A big year for Xbox. We launched a new console roughly a year ago. We launched Kinect for Christmas.
We had the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history, the fastest to 10 million ever with the Kinect product.
And yet I feel like we're just scratching the surface. We had hackers come along and hack up Kinect, and say, we need it for business applications.
We came with an SDK so you can use it now to build a variety of business applications for vision, and voice recognition.
We're still motivated in the Xbox team by entertainment, giving you any entertainment you want, or any entertainment you might be able to dream of,
to have you be able to share it with the people you care about, to make it easy to do, and to have that on any screen, not just the big screen TV in your house.
We're driving forward on that proposition.
You'll see more games coming this Christmas to Xbox for core gamers, Gears of War, new Halo.
We have more things coming for families and young people, Star Wars, Disney, and Sesame Street, plus with Xbox this year more movies, music, ways to socialize, and live TV coming for the first time to Xbox this holiday season!
But, we've got to make things easier to use. I mean, look, at the end of the day a game controller is maybe a little too complicated for the average person.
Heck, even a remote control is a little bit too complicated for the average family. And what we're trying to do is really work on making TV easier to use, by giving the TV a new voice. And that's your voice.
I want to show you the 2012 Xbox experience. This will be available this coming Christmas, and it's where you can use your voice to control entertainment through the magic of Kinect.
Whether you want to play games, watch movies, listen to music, or share with friends the voice should be your own, no buttons, nothing in your hands.
I'd like to introduce Ellena, who comes from our Xbox team. And Ellena is going to show you how it works.
ELLENA STIFF: Xbox music.
STEVE BALLMER: Instant access to 11 million songs.
ELLENA STIFF: Xbox games.
STEVE BALLMER: All the games you love, and even more of the experiences that you're looking for.
ELLENA STIFF: Xbox video.
STEVE BALLMER: Simple and effortless voice and motion control. Everything that you care about, all the content types integrated.
But, it's only a beginning. Our goal for this year is to increase the content in our entertainment catalogue from hundreds of thousands of entertainment experiences to many millions of entertainment experiences
Having all that content, though, will bring you another challenge. How do you discover what you're looking for? How do you find it?
How will you find that entertainment you want this Christmas? Easier ways and guides, and menus, and remotes, I went looking just on the TV set over here in the Marriott Hotel for CNBC this morning, and I never found it.
I don't know what that says about me, or how complicated the technology is, but in order to just simplify the whole thing, we're going to bring Bing to the Xbox. You say it and Xbox finds it.
ELLENA STIFF: Xbox Bing.
STEVE BALLMER: Bing on Xbox will search through Zune, Netflix, Hulu, Xbox LIVE, and even more content providers as they come to the Xbox system. With Kinect and Bing on Xbox, you can use your voice to find what you want instantly.
ELLENA STIFF: Xbox Bing Lego.
STEVE BALLMER: Let's say your kids love playing Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, thank you to the folks from Denmark for bringing Legos.
And let's say you want to search for more Lego games. There they are, no menus to navigate, nothing like that, just your voice and this library of content instantly accessible to you.
Let's say you saw the latest X-Men movie, and you want to enjoy more X-Men content.
ELLENA STIFF: Xbox Bing X-Men.
STEVE BALLMER: There we go, all the X-Men games, movies, shows, and even the animated series all in one place.
With Bing on Xbox this Christmas we give you effortless discovery, effortless discovery, the great content coming to Xbox LIVE, the power of voice and the intelligence of Bing.
If you wanted to put it simply you'd say: you say it, and Xbox will find it. Central to our vision of the next-generation experience is the TV and TV content that's most familiar to all of us.
ELLENA STIFF: Xbox live TV.
STEVE BALLMER: This year, live television will come to Xbox as we partner with leading TV providers.
We've already done this in the U.K. with Sky TV, in France with Canal Plus, and in Australia with Foxtel.
Watch live TV on the Xbox, news, sports, your favorite local channels. Watch in party mode, enjoy with your friends.
TV is more amazing when you are the controller. And it's all just a voice search away. You say it, Xbox finds it.
That's our vision at home for the future of television, personal, approachable, and effortless.
And just think of how you can apply the same kind of concepts eventually at work. Xbox and Bing this holiday season; I hope you'll all have a chance to enjoy.. =)
A year ago, Microsoft had no Windows Phone.
In the last year, we've sold millions of phones.
When we survey our users, nine out of ten of the people who bought a Windows Phone absolutely would recommend it to a friend.
It's certainly a very busy, active, competitive market. We've got a lot of work to do to break through.
And yet, the people in the phone business believe us. We've already had over 20,000 applications built for Windows Phone in eight months.
That's a faster ramp than either Android or iPhone had. Nokia, who had a choice this year to bet on themselves, to bet on Android, or to bet on Windows Phone said for their bet the company strategy, they're going with Windows Phone.
They saw our roadmaps. They saw what we've done. They saw what we're planning on doing. They're pushing us.
They're pushing us to go broader geographically with Windows Phone. They're pushing us to hit new price points with Windows Phone. But, they believe.
Others believe, too. Gartner and IDC both did predictions this year that said Windows Phone would be the No. 2 phone in the market by 2015.
We've already shipped two major updates since we launched Windows Phone less than a year ago.
The update that we just made available, “Mango,” which will be on phones this fall, has over 500, 500 new features.
We know we've got a lot to do, but like the cloud, like NT many years back, we're all in when it comes to mobile devices.
And whether it's phones or slates, or PCs, or console devices, we're certainly pushing extremely far, and extremely fast.
Windows, I talked about some of its success in the year, but probably the thing that's most on your minds today is Windows 8.
We did a brief glimpse of that at the COMPUTEX and D conferences a month or two ago.
We've made clear we're supporting the ARM processor architectures in addition to Intel. And Windows 8 really does represent a true reimagining, a true reimagining of Windows PCs, and the dawning of Windows slates.
And to talk more about where we're going with Windows 7 and 8 PCs and slates, please welcome to the stage Tami Reller, who runs all of our marketing and business for the Windows Group.
Tami.
TAMI RELLER: Well, thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone!
I'm so thrilled to be here. I always deeply value the opportunity to come here and talk to our partners about my favorite subject, Windows.
So, given our limited time together this morning, I want to focus on two things.
First, I'll share with you the sizeable opportunity we have with Windows 7 in the coming year.
I also do want to provide a brief recap on the “Windows 8” news that we have shared to date.
So, let me start with the momentum and the opportunity right now with Windows 7.
So, last year I shared with you that, at a rate of seven copies per second, 150 million Windows licenses had been sold in the first seven months.
That's the fastest, strongest start in the history of any OS.
So, let me put the 400 million copies of Windows 7 that Steve mentioned earlier into context.
That is three times the pace of Windows XP. Today, 27 percent of the Internet runs Windows 7.
And, at the center of all of this success, all of this momentum is you, our partners, partners across the hardware ecosystem, our retail partners who delight consumers every day, ISVs and developers, solution partners, distributors, and resellers.
Thank you. We are so grateful for the strong partnership that we have forged, first through the successful launch of Windows 7, and now as we continue on the path of helping our customers deploy Windows 7 across their enterprises.
That partnership will be the key to continuing to deliver the value of the Windows 7 PC experience to even more customers and even more desktops in this coming year.
So, let me share some of the impact you've had on customers with your efforts on helping them deploy.
Through your work, nearly 90 percent of customers are committed to Windows 7. Already a quarter, a full quarter of all desktops are fully deployed on Windows 7.
And there are companies like General Motors who are just inches away from 100 percent deployment across all of their users. That's almost 80,000 desktops.
For CIOs and IT professionals, upgrading to Windows 7 means several things. First, and perhaps foremost, it means lowering costs.
Customers have consistently reported to us and to you that upgrading to Windows 7 has resulted in material cost savings, especially in the areas of PC management and application deployment.
Security has been another important benefit and something that companies worry a lot about, especially as workers become more mobile, and as workers become more mobile, more devices are lost.
Windows 7 reduces this risk.
Another Windows 7 capability that our customers often talk about — and I know they talk about this with you, and they prioritize it — is virtualization.
When I talked to the team at Ford Motors recently, Eric Carson there, who is the senior management working on the deployment at Ford, made sure to emphasize the importance of virtualization in the actual migration process at Ford.
And, for Ford, virtualization was the deciding factor for moving to Windows 7. That's for IT professionals and CIOs.