Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the stage at the 2011 Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles and delivered a keynote speech summarizing the company’s greatest accomplishments of the year, and also gave the audience a quick look into the future. Ballmer spoke in front of 15,000 Microsoft partners from across the world and revealed that, thanks to its partners, more than 400 million Windows 7 licenses have been sold. This was accomplished in less than two years indicating that Windows 7 still holds its position as the fastest-selling OS in history.
At the event opening, Microsoft’s Tami Reller gave a presentation on Windows 8 emphasizing that Windows 7 is the path to Windows 8. “We see a future with a heterogeneous enterprise environment of Windows 8 devices and apps alongside Windows 7 PCs and apps,” she said. Microsoft will reveal more details on Windows 8 at BUILD conference in September.
Speaking at the event Ballmer highlighted a range of products, including MS Dynamics, Bing, and cloud services accentuating the wide range of opportunities that Microsoft is offering to its partners, putting a special focus on the cloud. “We’re moving forward to the cloud public and private. We’re all in and we want partners who are all in with us,” Ballmer said.
Speaking about Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based business productivity services, Ballmer said that 50,000 businesses have signed up to try it in less than two weeks since its global launch. He added that one in five of the Fortune 500 uses Microsoft Online Services noting that, as a part of the cloud momentum, large organizations around the world are moving to the cloud-based service.
Ballmer talked about the progress of Microsoft search engine Bing and its social features resulting from the company’s partnership with Facebook. The integration with Facebook is making searches more personalized and more relevant to Bing users. Ballmer noted that Bing currently holds 14.1 percent of search market share in the US. Microsoft CEO also noted a 20% compound annual growth rate for Microsoft Dynamics over the ten years of Microsoft’s presence in Business application space.
Talking about Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype Ballmer said “One of the great motivations in acquiring Skype is to allow the enterprise all the control it wants.” The company plans on integrating Skype with Lync which is now a part of IT for 70% of the Fortune 500 companies.
Ballmer also focused on major accomplishments for Windows Phone, such as the company’s partnership with Nokia and the fact that the Windows Phone market reached the milestone of 20 thousand apps in less than 8 months. “We have gone from very small to very small but it’s been a heck of a year,” he said.
During the first day of WPC conference, Microsoft also announced the availability of a public beta of Windows Intune and the next generation of Xbox expected to launch Christmas time.
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