Imagine if I had something that was the most important thing that you heard today. What
if you meeting with an employee or your boss and it was a really critical meeting you really
wanted to make sure you paid attention, listened, and captured what you are hearing, what would
you do? How about if you had a gnarly problem that you needed to work with two other people
on, where would you go, what would you do in order to work on that problem?
And how about if you had a concept in your mind whether it's a presentation or a device
or anything that you really wanted to work through as a concept, what tools would you
use to do that? I asked these questions because we're here to talk about the future of IT.
It feels very true that the past of IT is still the future of IT when it comes down
to the most important thing is how do we make individuals each of us more productive than
the jobs that we do? And so as someone who works on Surface, I
spend a lot of time talking about this trade-off: I want a tablet. I want something that is
lightweight, that allows me to read, that has great touch experiences, that has amazing
apps, but I need a tablet to do my job. I need something that gives me the ability to
really produce, to run the kinds of programs that my company uses whether they're internal
or finance or HR or big important applications like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCAD
those kinds of things. And with Surface what we've been working on
for a number of versions and really feel like we've hit a sweet spot with Microsoft Surface
Pro 3. And after we release a new product one of the things that we obsessively do is
go find who are the people that are buying it early on - not only were why were they
buying it, but what do they love about it? The people that truly are strong advocates
for the product who are out there telling other people, you got to try this you should
get one of these. One of the things that we found is one of the biggest predictors is not only
that they use it as a tablet and a laptop or that they were carrying both a tablet and
a laptop in their bag before, but also that they use the pen.
To start, it's amazing. We did a bunch of research as we were developing Surface Pro 3 on
different technologies and one of the key things we, of course, focused on is pen. We
had it available in previous versions, but we didn't see people using it enough. We thought
it was much more powerful than how people were seeing it themselves and we said shame
on us. We knew that 71 percent of people say that they use a pen for at least one hour
per day. It's clear that the pen is a really powerful
tool for learning, in particular. It's really critical to people to use a pen in order to
really remember and understand concepts. I think many of you probably remember as we
were in middle school, high school, we learned about different ways that people learn. We
learned about people that are oral learners, who learn things best when they hear. We learned
about people that are better when they read, they understand things better when they read
in a book and then a lot of people they have to write it down. The good news is the thing
about writing down notes is that you are not only taking the active approach, you're
reading it as you do it and many people sound it in their head and so there are many, many
studies that say you remember things better and that doesn't even mention the fact that if
I'm sitting in a meeting with you and I have a laptop up, it's not a very personal situation.
The ones that show up and they've got their laptop out and clanking away and maybe they're taking
really copious notes, but you don't believe them. I don't believe them.
Whereas, if they have a piece of paper, they could be talking about, "Boy, Brian really needs
a haircut," and writing that down, but it feels much more personal and it feels like something
that probably means they're of the moment. And that's certainly true if you're in a sales
meeting or anything like that, you also have the opportunity not only to learn better,
but to present a better, more personal relation in the meeting that you're in. We see lots
of different signals for the importance of writing. We have a picture of my three children.
The one in front is my oldest. He's eight. He has an opinion, I think, of his intellect
given the shirt that he's wearing. All of his homework that really matters is done with
a pencil and paper. And I look at the homework every other day,
someone like that, as it comes home, generally he's proud of it and it's great that he's
proud of it, but it's not surprising that as we were all learning, and as people around
the world still learn, pen is such an important part of that. 69 percent say that if they
want to remember something they write it down. There hasn't been much technology that's been
able to do that. I can give you an example. We came out with something called the Tablet
PC with a number of partners in, in 2001. It was built on Windows XP. It was great innovation,
great technology, but you had to boot Windows, you had to log-in, you had to go to your note
taking app and then you could use a pen and paper.
It's not that surprising that many people didn't do that. Let me give you an example
of where we've taken technology and said okay, how do we take the simplest of concepts: we
open a notebook, take out the pen and click and all of a sudden I'm in a note taking
environment. Again, this is note taking like on a piece of paper. I don't have to think
that I have to write like this because I can do that, but it stinks. Instead, I can set
my hand on the paper, I can start writing, "This is a great way to take notes," and
if you have horrible handwriting like myself, I can make them big and then make them smaller
as they want to save if I want to file that way. I can log-in and all of a sudden I have
the best of a piece of paper, pull out my tablet click a button and get going, put my
hand on it write and do it using what feels like a real pen.
Not a cheap stylus or something that is just an imitation of a pen, but something that
feels like a real pen. What you have here as I now have the CDW page open with the Surface
Pro 3 i5 version with 128GB memory and let's say I wanted to buy 4000 of them,
what would I do? Of course I could put the numbers in and just enter 4000 and submit
but I'm probably going to want to ask my procurement team to go look at it, so in this case rather
than single clicking I'm going to double-click, and what this'll do is it takes a snapshot
of whatever I was looking at. I get a kind of view that allows me to use my pen to cut
out whatever I want to select, it goes into my notes. I say not one, 4000 and I can send
it right from there and I can do this with anything whether it's a spreadsheet where
I just want to capture a screenshot or a webpage or anything all using the precision of the
stylus. This in many ways sounds like the kind of
a trivial thing because, right, we talked about how kindergarten, first-grade, second-grade,
we learn to simply open up a pad of paper, click a pen and go but this is the kind of
thing that ultimately technology has to be really good about not being different than
how everything works but first do the basics really well and then go beyond. Who here loves
meetings? I've never heard someone not laugh when you say that, it's like the most absurd
thing you can say I love meetings! Yet 62 meetings per month on average. 39 percent
of our working hours spent in meetings and when you ask people they generally think about
50 percent of the time is wasted. And so as we look at how this can be much
better in many ways it starts with the basics of how do you bring together the meeting and
the whiteboard in a way that becomes more than just drawing on a board. I'd like to
show you a video of a set of technology that we've been working on that tries to take on
of the notion of whiteboarding or working with a pen and do it in a way that brings
together how we're used to working when we have a drafting board or something else
out. What you're seeing here this is a prototype
type device that we have. It's pretty large you can tell and someone is manipulating a
set of files at the same time as they are using a pen. Now I want you to notice it looks
very very natural. He's moving things around, he's rotating things, he's panning in,
he's panning out, he's using the pen as he does it. This is just what I do if I had
a drafting table and we were doing a tissue session in a room with a number of people
looking at creative concepts. When we're on the whiteboard we go up there and multiple
people are adding things, and we erase and bring things in, but in the case of the whiteboard
of that tissue session, it's hard to capture all of the information and you certainly can't
do it in a way that brings people who are remote into the experience.
And this is a set of examples where it looks real natural, because he's just moving things
around and using the pen. So we talked about learning and active listening and how do you
do that? We've talked about groups working together. The last thing I want to talk about
is creation. What you see up here is an image from da Vinci's Codex Leicester. This is one
of the, I think it's one of the most expensive documents ever purchased, but at the time
it was essentially da Vinci's working book. You saw some of the most important innovations
that he had, including the man drawn like that in a circle, but also a lot of the thought
processes that went into it . And if you think today, if you think about
a creative and what is one of the most important tools of a creative, certainly one of the things
that you think about is the moleskin notebook. The moleskin notebook is iconic, it's something
that as you look at how people work within the creative environments, it really is a
way where people pour their ideas and their information and their sketches down in a way
that works for them really well. This is something that isn't just about artists.
For instance, architects - we've seen really interesting feedback and most importantly
ideas for improvement from architects and structural engineers who have a Surface Pro
3 and are out on the job. They have the full rendering of the building and they're
able to take notes and make modifications right there.
Even things like music. When we think about creation, in many cases the keyboard, the
keyboard feels like it gets in the way. I've watch musicians who will draft out their music
using score sheets and a piece of pen and paper and they will go through and draw
the everything to make their notes and then later, they'll have to go back and figure
out how do I transpose this or transform this. And so as we look at this, we think that there
is a ton of opportunity and guarantee that the pen will be a critical, critical aspect
of how we, how we see creation and conceptualization going forward, and so the last thing that
I want to show you is a video that Adobe developed that thought about what would it mean to take
many of the technologies that we have today and augment them with touch and pen and try and
invent the creative tools of the future.
[MUSIC]
We look at the future and we see the pen plus
multitouch being something that enables whole new apps, pending part of workflows so it's
not just an isolated thing that a creator or someone taking notes does, but how the
whole process of reviews and revisions happen. As well as, look at things like the number
of apps that we're able to bring together, Touch and Gyro, and those kinds of things augmented
with pen. I'm giving us a number of things that we can envision today but we know that
if we do the right things at the platform level, from an operating system perspective
and the like as well as providing great hardware technology like Surface Pro 3 with the
with the Surface pen, we will be able to see what the industry can come up with. Thank
you very much for your time today. I really appreciate the chance represent Microsoft
and be a part of this event with CDW, Have a great afternoon.