Microsoft Surface Pro 3 – the tablet that can replace your laptop – was unveiled on May 20, 2014 at a lunch event held in New York. Below is the full transcript of the said event..
Satya Nadella – Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft
Good morning everyone, and welcome to our event in New York. I’ve had a chance to see many of you over the last couple of busy months, and you’ve been on our journey with a couple of events. And so it’s great to see many of you made it to the East Coast. It’s good to be on a different coast this time.
I wanted to talk about our devices today. But I want to start by talking about the journey that we’ve been on. You heard me talk about our mobile-first, cloud-first strategy. And this is our focus for every device and every service that we launch at Microsoft.
And over the last couple of months, you’ve seen us talk about various aspects of this strategy. We started off by talking about how our cloud enabled everyone on every device. This is what we did when we launched Office 365 and Office Apps on the iPad.
We also talked at that event about our enterprise mobility suite, which enables enterprise IT to enable access to corporate information on any device.
We also had a major event around our data platform. This was the event at which we talked about creating this new platform for ambient intelligent experiences, as well as how one goes about creating a data culture within an organization using these data platforms.
And then lastly, at Build, which is our developer conference, we talked about the advances in Windows and our Azure platform on the cloud. We talked about how, in particular with Windows, we were advancing on every dimension from form factors to business models to experiences for both people, IT and developers.
Today is the next step on that journey. We want to talk about devices and hardware. But it starts for us with this obsession of empowering every individual and organization to do more and be more. That is what we at Microsoft are all about. This is what is the unifying theme for the company across everything that we do.
We want products and technologies that enable people to dream and get stuff done. We want products and technologies that enable people to be able to get more out of every moment of their life. That’s the mission that we’re on.
The motivation for this comes from really looking at people in real life. When you see a doctor doing a diagnosis and making important, but rapid decisions. When you see an architect do a design for a building. When you see a student create a trip report. A busy professional or a parent organize their life and their time and communicate. All of those activities act as the motivation for what we want to do at Microsoft.
That’s what has led us to build the ubiquitous software products that we’ve built to date. Take Office with over a billion users of Office. That’s the motivation for it.
And of course, now we’re extending it with Office 365 and services like Skype, OneNote, OneDrive, to really take that notion of productivity forward in a mobile-first world.
It’s just not us. In fact, we have many, many partners who also equally obsess about creating these software services for productivity. You take Adobe and Autodesk and SAP and Intuit on the other end of business process. All of them are also building software that is all about enabling and empowering people to do stuff.
Why hardware?
So that’s what leads us to today’s discussion. The question that needs to be asked and answered is: Why hardware? We clearly are not interested in building refrigerators or toasters. We are not building hardware for hardware’s sake. We want to build experiences that bring together all the capabilities of our company from our cloud infrastructure to our application services to our hardware capabilities to build these mobile-first productivity experiences. That’s the mission.
We’re building new strength and capability around that alchemy of being able to bring hardware and software together. And the Nokia close really gives us that extra strength to be able to do that.
We’re not interested in competing with our OEMs when it comes to hardware. In fact, our goal is to create new categories and spark new demand for our entire ecosystem. That’s what inspires us and motivates us with what we’re doing in our devices and hardware.
And today is a major milestone on that journey. It starts with dreaming the impossible, of can we design and build a device that takes the best of the tablet and the laptop and enables any individual to be able to read, and to be able to create and write. Allows you to watch a movie and make a movie, enjoy art and create art. That’s the device that we want to create. That was the motivation for the Surface line.
And today, we have a major step forward on that dream and that mission. And to really show you what we’ve done over the last year or so on that dream, I want to invite up on stage Panos Panay, he and his team have been really driving this quest forward. Panos? Come on up.
Panos Panay – Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Surface
What’s up, dude? Good to see you. Thank you, it’s always awesome to come up here and talk, and the privilege to talk after Satya is something that is almost dream-worthy.
I will tell you, starting every time I stand up here and I stand in front, and then all this flash and so forth, the truth is, it’s a humbling experience every time. And I’m humbled because I get to represent the Surface team specifically and they work so hard around the globe to bring these products to you alongside.
It’s a beautiful thing, but there’s a little bit more to this product. And it’s not just the Surface team that I get to represent today. It’s all of Microsoft. It’s been an amazing journey for Surface for sure, but when you think about all the hard work that you’re going to see that happened in this device, amazing work by Windows and Office and Skype, OneDrive, even Microsoft Studios all coming together. Representing that is one of these feelings that you get as a leader and it gets you pretty excited.
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