billg's CES2006 keynote rocked a little bit

Glad BillG is proving me wrong with his CES keynote today. It was very exciting to see first-hand some of the exciting future of the touch-screen, wrap-around PC he demonstrated. Gates says this is where he thinks we'll be by the end of the decade. His history in such predictions is pretty accurate (not 100%... we still don't have digital wallets). I also loved the PC that was built into the top of a desk (like an old Space Invaders game circa 1982) that could OCR the business card he just laid on top of it and synch it to his mobile phone.

Uh Oh - now he's talking about stuff we already know. We all have lots of broadband. New devices. Yeah yeah Bill, we don't need you to tell us this shit. Give us more demos of future technology!! Build a vision for us! You are our leader, you don't need to tell us how far we've come. We know. We were there. You're the only one of us who has hundreds of Ph Ds sitting in labs playing with cool shit though. Talk more about that!

Great... now my stream has collapsed. I hate Windows Media streams. Is it just me, or are they always more flaky than QuickTime streams? My stream is stopping every few seconds and I have Window Media Player set-up to buffer 60 seconds in advance... how does that work??

From what I can tell, Bill is now talking about software... yeah yeah, software's great, we love software Bill. Move it along.

Okay, now we're getting a Windows Vista demo from Aaron, a 'Serf. It's sure purty. Flip3D is the name of the new way to Alt-Tab. Looks nice. Got a sidebar on the right of the screen that looks just like Google Deskbar (but prettier). The LCD on the side of the laptop is also pretty cool. Your calendar can be on and available without having to open up or turn on your laptop. Their approach to tabbed browsing, "quick tabs", is nice. You do a search, open up multiple tabs of the results you think you might wants, then you can see them all in a reduced sized version on one screen, so you can choose which one is right for you with more accuracy.

Digital photos will always have their original fidelity available as a backup. There's goes that extra 200Gb hard drive you just bought! Lucky it only cost ya $200. Lots of talk about graphics, photos, video, all sounds good, but nothing that really "must have' exciting.

Ah... he finally gets to something I do care about - better performance when scrolling through a 10,000 song library. Performance, performance, performance. That's what I want.

Okay now Bill is back with Van Tofler from MTV. Oooh bad joke from Van about Bill being the inspiration for the film "Napoleon Dynamite". Nearly as bad as Bill's Time Person of the Year jokes at the beginning of the show. Ugh. Get a joke writer dude, seriously. So MTV is launching a new service called "urge". blah blah blah. Lots of motherhood statements about what it's going to be, little detail. Okay, urge demo time. Uh oh, Aaron is "super excited". 2 million tracks for sale. Built into Windows Media Player. This is iTunes for WMP. Will it have a podcasting directory? WILL IT HAVE A PODCASTING DIRECTORY? They didn't say. Frakkin hell. How long before they announce something??????

Wow, Van admitted he listens to Justin Timberlake. Maaaaate. All we need now is for Justin to come out on stage. Oh yeah. I didn't see THAT coming.... much. I wonder if Justin will do another nipplegate on BillG? C'mon Bill... get jiggy with it. Oh yeah JT says he's doing a duet with BillG on his new album... zzzzz.

Tablet PCs - okay, talk to me Bill. Price premiums are going to drop. The new Gateway Tablet is getting a plug. New "passive" digitisers are helping reduce the differential in cost. Mobile devices... yeah yeah, we know there are lots of them, lots of variety. Tell us something exciting Bill. Show me the iPod killer.

Ah! Wireless phones for the home - that's cool. I want a voip home phone that connects through my wifi. This is cool. Your IM buddy list (only MSN Messenger though I guess) is available on the phone and you can call people using VOIP.

TV - yeah yeah, the PC and the TV will merge. Is this CES 1994? We know that. When? This year? He says big deployments this year. Let's hope. About frakkin time.

Media Center - OEMs are going to be producing smaller form factors for US$499 (about AUS$700). Still way to expensive for my tastes. Build your own. Mod your old XBOX. Recycle your old PCs.

Ok, here's the iPod killer - a tiny 30Gb video/audio player. Here's new ways you can buy TV shows, subscribe to TV shows, jazzed up EPGs... but where's the citizen media? No mention though of podcasting or vidcasting. zzzzzz. This is 1994 all over again. Where's Malone?

PLEASE MICROSOFT - show me that you understand what's going on in the C-Generation. Please show me how you are going to make it easier for us to produce and distribute and subscribe to citizen media. PLEASE.

HDTV. Boring. Okay, I'm giving up on the stream. Too much crap, promoting their business partners, boring, boring, boring.

If any of you stick with it and they mentioned podcasting, lemme know.

 

 

Comments

[Phillip Molly Malone]

Call called? What you after?
Molly (Malone)

[Cameron]

I meant your Uncle John.

[Phillip Molly Malone]

John's my dad!
Molly (Malone)

[Paul]

Ummm, how can you say Bill Gates has a pretty good track record in predictions? I think people perceive that he is a good predicter because of his wealth, but let's take a look at some of his "prescient" predictions

* Tablet PCs ruling the world, like 2-3 years ago. Not.

* Media Center PCs ruling the world by now. Not.

* Origami PCs selling like hotcakes. Not.

* .NET (whatever the heck it was) ruling the world. Not.

* His sarcastic comment about the iMac when it was originally introduced in 1997 ("Oh yeah, colors are so difficult to do") because he thought the iMac would bomb. Not to mention it took Microsoft several more years to introduce native USB support into Windows, something the "gimmicky" iMac had built-in.

* Being totally blindsided by Apple with regards to the iPod, iTunes, and digital music, and the fact that it took Microsoft 5 years to come up with the Zune.

There are many other examples where something he predicted totally hasn't come true or where he completely missed an emerging megatrend, at which point he just changes his predictions to make it sound like he was right all along.

Let's remember his 1995 book "The Road Ahead" in which the Internet was mentioned, ummm, like once in a single paragraph in the whole book. Apparently, the Internet wasn't on Bill Gates' radar in 1995 and it was such an embarrassing lapse that the publisher reissued the book a couple years later with a whole new sections by Gates about how amazing the Internet was going to be.

So, it seems to me that Gates only has a reputation as a visionary, but his track record shows clearly he's anything but a wildly inaccurate one.