On Sept 30, 2014 Microsoft had a media briefing to begin the process of educating enterprises and businesses about the core design of Windows 10, which will be available broadly in late 2015. This video describes how businesses can evaluate the software starting now. (FOR CONSUMERS: the exciting features will be revealed in 2015!)
Video:
Terry Myerson – EVP, Operating Systems Group
Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. It’s great to be here to talk about the future of Windows.
You know it always amazes me, it’s kind of humbling to say this number, but there’s about 1.5 billion people using Windows today, from kids using a computer for the first time to writers and journalists like yourselves, engineers, gamers, CEOs. At some point, Windows has empowered each of us.
But we all know the world in which Windows has grown up has changed. Devices now outnumber people. Connectivity is oxygen. We take it for granted. In fact, on the Wi-Fi, the plane down here yesterday the Wi-Fi was terrible. It drove our whole team bananas.
Agility versus stability is a huge challenge for the IT pros we work with like never before. And no matter what machine we all walk up to, we expect our experiences to just work.
For one audience, the world hasn’t changed. That’s our developers. Still too much to do and not enough time. I think we’d all say Windows is at a threshold and now it’s time for a new Windows.
New Strategy
A few months ago, Satya articulated our company’s new strategy. In the context of that new strategy, our new Windows must be built from the ground up for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. It needs to be designed for productivity and our customers’ digital lives and, of course, in their digital work.
So let’s talk about the new Windows.
Now, what better place to start talking about the new Windows than the name? This has been something which we’ve actually enjoyed the speculation online, reading about some of the articles that have been dedicated to what should the name of the new Windows be.
Well, the natural thing for us is to name it in the chronological sense. We’ve done Windows 7, we’ve done Windows 8, now would be the time for Windows 9.
But we know based on the product that’s coming — and just how different our approach will be overall, it wouldn’t be right to call it Windows 9. So we’re considering our One Microsoft strategy, the names of our products like Xbox One, OneNote, and OneDrive, and it’s obvious what the name should be, Windows One.
But unfortunately, Windows One has been done by the giants that came before us. So where does that leave us? We’re at an inflection point in the history of Windows where we can look at the technology that has positively impacted the lives of billions for decades.
We’re at a point where we’ll carry forward all that’s good in Windows, and then step across into a new way of doing things, a new Windows. And because we’re not building an incremental product, that new Windows is Windows 10. Serious that time.
Windows 10
Windows 10 represents the first step — do you guys need a sec, or are you guys ready? Okay.
So Windows 10 represents the first step of a whole new generation of Windows. It unlocks new experiences to allow customers new ways to work, play and connect. Windows 10 embodies what our consumer and our enterprise customers are demanding, and what we will deliver.
Windows 10 will run on the broadest type of devices ever from the smallest Internet of Things to enterprise data centers worldwide. Some of these devices have four-inch screens, some of these devices have 80-inch screens, and some don’t have any screen at all. Some you hold in your hand. Some you sit 10-feet away from and you use with a controller or gestures. Some are mostly touch/pen. Some mouse/keyboard. Some devices switch between input types.
We’re not talking about one UI to rule them all. We’re talking about one product family. We’re talking about a tailored experience for each device.
Across this breadth of devices we’re delivering one application platform for our developers, whether it’s building a game or a line of business application, there will be one way to write a universal application that targets the entire product family. One store, one way for applications to be discovered, purchased, and updated across all of these devices.
Windows 10 will deliver the right experience on the right device at the right time, whether at work or at home, or on the go. Windows 10 will be our most comprehensive platform ever.
Enterprise
Now, of course, when we’re designing a new Windows we talk to many diverse customers. And one of the most important customers for Windows is the Enterprise. In the last year, I personally talked to dozens of enterprise customers hearing about how they are using and deploying Windows, what they like and what they need from us. These businesses are betting on Windows to run their business.
In the first half of 2014, shipments of Enterprise PCs grew 14%. Shipments of Windows Enterprise tablets grew 33%. These enterprises need to evaluate Windows early and we’re starting our dialogue with them today.
And we know we can’t have a rich dialogue with 20,000 enterprises without first talking with all of you about the fact the release exists. And so here we are talking about Windows 10 for the first time.
So let me share with you some of the things that we’ll be talking to the enterprise customers about.
The first, the most basic thing that our enterprise customers are looking for is that Windows 10 is going to be familiar to their end users. Whether they’re coming from Windows 7 or Windows 8, the worker at these companies will be immediately productive. They will know how to do things immediately within Windows 10. They will find all of the tools they’re used to finding. Windows 10 is to be compatible with all of the apps, tools and systems that these customers are using today.
The second discussion will be about modern management. Within enterprise today there is an incredible challenge with all of the new devices that are trying to connect to the corporate network. Windows 10 will be compatible with all of the traditional management systems that are used today with Windows devices. But to adopt to this new wave of devices, a new way of managing things has developed. It’s commonly called Mobile Device Management, or MDM.
Windows Phones and Tables support MDM today. But with Windows 10 customers will be able to use MDM to manage all of their Windows devices, not just the phones and tablets, but PCs, phones, tablets, industrial Internet of Things devices can all be managed consistently through one MDM interface.
Like the challenge of managing multiple devices is the challenge of managing the proliferation of apps. So with Windows 10, our enterprise customers will be able to customize the app store, ensure that their employees and their devices have access to just the right apps, ensure they buy just the right number of license for those apps, and those apps can be consistently updated and managed across the enterprise, across all of their devices.
And last but not least security. In today’s world, the enterprise has an incredible challenge protecting their corporate data. And doing this in a way that ensures the end users’ productivity and the way end users want to work but still gives these enterprises the security they’re looking for. Windows 10 has a very novel approach of separating corporate and personal data across all of the devices and protecting the corporate data wherever it goes, whether that’s on a BYOD device or on a managed device within the enterprise.
Windows 10 is going to be our greatest enterprise platform ever. And rather than me continuing to talk, let me invite Joe B. up now to do the first ever public demo of Windows 10.
Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group
Thank you. Good morning. My name is Joe Belfiore and I run the part of the operating system team that is responsible for, as Terry described it, the tailored experience for PC, tablet, and phone. A lot of you know me as a guy that’s worked on Windows Phone for a long time, but my team has been focused on evolving the PC experience along with the tablet experience and the phone experience for quite a few months now. And it’s a big thrill for me to be here and show you Windows 10 and go through a demo for the first time.
Before I jump into a demo, a couple of quick caveats and points of explanation.
First, the software that you’re going to see is a very early build and so we will have rough spots and some things may go wrong. That’s okay. We’re viewing this as part of the process of getting out and talking to all of you, and generally our customers, early so they can participate in the development as we go along. So that’s to be expected.
The second thing that’s worth talking about is, as Terry characterized, the reason that we’re getting out early and talking to people and showing builds now is that we want to engage our enterprise customers. And so I’m going to focus on the core experience of Windows 10. And I’m actually not going to spend a bunch of time on fanciful end-user features. So think of this as we’re sort of getting into the engine room a little bit and looking at the basics of how Windows 10 will work and how our experience will span the device types that have been evolving in the PC space for a while.
So I’m not going to show things like new Internet Explorer. I’m not going to show music and videos. I’m not going to show more consumer-y features. We’ll talk about those later.
Instead we’re going to focus on the core experience and how the PC is evolving in particular for users in businesses. Okay. So that’s the general caveats with that let me jump over here and show you Windows 10.
So if we switch to the demo machine, the first thing you hopefully will look at this and conclude, and say to yourself, it looks pretty familiar. I have a Windows desktop here with icons on the desktop. Down here I have a task bar, with items for switching between and when I click the start icon there, of course, I get the start menu.
So we showed a start menu back in BUILD, as it was under development and the software you all will get a chance to try out over there has this early build. And I want you to think about the audience that we have and the goal that we have in mind for trying to get this design right.
Literally we have hundreds of millions of Windows 7 users, mostly on PCs with a mouse and a keyboard. But it scales up to Windows 8 users on devices that are touch-based. And we’re looking to find the balance so that all of those Windows 7 users get a familiar experience on the devices they already have, but as we scale up to more capable devices, like touch devices, that the experience scales with it.
So in combination on the start menu, you’ll see things like my me tile, and you’ll see a simple power button where people can do the things that they commonly expect to do, like hibernate or sleep, or turn off their PC. At the top are the pinned apps. In the middle is the most used list, same concept on Windows 7. And then things like the All Apps button are in a place that people would expect. So I can click that and see all my apps.
And the little details really matter here, as well, things like jump lists, when I go to File Explorer it expands in place to show familiar jump lists that Windows 7 users are used to.
So the analogy that we’ve been using internally, we want all these Windows 7 users to have the sentiment that yesterday they were driving maybe a first-generation Prius. And then when they got Windows 10 they didn’t have to learn to drive something new, but it was as if we got them a Tesla. And so now there are some fancy, exciting new features, like an 18-inch touch screen. And there is more room for passengers and cargo. And the sound system is way better.
But, they don’t have to learn any new way to drive. And when you think about new features, as I said, we’ll talk more about those later, but some of them start to peek right into the core experience.
So of course here, familiar to Windows 8 users, we have Live Tiles, which our customers really like for the ability of getting information from apps, seeing what’s happening with apps, and developers like that connection with their audience. And so in our testing so far this blend has worked really well. It gives the familiarity of Windows 7 with some of the new benefits that exist in Windows 8.
And of course, it’s really easy to use. If I want to grab an app like Facebook here, drag it over, I can pull it into a space, choose where I want to drop it. In this case you can see the start menu is getting a little wider. But, we left this little space right there, so I could drop an item in.
Part of the brand values and things that we want Windows to be about is personalization and making your device really unique — represent your unique personality and needs. So we want people to be able to customize this and make it fit them. I can do things like resize these tiles. I’ll make the calendar tile here a large size and then I can take the start menu and change its size. I can make it short and stout if I would like, or I can pull it up here and go for the tall look, which during the rehearsal everyone reminded me for me going to higher heights is generally something I should try to do. So I’m going to configure my start menu in the tall mode.
And so you get the idea. Some of the new benefits in Windows 8 are blended into an experience that’s familiar to Windows 7 users and we’re trying to hit this balance in just the right way.
Sort of continuing on that vein, one of the things that we know a lot of Windows 7 users do is they type commands into the edit box on the start menu. And so of course that’s supported, but we made it better. If I start typing E-X-P you’ll see my search results change. And up at the top you get the apps that you use frequently, like the File Explorer, or Internet Explorer, or I have an expenses document that’s shown. Settings on my PC are shown.
And a feature that’s new for Windows 7 users, but not for Windows 8 users, is web results show up right here in the start menu, as well, so I can jump into a web search super fast and easy in a consistent way that I’m used to if I’m a Windows 7 user.
All right. So that’s a quick look at the basics, the task bar, the start menu.
One of the things that’s worth talking about as you think about our large installed base of Windows 7 users and our large, but not as large, base of Windows 8 users is a bunch of the valuable things that are in Windows 8 that Windows 7 users can benefit from. And one of those that’s worth spending some time on is the new app model.
So Windows 8 has a new application platform, Universal Windows apps, which developers can today write and put on phones and PCs. It’s a store-driven model. So it has a familiarity to users who are using mobile devices a ton. You go to the store. You find the app. The store provides updating. It provides commerce. It provides lots of benefits to developers and to consumers.
And when you install these apps they’re sandboxed in a way that keeps your PC running healthy. So tons of goodness in the Windows 8 store platform. And we want all of those Windows 7 users as they move to Windows 10 to get that benefit, too. And we want that to happen in a user experience that’s very consistent and familiar with what they already know.
So it goes without saying, as you look in the start menu here the tiles and icons that are shown are a blend of classic Win32 apps and new Universal Windows apps, put together in one UI and the user doesn’t have to think about how an app was implemented or how they got it.
And as users start using these apps they should just feel familiar and work in a natural way that you’d expect with a PC mouse and keyboard.
So here I’ve launched the mail app. This is a store app that was part of Windows 8. And here it is running on Windows 10 and we recently added the title bar with minimize and close, but in Windows 10 we’ve gone farther and we’ve made this work in a window, as well. And you can see when I restore this app it works just like Windows apps that you’re familiar with. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a classic Win32 app or a store app; the UI works the way you expect.
There are some nice things, though, and I’m going to start getting into a little bit of detailed nuance, because I want you all to get a sense for the depth at which we’ve been thinking of this and the kinds of things that we’re going to get data on people’s use when they eventually start trying these builds.
So the first thing I’m going to do is something that many Windows 7 users are familiar with, is just grab the window and pull it over here to the side to snap it. It’s handy. It’s a nice thing that a lot of people do, but not everyone does. Voila, it just works with the store app.
And of course, if I go launch a classic Win32 app here I have OneNote 2013, I can do the same thing and you notice it snaps to fill the available space in a nice little polished thing that we’ve heard Windows 7 users asking for, making it easy to get these two windows laid up in the way I’d like.
So that’s a quick example of getting the new app platform value to exist and be present in a way that Windows 7 users will feel super-natural with, and will value.
In fact, one way to think about this that’s a change in our philosophy. In Windows 8 when a user went and launched a modern app it sort of carried with it a different environment. They went into the modern UI environment, which it first didn’t have the task bar and offered different ways of switching between apps, and when they launched a desktop app it took them to the desktop environment. We don’t want that duality. We want users on PCs with mice and keyboards to have their familiar desktop UI with a Taskbar and Start Menu, and regardless of how an app was written or distributed to your machine, it works the way you’d expect.
This does present an interesting problem for how you deal with two-in-one convertible devices, but I’ll talk about those later.
The next thing I want to get you to think about as you think about these hundreds of millions of Windows 7 users, and these hundreds of millions of Windows 8 users is the diversity of that audience. And that is a diversity both of people and their capability, but also of device types. Some of them are mouse and keyboard without touch, some are convertibles, and some are mostly touch. And I want to talk about how we’re adapting this core experience to handle that diversity of users and diversity of devices.
So the first thing I’m going to do is sort of talk about multitasking. And if you think about novice, down here we have novice users and they scale up all the way up to people who are stock traders with multiple displays running with lots of apps at the same time.
If you think about novices, today they use the taskbar to switch between apps and that works nicely. But they miss out on a nice graduation into more visual and powerful ways of multitasking.
And one of the things we want to do in Windows 10 in particular as we get the App Store having more traction and these new apps going, is empower those novice users to walk their way up the scale and get better at multitasking. So down here on the taskbar you’ll notice a new button. This is currently called Task View. And it’s a way for novice users to work their way up to more powerful and capable multitasking with all of our new apps.
So when I click this Task View button, we jump into our Task View. And you’ll see I ran a OneNote app and I ran a mail app. There they are. Interestingly, the OneNote app also launches a Send to OneNote app, and now it’s visible here, and if I want to close it I can just go there and click close in the Task View. So the novice can just click the button and have a visual way of seeing all the windows that are open and running on their PC and switch between them.
But the second thing we’ve tried to do is scale them up into really taking advantage of apps from the store for all different types working in interesting configurations. So down here we now support multiple desktops. And this whole time I’ve been working on this desktop, but I’ve had a couple of other desktops already preconfigured.
So over here, as an example, I tiled classic Win32 Excel with a store app for Dynamics. And imagine the scenario, I’m working on expense reports, so I snapped one to the left, and I snapped one to the right. And now I’m working in those apps in sort of a task oriented way.
Novices find this discoverable. We’ve been doing a bunch of user testing on this. We know they find it discoverable. They click the plus button, they create a desktop, they open windows, and it works in a nice, natural way. We’re enhancing their productivity.
Here I’ve got a desktop with working my way up the advanced user scale. Here I’ve got a desktop with a bunch of windows, and things are starting to get complicated. And maybe I’m doing a task which is to author a PowerPoint presentation. And to do that I want to draw stuff from a Word document that somebody wrote, and I’m going to do web research, and I’m going to plug in a USB drive. And so I might want to look at these things together as a task that I switch back to.
And we’ve put affordances in the system that work across classic apps and new apps to make that really easy. I can grab my PowerPoint, pull it over here, and in a new feature for Windows 10, which we call Snap Assist, once I’ve snapped one windows — one window, if there’s a choice of a bunch of other windows, we present a simple UI where the user just clicks on the one they want.
So here I’ve got PowerPoints, and if I now want to grab stuff from Word, I click Word. Voila, the windows are tiled. And, of course, I have that multiple desktop thing to keep switching between tasks.
Let’s say I’m even more advanced and I’ve been working on my Word document, and now I want to do web research. I can pull this up here in the corner and choose my web browser, and now I’ve got a snapped web browser in a layout like this.
And then, last, of course, to sort of complete the story, I’m going to grab my PowerPoint, hit my File Explorer, and now I’ve got this tile done.
And you may say this is a rudimentary and basic feature. I agree. We don’t think this is world changing. But it illustrates the point that for Windows we need to address this breadth of users from novices working up all the way up to advanced users, and we need to address a breadth of hardware. You’ll have a chance to play with these systems over here with very large screens. And you’ll see when you get on a high-end PC this configuration really works.
And so having multiple desktops with Windows laid up like this we think can make people more productive as just a nice basic part of our core experience. And, of course, it goes without saying that I can use the multiple desktops feature in Task View to switch between those.
Okay, I’m working my way up from novices through intermediates, now doing more advanced task switching. Now I want to talk about the even more advanced people. And the even more advanced people are doing the world’s productivity on Windows PCs using the keyboard. And as we’ve thought about Windows 8 and its focus on touch and Windows 7 and its support for mouse and keyboard, we’ve tried to really think all the way along that continuum. And all of you are keyboard users, I’m sure you know tons of keyboard shortcuts. And so this UI works with those, too.
The simple one that all of you use all the time on your Windows PCs is alt-tab. We’ve improved alt-tab and alt-tab handles the case of multiple desktops nicely. If I alt-tab to excel to do my expense report I jump over to the desktop and I see those Windows in the mode they were in.
If I switch cover to my file management thing, because I want to grab something off a USB stick, I go to the desktop with those windows piled up. It’s a nice forward step enhancement to make all those people more productive.
Okay. Now I’m going to demo something that I’ve never demoed before and it’s an unusual thing for me to demo. And I do it only to illustrate the degree to which the enthusiastic designers and engineers in our development team have surprised even us with their embracing of this concept of productivity for the widest scale of Windows users.
So I’m going to demo the Command Prompt. So I’m going to go in here and launch the Command Prompt. I know some of you are Command Prompt familiar users as am I, although not frequently. And there are some things that are pretty annoying about the current Windows Command Prompt, like you can’t control C to copy and control V to paste, and the keyboard shortcuts that you have in your muscle memory for selecting text don’t really work the way you’d expect.
So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to switch back over here to my mail app where you will maybe have already noticed. I have this mail from Dave Barnett, who has been working with our IT team creating experimental line of business app installer scripts, which I have downloaded and I haven’t got them working right and he wants me to send him a directory listing of what’s in this folder.
So I’m going to control-C to select that. I’m going to come back here to the Command Prompt. I’m going to type CD to change directory, and then control-V to paste. Hit enter. I’m going to do a dir. There’s my directory listing. That was not so easy with the old Command Prompt. And now for those of you with keyboard shortcuts in your muscle memory, if you want to select six lines of text going up what button do you hold down? What key? Come on. Shift, thank you, so I’ll hold down the Shift key and Up arrow. And if you want to select by word what key do you additionally press to select by word? Come on. Control, thank you, so yes now I can Control-Shift and go through here, select the stuff in my Command Prompt, hit Control-C, Alt-Tab back to my mail, reply, paste, voila, job done. Simple.
I know this is a niche, geeky feature. I understand. But, we wanted to illustrate the point again that for Windows we have this huge breadth of audience and we want to deal with these different input methods, keyboard, mouse, touch, in a way that works for everyone. And by the way, we wanted to show something that you didn’t already know about and hadn’t read about a ton. So Command Prompt was our late add.
So that gives you a look at the core experience, not talking about cool new consumer-y features. That comes later. I’ve talked about keyboard and mouse. I’ve talked about keyboard.
Now let me wrap up by talking a little bit about touch.
It’s easy to go and do these demos and show the start menu coming back and this familiar user experience for a Windows 7 user and say, oh, is Microsoft giving up on touch? Absolutely not, we are not giving up on touch. And what we have is a problem of massive numbers of users who know Windows 7 well and a massive, but smaller number of users who know Windows 8 well, and we need a UI that works for that audience to move all the devices forward.
So what I’m going to do, I want to show you a few things that we’re doing. This is not final UI. But, we want to support those Windows 8 users that have touch machines and are getting a lot of benefit out of them. And some of you have lived through this, so this will resonate with you.
The touch features that we know are working super-well, scrolling, people find scrolling on a touch screen to be incredibly fast and efficient. They’re familiar with it on their mobile device, on a PC it just works, it’s great.
Pinch-zoom, same thing, it works great, efficient. People love it. There are a few other things when we first started doing these Windows 10 builds, and we were changing the UI that we took out and we got negative feedback inside our team, because we learned that people were using touch for some other shortcuts. One in particular was swipe right, settings, and then choose a Wi-Fi network.
And initially we knew we were evolving this UI and we took that out. But, after getting feedback from people we put it back in.
5So here you’ll see in this build when I swipe right the charms bar is still present. Now I want to tell you we plan to change this UI, the literal UI we expect to evolve and not be like this. But, I wanted to illustrate that we’re committed to supporting these touch scenarios, because we have great belief in touch on these devices as making people more productive across the board. So I can still swipe right, choose settings, and configure my Wi-Fi.
The way we’re going to evolve this touch UI, I expect that charms bar to change. The way we’re going to evolve this touch UI is to find UI approaches that use the same mouse and keyboard experience, evolving from Windows 7, so that touch users get something that’s really natural.
And what we’ve done on the other edge of the screen gives you a sense of what that might be like. I showed you the Task View and in Windows 8 people swipe in from the left with their thumb to get a task switcher to switch between apps, but it’s different than the task switchers they use everywhere else.
Well, in Windows 10, in this build that you all will get a chance to try out when you swipe in from the left we get our Task View, which people will discover using the mouse. It will be familiar, and even here we try to tailor it for the use of touch. So in the touch case when I swipe in from the left the close boxes are shown. So if I want to close that OneNote I can click close. OneNote goes away. I click touch to clear it up and now I’m using touch in a way that accelerates my use of the PC. Okay.
Now I have one last thing I want to show you and the last thing that I want to show you is not yet far enough along in our software builds to demo it on a real machine. So I’m going to show you a motion study. And if you think about the whole broad spectrum of what I’ve tried to characterize as what we’re doing here in the core UI, is to solve for a massive scale of users of different capabilities on a really wide range of device hardware, some of them only have mouse and keyboards with no touch, some of them have touch, and we definitely see people moving towards touch.
And the category of devices that we feel very enthusiastic about, both through our own experience and through working with our hardware partners and talking to our enterprise customers, is the effect that two-in-ones can have for the productivity of people using Windows to get things done.
And when we change the UI, if you go back and look at Windows 8, Windows 8’s focus on touch, the large start screen, the notion of apps running full as they do on tablet devices, that was trying to salute the idea that people would be productive on these touch devices, but we didn’t quite get it right.
With Windows 10 we think we have a better approach. So I’m going to show you a design motion study that we’re working on. The code is coming along, but it’s not ready to try yet. We call this Continuum. And the idea is for two-in-one devices can we build a UI that smartly changes its mode based on whether you have a keyboard and mouse present or absent to just adjust the UI in a way that will feel really familiar so a device is great at doing both.
So let’s run the video and you’ll get a sense of what I mean by this.
So here we have a device that’s convertible, and normally it’s used like a laptop. So here I’ve got a mouse pointer. I’m using the mouse. I click start. I get a start menu. I launch mail. Here’s a universal Outlook. It runs in a window, just as I’ve been showing you already.
Now when I remove the keyboard and mouse it prompts, should I enter the tablet mode. And when you say yes the app is maximized, the task bar adds a back button for switching, and when you touch start with your finger it switches itself into the large start mode, so that it’s really easy for you to pick other apps and navigate around and launch them.
So here we launched OneNote. OneNote it knows that it’s in the touch mode, so the UI adjusts. I say new page and I can do something like use the pen to ink write in my OneNote. If I want to switch apps I can go back to start, or I can use the familiar task bar that I have known for years and I have a simple, convenient way to do this.
When I bring the keyboard and mouse back I’m prompted again to exit tablet mode and when I do the start menu comes back to its small mode where I last left it and the apps that I ran are still present on the device in their windowed mode, because now I’m using it like a laptop.
When we’ve shown this to people, and we’ve shown this to a lot of partners, enterprises, OEMs, people say, yes, that feels right. And we’re now at the point where we’re getting to the our software development to where we can really be testing it out and making adjustments to how it works.
I’m going to actually run it one more time, it went kind of fast and I didn’t get to make all the points I was going to make as I was describing it. And I want to give you all a chance to get a sense for this Continuum from mouse and keyboard mode to touch and back.
So can you guys run that video one more time?
Okay. So here we are on a device that mostly gets used like a laptop. I want you to think about the Surface Pro, the Lenovo Yoga, the HP Specter, these are all devices that are convertible. And so you use them like a laptop a lot of the time but based on how the device works we’ll have an event in the system that can prompt the user to go into a different mode. And a user might say no and they can configure this not to ask, but we think it will be the most convenient thing.
We think a user could configure it to do it automatically without asking and what you get is a device that really operates with the simplicity of a tablet, making things larger and working well for touch, but when the mouse and keyboard come back it morphs itself to the familiar PC experience that hundreds of millions of people use and works in a really nice, natural way.
I think those were all the main points I wanted to make again.
If you look at the broad spectrum for Windows 10, certainly mobile has grown a ton and people have gotten incredibly comfortable with touch experiences on really small devices up through tablets. And the phenomena of two-in-ones, devices that are very laptop-like, but sometimes are tablets, we think is a huge opportunity for our OEM partners, all of whom are building lots of really innovative devices, and for businesses around the world to go make productive people even more productive.
And in Windows 10 we’re focused on the core experience to really enhance that experience for everyone from the lowest novice all the way up to people who have giant screens with multiple desktops running lots and lots of windows. And we’re trying to be thoughtful about an approach that, as Terry characterized, goes across all these devices in a way that will work and that no one else is delivering.
And as I said, this is the first step, and as Terry said, we’re coming to talk to you, because we’re going to now get on the road and talk to our enterprise customers. Later on we’ll be talking about additional consumer features, but not yet. But, we’re feeling good about this general direction. We think it’s time to show the world and start that feedback cycle going.
So that’s it. That’s my demo and now I’ll turn it back over to Terry to wrap up.
Terry Myerson – EVP, Operating Systems Group
Thanks, Joe. I mean every time I see the attention to detail that Joe’s team is putting into the UI I’m personally just kind of impressed. But, I’m also very happy to share that starting tomorrow we are going to launch our Windows Insider program, and so all of you are going to get to be able to experience everything Joe just showed, because we’ll be distributing to all of our insiders the technical preview build for laptops and desktops.
Soon after we’ll be distributing a technical preview build for our servers and our management tools and other device categories will follow. Through our technical preview build we’re inviting our most enthusiastic Windows fans to help shape Windows with us. We know they’re a vocal bunch and we value that so much and we really, frankly, look forward to all their feedback.
The Insider Program is being designed for people that are comfortable running pre-release software that will be of variable quality. We’re planning to share all the features we’re experimenting with before they’re ready for the audience. So if you — I expect many people in the audience will be an insider. I look forward to that. I look forward to your feedback, as does the rest of the team. But, we want to set expectations right. We’re planning to share more than we ever have before, but frankly, earlier than we ever have before.
But, our intentions, frankly, are quite simple. We believe that together with the feedback you’ll provide us we can build a product that all of our customers will love. Windows 10 will be our most open, collaborative OS project ever.
Now today we’ve shared just the first chapter of the Windows 10 story. As Joe alluded to, early next year we’ll start talking much more about the consumer story and the end user delight that Windows 10 will bring.
At our BUILD Conference in April we’ll really continue the story, the dialogue about Universal Apps. And then later in the year we look forward to launching Windows 10 and some amazing new devices.
On behalf of the Windows team and all of Microsoft, we’re excited to have you register as insiders, we’re excited to hear your feedback, and look forward to building this great product with you.
Thank you.
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