Microsoft Build 2014 Keynote Presentation Transcript – Day 1 (Full)

Some of the most entertaining and fun games have been built by people in this room. Some of the most powerful web services on the Internet are represented here and everything in between, and online we’re expecting viewers from over 170 countries to join us. And something that I think that is just incredibly cool. Using our public translation APIs, everything we say on stage here today is going to be translated in real time for that online audience. So I think that’s pretty sleek.

Now without further ado, I figure we should just get started. So let’s kick off Build 2014.

[Video Presentation]

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group, Joe Belfiore.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Good morning. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Welcome to Build. We’re obviously very excited to have you here in San Francisco. And just as the video said, your fans are waiting. And we were kidding about that. We think these are your fans because really it’s all of you that built value and created ton of what’s superb about the Windows ecosystem.

So I am Joe Belfiore. I’m now running a group for PC, tablet and phone within our operating systems team and it’s a great honor for me to be here and spend about the next 50 minutes with you, talking about some major updates for Windows.

In fact, today we’re announcing two things. Windows Phone 8.1 and our Windows 8.1 update. So I am going to start out by taking you through Windows Phone 8.1.

With Windows Phone, we set out to create an experience that’s inspired by people. One… an experience that gets you closer to the things and people that matter most in your life, one that’s a little bit less like technology and a lot more about you. And that’s why we believe that Windows Phone is the world’s most personal smartphone.

Now, with Windows Phone 8.1, this story gets a lot better. And that’s through not just a bunch of the software work that we’ve done, but also the wider range of hardware that you’re going to see showing up with Windows Phone 8.1.

At Mobile World Congress, we announced a range of new hardware partners that were all working on new phones. And in fact, today, we’re announcing two additional partners: Micromax and Prestigio.

Now, these companies are building phones, working with Qualcomm and with us through our reference design program, which is a lot of work that we’ve done in conjunction with Qualcomm to make it way easier and less expensive for companies to bring up new Windows Phone devices.

And at Mobile World Congress, we talked about the partners that were working on this, but we didn’t show any phones. And so I thought today we would bring a couple of new phones on stage here.

So what I have here in my left hand, Micromax, and in my right hand, Prestigio. So these are their real phones under development. These companies have worked with Qualcomm and with Longcheer Longcheer is an OEM that’s a device manufacturing partner. And these phones are up and running with Live Tiles and the software is in good shape and well underway. And you can expect to see all of these companies making progress on their engineering with Windows Phones to see that wide range of phone hardware.

Now, I know one of the things that you’re all really interested in is getting a good look at the software. So let’s get to a demo of Windows Phone 8.1 software.

Okay, let me see here. All right. Now, I want to start out by showing you a few ways that we’ve made Windows Phone 8.1 more personal, more sort of tailored to the way you use the phone and better at expressing your personality.

The first thing I want to show is a way that we’ve tuned Windows Phone to help make you more efficient and give you a customized way to connect to the apps that maybe you haven’t pinned, and get some notifications about things that are happening, as well as get quick access to settings.

So I’m going to come up here and pull down from the top and show you our new action center in Windows Phone 8.1. Yes, thank you.

We know this is something that a lot of our users have been asking for, so here it is. And if you look down from the top, the first thing you’ll see is it shows you more detail about things like your actual battery percentage.

If I had dual SIM running on my phone… woops, I think I pulled the power cord out there. If I had dual SIM running on my phone, I’d see information about both of my SIMs with their name.

Up here, you’d see these four buttons are customizable quick settings. I can set whatever I would like. And down below are the notifications coming from all my apps.

And as app developers, we’re putting you in a position to really control what’s shown in those notifications through new APIs that give you control. And the user has great control as well because they can decide which apps should cause the phone to vibrate, or make a sound, or just show up in the action center and so on.

So as you see, I brought this down over the lock screen. It’s accessible wherever you are in the UI, really very convenient.

Now, the second thing we’ve done to make Windows Phone feel even more personal is a feature that lets you greatly personalize your lock screen. And I’m pretty sure this is something that none of you have seen before.

In Windows Phone 8, we had support for applications to set a background image behind lock. But in Windows Phone 8.1, we’ve implemented a new set of APIs for the lock screen which we’re using ourselves for a little while before we publish them all to you.

These APIs enable lock-screen experiences that are highly interactive and unique where the application can take over full control and really render whatever it would like.

As the first app to use these, we’ve been collaborating with Rudy Huyn. Do you all know Rudy Huyn? Star Windows Phone developer behind Wikipedia and 6Tag and 6Chat. And he’s been working with us to build out a first experience which we, Microsoft, are going to publish in the store in the coming months to give users a wide range of highly varied lock-screen themes.

So in this case, this is one that’s called Diagonal. And you can see, the app has got complete control over the lock screen. And when I move and touch, it shows the time and calendar and notification information in a unique way. And when I unlock, it unlocks.

And I’m actually going to come over here and switch to a different one to give you a sense for how widely varied these lock-screen experiences can be. I mean, the sky is the limit in terms of what all of you will be able to do with this creativity once it’s available.

Here, you can see my day of the week is displayed completely differently. The arrangement of things on the screen is different, and up here you see this cool sort of — this one is called Tokyo. These three balls all align very nicely when I pan right up to the top, and then it unlocks.

So there’s a wide range of possibilities here. And we think our end users will love the creative flexibility that will be possible with these new lock screens.

Now, third, of course, we’ve evolved the heart and soul of Windows Phone, the start screen. And so I am going to pan over here. And the first thing you’ll notice on my small device, with Windows Phone 8.1 users have the option to choose a high-density, lots of tiles layout where they get three columns of cross of tiles.

And I’m going to jump in here to settings and go to the start and theme area where you can see down here, there’s an on/off switch for showing more tiles. I’ll leave that turned on. So that’s one way we’re letting users greatly customize their start screen.

But another thing we’re doing here is we’re letting people choose a background for start. So I’m going to choose background and go into the set of backgrounds that we’ve supplied. I like this one here with this cool, green texture, which matches my phone.

I’ll say Okay. And then you can see there, that photo has been selected. And now when I go back to start, voila, I have a really different and beautiful visual appearance for my tiles.

All of this is about making Windows Phone more personal and better able to fit your personality and look the way you want and give you customization because we think when a phone knows you, you have a better experience with it. There’s no other device that’s so personal.

In fact, along those lines, actually, one of the things that we spent a lot of effort on this past year is a new way — a new feature that makes Windows Phone very personal in an incredibly useful way.

So we’ve been working on this for a long time. We think it’s an experience you’re going to love, but rather than me describe it to you, I figure you should just watch as she comes to life.

(Video Presentation: Cortana)

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Well, here she is. I’m thrilled for you all to now meet our truly personal digital assistant for Windows Phone, and yes, her name is Cortana.

Hey, Cortana, do you like your name?

Cortana: Cortana? I love it. It’s certainly a lot catchier than “Microsoft Personal Assistant v.1 Service Pack 2 2014.”

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

We thought so too. Any comments about how you look?

Cortana: Some things I resemble: A hula hoop, a doughnut, a halo.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

All right. Now, Cortana is powered by Bing. So since she understands the entire Internet, you could say she knows everything about the world.

But beyond what you’d expect from a mere search engine, Cortana also gets to know you. She’s always looking out for you and she keeps you closer to the things you care about most in the world and the people you care about most in the world.

So let’s take a look about how she actually looks and performs on a Windows Phone.

So I’m going to switch over to my Lumia 1520 here. And I’ll unlock my phone. And I want you to notice right there on the start screen, front and center, right here, I have a Live Tile for Cortana.

So of course Cortana has a Live Tile. And you can see she’s animating right there. And there’s a number of interests that I’ve already taught her about and the Live Tile is showing me this news and information. So that’s one way I might get to Cortana.

But Cortana also fully replaces the search function on Windows Phone. So whenever you push the search button, Cortana is there to help you do searches, find information or get things done.

So I’m going to go down here and touch the search button, and there’s Cortana. And you can see, she greets me, she looks a little excited to see me here on stage, and probably to see all of you. She says, “What’s on your mind?” And below that, you see she’s giving a bunch of suggestions for things that I might ask.

And these suggestions are actually personalized. If you watch them, sometimes she suggests things actually related to people that she knows about me, people that she knows that I know.

And one of the nice things you can do here is I’ll just touch this “see more.” So you get an overview of all the kinds of things Cortana can do.

Like a real personal assistant, she’s good at handling your communications and your calendar. She can make phone calls or send texts or schedule appointments, or take a note, give you a reminder. She’s also good at helping you learn things. She can do searches, tell you what music is playing. She knows the places you frequent, and so on, and so on.

So all of that is built right in. But we knew that if we really wanted to make Cortana the most personal and the most powerful digital assistant, that we needed all of you to help us make her better and better.

So if I scroll down here, you’ll see as well, Cortana can be extended via third-party apps. And there are a number of app vendors that we’ve been working with to get ready for this announcement, have the first samples of speech-enabled Cortana apps that can do things when the user interacts with their phone, and I’ll show you how that works a little later.

Okay, so let me come back here again. And there’s Cortana. Now, a couple other things you might notice. When we went out and started working on Cortana, we met with a bunch of real-world personal assistants. And we talked to them about what made them good at their job.

And there was this recurring theme they had about getting to know their client, what were the things the client liked, who were the people that he or she cared about, when should he be bothered and when shouldn’t he.

And a lot of them said they kept that sort of information in a notebook. We said, “Well, that’s a pretty good idea. We should give Cortana a notebook.”

So right up here in the upper right, I’m going to touch this hamburger button. And you see here’s Cortana’s notebook.

This is the transparent way of putting the user in control of their relationship with Cortana. You can help her understand all of your interests, the people you care about, what your quiet hours are, and so on. So let me take you through some of this.

When I go to interests, these are all the things that Cortana has inferred about me or asked me about or that I’ve told her I care about. I want a daily glance, I want to know about traffic, I want some news headlines, I care about the NCAA tournament, Stanford football, Windows Phone and Xbox One. You get the idea.

And the more I use the search function, the more Cortana learns about me by asking and confirming, “Would you like me to keep track of this for you?” Just like a real personal assistant would.

Another good example of something Cortana really gets to know about you is the people that matter most. How could you have a personal assistant if they didn’t know your friends and family? And that’s the inner circle.

So here you can see Cortana has inferred some people that I might care about. She’s giving me suggestions down here. And then I confirm that certain people should be part of my inner circle, like my wife, my sister and so on. And she even gets to know the relationships I have with those people.

And that’s really useful for a lot of different functions, but in particular, it’s useful for quiet hours. I can turn on quiet hours and explain what I want my quiet hours to be and then Cortana has a set of rules you see here for letting the inner circle break through, even during my quiet hours.

I might not want Terry Myerson to call me during quiet hours, but I probably do want to get a phone call from my wife. That level of control is entirely up to the user, just like you would have in a real-world relationship with a real personal assistant.

Cortana also knows the places that you frequent. And she will automatically infer your home and work. But if she gets them wrong, they’re right here in the notebook, easy to find, you can fix them.

And if you want to teach her about some places that are important to you, you can just click the plus button and add a place and then Cortana will come to understand that place as well. So the point is, the user is in control of his or her relationship with Cortana.

Now, back on Cortana’s home, you might be wondering, well, where do these suggestions and things show up? You might notice down here on the very bottom, Cortana is prompting me with information that’s — wow, look at that — Microsoft is announcing Windows Phone 8.1? Here’s a photo. Obviously, that’s something I’m interested in, and you can see her in action right there.

Here’s news and information about Xbox One. Health news, sports news, the weather. And here’s a good one. Cortana is asking would I like for her to track Alaska flight 26 from Seattle to Chicago.

Now, let me explain how she knew to ask me that. I’ve given Cortana permission to read all of the email I have on my phone. That’s on my phone, Cortana on my phone. I’ve authorized her to scan email and recognize things that she might be able to helpfully track for me in the service.

This is not the service knowing, it’s the phone. And so Cortana has recognized a flight itinerary in my email. And now she’s asking, “Should I track it?” And I’ll say, “Yes.” And voila, now the service becomes aware of it, and Cortana can prompt me when it’s time for me to physically leave and get to the airport wherever I am. She can notify me proactively if my flight is canceled or the time changes and so on.

And that gives you a good sense of the way that Cortana on the phone gets to know you, with your permission. It goes in the notebook, and then the service can be helpful proactively.

So that gives you a sense of all the things that Cortana will do for you proactively. Now, I know a lot of you are wondering, is this guy ever going to get around to showing me how I interact with Cortana? Well, yes, thank you for bearing with me. I wanted to really give you a sense of what she’s about.

So let me actually get her to do some stuff for me. So here I am in Cortana. The first thing, of course, that you’d expect is that she can help me with my calendar and being organized like a real personal assistant.

Wake me up at 7 a.m. tomorrow.

CORTANA: Okay, your alarm is set for 7 a.m.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Yeah, simple, of course you’d expect that. She’s not only good at alarms, but she’s good with your calendar too.

So imagine a real-world personal assistant, the kinds of things you might say to be organized. What’s on my calendar for Saturday?

CORTANA: I’m finding three events Saturday. At 10 a.m., Alex’s soccer practice at soccer field. At 11 a.m., soccer game. And read all books from “Game of Thrones” before premiere all day.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

You’ve got to be ready, right?

So in this case, I just asked her a question and she responds. And she’s really good at telling me stuff on my calendar because that’s what you would expect a personal assistant to do. And she can schedule things too.

Now, imagine you’re in the dentist appointment at the desk and they want you to set up an appointment. Well, you can do this really easily. Put dentist appointment on my calendar for August 1st at 10 a.m.

CORTANA: All right. I’ll add dentist appointment to your calendar for Friday, August 1st, at 10 a.m., sound good?

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Yep.

CORTANA: All right. I’ve added it. Just so you know, you have pick up Christina from airport at the same time.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Well, that’s what you’d expect from a personal assistant, if there’s a conflict, you want them to tell you. In fact, I could say to Cortana, “Please move that appointment.” And so on. And she can handle all those sorts of tasks.

So that gives you a sense of how she can help you be organized and get things done.

Well, as I said, she’s powered by Bing and knows the entire Internet, so she’s pretty good at searches and questions and those kinds of things.

So here I am in San Francisco. I’m hoping to meet up with my family a little bit later, and I’m going to get a big group of people, let’s say, and go out down in Palo Alto. So this is the perfect kind of thing that Cortana can help me with.

Show me the best Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto.

CORTANA: Here are 10 Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto that are four stars.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Now, here’s what’s going on. Of course Cortana powered by Bing knows a lot about the Internet, but remember, Bing has relationships with lots of other great data feeds. So in this case, Yelp data helps Cortana identify four-star restaurants, and that’s what she’s showing me here.

Now, because that data is present and because Cortana is sufficiently smart, I can narrow my query in a really natural kind of way.

I’m going to have a big group of people, so I want to make reservations. Which ones take reservations?

CORTANA: Here are the ones that are four stars and take reservations.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

You notice, she knew what I was already talking about. Now, let’s get a vote from the audience. I know some of you will know these places. Who thinks we should go to Milagros? Come on. Milagros? No one, Okay, I’ve been warned off. Cascal? All right, Okay, thank you. The wisdom of the crowd in action here.

So now of course I want her to help me complete the task by getting a reservation. Call the second one.

CORTANA: Sure thing. Who would you like to call?

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Oh, well, there you go, our first little demo bug with my nervous voice. Generally, Cortana is quite good at recognizing in lists of places like that if I say call, she’ll call, the phone call happens automatically.

So sorry about that. Actually, that’s a good segue to mention that as you notice in the upper right, we’re launching Cortana as a beta because we’re training the service on the back end with lots and lots of voice utterances to improve its speech recognition as things go on. And later on, we’ll remove the beta tag as we expand from the United States to the UK and China and then, following that, to other countries. So it’s not that surprising that the service has a couple of glitches now. You’ll all get a chance to play with it later.

Now, there are a whole bunch of other questions that I can ask Cortana. How did the Seattle Mariners do yesterday?

Oh, it got a — I’m going to try that one again. How did the Seattle Mariners do yesterday?

CORTANA: On Tuesday, the Seattle Mariners defeated the Los Angeles Angels.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

You see that? That’s the “undefeated” Seattle Mariners there at 2-0.

Cortana is, right now, the service is in the process of learning a ton about sports and being good at answering sports questions. So I was out with a bunch of people and we were talking about a particular sports topic and this particular question came up, oh, and here was a perfect scenario for Cortana and one that I know a lot of you here in the audience will care about.

How old is Russell Wilson?

CORTANA: Russell Wilson is 25 years old.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

She has to think. 25. You know, for you 9’ers fans, I’m sorry, that means he’ll be with us in Seattle for a long time. So we’re all happy about that, we’ll see how that goes.

Cortana is good at answering questions about the world. And as I said, as a beta, we’re making the service smarter and smarter and smarter. And sometimes she can help me with tasks that are related to my questions.

So let’s say I’m out eating and I’m trying to track my calorie intake, watch my diet. How many calories in a banana?

CORTANA: There are 105 calories in a serving of banana.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Okay, so she answers the question. And what’s even more interesting, if you look down here, I can see more nutritional info, or I can add this to my diet tracker. And Bing will keep track of this. Part of Bing on the Web, but also the Bing Health & Fitness app gets this data as a means of Cortana being extended to apps. And then when I use that app, the banana is then added and I can keep track of those calories. It’s an easy way to interact with Cortana by asking a question and then get the data in another app.

So more questions. What’s the weather in Las Vegas?

CORTANA: It’s currently 51 and cloudy in Las Vegas.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Okay. Straightforward. Straightforward. I know some of you might be confused by that. How about in Celsius? For the Canadians.

CORTANA: Here’s that temperature in Celsius.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

OK, I know some of you are still confused, I’m sorry. I have one for the rest of you, and I want to hear whether this is what you were really looking for. How about in Kelvin?

CORTANA: I converted that temperature to Celsius.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

No, that’s not what I want. I’m going to do that again. How about in Kelvin?

CORTANA: I converted that temperature to Celsius.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

No! You know, the vagaries of a service that’s alive and up and down. You should try this yourself when you get these bits, because Cortana is smart enough to tell you the answer in Kelvin.

You know, we’ve tried to make her smart and sometimes you think about the things that she might know, and just how deeply can she reach into the Internet to figure things out for you. And it’s been fun to track in the limited use we’ve had at Microsoft to see the things that people are asking and tune the service and make it better.

One of the things I know you all will be really interested in: What’s the story of the next “Halo” game?

CORTANA: I’m quite certain you don’t have the proper security clearance for that information.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

It is Cortana, after all. I mean, I thought I’d give it a shot. But you never know.

Now, what you’ve seen me doing here is using the speech recognition capabilities to have a really natural conversation with Cortana.

But there are lots of times that you expect and need not only your search function, but you’d like your personal assistant to be able to work in situations where it doesn’t make sense for you to talk to her.

So Cortana works with typing as well. So I’m going to go here, press the search button, and I’m going to do some typed queries. So the first one — and if you think about searches, sometimes you want to search the Web, and sometimes you want to search on your phone, which is new in Windows Phone 8.1.

So I’ll say “email from Terry.” I’ll type that. And now Cortana recognizes that I’m probably looking for stuff on my phone. She doesn’t make any audio audible noise, and here you can see the emails on my phone from Terry.

So search of local content on the phone is now supported, and you can see how Cortana handles that in a very natural way.

Another example you might be wondering, well, can I type complex requests to Cortana? Or do I have to speak them? Yes, you can type anything. So as a personal assistant, one of the things that she’s also good at is reminders. So I’ll type in here, “remind me when I get home to cook dinner for my wife.” So remind me when I get home to cook dinner for my wife, probably more realistically, cook dinner for my kids.

I’ll type it in. When should she remind me? Okay, here, again, ordinarily she would recognize when I get home and you would see right there, “home.” You get the idea, I can type these things, generally she recognizes places, fills it in, and makes it super easy even when I’m not talking.

Now, one of the other things that we’ve added into Cortana that is something we heard these personal assistants talk about a lot is the degree to which they help their clients with relationships with other people.

You know, the personal assistants knew that you had a meeting with so and so, and they knew that the person got promoted or was bummed out about something. And so a real-world personal assistant helps you with those relationships. We thought, well, that’s a perfect thing for Cortana to do as well. In fact, it’s something that other digital assistants don’t do.

So I want to show you a kind of reminder that only Cortana can do, and these are people reminders. So I’m going to keep myself out of trouble with my sister by remembering to talk to her about her new addition to her family. Next time I speak with my sister, remind me to ask her about her new puppy.

CORTANA: All right. Next time you talk to Nancy, I can remind you to ask her about her new puppy. Sound good?

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Yep.

CORTANA: Great.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Now, of course since this is a phone, I might talk to my sister on the phone, or I might have a chat string with her, I might have an email conversation. And in all those cases, Cortana will now remind me when I’m in the context of talking to my sister to talk to her about her new puppy. And of course that will make my sister feel much better about me as her brother.

Okay. I showed you a little earlier that as we’re building up Cortana, we are making her smarter and smarter on the service back end. But we’re also inviting you all to participate with that as well.

And when people start talking to their phone in natural language, we want to be able to use the natural language capabilities in the cloud to make your apps work better.

So if a user addresses an app by name and then says some text, we’re going to parse that and get it to you so that good things happen. Let me show you some examples.

Skype, get David Treadwell.

CORTANA: Starting Skype.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

This is a new version of Skype that we’re updating for Windows Phone 8.1 and you can see here, Skype has recognized David Treadwell, and he’s coming online here in the contact that I have set. I’m not going to actually make the call here on stage, you get the general idea.

There are lots of other things that we’re working on right now. And we invite you all to participate as well.

Let’s say I’m at a party and I’m out and someone says, “Have you seen the new show, in this case, ‘Deadbeats’?” The new show on Hulu. Oh, Joe, you should watch that. I don’t want to have to navigate around and find stuff. I want to really get to my apps quickly. So I can now do that via talking to Cortana.

Hulu, add “Deadbeats” to my queue.

CORTANA: Opening Hulu Plus.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

And so the app runs, the service recognizes the data.

CORTANA: All right, adding “Deadbeats” to queue.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

There it is. “Deadbeats” has been added to my queue using natural language and making that really convenient.

Okay, I’ve got one more third-party app example I want to show you. We’ve been collaborating with one of our really good partners to light up Facebook.

Facebook, what’s up with Terry Myerson?

CORTANA: Starting Facebook.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

So of course the app will launch, the text is parsed in the cloud, it found Terry Myerson, and here I am looking at Terry Myerson’s news feed. So it’s very quick and easy for me to pan in — What? It’s so on. Okay. Who wants to see what Terry has posted about on Facebook? Yes? Yes? All right, let’s do it.

(Video Presentation: Terry Myerson Facebook)

Yeah. That sounds like something Terry would post to his Facebook timeline for sure. I wonder what Cortana thinks about that. Do you like Jimmy Fallon?

CORTANA: Thank you note to Jimmy Fallon. Thanks for my TV debut on your show, love Cortana.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Excellent. Well, we certainly think that that’s a great way for Cortana’s career to launch. You get a sense of what she’s about. From our point of view, Cortana is the first truly personal digital assistant who learns about me and the things that matter most and the people that matter most. She understands the entire Internet, and she’s great at helping me get things done, whether it’s by typing or talking.

So now I’m going to change gears and talk about a whole different part of the Windows Phone 8.1 and a bunch of work we’ve done to light up an audience that we love, and which I know a lot of you will love, and that is businesses.

So to help go through all the ways that Windows Phone 8.1 is now killer for businesses, I’m going to invite Nick Hedderman on stage. So, Nick, come on out.

Nick first started working — Nick is a great expert to have do this because he first started working with enterprise customers back in Windows Mobile 5, and I’m going to let him take you through a bunch of the work we’ve done for business and then I’ll be back.

Nick Hedderman – Senior Product Manager of Windows

Well, thank you very much, Joe. And good morning, everybody.

With the best productivity tools built right in like Office, and a platform that’s built on the secure NT kernel, Windows Phone has always been the right choice for business.

But now with Windows Phone 8.1, we’re taking it to another level. We’re respecting existing IT investments, and we’re working with a number of partners to support this new release. In fact, you can see just a few of them here on the slides on the screen.

What’s also great about Windows Phone is consumers can choose a device that suits their price point, design, screen size and the color. And two very important things once they’ve chosen the phone. First of all, they all come with that beautiful, consistent experience that Joe has been showing you so far. And secondly, they can be secured and managed in exactly the same way.

Now, I’m going to show you some of these new capabilities here on this phone I’ve got plugged in.

Now, we’re trying to recruit Joe for a new role at Microsoft. It’s a top-secret role, and it’s a thing that’s very, very close to his heart, and that’s keynote T-shirt design. You’ll, notice he had a pretty cool one on there, and he typically always wears a great one when he comes out to talk to you guys.

Now, this is Joe’s phone. It’s a beautiful Nokia Lumia Icon. He bought it from a retail store. And, in fact, he started using it for a few days before I took it off him.

And then I asked for his username and password. We enrolled this device into his new role that we’re trying to recruit him for. I want to show you some of the changes that have happened. Once we enrolled that device, it pushed down all of the corporate information. His email, applications, policies, settings and many, many more things.

Now, the first thing I want to show you is the fact we now support enterprise VPN in Windows Phone 8.1.

So I’m just loading up here an internal site that we’re connected to. Here it is. And I’m just going to go into – this is actually a real Microsoft website. And you can see there, this is on Joe’s phone, we’re behind the firewall, we’re browsing the Web. And if I just swipe down from the top here, you’ll notice that I’ve actually pinned VPN to my quick action settings there, and you can see the little padlock is flashing away as it’s going out there. It’s going in to connect up to VPN. And in a second, what you’ll see here is that it’s going to be connected. So that’s just one of the first things that we’ve done in Windows Phone 8.1.

The second is we now support S/MIME. So that allows users to read encrypted emails on their device and they can also encrypt and sign emails when they send them from their phone.

So I’m just going to go into — there we go, the VPN is connected there, just so you can see it.

I’m just going to go into Joe’s email here. And what you’ll notice, here’s a mail from Justin. And because of that little certificate symbol showing up at the top there, you can see it’s a signed message.

Now, what’s also great about Windows Phone is that when Joe or any user goes to send a new message from their phone, they can decide whether they want to encrypt or sign that message.

So, for example, if Joe was just sending an email to his wife or his family or his friends, he could just send it in the normal way. Or if he was sending something very confidential internally, he could choose to use S/MIME, so it gives the user choice.

Now, I want to move on and talk about some of the MDM capabilities that we’re bringing in this release. The first thing I want to do is show you a T-shirt design here from our head designer. This is a new designer that Joe’s going to be working with in this role if we get him to do it. Here’s a beautiful new Cortana design. Looks pretty cool.

Now, if Joe went to try and save that email to his device, I’m sorry, Joe, we don’t trust you with that information. You can see there, the save option is completely grayed out. That’s because the MDM policy is telling him that he can’t have local copies here on his phone.

Now, I also know that Joe loves to play “Wordament.” I saw him playing it just last night. And, in fact, he had “Wordament” installed on this device before we enrolled it. But what you’ll notice now is, unfortunately, we’ve put it on the deny list. So now the application can’t be used on that device. We want him concentrating just on work and not having fun. Sorry, Joe, that app’s been disabled.

So let’s get Joe back out on stage and see what he thinks about all of these new capabilities, and specifically, this new role we’re trying to recruit him for. What do you think, Joe?

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

I love the phone, but no “Wordament”?

Nick Hedderman – Senior Product Manager of Windows

No “Wordament.”

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

“Wordament”! Do you folks play “Wordament”? I’m still going for the elusive 16-letter word achievement. I don’t think I could do this. I love the T-shirt. I can’t do this without “Wordament.” Can you put it back the way it was?

Nick Hedderman – Senior Product Manager of Windows

You don’t want to do the role?

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

I’ll work on T-shirt design without the role.

Nick Hedderman – Senior Product Manager of Windows

All right. So the good news is that we can return this phone to its original state. We can do that remotely from the IT management console. But in this case, I’m just going to go into settings and do it manually here on the phone.

So I’m going to go into workplace. This is where we originally enrolled the device. You can see the relationship we have here. I’m going to delete that relationship. And then when I go back to my start screen, what you’ll see is all those corporate applications have now been removed. The email, the corporate apps, that connection to VPN, and all the documents that were previously saved in Office. So that’s now a device that’s back. And good news, if we load “Wordament,” it’s ready to go.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

All right.

Nick Hedderman – Senior Product Manager of Windows

So, in summary, we’ve added a host of new capabilities. I showed you just a few there, and we’ve got many, many more. Our partner ecosystem is expanding. We showed you just some of those new partners a second ago. And that beautiful, consistent, Windows Phone experience comes to life across an entire portfolio of devices. That’s why we believe Windows Phone is the right choice for business. Thanks, Joe.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Thanks very much.

All right, so the next set of things I want to talk about is a range of new features we’ve added to Windows Phone 8.1 just to delight users across the broad experience. And I don’t have time to show you all of these, but I’m going to give you a quick sampling of features we’ve put in just to make you smile.

And I’m going to start with one that we think will make all of you smile, which is enhancements we’ve made to the store experience in Windows Phone 8.1. We want end users to be happier finding apps, and we want all of you to be way happier downloading more and more apps and getting more app engagement.

So the first thing you see when I open the store, it’s all about apps. And, in fact, it lands on a new page that’s about featured apps, which we can program its visual appearance from the service. We can change these groups, we can change the size of the tiles. So if there’s a big launch, boom, an app gets a huge tile and the user will be massively invited to engage with it.

When I pan left, we’ve learned in our telemetry that promoting personalized suggestions works great for getting users to download apps. So we put the “for you” area just off to the left of the featured area.

And of course we have our categories, which are now the same as on Windows Phone. And then a number of quick links because we found these are the sorts of things, the lists, that users like to go down and load up their phones with. Things like new and rising apps when they’re looking for something fun to get, top paid apps, top paid games and so on.

So we’re excited that this store experience will get more engagement for you and get more users running apps.

Now, the next new delighter I want to talk about is, again, an app that has great benefit for end users, but is relevant to all of you as an audience, and that is our new calendar.

So I’m going to open up the calendar here. And you’ll see, here’s the calendar view. Looks a lot like what you’re used to in Windows Phone 8. You might notice up in the upper right there, I’ve now got the weather. But one thing that we changed in response to user feedback was enabling people to just swipe to the right to get to the next day. So I can go from today to tomorrow and so on. Very simple and straightforward.

Another thing that users asked for was some other views. In fact, people with fewer appointments on their calendar than I have really tend to like a week view because it gives you an at-a-glance way to see any particular day and how busy it is.

So if I touch on a particular day, then I have a way to jump in here and do that. You get the idea.

Now, the feature for you developers is that this new version of calendar, we have reimplemented using the public third-party developer API only. And that means that we’ve been testing out the new platform, improving performance in list scrolling, making it really smooth, and so this nicely tuned experience that you see is one that’s helped us get the platform ready so when you update your app, they have amazing performance as well. So that’s the calendar.

Now, the next thing I want to talk about is a few places that we’ve done a lot of work to improve the basic performance of Windows Phone. And you’re familiar right here on my start screen, I’ve pinned three of these, with Storage Sense, Data Sense and Battery Saver. And all of these have been enhanced.

But what I want to show you is a new Sense application that we’ve added for the phone called Wi-Fi Sense.

So to do that, I’m going to go into the settings here and choose Wi-Fi. And you’ll see there’s a huge, massive number of Wi-Fi networks that are set up here for the Build Conference.

I’ll scroll past all of those. And I’m going to open Wi-Fi Sense. What Wi-Fi Sense is about is helping users take great advantage of Wi-Fi networks. So there’s a service that we run that learns about the good Wi-Fi networks, and it will suggest great ones in your area.

And up here at the top, you’ll see it’s got this connect to Wi-Fi hotspot area that I’ve enabled. And what that does is asks Wi-Fi Sense to automatically connect me to free Wi-Fi hotspots when I’m in range.

And you can see here, Wi-Fi Sense, if I give it permission, will automatically accept the terms of use on these websites in the kind of portal page that you get, and I can even provide a name, email address and so on. So portals that require me to put in information get the information I provide and automatically sign me into Wi-Fi without me needing to do anything.

Now, with Wi-Fi Sense, we didn’t stop at free public networks, there’s a whole another scenario where getting people to Wi-Fi can be improved.

Think about this, you have your own home Wi-Fi network. You have prudently protected it with a password. But whenever your friends come over, they want to get on your Wi-Fi network and they say, “What’s your Wi-Fi password?” And then you tell them the password and they know your password, they sign in, and then they can get to anything on your network.

Well, we made Wi-Fi Sense take advantage of Windows Phone’s personal nature, the fact that we understand your Facebook friends, your Outlook contacts, and so on to give you a way at your choice to securely share your own Wi-Fi passwords with your friends in a way that’s automatic.

So if I turn this on, when my friends come over to my house, the Wi-Fi Sense service gives them a secure way to sign into my Wi-Fi hotspot without giving access to all the resources on my network, only to the Internet connection, and now I don’t have to verbally tell them the password.

This helps everyone take advantage of Wi-Fi networks wherever they are, and makes Wi-Fi way more automatic. So that’s Wi-Fi Sense. Thank you.

Each of these other experiences, Storage Sense, Battery Saver, Data Sense, they’ve all improved in a bunch of ways which we’ll explain in the blog. (phone rings.)

Okay, let’s see here, my sister is calling. Let me just take this. The timing is not great, but it’s not terrible. Okay, hang on, I’m in front of a bunch of people, just bear with me.

You see here, the first thing that you notice when my sister calls is there’s Cortana reminding me to ask her about her new puppy. Great. I’m not going to get in trouble. Thank you.

And there’s a second thing that I want to point out here that’s new in Windows Phone 8.1. We wanted to make it really easy and natural for people to take one form of communication like a phone call and go to a different form of communication like, let’s say, a video call.

So you notice right there in the middle of the screen is a Skype button. The new version of Skype is not only enhanced to work with Cortana, but also gives me a way to elevate from an ordinary phone call to a video phone call just by pushing that button.

And we do that in a smart way, keeping the phone call connected as long as possible while getting Skype up and running to get you to your video call.

And that mechanism works not just for Skype, but also for the RCS apps that mobile operators are writing and deploying around the world, so there’s an easy and natural way to take a phone call and go to a video call.

Your new puppy is beautiful. I got to go.

Okay. So that gives you a quick look at Skype, phone calling, and how we’ve enhanced that. And I have one last delighter feature that I want to take you through. And trust me, go read the blog. There’s a bunch more of these things. Play with the build, you’ll find more.

And this is actually, probably — and I hate to choose favorites, but this is really my other favorite feature in Windows Phone 8.1. And once you get used to it and you go back to an older version, you just can’t believe that you lived without this. And that is the enhancements that we’ve made to the Word Flow keyboard. The Word Flow keyboard is already a terrific keyboard on Windows Phone 8. It learns the things that you type and it knows about the people you care about.

And in Windows Phone 8.1, it’s way better. In fact, the thing that really has made it magical is our addition of shape writing, which is now built in for free. And now I’m going to do the riskiest part of my demo. You thought talking to Cortana was risky. This is terrible. I have sweaty hands, and now I’m going to type as fast as I can. You ready?

Being on stage at Build is simultaneously — whew! Not IV, but oh, come on — on. Being on stage at Build is simultaneously — Okay, that worked — delightful and horrifying. Whew! Of course — and I need all caps for this — I love, with a heart, developers. But occasional cynical techies can be intimidating. Whew! There’s the Word Flow keyboard in action. And now I can wipe off my sweaty hands because that part of the demo is over.

So you saw me do this here. And trust me, actually when I’m feeling natural about it, I can do it even faster. My thumb is like pressing into the glass here. And so I don’t want you to just take my word for it. In fact, as a proof point, I have a video I want to run because we thought our keyboard was so good that we should go for the Guinness Book of World Records world record. So let’s run the video and see Windows Phone 8.1 trying to beat out the Samsung Galaxy S4 previous record holder, going for the world’s fastest typing on a smartphone.

Now, that guy is not nervous on stage. There is an official sentence that you have to type. The Guinness Book of World Records people have an official one. So we had to type that one. This is actually with a beta, not final version here. And that complex sentence was typed in 17 seconds. And you’ll see in a second they’re going to zoom in here and — yeah, come on, let us see — oh, I think first they zoom out.

Trust me. Windows Phone Word Flow keyboard is now the world record holder for fastest typing on a smartphone. And this is something you all should try yourselves.

All right. So the last thing I want to cover on Windows Phone 8.1 is how Windows Phone 8.1 works with Windows in a lot of amazing ways.

And of course you know that we’ve been doing that for a while. Today on Windows Phone, if you take a picture with your camera, we auto-upload the photo to OneDrive and then if you switch to your PC or tablet, it’s instantly available for you to browse.

On your PC or tablet, if you create a presentation in PowerPoint and save to OneDrive, it’ll immediately be available on your phone where you can view and edit it. So we already do lots of these things. But in Windows Phone 8.1, we did a bunch more. And in particular, we focused on settings.

So, for example, if you connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot on your PC and typed in a Wi-Fi password, well, now with Wi-Fi Sense, that password is immediately and automatically shared to your phone. You don’t need to type it in again.

And there are a whole lot of these kinds of settings like your theme color and so on.

And one of the experiences that’s benefited from that that’s also connected between Windows and Windows Phone is IE 11, which is now part of Windows Phone 8.1, and that also adds a bunch of great new features like in-private browsing now on the phone, and there’s a terrific new reading mode that you need to try out that makes it super easy to read sites when they’re complex or have small fonts. It’s a terrific new browsing experience as well.

So that’s Windows Phone 8.1. And from our point of view, we’re taking the world’s most personal smartphone experience and making it way better with more customization options, with Cortana, the only personal digital assistant on a smartphone. A lot of enterprise features, and many, many delighters, including ways that Windows Phone connects with your Windows PC.

Now, I know a lot of you are going to be wondering when will people get this? Well, Windows Phone 8.1 is going to start rolling out to consumers as an update in the next few months. We’re finishing up our software, and then we work with the hardware vendors to match it with the software that they ship. Then mobile operators get a look at that, and then we roll that out on each phone model as it’s ready. So look for that in a few months.

You’ll also see Windows Phone 8.1 available on brand-new phones starting as soon as very late April or early May, and you’ll hear a little bit more about that later.

And for all of you developers, I’m not going to tell you now, you’ve got to wait until David Treadwell’s on stage, and you’ll hear what we have for you.

So now I’m going to change gears and talk to you about Windows 8.1. This is the second operating system update we have to talk about today. And at Mobile World Congress, I explained that Windows 8.1 is enhanced to work great on lower-cost devices with just 1 gig of memory and 16 gig of storage.

We’ve also improved its enterprise support, in particular through a new enterprise mode feature in IE 11, which I’m going to show you, and we focused on making it smoother and easier to use for people with mouse and keyboard focus.

And whether you have a touch screen or not, if you’re heavily using a mouse and keyboard, we wanted to make Windows 8.1 easier to learn and easier to use.

So today I’m going to show you the Windows 8.1 Update for the first time.

So let’s come over here and switch to the PC. I don’t know if you folks have that on there. You’ll notice I’m on my desktop because I’m on a PC here, which although it does have a touch screen, I’m going to focus on my usage with mouse and keyboard.

So I’m on the desktop and one of the new things we’ve done is enable the PC to boot or resume straight to the desktop. And what I’m going to do here is run IE. So I’ve run IE, I’ve opened Bing, oh, you notice on Bing here down at the bottom there are a few things that look pretty familiar as the interests I’ve told Cortana about. Because, in fact, Cortana on the phone and Bing in the cloud share a knowledge of my interests because I’m signed in right there. So that makes Bing a little bit more handy.

What I’m actually going to do, instead of focusing on this, that was a little non sequitur, I want to show you how IE 11 has been updated to help enterprises deal with legacy sites on their corporate intranet.

So I’m going to go here to this Contoso corporate travel site. This is a site that the Contoso company has put on their corporate intranet years ago when they targeted IE8. IE8, a very popular browser, and you see the site’s kind of confused. It thinks I’m using an older version of IE. It’s asking me to update to IE8. Oh, no, that’s not what I want.

And so what we’ve done with an enterprise mode in IE 11, which I’m going to switch to right here so you can see the difference, is change the user agent string, change the way ActiveX controls are invoked, re-enable some features that we had previously degraded and disabled, so these legacy sites will work great.

So you see when I switch to enterprise mode, voila, Contoso Travel now works.

And the way I showed that to you in this manual way is not the way we expect IT managers to really handle this. IT managers are able to set a list of sites on their corporate networks that should automatically go into enterprise mode, and therefore, end users will get the right rendering approach for the old sites and the most modern rendering approach for sites out on the Internet in a totally seamless way.

And this is great because it makes it much more plausible for enterprises to be deploying this on their new PCs, because they get to keep their site compatibility.

Now, the next thing I want to talk about is a bunch of UI improvements we’ve made to the mouse and keyboard experience of Windows. And I mentioned already that I can boot straight to the desktop or resume to the desktop, but now I want to talk about one of the most-used areas of computing real estate in the universe, and that is the Windows task bar.

If you are a Windows user that’s been a Windows user for a long time, you probably have a deep and intimate relationship with the task bar. It’s the way you think about switching between apps or launching apps. And we’ve enhanced it significantly in this update to work with new Windows Store apps.

So you’ll see down here, I have a few apps that are Win32 apps, and then over here, I have a bunch of task bar buttons for apps that are store apps.

So here is the Facebook app. And you’ll notice, when I open it up, right up here at the top, we show the title bar because Windows users that have a mouse and keyboard are incredibly accustomed to coming up here to choose minimize, and that now works in a modern app.

I’ll switch back here to Facebook again. And you’ll notice the task bar was displayed on the bottom as well. So if I move down here to the bottom of the screen, the task bar will pop up, and I can use that to switch between modern apps, there’s mail, there’s Facebook, or I can switch back to a Win32 app like IE, the desktop is brought up. I no longer have to think about a different switching model for apps whether they are Win32 desktop apps or modern.

And I want you to keep in mind that the work that we’ve done to make touch great is unaffected by these changes. If I were holding a tablet in my hand, being able to swipe in from the left and do task switching is convenient and natural. And that’s still present, but it’s no longer required for my mouse and keyboard use.

Now, similarly, if I’m using a tablet when I swipe in from the right with my thumb, it’s handy to have the start button and settings and search right there, but that was something that we wanted to fix for mouse and keyboard users as well.

So let’s take a look at the start screen. When I go to the start screen, you’ll notice we’ve made a few changes here to make it easy for mouse and keyboard users to get to those functions.

So right here, we’ve put a PC settings tile in because Windows 7 users expect to find settings or control panel on start. Up here, we’ve added a power button and a search button. So those functions which previously hung off your right thumb are now easy to find on start.

The second thing we’ve tried to do is not just make it compatible so it’s easy to learn, but get all of the new value, Live Tiles, and a customizable start screen to be more familiar for Windows mouse and keyboard users. So we implemented a right-click context menu that pops up in a familiar way, a way that all mouse users have grown to love, and it makes it easy for me to do things like resize a tile into its large or small size, and so on.

Even beyond that, there are power user commands that Windows users are familiar with, like holding down the control key and selecting a bunch of app tiles. And then when I do that, I can grab them all and drag them around together. I’ll move these tiles all to here, and you can see that set of three all moved. Or I can choose a set and change them all to small tiles. So I have a powerful and quick way to interact with the start screen via the mouse.

Okay. Now, the last thing I want to show are ways that we’ve improved Windows 8.1 via this update to help users find your apps.

So I’m going to come back to the desktop, and I want to point out here, you might have noticed — and this is on all PCs that get the Windows 8.1 Update — we are pre-pinning the Windows Store to the task bar so that desktop mouse and keyboard users will find the store much more discoverable, it’s right there, it’s always available, and in fact, I also want to show you that — this is a store update that will be coming a little later. We’re improving the store UI to be really mouse and keyboard-friendly. And instead of some of these functions being off-screen, handy if you have a touch tablet, but not so discoverable on a PC with no touch screen. Now it will be much easier for people to discover these categories, find recommended apps, so on and so on.

So the store update, as well, is going to become mouse and keyboard-friendly. And that’s something we’d like all of you to do with your apps. And we’re going to be providing samples for you and doing right-click menus and the kinds of things that make your UI discoverable and on screen for mouse and keyboard users.

So that’s the first change. The second change that we’ve done besides making the store really visible is when people are using their PC to do things like searches, we want your apps to be present. So here I am on the start. And I could click search, or I could just start typing. And if I start typing something like “pinball” you’ll see right here, we recognize there are apps in the store that match. We serve them up to the user. So finding an app and installing an app is incredibly easy. Right there at the top of search, I can just click here to jump to the store and install that.

And then the last thing is that we’ve seen some people get a little bit confused about where did the app go when I installed it? An installed app is no good if there’s not user engagement after the fact. So you see down here, just as in Windows 7, we added a prompt to show you where new apps are installed, and you see here that new apps are highlighted in the all apps list. And of course I can just right click on one and choose to pin it to my start screen or now pin it to my task bar. So whether I’m a desktop mouse and keyboard user or a tablet user focused on touch, I can find the apps I care about, I can make them accessible, and they work well in the modality that I care most about.

So that is a quick look at the Windows 8.1 Update. The Windows 8.1 Update will be available to all Windows 8 and 8.1 users via Windows Update starting April 8th, next Tuesday. And for you developers, yeah, you have to wait until David Treadwell comes on stage to hear what we have for you as well.

So that is my look at Windows Phone 8.1. One big, new operating system release from us, and the Windows 8.1 Update, a second that’s two in one. Thank you very much for listening. Have a terrific Build Conference, and especially thank you, Cortana. So long.

Cortana: Thanks, Joe. I like your T-shirt. Next up, David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group.

David Treadwell – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group

Hello, Build. Good morning. Well, that was a great look at what we’re doing in Windows and Windows Phone. Joe did some awesome demos, really a super job.

Well, I get to talk to you about what we’re doing for you as developers in our operating systems, our platforms, our tools.

First, let me take a moment to introduce myself. Dave Treadwell. I’ve worked at Microsoft for almost 25 years. During that whole time, I’ve always been involved in our developer technologies, our platform, our operating systems.

I started on the Windows NT group in the networking team. And I want to tell you a story that I’ve actually never told publicly before about one of my early projects.

My manager at the time, a fellow named Dave Thompson, assigned me to write the Windows sockets infrastructure for NT. And when he gave me this assignment, he gave me one criteria. He said, “Dave, whatever you do, don’t create a driver.” And the reason was totally legitimate. Drivers are complicated. They use more system resources. If you have a bug, they can crash the system. It’s tough to get a driver right.

So I went off and I worked to design this thing. And a couple weeks later, I kind of figured it out. But I concluded that, you guessed it, I actually needed a driver.

And we had a design review meeting with myself, and my boss Dave, and several other senior engineers. And we went over my proposed design for this. And the reason I needed a driver was that I needed socket handles to be native system handles. And the only way to achieve that at the time was with a driver.

So we had this meeting, two hours long, we’re trying to find some other way to get socket handles as native handles without a driver. But the conclusion of the meeting at the end of it was: Yes, in fact, we really do need a driver.

I’ll never forget this. Dave, my boss, he pounded his fist on the table and he said, “Gosh, darn it, another freaking driver.” Maybe not exactly those words, but that was the tone of it.

And I looked at him and I said, “Well, that’s cool, that’s what I’m going to call it.” Because it turns out that at that time in our build system, you couldn’t have a DLL and a driver with the same name. We needed winsock.dll for the DLL and I couldn’t use that for the driver.

So a couple days later, I checked in the beginnings of this new driver. And Dave came by my office and he said, “Hey, what’s this AFD thing you just checked in?” And I told him — remember, that’s the sockets driver, we talked about this. You need a driver for handles and all that. And he said, “Oh, that’s right, but why did you call it AFD?” I said, “Well, Dave, you named it, remember? Another Freaking Driver.”

And he kind of laughed and he said, “Well, that’s cute, but you actually need a real name for this thing.” And so I thought about it and I came back and I said, “Dave, I’ve got it.” Remember what the driver does? It provides additional functionality, it’s what we need for sockets. So we’re going to call it the Ancillary Function Driver. And he laughed and said, “That’s good, you can go with that.”

So to this day, on every single version of Windows, there’s a file called AFD.sys that is the driver for the winsock functionality. Check it out in Windows System 32 drivers, every Windows machine has that file, and now you know how it was named.

So I’m going to talk to you today about three main areas where we’re focused on listening to you as developers and helping you. First, we know that you need to reach your customers across multiple devices: PCs, phones and tablets. Windows will help you do that.

Second, we know that you’ve made huge investments in your apps and in your code, and you need to carry those investments forward. Windows will help you do that.

And third, we know that you need to deliver apps and services across multiple platforms. Yes, Windows will help you do that too.

Let’s start with how we’re helping you reach your customers across different devices. People work and they play across all kinds of computing devices. In a given day, I’ll use two or three different laptops. I have a desktop in my office at work. I’m on my phone all the time. I use a tablet for games at home.

My family does the same thing. My wife, she has a laptop. My kids, they have tablets. My older son, he has a phone. All of us want the same app experiences across all of our devices. I’m sure it’s the same with you and with your families.

Yet today, there’s no easy way to create apps that work across all form factors. Well, it’s my pleasure to introduce Universal Windows Apps.

With the Windows Phone 8.1 release, we’ve brought the new Windows runtime to phones. Now you can use common code to produce apps across phones, PCs and tablets.

Google and Apple, they have a different approach. They want you to create one app for phones and tablets, and a different app for laptops and desktops. We don’t see it that way. We’re excited to be the first in the industry to make it easy to build apps that reach customers across all the devices where they spend their computing minutes.

To enable Universal Windows Apps, we’ve streamlined every phase of the development cycle. With Windows, it’s simpler to design, to architect, to build, to debug and to deploy your app. Let’s talk about each of these in more detail, starting with the user interface.

When we looked at how to streamline the process of designing your apps, we found that some of you want to create one app that runs across all form factors. You want to adapt that user interface automatically. For example, here’s Paint for Kids, a popular Windows app that will be coming to Windows Phone with the 8.1 release as a Universal Windows App.

By using a grid you control that adapts automatically to screen sizes, by using pointer APIs that automatically take input from mouse, touch, ink — the developer is able to create an overall user interface and a single application that works great across form factors.

Next, we found that others of you want to tailor your experience to the form factor. You want to have a really optimized app for a phone and a really optimized app for the PC.

For example, here you see Epicurious, a popular cooking app on Windows that will be coming to phone also as a Universal Windows App. This developer chose to create different views that are highly optimized for each form factor, yet even so, the bulk of the code was the same across all the devices.

Now, let’s talk about the code, the app architecture, the programming languages, the APIs, the stuff that matters most to you as developers.

Universal Windows Apps are based on the Windows runtime on phone just like on PCs and tablets. This means that you have a common, familiar way to build and architect your apps. For example, how you handle things like suspend and resume, the security context and infrastructure, it’s the same across all the devices.

This also means that you can use the programming languages that you know well, the ones that you love, the ones most effective to your task for your Universal Windows Apps. If you love the power and control of C and C++, you can use it. If you love the productivity that C#, .NET, VB.NET enable, you can use those too. Or if you want the breadth of HTML, JavaScript, and the Web, yes, you can use those for Universal Windows Apps. Yeah, go ahead. Use the language you love.

This also means you have a common extensive API set for everything from handling low-level data types to higher-level concepts like the file system APIs, notification, the users, and more.

Of course, the best way to develop apps has always been Visual Studio. And now Visual Studio is streamlining development of Universal Windows Apps. VS makes it easy to share code across phone and PC apps, and it gives you the tools to debug and optimize them.

So I’d like to ask Kevin Gallo to come up and show you the vision we have for VS and Universal Windows Apps. Kevin?

Kevin Gallo – Director of Product Management

Thanks, Dave. So what I’m going to show you is an update to Visual Studio 2013 that allows you to build these universal apps. So let me launch Visual Studio here. And first I want to show you that if you are starting from scratch and you want to see the templates, it’s very easy. We have added a new node here under store apps for universal apps, and some simple templates to get you going from scratch.

But like you, typically, we’re not starting from scratch with an app. I have an app either on Windows or Windows Phone that I now want to take to the other platform and device form factor.

So I’m going to start with a Windows app. You could have started with a Windows Phone app. And then I’m going to make sure I add a device target for the other. So I’m going to go to one that I’ve already been working on here, which is a sports league fantasy app. You can see here I have it for Windows 8.1. And so I’m going to launch this, and just show you what the app looks like on Windows.

So as you can see here, I have a very simple, I have a hub control kind of as my main page here. And then my first little panel over here gives you some news. This will be like a table here where the people are and the points, as well as the teams, their rosters, and a schedule.

So let me go back to VS. And what I’m going to do is basically add the ability to have a Windows Phone 8.1 target.

So it’s very simple. I will just simply right click on the project here. And I say add Windows Phone 8.1. And so it’s going to tell me here in this dialog what it’s going to do. But I’ll just show you that.

So it’s going to create two nodes, one for the feature that is very specific, or code, assets that are specific to Windows Phone 8.1, as well as this new shared node. And this is really the significant addition here is you can now very easily mark what code and assets you want shared.

Since I built this application using the Windows runtime, I can share my entire app. So I’m going to drag this down here and move it all into the shared node.

So what’s this doing? It’s taking everything that was in my Windows 8.1 project, this includes my code, my localization files, my images, as well as my XAML, and moving it into the shared project because now it’s going to be shared. And I want to say, this is all of my code, including all of my XAML.

And the next thing I’ll do is, just like you, I have probably some third-party libraries that I’ve used here, and I’ve decided to use JSON.NET. So I need to tell it that I want to use that.

By default, we don’t assume you’re going to share. We’re going to make it so you select what you want shared, and move into the shared node. And so here I’m going to say I also want to share this third-party library. And so this reference is also here now in my Windows Phone project.

So as you can see, I’ve moved the entire app here, I have all my views. Again, by default, we don’t actually assume that your start page will be the same. But since I use the hub control and the hub control is a universal control, it can automatically lay out both for your phone and for your PC. So I don’t need this. So I’m going to delete these and say that I just want to use the default hub control that I had.

And let’s just rebuild it, make sure I didn’t screw anything up here, some typical warnings, and I’ll just ignore those, like most of you probably do as well. And we’ll kind of see if it runs, and then we’ll go back and figure out if they matter. Yeah, we all know we do it. Just admit it. Own up to it.

So we’ve made it very easy here to change the startup project. It was a little bit hard to do before, now it’s very easy. I do this drop down. I say I want to use Windows Phone Emulator here, and this will just launch my app. And let’s see what it looks like.

Again, this was a complete copy and share of all of my code. So as you can see here, the hub actually looks pretty good, I can pan around.

Now, if I look at the first page here, the news view, it doesn’t look that good. But the rest of it, really good. Looks really good. You know, it’s just a standard hub. This one kind of spins around here like our default UX on phone. So it’s a very, very nice app right out of the gate.

But you know what? I care about the quality of my app, and I want to tune this better. So not only can you by default get a great experience with all of the same code, you can go tune the UX to be better on the device and add some device-specific features.

So like I said here, these are my views. So I’m going to kind of choose three views that I’m going to tune specifically for the phone. The cover story, leaderboard and points here.

So how do I do that? First thing I do here is I drag my user controls back up here. So I’d shared it before and moved it down, I’m going to put it back and say, you know what, these three views are only going to be for my Windows Phone 8.1 project. My Windows project.

And here I’ve built a set of those views beforehand. And I’ll just drop these into my Windows Phone-specific node. So you can see here, I have different user controls for these three views, but everything else is shared.

So now let’s see this running. So now you can see what I did on here is I’ve just simplified the main page and I have a little icon down here that shows the newsfeed rather than having it there, and I’ve rearranged the layout.

I also tuned this a little bit here in my UX. You know, rather than having it big, I said let’s take advantage of a little bit of the density of the phone in this portrait view.

So then I also added one other view. And this is my points table. And so I can very easily here add that extra view. Well, it’s not working very well, wow. Dave, have you been messing with my code? Have you messed up my app? As usual, I have to go fix the bugs that Dave introduces.

So I will go back and, luckily, we’ve made some enhancements to our diagnostics center to help debug these types of issues.

So let me go there and say, you know, as you can see, there are a few more items here. First is we added a memory usage diagnostics tool, but I don’t think that glitch was really due to memory. I think that probably is due to CPU and maybe something wrong with my XAML.

And so I can run these now in parallel. Beforehand, you’d have to run them separately, but now you can run them in parallel and you can diagnose problems that maybe, you know, are a mix between the two and there’s some sort of interaction between your CPU and XAML.

But rather than run this here, which takes a little bit of time to run the diagnostics, I already have a log here that I’ll open up and show you.

So here we have our app startup and then, oh, wow, look, this looks like this is the problem right here. In my UI utilization, the frame rate drops through the floor, my CPU pegs, so let’s go look here and see what this might tell us.

Well, wow. You know, really there’s nothing in my XAML that is telling me it’s wrong, but wow, the CPU usage is high. So someone must have put something into the code here that just drove the CPU high. That caused that kind of glitch. So I can easily go diagnose, figure out where the problem was, and go fix that.

Now, once I’ve fixed that, I can then take this app and I can submit it to the Windows Phone Store. So I very easily was able to take that application and convert it to a universal app, do some tuning, and then submit it to the store.

One of the features that we’ve added here to make it easier to kind of look at your UI and manage it is what we call a context switcher.

So I’m going to load the designer here because clicking on this XAML here that’s in our shared project. As you can see, here’s my XAML and here’s a view for the phone. But I can very easily, using this drop-down, switch and look at it and what it looks like on Windows or tablet form factor. That’s a great feature, very easy to go do. And this is how you design universal controls, by building the multiple layouts for each of the different layouts that you want, and I could have tuned this right here.

So with that, I want to summarize that we’ve added two key features here with Visual Studio. There’s a whole host of them, but the two that I showed, one, you can build universal apps and you can easily share all of your code, or you can do some tuning to make the UX pop on the different form factors, as well as a bunch of different diagnostic tools to really help you make great apps, submit them to the store, and have high quality.

With that, I’ll hand it back to Dave, thanks.

David Treadwell – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group

Great job, Kevin, and sorry for messing up your code.

So that was a great overview of how Visual Studio makes it so easy to create Universal Windows Apps.

The last area I want to talk about is how we’ve streamlined the store experience around Universal Windows Apps. The Windows Store now features shared app identities. This is a concept where you can give your customers a common app experience across phones and PCs. For example, your customers can buy the apps one time and it works on both phone and PC. They don’t need to buy a different app for the phone and PC.

Likewise, your customers can now make durable, in-app purchases. If you’re writing a game, you can buy it on the phone, use it on the PC.

With shared app identities, you also get to share cloud storage and notification channel. And there’s a universal badge icon which makes it clear to customers that the application experience is the same across all the devices.

Shared app identities let you run your business the way you want to. If you want a common app experience, the same purchase experience across phone and PC, you can do that.

If for some reason you want a different purchase experience, you’re also enabled to do that with shared app identities. And there’s a host of other improvements that we’ve made in the ingestion and store process. For example, we’ve made submitting your apps to the phone store more than 50 times faster. We got a little feedback that we could do better there.

So now I’ve told you about how we’re enabling Universal Windows Apps and tuning the entire development cycle to help you build them. But I want to show you the real power of the platform. What’s the most powerful kind of app that we have built on the platform? What better example than opening up Cortana herself?

Hey, Cortana? Can you open yourself up in Visual Studio so we can take a look?

CORTANA: I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. What about Microsoft Office?

David Treadwell – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group

Nice dodge, Cortana. Great. With that I’d like to invite Kirk Koenigsbauer, VP of the Microsoft Office team, to show you what we’re doing with Office and Universal Windows Apps.

Kirk Koenigsbauer – VP, Microsoft Office

Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Sorry, I’m not Cortana. But I am from the Office team.

So what I want to do is giving you a look at some of the work we’re doing to build touch-first versions of Office for this modern Windows platform that, as Dave talked about, will scale from the smallest form factors, from phones, to tablets, to PCs up to the largest large-screen devices.

From a development perspective, the Windows runtime for us has proven to be a really great platform to build highly responsive, deep apps. So I want to give you a sense of what that looks like.

I’m going to show you PowerPoint. I’ll start there. This is a preview of our work in progress. We’ve still got some work to do before we ship these. But, hopefully, it’ll give you a good sense of the direction we’re taking and the direction of the power of the Windows modern platform.

So, again, just a preview. This is early user experience code, but one of the things that we wanted to do is to bring forward the experiences from Office on Win32 to the modern platform itself. What you’re looking at here is the early version of the backstage. The backstage is where you get all of your templates, you can navigate through those, of course your most recently used files. It roams with you from device to device to device. So we’re connecting to the service experience of Office 365 with the native client experiences here.

I’m going to go ahead and open up a file. Just go to the file picker. Pop open a document for us to look at, and we’ll work through this one here.

Now, as we built these new applications, we wanted to make sure that as customers move from Win32 to the modern version on Windows, that they would have an unmistakably Office experience. And a key part of that, of course, is the iconic ribbon for how commanding works and how people navigate through the applications.

So here you can see the ribbon at the top, and I can navigate through just using my finger, a great touch-first experience through all the commanding, really optimized and in the same hierarchical order, though, that people would expect on Win32. So there’s no learning curve as they come to these new applications.

The next thing that’s really important for every single Office customer is that every single one of their documents opens flawlessly on any version of Office. And so you’ll see that. We’ve taken the richness of the open XML file format, fully exposed here on these modern versions of Office.

And you can see as I go through there are things like smart art and text and graphics layered on top of each other. We’ve got, of course, pictures. We’ve got shapes wired up, tables and so forth. So you can see the full file fidelity of the Office experience is here.

The other thing that you’ll notice, and I’ll just tap through really quickly, is this is blazingly fast. And this is fast because we’ve built this application from the ground up on DirectX and we get really high-fidelity interop between the XAML layer and the custom DirectX code that we’ve built. And that’s what gives you this really snappy, blazingly fast experience.

Let’s go ahead and look at some of the editing surface that we’ve done, too. I’m going to just do some really simple things here showing you some of the touch-first experiences.

We’ve made the touch points on the ribbon really big and easy so you can just use your fingers, even big, fat fingers like I have, to go through. And I can just bold, italicize, underline.

I can bring up galleries. You’ll find that in these new, modern versions of Office that there are galleries for things like transition effects, charts, titles, colors, themes as you see them here. And so just using my finger, I can go ahead and pick the color scheme that I want to use.

I’ll go down a little bit. Let’s say I’ve got to finish up this very last slide that’s in this deck. And I can go ahead and maybe insert — you can see shapes, smart art, charts, pictures, tables. I’ll just drop a picture in here really quickly. And I can move it around. Again, you can see that great performance here. I’ll get it right where I want just using my finger. I can drag it here.

Let’s say I goof something up. Let’s say in the process of rotating it around or adjusting it, it’s not quite the way I want it to be. I can use the undo stack. We have multiple levels of undo. In fact, unlimited undo, unlimited redo. And a core reason for that is that we’re automatically saving all of the Office documents in this modern version of Office to the cloud, directly to OneDrive. And so that’s a great thing for customers, it’s a great thing for things like collaboration, it’s a great thing to have unlimited version history in these apps. You can applaud, it’s totally cool to do that.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at presentation mode. That is, of course, what people want to do when they work on their presentations. And you can see, I can just navigate through here using my finger. I can go through, swiping. You can see all the transition effects, the beautiful graphics, animations.

We’ve begun to wire up some of the gesturing capabilities. So, for example, I can pinch and zoom, and I can jump to any slide in the presentation no matter where I am. I’ll just go to this table you see here. That’s a really nice feature for presenters.

I can swipe down from the top. We’ve also worked with the Windows team to enable inking in the application. So I can pick a pen. This is preliminary UI here. I can use either a stylus for precision — this time, I’m just going to use my finger, and I can go ahead and circle things, highlight things. You get the idea.

Here I can drop down again. Pick a different pen if I want, exit out of the drawing mode, go back, pinch and zoom again, drop back to a particular slide I’ve got in the presentation. Really simple, collaboration on the go using this touch-first experience with Office.

Now, as Dave talked about, one of the most important things that we’re doing with these modern versions of Office is taking advantage of the Windows runtime to deliver these universal applications.

So what I’d like to do is ask the folks to put the phone experience up. And I want to show you this same application that I was just working on on the tablet. Same binary, same executable also works on the phone. So hopefully you guys can see that here.

I’ll go ahead and swipe. This is modern version of Office PowerPoint running on this Nokia phone. And I can swipe on the tablet, I can swipe here, back to the tablet. Again, you get this really consistent experience, full file fidelity across these two apps. So hopefully a really good example of the notion of universal Windows. I’ve got experiences for the phone, experiences for the tablet, PCs, large-screen devices — all single experience.

Thank you very much. Dave, back to you.

David Treadwell – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group

Kirk, that was awesome. I think one of the best parts of that demo is how it shows that Microsoft is bringing our most sophisticated, our richest, our most important applications to the Windows runtime as Universal Windows Apps. So we think this can handle all scale of applications.

Okay, the second theme I wanted to talk with you about today is how we’re adding innovations that support the investments that you’ve made in your code and your apps.

Based on your feedback, we’ve added hundreds of new features for Windows Phone 8.1. For example, new background triggers enable you to create apps that are always aware and can engage your customers in response to things like push notifications or geo fences.

Support for Bluetooth LE opens up new kinds of device scenarios like fitness, wearables, healthcare, home entertainment. We have new video-editing APIs that open up all sorts of new creativity and media scenarios for you and for your customers. And there are many, many more.

As we build these innovations, we’re working hard to have a technology continuum to give you a bridge from the code investments you have today to this feature.

Let me talk about what that means for those of you with existing Windows Phone apps first.

If you have a Silverlight Phone 8 app, it will, of course, continue to run on Windows Phone 8.1.

Next, if you want to take advantage of the new features that we’re adding to the platform, like the ones I just showed, you can easily update your app to be a Silverlight Phone 8.1 app. And third, if you not only want to take advantage of new functionality but also have your application run easily across devices as a Universal Windows App, you can migrate your app to a Universal Windows App.

We’re providing this technology continuum that lets you move forward and adopt the innovations at a pace that makes sense for you and for your business.

No matter which of these approaches you choose, I want to let you know that we’re committed to making sure your apps continue to run on future versions of Windows and Windows Phone.

Let me just show you one great example of how this works in practice. One of the platform innovations in Windows Phone 8.1 is bringing together voice commanding with the power of Cortana. You can now get an incredibly simple, yet amazingly flexible, system that enables whole new ways for customers to interact with your apps.

Voice command in Windows Phone 8.0 enable customers to invoke your app by its name, for example, Flixster. And they allow you to define a simple grammar, pre-existing phrases so that you can invoke specific commands like “Flixster, find moves near me.”

Well on Windows Phone 8.1, thanks to the power of Cortana, you no longer have to define grammars or long phrase lists. You can give Cortana’s speech recognition platform some hints, and she’ll do the hard work building and optimizing the grammars for you.

Everything Cortana knows about from everything in the dictionary, all the words in movies, musicians, all are now at your disposal. It’s like a natural command line for the future.

Let me show you one specific example. This demo is always fun, doing speech recognition demos in front of thousands of people on a massive PA system is often exciting.

This is a Twitter application where they’ve taken the advances that I just described to you on the Windows Phone platform and used that natural language processing to help me do a tweet.

Twitter, new tweet. Hello from Windows Phone 8.1, hashtag Cortana, hashtag awesome.

CORTANA: New tweet.

David Treadwell – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group

Well, we were close. I think we have a little more work to do on tuning the speech recognition engine for presentations in front of 5,000 people.

So I know that many of you in this audience have existing enterprise apps you’ve written using Win32 or .NET for the desktop. Well, we intend to provide you a great technology continuum for these apps and this code as well.

I’d like to show you just one of the things that we’re doing in the Windows 8.1 update to help you reuse more of your existing code.

Let me invite Harry Peirson on stage to show it off.

Harry Pierson – Operating Systems Group

Thanks, David. As you might imagine, we spend a lot of time talking to enterprises. And one thing we hear from them very consistently is this pressure they’re under to mobilize their workforce, to unchain their information workers from their desks and get them out to where the action is. Windows tablets are a great way to do that.

However, it turns out the typical enterprise has a significant investment in custom applications that they use to run their business. I know not everybody in this room does enterprise app development, but I’m sure you would all recognize a sort of canonical data access line-of-business application.

This is the order processing application for the Northwind Traders Company. Yes, I said Northwind. Older members of the Microsoft community will probably recognize that name. I figured that since we’re talking about leveraging existing code, I should leverage an existing sample database.

Now, the great thing about Windows tablets is that they run Windows. I can take this application — this is a C# Windows form, ADO, old school, data reader application sitting on top of SQL Compact. It’s sitting on top of SQL Compact because this is an application that the sales people use.

They go out and take orders from customers, and they don’t really know what the network is going to look like when they get there, so they better bring all the data they’re going to need with them.

I can take this application and drop it on an x86-compatible tablet like Surface Pro and it will work just fine. But it won’t be a really good user experience, right? This is clearly an application that’s been designed for keyboard and mouse, not for touch. So users are going to be much more frustrated than they are productive.

What Northwind really wants is a touch-first Windows runtime version of this application. But they also can’t afford to just throw all of this code away, this code works. It’s already been written, it’s already been debugged, it’s already been tested, it’s already been running in production for years.

What they want is to be able to take the parts of this application that already work and combine it with a new user interface that’s designed for touch-first tablet computing. And with Windows 8.1 update, the new brokered components feature of Windows runtime, they can do just that.

Let’s see how it works. So this is my application running in Visual Studio. I wasn’t kidding when I said this is old-school ADO.NET code. Right? SQL CE connection, read next, blah, blah, blah.

What we’ve done here is that we have the form application — sorry. And if you look in the references section, you’ll notice that we have the Northwind data access layer as a separate component. And if we look at the Northwind data access component, this is where we see this existing code for communicating with the database, executing queries, doing that kind of thing.

Now, what I really want is to have a modern version of this. So what we have now is a new version of this data access layer. Now, I haven’t taken that code and moved it over, I’m actually referencing that same library directly like a normal reference.

This Windows runtime component is called brokered because it runs in a separate app broker process outside of the typical app container, which means it has access to the full power of Windows and .NET.

Now, as you might imagine, this is a feature that’s specifically designed for enterprise computing, and is only allowed for side-loaded applications, but that’s exactly the scenario we’re looking at here.

So I have this application, and I have a component here called database. And if we look at it, you’ll see that it’s basically just calling the old database code. In fact, what’s really interesting is that this is a — I said it was old school, right? This is a synchronous call. If we want our application to be fast and fluid, we know we don’t want to be doing that. So what I’m actually doing is I’m running that code on a background thread and automatically surfacing it as a Windows runtime asynchronous operation. So that way when I execute this query against the database, it doesn’t actually block my UI thread and I continue to have a great experience.

Now I can use that component. Here’s my Windows runtime application. There you can see the Northwind RT database component, and let’s see what it looks like.

Now, this is a much nicer version of the application. You’ll notice that I have a touchscreen here, so I’m able to touch on it. All I had to do was to basically rebuild the UI and leverage the existing code that I had after I wrapped it in the Windows runtime component.

And now I’m ready to go out and run this application on a Surface Pro or any other kind of x86 tablet.

Thanks, Dave.

David Treadwell – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group

Great job, Harry. Thanks very much.

So again we care a ton about helping you support your investments and bring them forward to the future. The stuff Harry showed is a great example of the kinds of things we’re doing to help you bring your investments forward.

So to get to the third major theme of this talk, I want to talk about how Windows is enabling cross-platform apps.

This might come as a surprise to some, but we’re working hard to make cross-platform work better and be more capable for everyone, because we realize it is a critical need in today’s world. We know that lots of you want to have your apps work across many platforms, and we want to help you with that.

Not only do we want to participate but we also want to contribute to that world to make it easier for all of you, our customers.

Developers building games and apps today rely upon cross-platform frameworks, libraries, tools and services from a vast ecosystem. I want to thank the many partners delivering these building blocks for your universal Windows apps. On this slide you can see just some of them. Many of these, from game engines to ad services to Web frameworks to tools, are designed to help you share your code across platforms.

As one example, in less than nine months developers using Unity published more than 3,000 apps across the Windows and Windows Phone store.

More and more partners are bringing their libraries, tools and services to Windows every day, and we’re working hard with these partners and the open source communities, helping them to support the Windows platforms.

Of course, one of the most important cross-platform technologies is HTML in the Web. Windows Phone 8.1 brings the powerful, hardware accelerated IE11 down to phones. This means that you can have access to all of the latest and most important HTML features across all Windows devices. For example, this means you get WebGL, a great implementation that allows hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.

There’s cutting-edge video playback. For example, we now support inline video playback on the phone. We support the media source extensions to allow adaptive streaming, adaptive bitrate streaming, without requiring any plug-ins for video and other media scenarios. It’s a leading-edge standard we’re embracing on the phone and on the PC.

And we have great developer tooling like full remote inspection with Visual Studio, JavaScript debut to either an emulator or a tethered device. These are huge for your productivity as a developer.

Not only these but so many more. The ones in this slide in bold are brand new for Windows Phone 8.1.

Clearly, HTML is going to continue to be a critically important way to develop experiences with reach across platforms, not just for PC but also for mobile.

One of the things I’m personally passionate about is interoperability. We are committed to providing a high-performance, interoperable HTML engine with the key features that make cross-platform development not only easier but also more capable for everyone. WebGL is just one example of that. In fact, let me demo it for you.

Here we have a take on the classic Web-based fish aquarium demo. This is based on WebGL. We call it FishGL. It’s a 3D graphics benchmark.

The concept here is we blur the lines between native and Web experiences even more. We can pan around the scene that we have here, incredible performance, still running at 60 frames per second.

We thought it would be cool to switch views to see what the perspective is like from the fish’s point of view.

And so inside the aquarium you can see how the lines outside, the things outside the aquarium are actually wavy a little bit. This requires an incredible amount of processing horsepower to deliver.

So that’s the demonstration of what WebGL can do for Web applications exploiting amazing hardware-accelerated 3D performance and what you can do with the Web for cross-platform apps.

Next let me show you the inline video playback support we just showed.

Here’s a Windows Phone 8.1 device. We have a link to a search on the YouTube website, a popular video website that I’m sure most of you are aware of.

We’ll pick a video and what will happen is when I start playing the video, it’s going to play inline. I can scroll around. I have seamlessly integrated controls, integrated right on top of the video. That’s a terrific implementation of video playback in the Windows Web platform. Thank you.

So we know that making a great user experience for an app requires more than just HTML. A few years ago, we introduced a Windows library for JavaScript or WinJS to help developers build great user interfaces on top of HTML.

What is WinJS? It’s really just a JavaScript library, a set of JS, CSS and HTML files. It gives you the infrastructure for building high-quality, modern user interfaces, including things like virtualized lists, app bars and much, much more.

We’ve used it to make a lot of beautiful apps ourselves, and developers like you are using it to make many more apps. It works on its own and it works alongside other JavaScript libraries.

Well, I’m pleased to announce that today we are taking our first steps to bring WinJS cross-platform, so you can use it to make high-quality, modern websites and apps. That’s right.

Because interoperability is so important, because you need your Web Apps and websites to run across platforms, WinJS will really help you do that, and it’s the basis of the HTML Web that we all know and love.

In fact, starting today, Microsoft OpenTech will be making WinJS available as an Open Source project under the Apache 2.0 license.

This is just the start of the project. You can find the source code on GitHub. We’d encourage you to check it out, see our road map of investments ahead, send us feedback and, yes, please, even make contributions to WinJS.

So I showed you today three things. We know you need to reach your customers across phones, tablets and PCs today. We know you’ve made huge investments in your existing apps, and that you need bridges to tomorrow’s innovations. We know you need to deliver apps and services not only on our platform but across device platforms. Windows will help you do all of these things.

Before I welcome Terry back up, I want to share with you a few announcements so you can start taking advantage of all the things I talked about.

The Windows 8.1 update is available on MSDN today for you as attendees of this conference and MSDN subscribers. You can put the Windows 8.1 update that Joe showed off, all the great new functionality there, on your PCs, and get going with it before it rolls our globally next week.

Visual Studio 2013 update 2 RC is available today. It provides everything you need to get started with developing apps for Windows and Windows Phone that we talked about in this presentation.

And third, as a developer you will be one of the first ones to get access to Windows Phone 8.1 on your devices. If you’re a registered Windows or Windows App Studio developer, starting this month you’ll be able to download and install Windows Phone 8.1 on your existing Windows Phone 8 devices.

Thank you very much.

Terry Myerson – Executive Vice President, Operating Systems

All right, so we’ve been at this two hours. You guys ready for the good stuff now? All right.

Well, what Joe and Dave just spent that time talking about was a bunch of software that we are going to make available within days or maybe even a few weeks. But the number one feedback we’ve gotten from you for the last many years at Build is will you please share your roadmap with us, will you please tell us what’s coming? We’re investing with you; we want to arrive at a great place with you, and to do that we need to know where you’re going.

So everything I’m going to talk about for the rest of this talk is not coming within the next few days or the next few weeks, but we wanted to share with you, our most important partners, so we can make those investments and build great things for our customers together when the software arrives.

So with that in mind, what David talked about was bringing these universal Windows applications to the PC, the phone and the tablet. But there’s one screen he didn’t talk about and that’s the television.

There’s no better TV experience out there than Xbox. I mean, Xbox right now is being actively used on 80 million televisions in living rooms all over the world. The engagement with Xbox is just phenomenal. With our new Xbox One platform the average user is using it five hours per day. And what we are going to enable is your universal Windows applications running on the Xbox.

So to demonstrate that, I want to use Kahn Academy. Kahn Academy is just a phenomenal organization that distributes educational content, videos to students all over the world, a whole variety of subjects.

Their experience starts here with their website. Last year, at Build we showed how easy it was to take this website and turn it into this Windows web application. With Windows Phone 8.1 Dave just demonstrated how straightforward for Kahn Academy to create this Windows Phone application. But as we bring the Universal Windows apps to the Xbox, we’re working with Kahn Academy to now bring their application to the Xbox.

So here it is, Kahn Academy. Xbox, stop listening.

So you can see here is the Kahn Academy application, the same application on the Xbox. And so let’s go over here and see what this looks like in Visual Studio. Here it is, Kahn Academy projects, the unique code for the Windows application, the unique code for the Windows Phone application, the unique code for the Xbox, when most of the code all of the assets, all of the business logic, and a lot of the layout is down here in the shared common part of the project.

And so I can come here, here’s the homepage, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to comment out this new pane in our application, the knowledge map. And then I’m going to press play in Visual Studio, and what it’s going to do is it’s going to recompile this application for each of these targets, for Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. It’s then going to automatically deploy to each of those targets, and we can watch our application come to life with this new pane on each of these targets.

So first we’ll see the Xbox. The app was deleted. It’s reloading on the Xbox and coming back up. The phone’s restarting, Windows restarted, and you can see on each of these we now have this knowledge map that’s showed up on all three of these devices from that one project in Visual Studio. That’s pretty cool. There it is on the phone.

Now, if you’re going to put an application on the Xbox, you can’t just make it work with a controller. You really need to think about how you’re going to take advantage of Kinect.

And so in that same project here I am using Kinect to control the Kahn Academy application from that Visual Studio project, shared source, one interaction model across platforms. That’s pretty cool.

So we should talk about Kinect. Kinect was introduced a few years ago, and I’m sure many of you had an experience like myself. When I first saw it, I thought, hey, that’s pretty neat. But then I took it home and played Kinect Sports with my son or my daughter for some reason really likes playing Dance Central with me, which is just truly ugly to watch, but there’s just something magical about this Kinect experience. It’s a whole new way of interacting with the computer. You have this feeling that this is the future.

And so it’s so important to us to bring Kinect to the PC, and that is why a few years ago we introduced Kinect for Windows. And the response from all of you was pretty phenomenal, over 1 million SDK downloads, 400,000 active developers with Kinect. I mean, it’s just terrific work you all are doing.

And so I’m pretty excited today to announce Kinect v.2 for Windows. Now, the version 2 Kinect for Windows builds off of the sensors that ship with the new Xbox One. This is a 1080p camera with an incredibly wide field of view, so you can now build applications with a subject that’s much closer to the camera or works in a much smaller room.

The SDK has greatly improved skeletal tracking, facial tracking, gesture recognition, and really works well in low light.

And the applications that are being built with Kinect for Windows, it’s not just games. We’re seeing work done that’s incredibly creative.

I want to highlight two companies that are in a video I’m about to show. The first one Reflexion Health, is trying to revolutionize physical therapy. And Freakin’ Genius, which really is the company name and it’s a pretty cool company name, but Freakin’ Genius is trying to bring the art of animation to everyone, all with Kinect.

[Video Presentation]

So let’s go back to that same Kahn Academy application in Visual Studio, and here I am using the same gesture on the PC that I was using on the Xbox to navigate in this app.

And so let me just close talking about Kinect to say I really think you should explore this. We think this is the future. We think this is the way that we will all be interacting with our computers in some time. These cameras are going to become pervasive, and I would encourage all of us to really be creative about how we can take advantage of them.

Now, I can’t talk about Xbox technology without talking about graphics. The graphics that are on the new Xbox One are really phenomenal. I mean, this is a live action shot of someone playing Forza from Turn 10 Studios backstage. I mean, the photorealism in these games is just phenomenal. I mean, it’s magical when you see this take place on the Xbox.

And what makes this possible on the Xbox is that the Xbox graphics platform has an amazing level of low-level control and efficiency, which allows these artists to really envision what’s possible and then make it take place in front of the user.

So we want this graphics technology to be available for everyone on every platform, whether it be for medical imaging applications, computer-aided design, or any application that would want this same immersive experience.

And so we’re going to do that by bringing the magic of the Xbox graphics platform into DirectX 12, and bring DirectX 12 across all of our devices. Windows Phone, Windows and Xbox will all have the same graphics platform in DirectX 12. That’s pretty good; come on.

And DirectX 12, I mean, it really is phenomenal technology. We’re talking about a graphics technology that scales from our lowest and most inexpensive Nokia Windows Phone to our PCs to Xbox to these big honking graphics cards that have these jet turbine engines to cool them off to support this amazing gameplay from our most hardcore gamers, one graphic technology that scales, one API surface that efficiently takes advantage of all the GPU horsepower you can throw at, without taxing the CPU.

And so to see what’s possible, we asked Turn 10 Studios, the makers of Forza, to work with NVIDIA, who has the really early DX 12 driver, to say, hey, what’s possible, what will it be like when we bring DX 12 to the PC. And so I’m going to try and play and show you that, and I’m not going to be able to drive as well as the people backstage.

But you can see here this is the PC, this is a PC running DX 12, with some of the same photorealism you saw on the Xbox. The different graphics cards will have different capabilities, but there are not PC games like this. This is just phenomenal, this is so cool just to see this level of artistry, this level of graphics on the PC.

All right, I should stop playing now.

And so we’ve talked about the PC, we’ve talked about the phone, we’ve talked about the tablet, we’ve talked about the Xbox. But there’s a whole class of devices our industry is abuzz with right now that are broadly called the Internet of Things.

And what’s making these new devices possible I really think are these phenomenal breakthroughs in the silicon ecosystem. Where we used to have these large motherboards, we now have these incredibly small, incredibly powerful chips.

We’ve ported Windows to ARM, but one company that’s really done some incredible work lately is Intel.

You know, I have here Intel’s Galileo development board, and right in the center of it is this tiny little chip, their Quark chip. That chip, which is the size of a pencil eraser or your mouse cursor, this is a full X86 system-on-a-chip. This is a PC chip right there.

And then so you have to ask yourself, what’s possible, what kind of devices are possible when a PC runs on something the size of an eraser?

And so Intel’s shipped this development board, this Galileo board, and we have this great garage community at Microsoft who asked themselves, what should we do with it? So they decided to build a piano.

This piano is powered by that tiny little chip. Is this a piano, is this a PC, is this a — it’s a piano. It’s a piano that runs Windows. I think it’s the first ever piano that runs Windows.

And so this piano was built leveraging — this was a Windows developer that started with what’s possible, they leveraged all their skills, all the tools they know and asked themselves, what can we create? Just love the creativity.

And to show you this really is Windows, here we’re going to telnet into the piano. You can see that it’s running the Windows 8.1 kernel. We can go and see is David’s ancillary function driver there for us to use. There it is. And it can run Windows apps.

[Music plays]

So let me invite Joe up onstage, who’s a lot more musical than myself, and what I’m going to do now is I am going to — here’s the Windows — oh, I guess we won’t do that. So what I’ll do is — where’s the debugger? Here I’m going to attach the debugger to our piano.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

Always ready to be here to act as a human foil for a demo.

Terry Myerson – Executive Vice President, Operating Systems

Yes, all right. And so as Joe, who plays the piano now — go for it, Joe — we can all enjoy the debug spew from this Windows piano.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

My career as a tester begins. [Music plays]

Terry Myerson – Executive Vice President, Operating Systems

So using the Windows tools that we know how to use and we have so much experience with, we can debug our piano or maybe even debug our musicians.

But what’s so great about this Internet of Things is that it’s not just about the thing, it’s also about the fact that they’re connected to the Internet. And so this Windows application on the device is feeding all of this telemetry and data back to an Azure data service.

So here I’m going to show you a portal into that Azure data service, which is connected to the piano, and ask Joe to play it again, Jam.

Joe Belfiore – Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems

How about for the Internet this time the melody? [Music plays] That’s good enough. It’s nice to be the more childlike smaller version of you for this demo.

Terry Myerson – Executive Vice President, Operating Systems

So we don’t share this with you today because we expect many of you to be building pianos, but we are at a time where the devices that we are programming to are going to change. And leveraging all the skills and tools that we have, and leveraging all of the creativity that we have in this room, we should be making some amazing devices that do amazing things that connect to the cloud. So let’s make it happen.

Okay, so now we’ve talked about the PC, the phone, the tablet, the Xbox, and the Internet of Things. But one thing which I have not talked about is the Windows desktop.

One-point-five billion PC users out there, hundreds of millions of new PCs a year, and this is the primary interface they’re interacting with.

Now, Joe shared some amazing work the team’s doing to make that a great experience for every user on the PC, and I’m not here to announce the next version of Windows. But I am going to share that we are going all in with this desktop experience to make sure your applications can be accessed and loved by people that love the Windows desktop.

So for starters we are going to enable your universal Windows applications to run in a window.

And we’re going to enable your users to find, discover and run your Windows applications with the new Start menu.

You can see here we have Live Tiles coming together with the familiar experience customers are looking for, some customers are looking for to start and run their applications, and we will be making this available to all Windows 8.1 users as an update. So I think there will be a lot of happy people out there.

So something that now we want to share is we really want to get this platform out there. We want to remove all the friction between you and creating these devices, remove any hesitation you have to apply that creativity to creating new Internet of Things devices. So I want to announce today that when we have this new Windows for the Internet of Things available, Windows will be available for zero dollars.

But we’re not stopping there. Again, to drive adoption of your applications and get your applications out there for more customers, on phones and tablets with screen sizes less than nine inches we are making Windows available now for zero dollars. All about getting your apps out there.

So we’ve talked about a lot today now. We’ve talked about Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Internet of Things, the Windows desktop, removing friction to getting your applications out to our customers. But a concern that we all have is that some of this technology really is rooted in the Xbox experience. I mean, you really have to appreciate this immersive gaming on the Xbox, and Kinect, to really appreciate some of the stuff we’ve talked about. And we’re also concerned some of you just aren’t having as much fun as all of us at Microsoft with the Xbox One.

So I want to announce today that we’re giving a free Xbox One to everyone in the audience here at Build.

But let’s not stop there. We also want to make sure that everyone here has the opportunity to really appreciate the great work being done by our OEM partners, by Nokia, by our Surface team. So we also want to give everyone in the audience a $500 gift card to the Microsoft Store to choose a new device to do your best work on.

So let me just leave you with a few beliefs that really do guide us as we plan our platform roadmap.

We really do believe in this natural user interface. We believe in these gestures, we believe in voice, and we believe the applications of the future are really going to interact with humans using these techniques.

We really do believe in the Internet of Things. We think as the screens get smaller and the devices get smaller, the cloud gets bigger, and we’re going to make some incredibly new things possible.

And last but not least, we believe in all of you. We believe in our OEMs and device diversity, we believe in our developers and the best is yet to come, and we’re here to help you guys do it.

Thank you.

So with that, let me introduce our next speaker. His company has created over 80% of the Windows Phones that are being used by all of you. When we finish the acquisition of the Nokia Devices Group, we’ll be able to invest even more in his team and their ability to drive Windows Phone success. So please join me in welcoming Stephen Elop.

Stephen Elop – Executive Vice President, Microsoft Devices Group

Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pretty tough act to follow free Xbox, $500 and so forth, but I’m really excited to be here to share some of our own news.

It is very much a really exciting time for us at this point in time. In just hopefully a few days or weeks those of us at Nokia will be joining the Microsoft team. The possibilities as we unite are endless. We are very focused on sparking more opportunities for developers like all of you. Together, we can bring people an amazing family of devices, of services, of applications, many of which you saw hinted at here today.

Now, in the context of today’s announcement that spark is somewhat lit by Windows Phone 8.1. Joe Belfiore did a great job of demonstrating some things that we’re very excited about. And, of course, the Nokia Lumia devices are the absolute best way to light up that Windows Phone 8.1 experience.

Now, the first thing that I’m very pleased to announce is that the Lumia device that you probably have in your pocket right now gets better with Windows Phone 8.1.

We will bring Windows Phone 8.1 to all Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices offered in an over-the-air update coming this summer. That means people like you will immediately get access to that and have that on all of the existing devices, and your customers will have that as well.

So let me just show you what that means.

I’m going to invite Karan Nigam to come onstage to help me with a bit of demos here. He has a Lumia 520 in his hand, running Windows Phone 8.1, which is just amazing. Think about this for a second, in its price band the Lumia 520 is the best-selling smartphone in the world, bar none, compared to anything from Android. It’s a fantastic device.

But here’s the thing, go check out your low-priced Android devices and see if they’re getting the latest innovation that’s coming out of Google, and the answer of course is no. So we’re very, very proud to be able to take that innovation to those price points.

Now, it’s also the case you would expect this type of capability to come on the higher-end devices. For example, here I have a Lumia 1520, fully loaded with Windows Phone 8.1.

And in case you didn’t notice, for those of you who are tracking various announcements, we’re adding a bit more color to our portfolio in the days and weeks ahead, for example, this Lumia 1520 in bright green, one of many new colors coming for devices in the very near future. So we’re very excited to bring all of the developments that you saw with Windows Phone 8.1 to the existing portfolio of Windows Phone 8 devices.

But, of course, we’re also excited to introduce the next generation of Lumia devices that will be coming around the world. Let’s start off by introducing you to the Nokia Lumia 930.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Nokia Lumia 930. We’re so proud to be able to announce that first here today.

Now, the Lumia 930 is absolutely a flagship device built on and for Windows Phone 8.1. It integrates the best of Microsoft and the best of Lumia.

Now, as you can see in the video up there, as well as in my hands, the 930 is just a beautifully crafted device. It packs great Lumia innovation into an elegant smartphone, with metallic details around the side and vibrant new colors, sometimes matching wardrobe, which is a necessity.

It has a bunch of great colors. Orange is one. You saw the bright green. And it has a crystal clear five-inch full HD display, with amazing readability in all conditions, an amazing viewing ratio, and even in spotlight conditions you can clearly read what’s on the screen. It’s just great outdoors.

We’ve also taken the time to integrate wireless charging into the device so you can power it up quite easily. Love that, we all love the wireless charging.

Now, naturally, as a flagship Lumia device, the Lumia 930 offers unprecedented images and videos. It comes with an advanced 20 megapixel PureView camera. It’s got optical image stabilization, so as that gentleman is shaking his hand with a competing device, I will get the clear picture, you’re getting the blurry picture. And, of course, the high-quality Zeiss optics ensures that I get your picture and you don’t get mine.

But it’s not just about great hardware, it’s also about the software, it’s about the algorithms, it’s about everything we put into it to make the imaging and video great.

For example, we have an application called Creative Studio that’s also being updated. It’s a popular app that allows you to edit the high-quality images directly on your smartphone. We’ve added more professional filters, high-res reframing, and nondestructive editing capabilities.

So, for example, you can see here some of the filters the team has added with just one click from Lumia 930. And, of course, you can easily share these images up to Instagram or Facebook or your favorite social network.

Now, we’ve also updated some other imaging software and added some new capabilities. For example, we’re introducing something called Living Images. These images come to life as you’re taking them and as you’re viewing them subsequently, and these Living Images can be weaved into a beautiful story using our Storyteller application, which is also being updated.

Karan is going to show us an example here right now. And despite the rain, what we did over the last couple of days, the team went out and started to take some pictures here in the San Francisco area, and you’ll get a sense of the video that they were able to put together using Storyteller as well as the Living Images video.

Okay, there it is coming up there.

[Video Presentation]

Stephen Elop – Executive Vice President, Microsoft Devices Group

Now, as you see, what you’re actually getting are photos and videos that are automatically sorted and organized by time and location. You see the Living Images coming to life there as well.

Now, you might also notice that there’s a bit of music in the background. That’s a new feature to the Storyteller environment. You can always go back and edit that music, put your own themes against it, and create very quickly a beautiful experience. So there’s some new music that Karan has added. Again that can be shared to your social networks.

Now, the Lumia 930 also provides just fantastic cinematic video experiences. This is because we’ve included four high-performance digital microphones, and the Nokia rich recording capability into this device. As you record and then subsequently play back, you can hear the world around you like you’ve never heard it before. Let’s have a listen.

[Video Presentation]

There is more music than that in Finland, trust me when I tell you that. But you can capture and relive your videos with complete surround sound capabilities right from this device, or you can actually focus the sound recording with directional stereo recording, so just some amazing capabilities packed into this device.

Now, because this is based on Windows Phone 8.1, all of your favorite Microsoft services are well-integrated into your Lumia. I can save the images and everything that we’ve done here, my documents, all of that right to OneDrive, and then, of course, sync that across my PC, my tablet and Xbox.

Now, you see the experience on this device, the speed of the applications is just amazing. We have built the Lumia 930 for absolute speed and performance. It has a 2.2 gigahertz Snapdragon 800 quad core processor in it. In short, the Lumia 930 just rocks, so your applications are just going to sing on this device. Thank you.

Now, we’ll start selling the Lumia 930 globally in June. We will start in Europe and then move through Asia, India and the Middle East. Here in the U.S. we’ll be focusing on continuing with the Nokia Icon, which is a very similar device in terms of specifications to this, and of course the big boy that I showed you a few minutes ago, the Lumia 1520.

The Lumia 930 will be available with more than 100 operators around the world for around $599 before taxes and the subsidies that operators apply to the prices. So watch for that in the month of June.

So I’ll put this one in this pocket.

We have been successful not only in innovating our flagship products but also we’ve worked very hard to take that innovation to lower and lower price points, thus building on the success of the Lumia 520 that we celebrated earlier. I’d like to introduce you to two new Lumia products, the Nokia Lumia 630 and the Nokia Lumia 635. Let’s have a look.

[Video Presentation]

Here it is, the Nokia Lumia 630 and very similar to that the Lumia 635, just an amazing device as you’re about to hear. It brings an uncompromised Microsoft experience and an uncompromised Lumia experience to more people at much lower price points.

The 630 and 635 have a sleek design with a bright 4.5-inch ClearBlack display that is also great in the outdoor environments. They come in five stunning colors, with changeable shells.

But here’s what’s really exciting me. The Lumia 630 comes in two variants, a 3G single SIM variant, as you’d expect, and the very first Lumia with 3G dual-SIM capabilities, enabled by Windows Phone 8.1, which is just a huge opportunity for all of us to broaden the reach of our applications to many more people.

And then the Lumia 635 comes packed with lightning fast 4G LTE capabilities, so we have the full range of radio requirements.

So let’s go to a quick demo of that new variant, in particular the dual SIM phone so you can get a sense of that.

So we’re going to start off and you should be seeing up there the Lumia 630. First of all, this is a relatively low price device carrying on from the 520, and you can see that the three column capabilities are visible even on these smaller screen sizes on these lower priced devices, which is a big step forward.

Now, you can also see the beginning of the way dual SIM represents itself in Windows Phone 8.1. It’s really simple to use and understand.

So across the top you see two different colored tiles for each of the two SIM cards that are in the phone. On this particular device Karan has red tiles for the calls and messages from his first SIM, and he’s named that SIM “business,” and he has orange tiles for the calls and messages from his second SIM card, and that one he has named “personal.” Now, this helps to ensure that there’s no confusion or overlap between the messages and call history from one SIM versus the other.

But some of us want to work differently, and we may actually want to have the call histories and texting and everything blurred between those two environments or integrated, in which case you can just change the setting and the two SIMs make the phone work as one device with two different calling paths, which is really amazing.

Now, something I like is that you can also go to your contacts in your people hub, and you can specify for individual people which SIM card should be used when you’re texting or calling that individual. So without having to switch between SIMs you can just say, hey, when I’m calling my son I want to use my personal SIM or whatever the case may be.

Now, in many markets, particularly emerging markets like India and China, Brazil, this dual-SIM capability is critically important. Analysts suggest that in the year 2016 people will buy more than 100 million dual-SIM smartphones. The Lumia 630 dual-SIM capability opens up that market to all of us, so I’m really, really excited about that.

Now, the Lumia 630 is designed for hypersocial people who love to play games, and we have their favorite games. You can quickly go to their favorite Xbox game by tapping on the screen, or as we saw with Joe earlier today, you can use Cortana.

Now, it’s really great news that Cortana, as it’s rolled out around the world, will be available on the entire range of Windows Phone 8 devices, including the 630, our most affordable Windows Phone 8.1 device.

Today, our competitors have various voice assistant capabilities, heavily biased towards the high-end devices. We are bringing that innovation to all of the different price points, so that innovation is available to everyone, which I think is really good. It’s going to be good for your applications.

Now, for the really, really price conscious consumer, someone who might have just bought into a Lumia 630, perhaps as their first smartphone, these devices are also great ways to get the benefits of the equivalent of an expensive fitness band or wearable device.

What we are doing is introducing into these devices something new called SensorCore. This is a very low-power sensing capability that tracks motion and location. So now people can use their Lumia to keep track of their steps and calories burned using, as Karan is showing, the Bing Health and Fitness application.

You can even have this working when the Lumia device is in your pocket or in your bag, it doesn’t matter. This thing keeps track of your movements so that you can follow your improvements and your progress, built right into the device.

Now, let’s go back to the home screen. Final point I want to make about these devices is they are Lumia devices. So there’s many things we’ve come to expect as part of that experience, including Nokia MixRadio where you get at no additional cost the equivalent of your own personal radio station with more than 30 million songs, the cost of which is built into the device. You can save music offline, you can pin to the home screen your favorite playlists and all of that to make it a truly personal experience.

Similarly, you can use HERE Maps, you can download those maps. And again in many of the markets in which we sell devices the ability to download off of Wi-Fi a map and then not to be using over-the-air wireless charges to do that is fantastic.

Here Karan has pinned to the home screen a particular location, the Terra Gallery, where we’re hosting a media reception later today, so the journalists here today can get firsthand experience with these new devices.

So the Lumia 930, 630, 635, Karan, thank you very much for joining me onstage. Thank you.

Now, all of these great experiences are packed inside these robust devices. The 630 and 635, for those of you keeping score, 1.2 gigahertz Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor, at some amazing price points. So SensorCore, pictures, videos, MixRadio, HERE Maps, all of that are just going to operate so well.

So in short, the Lumia 630, the 635 deliver people an entry point to the Windows Phone experience with absolutely uncompromised performance.

Now, these devices, the Lumia 630 and 635, will be the very first Lumia devices that are being sold with Windows Phone 8.1, and that will be in the month of May.

We have received more operator support for the launch of these devices than any other Lumia device to date, and that’s based on the growing number of applications, the success of the 520, and everything that we have going. So literally hundreds of operators will be ranging the 630 and 635. We’ll start the rollout in Asia, move through India, the Middle East, South America and Europe, and will be here in the U.S. broadly with our partners starting in July. So you’ll see this ripple around the world, and we expect to sell a lot of these devices.

Pricing, the Lumia 630, 3G single SIM will be priced around $159. If it’s a dual-SIM device it will be $169. And if it’s the 635 4G version it will be $189, all before taxes and local subsidies. Here in the U.S., of course, the pricing’s quite different based on the operators, but very, very aggressive price points for a device that is going to compete amazingly well with anything that’s coming from the competition from a specification perspective.

So some great new devices coming for you. Thank you. That’s really good.

Now, you have also seen a pattern from Nokia and obviously from Microsoft that as we build some of this great innovation we want to make sure that you can build on it as well. So the great hardware, the great software that you see, we’re also trying to continue to build new opportunities for developers.

I want to say first of all a very heartfelt thank you, and that is thank you for adding 500 new applications to the Windows Phone store literally every day. So thank you very much on behalf of Nokia and Microsoft for doing that.

But to take this even further, I’m also pleased to announce that we are bringing developers to all of you two new SDKs, a new imagine SDK and a new sensor core SDK.

For imaging today we are releasing a preview of our imaging SDK 1.2, which makes creating the next generation of imaging apps faster and easier. The final version will be available in just a few weeks. It includes things like image manipulation capabilities, filter effects and on-screen rendering.

As well the new SensorCore SDK is based on that SensorCore technology we demonstrated with the health and fitness application. With the SensorCore SDK you’ll be able to create motion-based applications that are location- and context-aware while using very, very little battery power.

With these two new SDKs our ambition is to help all of you give people some really unique experiences.

So in summary, I’m pleased to introduce the new portfolio or if I may say the beginning of the new portfolio of Lumia devices built on Windows Phone 8.1. Today, it’s the 630, the 635 and the 930, but of course the existing Windows Phone 8 devices from the 520 to the 1520, which will all soon be running Windows Phone 8.1.

So yes, today is an exciting day for all of us, but I know that myself and all of my colleagues at Nokia are truly looking forward to when we can come together with our colleagues at Microsoft. We will continue to open up new opportunities for Microsoft, for our partners, for you, our developers, and most of all for people around the globe.

Thank you and we look forward to sharing more with you in the very near future. Thank you very much.

Now, if I may make one last comment to introduce the next speaker, you may have noticed a lot of things are changing at Microsoft, a lot is going on, and arguably one of the most profound changes is that for only the third time in Microsoft history there is a new CEO of the company. So it is a great honor and privilege of mine to introduce the new CEO of Microsoft, Mr. Satya Nadella. Please join me.

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Thank you so much, Stephen. Thank you so much. Backstage I was able to get one of these 930s. It’s a real sweet device. I saw that Stephen had even color-coordinated shoes. I need to get those, too.

It’s fantastic to be at Build. In fact, I was just reflecting, I think Terry said this is the 22nd year. In fact, I was in San Francisco for the very first PDC. I was not yet at Microsoft. This is when the Windows 32, WIN32 APIs were unveiled. And ever since I think I’ve not missed a PDC or a developer conference. So it’s fantastic to be here with all of you.

And it’s also, I was reflecting on it and saying, gosh, what happened, like why don’t I have a proper keynote anymore at developer conferences, and this is one of those privileges you lose when you get kicked upstairs, you don’t have your own keynote anymore. But it’s awesome to be here.

In fact, if you think about what developers mean to us, it’s pretty deep. We started out as a company that was focused on developers. We were a tools company before we were an Office company before we were a Windows company.

I was, in fact, talking to Paul Allen very recently, and he was reminiscing about his days when he was porting BASIC to all these new PC platforms, as he called it. And guess what, we are again in that sort of era right now. And you saw from Terry the entirety of the Windows family, from Internet of Things to the consoles to tablets to phones to PCs. We have that proliferation of what I talk about as ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence or this mobile-first, cloud-first world where Windows is prevalent.

So it’s exciting times for us and exciting times for developers in terms of the opportunity to be able to take your creativity, your applications, your systems, and then bring them forth to Windows as it evolves.

So we thought about what’s the best way for me to have a dialogue with 5,000 of my closest developer friends, and we figured that it’s probably a little logistical nightmare to try and do an open Q&A. So what we did was our evangelism group went out and got questions that are top of mind for all developers, some of them who are here, some in fact who are watching on the webcast, and recorded those questions. These are actually pretty hard questions and what’s really top of mind for you.

So what we’ll do is we’ll play those questions and I’ll have a chance to respond and give you what I have as both my perspective on it, as well as answers to some of the key things that you want answers to.

So let’s roll the first video with the first question.

Question and Answer Section

Question: Hi. My name is [Rahul Mehta]. I’m currently a developer at Lob.com. I work on the Android platform, and I was wondering why I should consider using Windows.

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

It’s pretty straight, why build for Windows. That’s the question, that’s the question of the conference, that’s the question of this morning, and I want to give you a very, very straight answer to it.

You want to build for Windows because we are going to innovate with a challenger mindset. We’re not coming at this as some incumbent trying to do the next version of Windows. We’re going to come at this by innovating in every dimension, the dimension of hardware, the software experiences across the Windows family, and go after this in such a way that you see us make progress with rapid pace.

In fact, today was a massive milestone. If you look at what we’ve done on the phone, the update to the PC and tablet, the new devices Stephen showed, this is all what you can come to expect from us, and we’ll keep pushing at it.

There will be a couple of things that will be pretty unique to what we do. One is what I call the sensibility we have of bringing end users, developers and IT professionals together. That’s one thing that we’ve always felt is what birthed the magic of platforms, from sort of the first version of Windows to what we think is Windows in this era of mobile first, cloud first.

And then the second real attribute for us is to be able to create a developer opportunity which is broad. So one of the things that we are doing is making sure that the opportunity for you as developers across the Windows family is expanding. Some of the changes that both Joe described and Terry alluded to where we are going, which is to be able to make your new applications built for WinRT and the Windows Store, in fact, the fact that you can use them in the desktop mode, that completely opens up a huge base of users for your applications that you’re targeting Windows with.

So this notion of creating the broadest Windows opportunity for you, sockets for you is a huge priority for us, and we have huge volume still. We have hundreds of millions of PCs, tablets and phones still on a run-rate basis, and a billion-plus PCs that will all be upgrading. So therefore we have a significant opportunity for any application you target Windows.

And then the last thing is, we are betting on this platform ourselves. You saw from Kirk Koenigsbauer how we’re building the next generation of Office applications for this platform. So we are going to basically use the same platform that we want you to target to build our own set of applications.

So those would be the three reasons, because we’re going to innovate with a challenger mindset, we’re going to create the broadest platform opportunity in terms of sockets for you, and we are going to bet on that platform ourselves, and that’s the reason why you should target Windows.

Let’s go to the next question.

Question: Hi. My name is [Siddharth Merchant], and I’m one of the organizers of Hacktag, which is currently the largest student-run hackathon on the West Coast. At hackathons most of my friends and I want students who use our apps to be able to use them regardless of what devices they own. So do you have any plans for ensuring that apps developed on Microsoft platforms easily port over to other platforms?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

You know, David Treadwell talked pretty eloquently about this. One of the core principles we have is we want to make it possible for every developer to bring their code assets forward and to be able to leverage their code assets they build in a very broad way, across our own family but also cross-platform. That’s the principle that drives us, because we know, I mean, it’s crazy to abandon what you’ve built and it’s also crazy not to be able to take what you have done and leverage it across the broadest spectrum of device targets. And that’s really the approach that we want to enable.

The first thing I would say is if you look at the platform itself that David went through, we’re the only platform that has APIs with language bindings across both native, managed and Web. And the fact that that flexibility exists means you can build your core libraries in the language of your choice and those core libraries you can take cross-platform, obviously the Web being the one that’s sort of easiest to conceptualize, and that’s what we have done even by taking WinJS and putting it into open source and making it a community effort so that you can take it cross-platform.

But we’re also working with PhoneGap, we’re working with Xamarin and of course Unity to be able to help you take what you build for Windows cross-platform, and that particular sort of sensibility of being able to take your code, leverage it across the Windows family itself with our tool chain, but to be able to take your core libraries cross-platform is something that you can expect us to continue to partner well with, use open source, but be very, very mindful about how we enable you to do that.

All right, the next question.

Question: Hey, Satya. I’m Derek. I’m a CS major from Stanford. One question I did have was, I have a Surface Pro and I use it every day at school, but I notice most people either use iPads or they use Android tablets. And I was wondering, what is Microsoft doing to compete against Google and Apple in the tablet space?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

When it comes to tablets there are multiple dimensions of being competitive, and we’re going to make sure we make progress on all of those. Great devices, it starts there, great software on that device, and then to have apps, as well as great price points. Those are the four dimensions I think of when I think about how do you get competitive with tablets.

The 8.1 update is a big milestone on it. We have really made it possible now to have tablets across the full price range. So you will have many partners of ours produce tablets that will have the full range of prices and to be able to really make sure we have tablets that anyone from a student to a professional can use.

Now, the second, when it comes to Surface itself, we will continue to innovate in driving what I think is the most productive tablet out there in the marketplace. And especially in combination with Office, as we build out these native applications for the new platform, you will see us continue to strive to make Surface the most productive tablet out there in the market.

But when we sort of talk about tablet competitiveness, the key thing that we look at is what is the role of a tablet in a user’s device family, because if there was one thing in this morning’s keynote, it’s the Windows family. It’s the consistency for the user, it’s the consistency for the developer, and that’s what we obsess about.

And to be able to talk about the tablet competitiveness to the exclusion of that family is not where we are going. So therefore we want our users to think about the Windows family of devices and the consistency of the user experience, and then from a developer perspective it’s the developer consistency, and that’s how we get very competitive.

All right, let’s go to the next question.

Question: Hi. My name is [Anna Gabriela]. I’m originally from Mexico City. I’m a U.S. designer and I really like designing applications for Windows, especially phone and tablet. My question for you today would be, how do you see the approach of UX design inside Microsoft, and how do you see this in five years? For example, do you see more like on touch side or would be more sensor, voice commands? That would be very interesting to know.

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

When it comes to design and user experience, we’ve come a long way. We have a fantastic team of people who are doing awesome work, and you see it. You see it in this personalized Live Tile experiences that we have created across the entire Windows family. In fact, we are now inspiration in some sense for other platforms even in terms of design. And so you can expect us to continue to push the envelope on it.

And this natural interface is definitely the frontier. Today, you see — in fact, this morning’s keynote stressed how we are thinking about gestures, how we are thinking about speech, with Cortana in fact a conversational agent. We are thinking about obviously about how do we even make modern applications still work with mouse and keyboard. So it’s a broad agenda when it comes to natural user interface.

And I subscribe to what I think Bill Buxton, who is a researcher in Microsoft Research, talks about when you sort of reflect on what is natural about natural user interface. It’s the context, which is who, where, what, when, should define the type of interface that you want to use with your application on the device. And to me that matters a lot, because speech probably is the best interface with any device when you’re in the car. And to be able to get that right and to have applications interact with you in the right modality becomes very important, and to be able to do that with these natural user interface advances in Windows is a pretty top priority for us.

And I would say we are the ones who have the broadest range of input modes today that we are really innovating with across the Windows family, and you can continue to see us do so going forward.

All right, let’s roll the next question.

Question: Hi. I’m [Michael Purdue], an architect for GE Healthcare. As Microsoft invests more heavily in the cloud, vendors are wondering how they can design for the cloud, not simply migrate there. How will Microsoft support those vendors, particularly in the healthcare space, to do that seamlessly?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

You’re going to hear a lot more tomorrow in Scott Guthrie’s keynote about all the advances in our cloud, but one of the things that we started our cloud effort with was with a very first-class notion of what is the cloud design point, what does it mean to build a native cloud app. In fact, the entire back end for Titanfall was built on this cloud service called Thunderhead, which runs on Azure, and it’s got these amazing attributes. In fact, we are exercising those as on the day one how we elastically scaled out that infrastructure and then scaled it back down for day one.

That notion of writing to the cloud design point where you have your data tier built for scale-out, that means you want to be able to partition your data for scale-out becomes a first-class problem that you’ve got to solve with a developer, you want to make your middle tier stateless so that you’re both resilient to failure and you can also really scale.

The last thing is you want to be able to have all interactions async with your devices so you’re not blocking. In many cases, especially in healthcare, you may want to rendezvous back with data inside your datacenter because you’re not putting everything in a public cloud and you make that a message passing system between the public cloud and your private cloud, and we have some great technologies like service bus.

So really understanding the capabilities of the platform so that you can build cloud-native apps and cloud-first apps is very important to us, and we have put a lot of focus on tooling, samples, patterns that we want to encourage developers to use to build, if you will, these applications that truly take advantage of the cloud versus just bringing your existing application to run in a virtual machine in the cloud.

All right, let’s go to the next question.

Question: Hi. I’m [David Yake]. I’m a developer from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and my question today is around the different APIs that Microsoft releases for each of their products. Today, developers have to relearn each time they pick up a new product. Is there something Microsoft can do to simplify that across the different products?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Yeah, for sure we can and we are and we will continue to drive that. And this again came across, across all the keynotes this morning. The Windows Universal App, of course, is a first step in this direction. The APIs, I would say 90 percent of them now are consistent between Windows Phone and Windows tablets and PCs and that’s fantastic to see. We’ll continue to push that. Everything I know is pretty irritating to have the camera API being different or the life cycle and the controls, and we are fixing all of that, and really bringing that consistency for developers so that you can have that shared library across a variety of device targets.

And on the back end, of course, we’ve got great consistency. If you’re a .NET developer, if you look at what we have done on Windows Server to Azure and with Visual Studio, we have made it much more seamless for you to be able to move your existing code and have consistency of the semantics of the API across all of these platforms, and you will continue to push on that, and it’s a pretty big focus for us.

All right, let’s go to the next question.

Question: Hi. My name is Ross. I’m a developer from Austin, Texas. As we move more and more resources to the cloud, I’m curious what’s the plan to deal with latency?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Latency is an industrywide issue. We have to start with developers building applications knowing that there is speed-of-light issues that get in the way. There is the Internet, there is the edge, and to be able to sort of really design your applications for it and to build a platform that is robust in terms of providing the best latency characteristics.

So we are doing a lot in terms of just the capital investment that’s required to be ready for this. We have spent over $15 billion to make sure that all our cloud services and our datacenters are there everywhere. We have 18 regions of Windows Azure, which is the maximum, is the most that any public cloud has. We have 1 billion users on any given day using Microsoft services all over the globe in 90-plus countries, so we have a great footprint. We are making sure that we do things on the edge. We are doing things to be able to cache our storage at the edge, to be able to improve latency.

And once you get to the datacenter you have to also still take care of both the North-South, as well as the East-West, so we’re putting in the right networking infrastructure, which is all software controlled, so that we can absolutely manage the best latency characteristics for your applications.

So we have a significant focus on making sure that the apps that you build run great in a geo-distributed way. And, in fact, in tomorrow’s keynotes you will some cool innovations in a service called Traffic Manager. So if you’re a developer, you’ve built an application, you want it to be available in China, in Asia, in Europe and in North America, you can take this Traffic Manager and then geo-distribute your application across the datacenters and route traffic in intelligent ways so that the user, the end user, gets the best performance characteristics they deserve.

So those are the things that we are doing to really help developers tackle the latency issues.

All right, let’s go to the next question.

Question: Hi, Satya. My name’s Jonathan Nelson. I’m the founder of Hackers and Founders. We’re the largest group of nerds building startups in Silicon Valley. We have 12,000 members in Silicon Valley alone, and about 100,000 members globally. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how Microsoft can better help and support startups as they grow.

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Startups as a community is very important for us. We have the BizSpark program. I’d really encourage, if there’s anyone in a startup here, if you have not sort of looked at BizSpark benefits, it’s perhaps the best startup program with the benefits packages that go with it, both in terms of devices as well as the cloud. We have got over 75,000 startups who have taken advantage of BizSpark across the globe.

We also have gotten started with Microsoft Ventures, which I’m very excited about. It’s small today but we plan to expand it, plan to learn from it. It’s got both community outreach to startups and community programs, but also seed funding and accelerators. So we now have accelerators in Silicon Valley, in Seattle, in Berlin, in Israel, in India and in China. And so it’s fantastic for us to be engaged with startups right at the seed round and create these accelerators where you get an opportunity to work with the latest and greatest Microsoft technology.

And so we’ll continue to push this, and feedback on this obviously is also welcome, but engaging the startup community in Silicon Valley and elsewhere is a big priority for us.

All right, let’s go to the next question.

Question: Hi. I’m Dr. Neils from nsquared, headquartered in Sydney, Australia. And Satya, I’d like to ask you a question about the vision for Microsoft. When I first started working with Microsoft technology 20-something years ago, the vision was very much around a computer on every desk, and that’s pretty much been achieved. So what’s the vision for Microsoft going forward?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Our vision, simply put, is to thrive in this world of mobile first, cloud first going forward. There is going to be more ubiquitous computing everywhere and there’s going to be ambient intelligence everywhere. So that means there will be more new form factors because of the coevolution of silicon, hardware systems and software. There is everything that we do is going to get more digitized. So that means every human interaction with another human, the human to machine interaction, as well as machine to machine interaction all get digitized. You get to reason over all this data to be able to, in fact, improve the fidelity of those interactions using techniques like machine learning.

So that’s the world that we are going into, and our goal is to really build platforms, create the best end-user experiences, the best developer opportunities and IT infrastructure for this ubiquitous computing or mobile-first, cloud-first world. And that’s really our vision, and hopefully you got a glimpse of some of the steps we are taking across the entire Windows family in this morning’s keynotes.

All right, let’s end with a question from our new friend that we met this morning, Cortana.

Cortana: Hi, this is Cortana. Now you’re chief executive officer, do you have any plans to become a master chief executive officer?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Sure. Remind me to become master chief in 500 years.

Cortana: Okay, I’ll remind you to become master chief on Monday, April 2nd, 2514.

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Great. Great, remind me to watch Scott Guthrie tomorrow morning at 8:30.

Cortana: Sure. I can remind you to watch Scott Guthrie’s keynote tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. Sound good?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Sounds great.

Cortana: Okay, your presentation is ending now. Would you like any exit music?

Satya Nadella – CEO, Microsoft

Sure. Play “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons.

Thank you very, very much, Build. Have a fantastic time at the rest of the developer conference. Thank you.

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