ANNOUNCER: Please welcome Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Windows Marketing Tony Prophet.

TONY PROPHET: Thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome and good morning. We are so thrilled that you could all join us here this week. And I’ve been so excited by the level of energy, commitment and passion that I’ve seen from our partners as I’m with them here this week in Washington. And also welcome to our customers and partners watching this on the Web around the world.

Now that video was a great example of partner collaboration. In this case, between the Mandarin Oriental Hotel group and two partners, Iris Software the system integrator, and InterKnowlogy the application developer.

Now as you saw the Mandarin group considered competing mobile platforms and they chose Windows. They chose Windows because for them it was the best platform to deliver a truly compelling mobile customer experience, with beautiful touch-first hardware, enabled by a rich set of open APIs, and built on enterprise-grade security and management.

Now as some of you know I’m relatively new to Microsoft. I spent the last eight-and-a-half years leading a team at Hewlett Packard, a team that delivered 400 million Windows devices around the world. And I joined Microsoft because I believe in Windows. I have seen the power of the Windows ecosystem around the world firsthand, and I believe in the future of Windows. And I bring to Microsoft a deep, personal appreciation, admiration, and respect for the unique and essential contribution that each of you brings to our mutual success. You wake up every morning imagining new solutions to delight our customers.

Our ecosystem is one of scale with a truly global footprint. We’ve got a vibrant device portfolio and we’re not highly fragmented. And we have an extraordinary suite of relevant cloud services. These cloud services are complemented by a compelling portfolio of partner apps and unparalleled desktop programs. But, most important, we have you. Our trusted partners are at the heart of this vibrant, open, and innovative ecosystem.

But, our technology world is changing. We are seeing truly seismic shifts, starting with the explosion in the number and variety of mobile devices. Further, our customers must choose among various cloud scenarios from public cloud, to hybrid, to private cloud, versus their on-premise solutions. And the security landscape is evolving in a worrisome way, with a growing array of new and persistent threats. Now, as Kevin Turner pointed out Monday, there has never been a year like this past year. Twelve people every second are victims of cybercrime, 400 million people every year.

Further, many customers are finding employees preferring, or even demanding bring your own device, BYOD scenarios, with all of the complexity and all of the security risk that that implies. And finally, the app ecosystem is becoming an increasingly confusing and complex maze of different APIs, different programming languages, different standards, different policies, different screen resolutions, different app stores, and different means of doing commerce.

Now, these seismic shifts demand a platform tailored to today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world. And that platform is Windows. Windows is a platform of global scale, which reaches to the cloud. Windows is business-ready. It universally supports the industry standard for productivity, Office and Office 365. Now in the smartphone race Windows is gaining momentum. We’ve got the Lumia 520 that’s quickly becoming one of the fastest-selling smartphones in many markets worldwide. And Windows is becoming the gold standard for mobile device management and security and it’s a platform built on the scale of 1.5 billion users around the world.

So at Microsoft we are committed. We are committed to moving faster. We are committed to listening actively to you, our partners and our customers. We are committed to embracing your feedback as we refine and evolve our platforms. We’re committed to partnering together with you to win in these exciting times, and we’re committed to making Windows the platform of choice.

We are accelerating the pace of our innovation and road map. And I’ll share a little bit more about that with you later. We’re working on our hardware partners on amazing new devices. We’re expanding our mobile device portfolio, and we’re answering a call for lower cost devices. We are accelerating our embrace of the cloud, and that is a cornerstone of the Microsoft strategy.

And we are delivering a groundbreaking converged developer platform, Windows Universal Apps. That platform will enable you to create universal apps that run across Windows devices, from a four-and-half-inch smartphone up to an 82-inch Windows PPI display. And we’ll leave no question that Windows defines the enterprise grade with the highest level of security and manageability, enterprise grade built on industry standards but bringing truly unique and differentiated capabilities.

Now clearly the world is moving fast, but so are we. Going forward our compass point is clear. We will be obsessed with the feedback and counsel of you, our partners and customers. We’ve heard your feedback and we’re pivoting from an approach that was based on multiyear Windows release cycles to regular updates, updates that go beyond simple fixes, updates that deliver new features, features that light up your digital work and life experiences.

You can see the major updates since 2013 to both Windows and Windows Phone; we’re delivering an array of new features, features that respond to the voices of our customers around the world. First, we focused on improving the core elements of the Windows mouse and keyboard experience. Now that bears repeating. Our Windows 8.1 update materially improved the Windows mouse and keyboard user experience. And we also responded to enterprise customer feedback, adding new features.

For example, the enterprise mode in Internet Explorer, which brings new and important backwards Web app compatibility, and we’ve extended our mobile device management capability. Now for Window Phone, you asked for more personalization and we delivered with important changes to the Start Screen. We added Action Center, and we added Word Flow shape writing. And, importantly, we added critical enterprise features to Windows Phone, VPN support, enterprise Wi-Fi, certificate management, and F-MIME for encrypted e-mail. And, finally, we added some magic, Cortana.

Now I’ve brought Nick Hedderman from my team with me to show you some of these Windows improvements in action.

Nick.

(Applause.)

NICK HEDDERMAN: Thank you, Tony, and good morning to you all.

So as Tony mentioned earlier, the latest version of Windows really embraces the mouse and keyboard user. And it starts with going directly to the desktop. So here’s my desktop in front of me, and I want to show you some of these changes that we’ve made.

You’ll notice along the taskbar at the bottom some of the more desktop-oriented programs like Internet Explorer and Word. And sitting alongside them as first-class citizens are these new applications that I’ve installed directly from the Windows Store. And they react just like those traditional programs with the little mini-pop-ups, and in certain cases even mini-controls that you can see here with my music app I can play a chord.

Now if I maximize one of these new applications, you’ll also notice at the top the title bar comes into view. So if I move my mouse cursor up there, I can minimize and close the application. And as I move my cursor back down to the bottom, that traditional taskbar comes back into view and allows me to interact with all of my different applications.

Now let’s click Starbucks and go into that staff experience. It’s a really great way of expressing my individuality and seeing all of those beautiful tiles come to life with rich information. And in this latest release, we’ve also embraced the mouse and keyboard. So just like usually I can right click, and I can resize and get a whole host of different options as I right click on those tiles. And if I wanted to, I can hold down the control button on the keyboard and use that to select multiple tiles. So just a few changes there on the PC.

Let’s move on to my phone. Now Windows Phone is the most personal smartphone around. And we’ve made some critical changes in this latest release, Windows Phone 8.1. The first thing you’ll notice is I can now really customize my phone by setting a beautiful image in the background there. It just happens to be of Washington in the spring and my tiles go translucent so that image comes to life through my phone.

And we also listened to your feedback and we heard loud and clear that you want all your notifications on your Windows Phone in one place. So we added something we call the Action Center. So from anywhere within the operating system I can just pull down and I can see all of my notifications in one place and I can take quick action to the settings that I’ve chosen at the top there.

Now, as Tony just mentioned, we’ve done some work on our keyboard. We’ve added what we call shape writing into that experience. So I’m going to start here a new message and I’m going to give you what I call the Mississippi test. This is a long word; lots of Ss and lots of Ps and you’ll notice that if I just glide my fingers over the keyboard it instantly gets that in a second. (Applause.) So with this new keyboard ability built into Windows Phone 8.1 you can be an absolute e-mail machine on the move.

Now I want to finally show you some of the magic we’ve brought to life with Cortana. Cortana is your truly personal assistant, who knows you, understands you and helps you get ahead every single day. We’re currently rolling Cortana out to the U.S. as I speak and it’s going to be hitting the U.K. and China later in 2014.

Now before I get started and show you Cortana in action I did just want to mention that she accurately predicted 15 out of the 16 rounds in the World Cup, and of course, beating Google, which is cool, and correctly guessing the right team to win. So is anyone from Germany in the audience? (Cheers, applause.) Congratulations.

So here’s Cortana home and this is very personal to me. She’s given me a little welcome. Good morning. Let’s get the day started. She’s telling me some things that I might want to know about, including the fact I’m on stage. You can see there she’s tracking some flights and so if I wanted to I could accept that and now those are going to be tracked and as the flight comes close she’s going to remind me about that. I can see some news. I can even see the weather at the bottom there.

I can also talk to Cortana in a very natural way. So I’ll start with a simple one. Wake me up at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow.

CORTANA: Okay. I’ve turned on your 6:00 a.m. alarm.

NICK HEDDERMAN: So you can see there I didn’t ask her to set the alarm. She just listened to my voice, figured it out and took action. Let’s try a little more complicated one. Add an appointment for Thursday at 8:00 p.m. Call it dinner with my wife.

CORTANA: Okay. I’ll add quick dinner with my wife to your calendar for tomorrow at 8:00 p.m., is that right?

NICK HEDDERMAN: Yes.

CORTANA: Okay. I have added it. By the way, you have dinner with Tony at the same time. (Laughter.)

NICK HEDDERMAN: Sorry, Tony, happy wife, happy life. (Applause.)

Now Cortana works great with all the first-party experiences that I’ve just shown you. But, Cortana can also extend to your applications, as well. You can leverage our investment in our voice platform.

I want to show you an example that we’ve been working on with our partner Sage. Now in this scenario the customer can speak to Cortana and then she can invoke the Sage application on the phone and connect into the ERP system that Sage has in the background. And I’ll give you an example here for a very simple scenario and this is a stock check. Sage, stock check universal five.

CORTANA: Asking Sage.

NICK HEDDERMAN: It’s gone off to the application, connecting into the cloud.

CORTANA: 8,971 universal 5 1/4 SSDD flex DSK, 170 available in location East Warehouse.

NICK HEDDERMAN: Pretty cool, huh? (Applause.) That’s a great example of how you as partners can leverage our investment in the voice capabilities on Windows Phone.

So in summary, you’ve seen how Windows got even better for the mouse and keyboard user, and how Windows Phone has come to life with all these new changes from the Action Center to the Start Screen and of course Cortana.

Tony, back to you.

(Applause.)

TONY PROPHET: And that was really impressive, and I feel great about our accelerating cadence.

Now, as Kevin Turner mentioned on Monday, we are hard at work on the next version of Windows. And while we have nothing to announce today, I will share with you a couple of features we’re thinking about.

Now this is the same screen shot that we shared at Build, our developer conference, earlier this year. Now the first feature I’ll share with you is the Start Menu. Now it’s like the old one, but better because this one has Live Tiles and modern apps. The second feature we’re thinking about is enabling modern apps to run windowed on the desktop versus only running in the immersive full-screen mode. This will enable you to run multiple modern apps side-by-side or layered or combination of modern apps and desktop programs side-by-side or layered.

(Applause.)

So what you are seeing is clear evidence that we’re listening to you. We’re listening to your feedback and we’re actively using it to shape our road map and to guide our future thinking.

Now let’s take a look at some of the hardware innovation our OEM partners are bringing. Here’s a quick video of some of the amazing devices that are bringing Windows to life.

(Video segment, applause.)

Thank you. Now clearly our OEM partners are raising the bar, offering thinner, lighter and faster devices like the beautiful HP Stream that Kevin Turner revealed on Monday. Now, naturally in that video and in our ecosystem you’ll see the conventional phone, tablet, notebook, and all-in-one form factors. And you’ll see some of those form factors in other ecosystems.

But what you won’t find in those ecosystems are the form factors like the two-in-one, the convertible, the docking stations, the ruggedized devices, the purpose-built point of sale devices, and the mobile all-in-one. And your customers can also enjoy SD cards, USB ports, and native pen support. You won’t find these on an iPad. And unlike Chromebooks, Windows devices are designed to work offline and with limited bandwidth. Windows devices run native Office. Windows devices work with thousands and thousands of peripherals, including pretty much every printer.

But what about the emergence of low-cost Android devices? Microsoft is responding. We have acted to mobilize the hardware ecosystem. You heard some of this from Kevin on Monday. This ecosystem is going to deliver a range of low-cost tablets and phones for the Windows platform. The Windows 8.1 update added support for devices with as little as 1 gigabyte of RAM and 16 gigabytes of storage. We’ve added 64-bit Windows support to the Intel Atom architecture.

With Qualcomm we’ve released smartphone reference designs. These reference designs will speed up the time to market and broaden the range of manufacturers making low-cost phone platforms. And we’re going to fight to win in this segment. And as you heard from Kevin, we’ve responded lowering our OEM licensing prices to zero in the less than nine-inch segment.

I would like to highlight a few of these low-cost devices for you. Of course, these devices complement the value-priced Lumia 630. But first I would like to highlight the Micromax Windows Phone. This will be available later this month. It will have a five-inch HD display. It will have a dual sim, which is a very important feature in many, many emerging markets, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon Quad4 processor.

Next is Xolo Windows Phone with a 4.7-inch display. It also has a dual sim. It’s available this month in India, and it will be the world’s lightest Windows Phone.

And finally, what I have in my hand will likely be the first seven-inch Windows tablet by a major brand. This entry-level device is being developed by Toshiba in close collaboration with Intel. It will be available soon, and you can bet that it will be offered at price points competitive with today’s seven-inch Android devices. Now just as important, you can be confident that it will bring the security, manageability and backward-app compatibility that your enterprise customers demand and at the moment cannot get from Android.

And this is just the beginning, the beginning of a wave of compelling low-cost Windows devices. So for you and for our customers the bottom line is, as you develop solutions that require low-cost Windows hardware, think Windows first. And it goes without saying, these will be price points that iPhones and iPads currently cannot be.

And just as we’re driving for mobile leadership, we’re also extending our embrace of the cloud. We have an extraordinary suite of cloud services to light up that array of devices that I just shared with you. Services of scale, familiar brands that are known and trusted around the world from the industry standard for productivity Office and Office 365 to Xbox Live, which delights and entertains us every day. These services connect hundreds of millions of people around the world every day.

But there’s even more. The Windows App ecosystem is making great strides. We’ve seen a 50 percent year-on-year increase in active developers, and our app catalogue has grown by nearly 100 percent with hundreds of thousands of apps, apps to work, create, learn and play. Of course we have consumer apps that you know and love, like Whatsapp, Spotify, WeChat, Pandora, but these consumer apps are complemented by a flagship portfolio of the industry’s leading line-of-business apps. For example, Microsoft and SAP have agreed to develop a new set of mobile apps for Windows and Windows Phone, bringing the power of the SAP platform to Windows mobile users.

And Blackboard, a world leader in education software, has agreed to roll together their existing mobile Learn and Collaborate products into a single product with a compelling experience for Windows tablets and phones.

And then there’s AutoDesk, a world leader in 3-D design and engineering used by millions of professionals around the world. You can find their flagship AutoCAD 360 application in the Windows Store.

Now, of course, we have the exceptional Dynamics CRM Windows app, but the Windows platform is about being open. And a few weeks ago we announced that Salesforce One will be coming to Windows and Windows Phone in the fall of 2014, letting your customers decide the solution that’s right for them.

Let’s never forget that the world has come to trust and rely upon Windows for its incomparable universe of desktop programs, household names like Citrix FileShare, MicroSymphony, Intuit Quicken, Epic Medical Records, Citrix Receiver, Adobe Photoshop, Citrix WebX, Evernote, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio, Skype. And this point of differentiation is unmatched by either of the two competing ecosystems.

But what about the future of apps and programs? Developers today face an increasingly complex maze, a confusing maze of different APIs, programming languages, resolutions, policies, stores, commerce methods. There has not yet been a single way, an easy way, for a developer to create an app that works across the breadth of these form factors and use cases until now. At BUILD 2014, we introduced the Universal Windows App Platform, a way developers, you, can code once and deploy across multiple Windows form factors and multiple use cases.

One set of APIs, one set of code, one set of policies. This is not only great for you; it’s great for your customers, too. With universal apps customers will be able to buy the app once and use it across all of their Windows devices. So let’s take a look at a Universal App in action.

Now the app we’re looking at is a retail management tool Microsoft is actively piloting with two large retail partners. You can see over on the demo podium three devices, the big, beautiful Dell all in one, the thin and light Lenovo 8-inch tablet, and the exquisite Lumia 1520. This universal app was built using Visual Studio, then it was deployed automatically and scaled for the various size devices. So from the back-office staff, on their all in ones, to the store associate on his tablet, to the store manager on her phone, all will have access to the same apps, the same information, and will be part of the same digital workflow.

Now, for your customer this means easier deployment, less training, and boosted productivity, but what about security? Today’s mobile and cloud-first world is blurring the edge of the network, is bringing new and potent cybersecurity threats and it’s often allowing business and personal data to reside, to be shared on the same device. Now, Windows defines enterprise grade. At the hardware level trusted boots protect Windows devices against low-level tampering at the boot. And it protects them against malware. So when Windows starts it starts and stays tamper-proof. And when you have Windows Pro and you combine it with a TPM chip you get BitLocker encryption. That protects your customer’s data.

So if a device is lost you don’t have to worry about the data being lost. And when a Windows device enters an enterprise that has System Center and Active Directory, whether that device is corporate owned, or BYOD, that device integrates seamlessly with the customer’s existing infrastructure, security and management policies.

Now, let’s bring Nick back to demonstrate just what we mean when we say enterprise grade.

NICK HEDDERMAN: Thanks, Tony.

So Windows 4-inch Phone has always been a great choice for business. And thanks to the latest release we’ve added even more capability. Now, let’s replay a scenario where you go and buy a device from retail, a very common scenario today. With a few simple steps I enrolled this within my company. I added my user name and password and then the mobile device management server pushed down lots of stuff. It pushed down my corporate e-mail account, my corporate applications. It provisioned my Wi-Fi connection and my VPN, and it even enforced some policies.

So let me show you what’s happened to this phone as a consequence. I’m going to start with the Office Hub. Every Windows Phone comes with Office built in, no matter the price point. So that means I can stay productive wherever I am. And you’ll notice here in my Office Hub I have a number of different files. Those Excel files are all ones I downloaded from my corporate e-mail account. And at the bottom you can see something that I’ve taken from my personal OneDrive account, so a mix of those different files. And I’m going to come back to that a little bit later on.

Back to my start screen you’ll also notice some policies in action. I’m a big fan of Wordament. However in this case I’m afraid the company has disabled me from playing. So that’s not good enough for me. In fact, I want to un-enroll this device. So I’m just going to drop quickly into my settings, find that relationship and delete it. And now the phone is hard at work removing all of that corporate data, all those corporate applications, and all those policies.

So when it gets back to my start screen you’ll notice a bunch of black squares. That’s where all of those applications previously sat. If I go back into my Office Hub you’ll see there the files have been deleted directly from my Office Hub. And if I want to try and get 1,000 points and more in Wordament, good news, I can now play it again. So that’s what we mean by enterprise grade. (Applause.)

TONY PROPHET: Thank you, Nick. And that’s what we mean by enterprise grade. And many of those improvements are improvements that you asked for. So today we’ve talked about Windows as the platform of choice, and together we’re in a unique position, a position to win in today’s mobile-first and cloud-first world. Now in the days ahead consider these three opportunities as examples to grow your business. First convert your remaining XP customers to a modern version of Windows. And when you’re done with that find some other XP users and convert them, too. Second, build an enterprise mobility practice. Enable your customers with compelling mobile solutions. Build this practice on the Windows platform, on Office and Office 365, and the enterprise mobility suite. And third, develop a compelling line-of-business app on the Windows platform.

Just take those three only as examples, because partnering with us, each of you will have new opportunities to reach upstream and down to create new hardware innovations, to imagine new applications and new cloud-based services to bring the right solution to the right place at the right time, appropriately provisioned, and expertly managed.

So at Microsoft we are committed. We are committed to listening to you, to moving faster, to putting the customer at the center of everything we do. We are wedded to this partnership and to our mutual success.

So in closing I want to thank you all for everything you’re doing, everything you’re doing to make Windows the platform of choice.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

END