Click here for photos from the CES showKEY POINTS:
Fresh from his low-key quadbiking and golfing excursion in New Zealand, Microsoft's Bill Gates must have been in a summery mood as he took to the stage to give his last CES keynote. He and his executives were wearing pastel-coloured jumpers.
You can check out the webcast of the keynote or read the transcript here. There were no emotional reflective comments, no barbs for competitors or visionary proclamations. It was pure Bill Gates, matter-of-fact, heavily-scripted and Microsoft-centric. Windows Vista only got a passing mention from Gates, who said that 100 million people are now using the operating system and "that's a very significant milestone for the kind of applications development, and special hardware work that we think is very important", said Gates.
He talked about the second digital decade, which we've been in since about 2005 and suggested three things that will define this decade:
High-definition everywhere:
"Screen technology is getting better, not just the high definition displays, but projection that will let us project onto every wall,"said Gates. "Your desk, we won't just have the computer on the desk, but in the desk, so a meeting room table as you're collaborating, and the living room if you want to briefing up and play games with something like a Surface, or organize your photos. It will just be there, and easy to manipulate, easy to change and have multiple people connect up."
Everything connected via services:
"Getting the latest software, the browsing applications, and getting your data, you'll just take that for granted," said Gates.
"The idea that when you take a photo that it shows up in the place that you'd like it to show up, that would be extremely simple. No longer will users have to bridge between the devices, and they're the ones who have to remember what's where. By having essentially the master of what's going on stored up in the cloud, things like docking up, connecting, searching across devices will be very simple, and the information, of course, can be shared across many users in a very strong way."
Natural user interfaces:
"The first digital decade was largely driven by the keyboard and the mouse. Just in the last two years we've started to see the emergence of other modes of interaction," said Gates.
"Touch on the Windows PC, touch on the iPhone, the Surface device that we're talking about. We started to see speech, - the Tellme capability - built into the phone, the Ford Sync, where you get to talk and interact with your media or your phone capabilities.
Elsewhere, Microsoft announced a host of new content deals to get TV shows and movies downloadable via its Xbox Live platform
"Xbox Live, when we're done integrating this content, will offer more than twice as many hours of on-demand, high definition content as any cable or satellite provider. Over 35 studios and networks are supporting us now, and it's quite clear that online distribution is going to be a powerful force in the future of video," said Microsoft's entertainment and devices head, Robbie Bach.
Microsoft's Zune music player will get a release outside of the US in the spring (Northern Hemisphere) and Microsoft is launching Zune Social, a social networking website for music lovers. Mobile search, Media Room, which will now allow TV to be sent around a home network to numerous TV sets and Surface, got a lot of attention during the keynote, which is the 11th and final one Gates will give. He steps down from fulltime employment at Microsoft midyear, when he'll begin running the US$37.6 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he founded with a chunk of his fortune.
So farewell Bill, who despite the Guitar Hero-themed ending to his keynote, was never the rock star of the tech industry, but the geeky guy with big plans and the drive to follow them through.
As I was watching the keynote on the internet I thought back to my visit to Microsoft in Redmond last year just after CES 07. I was showed Microsoft's futuristic home which contains all sorts of interesting prototypes including a bedroom with walls that are coated with dynamic displays so you can have a picturesque scene around you, rather than boring old wallpaper. Feel like a new scene, just select one on your computer and you're surrounded by it. It's a lot like that old Ray Bradbury short story from the fifties, The Veldt, which you can read here. Given the story's ending, I was happy we only spent a few minutes in Microsoft's bedroom and that there were no safari scene on the walls.
