Terry Myerson: Build 2015

Remarks by Terry Myerson, executive vice president, Operating Systems Group, on April 29, 2015.

TERRY MYERSON:  Hello, developers!  It is so great to be back here at Build to talk about Windows 10.

Satya shared that our aspiration is for customers, for end users to love using Windows 10.  Well, we also have this aspiration for you to love developing for Windows 10.

Our goal is to make Windows 10 the most attractive development platform ever, enabling you to build the most innovative applications, applications that your customers never before thought possible, integrate Cortana into your apps, integrate Xbox Live into your apps, giving your customers awards and achievements or bring them to life with the avatar, add natural user interactions to your apps like pen or speech, turn your apps into holograms.

With Windows 10 we’re targeting the broadest device family ever, from devices with small screens like phones to large screens, going beyond an all-in-one PC to our large wall-mounted displays, the Surface Hub, to devices with no screen at all like the Internet of Things or HoloLens.

We’re talking about one platform, a single app, a single binary that can run across all of these devices.

When we look at the search terms in the store and we compare what people are searching for on phones to what they’re searching for on PCs, we see that 40 percent of the search terms are exactly the same.  Customers are looking for your apps in all of these places.

With Apple you choose to invest in iOS or Mac OS.  With Google you choose to invest in Android or Chrome OS.  Windows is the only ecosystem that lets you bring your apps to all of these devices efficiently.

Now, there are many ways to get apps on Windows.  Let’s talk about the Windows Store.

Apps that come from the Windows Store come with a set of promises to the end user, your customers.  For end users applications in the Windows Store will be very easy to discover, not only within the store itself but Joe Belfiore soon will show you how Windows applications can be discovered throughout the Windows experience.

Apps from the Windows Store will be easy and fast to install, and uninstall if you want, and they will never junk up your system.

Commerce with the Windows Store will be convenient and trusted, with a wide variety of global payment instruments, not just the credit cards we use here in the U.S., but payment instruments like Alipay for China, and today we’re announcing carrier billing, not only for Windows Phones but all Windows devices.  And Windows will have the largest carrier billing footprint of any ecosystem, with connections to 90 mobile operators.  Our experience with phones, this is great for our customers that don’t have credit cards but do have phones.

And this is great for developers, because our experience with phones is that in emerging markets application purchases have gone up by a factor of eight times when carrier billing is enabled.  And now it’s available across all Windows devices.

The new Windows Store will offer new business models and ways to monetize for all of our Windows developers, including subscriptions, affiliate referrals, an updated advertising SDK with support for video ads and install tracking, one set of tools, one set of processes for you to reach customers across all of these devices, and engage with the customers all over the planet with reviews and ratings and the other tools that are available in the Windows Store.

And today, we’re introducing the Windows Store for Business.  Businesses and schools can customize the Windows Store, highlighting applications from the public catalog that they want to make more easily discoverable or recommend to their employees or students.

And the Windows Store for Business will support business payment methods like purchase orders, opening up a new vein of opportunity for Windows developers to engage with Windows enterprises worldwide.

Now, to make all this worthwhile for developers we know we need to get Windows 10 to be broadly adopted quickly.  So we started by making it available as a free upgrade for the first year.

And now we’re investing in making it easy for consumers and businesses to adopt Windows 10 worldwide, and today we’re sharing our goal.  Our goal is that within two to three years of Windows 10’s release there will be 1 billion devices running Windows 10.

No other platform version in any ecosystem is available on 1 billion devices.  Current estimates for Google Play KitKat is at a little over 500 million devices.  iOS 8 is lower than that.

With Windows 10 there will be 1 billion devices ready to run your applications.

Now, we’ve already been working with many of you on your XAML apps, embracing this new universal Windows platform, working on doing things that you can’t do on any other platform.

We’re delighted to have companies like Disney, Netflix, Vine, Twitter and so many more working with us to build amazing applications for the 1 billion devices that will run Windows 10.

Let’s take a look at some of the work by these partners.

I thought I’d start by highlighting the work being done by USA Today, which has been a great Windows developer and a great partner.

Today, they have a separate codebase for their phone application and their PC application.  They want to bring these codebases together so they can focus on great quality and great functionality, and then take that application to new Windows devices.

And so here you see the USA Today’s Live Tile from their new universal Windows application.

On this PC it’s great work with touch and keyboard shortcuts.  The application uses our standard platform controls, so it resizes and reflows as the application is resized on the desktop, snapping it, allowing me to do more work.

Now, I can never get enough reading about Duke’s basketball team, so let’s go there, and you can see here that article flows great in this size window.

Now, this application is also using our platform capabilities to automatically store state in the cloud.  So the state of me reading this article is available on all of my Windows devices or other devices that I might want to access the same state.

So now when I pick up this Windows Phone, I have the same binary running here, the same Live Tile.  I run it and the article’s opening up to the exact same place, leveraging the state that was automatically shared to the cloud.  One binary, one codebase, all working across phone, tablet and PC.

Now, USA Today wants to bring their application to the Xbox.  But we don’t do a lot of reading of articles on the Xbox, so they wanted to tailor the application, filter the application down to just video feeds.  So they invested one hour in their universal Windows application codebase, and here it is running on the Xbox, filtered down to just video.

I’m navigating it with the controller, navigates down where I see the same video controls that are available across the Windows 10 platform, navigating down further in the controller and I get recommended video articles.

So with investment in this one universal Windows application they now have phones, tablets, PCs, interactive television, all covered with one codebase and one app.  (Applause.)

So now let’s take a look at the word Tencent’s done with their WeChat application.  WeChat is an incredible phenomenon.  They just crossed 500 million monthly active users, growing 40 percent year over year.  They’ve been a great application for Windows Phone users.  Here they are on my Windows Phone.

Tencent wanted to bring WeChat to Windows PCs and tablets.  So they made an investment in their Silverlight application on the phone.  The team spent about approximately one month, and they now have a universal Windows app that runs great on the phone and will also now be available on the desktop with some tailored experiences for the desktop.

So let’s look at WeChat on the desktop.  Now, on the phone, I don’t know if you noticed, Shen has sent me a message.  I have WeChat installed on this PC, but now we can access that new message from the notification center.

I click on the notification center message from WeChat.  This is the same binary running in both places.  Open the message from Shen asking for the file, and here they’ve done some tailoring to accept drag and drop from the desktop, all with a universal Windows application that’s running across these devices.  (Applause.)

So USA Today and WeChat are just a couple of the many great apps coming to the universal Windows platform.

In a few minutes, Joe Belfiore will join us and show how universal Windows apps are going to enable you to do things you never thought possible on a phone.

And Alex Kipman’s going to join to talk about universal Windows apps you never thought possible on HoloLens.

Now, partners like these are giving us great feedback as they engage across all these devices with the universal Windows platform.  Netflix loves it.  They can deploy their app efficiently everywhere.

The team at Trivia Craft — Crack, my favorite, you know, it’s a great game — Crack, I’m sure you Crack — told us that developing a universal app is four times faster than developing for Android and iOS.

So let me just say thank you for your early engagement on the universal Windows platform, so we can bring your applications to life.  (Scattered applause.)

So that was about new — (applause).  That was all about new universal Windows apps, but today we want to talk also about your current code, your current apps.

Windows has always embraced a wide variety of technologies to build great apps.  And today, we’re going to announce four new ones, four new ways to leverage your existing code and skills, four new ways to reduce the cost and effort, making it easy for you to bring applications to the Windows Store, four new ways to delight 1 billion Windows 10 customers at home, at school, and at work.

Let’s start by talking about the Web.  Now, many of you have websites that provide great functionality to your customers.  Today, I’m announcing that you can reuse your current server-hosted website code and tools, and take advantage of the rich capabilities of the universal Windows platform, to have your website send notifications, to give your website a Live Tile, have your website integrate with Cortana, do in-app purchases, integrate with Xbox Live and more. This will help your websites reach new customers and delight Windows customers in new ways.  Let’s see this in action.

So to demonstrate this, we’re going to use a website, 22Tracks, which deejays across Europe use to exchange their tunes.  It’s a very rich website, uses WebGL, reflows to the browser, resizing.  It’s a great website.

But what they’ve done is they’ve registered their website with the Windows Store, and then I have installed that application on this machine, and it’s going to open up as an application.

The server-hosted Web code can detect whether the code is executing inside a browser tab or inside an application frame.  When it’s inside an application frame, it knows it can call the whole universal Windows platform.

So now when I close the browser tab, the website’s gone.  But now that it’s an app, when I close the app, 22Tracks can now send me a notification.  I click on the notification and I come back to their app.  Likewise, now that 22Tracks can detect they’re running as an app, they can efficiently, conveniently offer in-app purchases to all their customers for the music, leveraging the commerce capabilities of the Windows Store.

So this is just fantastic, letting website developers leverage all of their server-hosted code and take advantage of the capabilities of the Windows platform and the Windows Store.  (Applause.)

So now the second technology I want to announce today to enable you to bring new applications to the Windows Store is actually the most popular technology within the Windows development community: .NET and Win32.

There’s over 16 million .NET and Win32 applications being used every month in the Windows user base, ranging from some amazing games to some of the most important line of business apps used worldwide.  This is a testament to the great work being done by Windows developers.

So I’m so excited to announce that we will be adding support for bringing your .NET and Win32 apps into the Windows Store and take advantage of all of the new universal Windows platform capabilities.  (Cheers, applause.)

To show you how this works, let’s use an app that’s loved by customers worldwide, one of the best Win32 applications ever, Adobe Photoshop.

So here you see Adobe Photoshop Elements in the Windows Store.

Now, I shared earlier the promise the Windows Store makes to end users, that applications will be very efficiently installed, uninstalled, and will never junk up your system.  We know at the same time, Win32 applications can do anything to a Windows system.

So we’ve learned from App-V, our enterprise application virtualization technology, we’ve adopted it for the Windows Store, so now Win32 and .NET applications come down from the Windows Store and they run in an isolated way from the rest of the system so they can deliver on that promise to end users to deliver a great end-user experience.  (Applause.)

And so here is Photoshop.  You can see it is the full Photoshop experience, with great performance, and I’ll prove that to you with the full limits of my Photoshop capabilities.  (Laughter.)

Helping Scott out here.  So there you go.  (Laughter, applause.)  But all come down from the Windows Store.

And it’s very exciting to share that later this year, Adobe will be bringing Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements to the Windows Store.

So the Windows Store will have great support for apps built using Web code, .NET and Win32 code, enabling you to use your current codebases, extend them using Windows 10’s new platform capabilities, and delight customers across the 1 billion Windows 10 devices.

Now, the third technology I’m announcing today will enable developers to reuse nearly all of the Java and C++ code from an Android phone app to create apps for phones running Windows 10.  (Applause.)

To make this possible, Windows Phones will include an Android subsystem where an app can be written that takes advantage of the Android code but also the extensions you would write in the Windows platform to really delight the Windows user.

To show you how this works, please welcome to the stage Agnieszka.  (Applause.)

AGNIESZKA GIRLING:  Thank you, Terry.

Hello.  My name is Agnieszka Girling.  I’m one of the project leaders working on the technology that will enable you to build great Windows apps by reusing a lot of the code you have written for Android.

Here I have an Android device, and on it I am running the Choice Hotels app.  Choice Hotels is the highest app in its category, makes it very easy for travelers to find a great hotel.

Now, I’m going to switch to Windows Phone.  On this Windows Phone I am also running the Choice Hotels app.  This app is reusing the code you just saw running on the other device.

I’d like to look for hotels nearby.  The app is taking advantage of the Windows location API to find hotels in San Francisco, California.

OK, can I have a switch, device switch?  Well, let’s try that again.

All right, as I scroll through the results, you can see that the Windows graphics and touch just work, and the app is running smoothly.  It’s running in the Windows security container to ensure a trustworthy experience for Windows users.

I’d like to go back, and as I hit the back button please note that the app’s navigation is integrated with the Windows navigation model.

I’d like to select a different city.  So I am going to type in Seattle with a built-in Windows keyboard.

So I have just shown you how an app can efficiently reuseits existing code to deliver a great experience on Windows, and in tomorrow’s keynote we will show you how you can light up your app’s experience with native Windows features such as Live Tiles and with Microsoft services.

Thank you.

Terry, back to you.  (Applause.)

TERRY MYERSON:  Thanks, Agnieszka.

So Windows 10 is going to enable you to reuse your Web code, your .NET and Win32 code, your Android, Java and C++ code, to build amazing new applications, bringing the code over, extending it, putting it in the Windows Store, and reaching 1 billion Windows 10 customers.

Finally, the fourth technology to build great new universal Windows applications is Objective-C.  (Cheers, applause.)

So today, we’re announcing that you will be able to compile the same Objective-C code that’s being used in iOS applications within Visual Studio on Windows.  (Cheers, applause.)  Enabling you to leverage that code and extend it with the capabilities only found on the Windows platform.  Let’s take a look.

So here in this directory we have an iOS application, Math Dream.  You can see here the Xcode project file for Math Dream.  You can see the NIB and ZIV files for the UI.  You go into the classes directory, you can see the .M files for the Objective-C.

Using the toolkit we’re announcing today, we’ve converted the Xcode project file into a Visual Studio solution.  So let’s open it up here in Visual Studio.

You can see full support for this Visual Studio project Objective-C, great syntax highlighting support that you’d expect from Visual Studio, including highlighting all of the weirdness of Objective-C.  (Laughter, cheers, applause.)

We’ve taken this application and now we can debug it and execute this tablet app on Windows.  (Cheers, applause.)

You can see that this is a relatively sophisticated app that uses UIkit, uses core animation.  On Windows the performance is good but it also works with mouse and touch.  You can do very complex arithmetic, too.  Look at that.  (Laughter.)  But actually that’s the wrong answer, so let’s adjust this to the right number of apples.  And you can see — (laughter) — not only can it correctly do math — (applause) — but this application has been extended to offer me an Xbox Live achievement for doing the proper math equation.  (Cheers, applause.)

Now, you might be wondering if this actually works.  (Laughter.)  Will it work for a more complex app?

Now, usually when we announce this kind of thing, we would say “coming soon.”  Well, in this case it’s different.  We’ve been working with some great development partners on bringing their applications to Windows using this technology already.

And today, I’m very excited to share that this is how King brought Candy Crush Saga to Windows Phone.  The app has four and a half star reviews, 40,000 reviews.  King brought the app to Windows Phone with a very fast time to market, very few code modifications, and it’s a great app.  And now King will be releasing more titles for Windows 10 soon.  (Applause.)

So four is not enough.  There is actually one more thing we’re going to do to help make it easy for you to build great Windows applications, and that is we need to get you some great hardware.  (Cheers, applause.)

So we’re going to start today by giving everyone here a brand new HP Spectre two-in-one.  (Applause.)  This is a great device.  Compared to a MacBook Pro, it’s thinner, it’s lighter, it has longer battery life, and of course it has a touch display.  And I would encourage everyone here to join the Windows Insider program, engage with us on this platform, and help shape it for your needs, but please do the upgrade to Windows 10 from your hotel’s Wi-Fi, not the Wi-Fi here at the conference.  (Laughter.)

So today, we talked about our goal of 1 billion Windows 10 devices, the unique capabilities of the Windows 10 platform, and our commitment to a broad range of technologies to leverage your skills and your current code to build great apps.  And we’ve got so much more to come.

So please welcome Joe Belfiore.  (Cheers, applause.)

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