 Hey guys, this is Tom from The Verge and I'm here at Microsoft's Build 2012 conference. While it may have been raining all week, Microsoft has been trying to excite the crowds around Windows Phone and Windows. The opportunity to transform the kinds of devices we build, the kinds of applications that we create has never been better than it is today. I've been at Microsoft since 98. I moved to phone back when it was Windows Mobile in 2004. You know, 2007 happened. 2007 was a sea change for the industry. Obviously we know what happened then with iPhone shipping. And you know, we were not necessarily where we wanted to be at that point. Fast forward to March 2010 when we released the first version of Windows Phone, a very different product. One where we tried to focus first and foremost on the end user experience. What you're seeing now, this has been an effort, a concerted effort, at least as old as Windows Phone 7 to try to move to one single underlying shared core operating system. And that's the result of that is finally now Windows Phone 8. Users who buy Windows 8 are going to have their best phone companion experience by far on Windows Phone 8. We share the same name, we share a lot of the same kind of applications, we also share the same name for the store. I see this as two efforts going on in parallel. One we want to build a share code as people build new apps and invest in Windows and Windows Phone. We also want to reduce their costs as they're targeting iOS and Android because they're going to target all of them. And so we make it very easy, especially with native code, so you guys can build a game or use a gaming engine, you can get all the platforms, including us, on the same day. If you reduce the cost of coming to the platform, you reduce the time. And then especially if you get middleware. Havoc's a middleware company. We write middleware technology which runs across platform. From our perspective it was pretty straightforward to get our technology across. For someone just getting into development, I would think Windows Phone would be the easiest. There's not a lot to really learn on the back end. You can come in with an idea and you can make something quite good quite fast. We want to enable developers so they can write apps as soon as possible. We release the SDK, Visual Studio's available, now they have the devices they need to test and write those apps. I've been on an awful lot of platforms and iOS is really the one to be on for making apps at the moment. Hopefully with the changes in Windows Phone 8 there will be a lot more potential to create great apps. People when they go in and buy a phone aren't thinking about Feature X, they're thinking about cost and familiarity. As people see the Surface and as people see the Windows 8 which will be at their work and their new laptops and the devices that they normally have, I think that people talk about the Helo effect that can happen when people suddenly look at a Windows Phone and it feels familiar. Up to now Microsoft has had the quality in the OS but they haven't had the user base to make it worthwhile for developers. So unless a developer is in love with the platform itself they weren't really going to invest time and money in making a Windows Phone app. We didn't have experience with iOS and Android and we came from a kind of Silverlight WPF background so the transition to Windows Phone when it came out was very natural for us and we also found that iOS and Android are already so saturated and so Windows Phone was this new thing that it could be quite an opportunity to kind of make a name for ourselves in a very small market. Developers need to make money on our platform either by ads or by selling their applications or they own a service and they want to hit customers so in some cases really by just getting more eyeballs and with Windows and Windows Phone combined, our ecosystem combined, we believe we're creating this very, very broad market where people who are going to be your customers are going to be on our platforms and you'll get customers by supporting our platform. So it's all about that return on the investment. We've had multiple developers that earn five, even six figures a month on the Windows 4 store and we've had some developers that barely make enough to buy a candy bar. We're a team of ten people doing Windows apps. We don't do iOS, we don't do Android, we don't build websites, we just build Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps. At the moment our primary goal is exposure and so we don't actually, it's free, our apps are currently free on the marketplace and the ecosystem isn't quite big enough yet for us to be able to monetize. We have 46 out of the top 50 apps that are available on Android and iPhone today. Now that list is going to change. In six months some of the apps that are really popular now may not be as popular. This is not a journey that ends. I think you're going to see games coming out on Windows Phone, possibly even before you see them coming out on iOS and Android. The reason being that when you build a game to run on a PC, you're building it with DirectX in mind. So it's going to be very fast to get a game running on Windows Phone. Everything that we've seen so far speaks to a really, really strong conviction to the platform from phone to Surface to desktop. We're on the same train tracks now and so that means that we're going to hook our train together and get to be one train. They used to always say Microsoft gets it on the third iteration and so if you think about Windows Phone, this is our third iteration and I feel like we actually have a product now that's no compromises. I think this is Microsoft's first reboot and first in a long time at least where they're unifying everything across the company. I think for the first time they're realizing they have to play in a slightly different space than they've been working in so far and they're learning a lot from Apple and they're building something that is really nice but it's not derivative, which is also a nice change.