Steve Ballmer, Joe Belfiore: Mobile World Congress 2011
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
2/20/2011 Steve Ballmer, Joe Belfiore: Mobile Wor… Click Here to Install Silverlight Location Change | All Microsoft Sites Home Our Company Our Products Blogs & Communities Press Tools Executive Share Steve Ballmer, Joe Belfiore: Mobile World Congress Send Email 2011 Subscribe to Feed URL for Email or IM Remarks by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Share via Messenger Windows Phone Program Management Digg This Post to Facebook Mobile World Congress 2011 Add to StumbleUpon Barcelona, Spain Post to Twitter Feb. 14, 2011 Press Resources ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. (Applause.) Contact Rapid Response Team Waggener Edstrom Worldwide STEVE BALLMER: Well, thanks, and good afternoon. (503) 443-7070 The last year has certainly seen a lot of change for our industry. It's clear today that the mobile industry is moving from a device battle to a platform battle. That change is happening faster and faster. It was Related Items only a year ago at Mobile World Congress that we first introduced our Windows Phone 7 product. Windows Phone 7 was really more than the launch of a single new product. Every Windows Phone brings Microsoft Resources: together the best from across Microsoft, including Bing, and Xbox, and Hotmail, and Office, and Windows Windows Phone 7 Website Live. Windows Phone 7 Newsroom These phones have also reached out to embrace third-party services, like Facebook, and enable developers to very rapidly build exciting new applications. For consumers, we think Windows Phones are Press Releases: the easiest to use, and the most delightful phones in the market. And the amount of work we have to do Nokia and Microsoft Announce to let people touch, feel and experience certainly stands in front of us. Plans for a Broad Strategic Partnership to Build a New Global Mobile Ecosystem – Feb. 11, 2011 Feature Stories: Microsoft Shows New Features and Future Direction as Momentum Builds for Windows Phone 7 – Feb. 14, 2011 Blogs: Accelerating the Windows Phone Ecosystem – Feb. 14, 2011 Watch the full keynote from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, joined by Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president, Windows Phone Program Management, and Mentioned in this Story Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop. People | Products The past year has been very fast-paced, very fast-paced. In March, we unveiled the Windows Phone Development Platform for the first time, and previewed our Visual Studio toolset optimized for Windows Steve Ballmer Phones. In June, we delivered our first technical preview. In October and November, our handset and Chief Executive Officer mobile operator partners put the first Windows Phones into the hands of consumers. See BIO Then, this last January at the Consumer Electronics Show, we showed the first new features coming in updates for Windows Phones. That first update will be delivered in just a few weeks in early March as we Joe Belfiore Corporate Vice are moving rapidly to continue the drive forward with Windows Phone. President, Windows Phone Program Management And if last Friday's announcement with Nokia is any indication, I think it's fair to say that 2011 will be at See BIO least as fast-paced, if not more so, as 2010. Today, I want to share with you early feedback we've received from our customers. I'm going to talk about Windows Phones and give you a small glimpse of what we have coming later this year. microsoft.com/…/02-14MWC.mspx 1/11 2/20/2011 Steve Ballmer, Joe Belfiore: Mobile Wor… I also want to discuss how we're building our platform with our new and with our existing partners. With Windows Phones, our top priority is to build phones that people love. Our phones feature two technology user interface concepts that we call smart design and hubs. Smart design makes access to information easier, and completing tasks faster. And hubs organize information, applications and services into complete and integrated experiences. We knew from the reaction that we got here at Mobile World Congress last year that we were on a right path. And as we survey initial Windows Phone customers today, 93 percent of customers are delighted with their Windows Phones. We're thrilled by the high degree of satisfaction. Nine out of 10 people who purchase a Windows Phone will tell their families, their friends, their co-workers that they should go out and buy one, too. Great products are really defined by the passion and the loyalty that they inspire from the people who have gone out and purchased them. And while it's still very early in the game, we now know that our customers are already becoming broad evangelists for Windows Phones, and the benefits of these two new user interface approaches, smart design and hubs. Let me tell you a little bit about why, and I want to start with smart design. Research shows that people want a phone that makes information much more accessible, and helps them complete basic tasks more easily. We talk a lot about applications, and all the additional things they want to do, but there are some basics. Certainly for the last few years, the market has been swamped by phones with fairly similar designs. Phone after phone, good phones, but all filled with home screens that have a sea of icons of applications that connect to information, which leads to commands that trigger action. With smart design, we're trying to really go about improving that experience. When a customer sees a Windows Phone for the first time, they almost invariably have a reaction to how different the Windows Phone looks compared to all other phones. Then follows this kind of recognition, at least if they spend a minute with it, the recognition that they like the difference they see. With a Windows Phone, it's easier and faster to see information at a glance, weather information, stock prices, sports scores, calendar appointments. Without touching a button, or opening an application, right there on the home screen. With Bing, you simply ask your phone, "Phone, how do I find coffee?" And your phone gives you exactly what you're looking for, the local coffee shops, directions, consumer reviews, and the like. And all of that with the ability to see what else is nearby just one touch away. An example of a common task for all of us is taking pictures. You'd think that would be easy. It's something we all do all the time with our phone. With smart design and a Windows Phone, it actually is easy. If you want to take a picture even when the phone is locked, share it with your friends, no opening an app, just have it; take it instantly, have it saved out to the cloud. Let me tell you, that is not true today with some of the other products in the market. We're continuing to invest in this smart design approach, and I want to give you just a couple of examples here in the very near-term. First, we're going to help customers move between their many applications very easily and very quickly. Just in the near future in 2011 we will bring multi-tasking to Windows Phones. Secondly, and perhaps even more significantly, we need to give people the full Web, the full Internet, on their phone, like they've come to expect with the PC. The Web in some senses has been designed PC first, and we need to make it a first-class citizen on the phone. This past September we released the beta version of our Internet Explorer browser, Internet Explorer 9, for the PC. We've had 25 million downloads and we just this last Thursday made the release candidate available of Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer 9 takes advantage, not only of the Web, but of all the hardware in the PC , like the graphics processor, to increase the performance and really deliver the beauty of the Web through the power of HTML5. Well, today I want you to understand that later this year we're going to release a version of Internet Explorer 9, complete with hardware and graphics, and other hardware acceleration to the Windows Phone. IE9 is a great example of bringing assets together from across Microsoft to improve the Windows Phone experience. As I think should be obvious from my enthusiasm, smart design really is one of the key focal points for Windows Phone. The second one is hubs. Hubs are tiles that work on your behalf, to organize your information, applications, and services into a single, integrated experience. It is important, because we love our apps. We love our services. It's often, frankly, just too hard to find what you want when you want it. And so with hubs we're trying to integrate the things that are most important in your life, and bring them together. We created six hubs around what our customers tell us microsoft.com/…/02-14MWC.mspx 2/11 2/20/2011 Steve Ballmer, Joe Belfiore: Mobile Wor… they care about most. First, the People Hub, the People Hub combines the information about the people in your life, social feeds, contact information, into a single view. And from that single view you can comment, update, view all posts, texts, send e-mail, basically everything you need to interact from one place with the people who are important with you, without branching always to additional applications. The Office Hub brings together the documents and information that are important to us in the productive side of our life.