Ballmer's parting message to CES: just Windows, Windows, Windows
Microsoft chief executive talks up the Metro interface, Xbox, Kinect and Windows Phone - but where's the vision that we used to see from his predecessor Bill Gates?
View of the stage ahead of Steve Ballmer's 2012 CES keynote speech, seen from behind the sound and video mixing desk
Steve Ballmer's final keynote at CES is being held in the Venetian hotel. The queues are colossal - though they always are - but thankfully there's room for everyone who wants to get in. (Note: this was blogged as live, but posted afterwards. For best results, read slowly and take a drink between each chunk. What you drink is entirely your choice.)
18:10 Sitting right behind the sound desk in the ballroom in the Venetian hotel (to which the keynote has been moved; in previous years it has been in other more distant locations). The queue was miles long, but the ballroom is just as large as last year's - though this one isn't raked, so those at the back may have to hope that Steve Ballmer, whose swansong it is, stands on a ladder for some parts of his keynote. At least they won't have to worry about hearing him; at the Nokia press conference three hours ago he proved once more that he doesn't need a microphone to be heard extremely clearly at the back of any room.
18:26 Lights are starting to go down, and the room is pretty much full. And limit flash to "the first few minutes of each presenter's presentation". Reasonable enough. There are two tables on the right and left of the main stage which seem on the right to have a number of devices, and on the left just seems like a table - perhaps Microsoft Surface 2.0 (or are we up to 3.0 now?)
18:29 Lights down. Here we go. "World's largest consumer technology show", say the slides. We'll have to ask CeBIT what they think of that. Promo video rolls for Consumer Electronics Association. No people on stage yet.
18:31 Gary Shapiro of the CEA, the guy who had the difficult conversation with Steve Ballmer about the 2013 keynote. "We know today the PC and its progeny are a critical part of the home enertainment experience… we learned about the convergence of TV and PC. in 1995 Bill Gates took to the stage to talk to a small group… Bill walked into the Hilton by himself with his head buried in a book. His speech was called "the coming revolution in consumer computing". Bill said the revolution would be social. and that was in 1995." (We think: classic Bill, right in the long term, wrong in the short term.)
"Now as many of you have heard, Microsoft is taking a break from the keynote stage in 2013.. for those who have asked why Microsoft got the keynote slot… they uniquely changed the world and improved productivity and the way we communicate… and drove press and attention to the show. Microsoft took a risk on us early and we both benefited.
"But as much as our inclination is to protext the status quo.. for us both to be fresh innovative and enticing we agreed to a pause." (That's a different story from Microsoft, which didn't talk about "pauses" or "agreements".) "I offer gratitude and goodwill towards Microsoft. In one introduciton I compared Microsoft to the founding fathers of our nation.. America has been blessed by the vision of our founders and of Microsoft… I would be shocked if Microsoft did not take the keynote stage in the next few years." We'll note that as a prediction, Gary.
18:35 And it's Ballmer. He and Gary Shapiro do some gladhanding and complimenting. Shapiro gives him a giant … something with pictures. A memento of all the years of Microsoft keynotes.
OK, 11 speeches from Bill, 4 from Steve. Two-minute video of how it has gone over the past 15 years. Autotuned Billg is really very weird. Including the time when the machine died. Someone has worked hard on this video. Fun. Watch on YouTube, or below:
18:38 Ryan Seacrest is our host. (I'm afraid I don't know who Ryan Seacrest is. If you don't either, here's the Wikipedia entry.) The background is a big orange Metro tiled shifting pattern; it's as though Joan Míro were in charge, but given only one colour to work with. "Tonight we'll do it conversationally, talk about the tech industry, what's next for Microsoft, Steve, me, and a lot of Microsoft's latest gear." So Steve Ballmer comes up to the stage for the second time. Blue background. They're now sitting on stools. What should we expect this evening?
18:40 "We have chance in the next year to raise our product line to the next level across phones, tablets, TV, xbox… our featured attraction tonight…" We await the words Xbox 720: "our Metro interface". Gah.
Seacrest: "so it's going to be a fun night. Let's start with Windows Phone." Localised outbreak of whooping. That'll be the Windows Phone team.
Ballmer: "I'm excited about where we are. Unique and beneficial experience. The other phones make the sea of icons the view of the world. We have a better way putting the people who matter to you.. in front of you." Give us some numbers, Steve. Give us some hard facts about licences sold.
Nope, lots of noodling about Windows Phone and its interface. He could have done this last year. "I'm in regular touch with hundreds of people…"
18:45 Derek Snyder of somewhere comes out. "Breadth of choice.. same software on all our handset makers." It's Windows Phone, demo, again. Microsoft's $1m for its keynote is buying it some more forced advertising. Hard to feel that this is really showing the consumer electronics business the direction of the future: it's a marketing splurge.
18:47 Still with Snyder. Personally, I'm pondering who should do the keynote next year. Larry Page, Google's chief executive? He'd never do it. Andy Rubin, head of Android inside Google? At least he would be someone who'd be able to tell the CE industry what's happening: everything's going mobile. Or should it be someone who stands outside the industry, an analyst of some stripe who could point to the trends that are coming and tell them the direction of the weather? A smart person last year could have pointed to the rise of HTML5 by looking at how browsers were shifting. They could have pointed to the rise of Android. Looking back at last year's keynote from Ballmer, none of it has come "true". He talked about Windows Phone; it didn't take off. (This is the reboot.) He talked about Surface; no sign yet. He talked about Bing; its market share hasn't shifted (anything it gains from Yahoo is stolen from itself, since it does Yahoo's search). He talked about Windows 8 and running on ARM chips; we've seen more demos (and 3 million downloads of the Windows 9 preview) but it's still not expected until October.
Synder's demo is going terribly - his voice-driven memo didn't transcribe correctly, his Local Search didn't work. OK. He virtually runs off the stage.
18:52 "Tell us what's going on with the phones' hardware partners, Steve." This really is pretty dull. Nokia has a phone. HTC has a phone. App Market growing about 300 per day.
18:56 Windows PCs. "Tough competition. Nothing better than tough competition." Huh? Who would that be? The suggestion that Microsoft has any competition in the desktop OS market is just madness. Apple is its only competitor, and has about 5% of the market; if it continues at its current rate (growing faster than the market) it might reach 50% in about 2099. But competition sounds better than complacency, one supposes.
Ballmer: "One of the most amazing phenomena in our business has been the way that the Windows PC has constantly changed and reinvented and spurred other technology innovations… over 3bn Windows PCs are in use around the planet." (Analysts I've spoken to suggest more like 2bn. Perhaps 3bn sold, but half of those have been replacements.)
"People don't want to compromise. Nobody wants to give up on their desktop when they moved to notebooks. We don't give up anything… with Windows 8 we've reimagined Windows. It will give a no-compromise experience. We kicked this off at CES and we're further down the road now."
Seacrest: "tell me about the Windows 7 hardware available now."
Ballmer: "Intel's done a lot of work maing them lighter, thinner…" Video of ultrabooks, though the word isn't used - why not? Lots of Macbook Air-alikes and Pro-alikes.
19:00 Tami Reller, chief marketing officer for Windows. She's really thrilled to be here, apparently. To talk about… Windows! She's going to talk about Windows 8. OK. "It's more than the next version of Windows. It's a new way of thinking about your PC. Windows reimagined."
Ah, this is going to be the phrase: "no-compromise experience". You can see that the marketing is going to suggest that the iPad is a compromise device compared to Windows 8 tablets. That could be an interesting one. Reller: it lets users "effortlessly move between what they want to do and what they need to do."
19:02 Lock screen shows things such as waiting emails, other things without any need to unlock it. Picture password unlock - very neat. She's on Windows 8's start screen, which is a Metro screen: "the tiles act as a window into your apps without you having to launch them." Works with touch or mouse/keyboard. No matter how large your screen or screens. Swipe from the right edge to reveal "charms" - search, share, Start (your old refuge), devices, or settings.
She's going to launch a finger-painting app. Would have been more interesting to see her launch email, to be honest. Finger-painting not in particularly high demand for most Windows 8 users, I suspect.
Now a tablet with an i5 processor, from Samsung. "The same device we gave out to developers last fall [autumn] to let them start building Metro-style apps." Apps once written can run on x86 or ARM architectures.
"Apps are what power the new experience in Windows 8… you can see it's very easy to navigate the store." It is, but one looks at the Metro tiled interface and wonders how well it will be for presenting a really big list of things.
"Windows Store will initially open in late February.. let you test the range of free apps. Will be global, available in every language authored for Windows. Free and paid in more than 200 countries. Businesses can use to deliver apps and updates for employees."
Good news for software developers. (Still a little unsure how this is going to benefit the broader consumer electronics industry, though. Will there be standard interfaces for tablets, or will different companies have different connectors, thus splitting the market?)
Apps can be grouped, can be named (and renamed). (Wonder if a group can be password-protected; seems like a good idea.)
19:12 Looking at Reller's demonstration, one immediately thinks two things: Windows 8 is an enormous leap forward in usability, and it's likely to unsettle some people who have always wanted to be able to root around in the file system. It abstracts the file system away, rather like the iPad or iPhone. OK, you can go to a standard Windows desktop, but you'll miss out on many of the best usability features of the new OS if you do. She seems very purposely not to be showing the standard desktop view. That's the past, though it's also the foundation.
Next big Windows 8 milestone will be in late February (with the store opening). We're also being invited to get a new PC: "Windows 7 today, Windows 8 tomorrow."
19:17 Ballmer: "Windows 7 is the best-selling operating system ever, 500m users worldwide, licensing about 7 new copies per second. Every Windows 7 PC will be ready for Windows 8 on day one." Good business for Microsoft, not such good news for the hardware makers?
19:19 We're now getting the Tweet Choir. Short and to the point. They sing tweets. (None of mine, it seems. Rotten luck.) Here's one: "watching #ces: hoping for good Xbox news." Yes, let's hope for that. They're nearly as loud as Ballmer himself.
19:22 Xbox appears on the screen. Seacrest: "Ten years ago… if I said Xbox to someone in the street they would give me a blank stare. Did you expect it would turn out like this?" Ballmer: "Xbox represents a part of our DNA that we like best… we're the world sales leader in the last year for consoles, 66m users, 40m Xbox Live subscribers tuning in for entertainment experiences, some for games, more for family entertainment, and for an entertainment hub.. social, music, and still games. Did I expect it ten years ago? No, I bet on it ten years ago."
Kinect getting a big mention again. "We shipped a little over 18m of these [Kinects] in the year.. and as we integrate Bing into the Xbox and Kinect experience it will change the experience." The 18m is an interesting number. Sales must have slowed down considerably from the first year; still, they seem to be integrated into the new Samsung SmartTV (this hasn't been mentioned yet by anyone, including Samsung). But the motion and voice sensing of the Smart TV, which also uses Bing, screams Kinect.
19:29 .. showing the ESPN app on the Nokia Windows Phone via Xbox on his Xbox playing on his TV. And now showing off how he can use his voice to navigate around. (One watches and thinks: really clever. And then: you'd quickly get bored of waiting between commands, such as "Xbox: TV." (Pause while it navigates there.) "Program guide." You really want to go there straight away: "Xbox, TV program guide", or stack instructions together - "Xbox, TV, program guide" and let it figure it out.)
19:32 Demo for Xbox Kinect Sesame Street. "For the first time you can physically and vocally impact a TV show." It's Microsoft's take on smart TV. Hard to range it against Google's or Samsung's approaches here: it's not exactly apps-based, and it's not quite about bringing the internet to your TV. It's a different approach altogether. (If I'm honest, I'm really unsure what it is that Microsoft is hoping to inspire here. Is the expectation that people with Sesame Street-aged children will rush out any buy a Kinect and Xbox? Rather than a Samsung Smart TV or a Google TV set-top box?)
19:38 Ballmer: "the number of things you can do with video entertainment.. it's enormous. Getting the computer to see and hear you… we'll see Kinext revolutionise other industries, health care, education, it really is incredible."
Kinect promo video. (So is the thinking that people who exhibit and come to CES don't browse the internet and know about Kinect? Haven't seen the promo video?)
Kinect is coming to Windows on February 1st. We're working with more than 200 companies on unique Kinect applications.. Amex, Toyota…" No explanation of what they're actually doing.
SIG is in lots of cars. Office 2010 is the fastest-selling version in history. Pushed into the cloud, had a "Stunning" success rate compared to the other cloud services guys. Acquired Skype, people who use over 300 billion minutes of voice and video. And of course the product that Microsoft … Bing, we've reached 30% market share in partnership with Bing in the United States." Uh-huh. Let's not mention its massive losses, eh. But perhaps it is going to be an Xbox in disguise, which over time will dominate. If the market can turn to using TVs for search, and if they aren't using Google TV, and if Xbox can be the dominant internet TV experience. That's one big "if" followed by another.
Seacrest: "we're almost out of time.. one final question: what's next?"
Ballmer, loudly: "Windows 8 is what's next! Late February and then BOOM! on to the shipment. The kind of no-compromise experience with the dynamic Metro experience…" People are heading out. Like water pouring out of a breached dam. Ballmer is still talking. "We'll use the software and services to invent incredible things… Metro will create incredible experiences.. Metro will ensure that 1+1 really does equal 3. Metro, Metro, Metro and Windows, Windows, Windows." Notice - no date on the shipment for Windows 8. Analysts expect it in October.
19:43 And we're done. Not a bang but a sort of whimper. That's it: 16 years of history ends, with Windows front and centre of Microsoft's message, but no wider picture for the consumer electronics industry to chew on. Next year, could they pick someone who will be able to paint the landscape they can see beyond the window - rather than inside Windows?
Serious suggestions welcome: who should give the keynote next year, and why?
18:10 Sitting right behind the sound desk in the ballroom in the Venetian hotel (to which the keynote has been moved; in previous years it has been in other more distant locations). The queue was miles long, but the ballroom is just as large as last year's - though this one isn't raked, so those at the back may have to hope that Steve Ballmer, whose swansong it is, stands on a ladder for some parts of his keynote. At least they won't have to worry about hearing him; at the Nokia press conference three hours ago he proved once more that he doesn't need a microphone to be heard extremely clearly at the back of any room.
18:26 Lights are starting to go down, and the room is pretty much full. And limit flash to "the first few minutes of each presenter's presentation". Reasonable enough. There are two tables on the right and left of the main stage which seem on the right to have a number of devices, and on the left just seems like a table - perhaps Microsoft Surface 2.0 (or are we up to 3.0 now?)
18:29 Lights down. Here we go. "World's largest consumer technology show", say the slides. We'll have to ask CeBIT what they think of that. Promo video rolls for Consumer Electronics Association. No people on stage yet.
18:31 Gary Shapiro of the CEA, the guy who had the difficult conversation with Steve Ballmer about the 2013 keynote. "We know today the PC and its progeny are a critical part of the home enertainment experience… we learned about the convergence of TV and PC. in 1995 Bill Gates took to the stage to talk to a small group… Bill walked into the Hilton by himself with his head buried in a book. His speech was called "the coming revolution in consumer computing". Bill said the revolution would be social. and that was in 1995." (We think: classic Bill, right in the long term, wrong in the short term.)
"Now as many of you have heard, Microsoft is taking a break from the keynote stage in 2013.. for those who have asked why Microsoft got the keynote slot… they uniquely changed the world and improved productivity and the way we communicate… and drove press and attention to the show. Microsoft took a risk on us early and we both benefited.
"But as much as our inclination is to protext the status quo.. for us both to be fresh innovative and enticing we agreed to a pause." (That's a different story from Microsoft, which didn't talk about "pauses" or "agreements".) "I offer gratitude and goodwill towards Microsoft. In one introduciton I compared Microsoft to the founding fathers of our nation.. America has been blessed by the vision of our founders and of Microsoft… I would be shocked if Microsoft did not take the keynote stage in the next few years." We'll note that as a prediction, Gary.
18:35 And it's Ballmer. He and Gary Shapiro do some gladhanding and complimenting. Shapiro gives him a giant … something with pictures. A memento of all the years of Microsoft keynotes.
OK, 11 speeches from Bill, 4 from Steve. Two-minute video of how it has gone over the past 15 years. Autotuned Billg is really very weird. Including the time when the machine died. Someone has worked hard on this video. Fun. Watch on YouTube, or below:
18:38 Ryan Seacrest is our host. (I'm afraid I don't know who Ryan Seacrest is. If you don't either, here's the Wikipedia entry.) The background is a big orange Metro tiled shifting pattern; it's as though Joan Míro were in charge, but given only one colour to work with. "Tonight we'll do it conversationally, talk about the tech industry, what's next for Microsoft, Steve, me, and a lot of Microsoft's latest gear." So Steve Ballmer comes up to the stage for the second time. Blue background. They're now sitting on stools. What should we expect this evening?
18:40 "We have chance in the next year to raise our product line to the next level across phones, tablets, TV, xbox… our featured attraction tonight…" We await the words Xbox 720: "our Metro interface". Gah.
Seacrest: "so it's going to be a fun night. Let's start with Windows Phone." Localised outbreak of whooping. That'll be the Windows Phone team.
Ballmer: "I'm excited about where we are. Unique and beneficial experience. The other phones make the sea of icons the view of the world. We have a better way putting the people who matter to you.. in front of you." Give us some numbers, Steve. Give us some hard facts about licences sold.
Nope, lots of noodling about Windows Phone and its interface. He could have done this last year. "I'm in regular touch with hundreds of people…"
18:45 Derek Snyder of somewhere comes out. "Breadth of choice.. same software on all our handset makers." It's Windows Phone, demo, again. Microsoft's $1m for its keynote is buying it some more forced advertising. Hard to feel that this is really showing the consumer electronics business the direction of the future: it's a marketing splurge.
18:47 Still with Snyder. Personally, I'm pondering who should do the keynote next year. Larry Page, Google's chief executive? He'd never do it. Andy Rubin, head of Android inside Google? At least he would be someone who'd be able to tell the CE industry what's happening: everything's going mobile. Or should it be someone who stands outside the industry, an analyst of some stripe who could point to the trends that are coming and tell them the direction of the weather? A smart person last year could have pointed to the rise of HTML5 by looking at how browsers were shifting. They could have pointed to the rise of Android. Looking back at last year's keynote from Ballmer, none of it has come "true". He talked about Windows Phone; it didn't take off. (This is the reboot.) He talked about Surface; no sign yet. He talked about Bing; its market share hasn't shifted (anything it gains from Yahoo is stolen from itself, since it does Yahoo's search). He talked about Windows 8 and running on ARM chips; we've seen more demos (and 3 million downloads of the Windows 9 preview) but it's still not expected until October.
Synder's demo is going terribly - his voice-driven memo didn't transcribe correctly, his Local Search didn't work. OK. He virtually runs off the stage.
18:52 "Tell us what's going on with the phones' hardware partners, Steve." This really is pretty dull. Nokia has a phone. HTC has a phone. App Market growing about 300 per day.
18:56 Windows PCs. "Tough competition. Nothing better than tough competition." Huh? Who would that be? The suggestion that Microsoft has any competition in the desktop OS market is just madness. Apple is its only competitor, and has about 5% of the market; if it continues at its current rate (growing faster than the market) it might reach 50% in about 2099. But competition sounds better than complacency, one supposes.
Ballmer: "One of the most amazing phenomena in our business has been the way that the Windows PC has constantly changed and reinvented and spurred other technology innovations… over 3bn Windows PCs are in use around the planet." (Analysts I've spoken to suggest more like 2bn. Perhaps 3bn sold, but half of those have been replacements.)
"People don't want to compromise. Nobody wants to give up on their desktop when they moved to notebooks. We don't give up anything… with Windows 8 we've reimagined Windows. It will give a no-compromise experience. We kicked this off at CES and we're further down the road now."
Seacrest: "tell me about the Windows 7 hardware available now."
Ballmer: "Intel's done a lot of work maing them lighter, thinner…" Video of ultrabooks, though the word isn't used - why not? Lots of Macbook Air-alikes and Pro-alikes.
19:00 Tami Reller, chief marketing officer for Windows. She's really thrilled to be here, apparently. To talk about… Windows! She's going to talk about Windows 8. OK. "It's more than the next version of Windows. It's a new way of thinking about your PC. Windows reimagined."
Ah, this is going to be the phrase: "no-compromise experience". You can see that the marketing is going to suggest that the iPad is a compromise device compared to Windows 8 tablets. That could be an interesting one. Reller: it lets users "effortlessly move between what they want to do and what they need to do."
19:02 Lock screen shows things such as waiting emails, other things without any need to unlock it. Picture password unlock - very neat. She's on Windows 8's start screen, which is a Metro screen: "the tiles act as a window into your apps without you having to launch them." Works with touch or mouse/keyboard. No matter how large your screen or screens. Swipe from the right edge to reveal "charms" - search, share, Start (your old refuge), devices, or settings.
She's going to launch a finger-painting app. Would have been more interesting to see her launch email, to be honest. Finger-painting not in particularly high demand for most Windows 8 users, I suspect.
Now a tablet with an i5 processor, from Samsung. "The same device we gave out to developers last fall [autumn] to let them start building Metro-style apps." Apps once written can run on x86 or ARM architectures.
"Apps are what power the new experience in Windows 8… you can see it's very easy to navigate the store." It is, but one looks at the Metro tiled interface and wonders how well it will be for presenting a really big list of things.
"Windows Store will initially open in late February.. let you test the range of free apps. Will be global, available in every language authored for Windows. Free and paid in more than 200 countries. Businesses can use to deliver apps and updates for employees."
Good news for software developers. (Still a little unsure how this is going to benefit the broader consumer electronics industry, though. Will there be standard interfaces for tablets, or will different companies have different connectors, thus splitting the market?)
Apps can be grouped, can be named (and renamed). (Wonder if a group can be password-protected; seems like a good idea.)
19:12 Looking at Reller's demonstration, one immediately thinks two things: Windows 8 is an enormous leap forward in usability, and it's likely to unsettle some people who have always wanted to be able to root around in the file system. It abstracts the file system away, rather like the iPad or iPhone. OK, you can go to a standard Windows desktop, but you'll miss out on many of the best usability features of the new OS if you do. She seems very purposely not to be showing the standard desktop view. That's the past, though it's also the foundation.
Next big Windows 8 milestone will be in late February (with the store opening). We're also being invited to get a new PC: "Windows 7 today, Windows 8 tomorrow."
19:17 Ballmer: "Windows 7 is the best-selling operating system ever, 500m users worldwide, licensing about 7 new copies per second. Every Windows 7 PC will be ready for Windows 8 on day one." Good business for Microsoft, not such good news for the hardware makers?
19:19 We're now getting the Tweet Choir. Short and to the point. They sing tweets. (None of mine, it seems. Rotten luck.) Here's one: "watching #ces: hoping for good Xbox news." Yes, let's hope for that. They're nearly as loud as Ballmer himself.
19:22 Xbox appears on the screen. Seacrest: "Ten years ago… if I said Xbox to someone in the street they would give me a blank stare. Did you expect it would turn out like this?" Ballmer: "Xbox represents a part of our DNA that we like best… we're the world sales leader in the last year for consoles, 66m users, 40m Xbox Live subscribers tuning in for entertainment experiences, some for games, more for family entertainment, and for an entertainment hub.. social, music, and still games. Did I expect it ten years ago? No, I bet on it ten years ago."
Kinect getting a big mention again. "We shipped a little over 18m of these [Kinects] in the year.. and as we integrate Bing into the Xbox and Kinect experience it will change the experience." The 18m is an interesting number. Sales must have slowed down considerably from the first year; still, they seem to be integrated into the new Samsung SmartTV (this hasn't been mentioned yet by anyone, including Samsung). But the motion and voice sensing of the Smart TV, which also uses Bing, screams Kinect.
19:29 .. showing the ESPN app on the Nokia Windows Phone via Xbox on his Xbox playing on his TV. And now showing off how he can use his voice to navigate around. (One watches and thinks: really clever. And then: you'd quickly get bored of waiting between commands, such as "Xbox: TV." (Pause while it navigates there.) "Program guide." You really want to go there straight away: "Xbox, TV program guide", or stack instructions together - "Xbox, TV, program guide" and let it figure it out.)
19:32 Demo for Xbox Kinect Sesame Street. "For the first time you can physically and vocally impact a TV show." It's Microsoft's take on smart TV. Hard to range it against Google's or Samsung's approaches here: it's not exactly apps-based, and it's not quite about bringing the internet to your TV. It's a different approach altogether. (If I'm honest, I'm really unsure what it is that Microsoft is hoping to inspire here. Is the expectation that people with Sesame Street-aged children will rush out any buy a Kinect and Xbox? Rather than a Samsung Smart TV or a Google TV set-top box?)
19:38 Ballmer: "the number of things you can do with video entertainment.. it's enormous. Getting the computer to see and hear you… we'll see Kinext revolutionise other industries, health care, education, it really is incredible."
Kinect promo video. (So is the thinking that people who exhibit and come to CES don't browse the internet and know about Kinect? Haven't seen the promo video?)
Kinect is coming to Windows on February 1st. We're working with more than 200 companies on unique Kinect applications.. Amex, Toyota…" No explanation of what they're actually doing.
SIG is in lots of cars. Office 2010 is the fastest-selling version in history. Pushed into the cloud, had a "Stunning" success rate compared to the other cloud services guys. Acquired Skype, people who use over 300 billion minutes of voice and video. And of course the product that Microsoft … Bing, we've reached 30% market share in partnership with Bing in the United States." Uh-huh. Let's not mention its massive losses, eh. But perhaps it is going to be an Xbox in disguise, which over time will dominate. If the market can turn to using TVs for search, and if they aren't using Google TV, and if Xbox can be the dominant internet TV experience. That's one big "if" followed by another.
Seacrest: "we're almost out of time.. one final question: what's next?"
Ballmer, loudly: "Windows 8 is what's next! Late February and then BOOM! on to the shipment. The kind of no-compromise experience with the dynamic Metro experience…" People are heading out. Like water pouring out of a breached dam. Ballmer is still talking. "We'll use the software and services to invent incredible things… Metro will create incredible experiences.. Metro will ensure that 1+1 really does equal 3. Metro, Metro, Metro and Windows, Windows, Windows." Notice - no date on the shipment for Windows 8. Analysts expect it in October.
19:43 And we're done. Not a bang but a sort of whimper. That's it: 16 years of history ends, with Windows front and centre of Microsoft's message, but no wider picture for the consumer electronics industry to chew on. Next year, could they pick someone who will be able to paint the landscape they can see beyond the window - rather than inside Windows?
Serious suggestions welcome: who should give the keynote next year, and why?
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