Monday, January 08, 2007

Microsoft at CES - The Keynote

I'm watching/watched Bill Gates' keynote at CES. Some comments as I watch it:
You can make videos be your desktop, the document preview is neat, it did seem a teeny bit slow (I'm curious what the hardware was driving the demos.). There is a cool feature that will allow you to combine pieces of pictures in a new picture, they called it "Create the picture you wish you had taken." I can see uses for this with GeekMeet pictures, for sure. ;) In the music space, some one (I forget who) spoke of the Urge store, and the Zune ("the 2nd best selling media player" ;) ). The part that I found ironic, was they trumpet the connectivity of Vista and the 360 and the car (see below) but the Zune doesn't work with Urge, as I understand it, anyway.
Office 2007 was briefly demoed and the background restore (with a snarky comment about whatever Apple calls it) was shown. The preview format in Office was more speedy than the preview in Explorer, or so I thought. Then they controlled Vista with the XBOX 360 controller (flying through Las Vegas on live.com with it) and a woman demonstrated playing Uno on Xbox Live with a PC and a 360. So, Vista will connect to Live, sometime this year. Then the IPTV capabilities were demonstrated with the XBOX 360.
Microsoft has entered in to a partnership with Ford Motor Co. to allow your car to sync with all the "devices you carry in your car" according to a Ford executive. The part that concerned me, besides an BSOD while driving, was the promise of constant updates as new devices are released, so your car connectivity will never be obsolete.... The car gets updates??? Ok, there is a bit of excitement when I consider Wide Area wireless, but there's the BSOD fear. :) The car will read your IM messages to you, and respond to voice commands, there's even a link to a youtube video demonstrating this.
Those are my highlights of Gates' keynote at CES. [When I went to find the url for CES, the #3 result was a 404 error on the CES page. lol]

--MissM
Microsoft at CES
P.S. I wonder what Jobs is going to say at MacWorld...
P.P.S. Oh yeah! I'm letting the keynote play a second time (what dedication, eh??!?!?!?!) and in the middle of the keynote, there's a section showing something with HP, but instead they put up a screen that says "In respect to the intellectual property demonstrated... " yadda yadda. Sigh... This seems silly to me because how many hundreds or thousand saw it? Oh well, I'm sure there's some perfectly legitmate reason for this, but it eludes me.

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