 Hi, I'm Blaire with The Verge and I'm joined today by Joe Boffiore from Microsoft. Thanks so much for joining us, Joe. We're here at CES in Las Vegas, CES 2012. How's the show been for you? It's great so far. We're excited at Microsoft with a broad range of stuff, but for me, Windows Phone, the Nokia Lumia 900 is exciting. It's a big day. That's a highlight for you, the Lumia 900. What about the HT Titan 2? How do you feel about that? Pretty exciting too, but for me, yesterday, being part of the Nokia announcement, getting that device out there, spending time with those guys, it's definitely meaningful. They're a key partner for us. We're excited about the Titan 2. Generally, lots of good stuff happening here. Cool. Well, we had heard that you guys would come out with some LTE Windows Phones. You've done that with HTC and with Nokia. Any other Windows Phones that we can look forward to with LTE? Well, right now, what we're talking about so far and what the announcements have been at CES have been the two new phones, as I said, the one from Nokia and then the one from HTC. So, so far, no additional phones that we're talking about. So far. Well, there's another big mobile event, specifically mobile event, MWC coming up. The Lumia 900, quite a few folks have been disappointed to see that it's AT&T exclusive, so it's US exclusive. Can we look forward to similar devices in Europe? You know, that's a good question for Nokia. I think what they would say is that to the extent that people are excited about that device, they're going to look at expanding their lineup over time. But right now, the Lumia 900 really was built for the American market. It's designed for LTE, for AT&T's bands. They're entering into a significant partnership with AT&T, so whatever happens in the future, we'll have to see. But I hope it is true that people are excited enough by that phone, that they want it in a bunch of other countries and that Nokia gets that feedback. Well, yeah, I mean, I, just today, I got a chance to play around with it and I do like it very much myself. I got to review the Nokia 9 and the Lumia 800, which was Nokia's first phone. And the 900 is kind of very much like a scaled up 800, which is kind of a good thing. It's a pretty good thing. But, you know, you do have to note the fact that it has WVGA resolution, 800 by 480, which is starting to lag the competition. Can you tell us anything about what Microsoft is planning on that front? Yeah, it's interesting. I think if you look at how we built our team and the program on Windows Phone, we've really tried to focus our engineering efforts on a relatively narrow set of hardware so that we can optimize it greatly. And if you look at the chip sets, for example, we're on Qualcomm chip sets, the Snapdragon chip sets. And if you look at the screen resolution, by focusing on a narrower set of things initially, we think we can drive performance up, battery life up, and help ISVs go get their apps done. So if you think about Windows Phone and sort of its, we're barely out of our first year. We're trying to bootstrap this new high quality experience. The approach that we've chosen to take is to focus on a narrower set of things. You take the, you pick the screen resolution as an example. Now what I would say is for most consumers walking into a store, or even forget walking into a store, carrying a phone around as their phone for two years on contract, that resolution looks very good. And you take any of these phones, really, take any of these phones with the technology they have for applying great contrast and making colors pop out, the screens look really nice. Now that's not to say that you can't incrementally improve how things look by increasing resolution. You can, but it does come at the cost of some battery life. You have to put a stronger processor in to drive all those pixels. And the trade off that we've made so far is in the combination of battery, smooth, buttery animations and performance cost to focus there. Over time, I think you can expect to see us expand the breadth of the kinds of things we're doing, but right now we think it makes sense to... But over time is a very wide range. The thing we'll be trying to get with guys here at CES is to contract the overtime. Because when they say, we're introducing something this year, we're basically at the beginning of January, that doesn't really give us much of a... The good and bad news for you is we're talking at CES about the things that are announced now and that are coming really soon. We'll have other announcements and other things to talk about for later in the year, but right now we're excited about the lineup we have. Well, something that you self-mentioned is cost. Where do you see Windows Phone fitting in, in terms of the competition? I think it's fair to say that Android and iOS are the biggest competitors, and they both have very specific strategies or approaches to the market. iOS wants to keep it very narrow with one hero device. Android wants to keep it as versatile and as diverse as possible. So how does Windows Phone stand out? How do you tempt somebody away from the iOS and Android ecosystem? I think that there are a number of different things that we're thinking about in that regard. One is in terms of the value proposition that we want to create for end users. We started on Windows Phone and looked at the iPhone. We looked at Android was emerging at the time. And we said, what are the characteristics of this and what is it good at delivering? iPhone at the time was very focused on apps, good touch experience, good at web browsing. And we felt like we could do a lot by focusing on human connections, deeply integrating social networking, bringing people to the forefront, and trying to do that with a visual appearance that's unique and differentiated. I take the point, but it's just you're different and unique. In my personal opinion, the things that you've done are very good. But when a person walks into a store, is the price point going to be something that you push? Well, where I was going is I think there's sort of two dimensions here that are interesting. One is what's the design and feature set? What I'd say for us is we have a unique visual design and we offer a feature set that focuses around people. It's good at apps. In fact, it tries to integrate applications into the experience, but it tries to really make your human connections work well. But then there's a separate sort of track of what's the program. And you characterized the iOS program. It's Apple's relatively narrow set of devices and their ecosystem. And Android is a very broad one. We're trying to use a methodology that balances those things. We want to get the kind of predictable quality that people generally expect on iOS because it's controlled, but with more variation than you would get only going with one vendor doing deeply integrated hardware and software. And so unlike Android, I would say, where with open source, there's the benefit of someone will take that source and they'll engineer the craziest device you can think of and it'll happen really fast. That's what open source enables. We will be slower for those kinds of crazy or speculative things to happen, but the trade off that we're aiming for is higher quality and value. In a way, it's a little bit of a less edgy early adopter approach. It's more of a broad mainstream approach where we focus on predictability, really high quality, ranging from how good are the phone calls to the battery life to the stutteriness of the user experience to being able to count on all the apps running. And so that's how we think about those two things, a unique design and then a program that balances aggressiveness and speed with predictable quality. Okay. That's a very comprehensive answer, I have to say. I appreciate it. A little long-winded maybe. But I want to stick with the price point for just one more question, which is to ask, would you look to match Android devices? You just said you're not looking to fight a spec war with Android, which is fair enough. You're looking to differentiate in a different way. But would you look to match Android devices in stores at price points or would you look to undercut them? I think in general matching on price point is the right way to think about it. We have a cost structure and Windows phone has a cost structure that's different than Android. Android, for a device vendor to bring to market, typically requires more engineering investment to do work to fill it out. We think we require less engineering investment, so we're less expensive in that way, we think. We have a license that's different than Android. There's no license for Android. So the cost structures really are different. In terms of supported hardware, because Android has the open source model, they can span very wide. And so OEMs do make decisions to drive prices down that, in our opinion, compromise the user experience in ways that are particularly unfortunate because they're not detectable by the end user. So I'll give you a good example. We have a lot of debate in our team about whether, today we require four point symmetric multi-touch, which means you can detect multiple fingers. There are a lot of Android phones that ship with just two point symmetric multi-touch. You can shave some cost off the phone by doing that. The problem is some games won't work right. And as an end user going into a store, you have no way of knowing really whether the phone you're getting has the better controller or the less one. So we are going to make decisions that, in the service of quality, probably keep us above Android's lowest price point. But I think as a practical matter, the low price points that people are looking for will get into those price bands, but Android will always be able to go a little lower than we can. Sure. You also mentioned the standardizations in terms of hardware. But recently, ST Ericsson announced that, in partnership with Nokia, they will ship a Windows Phone device with an ST Ericsson chipset inside it. How would that affect things? Would it have any significant impact? Well, we haven't commented specifically on other companies doing chipsets, but if you take that as a hypothetical example, over time it's certainly our intent to broaden the ecosystem of hardware that's supported by Windows Phone. And if you go look at where we're at in our life cycle, as I said, I think we're in the phase now where we've got a pretty good value proposition. We're building out the number of apps. We're starting to increase the breadth of phones. Getting a wider range of chipsets will make sense, and it's something I expect we'll do, but we don't have any announcements about that yet. So let me just... Let's actually switch over to discuss the upcoming Windows Phone. So we know Windows Phone. We know Windows Phone 7.5. But we've also heard about Windows Phone Tango, and we've heard about Windows Phone Apollo. Can you tell us anything about Tango? No. No? Very brief. Well, because we've heard about Tango being re-engineered to make Windows Phone compatible with 256 megabytes of RAM. Anything you can tell us about that? Sorry. No. A roadmap for Tango at all? Nothing at all. I think Tango is a cool sounding word. It's a cool sounding word. Apollo? It ends in O. Okay, you're killing me here. Okay, what can we look forward to with MWC? You know, it's too early to say. I think if you look generally at what we're doing, I can say that the team certainly is busy doing a whole lot of interesting work. And I know that all of you watching this, and you guys would love to hear more specifics, but unfortunately I just can't talk about those yet. We're trying to make sure that we focus on the exciting announcements that we have today, solve the problems, and then announce stuff when it's ready. And just to wrap up, we recall Andy Lees mentioned last year that Microsoft had a vision of one ecosystem which includes Windows 8, includes Windows Phone, and Xbox, and all of those things. How are you guys going about making that happen? Yeah, actually I'm really excited about 2012 from the perspective of Windows 8 coming to market. And there's a lot of things that already align between the Windows 8 plans we've announced and the Windows Phone product that we have now. If you look at the general user experience of live tiles, there's obviously some good alignment there. If you look at the app platform for Windows 8, the app platform for Windows 8 is a combination of ways that developers can write apps. And one of those, the methodology of writing in Silverlight or XAML and C-Sharp, is highly similar between what Windows 8 is going to be doing and what exists today on the phone. So as a developer, it will be really easy for you to use a similar or the same tool set, similar or the same language and API access. So we think that's going to help a lot in terms of developers coming to Microsoft, learning the tools, learning the languages, and then being able to target both platforms. So it's kind of evident that you've tried to have a consistent look to the interface with the start UI. And what you're saying is that basically you're trying to give consistent tools to developers. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that certainly we will do new revisions of the product, which we're just not talking about yet. You can expect to see other things that will do that. What about apps? Will we have apps that are consistent across all three device platforms? If you mean in terms of will developers go and try to take advantage of the similarity in platforms to write software that interacts across both, I'd say it's highly likely they will. Although right now it's early days, certainly for Windows 8 in terms of getting developers going. We haven't shown that many apps or talked that much in specific about what developers will be doing. But I think it's right to assume that developers will look at this very similar platform in its user experience and some similarity in the way you go about writing the code and take advantage of that fact. Certainly from a Microsoft perspective as well, I think next fall we will talk about Windows 8 and Windows Phone as family products. And I think that will also create more of a momentum around people doing work that crosses both. Okay, Joe. Thanks very much for taking the time. Yeah, thanks. Good to see you. Thanks for having me.