Steven Sinofsky: Windows 7 Launch

Remarks by Steven Sinofsky, president, Windows and Windows Live Division
Windows 7 Launch
Tokyo
October 22, 2009

STEVEN SINOFSKY: (Music, applause.) Thank you very much. It’s great to be here today, and joining us in the introduction of Windows 7 to the Japan market and to the markets all around the world.

I wish to thank all of the Japanese customers and partners for their cooperation and support in helping us to deliver Windows 7 in a very ready and robust and stable product. Thank you very much.

I want to thank everybody for helping us do a great job with our partners and with the press all around the world in delivering Windows 7. As Saguchi-san (ph) mentioned, we’ve already received pre orders in one month more than Vista had in the first three months of selling through.

In fact, I’m pleased to share with you that this morning here in Japan, we learned that Amazon has said that this is the fastest-selling pre-order product in the history of Amazon all around the world. In fact, it’s sold more pre-order copies than the Harry Potter book.

So I’d also like to thank the press who have done a wonderful job in helping us to get the word of Windows 7 out to customers and partners. And because of the great work that we’ve all done together, over 500 different articles have appeared talking about the great value of our partners and the work that has been done in Windows 7. So thank you very much.

I would like to start today by talking about how we are listening to people in how we built Windows 7 and how we did a great deal of research to learn what customers wanted from their operating system and how we could work together with partners to deliver Windows 7 to everybody.

During the course of developing Windows 7, we received information from millions of PCs in almost every country of the world. And this information helps us to design a better version of Windows by understanding how customers really use their PC in the real world.

Here in Japan, we conducted tens of thousands of interviews and over 40,000 hours of Windows 7 usage studies were logged during the course of developing the product.

All around the world, we had an incredible number of people using Windows 7 before it was even released. In fact, we’ve had over 8 million people using the pre-release software, which is just an incredible number.

Here in Japan, we had 615 employees of Microsoft Japan join in testing the localization and making sure that delivered a great product for the Japanese market. In fact, because of their work, we fixed over 100 important specific issues to the Japanese version of Windows 7. And really what’s so exciting about Windows 7 is that it’s a product of our customers and our partners.

What I would like to do is share with you a video. And this video are real customer voices who use the Japanese beta, the release candidate of Windows 7. So this information and these quotes were all gathered from our community site that’s called “I Run Windows 7.”

(Break for video presentation.)

STEVEN SINOFSKY: So that’s Windows 7 in the words of customers who experienced the product before it was even released. And those are the customers that helped us to do a great job in building Windows 7 as we incorporated their feedback, their perspective, and their point of view in developing it.

As we look to Windows 7 today, we think of Windows 7 as your PC, simplified. We’re very excited at the way that people have received the product and their positive comments, and your PC, simplified, means three important things, but all of them together are about your PC and your digital life every day, and making those simple.

These three things include simplifying your everyday tasks. So all of those things that you do a hundred times every day are simpler to accomplish: Launching programs, switching windows, moving between tasks in Windows.

Windows 7 works the way that you want. It’s faster, more secure, and more reliable. And these improvements in Windows 7 are the kind that all of our customers spoke of the most as we were developing the product.

But, you know, it’s not enough to just improve the things that everybody knows about. It’s also important to make new things possible. And we did that with Windows 7 and enabled you to discover exciting new ways to have fun and get things done with your PC. So all of these together are about simplifying your PC and having a great experience with Windows 7.

I would like to talk about the importance of the Japanese market. You know, it’s fun for me to be here. This is my favorite place to visit, and I’ve participated in many product launches here in Japan. In fact, many people have been asking me, “Why are you here working on the launch of Windows 7 in Japan and not with your boss in New York?” Well, I’m excited to be here in Japan, and I’m glad that I had the chance to participate.

We are very passionate and excited about the support that we’re receiving from the Japanese market. And particularly because of the Japanese attention to the product quality and the development of Windows 7, which makes it so important for us to make sure that we’re in touch with the Japanese customers.

Of course, Windows has a very strong relationship with all of the Japan OEMs. And as the best partners for Microsoft, it’s great that we’re here in Japan today. You know, our Japanese OEMs have done a great job of having amazing, premium PCs ready today all around the country.

And, of course, Japan leads the word in advanced technology for consumer electronics. In particular, what we’re seeing is the great connectivity of Windows 7 to television, which has a leading position here in Japan and some of the things that we’re here to show you today with our partners.

Really, being in Japan is about being part of the Windows ecosystem that really starts here in Japan with OEMs, peripherals, software developers, and all of the components. And it’s great to be here to recognize the great contribution that everybody here in Japan makes to the development of Windows 7 for all of our customers around the world.

You’re going to hear us talk a great deal in Windows 7 about the premium experience. The premium experience, for us, is about delivering the very best that modern hardware and modern software combined together can deliver. For Windows 7 here in Japan, we’re focusing on three important elements of the premium PC experience.

First, there’s Windows Touch. And Windows Touch enables us to deliver a new experience with new hardware and new software for a broad array of new devices, many of which you’ll see here today for the first time.

The second area of the premium PC experience is what we support in Windows 7 with digital TV. With so many analog TVs and analog PC tuners about to be replaced, a PC is an obvious target for people to use the great functionality of a PC and to combine that with all of the power available to you in great displays, information sharing, recording TV, and really doing a great job at the integration of a Windows PC and ISDB.

And the third area is about home networking and how many homes today have multiple PCs or how many people have a PC at work that they want to bring home and have it join their existing home network? With Windows 7 and an important feature we have called Home Group, you can set up these home networks far easier than you ever have before, and you can use those networks to not just share files, such as your recorded television, but to also share the peripherals such as your printers that are all attached to your home network.

And so it’s a great way to think about Windows 7 is the premium experience across all three of these dimensions: Windows Touch, Digital TV, and Home Networking.

To complete the Windows experience, we believe in adding Windows Live to a Windows 7 PC. Windows Live allows consumers to complete their Windows experience with a great set of free applications and free services called Windows Live. The applications known as Windows Live Essentials can connect up to a variety of services, not just Windows Live but blogger services, photo-sharing services, or moving-sharing services. And those applications also demonstrate the value of Windows 7 by integrating well with the Windows 7 desktop experience.

Choices are good for everybody, and this approach of including the applications in Windows Live Essentials gives everybody the opportunity to have the most choice and the best way to keep their software up to date and connect those to online services that support them. And so Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, Windows Writer, all of those applications, and more, connect up to Windows Live Services such as Hotmail or Sky Drive or Photo Gallery. And together, all of those are available for free and complete the Windows 7 experience.

I would like to start showing some demonstrations of Windows 7, and these are very exciting. So first I would like to come over here and show some of the new, Windows 7 premium PCs. So these laptops are some examples of some of the cool, new PCs. Now, I can’t show them all here today up front, but I will be able to share them with you in the room next door.

So what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to very quickly run past all of these machines and just resume them from standby. But you have to look really quickly, because they all resume pretty fast. So here’s the first one, the second one, the third one, the fourth one, and the fifth one. And these machines all resume from standby in between one and three seconds. And so that’s very exciting, and that’s some great work that we’ve done working with our partners and to deliver a great experience from the hardware, the firmware, all the way through Windows 7.

So these are some terrific new PCs here. Just some great machines. This one has an integrated touch panel that’s an auxiliary monitor. This is a swiveling tablet PC that also supports multi-touch. And then we have a variety of other desktops – of other PCs as well, including desktop replacements.

Now, these are premium laptops that support the full Windows 7 premium experience. I would also like to talk about some of the new premium PCs that are available for people to use. So behind this curtain are the premium PCs that I wish to show, if I could find the person who is going to do this. They’re hiding, there we go. (Music.)

We want to share with you some examples of some of the new premium PCs that we have for Windows 7. Now, these are all representing premium, all-in-one PCs developed specifically for the Japanese market. So we have a multi-touch-capable machine from Hewlett Packard, we’ve got integrated all-in-one digital TV PCs from Fujitsu. This is one of my favorite PCs, Raku-Raku from Fujitsu that supports the large keyboard. And for seniors, it’s a great PC.

As I move over here, you can see we have NEC machines with great audio. We have a nice Dell all-in-one, a Sony, multi-touch-capable PC that’s also a great all-in-one. And then finally over here, we have an Acer Revo, which is a small form-factor desktop that connects up to a monitor and it uses less power and is particularly green.

So these are just a small sample of some of the Windows 7 PCs specifically designed for the Japanese market, and also that take advantage of the premium PC.

So I have a couple more things that I want to share with you, and then I’ll show you some more PCs. And so the next row of PCs are some very special PCs that came out during the course of developing Windows 7. And these PCs are called premium small-note PCs. So these PCs represent some of the new small, lightweight machines. But what’s so exciting about all of these is that these machines all run Windows 7 Premium.

And so now while some of these PCs are available with Windows 7 Starter, we’re very excited that the Japanese market has done a great job helping us deliver Premium PCs even that are extremely small. So I’m going to hold up one of my favorites, which is the Sony Vaio X series. So this is a terrific PC because when you look at it, it’s extremely thin and small. In fact, it’s even thinner than the Macbook Air.

And here you see a wide variety of machines from all of the different manufacturers, each of them running Windows 7 Premium.

Now, there are even more of these in the room next door, and hundreds of other small-form-factor PCs that are available as part of the Windows 7 launch. And so we’re very excited about all of these.

The Premium, small-note PCs are the ones that we just saw. And these came about, of course, because of the importance of the mobile scenario, particularly here in Japan. The mobile scenario makes it possible, combined with the new hardware from our partners, makes it possible to have these very thin, very small PCs, but that also have the full functionality of Premium Windows 7.

And so I’m happy that our OEM partners have done such a great job delivering these Premium small-note machines. And just a reminder that there are more of these machines in the room next door.

I would like to now introduce a colleague of mine who is going to be able to show a demonstration of some of the Premium support in Windows 7. So I’d like to introduce the group lead for consumer Windows Business at Microsoft KK, Fujimotosan.

(Break for demo.)

STEVEN SINOFSKY: (Music, applause.) Thank you, Fujimotosan, for that wonderful demonstration of Windows 7, but not just Windows 7, but all of the work our customers and partners have done together. I wish to just thank everybody for joining us here today and to remember that Windows 7 is around – is about your PC, simplified. (Japanese comments.) Thank you very much everybody, arigato. (Applause.)

END