Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2013is happening this week in San Francisco and Tami Reller, Executive Vice President, Marketing joined Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, on stage during his keynote this morning to talk about Windows. The strong continuation of the long lasting (over 25 years!) partnership between the two companies.
Customers expect Windows on Intel architecture to provide compatibility and consistency along with personalization, productivity, and security - on beautiful, smart, connected devices. And this is even more true with Windows 8.1, which is optimized to power the latest in innovative form factors powered by Intel’s “Haswell” (4th generation Core) processors and “Bay Trail” (Atom) processors that Intel is launching this week at IDF. "Bay Trail” is Intel’s first 22nm system-on-a-chip (SoC) for 2-in-1 devices and small tablets and will offer high performance with amazing battery life. A number of these new devices were announced at IFA last week in Berlin– with more to be announced in the coming months going into holiday and beyond.
As we ramp up toward general availability of Windows 8.1, we’re seeing accelerating momentum with Windows 8. Windows 8 PCs were in demand for back to school and we saw a bump in activations (or new PCs coming online) and Net Apps data released earlier this month confirmed this bump between July and August. Our August activations were the highest for Windows 8 so far! And remember,consumers will be able to update their Windows 8 devices to Windows 8.1 for free through the Windows Store.
Tami also talked about the work we’re doing at retail, specifically the Windows Store Only at Best Buy. These store-within-a-store experiences are one of the newest places you can find new Windows devices. We offered more than 100 unique Windows devices in Best Buy stores during the Back to School shopping season. We launched Windows Stores Only at Best Buy in June and today we have more than 400 stores up and running all around the country, manned by Microsoft trained employees to help you find, personalize and purchase the new Windows device that fits your lifestyle.
And finally, Tami also discussed to the work we are doing to raise awareness for Windows XP end-of-support (on April 8th, 2014) and helping businesses and consumers move to a Modern OS. While, we’ve been talking with enterprise customers for years about this deadline, we’re accelerating our efforts across business and consumer audiences. We have a number of programs designed to reduce cost and complexity of migrating like TouchWins, which incents partners to drive PC refresh with Windows 8.1 devices. For more on Windows XP end-of-support, see this blog post.
We are excited for Windows 8.1 all the different kinds of devices coming powered by Intel’s latest processor technology.
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