Yostivanich

Bill Gates last night gave his final keynote at the Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show (CES). Gates will be step­ping down from Microsoft as a full time employee, and work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foun­da­tion start­ing this July. I watched his keynote address and wasn’t all that impressed with either the actual speech or with the prod­ucts Microsoft is look­ing at releasing.

Gates’ keynote focused on the idea of the sec­ond dig­i­tal decade, a con­nected decade, with the first being a soft­ware decade. His idea is that in the com­ing years, no longer will where data is located be an issue instead all of you data will be with you every­where. The pos­si­bly most inter­est­ing aspect of this to me was the idea that I could authen­ti­cate a phone as belong­ing to me and it would con­nect to the inter­net and have all my con­tacts. That would be a very cool fea­ture. How­ever over­all the vision wasn’t all that impres­sive. This has been an idea that has been thrown around before by the vast major­ity of the tech indus­try. It wasn’t all that vision­ary espe­cially com­ing from a man who has pretty much been at the fore­front first dig­i­tal decade.

Microsoft then dis­cussed some both new and already announced prod­ucts. First up was a focus on Win­dows Live and how if all of your fam­ily and friends use Win­dows Live you are able to coor­di­nate activ­i­ties between every­body. Noth­ing new there and I would say not that it mat­ters, as long as one friend doesn’t use the ser­vice you don’t gain the full ben­e­fit of it. Also I don’t want to have to be tied to one par­tic­u­lar ser­vice. Next the Microsoft Sur­face was re-demonstrated and not much more to say on that. A social net­work for the Zune was unveiled, Zune Social. Okay, so the first part of it of being able to cre­ate badges that dis­play recently played songs and favorite artists that you can dis­play on MySpace or Face­book or your blog is nice. How­ever then Microsoft evi­den­tially felt that they needed a social net­work built around it. So you now have another social net­work to keep track of, which there are already ser­vices that will do a much bet­ter job than Microsoft ever could, Last.fm is just one exam­ple. One thing that they toted was that inside of the social net­work while dis­cov­er­ing music you can pur­chase the music from the Zune Store. The tran­si­tion though when you went to the Zune Store was goofy and it took con­trol of the whole screen, also the inter­face was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. It didn’t make a ton of sense and will prob­a­bly go nowhere. Ford sync was then shown off, voice com­mands for your phone and MP3 player. Ehh, it’s cool, but seri­ously it’s already been out in the pub­lic for a while some­thing new please.

Finally we get to the far off gad­get from Microsoft. It was a device that as you walked you could point at objects and peo­ple and dis­play infor­ma­tion about what­ever. It would pull up all the dig­i­tal mem­o­ries that you have that are asso­ci­ated with that object, you could pur­chase movie tick­ets, get direc­tions, and it could even show an ad from say a restau­rant on why you should eat there tonight. Umm, this is dumb, nuff said. Why would I need to pull up all my dig­i­tal mem­o­ries asso­ci­ated with a per­son or busi­ness. I prob­a­bly have those mem­o­ries in say my head. Also I don’t want an ad play­ing when I’m walk­ing down the street, aren’t there enough ads in the world that my mem­o­ries need to have an ad. Imag­ine point­ing it where you and spouse got engaged and see­ing pho­tos of you two together and an ad play­ing in the back­ground. Just doesn’t work. Also how hard is it to walk up to a movie the­ater and pur­chase the ticket. If you are close enough for the device to tell what build­ing you are point­ing at, it can’t be that long of a walk. Over­all it seems to be a device look­ing for a problem.

Over­all, the keynote was not highly ranked in my opin­ion. The spoof video of Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft was awe­some and is rec­om­mended, though don’t suf­fer through the whole keynote.