lots of interesting tidbits (much talk about the enterprise which I'm skipping but the transcript's at the Microsoft Investor site):
Mobile-related
So everyone knows mobility is on fire. Mobility has changed how and where people work and communicate today. It's a mobile applications and mobility-first market out there. It's the driving force behind the Internet of Things. And according to Gartner, it's $716 billion in devices that will be spent by 2017. The two key areas that we're going to focus on in mobility, first and foremost, is around productivity. We're really driving for the best Office mobile experience across all platforms. And we want to provide a great experience on both iOS and Android phones.
And when you think about what we've done, we now have Office Mobile for iPhone in the Apple app store. It's free for those Office 365 subscribers. And it's available in 135 markets and 29 languages.
Office Mobile for the iPhone lets you view and edit across Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and you get a similar experience to what you get on a Windows Phone.
And we have Office Web Apps available for iOS, high-fidelity document viewing in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote on the iPhone, and we have some viewing and some editing available on the iPad.
And so we're continuing to work through how to bring and be the strongest productivity player across all platforms, including iOS and Android in the marketplace.
The second big area that we're focusing on in mobility is we want to be the leader in mobile device management. And with the new release of System Center, we not only manage Windows devices, we also manage iOS and Android devices really well. And wrapped with Intune, we have an incredible story to be able to bring mobile device management to a whole new level across all devices.
So in the bring-your-own-device world, we have a great solution with System Center to be able to help enterprises and businesses really and deeply manage all devices.
Nokia-related:
We've also made some impressive progress as it relates to Windows Phone. The one thing we know about Windows Phone is when people use it, they really, really like it. In fact, we've won a lot of surveys this past year on the quality of the experience. And, yes, we're proud of the fact that we've now scrapped and made progress to be the third-largest-selling smartphone OS in the world. Now, we're a distant third, so we've got a lot of work to do there, but we're making product and continuing to innovate in a giant way.
When you look at some of the progress we've made globally, Latin America up 900 percent, India 400 percent, China up 300, Asia-Pacific up 300, Middle East and Africa up 700. Again, the momentum in the marketplace, particularly outside the U.S., is accelerating for us. And we're going to continue to double down and leverage that.
And one of the things that we're very excited about is the capability that Nokia brings to the company. Not only do we have an impressive lineup of devices, the 1020 at the high end, which has a 41-megapixel camera, the best smartphone camera in the world. All the way down to the Nokia Lumia 521, that is really selling well from an opening price point perspective in emerging markets.
This last week, we launched the Nokia 925 where Nokia got into metals, and it?s available here at AT&T. It's our thinnest and lightest offering. It's a very, very impressive phone.
And so the capability that Nokia brings with us on distribution, supply chain, the ability to continue to leverage the economies of scale that they bring, we're very excited, pending regulatory approval, of the potential and possibility of this particular acquisition.
But I also want to stress the fact that we remain very open with our phone system, and we have phones available from HTC, Samsung, Huawei, TCL Alcatel. We want to continue to have that. And we're going to continue to provide that because we believe that's an important part of our offering going forward.
Windows 8.1-related:
You know, we have a great release with Windows 8.1 coming out. And I wanted to touch on that for just a moment. In 8.1, we've got some incredible enterprise features. We've got tremendous IT controls built into 8.1. We've got the ability to do remote data business removal. We've got open mobile device management available so you no longer have to have a server at your enterprise to be able to manage the mobile devices.
We've got direct access, which requires no separate VPN to be able to get into the network.
We've got something called workplace join, which is very exciting. The ability for someone to show up at work with their own personal device, for them to be able to use workplace join, for the enterprise to be able to control the business data on that personal device, and in the event that employee leaves the company, loses the device, the corporation, the enterprise, has the ability to remotely wipe and clean the business data only on that device without touching, harming, or impacting the personal data. This is powerful.
Xbox-related:
"Xbox became the worldwide console share leader last year, and we're very proud of that performance as well." [I assume he's referring to FY13 only]
"Xbox Live is now one of the largest paid services in the world at 48 million Xbox Live members in 41 countries, and that business continues to explode."
"And one piece of social that I had to touch on here because it's so impressive is in the Xbox Live space. 48 million users, as I said, in 41 countries. Couple of stats you may not know. 42 percent of the Xbox Live subscribers in the U.S. now watch 30 hours of digitally distributed TV and movies every month. Also, we're proud to be able to report now nearly 40 percent of the Xbox Live audience in the United States is female. That's a giant change from when we launched our platform. Xbox delivered over 18 billion hours of entertainment globally in 2012 alone.
And we're excited about the upcoming Xbox One launch. We believe we've got an incredible offering with Xbox One as it relates to multi-player experiences and services. It's going to give you -- we've wrapped a lot of entertainment with the product as well, and we believe we've got our strongest game lineup, and the external pundits say it as well, that we've ever had to be able to offer as a company.
So we're excited about the potential of what we can do with Xbox and Xbox Live from a social perspective."
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram