… even non-Microsoft devices are supported as Android and Apple phones are embraced as well
Preliminary information from this same ‘Experiencing the Cloud’ blog:
- Windows Embedded is an enterprise business now, like the whole Windows business, with Handheld and Compact versions to lead in the overall Internet of Things market as well [June 8, 2013]
- Proper Oracle Java, Database and WebLogic support in Windows Azure including pay-per-use licensing via Microsoft + the same Oracle software supported on Microsoft Hyper-V as well [June 25, 2013]
- Windows 8.1: Mind boggling opportunities, finally some appreciation by the media [June 27, 2013]
- Windows Azure becoming an unbeatable offering on the cloud computing market [June 28, 2013] Important note: Samsung was complete missing from device OEM roundup of Day 1 keynote despite of its leadership ATIV Q, ATIV Tab 3 and ATIV One 5 Style devices. It is not by accident as according to Intel’s tablet challenge: How Israel helped lay the foundations of its Samsung-led fightback [ZDNet, July 9, 2013]:
Intel, along with Samsung and other companies, are betting that the public is going to go for a new breed of device — two in one devices, which be switched between tablet and laptop mode, running both Android (when separated from the keyboard/base) and Windows 8 Pro (when attached).
Brief subject summary:
industry megatrends:
- [MS leading the enterprise cloud era] cloud,
- [MS has unmatched offerings, unmatched insight] big data,
- [MS solution is woved in, not forced] enterprise social, and
- [MS has best devices for doers, best tools to manage] mobility
Partners going ‘cloud first’ with Windows Azure
Microsoft unique point of view: delivering high-value experiences through our software value-added devices and experiences
support non-Microsoft devices: embrace Android and Apple phones
new user experience design [partner] competency [to be launched in January]
Windows 8.1:
- one modern and complete experience across the devices that matter today
- the best of the modern UI and the best of the desktop UI brought together in a harmonized way
- multitasking on one or any number of screens to increase productivity in a workstation like way
Windows 8/8.1 devices:
- Windows Embedded 8
- large-format touch, or the all-in-one (also as a desktop replacement)
- ultimately thin and light ultrabook
- tablet with touch, and convertible form factors
- docking tablet (also as a desktop replacement)
- waterproof tablet
- tablet with ink/stylus
- ruggedized tablet
- “one-handed Windows”
- thinnest and lightest tablet with ARM
- phones
- innovation: in hinge, in screen quality, in combined desktop replacement/home device/flat tablet mode
Self-service BI with Power BI for Office 365 Preview: next giant leap via building into Excel and SharePoint data discovery, data navigation, visualization, collaboration, and enterprise features around auditability
Application development: sea change with Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the development platform
- “A platform that is capable of both infrastructure as a service and platform as a services (IaaS + PaaS)”
- “That means any mission-critical Web application you want to build, any mobile front-end you want to build, where you’re automating a business process with a mobile front-end; any cloud service you want to build, you want to have this rich capability of both infrastructure as a service and a platform as a service”
- “And you want to be able to deliver that, by the way, in both Windows Azure, as well as on Windows Server. So that symmetry of development runtime is also very important, and that’s what we’re building out.”
- Visual Studio 2013 Preview availability announcement
- SQL Services, or SQL Database Premium Services for Windows Azure announcement: “unique already with the fact that we have a PaaS-based SQL Service”
Cloud infrastructure: “No one else in the industry, neither Amazon nor VMware can promise or deliver this level of consistency, this level of mission-critical readiness because of the battle testing of all the diverse set of first-party workloads.”
From: Jon Roskill: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Introduction [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
JON ROSKILL: Now let’s turn our attention and look forward, because while WPC is about celebrating, it’s also about us coming together to build our business plans together for the next year and kick off the fiscal year. That’s what WPC is all about.
And we’ve made a few changes in WPC, some of which you’ve already noticed as you look at things we’ve done in MPN today, but changes based on your feedback.
One of the key ones we’ve made is in the keynotes. You guys told us that you needed to have all of the product strategy upfront in order to be able to go and build your business plans over the remaining days. And so we’ve taken the day two keynote and the day one keynotes, and we’ve combined them together into a WPC day one supersession. So that’s what we’re going to do this morning.
Then you have day two fully open to go and do networking, go to sessions, and build out those business plans.
And then on day three we’ll come back together here with me, Kevin Turner. And then Wednesday night we will celebrate. And boy, are we going to have an amazing celebration. And by Wednesday night I’m going to be so excited to go crowd surfing with you guys.
We’ve also made this year ‘s WPC, we’ve built it around a customer-centric notion, customers at the center of WPC. And we’ve done that by basing WPC around these four industry megatrends: mobility, enterprise social, cloud, and big data. These are trends that are relevant every day to customers, and they’re driving demand for all of our solutions. So you’re going to see these four trends reflected not just in the keynotes and the sessions, but also in the expo across the commons, in the BG areas, et cetera.
Windows 8 takes center stage at Worldwide Partner Conference [Blogging Windows blog, July 8, 2013]
At Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, Texas, executives discussed the company’s approach to services and devices. Tami Reller, Windows chief marketing officer and chief financial officer, announced that Windows 8.1 release to manufacturing (RTM) will be available for original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners in late August, so they can prepare Windows 8.1 devices just in time for the holidays.
New Power BI solution for Office 365 delivers self-service business intelligence on nearly any device [The Fire Hose blog from Microsoft]
Today, at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced a new offering: Power BI for Office 365 – a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution that enables customers to easily gain insights from their data, working within Excel to analyze and visualize the data in a self-service way.
Developments from Worldwide Partner Conference: Partners can go ‘cloud first’ with Windows Azure [Windows Azure blog, July 8, 2013]
At Day 1 of the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft made several announcements that highlight new ways for our partners and customers to embrace cloud computing using the Windows Azure platform.
Partners in the cloud for modern business [The Official Microsoft Blog, July 8, 2013]
From the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, Texas, Microsoft President of Server and Tools Business Satya Nadella announced new programs and services that are designed to help Microsoft partners and customers embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing and big data. One such program, Cloud OS Accelerate, brings together Microsoft and key partners – Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and Dell – who will invest more than $100 million to help put thousands of new private and hybrid cloud solutions into the hands of customers.
Partners: Want higher profits and faster growth? Sell cloud solutions, new IDC study says [Microsoft press release, July 8, 2013]
Today from the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Microsoft released a new study from IDC that shows partners selling cloud-based solutions benefit from higher gross profit, more new customers, higher revenue per employee and faster overall business growth. The study also revealed customer buying preferences that highlight the importance of the role of partners in the overall industry cloud transition.
Microsoft survey reveals SMB and enterprise opportunities for partners [Microsoft press release, July 9, 2013]
IPSOS study released at Worldwide Partner Conference highlights utilization of social tools and showcases opportunities for partners.
Windows Embedded partners to join Microsoft Partner Network [Microsoft feature story, July 9, 2013]
Resources will strengthen opportunities in rapidly growing intelligent systems market.
Details
Steve Ballmer at the Day 1 Keynote [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013]
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer provided opening remarks at the WPC 2013 Day 1 keynote.
From: Steve Ballmer: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
… There’s 15,000 of you here in the room today, and to all of you I want to start with a simple message of thanks. Thanks for your support, thanks for your good work, and thank you every day for taking care of our customers. (Applause.) We have a total of 750,000 partners around the world, but about 90 percent of the revenue that we do is actually represented in some way, shape or form with the partners who are here today: systems integration partners, resale partners, hardware partners, development partners, software partners, cloud partners, framing partners, distribution partners. The range in breadth of the activities in which you engage are amazing. This year, our partners in aggregate had really quite a good year. Growth in the businesses from our partners was about 6.5 percent year over year, but on a base of $650 billion. That’s the total revenue of our partner network, $650 billion, and you still manage to grow at 6.5 percent. Congratulations everybody. (Applause.) …
…
We spend a lot of time as a leadership team thinking about the remaking of Microsoft. About a year ago in our annual report, we talked about the move from being a “software company” to a “devices and services company.” What that really means? It means that the world, and I’ve been saying this at our partner conferences here for a while, the world we grew up in was a world of software. When I dropped out of school and joined Microsoft, I had to explain to my mother and father what software was and why I was joining a software company. That was a long time ago.
And software development, I believe, is still the most valuable skill that anybody on the planet can possibly have. And yet the way in which software innovation gets really packaged and presented now is through a set of devices that include the software, and through a set of cloud services that deliver that software.
Just about six or seven years ago, I started talking about the cloud here at WPC. And it was highly unpopular the first time I talked about it, because it looked like an end around. And yet I think today everybody understands that this is the future of innovation. Even Windows, if you think about it, has really always been much more of a device than a piece of software.
Windows defined a class of devices called the PC. And we are certainly incredibly determined to have Windows define new classes of devices, tablets, phones, two-in-ones, living room devices, defined by Windows as a piece of software, but purchased and implemented by our partners as tested software. So we’re in the transformation from delivering our software value one way to delivering it in a new form, and we need our partners to come with us on that journey, whether you design and build computers, whether you deliver systems integration services, whether you provide custom development, there’s a place in this journey for all of us.
At Microsoft we say, what’s our unique point of view. Our unique point of view is on delivering high-value experiences through our software value-added devices and experiences. We think we understand the tools, the technologies that it takes to help people get work done better than anybody else on the planet, whether you are an employee, whether you are a customer or a trading partner, whether you are an IT person or a developer, we build experience that help people get stuff done. You need to do a piece of analysis, we’re going to have the best tools, the best devices and services for helping people do analysis. You want to participate in a virtual meeting, nobody is going to give you a better experience to participate in a virtual meeting than Microsoft does. You want to ensure information integrity in your customer, because no matter what happens with consumerization, it’s still the IT department that has to protect the integrity and value of corporate information. We together understand these things, and we together, Microsoft and our partners, will deliver the devices and services that really bring these things alive when people want to be productive.
Now, we have another side of ourselves at Microsoft, too. That’s the fun side. I refer to it as serious fun, because unless you’re hardcore about fun, the Xbox probably hasn’t been the product for you. But when it’s serious fun, or serious business, we’re going to make sure that we provide the core experiences through our devices and services, and through the value add of people in this room to really bring that alive. That’s not easy. It takes a lot of core technology investment in operating systems, in user interface, and particularly now natural user interface, in machine learning, in cloud infrastructure.
…
So what is on our customer’s mind? These are the four big trends that I think in particular our IT customers, but businesses in general, want to speak with us about every day. They come to us and they say, what about the cloud? They say it to you. They say it to us. They say, hey, I hear about big data, or I understand big data, or I’m afraid I’m missing out on big data, how are you going to help me get there, they’ll say to the two of us.
Social, part of the consumerization theme of the day is how do we apply techniques and software services that people get to know in their personal lives, how do we apply those to enable business productivity? And we’re going to show you a lot today of what we’re doing with social so that people can come together in what I would call human ways to do superhuman tasks at their work.
And last, but certainly not least, is mobility. I get to do something that the rest of you don’t do, because I sit on the stage, I get to count the number of mobile devices that go up for pictures and various other things during my speech. We’re at about 25 percent would be my gauge this year. I’m sure everybody has got a mobile device with them, but what it says is that the range of applications of mobility just continues to increase. And I want you to really understand just how rich our mobile offering has become, both in terms of the Windows devices that you can use as part of your solution, and the work that we are doing to support some non-Windows devices. So let me dive into each of these in turn.
First is the cloud, the cloud remains a little bit of an amorphous thing. But, at the end of the day, the task of the cloud probably means, and it might be 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it is really a path that leads for almost all companies to the public cloud. And that puts a lot of pressure on providers, whether it’s Microsoft, folks we compete with, our service provider partners, it puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we have world-class scaled, low-cost, low latency, high-bandwidth cloud infrastructure across the world. How do we, from a public cloud application, deliver with incredibly low-latency and with exactly the right data security and privacy and protection? How do we deliver information, whether it’s in the U.S., or Australia, or China, or Malaysia, or any place else in the world? And we are investing in that infrastructure.
We actually started the investment process in that infrastructure in order to support our own applications, to support Bing, to support Office 365. And what we would tell you is that our cloud infrastructure, Azure, is being proven out, is being battle tested, and is being advanced on the backbone of our own first-party applications, but then that infrastructure, that Azure infrastructure, is there for all of you to use, to deliver solutions to your customers.
I claim there really are almost no companies in the world, just a handful, that are really investing in scaled public cloud infrastructure. We have something over a million servers in our datacenter infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less. So the number of companies that really understand the network topology, the datacenter construction, the server requirements to build this public cloud infrastructure is very, very small, very small. And the number of companies that are at the same time seriously investing in the private cloud, which is not going away, and in these hybrid clouds is really just one and that’s us. We are building in a compatible way private cloud infrastructure based on Windows Server, and public cloud infrastructure based on Windows Azure, and we will talk to you about that today.
Sixty-three percent of customers surveyed will say they really want a single vendor who can provide them both public cloud and private cloud. We think we are the only solution and certainly the best solution for customers who want that. We continue to advance with our cloud applications, our Bing search service has made progress each and every month, improving not only its market-share and its quality, but also the speed and performance with which we deliver our results, which should be a key indication to you on just how rich our cloud infrastructure is.
Through your good work our Office 365 service has literally exploded. For the last few years we were saying SharePoint was the No. 1 fastest growing product at Microsoft. Then it was Lync, the No. 1 fastest growing product at Microsoft. Through your good work it’s Office 365. And what all of that means is our mutual customers are ready for the cloud, and our product line is ready for the cloud. People want full, familiar, world-class productivity tools in the cloud. Only we give people those tools that really let you get work done. There are pretenders who come from the consumer world, but there’s only one set of tools for your business customers who really need a productive, high-security, high-reliability, infrastructure in the cloud for their applications.
No. 2, big data, big data is I think one of the areas that is still very, very early actually in its exploitation. Big data means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it’s very important that we continue to push forward on these big data themes. You’re going to see demonstrations today of some of our tools, some of the work that we’ve done with Excel, and SQL Server, I guarantee you for people who have a lot of data, there is no question that the No. 1 sort of most familiar, easy-to-use toolset to get insight out of data comes from Excel and SQL Server.
Ninety percent, literally, of the world’s data, this is a very interesting fact, ninety percent of the world’s data has actually been created in the last two years, 90 percent of all of the online data in the world in the last two years. What it says is there’s an explosion in this data. And so tools that let people mine it, get insights from it, and understanding from it are essential. We’re going to show you a demonstration of some of the things that you can do with our big data and BI suite later on today that I think will absolutely blow your mind.
But, we’re also providing you with the infrastructure that lets you build out automated solutions for your customers, because over time most of the value in big data will actually be in having the data learn from itself and take automated actions on our joint customers behalf. We’re building out our Hadoop infrastructure on Azure, so that you can do a mix of things with structured and unstructured data. We are certainly doing a lot of work on SQL Azure, so that you can access the structured data in the cloud. Because of our investment in Bing, we know we have a lot of data. We are putting that data in a structured form, where you can use it as part of the applications you deliver.
One of the key things that we showed at our developer conference a couple of weeks ago in Windows 8.1 is the way we’re starting to take entities that Bing understands and make them part of a platform for you to use as developers in your applications.
Last but not least is the Azure Data Marketplace. There is going to be a lot of data that people are going to want to use inside their applications that don’t actually live inside the enterprises you serve. If you want to write a forecasting application for one of your customers that forecasts how many raincoats they need in each of their retail stores, I guarantee you the weather data is a helpful input. And yet most of our joint customers don’t keep the weather data in their enterprise systems. And so we want to let you mix and match public data and private data. We want you to be able to bring that data together in structured and unstructured ways. We want to bring it together in ways in which humans get the insights, and we want to give you the machine-learning infrastructure so that the computers themselves can actually help your customers respond to their customers in real time. The work we’re doing here you’ll hear about throughout the morning, and particularly the demonstrations you’ll see I think will really bring these things alive.
Social. Some people think social is one product. I don’t. Social is a way of working. How do four of us come together and collaborate on a project? How do we collaborate if we work in the same company? How do we collaborate if we work in different companies? How do I reach you if you are in my customer base and I want to do a seminar for you? Or I want to put on and have an event where we communicate real time? All of these are social activities that are involved in business. So it’s people to people, it’s people to businesses, it’s employees to employees, it’s all of the constituents, consumers, employees, customers, and partners. How do you bring them together naturally? Sometimes you want to do that on a real-time basis, and sometimes you want to be able to do that in a way in which people can participate asynchronously.
I’m glad to have 15,000 people here today, but many more people will watch the video of this section in our partner community around the world. And it’s part of, if you will, the social infrastructure, letting people participate the way they want when they want. And we’ve woven this into the fabric of everything we do. Windows devices come from the get-go with integrated communications and social capabilities like Skype. Skype and Lync are being brought together to allow the consumer and the businessperson to interact together in real time.
We continue to push forward in Outlook, adding more social capabilities directly into the e-mail client that is the base station from which most of us would communicate with other people. We acquired Yammer over a year ago, and you’ll see the way we’re using Yammer both inside companies and now enabling it to stretch between companies and their partners to involve real-time communication that feels very much like what somebody would do on Twitter or Facebook, but in a productivity context. We continue to push SharePoint social capabilities forward, and even in our Dynamics product line, even when we’re talking about line of business process, it is very important to collect the information from the social realm, and to be able to let people in formal line of business processes actually connect to social environments. And we’re going to show you some of that later on in the demonstration.
Last but not least is mobility. This is an area where we’ve made huge strides in the last year. I had a chance to beat my chest a little bit, get excited about Windows Phone, but we’re also going to show you today what we’ve done with Windows 8.1, and what our hardware partners have done with Windows devices. You can buy beautiful Windows devices today in so many different shapes and forms. Windows PCs, everybody has a notion of what we mean by a Windows PC. But we’re going to show you small Windows tablets. They’re still all Windows all the time, but they’re hard to mistake for a PC.
We’ll show you Windows two-in-ones, devices, which depending on how you configure them at any time will feel like a PC or can feel like a tablet. I happen to think this will be the most popular configuration for business people because they’ll want the ability to seamlessly go back and forth between their productive life, their consumptive life, and their personal life.
I talked about Windows Phone. You’re going to get a chance to see the Surface. Hopefully many of you will choose to pick one up, but what we’re doing with Surface I think is also amazing. We’re trying to really lead the way on products like Surface Pro, and the use of the pen, which I think is pretty fundamental in mobility.
While we’re making these investments in sort of Windows mobile form factors, if you will, we also continue to do work to support non-Microsoft devices. You’ve seen us certainly move with SkyDrive, with Lync, with OneNote, with a number of our offerings to embrace Android and Apple phones. We’re going to show you some technology today for managing mobile devices that apply outside the Microsoft sphere. So our mobility strategy, as centered as it may feel in our Windows devices, and they are beautiful, and they are the most productive, for those people who just don’t happen to have one, we’ll also show you a little bit of some of the technology that we’ll give you so you can stay well anchored in Windows and Active Directory as the center point for managing devices of all shapes, sizes and forms.
At the end of the day we may see ourselves focusing on high-value experiences, and our customers may ask us collectively about cloud, and big data, and mobility, and social, but at the end of the day we deliver to you some products. And with those products in hand you turn around and try to serve our joint customers.
Windows, we’ll show you 8.1 and I couldn’t be more pleased with the progress. Windows Phone, if you haven’t checked it out recently you must. Surface, I hope you get the opportunity to delve in and really explore at the partner conference. Office 365, including Yammer, and Skype, and Lync, and SharePoint and Excel, and BI, and all of these phenomenal capabilities, the footprint of what you can do with Office is continuously expanding. And when you leave here, we want to make sure you leave here understanding completely the breadth of footprint that Office is embracing. Windows Azure, and when I say Azure today I include Windows Server, and the full on-premise product line. Your ability to go out and articulate a hybrid cloud story with Windows Server, SQL Server, and Windows Azure is incredibly important to us. So we are going to try to equip you to do that by the time you’re done today.
And then last, but not least, is Dynamics. Dynamics continues to evolve in its footprint, in its embrace of the cloud. Dynamics is an amazing business for Microsoft. I’ll bet we get less PR on the business that is billions of dollars for Microsoft, and where we probably have the most loyal committed partner base in the world, and the most loyal committed customer base. And for those of you who have not come back and looked recently at the amazing work that we’re doing in business applications I hope you’ll feel enthused to go do that by the end of the day.
We will only succeed as a company if we arm you to go approach these challenges. You need to see these products. You need to understand their potential. You need to believe that they can help you serve our joint customers. You need to know each other. Some of you are experts in hardware. Some of you are experts in systems integration, some are developers, some are resellers. Bringing you all together and equipping you with the common base, so you understand where we’re going, what we’re doing, and collectively how we can serve our joint customers that’s what WPC is all about, and if we take advantage of this opportunity and certainly with the phenomenal product lineup that we have today, and we’ll roll out over the next month, we know absolutely that we can succeed together.
Thank you all very much and enjoy WPC.
Windows 8.1 Product Enhancements [msPartner YouTube channel, July 9, 2013]
Tami Reller, CVP and CFO, Windows and Windows Live, provided updates and demos of Windows 8.1.
See also: Windows at WPC 2013 [Blogging Windows, July 8, 2013]
From: Tami Reller: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
Tami Reller: … 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 [partner] 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.) [6:40 … 7:10 essentially for Office 365]
… [Office 365: complete Office in the cloud … this is the Office enhancement … +extension to the Open program … +investment in partner enablement]
… [Windows Phone: Lumias … suitable to build end-to-end enterprise solutions … tools to build enterprise solutions]
… [xBox: … newest xBox One …]
… [Surface and Surface Pro: … hand down more productive than iPad … better with Windows 8.1 …]
… [Windows: … mobility is top for CIOs … Windows 8 tablets are best for the business … SkyDrive … destination for developers … more than 100,000 apps … LOB customers need partners … 2 out of 3 enterprise enterprise organizations are investing today in mobile applications … great UI enhancements, great usability functionality … migration from XP opportunity … Windows Accelerate program continued … new Touch Win program incentives directly to authorized distributors as well as reseller partners …]
… [Windows 8.1: … 900 continuous improvements and hundreds of updates to our inbox apps … represents responsiveness, it represents rapid timeframe … feel natural on everything from a small tablet to a large work station …]
[21:18 Jensen Harris showing Windows 8.1 via a jam-packed demo here for the next few minutes, including some things that we have never publicly shown before]
… [Nokia Lumia 925 … 8-inch Acer Iconia W3 … in landscape games and productivity … +optimized Windows 8.1 specifically for portrait for working great on these small tablets e.g. Reading List, ergonomics … ]
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.
… [search hero: … 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 … integrated with Maps functionality…]
… [xBoxMusic app: … redesigned totally to make it fast, to make it efficient, and to focus on your collection of music …]
[Dell all-in-one, 27 inches with touch … the world's best Skype device, a Windows 8.1 PC … Start screen changes: all the things that you love on one screen … new personalization options … multiselect … Reading List … SkyDrive … picture editing built-in … a lot of new [built-in] apps: e.g. Food & Drink … hands-free mode … Windows Store big-big update: e.g. recommendation engine built one Bing … … OneNote syncing with SkyDrive …]
[Surface Pro: “play to Xbox One” … Miracast built-in … OneNote
Windows Phone: OneNote syncing with SkyDrive ]
… [desktop PC: … doesn’t need touch …bring together the best of the modern UI and the best of the desktop UI and harmonize them in Windows 8.1 … Start button .. enterprise cosumer dashboard … productivity (… multitasking) taken to next level: e.g. new version of Outlook … ]
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.
[1:02:06]
Tami Reller: … 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.) [1:04:05 … 1:04:35 essentially iPad 32 GB $599 vs. Windows Tablet $299 (Dell XPS 10 32GB) Limited time offer at Dell.com]
Dell Tablet vs. iPad [WindowsVideos YouTube channel, June 13, 2013] here the limited time offer at the end stands at $399
See how the Dell XPS 10 with Windows RT stacks up against the iPad. Check out more at http://windows.com/compare
Nick Parker:
… Windows Storage Server: e.g. Western Digital Sentinel, a 16-terabyte small business server … Windows Embedded 8: e.g. IEI [?Institute for Emerging Issues?] display panel … large-format touch, or the all-in-one: e.g. Dell XPS 18 also as a desktop replacement … ultrabook: e.g. the world’s thinnest and lightest one Sony VAIO Pro 13 … tablets with touch, and convertible form factors: e.g. Lenovo Helix … tablet with stylus … docking tablet, also as a desktop replacement: e.g. Latitude 10 … Fujitsu Arrows Tab waterproof tablet … Hewlett Packard ElitePad 900 the choice of Emirates Air for their in-flight device, also with a very innovative sleeve … Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 , not just a small app running a stylus capability, but ink immersed as part of your input mechanism … Panasonic FZ-G1, the Panasonic Toughpad ruggedized computer … Acer W3 one-handed Windows … 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: Asus VivoTab RT … phones: Nokia 925 and Nokia 520 … innovation: Acer Aspire R7 with innovation in hinge, Toshiba KIRAbook a 221-pixels-per-inch device, HP Rove the 20-inch IPS all-in-one for both desktop replacements as well as great home devices + complete flat tabletop mode for using an application that’s maybe multi-orientational …
[1:22:24]
Note that Samsung was complete missing from this device OEM roundup despite of its leadership ATIV Q, ATIV Tab 3 and ATIV One 5 Style devices, as you could read in 20 years of Samsung “New Management” as manifested by the latest, June 20th GALAXY & ATIV innovations [‘Experiencing the Cloud, July 2-5, 2013]
Satya Nadella about Platform, Infrastructure, and Applications [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013]
Satya Nadella, President of Server and Tools, speaks about the enterprise.
From: Satya Nadella: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
… <before that: how to enable dynamic business … demoed across Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online Windows Intune, and System Center Configuration Manager, and Azure Active Directory … >
[30:08] When you think about having lots of data and having lots of rich processing capabilities, the next step is to be able to empower your end users with the best tools to drive insights. This is where we collectively have really created one of the most amazing phenomena when it comes to BI with self-service BI. We took the most ubiquitous tool around data in Excel, combined it with the power of SQL Analysis Services, and started the self-service BI revolution, and especially in combination with SharePoint, we really have done a fantastic job of driving insight at the edge of all data, big or small.
Today I’m really pleased to announce the next giant leap, if you will, when it comes to self-service BI. We are announcing Power BI for Office 365 Preview. It takes all of the rich capabilities around data discovery, data navigation, visualization, collaboration, enterprise features around auditability, taking all of that, building it right into Excel and SharePoint, so that every user has friction-free access to it. They’re also delivering all of the rich cloud capabilities that power this natively in Azure. So that means all of the SQL analysis capabilities that power this experience are all there natively in the cloud.
So to show you a glimpse of what this new solution, Power BI for Office 365, can do I wanted to invite up on stage Amir Netz.
Amir.
Power BI Demo [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013] for those who want to watch only this part, watch especially from [8:10] on especially (incredible demo/performance)
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