Microsoft Windows 8 BUILD keynote

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Microsoft Windows 8 BUILD keynote

Live from Microsoft's BUILD conference.

Check back on September 13th at 12:00PM ET / 9:00AM PT for live coverage from the BUILD keynote.
And we're in our seats!
Pumping upbeat music while Build sizzles across the screen.
President of Windows Steven Sinofsky's out on stage!
"
We are pretty excited... wait, this is MIcrosoft. We're super excited to be here today!"
He's really excited.
We've got Windows 7 stats up first -- nearly 450,000,000 copies of Windows 7 sold, Windows 7 is finally surpassing Windows XP in terms of consumer usage
According to Steven, there have been 1,502 changes to Windows 7 -- not including security fixes.
Internet Explorer 9 is the fastest growing Windows 7 browser. Good to know. "All those fish swimming around really mean something."
Steven wants to talk about the changing world of computing.
He's talking about new form factors, how tablets are pushing the envelope. "Touch is unbelievable."
"As soon as you use touch on a PC, you want touch on all your PCs."
"I promise you, the minute you use a touch device with Windows 8, the moment you go back to your laptop or desktop, you'll have fingerprints all over your screen."
More connectivity between apps, more connection to customers... he's hinting at the Contracts we saw in our Windows 8 Developer Preview: thisismynext.com
Two major improvements in WIndows 8, he says -- and the first one is that it's improving on Windows 7 directly. Everything that runs on Windows 7 will run on Windows 8.
Second, they've reimagined Windows. ""Windows 8 reimagines what WIndows can be."
We're sure "reimagine" is going to be a buzzword today -- he's throwing out all sorts of things, such as support for ARM chipsets, the new form factors, the user experience, as part of this reimagining.
"All of the demos we're going to show you today work equally well on ARM as they do on x86."
He's going down the agenda for the day. We're going to get four major demos, and discussions of Metro, hardware, and cloud services.
He's addressing supposed worries that Windows 8 will lose its fundamentals and made programming more difficult.
He's showing off an old Lenovo netbook, running Windows 8.
He ran Windows 7 against Windows 8 and took screenshots of the Task Manager on the same Lenovo earlier, he says -- 404MB and 32 processes used on Win 7, 281MB of memory and 29 processes
on the exact same hardware using Windows 8.
He's saying WIndows 8 has a lighter footprint, basically.
Next up, Julie Larson-Green to demo the user experience.
She swipes up the Windows lockscreen, enters her password, and now she's on the Start screen. "The Start screen is Windows," she says.
It's Windows Phone 7's live tiles everywhere here, of course -- pictures of people, moving stock tickers and RSS feeds are the actionable icons.