stephen: things are changing and changing in some very, very interesting ways and the way that customers, consumers, enterprise customers, small businesses, due business is dramatically changing. i'll dove in to that but i thought for those of you not familiar with me and my role at microsoft i own a lot of different things; at the top of that is our technet platform. if you've ever gone out to technet and looked at any information on windows 7, windows 8, windows xp, windows vista, our [mdot] product line or internet explorer that's a property that i own and manage.
all of that technical content built for small businesses, mid market, enterprise, it process there. the windows forums. i oversee the team that manages our windows forums. i oversee our social media listening. every day we listen to 10,000 websites in english as well as twitter, facebook, blogs, etc. and then we do that in ten additional languages and we look at sentiment, things along that line. i do our springboard series inside our newsletter, virtual round table.
pretty wide variety of stuff at microsoft but my job is really to interface directly with it pros. i've spent 15 years as an it professional running my own company. i was a three-time mvp. before joining microsoft i've also been an mct back since about 1996. go way back. three-minute popcorn world, what does that mean in … i love this analogy. i think it's really great. for those of you that are older like myself you remember making popcorn like this.
you put it like that and that was it. you put it in this pot, you put a little bit of oil and you cook it up and then in the ‘70s much to my delight we had jiffy pop which if you could time it just right you would not get a ton of burnt kernels at the bottom. that's not how we make popcorn anymore. this is how we make popcorn. but what's interesting about this is go to your office and watch somebody put popcorn into the microwave and then hit the popcorn button. two minutes 45 seconds.
after a minute and a half they start doing this and they start waiting for it. they're getting anxious. it used to take 20 minutes to make popcorn. we now make it in three minutes and it's still too long for some people. atms. i remember my dad would go on sunday and cash a check and would give money for the week. there was no atms. things have changed and people's expectations on how we support them, how we listen to them,
how we answer their problems is very much at the critical aspect of that. every month we listen to, like i said, about nine to 10,000 it pro focused forums so if you are in tom's hardware, if you're in spiceworks, if you're on the hp forum, the technet forums, no matter where you're at we are focusing on what you're saying but we look for very, very specific terminology. we don't read every post. we look for specific words that pop up. we track 1 million twitter conversations.
again, using specific words that says you are an it pro. things like domain join, user or work space, things like that. terms that we know do that: windows 8 pro, windows 8 enterprise, enterprisequeue, small business, server, domain, things along that line that say, “hey, this is an it pro conversation. we currently track [inaudible] eight languages in about 3,000 language unique sites. there are sites in russia, in china, etc. that are unique to those countries where it pros tend to talk. our current forums answer,right? which is answered by …
we do have an outsource team in china, we have mvps and we have workforces here in united states that help to support that; is 82% answered within 72 hours, three days. that is our service level agreement, is 70% or above within three days and it's 82% within five business days. that is our goal. if you are not seeing an answer, if you've seen a question post and not seeing an answer give it that additional day or two. see when it was posted and where it's at.
what have we learned from social media? this is interesting so you understand when i take a look at users and who we really focus in and who we don't to get that. we don't focus our efforts on people who are happy or unhappy and let me explain what that means. if someone is really happy i'm not going to be able to make them happier. okay? it's not a good use of our time. you guys do a great job. if somebody's happy saying thank you and have you tried this?
if someone is pissed off beyond belief because they just don't like microsoft. “i hate windows 8, it sucks.†okay. great. you're entitled to your opinion. is there a reason why? is there something you're trying to do or achieve that you're unable to do? “no, it just sucks.†okay. we're done. we're not going to spend any more time on you because the amount of time and energy it would take to get the sky to go …
well, i guess it doesn't suck that much. we could have helped a lot of people in what we call mixed or neutral and that is … someone who says, “i like windows 7 or windows 8 but …†that's where our gold nugget is. that's where we really strive to chat with people is when they get to that but. but what is that? what is that one thing that's holding you back from playing with it? why did you uninstall it? why did you not have a good experience on playing with it and
we look forward those folks who say, “i like windows 7, i like windows 8 but …†that's a really critically area for us and that's where we really focus our efforts. what we call mixed and neutral. if you're neutral we try to move you in a mixed, mixed to positive. that's where our key area of focus is. it's not to say if somebody has a problem says i hate windows 7 because it won't load properly, absolutely! we're going to get on it, we're going to jump on it and that's where we look for you folks to help and vice versa.
where we are also here and available, if you are in the hp forums or other forums and have problems you have ways to get a hold of us and get answers. you can twitter me, you can email me, you can go to our forums and ask that question. we have twitter feeds for just about every single product at microsoft. email [aliases]. if you're not getting what you need from us that's something that we really want to know and we want to find out what is your best way to communicate and it's going to be different in different languages and we understand that. social media though is perception, not reality and the forums is reality.
what do i mean by that? we do a lot of look at social media and i give you a good real world example. we had about a year and a half ago an issue called the blue screen of death update, bsod update. it was an update that people supposedly got blue screens of death. what we found was in social media this topic went viral. we had tens of thousands of post. when we looked in our forum we had 26 posts. twenty-six people actually really have the blue screen of death issue as oppose to tens of thousands of people talking about it.
these were not people that had the issue, these were people that just enjoyed talking about the issue. it's very interesting and it's something to keep in mind when you look at social media, when you take a look at twitter and facebook and these types of things. it is perception. it is people that like to talk about issues, positive and negative but it's not necessarily people having those as oppose to forums where you are doing that. it's how we respond is different. if we see a lot of people chatting in social media then we go,
you know what, it's a twitter, it's a blog feed. it's something that's a point in time to redirect. if it is something in the forums we need a knowledge base article. we perhaps need to fix. we need a piece in the technet library. how we are going to respond to that becomes different so again if we start to see things in the forums you guys raising that up becomes really, really critical. what's really important is that on the forums people are happy with three days but with twitter and facebook and things like that people want answers within hours. again it's that standing in front of the microwave, tapping your foot,
waiting for the popcorn to come out. this session's about you and i thought a great way is to take a look at some of the big common questions that you guys have in your forums and webinars and answer these and then answer any questions you have beyond that and that's just me standing here asking, answering your questions kind of going through. i want to cover these and then i want to cover yours and i'll cover these short and then we'll go into your questions. i'll also mention that when we came out of the gate there was a lot of focus at a company level on consumers and developers and that's something which
we are moving back a little bit to also really go after it pros and that's something that's been very, very important to us because a lot of people right out of the gate say, “my two favorites, windows 8 is a consumer os and number two it's only meant for touch screens.†it's only meant for touch screens is absolutely not true. i will tell you, go find a windows 7 laptop and put windows 8 on it and there are three things you will find right out of the gate. number one, it boots incredibly fast. number two, your battery life should go up dramatically.
my asus zenbook went from five hours to six and a half hours of battery life. immediately i saw a better battery life once you learn a few key shortcuts. key shortcuts like? windows x. i love windows x. you hit windows x or you right mouse click in the bottom left-hand corner and you get mobility center, programs and features, device manager, disk manager, admin command, prompt task manager, all of those cool things that you use to have to dig for in windows 7 are all right here by simply clicking windows x.
want to bring up something? fine. on your start screen, in windows 7, if you wanted to launch an app you have to go into your start screen, type in the name of it, bring it up. if i want word there's word. from the start screen i can type in the name of any single app whether it's an installed app or a non-installed app write on my machine and launch it right from there. i found that, yes, i was spending probably 80 to 90 percent of my time here on the desktop. desktop's pretty … that's where i spend most of my time. i pin all my apps, everything is right there.
what's interesting though is there was a very interesting blog post by steven sinofsky and this goes to my why the start menu on how people worked. do you know where nearly 82% of all users store the apps that they use every day? where are they putting all of their icons for their apps? on the desktop. all of their apps, so they would have a desktop with 300 little icons for all their apps and then folders with the stuff that they wanted to use and it would be completely full but yet when we say … well, we can organize it like this.
look! there's your folders and there's those apps, we've just made bigger icons and the icons, if there's something new happening or something interesting it will update. no, no, no, you can't do this. this doesn't make any sense having a screen filled with the icons of all the applications that i use big and easy to click rather than small and tiny up in the top left hand corner. my favorite is, “where is the start screen?†and i point to the big word start. it's right there in the front. we've kept it easy to find. yes, most people are going to spend time on the desktop but when you organize this
and people say, “well, i had folders,†well, i have every day, i have office 2013, i have people, work apps, travel, my business and partner apps, entertainment. there's my folders that i had. trying to use a start menu on the touch screen is difficult hence why we did it this way but you don't have to have touch. if somebody has a laptop, it's a little bit older, it's early windows 7, late windows vista, put windows 8 on it and see what a difference in performance that machine is going to have for you.
without touch it's great. i don't use the touch that much. i have a surface pro, i have a dell xps12, i use a lot of different machines to test out and it's rare when i touch the desktop. tends me more when i'm at a webpage to scroll up and down that webpage just ‘cause it's faster than going to my mouse. that's the one time that i really, really use it. windows rt versus windows 8. anybody want to tell me what the big difference is between rt and windows 8? anybody want to take a stab out it? pardon me?
yes, that's part of it. at the core there was the chip set. rt devices use an arm chip, the same chip that you find on your smart phone. you can use windows 8 apps, apps that are installed from the app store. but the big thing about an rt devices you cannot install third party desktop apps. that can't join the domain and you cannot image the machine meaning you can't use like ghost or something like that to image out the machine. you can refresh it, you can use those great tools the guys talked about in the last session, the system refresh and all of that but you cannot deploy an rt, you cannot join the domain, cannot install third party apps.
it's what we refer to as a consumption device like an ipad or the android tablets, they're consumption. they're great for reading news, they're great for doing email, they're great for consuming information. the direction that we find and what we hear people are saying is i have three devices. i have my smart phone which i use quite a bit, i have a consumption device and then when i need to create i have a creation device. that's my one that has excel, that's my one that has powerpoint or has photoshop. my surface pro i run photoshop, i run client hypervisor, i run visual studio,
i run everything on that device. it is a consumption and a creation device. i was looking at one of the new hp devices, the convertible tablet which also is a creation device: full version of windows 8 pro, 64 bit, full capability of installing app. it's important to understand if somebody says, “i'm looking at a device to go is it rt?†there are limitations, “or is it the ivybridge chip or is it a full intel processor?†and it's going to really kind of tell you what you're going to get. the lower powered chips like the oak trail and the ivy bridge and the adams,
less power, but the ability to install apps. if you have somebody saying, “i need to run office. i need to do some pretty simple thing. i'm not gaming. i'm not running photoshop. i'm not running client hypervisor. i'm not using visual studio.†those are going to be great machines with eight, nine, ten hours of battery life. they're going to run the base test up apps, their domain joinable. key thing to understand the biggest problem that we find with it process they say, “we love ipads and android devices but our concern is byod, bring your own device.â€
we can't secure them because they're not domain join. we don't own the data. one of the coolest features in windows 8 is this. this is an enterprise feature, it's only available in the enterprise queue and this is windows to go. we have companies right now where people are saying, “hi. what is my next pc?†and they go, “hi, here's your brand new pc.†and they say, “excuse me?†let me show you.
we see on this machine, when it comes up, notice i've got microsoft office, i've got people, i've got this really cool apps that we built, you can with any of our rt or pro-devices, you can build your own business apps, you can build your own app store, you can deploy those apps to your employees. we have the ability in windows 8 to do that. again, something that really separates us. okay? we've seen this, this is cool. i have office. i take this stick, i already have one in my machine so what i'm going to do is it's in my machine,
i'm going to press power and i'm going to restart and i've set the bios to boot from usb. by the way, 256 gig hard drive on this machine and i'll show you in a few minutes why that's important. there's the hp logo and we'll give it a minute. okay. we should be able to see that. there we go. the first thing you notice is, “hey, his start screen looks different,†and here's my password.
windows 8. there's my machine. notice. this is my own personal machine. all of a sudden there's my pictures because i keep every document that i use in sky drive or sky drive pro. i have nothing in my my docs which means is if i change a document on one machine, if i go to my tablet i go anywhere, my data stays the same on all machines. you see all my favorites, you see everything that makes my machine personal and unique but i'm running that all from this usb key.
well, prove it. all right, well. if i take a look and i go to windows e you'll notice 30 gigs. this is a 32 gig usb key. this is a full version of windows, all my apps, everything that makes my pc unique, running off of this usb key. start to think of the scenarios for that. who thinks this is a pretty cool feature? i got three of them. you can have one, you can have one, one way in the back.
those run about $40 a piece for those drives. there also is a great western digital 500 gig drive that runs about 80 bucks. these are not your normal average usb three drives. if you put it into your machine and look at it you're going to see nothing. these are like mini ssds that are meant for read and write. for those of you who got that you'll need to set your bios or f12 boot into the usb drive. the first time you do it it will take about six to eight minutes to load up because it's going to look at the machine, its' going to grab all the drivers that are built in, load them up appropriately
and then it's going to ask you to go ahead like a brand new pc setup. let's personalize. what's your windows live id, what's the wi-fi, etc. you can put that into as many machines as you like. the windows to go license by the way with enterprise is free. if you buy 50 windows 8 licenses you have licenses to build 50 of those windows to go keys. what's different than just installing windows 8 on the usb stick? you're going to be great till you plug it in to your next machine. when it says, “hi, none of this hardware matches.†this is an invalid copy of windows.
you'll notice this moves quickly, apps launch very, very fast. there is no difference from how i see it launching here to how i see it launching on my main desktop. if i pull this usb stick this machine will freeze up and after 60 seconds this machine will shut down. pretty cool feature. this is the future of windows. this is the direction that we see things going. that it is going to make a dramatic change.
as people say, i want my data everywhere. i want to be able to bring my own pc from home and bring it into work. what a great scenario. somebody walks in with a windows 7 home pc, we hand them this, they plug it in to their usb, usb 2 or 3 port and boom there's our windows 8 domain joined, bit-locked corporate image with all of our apps ready to go right on their pc. if there's any viruses or malware it doesn't make a difference because we don't see
what's on their pc. we're only really using the hardware. imagine if we basically took the hard drive out and replaced it with this usb key that that's doing it. that's all right. i don't need internet right now. it's going to make me do that every time is it? windows to go. one of the cool new killer features in windows 8 and becomes a really neat idea on how to really help customers in certain types of situations which makes sense.
support ends for windows xp. who knows when? what date does support for windows xp end? anyone? sixty percent of all people in the world do not know the date. nobody knows? come on, take a guess. june 7th, wrong. not correct.
april 8th 2014. we're just about at the one year countdown. now right now if someone is not on extended support they are not getting support for windows 8 but they are still getting key and critical patches and updates. on april 8th 2014 12 years almost to the day since windows xp was born we will stop supporting it, we will kill it. i will tell you right now, mark my words, take a picture, quote me. we will not extend support for windows xp on that day. we have people that don't believe us. i am telling you right now, believe me.
we will stop supporting it on that day. i had somebody walked up to me yesterday and this was great, he said, “norton,†or one of the antivirus companies, is going to continue supporting windows xp after that date. so that means my pc is safe, right? i said, “no.†all you're getting now is … you may not get a new virus but if we find a weakness in xp, something that can be exploited, we will not be patching it after that point. great, you're not going to get a virus but somebody can hack directly into that machine
and can do it. windows xp does not make sense for the way users are using pcs today. they're working out of a starbucks, they work for multiple occasions, they want those quick and fast food at times, they want to know that their os has hardened and we recommend theymove to a modern os, windows 7 or windows 8. i don't care which one. for some users windows 7 is going to make great sense. “hey, i sit at a desk all day, i enter data, i manage a help desk,â€
windows 7, keep them on. that's awesome. but as soon as somebody says, “hey, i want a tablet. i want to be able to use the small tablet, i want to be portable.†windows 8 immediately make sense because it's a tablet that's domain joinable, manageable and can be completely locked down. you can build your own apps for windows 8. those can go into the store and they're publicly available or you can build an app store which your company can pull apps from that are built only for your companies. why isn't windows to go available for pro users?
there's a lot of reasons for that but the main thing is in order to keep licensing to [inaudible] plug it into those multiple machines we actually license it through kms mac servers. it has a licensing that enables it to be plugged in to all these machines without it all of us and going. “hey, i've already used up that license and taking out a license compliancy.†then uefi. if you guys have questions on uefi i can answer that too but let me ask your questions. i've saved 20, 25 minutes in this.
what questions do you guys have on windows 8? what are you saying, what are people asking that you just don't havea good answer for? yup. windows 8 and uefi, how many changes can you make before it does? we're still around that depending on the mother board in the system between five … i think it's five out of the eight. it depends on how many happen at a time. if you change out a hard drive you're going to be fine but if you change hard drive, memory and something else it depends on the combination.
it says little as three and as much as five depending on the components that are changed. for those of you not familiar with uefi, uefi is the new bios in new windows 8 machines. the uefi. they talked about this earlier. anybody know why left the old traditional bios and move to uefi? anybody read the blog post on that? yeah. secure boot and manage boot is absolutely one of those which is an intelfeature. i had a lot of people saying we're really mad at microsoft because they built in this mini os on a chip which actually checks for malware and spyware and viruses and that nothing in the machine has changed and it holds a mini os.
that wasn't us, that was intel. we leveraged the technology. but you're absolutely correct and i'll go into that more in a minute but the second one is the bios was the slowest part of the boot. the bios was taking six to eight seconds out to boot; uefi, two seconds. we're able to get your windows pc to boot up 8 to 15 seconds faster by changing out bios. now what soc system on a chip is and this is great. grandma's at home, grandma gets an email and in it it's from her favorite grandson and it says, “grandma, click here for a card that says how much i love you
and 20% off your next purchase at the shoe barn and grandma clicks it and all of a sudden 50 web pages start popping up and grandma is seeing things that grandma probably doesn't want to see on the internet. okay. with windows 7 that's a problem. with windows 8 it's not. all grandma has to do is what's going to pop up is little thing that says, “you've got malware spyware.†what it's going to say is there's a problem with your pc. you'd need to reboot.
grandma knows, “okay, i can do that,†and she hits reboot. when her pc reboots and i use the analogy of it's hard to change the tires on a car while the car is running. it's hard to pull malware and viruses out of a system when the system is running. so what it does is it basically loads a mini os, it says, what's new and different? what shouldn't be here? it removes it, it fixes it and makes repairs to the system and then reboots the pc and now the root kit, the malware, the virus, whatever it is is gone and all grandma had to do is hit a button that says reboot. no other instructions, no insert media,
no insert disk, we've made it easier. we know one of the big things people said is, i like my mac because my mac doesn't get viruses. which is crap. there's a big os virus that's going around today for safari users. there are viruses. we have built in antimalware, anti spyware, antivirus and firewall into windows 8. you don't even need to go out and go buy a norton products. they do add another level of security which is great. if you are a person who tends to hit at risk websites
because of your job then that's great, it's good, but we've made it for the average consumer where they don't need to do anything but boot up that pc and run it. and be able to get it back to a good place and that's pretty critical too. we were chatting about in the last session, we were chatting about these features and they're awesome features. if i go here and they'll change pc and i go into general and i go down here. first of all tells me my available storage, how much do i have left, how much are all my apps using up but i have this refresh your pc
without affecting files where it's going to go through … do exactly that. it's going to repair the os, it's going to fix those problems but it's not going to remove any of the user data. it's great. saves that user so much time and trouble. we have removed everything and reinstall windows. if i decide that i'm feeling overly generous, i want to give one of you my surface pro all i'm going to have to do is hit this button, it's going to wipe the whole machine and bring it right back to the factory settings.
i can hand it to you, all my data's gone. it's nice and secure, it's done. the advance start up option is still there but here's a great thing about advance start up option. if you have built the perfect pc, you get all the drivers, all your updates, you've installed all your appsand you love the way it is, if you can image your pc you can then pull from a wim image and you can pull from that wim image and you can reimage back that pc. you can put in that usb key say,“hi, this wmi is my pc image and you cannot only bring your pc back but you can actually reimage that pc with all your apps
and all your data and everything that made that pc unique.†again, more flexibility in how we go ahead and bring that out. backups are another thing where we built in software that automatically every 20, 30 minutes as often as you want will go into the system and will just back up exactly where you're at. it's going to take all your apps, here's where they're at, here's the changes you made, here's what you did. what step do you want to get back to? we made it very, very simple to use. it's features like that that we heard from a lot of you guys, a lot of other folks, these are things that make it hard for the average user.
other questions? oh come on. somebody's going to have one. yeah. how reliable is wim imaging in going [inaudible]. it depends on the tool that you're using. if you're using mdt … if you're using something like mdt to build it it's incredibly reliable, it's going to [inaudible]; depends on the tool that you're using to build a wmi image. if you use mdt, awesome. because you can go to mdt, you can say, grab a snapshot of this machine,
turn it into a wim image as long as you have those base files you're going to be great. wim image is only as reliable as the tools you're using to build the wim image. but if it's a good, solid wmi image it's going to pull in without a problem on the usb key. did that answer your question? have you tried it? you haven't yet. okay, email me. play with it, try it. if it doesn't work for you let me know and we'll walk you through
and make sure that the scripts were built correctly, that are setting up because the other thing to keep in mind is that when you take a look at it you do need to say things like install.net framework before you install link or office. if you do it in the wrong order things are going to fail. so you may want to go into the task sequence and make sure that the sequence happens in the right order. things like bit locker, things like that have to be turned off as well so you want to make sure you haven't missed any of those steps. it's a good question.
other questions, i can get plenty things i can talk about. yes sir. audience: particularly flash in your browsing experience in the windows more touch environment. i'm sure i don't have to go into … the challenges with that, do you guys get a lot of questions coming in for that? stephen: flash is now supported. we had an update for windows rt devices that flash is now supported in the windows desktop browser that came about a week or so ago. any rt device that's out there got the update. it's already works in all the pro devices because you can install flash.
the big thing and i think the thing you're getting at is when you're in this browser. where is my windows 8 browser? when you're at this browser. why am i not seeing it? right here. yeah. when i'm in this browser why are not all the plug-ins in this browser supported but are on the desktop and there's a very, very good reason for that. we wanted to have the fastest, simplest, best experience. here's a good example. for example, i'm going to get into … i'll type in word chicago and once again, what is it, hp summit, right? oh there it is, hp social summit. i remembered it this time.
all right, we'll try that again. so i'll launch this and we're going to my desktop browser and i will type in chicago. okay. so great. i've got this really nice experience and then what i can do is i can use something called flip forward. flip forward is a feature that's built in that says i'm going to figure out automatically what the next page is you're going to want to go to and allow you to flip back and forth. very, very simply through web pages. you can do this, you don't have to have touch, you can go ahead and click on it.
if i go to a page like cnn, okay? again pinch zoom work really fast, pick an article. that's great. here's the article, work through it, reverse, go back. the idea was to have the fastest, smoothest, best browsing experience for end users and by removing a lot of the plug-ins, not allowing them to run here it made for a fast, simple, great experience which also reduce the chance that you're going to hit something, no pop ups, go to a site that has a ton of pop ups some problems, in this browser it doesn't happen. by removing that we've made a safer, faster browser experience.
if there's a plug-in you want to use absolutely with any page you can go down here and you can say view it on the desktop and boom! there it is on the desktop, your skype plug-in's available, whatever it is that you need. but our goal was to make sure that people have that great fast, smooth, easy to use experience on that desktop browser. it is one browser, it is two different phases for it, depending on how you want to use it. but flash is now supported on our rt and in this browser because we realize that scenario with a lot of videos and things that people do want to do that should be able to support it and now it does do it.
that update came, it's a major update to rt about a week or so ago and there's blogs out on it too if people have questions. you had a question, and then over here. audience: yeah, i had one. sorry. stephen: that's okay. audience: you're a lot faster of windows 8 than i am. audience:that's pretty cool. yeah, stephen: it's kind of my job. audience: yeah. right. this was a little bit different but i'm a big fan of windows' home server and of course it's gone so … stephen: yeah.
audience: but it still works but it's … what do you recommend? do you recommend windows 8 to replace windows some server on that same device? stephen: i think it depends on how people are using it. i for example love … i setup a home group at home so my wife and i would share all the pictures. i use sky drive where i can share everything with my friends and family and go that way and i love xbox smart glass. if you guys have not play with this feature, if you have an xbox go home and play with xbox smart glass.
so cool. i was watching game of thrones. so on my tablet, i'm running smart glass and it connects with the hp o and it goes, “hi.†and also there was bios on the characters, there was maps, there was all this cool interactive stuff and i can control the xbox which is really my media server at home. i do net netflix, i do amazon prime, redbox is going to be available very, very soon for that so you'll have the redbox. i watch nho game center so i watch all my hockey games through it.
that's really replaced my media center. i can put in a usb drive filled with photos, i can connect to sky drive where everything's at. so what we're really saying is for a lot of folks … if you buy a movie, again, that three-minute popcorn role, the problem is if you buy a movie you got to wait for that movie to download. not with xbox video. buy a movie for … rent it for four bucks, buy it for 15, hit play, it's streaming right then and there. that's it. it takes 30 seconds to get to that point.
and my favorite part is i could be watching that movie and i can say … play it on my tablet and i'm only watching it on my tablet and i can say play on xbox, i hit a button, that movie right where i'm at moves to my xbox. same with musical playlist, same with pictures. we're really seeing that rather than media centers which are great for enthusiast and great for hobbyist but not good for the everyday person that says, “i'm not technical and i don't know how to set this stuff up.†i have a dvr, i'm fine. i just really want to be able to share my pictures and watch my movies
and make it easy for my kids to be able to do this stuff; that becomes a really awesome feature. so xbox is really replacing it. we're going to continue to support the home server for those folks that invested in that. that's not going to go away but i don't see us making big advances where xbox and then our new version of xbox that will be coming out later this year is going to add even more functionality that i think a lot of our users are going to be very, very happy with. yes. in the near future. yeah.
we're working very, very hard on that. i've seen some of the new stuff that's happening with kinect and xbox and i think one of the most exciting things that we're seeing is the merge and our goal is over the next few version of windows is that windows phone and windows and xbox which are all now based on the windows rt platform which is not the rt device but we've replaced the windows 32 run time with the windows rt. windows run time is that it's now the same framework: phone, windows 8 and xbox all now are going to run on the same base platform. it's not saying they're all running windows 8 but they're running the key …
imagine the plumbing and electricity in your houses the framework, that's the framework. our goal is to merge that so you're really running one version across all your devices. buy an app once and this is something we see a lot with ios and android users is they buy an app, it's not the same version with the app that runs on their iphone, that runs on their ipad, that runs on their mac book. its different versions with different feature functionality. how great to buy that app once, have it work on all of your devices and have one level of functionality that that's available on all. we already see that with sky drive.
i have sky drive here on my laptop, i have it on my phone, i can watch those documents, edit them, play with them through office 365 and through office online. we're offering that functionality and that's really our goal. the other key thing to understand about windows 8 is if you want to do something interesting walk through any college or any … not high school but college. as you walk through the halls you're going to see every student doing this. they're looking down at their phone. why? i saw a lot of people doing it here at the conference. never mind the college campus. why? this is their hud, this is their heads up display, it's their dashboard.
where do i need to be next? did i miss a call? did i miss a message? drive emails. did somebody twitter me? did somebody facebook me? that information is right there. with windows 8 it's right here. as soon as you look, what's my next appointment? i have lunch at the steakhouse. i have 40 unread emails. i have 37 advance projects i'm doing. i have four expense reports that i need and three pending invoices. like a heads up display that information is here. in windows 7 you have to launch everything single one of those apps to know what you were doing. [inaudible] behind windows 8 is there's that information right there at a glance.
even on the lock screen, it's going to give me that information and that ability to know at a moment exactly what's important in your life and where it's at and to organize these tiles into groups and into areas that make the most sense for what's important to you is at the core of the windows 8 products. whether it's phone, whether it's this and having that same experience on a tablet and on a desktop and on a laptop and on an ultrabook really becomes so critical. no compromise experience is really at the center of it. who had the next question? i think you did. speaker 4: hello? stephen: yeah.
speaker 4: music, the music app and music cds. stephen: yeah. speaker 4: all right. stephen: the music app sucks. we're working on it. it does. we're working on it. we'll have some updates to it in the near future which i'm very excited about. i think the mail app has got a long way to go. the music app and the video app have a long way to go. they were not finished in the level that we would have like when we released windows 8. we have updates coming for those in the future and that will be great. the reason you're asking about why is there no windows media center and dvd playback
on windows devices. well very, very simply we don't own all the codecs for it. we thought, well we could include media center in every copy but you know what? we have to charge all of you … i think its ten bucks. that's fine if you're using it, but why charge everybody on the planet $10 for something they may not use? if you buy pro it does not include windows media center. you can get the update for … i think … is it ten bucks? i think it's $9.99. you can go into the front page of pro say upgrade to windows 8 pro media center or whatever it is and you can download it and you can get it and then you're paying for that
then you can do dvd playback and all the other stuff that you may want to do. it just didn't make sense to charge everybody for a feature that a lot of people weren't using or you can go into our windows store and download power dvd which is also going to do that for you or a myriad of other products that are available on the market that you may like better that may offer more features and functionality than we were giving you within the product. that was really our reason behind it. it was just to be able to lower the price and not charge everybody for something that not everybody needed or wanted.
does that answer your question? good. other questions? i can keep talking for awhile. i'm good at that. let's get to the mic as it's hard to hear you up here. speaker 5: is there anything you can tell us about the next version of windows? stephen: it will be cool. unfortunately there's really nothing i can say about windows … the code name blue or whatever people are calling it this week and what we're doing next. what i can say is that we look a lot at social media and what people are saying. that is how we really hear. we have five million people who subscribe
to our consumer facebook page. five million. we do anything, we get a lot of feedback very, very quickly. we look at forums, we look at twitter, we look at … what are people getting and what aren't they getting in windows 8 and that really drives our process. as we look to what can we do to make windows 8 better, more functional: mail, music, video, things like that. we take that in and that goes right into our engines on what are we going to do and it goes into a list. if we hear about something more than something else … i mean, i get people all time.
“i would use windows 8 except you don't have x, y, z obscure feature so i will never use windows 8.†okay, right now i have one email from one person on the planet. i'll swear to god, my favorite was a guy who was upset that you had to go online to activate because he was on a boat with no internet connectivity eight months out of the year. well my question was, “well then how are you getting this email to me?†not going to chain something for one person but the more that you guys see issues, the more that we see it in the forums, the more that we see that raised up and discussions become bigger on. not just “i hate this, this sucksâ€
but “hey, what if it did this,†or “i wish it had this functionality,†or “this really becomes a blocker,†those messages get through and you guys at the widest level as well as the customers that you support help to drive those changes to make the product better and make windows 8 what you want it to be. some things we're not going to do like bringing the start menu back. it's just not going to happen. there are tons of great third party, startdock, stuff like that that you can go buy. if someone says if the only thing keeping them from using windows 8 is a start menu, well, they don't know enough about windows 8.
they're probably scared and still windows 7 user, fine. go pay the five bucks, download them if that's what's keeping it. but chances are, that's not it. it's a lack of education. it's a lack of understanding. hey, you can use windows x, you can build these great groups on your desktop and you can, you know, organize them. i have people who just seriously have no clue how this feature here even works like how do i do them? i'm like, “well, you take an app and you grab it and you drag it until you get a little gray bar like that and then you release it and you pull and you pull down and we give it a name and we call this test.
and i hit enter. then i go back and look, there it is. they go, “oh, cool. i didn't know that that did that. that's awesome.†now we've sold them [inaudibl], okay, neat. it's those little things that really drive those people and that's why you guys are so incredibly important. that's why i'm here this week is to get a chance to sit with you guys and talk to you guys and get that feedback on what we need to do to make the product better. and what isn't working for your customers. i got time for one more question then i have another session where we'll dig in to this.
more about windows to go and more about some of the key features in windows 8 and that bring your own device scenario, we'll dig in to a little deeper. i think i have three or four more windows to go device i'll throw out. if you didn't get one then we'll give one to you then. i also have a cool surprise in that session so make sure you're there. yes? dib? oh dibs. no dibs. no favorites, sorry. yes, question. since we've launched windows 8 products like … speaker 6: okay. since you launched windows 8 there's been products on the market like start 8, classic shell … and people are installing these by the thousands.
stephen: sure. speaker 6: what does microsoft learn from that other than people don't like change? stephen: people don't like change. that once people get to windows 8 and really start to use it they love it and often they stop using those features. it's the ones who are on 7 and they just aren't willing to sit down and take the time. we've had a lot of people … i'll tell you right now. we've had three million downloads of the eval which by the way if you download the windows 8 eval you can build your own windows to go stick.
just type in windows to go when you're on enterprise like this. type in windows to and there it is, windows to go, and you'll see it right there underneath settings, you can build it. those folks were on windows 7, they tried it and they just didn't take that time, they haven't watched the tutorial or they uninstalled it. we've had a lot of people that have uninstalled it, reinstalled it three times and finally on the third time they got a great machine, they started playing with it. “oh, i really like it.†and they find they're doing things faster. it's just that change. what's great is all of our competitors seem to be able to.
i go, “where's the start menu on your ipad? where's the start menu on your android?†“i don't have one.†“why?†for some reason they're fine when all of our competitors do it but us because we're the tried and true and don't change, we make a big change, people lose their mind. but that's good. it's great to see, and this is the direction. we're going to make changes, we're going to change things, we're going to move forward and we're going to do what our users … not only what they're asking for but really what they need to be successful and that's critical. that's all the time i have. i'll be walking around.
i have another session in about an hour or so. thank you very much.
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