WPC Flashback: Top 10 Kevin Turner-isms

Each year at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), Microsoft sends out COO Kevin Turner for a closing keynote that gives partner attendees an entertaining but forceful kick in the pants to go home and redouble their sales efforts.

In Houston, Turner was a little less incendiary than in years past, with fewer disparaging things to say about competitors and with less of his presentation time dedicated to making fun of others in the industry.

Here are 10 of the most interesting, and in some cases inflammatory, things Turner said this year:

10. "Best deployment numbers"
"We've got the best deployment numbers in the history of our company. Right now we're 73 percent current on Windows in the enterprise and 62 percent current on Office. And that's not good enough. But boy, we're making progress. We're pushing, both of us collectively."

9. Called Surface "A hero platform"
"We designed our first first-party hardware with Surface RT and Surface Pro...We put those in market to have a hero platform, to have a beautiful stage to put Windows 8 on. Is it a tablet or is it a laptop? Do you need two devices? We don't think so. And we took a different point of view with that."

8. "You're going to care about Haswell"
"Intel's got a great new chip out called Haswell. And you're going to care about Haswell, because it has the ability to operate fanless devices. So thinner, better battery life is on the way across the ecosystem."

7. "86 percent"
As in previous keynotes, Turner trotted out Secunia statistics on security. "This past year, ladies and gentlemen, 86 percent of all the vulnerabilities in the most popular platforms were not on the Microsoft platform. Eighty-six percent of the vulnerabilities were on the other guys' platforms."

6. "Feel free to use our stores as an extension of your office"
Turner, who came from retail, is a huge internal advocate of Microsoft Stores. He encouraged attendees to bring customers and their teams to the Microsoft Stores.

5. "Dude, this is Microsoft"
"No other company in the world has 20,000 cloud partners. Some people would say, 'Hey, we should celebrate that, that's great.' Dude, this is Microsoft. We're a company for partners, built by partners, with partners. I want all 600,000-plus selling and transacting in the cloud."

4. "You're Getting Scroogled"
The phrase appeared on one of his slides; Turner didn't actually repeat it. He did say, "Google goes through every word of every Gmail that's sent or received to sell ads. Outlook.com is different. You won't see ads based on keywords from your personal e-mail."

3. KT said something nice about the competition...
"We should absolutely have high respect [for], but absolutely no fear of any one of these competitors. Respect everyone, fear no one."

2. ...and left the hammer (partly) to Oracle
"Ironically, we found some common ground with Oracle. This came from Larry Ellison: 'Salesforce.com's Force.com platform is the roach motel of cloud services, amounting to the ultimate vendor lock-in due to its use of custom programming languages.' I think Larry said that very, very well. Don't let our customers go to the roach motel."

1. "It's about frickin' time, don't you agree?"
Turner said after playing a pair of new Microsoft ads pitting the Microsoft Surface RT against the Apple iPad.

Posted by Scott Bekker on August 05, 2013