CES 2008: Bill Gates delivered his last keynote as Chairman of Microsoft at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While he treated the audience to a hilarious celebrity-filled farewell video and played Guitar Hero on stage with Guns’n Roses star Slash, he did not make any really ground-breaking new announcements (as DMW’s readers predicted.) Gates’ keynote underscored the fact that Microsoft is still far from a digital entertainment company (but at least they are working on it.)

Gates has inaugurated the yearly Las Vegas gadget extravaganza ten times and during those years the focus has shifted from the devices to what they actually can do for you. In other words, CES today is all about the experience of digital entertainment, not gigabytes and megapixels.

Gates pointed out that we’ve just been through the first "digital decade," and we’re just entering the second one. Gates predicted that it will be one more focused on connecting people and span both business and leisure activities. Gates wanted to show that Microsoft now gets the importance of the latter and made a point of announcing that they’ve signed a number of deals with studios such as NBC Universal, Disney, MGM and Showtime to offer more exciting entertainment content the Xbox Live and MSN platforms.

Gates is a true innovator, no doubt, but he will not be remembered as an expert in providing compelling entertainment content and designing sexy devices and services that enhance and empower peoples’ lifestyles as well as allow self-expression.

During his keynote, Gates once again proved that he is much more confident talking about research into new user-interfaces such as touch-screen devices (surface computing) and visual recognition software on cell phones.

While the Microsoft Chaiman may claim to have changed the focus of the company, Microsoft under Gates is still a company run by engineers and the “cool” stuff has, so far, been better left to companies run by people like Steve Jobs (just look at the Zune).

Perhaps Microsoft will become less like the “PC guy” in the popular Apple commercials after Gates steps down? We’ll see next year at CES. Until then, be on the lookout for Gates’ farewell video on YouTube, because I bet that it’ll turn up there before it hits MSN (or at least be easier to find)…

Joakim Baage

text and photo