ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft’s CFO and chief marketing officer, Windows, Tami Reller. (Applause.)
TAMI RELLER: It’s so great to be here. I’m pleased to be back with you at WPC this year, and I’m especially pleased to be able to represent our family of devices and the high value services that Steve set up so well.
So as we move forward into this next era, our partners are as integral as ever. You create and bring our family of devices and services to life, to life for customers. You come up with so many creative ways to build on our platform and build on our products. One of my favorite examples is the 2,000 Lync app extensions that you’ve built or, of course, working with businesses to help them migrate to the latest products and services. You are absolutely a central part of our future.
So everything that we are talking about today is anchored by this idea that we can do something that no other company can. And that is one modern and complete experience across the devices that matter today. Your experience, your data, everything can travel with you. And it’s connected through this trusted foundation of Windows. This is one experience that is unique to Windows, but it’s also uniquely yours.
I mean, we know that when a customer chooses an Apple product, they get a device that reflects Apple. When you choose an Android device, you get a device that reflects a dizzying number of points of view. But when you choose a Windows device, you get a device that reflects you.
Start a Word document from your laptop, then easily finish it on a Windows Phone. You get music, video, and games from Xbox. The best of the Web with Internet Explorer. The best cloud storage in SkyDrive. And of course the best way to stay connected, Skype. And the absolute best in productivity with Office. All of this across every device providing the most complete experience from the start.
Well, we’re believers, continue to be believers that user experience and the design is going to continue to be an important differentiator for Microsoft, and it’s also going to continue to be an important differentiator for the experiences that you are building for customers.
What we’re finding is that businesses are seeking trusted partners who can not only write great code, that’s critical of course, but they can also design beautiful and engaging experiences for customers.
Apps that are better designed, they absolutely achieve better ratings in the Windows store, and even equally as important, they are more engaging for customers, and they deliver greater monetization opportunities.
So to support all of this, I’m excited to announce that in January we will be launching a new competency: The user experience design competency. And the whole idea behind this competency is to give you the best way to train your designers and to get recognized for your expertise with the Microsoft design language and user experience for app building.
This competency will provide your designers with training and certification and gives your firm a head start in building great apps, and we think will help you recruit the best people. So I hope you’re as excited about this as we are, look for this in January.
So we’ve been talking about devices and services for about a year now. And while so much of the opportunity that we see for us and that we see for you is still ahead, there’s a lot of great momentum to talk about.
Let’s take, for example, Windows Phone, which Steve did such a great job talking about. Our sales are growing six times faster than the overall smartphone market. Safe to say that we are now officially the third ecosystem in mobility. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you.
Windows. We are moving forward. Steve did a great job talking about that. We’re moving forward, and you heard us talk about 100 million licenses. I can also report that we have over 20 million enterprise evaluations. So great in consumer and a lot of enterprise traction starting.
And Windows 8, so far, has logged 60 billion hours of use. And our new customer activation continues at a consistent pace.
Office. It’s a great example of a product that is used multiple times every day and it is known and loved by more than a billion people. The new Office is our fastest-selling release in history. Worldwide, one copy is sold every second.
Additionally, one out of four enterprise customers are already on Office 365. And I love this next statistic. Partners lead three out of four enterprise Office 365 deployments, three out of four, great opportunity. Thank you so much for your role in moving businesses to the cloud. (Applause.)
Amazing momentum on Skype. More than 300 million people use Skype each month. And that’s a service that can see up to two billion minutes of use per day on some peak days.
So how our products come together really starts with the experience. And people are using our products as part of everyday life. Important parts of their life. And Steve talked about this as well.
So I have this short video that I think does a great job of showing what we mean by this. Take a look.
(Break for video segment.)
TAMI RELLER: Great. So I love that video. It really shows how devices and services through the power of Office help us do the important things that we need to get done in life.
So Office. Office is a product that has come a long way. It has grown and it’s evolved to meet the needs of its many, many customers across the globe.
So at its onset, we had applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which we then combined into the Office suite. Along the way, we added integrated servers. Exchange integration into Outlook, SharePoint integration into Word. And now with Office 365, we have the complete suite of Office available in the cloud without the need to install servers. And with new technology, even full-fidelity Office clients can stream right to your desktop.
Office 365 has been incredibly well received by customers. It’s your complete Office in the cloud. It’s all the Office apps that you know and love today. It’s Word, it’s PowerPoint, it’s Excel, and it’s Outlook. It is perfect for running your business.
And many of our small and medium-sized businesses, which I know are very important to people in this audience, are really benefiting from the enterprise-level services that Office 365 offers. And you have the opportunity to bring that to them.
So with Office 365, you should already be realizing the opportunities through the Office 365 Open program, which we announced last year at WPC.
And then in response to your feedback, we evolved that program back then to allow you to own the billing relationship with your customers and to capture the top-line revenue and up-front margin. Both very important to you.
So today, I’m happy to announce an expansion of the Open program to include Exchange Online, Enterprise, Government, academic offerings, and even more. (Applause.)
We’re also investing more. We’re investing more than $100 million in partner enablement, and that’s above and beyond our margins and channel incentives that are already in place. Where we are heading with Office 365 presents even greater opportunities, leading your customers to the cloud, that’s just the beginning. You continue owning that relationship and helping customers get the most out of Office 365 with your service offerings.
What we want to make sure you hear is that we want and need you to lead. And that intent, we aim to make very clear throughout WPC as you hear more about where Office 365 is going.
So Office is a great example of one of the apps and services that runs across all devices. Devices like the Windows Phone. So let me talk a little bit more about Windows Phone. Windows Phone represents a new range of devices, like the new Nokia phones. Especially, I just want to talk about the Nokia 928 and Nokia 925. Polycarbonate and aluminum bodies. They really do have the finest camera technology in the market today. They have beautiful screens, they’re thin, they’re light. They’re a great representation of the beautiful software that we have running on phones. And customers are, increasingly, choosing our phones over iPhones and Android phones, both consumers and businesses.
So I want to talk a little bit about Windows Phone and business. It’s a real opportunity for this audience. A successful mobility strategy is top-of-mind for just about every business today. And with Windows Phone gaining the type of traction in the marketplace, you really do have the opportunity to offer end-to-end mobility solutions that are based on Microsoft technologies.
Functionality wise, Windows Phone is now rich with enterprise features. It’s highly secure and, of course, integrates completely seamlessly with the Windows infrastructure.
We also are offering best-in-class development tools, support infrastructure, and cloud services that make mobile solutions based on Windows Phone a really obvious choice for businesses today. No other company can offer the wide range of devices, competitive prices, and management capabilities. Now is the time where we can say to you, it’s time to build a mobile practice and to develop Windows Phone apps. Whether they’re consumer apps or line-of-business apps on Windows Phone.
Xbox. It’s another instance of the expression of our beautiful connected software experience. The number-one-selling console is Xbox.
Xbox is also the leading platform for partners. I love this statistic. In 2012, our third-party partners generated $4.5 billion in revenue on Xbox. And that’s more than the total revenue generated on the Apple App Store across all categories, including gaming, an amazing partner opportunity.
And the partner support we’re receiving on this platform is overwhelming. More than 100 entertainment apps from our partners are now on Xbox 360 with full Kinect integration. That’s incredible. And we continue to celebrate great new partners coming onto the platform: Time Warner Cable, ESPN, among others who have most recently joined. And the category is really moving rapidly. Entertainment app usage grew nearly 60 percent this past year, and we continue to see significant growth.
And as you might be aware, Xbox is working to bring its newest console to market this holiday. It’s called Xbox One and it’s already made quite a few headlines. It’s the all-in-one Xbox One. You’ll have an opportunity to see a little bit about this when Jensen Harris comes up on stage in just a moment.
Shifting gears to talk about Surface. So a J.D. Power and Associates 2013 tablet survey found that only about 20 percent of current tablet users use their tablet for business of any sort. Windows tablets are changing that and can change that.
Surface is hands down more productive than an iPad. Hands down. It’s a great tablet for business because it quickly goes from tablet to laptop. Whether it’s the built-in kickstand, or the click-in keyboard. Plus, you’ve got the full USB ports and HD audio and video out, lets you connect your device to the information that you need. It just works; it’s productive. Surface Pro runs Office, and of course all desktop apps as well as a lot of great new touch ISV apps. If you’re an ISV here with us today and you’re building touch apps for Windows, thank you. You’re making such a difference for customers.
With Windows 8.1, Surface only gets better, including Outlook, which will be built into Surface RT, and management and security get that much better. Both on Surface Pro and Surface RT. I mean, think about the power of Office 365 and Surface. It’s such a great example of our devices and services strategy coming to life.
Let’s talk Windows. So Windows is the foundation to trust. With Windows today and moving forward, partners are absolutely central to our strategy. You always have been, and you always will. Mobility is now a top, top investment area for enterprise CIOs. Those coming together is a great opportunity for Windows 8 tablets. Windows 8 tablet is, hands down, the best tablet for business.
A Windows 8 tablet is going to provide full manageability, absolutely the best security, and the desktop apps that are so critical in a business environment. We’ve made a lot of investments in mobile solutions, Direct Access, VPN, Windows To Go, SkyDrive Pro, as well as Skype and Lync and the integration we’re doing there. It allows people to work from anywhere and yet have all the information they need.
So building apps for Windows. It’s becoming a more obvious destination for developers. Whether it’s the 100 million devices and growing, our flexibility in our payment engine. Very easy trial option. And we allow you to keep more total revenue than competing stores.
We already have more than 100,000 apps in the store, and new app releases like OpenTable, Rhapsody, Rockmelt, and games from Disney are already gaining traction in the store.
And customers who need line-of-business apps on Windows 8, they need partners to help them. And there are companies like Emirates, PCL Construction, Baker Hughes that we’ve talked about, BT, Toyota Racing that we’ve highlighted. These are all companies that are already seeing the benefits of well-designed, modern line-of-business applications.
One thing we’re seeing is that about two out of three enterprise organizations are investing today in mobile applications. So it’s a great opportunity to build a practice around building line-of-business applications, modern design on Windows 8. And Windows 8.1 makes that even more obvious.
Now is the time for enterprises to consider Windows 8 with Windows 8.1. We’ve got great UI enhancements that you’ll see, as well as just great usability functionality. Like the ability to boot to anywhere. Whether it’s an app or to the desktop.
So I know this audience in particular are well aware that Windows XP, end of support is looming. 273 days away. So with the obvious ROI that customers are seeing with Windows 7, and the confidence that we really aim to deliver with Windows 8.1, there’s never been a better time to really migrate those customers forward on Windows and off of XP.
I mean, as we look ahead and you think about where opportunity is and where you want to put your focus, migrating customers off of XP and onto modern Windows is one of the largest business opportunities this next year.
To support you, many of you are familiar with the Windows Accelerate program. We’re going to continue that program, and we’re going to increase investments worldwide. The whole idea behind this program is to support proof of concept and pilots through you to help customers move off of XP and to get modern, including modern apps.
To further support you in bringing customers forward on Windows and all the latest devices, we are rolling out another program. And this program is called Touch Win. And the whole idea is to provide incentives for the commercial channel for featured devices and tablets, PCs and tablets, and through this program, we will provide incentives directly to authorized distributors as well as reseller partners who sell feature PCs and tablets that have Windows Pro and are touch enabled.
So we hope you get excited about this program, and in addition to Windows Accelerate, take advantage of the Touch Win program. Please do check it out and learn more. We’ll talk more about that in our value keynote in the next few days.
So I’d like to shift gears and talk about our newest platform development, and that’s Windows 8.1. It’s an incredible thing to think about that we’re able to talk to you about this today. Just last year from the WPC stage, I announced the RTM date for Windows 8. So it’s fairly remarkable to think about being here a year later and talking about Windows 8.1.
Since we launched Windows 8, we’ve brought to market 900 continuous improvements and hundreds of updates to our inbox apps. And yet, here we are to show you Windows 8.1, which represents even more significant progress. It represents responsiveness, it represents rapid timeframe, and we’re really excited about what Windows 8.1 is going to bring to the marketplace. It advances the vision, no doubt it really listens to feedback and it’s made better by that feedback, and it incorporates all the latest technologies.
We designed Windows 8.1 to feel natural on everything from a small tablet to a large work station. Nothing better to bring it to life than a great demo. So please help me welcome Jensen Harris to show us Windows 8.1. It’s all yours. (Applause.)
JENSEN HARRIS: Thank you, Tami. Hi, everyone. It is a great honor today to show you what we have built in Windows 8.1. And we’re going to show a jam-packed demo here for the next few minutes, including some things that we have never publicly shown before that you will see for the first time here in Windows 8.1.
Just by show of applause, how many of you have seen or tried the preview of Windows 8.1? (Cheers, applause.) All right. That’s a lot of you.
I’m going to start my demo today, though, actually on the smallest of the Windows devices, which is, of course, a Windows Phone. And what I have here is the Nokia Lumia 925. This device has a 4.5-inch HD plus screen, 8.7 megapixel camera, and six Carl Zeiss lenses.
As you know, the Nokia phones have the best photography that you can get on a mobile phone. And I’m going to start here by revealing why we have had this flower sitting here this entire time by taking a picture of it now. So let me grab the camera here. Find a good angle. And I have taken a photo here with the phone.
Now, that in itself — you can applaud, I mean, that’s a pretty good demo. (Laughter, applause.) But, trust me, it gets a little bit cooler from here.
One of the things that we’ve done in taking Windows from a device like a phone up to a small tablet is take the best of what is on the phone, Windows, and bring it to Windows 8.1.
What I am holding here is the Acer Iconia W3. Now, this is an 8-inch tablet, and while the device itself is interesting, what it is representative of is the class of small, 8-inch tablets that are going to be coming that you are helping us bring to market throughout this year that are going to be powered by Windows 8.1.
Let me show you a little bit about what we’ve done to make Windows 8.1 work great on this PC.
So here you can see this tablet. 8-inch tablet, and you can see the Start screen. It has these large tiles that are optimized for easy reading. You know, one of the things that’s interesting about this kind of device is that it’s equally likely to be used in portrait or landscape. For landscape, you’re doing games or you’re doing productivity. But when you’re reading, you really want to be using this in portrait. So we’ve optimized Windows 8.1 specifically for portrait.
So, for instance, when I launch Nook and start reading, you can see that it’s already been formatted perfectly for this device and its ultra-sharp screen.
Or I’m going to go back to Start here and launch the news app. The news app has also been fully optimized for portrait. You can see that it has all my sources, it has all my articles right here in place and already looks great on this device.
But it’s not just our built-in apps. The entire ecosystem and our entire partner set that are building apps have started to optimize for portrait, for working great on these small tablets.
For instance, I’m going to launch the New York Times app. And you can see that the New York Times has actually done the work to, if I bring up an article, for instance, on the saved list is actually going to have an article that is already formatted and looks great.
Or if I launch Amazon, you can see that our friends at Amazon have already changed their shopping app to work fantastically on this kind of device. So even though this is Windows, which you associate with a PC, which you associate with landscape, it works great in portrait on 8.1.
Reading is so vitally important on an 8-inch tablet that we’ve introduced a new feature into 8.1 called Reading List. And what this says is that I don’t always have time to read everything right when I’m on this device. So, for instance, here is this article about a plant in England I think that actually eats sheep. Supposedly, this is real. I found it on the Internet, so it must be. (Laughter.) And I don’t have time to read this whole article now.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to bring up the share charm. And I’m going to share this article with my Reading List. It says here, “bookmark it for later.” And what that’s going to do, I’m going to save this to my Reading List, it’s actually going to save this to the cloud and I’ll be able to read it later on any of my Windows devices.
So a thing that you’re going to see from the phone to the tablet as I work up through a class of devices to large engineering work stations is that the thing that brings together all of these devices is Windows and the cloud. The cloud pervasively powers your entire experience. And Reading List is just the first of those that I’m going to show.
Another thing that you really have to get right on something like an 8-inch tablet is the ergonomics. And something that is really important is typing because you do a different kind of typing on this kind of device. And there are some really great improvements that we’ve made to the touch keyboard.
For instance, I’m going to start typing, “Let’s get dinner.” And notice as I do, that you see these suggestions show up directly under what I’m typing. And I could, of course, just tape one of these, as you’ve seen maybe on other platforms before, say “let’s” and then I’m going to say “get” and I’m going to start typing “dinner.”
But I can also do something else, which is not actually move my fingers all the way to the top of the screen, but instead, just gesture on the space bar. And notice as I do that it toggles through the possible suggestions, and then I can hit space and it just enters it very quickly. So let’s get dinner at — and now I want to type a number. And one of the things that erodes fast typing is having to go to this layout, the dreaded numbers and symbols layout, which requires an extra touch, requires you to switch back when you’re done.
So what we’ve done is very simply hint the numbers at the top of the keyboard. So if I press and hold, you can actually see that we bring the 8 right up here on the top, the same thing we’ve done for punctuation. So if I want to hold the period, I get colon above it. And once I know those are there, I don’t even have to press and wait. I can just swipe up. So if I want to enter two zeroes, I can just do zero, zero, and then I’m going to swipe up on the question mark to get the exclamation mark, and I’ve quickly entered text without ever leaving my thumbs sort of on the home screen. (Applause.)
It’s another example of how we have taken Windows 8.1 and brought together the best of a straightforward touch keyboard with some awesome gestures that take advantage of the format without requiring you to learn a bunch of crazy, new techniques for using the keyboard. So that’s a little bit about what we’ve done here for 8-inch tablets in Windows 8.1.
Now I’m going to move over here to a Surface and I’m going to show you one of the most important near features in 8.1. Every month, 20 billion searches are performed just in the United States on Windows PCs — 20 billion searches every month.
We looked at this as an opportunity to say if we made search better in this product, we would be making 20 billion things every month better for people. And so we’ve introduced search in 8.1.
And the way this works, I’m going to start here by just searching for where we are. Houston. So I’m going to type “Houston” and hit search. And what this brings up is what we call a search hero.
A search hero is a curated, built-on-the-fly app that brings together information from Bing, information from your PC, files from the cloud, things from the Web, and puts it all together in one view.
So you can see here we have all the Web results. And even the Web results come back beautifully. You can see exactly what they’re going to look like before I click on the page. I get previews that are updated every two minutes. You see news articles integrated.
And this has some really rich functionality. For instance, I see the weather here is 82 degrees. I can just tap that, and that’s directly going to bring up the weather with things like actual live temperature maps that are going to animate over time and show me what the temperature is at 10:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 12:00 p.m.
It’s integrated with our maps functionality in Windows. So I can say show me the map of Houston, and there are a few restaurants that I’ve highlighted to look at once I got here possibly to go eat at. And so I can tap one of these. And when I do that, I actually get pictures of what the restaurant looks like and what their food looks like. I get their hours, I can make reservations with OpenTable. I can call them. I can integrate with their Facebook page. I get all of this just integrated into search because I searched for Houston. So it’s a very, very powerful situation.
So now I’m going to show a different kind of search. In this case, I heard earlier and talked about that there’s a band called Fitz and the Tantrums that is going to be here. And I’m going to type “Fitz” and I’m going to just tap on “Fitz and the Tantrums” which is the top suggestion. This brings back another kind of hero, in this case, a hero about a band.
And this is integrated with Xbox Music. And you can see that I have the top songs, I can just play these directly from here. I’ve got their albums. I’ve got their videos, of course I’ve got Web pages about them.
But one of the most common kinds of searches that people do is actually image search. And so I’m going to tap this image search. And of course it’s going to bring back beautiful images from Bing. But this has a lot of power that’s never before been built into an OS. For instance, I can sort by color and say just show me the purple images of Fitz and the Tantrums, for instance. (Applause.) Yeah.
I can also look for faces. I can look for just head shots. Just black and white. Just large. All of this is just integrated directly into Windows.
I’ll show you a little bit more about this later, but really this brings together everything on your PC in one place, lets you search for files, lets you search for settings, lets you search for apps, lets you search for stuff in the cloud, and the steep Web search powered by Bing and apps on your PC.
When I actually open up Fitz and the Tantrums in Wikipedia, it’s actually going to open up in the Wikipedia app, not in some Web page on the PC. This is actually the Wikipedia app, so it has deep linking into the apps on the PC.
So as long as we’re talking about music, I thought I’d show you the new Xbox Music app. Xbox Music has been redesigned totally to make it fast, to make it efficient, and to focus on your collection of music. When we shipped Windows 8, Xbox Music was very much about helping you discover new music. And why that is important, personally, I’d rather have a music app that is optimized on the music I like, not the music it thinks I might like.
So as you can see, we’ve made it very easy to see all the things in your collection. I can sort by artist and see all of those.
It does have, of course, the exploration features that let me find new music, just as Xbox has always had. And it has a totally new feature called Radio, which builds a dynamic station based on an artist that I love. This is really cool because it doesn’t require a pass, it doesn’t require subscription, you don’t have to sign up for anything. You just come in here, type the name of an artist, and you’re playing and streaming based on Xbox Music. So it’s really cool.
One of the neatest new features that is coming this year to Xbox Music actually requires me to start in the Web browser. And so here I am, and this is the Web page. This is the Web page for something called Decibel. And they have a music festival called the Second Wave Music Festival. And, undoubtedly, you’ve been somewhere before where you’ve been on a Web page and they’re talking about songs or they’re referencing music.
And so what I can do here on any Web page that mentions a song, an artist, an album, is I can just share this Web page to Xbox Music. And it’s going to scrape the page for text and it’s going to make a playlist out of it. Now when I tap this, it’s going to open up Xbox Music and it’s taken all of the music that was on that Web page without the Web author needing to do anything. It just uses Web standard sort of scraping technologies to look at the text on the page and it’s generated a playlist that I can play from that page. So this is one of the examples of how Windows can take something on the Web and just bring it into your experience in just a few clicks. (Applause.) Something that has never been done before in any music app in the world. And so that’s a little bit of Windows and search and music on a Surface.
So now I’m going to move up to another kind of PC. This is a Dell all-in-one, 27 inches with touch. This is the kind of PC that you would have in a kitchen or a living room. And the first thing that we thought of when we started to think about what it was like to have Windows PCs more in the living room or to have a laptop on your kitchen counter is that we had this beautiful lock screen that we had created in Windows 8 that showed a single picture of something that you love. And this was sort of the personal face of the PC here on the screen.
But we thought, couldn’t we take this further? What if we built the best, most beautiful cloud-powered photo frame in the world? A place that rotates through your pictures, that shows you pictures from SkyDrive and your phone and brings them all together in one place? How cool would that — to just have that be on any device that was sitting there plugged in?
But we didn’t just make the lock screen more beautiful, we also made it more functional. For instance, I showed you on that very first Lumia 925 that I could take a picture just by hitting the camera button without unlocking the phone. I can do exactly the same thing in Windows 8.1. I can take a picture from the lock screen without unlocking the device.
Another thing I can do without unlocking the device is answer Skype calls. So how often have you had grandma call, it’s time for the kids to make the call, and you’re struggling to get the PC unlocked or get the phone unlocked? Well, now a call comes in, I don’t have to unlock the PC. Hey, Jed.
JED: Hey, Jensen. That was way faster than last time.
JENSEN HARRIS: Well, that’s because I didn’t have to unlock the PC, I didn’t have to enter a PIN, I didn’t have to find the app, I didn’t have to launch it. Grandma calls — or Jed — (laughter) and I come right over to it and I can just immediately start the video chat. This is the world’s best Skype device, a Windows 8.1 PC. (Applause.) Awesome.
So I’m ending the call with Jed here. Bye-bye, Jed. And now I’m going to unlock the PC. And here we are on the Start screen. And we’ve made a lot of changes to make the Start screen better in Windows 8.1. The Start screen is this personal, efficient place to put all the things that you love on one screen. The apps that you love, the data that you love, the people that you love, the pieces of information within apps that you love, the books that you love all in one place.
And as you can see, we’ve given you a lot more flexibility now in how you can actually arrange your Start screen. For instance, down here in this corner here, you can see where my finger is, you can see we have small tiles. These small tiles allow you to create a highly efficient layout that you don’t need a gigantic tile for everything on your PC. Sometimes an app is just an app and you’re happy to have an efficient way you can tap it, touch it, or click it to open it.
But we also have these large, expansive tiles. So if you have — if you want to see your last few mails, you want to see your entire day of calendar appointments, you want to see line-of-business data, you have that flexibility to make the things big that you want and the things small that you want to create this highly efficient screen.
We’ve also added a bunch of new personalization options. And so you’re going to see really cool effects like this dragon here that follows my finger and goes up and down. You can choose now from basically any possible color that you could want to make this look exactly like you want to.
We have these motion tattoos which if you look, you can see the gears moving at the bottom, and you can see the robot sort of following my finger at the top. So we have some really cool ways of making this Start screen yours.
But my favorite new feature is the new all app screen. And what this does, it lets me get from the Start screen, which has just the apps that I’ve pinned that I love, if I swipe up, I get to the list of all of the apps on the PC. Show that again, I can swipe down and I’m on Start, I swipe up, and I’m on the all apps screen. This is very powerful. Thank you. (Applause.)
I can take this and I can do things like — well, how about you sort this by category. Put all my games together. Put all of my news and weather apps together. Or how about we see the most-used apps. So here’s just a place where I can see the apps that I use all the time right here on the left side.
And of course, you can choose to start up in this view if you want. My favorite here is probably date installed, which shows me the last few apps that I installed from the store.
Now, getting things from the apps view to the Start screen is very, very straightforward. So I’m going to take two apps here. I’m just going to press and hold on Urban Spoon and on Epicurious. Two at once. And I’m going to pin these to Start. And you can see they get added right there at the end of Start.
Now, a cool thing you can do in Windows 8.1 is multi select. So I’m going to take Epicurious and Urban Spoon and all of the rest of my cooking apps, and I’m going to make a new group out of them. So you can see, I’m just selecting. And as I do, you notice that I have all of these apps selected. And I can now uninstall them all at once. I can turn their live tiles on all at once, I can make their tiles big or small all at once. No more individually deleting apps as I move.
I can also do something pretty cool, which is pick up all seven of these tiles at once. You can see I get a little 7 to indicate that I have seven, and I can move them the entire way across my Start screen, make a new group out of them, I can name that group, say these are my cooking apps. I can take Food and Drink, this new app here, make this large. And, boom, in just a couple of clicks, I’ve created a totally custom group within my Start screen. (Applause.)
And something pretty cool, once I’ve set this up, I never have to set it up again if I want to because we give you the option to roam this Start screen across all of your devices. (Cheers, applause.)
So I mentioned the cloud. The cloud is what powers that roaming. I mentioned earlier the Reading List, and I showed you that. And I had that story about the plant that eats the sheep. Well, I’m now ready to read the rest of this now that I’m home. And this is the Reading List. And you can see that it has synced that story from my 8-inch tablet to my all-in-one PC. And I can just tap this and it’s going to bring up that story right here along with everything else that I saved from all of my devices.
So I can read perhaps this story. It doesn’t just have to be within the Web. So any app on the PC that participates in share. So here’s the sports app, for instance. And I can just read things directly within that app as well. And when I’m done with one of these, I can just select it, do delete, and it removes from all of my devices. So that’s an example of the cloud powering a built-in Windows 8.1 experience across all of my devices.
The thing that makes that possible is SkyDrive. SkyDrive is the backbone of the Windows cloud. And SkyDrive is built into Windows 8.1. There’s no external download necessary, your files synch between all of your devices, and you choose what you want to make offline and what you want to keep in the cloud.
So if you have 7 gigabytes, which is what we give you for free right now, and you have that filled up and you want that just on all your devices all the time, you don’t have to do anything, it’s just going to be there available.
Or, on the other hand, if you want to say, no, I just want this folder, or I just want these two files, you can mark those for offline. Those will be downloaded and always synced. But you still have the option to see all of the other files. And if you choose to open one of them, like here is a file, a PDF that I have, a travel itinerary, it’s going to bring that down on demand from the cloud as I open it. So it’s very, very powerful.
Of course, it has built-in pictures as well. So it syncs my pictures across devices. Syncs pictures even from, of course, the camera roll.
So here’s my camera roll of photos that I’ve taken with my tablet or with my phone. And if you look here, if you look carefully, you may see the same exact picture that I took at the beginning with the Lumia 925 of the orchid has already made its way to this PC. I didn’t do anything, there are no tricks, the cloud is just working behind the scenes. So you don’t ever have to think about where you want to put anything. It just works. And even better, all of the apps on the PC don’t need to be updated either. They already can just save to SkyDrive without any updates necessary. So very, very powerful. (Applause.) Thank you.
Of course we have now built into Windows 8.1 picture editing. And so I can do things like now that I have this photo open, I can apply different filters to it. One of the really cool things that I like is a feature called color enhance. And what it lets me do is pull out this pin here and I can drop it on a color, like here’s pink. And I can selectively just saturate or desaturate just that color, but not the whole rest of the picture. So I can blow up the pink and make the orchid look super-hot. And this is built right into Windows 8.1, this photo editing built right into the photos app.
And we have a lot of new apps in Windows 8.1. And so we have one of the new ones actually that I like the most is something called Food and Drink. And what Food and Drink brings together is recipes and tools from all over the Web. Meal planning, shopping list, things that come from sort of exclusive content from chefs.
But I’m not going to go into all that right now. What I’m going to show you instead is a feature that was born out of watching people use Windows in their home. And so it turns out that people do a lot of cooking with their tablets and with their PCs. And I guess I sort of knew that, I’ve done that before.
What we didn’t know when we went to go visit people in their homes is that they were putting baggies over their screens because they were getting their hands dirty and didn’t want to touch the screen and get their screen all dirty. And so suddenly you had people putting Ziploc bags down over top of their laptops.
So we thought there must be a better way. And, thus, hands-free mode was created. What hands-free mode lets me do is using the built-in webcam and any laptop, any tablet, any all-in-one, lets me flip between the pages of the recipe without even touching the screen. I just put my hand up and I swipe across. And I swipe across. (Laughter.) And I swipe — there we go. (Applause.) Swipe across. (Applause.) And as I do, you will see that we automatically switch between the pages of the recipe.
So that’s hands-free mode, and it’s an example of the kind of innovation that comes from just watching people at their homes and seeing what they’re doing with the product and moving that into Windows.
We have a whole bunch of new apps in Windows 8.1. I’m not going to have time to show them all to you now. But we have new utilities that complete the experience, like an awesome calculator, an alarm, and sound recorder. We have big, new updates to sports and news, weather, finance, travel, and an awesome new app called Health and Fitness. But all of this is powered by the Windows Store, which has had a big, big update in Windows 8.1.
As you can see, it’s more visually stunning. It puts the apps front and center and actually gives me the information that I need to find the apps that I want. It puts the charts right at the top, the new releases and the top paid and the top free, which are the apps that people want to see all the time.
But my favorite thing about it is the section here, pics for you. And what this has is the whole store has now been powered by this Bing recommendation engine. And what it does is it knows the apps that you have used, the apps that you’ve installed, apps that are popular, things that are new, and it’s constantly able to make recommendations of things that you’re going to like. So you’re not always just spelunking through the store, hopelessly trying to find the cool apps that you know all your friends already have. This makes sure that you are never left out and it’s really, really cool. So I definitely recommend that you try out and look at the new, redesigned Windows Store.
When Tami was up here before, she mentioned Xbox One. And we have an Xbox One sitting over there in the corner. And one of the things that you do on a PC that’s in your home is you watch TV, you watch video.
And we wanted to make it really easy to take something like the “Star Trek” movie that I’m watching here in the kitchen and beam it to the Xbox One with no other configuration necessary.
So what I can do in Windows 8.1 is I can just tap “play to Xbox One,” and in just a few seconds, the same exact video picks up in the same spot on my Xbox One, full HD video, and it’s just playing there with no other configuration necessary. It is a totally seamless experience. And this could be an all-in-one, or it could be my 8-inch tablet streaming my video straight to Xbox One. So it is really, really cool.
Now, I’m going to show you something that we have never shown before publicly. I’m going to now pick up a Surface Pro. And the most interesting thing that you probably haven’t noticed yet about this Surface Pro is that it doesn’t have any wires attached to it. Now, I could have brought out the hoop to put over it to prove that there are no wires, but you can see, believe me that it doesn’t have any wires.
But if you look over here at the TV, you actually see that it’s actually projecting exactly what I’m doing on the TV. This is using a new technology that is built into Windows 8.1 called Miracast. And what Miracast is is a standard for peer-to-peer wireless video and audio streaming. It streams 1080p video and 5.1 surround sound over Wi-Fi to, in this case, a TV that has a Miracast receiver attached to it. (Applause.) This is really, really cool.
And so imagine now that just with a tablet and the pen that comes with the Surface Pro, I can turn this into a whiteboard. And I can write Miracast so you know how to spell it, you can look it up, I can draw boxes and squares, and all of that is just going up onto the TV with no wires and totally wirelessly and awesome and full quality using Miracast. And this is something that, again, is just built into Windows 8.1.
And something that really completes this scenario now is you notice that what I used here was a OneNote app. And here I’ve got my Windows Phone. And because Windows is always just syncing with SkyDrive, you can see that without me doing anything on my Windows Phone, the exact same thing that I wrote here is here on my phone. (Applause.)
And so this just shows the power of bringing together one ecosystem of having Windows on a phone, on a tablet, the power of the ecosystem to bring together things like Miracast across the TV, video streaming to Xbox One, the entire Microsoft ecosystem together. It’s pretty awesome.
So now I want to move to the last kind of PC that I’m going to show, which is this desktop PC. And this desktop PC doesn’t even have touch. Believe it or not, we love mouse and keyboard. And one of the things that Steve mentioned that we have put a lot of emphasis in Windows 8.1 is making the desktop better.
The desktop in Windows is the single most powerful platform in the world. It is the only platform in which you can run Photoshop and Lightroom and AutoCAD and Visual Studio and Office all in one platform. And we really wanted to bring together the best of the modern UI and the best of the desktop UI and harmonize them in Windows 8.1.
So the first thing that you’ll notice is that we’ve made it really easy to get to the Start screen in 8.1 with the addition of the Start button. (Laughter, applause.)
So when I click this, this is not just your father’s Start button, this actually floats in the tiles on top of the desktop. So you get this beautiful look of your desktop. You don’t lose context of what you’re working on. It just comes in over top and then floats away.
And you can see we’ve done a lot of work here to make your Start screen be ultra-efficient. We’ve got the small tiles, we’ve got the groups, we’ve got the large tiles that allow you to create, together with new enterprise custom ability and control that we’re giving over the Start screen in Windows 8.1 for you to create an awesome, enterprise consumer dashboard that has all the things that you love in one place.
And of course, one other thing that you can do by default in Windows 8.1 is boot to the desktop if you want as well. And so the whole experience comes together where you have control over the PC.
So we love the desktop and we have made it a lot better. But productivity isn’t just defined by the desktop. The desktop is one way of working. Productivity is defined by robust multitasking, flexibility, efficiency, and having all the apps that you need. And what we’ve done in 8.1 is taken productivity to the next level and brought what was great about the desktop and the things that you could do there and made it even better in the modern UI and optimized it for not just 8-inch tablets, but also large screens, desktops, powerful laptops.
Let me show you some of what we’ve done. So one of the most important apps that exists is mail. This is the new version of the mail app that we have not yet made available publicly, but will be available with Windows 8.1 RTM.
And I’m going to use my mouse here. The first thing you’re going to notice is this power pane here on the left that shows me my folders, it shows me people. I can flag mails very quickly just here in the view — boom, boom, boom, boom, boom — and they’ll show up here in my flag view.
We have my favorite people, all of the mail here, and I also have them split out. Of course I control this. So if I want to put Panos in my list of favorite people, I can do that. If I want to take some people out, I can do that as well.
We’ve also integrated some awesome features to help keep your mail under control. Of course something like drag and drop is really important, and we have all your folders here that you can just directly drag and drop into using your mouse or touch.
We have brought together all of your social updates. So things from Foursquare and Facebook and LinkedIn, these sort of pseudo-spammy, but kind of interesting things and put them in one place so they’re out of your way without needing to set anything up.
And then probably my favorite view here is the newsletter view. And these are also things that sometimes you want to see. Like I love that I have these Living Social deals, but I don’t need to get eight of them a day, I really only need to see the most recent one. And so we’ve integrated a feature called Sweep into the mail app. And what this allows me to do is I can delete all of my Living Social deals. But what’s even cooler is I can say, just delete all of them except for the latest ones. I’m going to hit Sweep, and it’s going to set this up on the server. You’re going to see all of the Living Social deals have disappeared except for the top ones, and it’s always going to make sure that I only have one of these in my inbox from now on. These are some of the ways in which mail makes you more efficient. (Applause.) Thank you.
Another thing, though, that’s really important if you’re being efficient is the keyboard because I don’t know about you, but I do an awful lot with keyboard shortcuts just typing. And I showed you the new search feature, but I haven’t shown you how well it works with the keyboard and how it makes you more efficient.
This new search feature is really the command line for Windows. So I’m just going to type a single — I type “Windows plus S” to bring up search. I’m going to type a single character, “K.” And in doing so, it has brought back apps like Kindle and In the Kitchen, it’s brought back Music, it’s brought back settings like keyboard settings, it’s brought back files, local and in the cloud, it’s brought back Web suggestions, it’s brought back people on my PC. And it’s very, very powerful.
For instance, if I’m just here in mail and I just want to start playing a song, I can just type “K” it brings up the name of the song. I’m just going to hit enter, and it starts playing without even taking me out of the app. Just immediate music playback. So this is one of the examples of how the new Search box makes it possible to do things very, very fast. You will find that this becomes the stickiest feature in Windows 8.1, and you can’t imagine ever living without it.
Another thing that defines productivity is multitasking. And one of the things that I think is really cool about 8.1 is the multi-window view that we have.
So here are a few photos that are attached to a mail. And when I click one of these, notice that it opened up photos side by side with mail. This isn’t some weird preview app that only shows a few file formats or something like this. This is the actual app that is associated with the file extension. And so this could be photos, PDFs, it could be Office, it could be anything. And this happened just automatically.
Another example of this, let me pull this off the screen, and I’m going to show you a link. And when I click this, it’s going to open up IE side by side with mail. You can see that there’s no restriction anymore on just one very small snapped app and then a huge app. We can now use the window 50/50. I can move the snap point so I can make one a little bigger, I can make the other one a little bigger if I want. And it’s not just limited to two apps side by side.
So here in IE, I’m going to right click and do open link in new window. And suddenly, what I have here is two IE windows side by side. (Applause.) Yeah. Suddenly, I have something that is starting to look like a very productive work station. And I can move these windows around, I can put them where I want. We have maximize, we have resize, and all of a sudden you start to realize that there’s more than one way of doing awesome productivity. This uses all the pixels on my PC.
And on this sort of smallish monitor, I can fit three. But if I had something like a 2550 x 1440 monitor, I could show four apps on the screen at once. And all of a sudden, now you’re way more productive than you could have been on the desktop. You’ve got your Twitter feed, you’ve got your full running mail app, you’ve got multiple browser windows or multiple mails up at once.
And it gets even better. If I attach a second monitor, then suddenly I can do the same thing on multiple monitors at once. So I have any collection of apps across my monitors in any configuration I want, any size I want, blending desktop and modern apps across my screens. I can bring the Start screen up on one and just leave it, and this doesn’t just work for two monitors, it works for three, four, five, six, seven, as many as I have. And so this sort of shows the power of Windows 8.1 and the modern UI even on a desktop engineering workstation making you more productive.
And then we think about Windows starting on —
TAMI RELLER: A phone?
JENSEN HARRIS: A phone. On 8-inch tablets, also doing the same multitasking and running all the way up across all of these devices, integrated with Xbox and out to any kind of workstation. And it is pretty fantastic.
TAMI RELLER: Powerful.
JENSEN HARRIS: It’s very, very powerful.
TAMI RELLER: Jensen, thank you so much for showing us all of this today.
JENSEN HARRIS: Thank you for having me.
TAMI RELLER: It’s great. Thank you very, very much. (Cheers, applause.) Thank you.
All right. So thank you again. That’s the most extensive 8.1 demo we’ve done to date, and we’re thrilled to do it here with you at WPC.
So a couple of really important reminders on Windows 8.1. It’s a free update. I think it’s safe to say that’s a lot of functionality coming free in an update. It’s available later this year. It will be available for every Windows 8 device, and that will be directly and easily through the Windows Store.
What I want to make sure that I underscore is that any PC that’s purchased, any tablet that’s purchased today with Windows 8, easily downloaded from the Windows Store and we’ll even do a prompt so that it’s easy to know when it’s available and what one quick step to take to get that. And that means that people can buy with confidence, knowing that there’s a lot of value coming in just a few short months.
The Windows 8.1 update is available, as Jensen noted. You can find that at Preview.Windows.com. Please do check that out. Encourage your customers to check that out.
I’m also quite happy to be able to confirm today that Windows 8.1 will be available for our OEM partners in late August. Meaning that holiday devices, many of them will have Windows 8.1. So late August available to OEMs. So very pleased to confirm that today.
What better timing to talk about our OEM devices? We’d like to do that. Please help me welcome to the stage Nick Parker. To do that, I’d like to open with a little video, a commercial we have on air that shows just why Windows 8 tablets are so special.
(Windows tablet commercial video.)
TAMI RELLER: (Cheers, applause.) Over to you.
NICK PARKER: Thank you, Tami, and thank you, Jensen. It’s when we bring together the software, services, and hardware that we really see the incredible experiences that we jointly deliver to our customers. And no better way to see where we’ve been successful in the experiences than with our Windows Server solutions.
So let’s just start by thinking about whether we’ve delivered Internet-scale datacenters on Windows Server, whether we’ve enabled a corporation to consolidate or virtualize its server infrastructure, or deliver a solution to a small business that’s managing its exploding data on more and more devices wanting to get access to the network.
We’ve really done a great job, and I thank you all for the incredible partnership and great success we’ve had this year, so thank you.
I’m just going to show you one brief solution here. This is a good example of Windows Storage Server and some of the solutions we’ve done so well selling together this year. This is the Western Digital Sentinel. It’s a 16-terabyte small business server. High value, small package, and the kind of thing that small businesses are really starting to take on more and more, and that’s what’s been driving some of our growth.
Another area we’ve seen great business growth and presents a great partner opportunity is in Windows Embedded. Windows Embedded is a componentized version of Windows. And this enables hardware partners, software partners, as well as integrators to build solutions based on Windows Embedded to target vertical business markets or needs.
With the advent of Windows Embedded 8 bringing touch and new capabilities to this platform, we see incredible growth. Whether it’s in point of sale, whether it’s in field service automation or kiosks or healthcare. And this is an example of the IEI display panel. You can see here it’s a full-blown PC, it’s touch, this is running a cardiac monitor. So I can go into the application which is custom built, and you start to see some of the extensibility and the seamless integration between the hardware, the software and the service.
And this particular device, in fact, you can change the color of the bezel based on what’s going on in the software as well as having this great PC which is touch built for the healthcare environment. And, of course, because it’s built on the power of the Windows platform end to end, you can have these secure, reliable devices as the end points of your network, the interaction with the customer, in this case the patient. And of course all the way secure to the back-end system where you get that reliability and manageability as well as security you’d want in your environment.
A form factor that we’ve seen really take off in business is the large-format touch, or the all-in-one. Here is the Dell XPS 18. A great desktop replacement. You can see keyboard and mouse. But as a result of the hardware innovation at Dell and other partners, we’re seeing these devices get thinner, lighter, as well as increasing their battery performance.
You can see how thin this device is. It’s a beautiful device. Very light. And you can now imagine a scenario where you’re actually able to take a lot of your large format with you. And whether you’re just using touch, whether you’re using the applications, you can have custom-built applications for touch where you can zoom in, manipulate images. Or if you’re just using it for marketing presentations, very, very easy to use now, the large-format touch in a business environment. And of course, this is also a desktop replacement.
So very good scenario you’re starting to see from the improvement in lightweight touch as well as battery life.
The notebook category just continues to innovate and you have to love this Sony VAIO Pro 13. This is the world’s thinnest and lightest ultrabook. At just over a kilo, 2.4 pounds, this is a beautiful touch ultrabook. You can see there it’s the world’s lightest ultrabook, and this is running the Intel fourth-generation Core processor. It has all of the power you need for those business tasks. Slim, beautiful, gorgeous design.
Tablets. Tablets, touch, and convertible form factors. You can’t beat those, and it’s a most exciting category. Steve talked earlier about the two-in-one. This is the category that gives you everything you want from your notebook as well as everything you want from a tablet with no compromise to what you do on it. Whether you want to be productive and write that sales presentation, proposal, or document, whether you want to be consumptive and flip through a manual or XPS file, or whether you just want to do your personal life or whether it’s surf the Web or do something like that. The Lenovo Helix is a great example.
And along with the Sony VAIO Pro 13, these are new devices that will be coming to you soon. This is the Lenovo Helix in tablet mode. And what you’ll notice here as I open it up is this is actually a tablet that has a full-blown notebook capability as well.
I can just detach the tablet very easily here. As you can see, it’s full touch. And I can actually put it back in and use it like a standard clamshell.
Let’s stick with the tablet mode for a second. Very lightweight tablet, again, running Intel Core processor, so all of the power you’d want. And let’s just open up OneNote.
You’ll notice I pulled the stylus out of the stylus port on the back. And it is incredibly smooth writing on the device. And when you start to think of ink now as part of your input mechanisms, whether you’re typing, whether you’re touching or ink, you really start to see the power of the Windows platform, Office, and OneNote seamlessly synchronized in the cloud to show the power of productivity as well as consumption as well as your personal life on a device. And these two-in-ones are going to be explosive.
It is a device you can buy with no compromises. You don’t have to buy two devices. It’s a great device.
The next device you have here is the Dell Latitude 10. Let me just pull it out of its dock. Great 10-inch Windows tablet, and you see the extensibility that Dell has put into this hardware platform here. You see it’s a removable battery, which helps for the manageability and serviceability of this in the field. Great for the business or education environment, and comes in different configurations.
And the innovation doesn’t stop there on the Dell Latitude 10. You have a great dock. You have USB on the front. You have three USBs on the back as well as an HDMI. So you could actually use this as a desktop replacement. You can run multi monitors out of the back as well as just a keyboard. So you could use this as your desktop replacement with your large monitor and then take it with you to a customer presentation or if you’re on the go.
The Fujitsu Arrows Tab coming to the U.S. very soon, but available worldwide is a very light Windows 8 tablet. Beautiful design. Nice anodized effect there. But this device is waterproof. So if you need a Windows 8 device that has that capability, the Fujitsu Arrows Tab is here. Lightweight and waterproof.
The Hewlett Packard ElitePad 900, as you can see here, and briefly mentioned earlier by Tami, this is the choice of Emirates Air for their in-flight device that actually comes with their specialized app for that. And Hewlett Packard has some very innovative sleeves. So here, for example, this sleeve has an extra battery with extra ports that you can use. And a good example of, again, the ability for you to be able to build customized solutions for your customers as well as provide them with a unique, full-blown Windows tablet in a great form factor.
This is the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2. This is the award-winning 10-inch tablet from Lenovo. Again, running on the Intel platform. And a good example of the integration of ink. You can see here, again, the same stylus from ThinkPad. We can go to the OneNote. And you have all of the applications you’d want on this device. You know, whether it’s Office, and you can see there my OneNote syncing to the cloud, so you can see very seamless across there. All the applications of Office plus OneNote and really bringing ink into being part of an immersive technology we should expect from a tablet and not just a small app running a stylus capability, but ink immersed as part of your input mechanism.
The Panasonic FZ-G1, the Panasonic Toughpad. Panasonic, the world-leading brand in ruggedized computer. And this certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of that capability. This one’s running Intel Core i5. Very nice touch screen. You can see the stylus on the back there as well as running Windows 8 Pro. So you have that security, reliability that you would expect from Windows Pro, as well as everything you’d want from Office and so on. And you see the modular design where you can change batteries or hard drive or RAM and the ruggedized camera and the flash you can actually see there.
Great device from Panasonic. And we’re really seeing a huge pickup on these. So much so that if you go to the Panasonic partner portal, if you would have ideas about how you would like to work with Panasonic and start integrating ruggedized computers into business environments, we’re seeing great pickup. Whether it’s field service automation or any of these kinds of harsh environment or external use, also great in daylight.
This device, and Jensen did a great demo in terms of showing us, is the Acer W3. One-handed Windows. Absolutely beautiful device. You can see it comes with a great keyboard accessory here that also acts as a carry case and that’s a full-sized keyboard. But whether you’re just using it for your business user or whether you’re playing a video, and I think Jensen probably showed a video, this is a great device that has all of the capability of Windows. So all your peripherals, all of the things that you’ve bought over the years that you want to run on this through USB and so on, you can do that with Windows. And that’s first and best with us as well as coming with full Office.
The next category I’ve got here is more on the mobility side, and then we’ll talk about innovation. But this is the Asus VivoTab RT. This is a wonderful full Windows 8 tablet with Office as well as Outlook. And you can see this is built on the ARM platform. So it’s the thinnest and the lightest tablet that you can get, as well as having all-day battery and integrated 4G. And those are capabilities built on the ARM platform. Beautiful design, and that is so thin. Look at that. This is a really, really nice product. And with the keyboard docking station, you can actually put this in the keyboard and you’ll get over 24 hours of battery because it has an extra battery in the keyboard. Really nice device running on RT.
We’ve taken share in phones together this year. So another great thank you to all of our partners, largely in part to the incredible designs from Nokia and HTC and Huawei. But these are the two phenomenal devices that we’ve talked about from Nokia today.
This is the Nokia 925. As you see, the HD plus screen, it’s 139 grams, so a very light device. Really, really nice anodized metal effect there. You can see the beautiful back, and the six Carl Zeiss lenses, again, as Jensen demoed, and the world’s best photographic imaging capability. Very, very beautiful device from Nokia. The full power of Windows Phone and a good example of why we’re taking share and we’ll continue to take share.
This is the Nokia 520. And this device really proves that you don’t have to compromise on the experience or the quality to produce a phone at a lower price point. Again, when we start looking at our worldwide growth and the phenomenal growth that some of our partners have been able to drive in the rest of the world, it’s as a result of some of these kinds of devices and the collaboration we have with our hardware partners. Again, great device and a full Windows Phone experience.
So the last category is innovation. And it just doesn’t stop. It’s unrelenting from our hardware partners and our OEMs and our silicon partners. This Acer Aspire R7 device looks like just a beautiful 15-inch laptop. A very popular size, great screen, and of course it’s touch. But what’s great about this is the innovation in hinge. What we’re starting to see more and more is people want to use touch and type seamlessly where you’re typing and touching. This is an incredible device for being able to do that.
The other thing this hinge design will do is enable you to present. So you can also present that way. And then, finally, if you want to use it in full tablet mode, you have that two-in-one capability so you can use it as full-touch tablet.
Toshiba with their KIRAbook you see here, again, a beautiful thin and light ultrabook, have decided that they want to differentiate onscreen resolution. This is a 221-pixels-per-inch device. Very high resolution so if you’re working in fine arts or graphics and you want that capability, then Toshiba has a differentiated product for you. Or, of course, if you just want to watch high-def video all of the time.
The final in the innovation category here is the HP Rove. And I’m just going to walk around the back here. This is the 20-inch all-in-one from HP. These 20 inches, which are both desktop replacements as well as great home devices, we see more and more with touch. We see touch, really, two things driving touch. And a lot of people ask me, “What’s happening with touch and commercial? Is it taking off?” The answer is: Yes, it is. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream for two reasons. One is how people use it, and the second is how the ecosystem is driving it.
Firstly, in terms of how people use it, people are using touch more and more in just everyday productivity. Paging through documents, scrolling down, zooming in. The second area is in the vertical applications. Whether it’s a kiosk in an airport or a hotel, or whether it’s the healthcare solution, or whether it’s a point-of-sale checkout, we’re seeing vertical use of touch in business.
And then the final area is where we start to see large-format touch like this device where people like to go from those large printed materials, whether it’s a sales presentation or a graphic design piece of paper that they’re now using this large format, but portable, touch capability with these devices where you actually have processor, touch, and viewing capability all in one.
And that’s just how people are now using touch in business. How the ecosystem is driving it with the innovation in touch and the panels and how they’re getting cheaper enables the ecosystem to be able to provide that touch at a rapidly narrowing price point, which of course both increases adoption for our commercial customers when they start to think about making a purchase of a device. And with touch and the narrowing price delta to non-touch, they’re making sure they future-proof their IT investment by buying the touch version now.
And I would say to all of you as you start looking at your customer solutions, do the same. You should make sure that they are future proofing their PC purchase now by buying the touch PC or the touch two-in-one or the touch tablet to ensure that all of the capability that you’ve been seeing in the software and the services is available to them as they become available or as they find that specific touch capability in the software, the service that makes their business opportunity.
And HP has decided to differentiate with their touch large-format device with an IPS screen. And what that enables you to do is have a great viewing angle. And so if you’re sitting there in a customer presentation with a room full of people, it’s great for people to view, but also in the consumer environment, if you’re sitting there watching a movie maybe as a family, or if you’re in complete flat tabletop mode and you’re using an application that’s maybe multi-orientational like this app we have here, it enables everyone to be able to see it, Scrabble, Monopoly, or this one, the Jigsaw app, and easily work across the screen.
And so that’s a good example where a hardware OEM has innovated in terms of how the screen works to generate new commercial or consumer opportunity from that hardware capability.
So that concludes this. And it’s really a brief sample of the incredible innovation our OEM partners are building on top of the Windows platform. And it should go some way to show you the opportunity as you think about building your businesses or solutions with Windows and our OEM partners. Thank you very much for your time, have a great show. Thank you. (Applause.)
TAMI RELLER: Nick, thank you so much. So great to be able to show off the innovation that you all are delivering. So great devices, great services.
I just want to close by saying thank you so much for the support. We quite literally could not have done this without you this past year. And we couldn’t be more optimistic in looking ahead. I hope you can see that we’re moving fast, we’re bringing things together, and we’re really trying to create the most amount of opportunity for all of you.
I hope that you’ll enjoy the next session. I want to make sure I give time to Satya Nadella, who will talk about the enterprise direction we’re heading.
Thank you so much, have a wonderful WPC. (Applause.)
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