Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.

— Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie says Apple is late to the game with Siri
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111123/qotd-and-its-called-microsoft-bobbi/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/way-to-sell-those-windows-7-tablets-craig/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/way-to-sell-those-windows-7-tablets-craig/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 18:16:44 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=59508

“The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I’m already using a tablet as my everyday computer. It’s a PC that is virtually without limits–and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”

– Bill Gates, Comdex, 2001

Good thing Microsoft missed the train on tablets. Because it turns out the things don’t have much longevity.

In fact, the age of the tablet PC, which Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates heralded a decade ago and Apple only recently ushered in, is already drawing to a close. This according to Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, who’s not sure tablets have much of a future.

Speaking at an economic development lunch in Sydney, Australia, this week, Mundie said he didn’t know whether tablets like the iPad would “remain with us.”

“I think there’s an important distinction–and frankly one we didn’t jump on at Microsoft fast enough–between mobile and portable,” he said. “Mobile is something that you want to use while you’re moving, and portable is something that you move and then use. These are going to bump into one another a little bit and so today you can see tablets and pads and other things that are starting to live in the space in between. Personally I don’t know whether that space will be a persistent one or not.”

For Mundie’s sake, let’s hope it persists at least until the fall of 2012, when Microsoft is expected to release a version of Windows 7 for tablets.

[Image credit: Microsoft]

Microsoft had its annual Financial Analyst Meeting at its Redmond, Wash., campus yesterday, where BoomTown liveblogged the morning and afternoon sessions with the software giant’s top execs.

That included CEO Steve Ballmer, who talked about how a tablet device to compete with the Apple (AAPL) iPad was coming from Microsoft “soon” and also the company’s efforts in its eight “core” businesses.

And, because it is Microsoft (MSFT), there were lots and lots of slides to look at, which are all below from its panoply of execs on everything from finances to robotics to Facebook on the Windows Phone 7.

Here they all are for your data-crunching pleasure (and you can also read transcripts of the day’s events on Microsoft’s newly refreshed investor site.

CEO Steve Ballmer:

Ballmer_FAM_2010_Part1

COO Kevin Turner:

Turner_FAM_2010

CFO Peter Klein:

Klein_FAM_2010

Bill Koefoed, General Manager, Investor Relations:

Koefoed_FAM_2010

Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer:

Mundie_FAM_2010

BoomTown took the corporate All Things Digital jet–aka Virgin America, seat 10A–up to Redmond, Wash., today to attend Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, which also includes a passel of media drones like me.

I will be liveblogging the event all day, which is essentially a cavalcade of top execs from the software giant taking the stage and showing off their wares.

There should be a little bit of swanning, since Microsoft (MSFT) turned in very good financial results last week, posting a huge increase in earnings and revenue due to the uptick in PC sales and the intro of the Windows 7 operating system. Losses at its Online Services division remained high, so thank goodness for servers and tools!

Here we go:

8:15 am PT: I was late due to the completely confusing streets of suburban Redmond, all of which look exactly alike, as does every building on Microsoft’s sprawling campus. I am a streets of San Francisco girl, obvi.

In the Conference Center, though, things had not started well past the 8 am start time, as we await the entry of investor dude Bill Koefoed.

U2′s “Beautiful Day” was playing over the sound system, which it was not up here in the Pacific Northwest this morning–it was kind of cold and gloomy, a la “Twilight”–but hopefully will be for sparkly Microsoft execs. We’ll see!

Finally, Koefoed came out and started in on feedback, touting the newly renovated investor relations site, which he is “pretty proud of.” It is nice looking, as are most of Microsoft’s hand-out materials.

In fact, he sent me an excited note last week, because I posted Microsoft’s pretty fourth-quarter slides.

Dear Bill: You need much better things to get excited about! Like the new Magic Trackpad from Apple (AAPL)! Wait, I mean Windows Phone 7!

Koefoed moved quickly to point out last week’s strong results, which is no surprise. When you’ve got lemonade, make more lemonade!

Then he outlined the various Microsoft’s eight “core” businesses, such as Xbox, Bing, Microsoft Office, Windows Azure and, of course, Windows, that the company will be going over.

That’s a lot of core, isn’t it?

Some questions to be answered: Business PC refresh and share momentum? Impact of iPad/slates? Windows 7 phone? Expense control?

Beautiful or not, it was going to be a looooong day.

8:42 am: A jaunty Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s COO, bounded out. He tried to get the crowd more lively, but this was not to be unless there was a lot more coffee.

I had great hopes for a goofy quote this morning from Turner, who declared at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this month about Apple’s antenna controversy: “It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that.”

I don’t know about you, but insulting a competitor by shooting off your own foot is a gift that keeps on giving to me.

In any case, Turner said Microsoft was now “leading with the cloud,” a move that the company had been resisting in the past. Now: All in!

He outlined all the various services for business customers. “We are the market leader in cloud services for business,” said Turner, noting Microsoft had been too quiet about the inevitable move of data and software services to big services in the digital sky.

(Actually, in its secret heart, Microsoft was hoping this whole Internet thing would go away and it would be back to a PC on every desktop, but that horse has left the barn, so it’s cloud time!)

Next up for Turner: The much deserved popularity of Windows 7. Of course, since Vista was Microsoft’s Antennagate–except much, much, much worse–it was not hard to be better.

Turner then moved on to bashing Google (GOOG) and other competitors. Turner put up some quotes from Jaguar employees, after the car company switched to Google for email and other services.

One said Google was like vinyl seats. Ziiiiing!

Next Turner victim: VMware (VMW)! He claimed its products were pricier and not cloudy enough.

As for Linux: Meh!

Oracle (ORCL): Customers don’t want to be locked into the land of Larry Ellison!

Cisco (CSCO): Just you wait, John Chambers!

9:19 am: Turner headed off and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie started in on his speech, titled “Reimagining Microsoft’s Future.”

That would be the client plus the cloud, natural user interface and something he called “working on your behalf.”

Mundie launched into his future-dude schtick, but he’s not exactly Alvin Toffler, so I started desperately mainlining the caffeine.

He talked about movable data centers, the “Internet of Things” and other cloud innovations, but there is no new idea here to blow your mind.

Is it too much to wish Mundie would talk about an invisibility cloak? Instead, it was the orchestration of data authority.

That will apparently be a new data marketplace product, codenamed Dallas, to shop for giant data sets and more.

Mundie than showed off some personalization-driven features in the Bing search service, which are also not new concepts.

For example, he showed a menu, embedded in a table, that might know what you like to eat at a particular restaurant you frequent.

This is what would be on my table and there is no need of a fancy computer table to know this: Donuts, donuts, donuts.

Speaking of which, FAM minions: Where the heck were my donuts?

Mundie then moved onto Kinect, once called Project Natal, the actually cool gesture interface for gaming that will be available for Xbox soon.

Finally, he finished up with a video clip of a medical triage assistant. Great, even less customer service from hospitals. The demo was flatly freaky.

The morning session wrapped up with a visit to the technology showcase to “expect the unexpected,” although I was not expecting that in any way, and then it was off to lunch.

Next up in the afternoon session: CEO Steve Ballmer at 1 pm PT.

While Microsoft COO Kevin Turner did a kind of modified cheerleading act at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach played the teenage boy and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie the voice from the future.

During his presentation at the event at the Microsoft (MSFT) HQ in Redmond, Wash.–a series of presentations for Wall Street analysts and the media–Bach showed off the Xbox’s new Project Natal motion-sensing technology, which lets you play games and more without a controller.

Bach spazzed out nicely playing a game called Ricochet, with a storm of virtual red balls coming at him, although I was slightly worried the exertion might cause him to collapse on stage.

Turner was on before Bach, pretty much doing cleanup after CEO Steve Ballmer’s presentation, talking up all of Microsoft’s various businesses, while talking down its competitors’.

Said Turner, whose mantra was building market share for Microsoft: “Strong innovation, strong innovation investment, as well as strong operational excellence that we’re driving to compete and grow our market share.”

Strong, got it? (Frankly, I know companies always put their best foot forward at events like this–but after Ballmer’s own He-Man speech, BoomTown is a little worried that Scary Microsoft could be making a comeback, after a few post-antitrust years of Kinder-Gentler Microsoft.)

Bach, given his job, was a lot more entertaining and had more to show off, although he could not be as positive about the software giant’s mobile experience, given the juggernaut of the iPhone from Apple (AAPL).

“First of all, in Windows Mobile, as Steve pointed out, we had a challenging year from a share perspective,” said Bach. “Much tougher competition in the U.S. and certainly there is plenty of competition in this space.”

No kidding!

Natal is, of course, the pretty one for Bach’s division.

“It is about technology innovation and experience innovation. I think it will lead to a bigger and better business as well,” said Bach. “It is certainly an opportunity for us to build something new.”

Mundie also showed a lot of new futuristic stuff, which borrowed from the Natal technology, including a demo of a gesture-rich “office of the future” experience.

Said Mundie: “But as far as Microsoft, one of the greatest opportunities going forward is to realize there will be a successor to the desktop. It is the room. It is the fixed computing environment. The question is what can you do with computing when you have a much more robust man-machine interaction model and you don’t have to fold it in half and move it and run it on a battery.”

In the midst of it, though, he chit-chatted with a very scary “digital assistant” named DAG (I think it must stand for Digital Assistant Golem) on the screen, whose voice freaked me out in the exact way HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” always does.

After helping Mundie with a bunch of stuff, I am guessing DAG went off into the computer to work on a secret plan to kill off the human race.

Well, it was nice being here for this long on our little blue planet, Earth!

So, while we wait for DAG to destroy us, here’s the video demoing Natal that Bach showed to the audience, which is not new, but still pretty cool:

The fun never stops at Microsoft, it seems.

Well, not fun–more like a long march of khaki-clad Softies.

They will be on display bright and early this morning at the company’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, a cavalcade of top execs at the tech giant blabbing away.

BoomTown will be there covering it in person, natch!

The Microsoft management smorgasbord includes:

CEO Steve Ballmer, COO Kevin Turner, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach, Online Services President Qi Lu, Microsoft Business President Stephen Elop, Servers and Tools President Bob Muglia, Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and CFO Chris Liddell.

I am betting that most of the focus at the gathering, which is being held at the worldwide HQ of Microsoft (MSFT) in Redmond, Wash., will likely be on two major events over the last week–its billion-dollar revenue miss in its fourth quarter and its just-born search and online advertising deal with Yahoo (YHOO).

The former, of course, was bad news for Microsoft, as it continues to signal weakness in its core operating system software and server businesses, due to lower demand for personal computers in the midst of the econalypse.

The latter was good news, of course, since Microsoft seemed to score a coup in nabbing the search technology business from Yahoo with no big upfront payments.

I have a lot of questions about both these issues, as will the crowd of reporters and Wall Street sharpies at the FAM, which is what they call the meeting here.

There could even be be plenty of answers, especially given that the entire leadership of Microsoft will be there.

Here is a link to a live Webcast of the FAM event, if you want to join the party too.

How quickly things changed. By 2007, Davidson had been joined by 11 other lobbyists, among them a former high-ranking Justice Department antitrust lawyer. And now, two years later, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been named by President Obama to his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In that role he’ll work with a group of distinguished academics and executives–a group that, incidentally, includes Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft (MSFT)–to help the administration “formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.”

Schmidt’s appointment isn’t all that surprising. He served as an informal adviser to Obama during his campaign and he’s a smart guy who’s got some strong opinions about network neutrality, next-generation broadband, and intellectual property–issues that figure high on the president’s tech agenda. Still, it’s one more indication–and the biggest one yet–that Google has become firmly part of the Washington establishment.

But if Yahoo, beaten into submission by irate investors, should suddenly come crawling back to the now empty negotiating table, Microsoft might indulge it, if only for a moment. For now, it’s busy with what Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie refers to as “Plan B.”

“The market may wish that the Yahoo deal may come back together, but Microsoft at least at this point assumes it’s over,” Mundie told Reuters. “Yahoo could always come back again and say, Please buy us for $33 (a share), and I’m sure we might reconsider it, but we’re not assuming that’s going to happen.”

Seems Microsoft, like Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, is more than willing to listen if the company has anything new to say. And it’s not even facing any shareholder lawsuits …

But if Yahoo, beaten into submission by irate investors, should suddenly come crawling back to the now empty negotiating table, Microsoft might indulge it, if only for a moment. For now, it’s busy with what Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie refers to as “Plan B.”

“The market may wish that the Yahoo deal may come back together, but Microsoft at least at this point assumes it’s over,” Mundie told Reuters. “Yahoo could always come back again and say, Please buy us for $33 (a share), and I’m sure we might reconsider it, but we’re not assuming that’s going to happen.”

Seems Microsoft, like Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, is more than willing to listen if the company has anything new to say. And it’s not even facing any shareholder lawsuits …