Executive Keynotes, Day 2: Microsoft 2008

Remarks by: Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect; Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group; David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President, Live Platform Services; Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Division; Takeshi Numoto, General Manager, Office Product Management Group

Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008

Los Angeles, California

Oct. 28, 2008

saying last year your broadcaster chose what you watched. This year, thanks to on-demand propositions, you choose what you watch, although probably what you're going to watch was really determined by your broadcaster, but next year your friends are going to choose what you watch, and it thanks to Meshified applications like this that will allow that new broadcast 2.0 proposition.

Thank you. (Applause.)

DAVID TREADWELL: That was great. Thanks very much, Anthony.

So, that was taking a Web application, a Silverlight based Web application, integrating it with these Live Services, Live Framework capabilities, so that you can run offline, access to data offline, and run out of the browser that does it.

So, we didn't have long to talk about it. That's a very high level view of what we're doing in Live Services, and obviously we're genuinely enthusiastic about what we're doing there.

You want to get started. First off, download Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It has a lot of advances that Scott talked about, great development environment, and I'm sure many of you use it already.

Later today, on Azure.com, we'll have the Live Framework CTP. Please go check it out and make use of this infrastructure. Build applications that exploit these concepts around synchronization of data, of devices, of applications and of people to build awesome, compelling applications that take the best of the client tier and the Web tier for your users.

Please sign up for Live Mesh as an end user. Later this week, we're putting Live Mesh in beta, and we're adding capabilities, both new features as well as support for Windows Mobile 6 and Macintosh from the Live Mesh. (Applause.)

And finally, later today, around 1:00 we'll have the good USB hard drive, 160 gig hard drive that will have a ton of the bits you'll need to make use of all this stuff that Steven and Scott and I have talked about today.

So, with that, I'd like to introduce Takeshi Numoto, who is going to show you how Office is taking advantage of the technologies that we've been talking about today to build transformational application experiences. (Applause.)

TAKESHI NUMOTO: Good morning! It's my absolute honor to represent the Office team today to share our vision for delivering great user experiences across the PC, phone, and the Web in Office 14.

Office is about helping you work the way you want to, and with over half a billion customers using our product worldwide, we have learned a tremendous amount in terms of the huge diversity in the way people work.

Customers also tell us that no matter what their work style, they want to be able to share information, connect with others, and collaborate without boundaries. And, of course, people want to do this with a seamless experience across the PC and phone and Web.

And that's why I'm so excited to announce today that we'll be delivering Outlook Web Applications as part of Office 14. (Applause.)

Office Web Applications are lightweight versions of our desktop productivity applications that enable people to view, edit, and collaborate on Office documents right within the browser.

We will be delivering those for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and you will see many of them today.

So, let's get to the demo.

Let me start with OneNote 14, our digital note-taking application. Today, I'm playing the role of a movie producer, with Chris as an outside consultant. We are using a notebook that we're sharing on Office Live. On the left-hand screen you can see the notebook open in OneNote on my PC, and on the right-hand side you can see Chris at an Internet café using OneNote Web Application to access the same notebook.

OneNote gives me a very flexible surface to keep track of all sorts of things, like the text, documents, images, and I can also see who contributed what content into this notebook.

We are all brainstorming together for movie locations, and one of the locations we're interested in is the Regional Pantry Café, which is a local favorite just a few blocks away from this convention center.

So, let me grab a screen clipping of a map for this location. I can take just a portion of the map I want, and then OneNote automatically adds it to the notebook with a very helpful URL that helps me go back to the source if I want to later, and in a few seconds it should show up on Chris's browser as well; very cool. (Applause.)

CHRIS BRYANT: So, Takeshi, I see that the picture has synched into my view of the notebook, but we still do need some information from the café. So, I'm going to make a note here that we need to take a shot from this location. I'm a terrible typist.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: So, I get an update from Chris with this green highlight here on my PC as well.

We also have Dan in the audience, and imagine that Dan is actually at the café scouting this location using his phone and taking photos using OneNote Mobile.

OneNote Mobile synchronizes all the notes he takes on the phone to a shared notebook on Office Live. This means that the photo he just took on site, it will show up on my PC shortly. And there it is.

You can see the menu from this café here. And let me just grab this and put it right here. And this is now going to be showing up on Chris's browser as well in just a few seconds. (Applause.)

So, this is a great example of Office enabling dynamic collaboration across the PC, phone, and the Web, and it's also a great example of our vision for the future of productivity.

Now let me switch over to Word, Word 14. So, imagine now that Chris is back in his office at his PC, and he and I are looking at a contract to finalize a business arrangement. So, you are seeing that both he and I can open the same document at the same time without being locked out or being forced into read-only mode. And on the right-hand screen you can see that Chris edited the location information and in my view of the document on the left-hand side I am seeing his presence information. This helps me avoid making conflicting changes, and also lets me use the presence icon to reach out to him if I want, whether it be in e-mail, IM or a call.

Let me add the project title, and as I type, in a few seconds Chris should be seeing a presence of myself in his document. But now that I'm ready, let me just synch the document and I get the updates in green highlights from Chris.

Now let me go back to the Office Live Workspace where we're sharing this document. Office Live Workspace is built on many of the Live technologies, Live Services that David talked about earlier, and in the future your Live Mesh Folder will start showing up here as well.

Now let me open the same contract we just looked at, and this time open this in the Word Web application.

I get a fantastic rendering of the document just as it was meant to be read. All the elements of the document are here, the nice formatting, the table, the footer, even the watermark.

And Office Web Applications would work on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, but we can make the experience better when we can use Silverlight. Like when I zoom here, I get a fantastic crisp text, thanks to Silverlight.

Now, of course, it's not just about viewing. I can go into editing, and you can see that we're delivering the Ribbon to enable a consistent experience in the browser, as well as enabling an editing experience that's simple and fast.

One important thing to note here is when I make changes in the browser, the document still retains its full fidelity, which means I don't lose any data or formatting.

Now let me switch over to Excel Web Application. I have a spreadsheet that helps me score the various locations to figure out which one is the best one for our film. I am opening this in IE 8 here, and Chris will be opening this in Firefox. Just like the Word Web Application you saw earlier, I get the same Ribbon experience, consistent Ribbon experience delivered into the browser with all the basic editing capabilities. I get things like conditional formatting, data bars, icon sets or things like the chart down below, just like I'm used to on the PC. And I can do things like use the familiar sum function just as I'm used to.

I'd better type something. Okay.

CHRIS BRYANT: So, Takeshi, I'm a huge fan of Felipe's, which is actually downtown. (Applause.) Thank you.

I'm a huge fan of Felipe's, and I'm going to call this location out by highlighting it here in my view, just so you know how much I like it.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: Okay, you can see that Chris's change is being reflected on my view, and, of course, my changes are reflected in his as well.

Now let me just hit publish, and this lets me publish the various elements of the spreadsheet with an embed tag that I get here, into some other sites or blogs. In this case let me pick the chart I showed you earlier, and publish that into Windows Live Spaces.

Let me finish the posting. So, here you are seeing the chart posted into this blog using REST APIs, which allows me to pull the various information from the spreadsheet. This means that when the data in the underlying spreadsheet changes, the chart will get reflected as well.

CHRIS BRYANT: So, Takeshi, I don't think the score for Felipe's is quite fair, especially not given how much I like it, so I'm going to manually bump that up to say 500 I think is fair.

Okay, let me hit refresh here. Updating. Let me try again.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: You can see that chart reflects the changes that Chris just made. (Applause.)

This is also a great example of how Office Web Applications can help extend Office documents into the Web.

As you can see, we are very excited about the Office Web Applications, but they are actually just a small part of our overall story for Office 14, and as we move along, we look forward to sharing more of the full story on Office 14.

Office is all about defining the future of productivity and to us it means embracing all of the diversity in the way people work, while bringing them together in a great collaboration experience that spans the PC, the phone, and the Web.

Thank you and let me bring Ray back onstage. (Applause.)

RAY OZZIE: Thanks, Takeshi.

For quite some time now many of you have wondered just how or even whether we might truly bring our Office suite to the Web. Our aspirations have been about more than just delivering docs and spreadsheets in a browser over the Web. What Takeshi just showed you is that the combination of the Web, the phone, and the PC can be clearly more valuable for our customers than any one of those platforms as taken by itself.

As a combined, integrated solution we can center the creation and editing tasks where they're most natural and effective, on the PC. We can pivot the sharing and collaboration around the Internet and the Web. We can channel your most spontaneous actions to within your arm's reach on the phone.

This is a vision of seamless connected productivity, a coherent vision of a multi-screen office, an office across platform boundaries, an office without walls.

Before Takeshi was on stage, Dave Treadwell gave you a quick overview of the Live Services platform and how we're using Mesh technologies to create a synchronization bridge that spans Windows PCs, the phone and the Web. He showed how Live Services can be used to Mesh enable a content rich Web site, letting Microsoft bear the risk of understanding how to reliably synch at high scale across a world of Windows PCs, phones, and devices.

Scott Guthrie showed you some tremendous innovations in the realm of our platforms, tools, and runtimes, and what I found great about Scott's talk is just how easy we're making it to build great Windows apps and Web apps, which, of course, I think is a critically important thing, because a contemporary software and service app should easily be able to deliver the best of Windows and the best of the Web.

And opening the morning, Steven Sinofsky showed you some of the great innovation in Windows 7 and Windows Live wave 3, Windows and Windows Live coming together to deliver a seamless PC, Web, OS experience, a Windows without walls.

So, in terms of a call to action, if you haven't done so already, please make sure to register for provisioning at Azure.com. And starting at 1:00 PM today every attendee can pick up a copy of the goods, a disk containing the bits for Windows 7, Visual Studio, .NET Framework 4, and much more.

So, as I draw today's keynote to a close, I hope that these presentations and demos have been useful to you and to your business. All of what you saw yesterday and today is real, and I hope this was pretty clear to you in the way that we're betting on our platforms with our apps.

But unquestionably some of the elements of what you saw yesterday and today were also nascent, and for some of the things we introduce it's really just the beginning.

We showed some nascent but important back-end infrastructure, design patterns and models that are aspiring to be the basis for our horizontally scaled systems of the next 50 years.

We showed some nascent but important front-end infrastructure and design patterns and models that are aspiring to be the basis for the multi-screen experiences of today and tomorrow, Windows PCs, the Web, and a world of devices.

At both the front-end and the back-end, for all of us as developers, for you and for Microsoft, we see these as significant investments in our future.

So, once again thank you, thank you very much for your time and attention and for coming to PDC08. Thank you for investing in us. And I hope together we can continue to do some amazing and valuable things for all of our customers.

Enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks. (Applause.)