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The Final CES Keynote From Bill Gates
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jan 07, 2008 08:12 AM
from the won't-be-the-same-without-him dept.
from the won't-be-the-same-without-him dept.
Sunday evening saw the final CES keynote delivered by Bill Gates in his current role with the Microsoft corporation. Speculation about big announcements generally seemed to be for naught, as his last address at the show focused more on broad concepts than blockbuster news. "Gates outlined three major themes for the second digital decade-high definition displays with 3D experiences and high quality video and audio, connected services and the power of natural interfaces. Gates had a vision early of those themes, but his quest to make the Tablet PC, Media Center PCs and natural interfaces, such as speech and touch, more mainstream has not been realized." A full description of the talk, including his Guitar Hero finale with Slash, is available in Engadget's liveblog of the event.
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Games: Gates May Announce Xbox 360 DVR At CES 117 comments
Via Kotaku, an article at the Seattle Times offers an interesting theory on what might be an important part of Bill Gates' keynote at CES next week. According to Times writer Brier Dudley, upgrades and licensing for the Xbox 360 could be a big new feather in Microsoft's cap: "I've speculated on my blog that Microsoft may be preparing to license the Xbox gaming platform to consumer-electronics companies. In particular, Microsoft could work with Toshiba to develop a digital video recorder with a hard-drive, high-definition HD-DVD drive and Xbox gaming capabilities. They're already allied against Sony and other backers of the Blu-ray DVD format, and Toshiba could help Xbox finally penetrate the Japanese market." Toshiba has repeatedly denied the possibility of a 360 unit with a built-in HD-DVD drive, it should be noted.
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Games: Hints at the Future of the Xbox 360 Emerge 105 comments
CES has brought out quite a bit of news, for subjects across the tech industry. The future of the Xbox 360 seems to a subject Microsoft can't talk enough about. Gates' keynote touched on new media partnerships for Live Marketplace, like the collaboration with Disney/ABC. A post-keynote email to several games writers noted that 2008 will be the company's year to capitalize on strong hardware and software sales from the holiday season, and that several as-yet-unannounced exclusive 360 titles are in the works. Fans of the platform might still have some anxiety this year; a rumour on the 1up site indicates Microsoft is already working on a game for the next-next-gen console to bear the Xbox name.
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Silverlight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft's heard of Flash, I'm sure, but I'm also sure they prefer their own in-house developed stuff to anything coming out of a competitor.
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Re:Silverlight? (Score:4, Insightful)
Create your own, force it on your customers. Of course they would prefer that their tech become commonplace, besides, flash is mainstream on Linux too, so if they can find a way to lock Linux out by making an alternative they delay Linux growth in market share.
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Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Insightful)
...as long as it's politically convenient, i.e. until it becomes standard.
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Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Insightful)
As siblings have mentioned, Moonlight will likely always be a few steps behind silverlight. Also, there's no guarantee the spec will remain open in the future (see SMB, IE for Mac/UNIX for more info).
More importantly, Moonlight will never be truly Free. Take a look at the audio/video formats it supports. VC-1... sure great for video, also have the option of WMV which I have a feeling will be quite popular. Audio - WMA or MP3. From Miguel de Icaza's web log [tirania.org]
Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser
Sure these formats have been/will be reverse engineered, but with DRM out there in the world it will make decoding DRMed media with open source codecs illegal! So much for free!
This doesn't make Flash any better, I'm just saying that people who proclaim that Silverlight is great because it will have a real open source implementation aren't telling or don't know the whole story.
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Re:Silverlight? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure these formats have been/will be reverse engineered, but with DRM out there in the world it will make decoding DRMed media with open source codecs illegal! So much for free!
Not to mention that the codecs will only run on IA32 or whatever other platform MS chooses to grace with their presence, and explicitly will be useless for anything outside the web.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Java already exists, is open, tested, and runs on lots of stuff.
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The uptake is slow, but IMO its really a better technology than Flash. It gives far better language tools to the programmers and provides much better separation of design, interface and code where doing larger projects with bigger teams will be easier.
Silverlight 1.0 was very flash-like -- the framework wasn't fully fleshed out as
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
And when it comes down to it, this is just plainly a better technology than Flash. The only advantage flash has is it's adoption rate and mind-share. Eventually these will be neutralized.
The newest version of ActionScript is a HUGE improvement upon its predecessors. It truly is. But when it comes to building full-featured web apps that look and act like native rich-client apps, it's still nearly as hard to do that with AS in Flash as it is to do it with JS/Ajax/HTML.
But with silverlight 1.1 you get the ability to use any CLR-based language-- C#, C++.Net, J#, Python.Net, Ruby.Net, TCL.Net, VB.Net, etc etc. You also get the advantage of the largest framework ever shipped with a language (.Net, of course) and the huge amount of existing code. Not to mention, if you've already got an app -- web based or rich client -- written in
I'm really not a big Microsoft fan. I've spent most the last year developing with PHP on a LAMP stack. But if I was asked to build a large web based app with a rich-client feel and given the choice of Flash and Silverlight, not having ever tried either, I'd feel a lot better about the latter than I do the former.
I'm not knocking flash. It's just that flash wasn't really designed to build large apps. It's just been manipulated into that in the past couple years. Silverlight, OTOH, was designed precisely for this reason.
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Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not about the tool itself; it is about what the Microsoft management/lawyers will do with it to negate their competition. They've done it before, many times. They've been convicted in an antitrust case, dragging it out long enough for a sympathetic administration to bail them out of hot water. They will do it again.
Microsoft tools are snake oil.
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Imagine the difference, if it helps, between Javascript and Java. The difference is that significant between what any of the Flash environments will do and a real language and framework for building real enterprise applications -- basically you probably COULD do it, but you're going to be hating life as the project grows bigger.
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Wasn't that Java's goals like 10 years ago?
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Offtopic: Anybody's curious when Msft is going to buy Novell and Suse with it? So much Msft cash is going into Mono and similar projects sponsored by Novell...
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Yes, and they're trying to kill it.
Holodecks! (Score:3, Funny)
Now I ALSO hope that by that time Linux will be the OS of choice for the manufacturer, I simply will not survive a BSOD in glorious Holodeck VR...
Gates on Tablet PCs (Score:5, Insightful)
And unlike the 640K story, there's an actual source [microsoft.com] for this quote.
Re:Gates on Tablet PCs (Score:5, Interesting)
He is not completely mistaken, actually... [apple.com]
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yeeeew (Score:2)
Xbox 360 Ultimate (Score:3, Interesting)
Video of fun part (Score:4, Funny)
The problem might be too much too soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Disruptive technologies gain traction fast when they have a compelling advantage and a short learning curve.
For instance, cannon were a disruptive technology but had a very long learning curve, maybe hundreds of years. Railways, on the other hand, had a compelling advantage in speed and capacity, but had a relatively short learning curve because on the one hand there was a huge body of canal building knowledge to draw on when building railways, and on the other the user interface (buy ticket, get on train) was dirt simple. So railways spread rather fast.
None of the ideas Microsoft have touted have had either a compelling advantage or a short learning curve. Speech input is simply less effective, for many reasons, than learning to type. Lugging around a tablet PC does not result in productivity gains for most people. And, as anyone who has ever tried to design a rule based decision support system knows, anything involving natural interfaces is simply very hard to do indeed, and the payback is rarely there except in a few niche markets.
I believe that the reason for this is that many large corporations have simply forgotten who their customers are. Google will find it hard to do this because there is no lock-in, and their customers have no loyalty. They must listen to their two classes of customers - sellers and end users - or die. Microsoft doesn't seem, any more, to know whether its customers are the recording industry, computer manufacturers, CIOs or, a poor fourth, the actual end users of their computers. Apple could fall into the same trap, but at the moment (at least with personal computers) seems to have its eye on the ball.
Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich. It is impossible to second guess them, and shorting their stock would be foolish. But anyone who has followed the trajectory, in recent years, of (say) Ford versus Toyota and Porsche, would have to agree that being very large is no guarantee of continuing success.
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I'm not sure what you mean with that last example, but it seems you are missing a fact here: Toyota is the largest car manufactorer bar GM, and is set to surpass GM in years or m
Re:The problem might be too much too soon (Score:4, Insightful)
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Bye-bye Billy... (Score:3, Funny)
Someone has to defend him here (Score:3, Insightful)
It's easy to bad-mouth his business practices, it's easy to bad-mouth his products. But I can't bad-mouth the man himself. He's way more charitable than I would be in the same circumstance.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Before you blast the man, think long and hard about the fact that he is the first billionaire to ever publically give away his entire fortune to real charity (that's right, he's not even giving his own kids anything). That's way more than any of the geek "heroes" like Steve Jobs have done or will ever do for humanity.
It's easy to bad-mouth his business practices, it's easy to bad-mouth his products. But I can't bad-mouth the man himself. He's way more charitable than I would be in the same circumstance.
Did he earn his vast fortune in an ethical, and in some cases legal way?
... oh wait ...
No.
MS is a convicted monopolist on 3 continents. MS used every possible strong arm tactic to cram their shitty OS down on everyone's throat. It's very easy to bad mouth the man himself when he earned most of his fortune by screwing others.
And I won't even mention BillG's "stellar" predictions. Now let me go back and continue work on my Tablet PC because it's more productive
Give Bill a break (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
From the Wikipedia article on Al Capone:
"Capone often tried to whitewash his image and be seen as a community leader. For example, he started a program, which was continued for decades after his death, to fight rickets by providing a daily milk ration to Chicago school children. Also during the Great Depression, Capone opened up many soup kitchens for th
Re:Give Bill a break (Score:5, Insightful)
The negative effect that monopolistic actions have had in stifling innovation has been extremely unfortunate, even if in some ways we don't even realize how unfortunate.
Also, while I give him credit for what he has been doing lately, as far as I remember, Bill Gates was late to the humanitarian game too. I seem to remember him having to have external pressure applied to get going on that.
Like many, he has (and will have) a mixed legacy.
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Gates is a visionary (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the visionary who missed the digital media revolution, requiring burst.com and Apple to show him how to do it. In the past ten years of the digital media revolution, which stock price appreciated more, Microsoft's or Apple's?
Is Gates a visionary, or a monopolist? Gates' image and PR people want him to be viewed as the former. History will record him as the latter.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The cries about him being a "monopolist" are somewhat misplaced, IMHO. Show me ANY C.E.O. of a successful, global business today who wouldn't want his/her company to achieve a similar market-share, if they could only figure out a way to do it! Yes, Microsoft made some questionable business deals, but again, I'd say that's "par for the cour
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a Laughable Explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate Microsoft too but it's the natural succession of leadership, Gates is past his prime. His company is not (has it ever had 'a prime'?). I don't think he's stepping down from lack of success, I think he's stepping down because maybe he realized what horrid things a leader with that much power (inadvertently) has to do.
And that's fine with me because Ballmer is one easy man to hate. Just redirect everything to him. Gates is rich but that doesn't make him any more despicable than Rockefeller, Hughes or Warren Buffett. At least he's trying to help other countries in the world. I think Gates has generally had good intentions with bad consequences for many members of the tech community. Whether it's for family, boredom or health reasons, he's certainly not stepping down because Microsoft is losing this game.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, MS has too much money jammed up its collective ass and too many branches for the loss of a monopoly in the OS market to kill it outright. They still make wonderful peripherals, the RedRing 360, and their research division must bring in plenty, thanks to patent licensing. Oh, and don't forget that many are just snapping up XP if they don't like Vista; it's still another dollar for MS.
Who knows, maybe MS would take another look at Windows if sales started plummeting.
Re:Is it any wonder Gates is stepping down? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Linux on the server? Yeah I can see that...
Linux on the desktop? Nope not a chance... That moment passed.
Think about it... Vista took how long? And Vista is selling how much? And still people are saying "this is the year of Linux on the desktop." BUT... What has been gaining traction? OSX...
This says one thing. I want a desktop that works and lets me get my work done and I don't care if it costs.
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FWIW, this (2007)was the year when I first put Linux on my desktop. After a horrific experience with Vista, I installed Ubuntu Studio and it's been smooth sailing so far. My daughter, who is not a techie, prefers that machine over all my others. She gave me a lecture about how Linux is "safer from viruses and DRM" and I did a double-take. I wonder who she's been talking to.
If it's any of you guys, hands off.
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The Road Ahead (Score:3, Funny)
Blind Squirrel Seeking Nut (Score:4, Interesting)
I had the fortune to catch Bill doing a CES Key-Note address a few years back. It's pretty funny to see how he continues to get it wrong and they continue to have him do Key-Note addresses.
As a company, Microsoft is not terribly good at being visionary. Their track record is a line of failed attempts to push their technology, which should be hooking every household into a Microsoft world. Where they fail is understanding most of these items consumers buy, use for a while and then toss, without ever getting fully hooked in. Windows CE was to be in everything from CD players to Bookreading tablets, but we're seeing Linux, java, etc. thriving. Clearly there's some reason why not every Consumer Electronics company has not jumped on the Windows bandwagon - they better than I know their reasons, I only observe the results.
The last time I heard Bill talk he seemed, perhaps unwittingingly, to be threatening about half the companies at CES with muscling them into a Mafia-esque grip of their technology and vision for the future.
Once you realise most of it is utter bollox, just sit back and wait for him to flub words or his on-stage demo to crash.
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