Marketing Microsoft
I was clearly not going to get any more juicy MWC morsels from Payne, so we moved onto his role within Microsoft. What does he do all day?
"My role is very much around taking the products we're building out to our customers, in the right way and with the most impact," said Payne. "While I work in the consumer arm of the business, I nevertheless work with quite an array of different stakeholders in order to be able to do that. Because we don't generally offer the whole closed experience ourselves, we work with a lot of other people to help them show what's possible.
"We don't try to lock our customers into a particular stack of products, unlike some other people we could mention. Our play really is about leveraging the broader industry. So if you look at Bing, for example, if you have an iPhone, there's an app to put Bing on the iPhone. If your preferred way of communicating is Facebook, then you can do that on Xbox. Giving people that level of choice and freedom is really where we're driving towards."
So what can we expect to see from Microsoft this year?
"I'll try to just pick the big things and these aren't strictly in order: the next version of Windows Phone, I can't comment about Project Pink, Office and all the app experiences that come with it, the next version of Windows Live, a very good line-up of games - for example, the Halo prequel and Alan Wake - and Natal is coming in the holiday period," said Payne.
