Antoine Leblond, Corporate Vice President is speaking, and the topic is Windows 8.
Over 600,000,000 copies of Windows 7 have been sold. The enterprise features of Windows 8 are based on, but evolved from Windows 7. We have moved on from the desktop-centric world when Windows 7 was launched. Over 75% of consumer machines being bought in USA this year are laptops. Next year it is projected that tablets will outsell PCs. More machines will run off of the battery than DC power. Every microwatt of power saved extends the battery life of the machine. Tablets = touch UI. If projections are right, then touch becomes the primary UI.
Connectivity is ubiquitous. We have moved from a world of local content to a world of multi-cloud stored data: flickr, facebook, Skydrive, Office365, and many others.
The hard split between how I use a machine at home and how I use a machine at work has been blurred or completely dissolved. Users have reimagined how they use PCs, and Microsoft has reimagined Windows.
Demo Business Apps
We see a bunch of bespoke apps with live tiles. Info is flashed up so user can see current status. The dev has use semantic zoom … a conceptual zoom rather than a graphic zoom.
A CRM app uses GPS sensor to find out where the sales person is, and then shows the location of customers in a map. Clever.
Linda Averett
Demo on Samsung Ultrabook with mouse/keyboard and a “modern touchpad”. The Windows 8 gestures are recognised by the touchpad. Kind of Mac-like I guess, handy if you don’t have touch screen – or are one of those OCD people who hates fingerprints on their screen.
A NewEgg app is shown, with search, filter and contracts being shown off.
Antoine Leblond
Now we see a sales pipeline automation app that is a beta/test app by SAP. Looks very sexy … and it’s by SAP! What an oxymoron! Using touch, the user can explore the data that is graphically presented, changing variables and seeing the results. Don’t thing columns and rows of numbers. It was all imagery that was designed for exploring and touch.
Linda Averett – Business Features
She has a Lenovo laptop, but it has a touch screen. Windows 7 is running in a Hyper-V VM on Windows 8. As you should know by reading here, Hyper-V is in Windows 8 Pro and Enterprise. It seems to get biggest cheer of anything in the keynotes so far (audience has been very quiet these 2 days). Cut The Rope is running in IE 9 in the Win7 VM.
BitLocker (AES256 full disk encryption) is shown off – it and BitLocker-To-Go now are in Windows 8 Pro, not just in the Enterprise edition. Great for customers – not great for those of us trying to sell Software Assurance 
Then lots of dev stuff and then the end of the keynote.