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Turner, making his fourth appearance as a CeBit speaker, was introduced by Andreas Gruchow, a member of the board of Deutsche Messe, the company that runs the giant trade show, with this year features 4,200 exhibitors from 70 countries; they are expecting 300,000 attendees.
Here are some of the highlights from Turner's comments:
- Turner notes that Microsoft is focused on a few things. They have 95,000 employees, and operate in 190 countries. They will spend over $9 billion in R&D this calendar year, $3 billion more than the next closest technology company.
- Turner notes that they are one of the few tech companies on the planet that supports consumers and enterprises both.
- Over 1 billion people use MSFT products every day.
- He says MSFT gives hundreds of million in cash and software each year to schools around the world.
- Turner noted that the company had record earnings, revenue, cash flow and EPS in the June 2011 fiscal year.
- He's walking through the trends: cloud, social, consumerization of IT, a shift to mobile, natural interface, explosion of devices, big data. There are the trend they are working on with that $9 billion of IT.
- Turner notes that the job of CIO in the enterprise is evolving - consumer and end-user has more capability at home or on their person than in the workplace. Business decision makers under pressure to boost productivity, no matter what they do. CIO becoming the chief innovation officer.
- On the cloud: he cites a Forrester stat that says cloud spending will reach $241 billion in 2010 from $40.7 billion in 2011. He says Microsoft has cloud software for every single business. That includes public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. Turner says they are seeing a lot of uptake of the private cloud, to find, use and share information when, how and where they want it.
- In the public cloud, Turner says they are being asked more and more to manage the platform
- On big data: He says they are seeing growing demand from end users and growing availability of new types of data. Causing a widening gap between ability to store the data and take the data and turn it into information, knowledge and informed decisions. He says they have a big data approach - discover insights across all users and data types.
- Four pillars to their big data strategy: enterprise ready; connected to the world's data, easier to curate public and internal data sets; provides analytics for everyone, familiar and easy to use business intelligence tools; direct integration with Excel; open and flexible, compatible with Hadoop, choice of development tools, compatible with existing data warehouse software.
- Turner said the digital workstyle is converging with a digital lifestyle. Ultimately, he says, customers have more choice; line between personal and professional continues to blur. Microsoft is unifying the user experience today.
- Turner says he is excited about Windows 8 - an operating system with no compromises. The ability to have the power and magic and significance of traditional PC in lots of different devices. Allow flexibility but provider functionality, security and management.
- Demo time. He brings out Erwin Visser, senior director for Windows, to do a demo of Windows 8. He says they can deliver tablets with power of PC; with the Metro interface. The device will run old WIndows 7 apps, as well as new Metro style apps.
- It starts with the home page, with a list of appointments and other basic information, plus a big picture. He demonstrates the optional new picture passwords option - touch specific points on an image rather than typing a series of letters and numbers. (In his case it involves touching specific spots on a picture of his kids.) Then on to the Start screen, with business and personal apps. The tiles are alive and update information continuously. You can zoom out to easily see all the apps, and rearrange them. Pin tiles for any Web page to the Start screen; one click takes you to the page via Internet Explorer 10.
- Visser demonstrates that how Windows 7 apps work on Windows 8; basically he seems to be suggesting that for apps that require mouse and keyboard, you would still run Windows 7. For tablet input, you'd shift to Windows 8. You can run both variety of apps at the same time, on the same screen.
- Another interesting demo: an application called Windows To Go, which allows you to boot a laptop from a USB device. In the demo, he showed how you could boost a Windows 8 desktop via USB on a commercially available ultrabook. He says that among other things, it would be a great backup solution.
- Turner returned to the stage the demo was completed. He says the ability to have an OS with a unified experience on every kind of device has never existed before. OS that supports both Intel and ARM. An extremely "bold and ambitious move that we are making as an organization."
- He says there were over 1 million downloads of Windows 8 preview in the first 24 hours of availability.
- Windows 8 will change the face of computing, he says.
And that's about it. Not a lot of news, but Microsoft again pounds the tablet on Windows 8.
