broad range of changes and improvements across all of Windows 8. We previewed the Windows Store back in December, and right from then we started on the app contest, and we started building apps. And so you saw an early app preview of some of the apps, apps that are going to be included in Windows, apps from third parties, and we talked about that it’s a little early, and a lot of dynamic nature of the app world is about to be downloaded and experienced.

We really showed the cloud connection across all of your Windows PCs. Here at Mobile World Congress, we showed a lot of your Windows Phone 7.5 connecting up to SkyDrive, to your Hotmail accounts, to all of your identity, all of that roaming is just totally seamless. So, when you first sign on, you’re with your Windows Live ID. It carries with you across all of your devices. Julie showed Xbox as well. And so, just a broad selection of ways that the cloud connection really shows.

Under the covers, you saw a lot of Internet Explorer 10. That’s the Internet Explorer 10 platform preview number five. And so, we’ve continued to move forward on Internet Explorer 10 with an amazing rendering engine that’s the heart and soul of the browser, whether it’s in the desktop or in Metro style. And it’s also the heart and soul of the platform for building apps like Cut the Rope if you choose to use HTML5 and JavaScript. It is world-class. It is highly, highly, highly compatible with all the standards. And its performance, reliability, security are all world leaders.

And we also showed you a preview of some of the kind of hardware capabilities that really enabled by Windows 8. We actually showed you a whole lot of other features. I have a copy here of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview Guide that all of you are going to get a copy of, and this book with all that’s in it is still just an overview of all the capabilities. I think a few of you are going to find a couple of really cool gems in there, in the book and in the product, some things not even in the book that you’ll get to experience.

I want to make sure to update everybody on our path to general availability. Today is the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. We’ve updated the developer preview with over a hundred thousand changes. We’re going to make the consumer preview available in five languages, English, German, Japanese, French, and Simplified Chinese.

Also today, the Visual Studio 11 Beta will be available for developers, and we’re going to include the Preview apps, both in the downloadable images for x86 and 64, and also in the Windows Store.

But we’re not going to just stop here today. In fact, along the way, starting really soon, you’re going to start to see updates to the operating system, new drivers from our partners, new preview apps, updated preview apps. It’s going to be a very dynamic consumer preview getting to the next milestone.

We’re also going to update folks on the Windows 8 enterprise features at upcoming CBIT. And so we’ll dive into features like Windows To Go, and the broad range of enterprise capabilities for managing, controlling, and using Windows 8 in an enterprise environment.

And so, we deliver the consumer preview just as we promised, and the next milestone after that is going to be the release candidate. And then after that is going to be RTM, and then after that is general availability. So, that’s going to be our pattern, and we’re going to sort of commit to delivering on that pattern starting today, in fact, starting right now. So, while we were all talking, the consumer preview went live. Very quickly we had downloads from over 70 different countries. In fact, I’m pretty sure the network hiccoughed right when the build went live. And so, you can go download it now on Preview.Windows.com. Not only is there software and the images with the preview apps in the store, but there’s a broad range of new information for developers, a broad range of new documentation, as well as the preview product guide for download.

We’re going to keep blogging on the Building Windows 8 blog, and we’re going to get details about the system requirements, details about how we made choices in the consumer preview, continue our dialogue there, and lots, and lots more.

So, I would, just on behalf of the Windows team back in Redmond that have been up kind of all night, I really want to thank you for taking your time at Mobile World Congress to join us here today and be the first folks to really see firsthand the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

So, thank you very much everybody, and have a great rest of your Mobile World Congress.