It was previously announced that after 14 years of presenting the opening keynote at CES, Microsoft would not be attending CES in any fashion next year, making tonight’s keynote the final one from Microsoft. This will obviously have huge ramifications for CES next year and it was completely evident in the introduction given by the CES president, who rather than simply introduce Ballmer and Microsoft used the opportunity to stress that Microsoft was only “taking a break” and he had no doubt they would be back in the future.
With this being the final Microsoft keynote I had high expectations that something great would be announced but was once again disappionted. Upon further reflection this simply underscores how overdue it is from Microsoft to retire from the antiquated trade show. The pace of new development has picked up considerably as companies need to work faster and harder to compete in the same product space. Not only is it no longer feasable for a company to time product milestones with CES, but news propogates so quickly these days that the value of CES for promotion has decreased significantly.
Things started with a bang as the video stream provided on Microsoft’s CES page simply yielded a null reference exception for the first 15 minutes of the keynote. It was also streamed through Facebook, at significantly worse quality, but at least it was functional. Looking back though, it would have been better if I was simply unable to access the stream, saving me two hours of my life. In fact, I’m so unmoved that I’m simply going to provide my minimal, mispelled notes rather than try to extract anything useful from them:
-intro from ces president doing its best to save next year’s convention by saying Microsoft is just “taking a break.” never ending praise and a prediction that he would be “very surprised if they don’t return.”
- a lot of bill gates references and past clips… feels like they’re trying to remind everyone of bill after all the steve jobs coverage
ryan seacrest. metro joke, fell flat.
ms strem fixed 15 minutes late. quality far better.
windows phone — ballmer follows the kardasians on twitter (strike two, your jokes are missing your audience)
makes me again sad that I didn’t get a windows phone, but no new cdma options.
- tmobile sees first nokia wednesday – nokia 4g lte coming to at&t soon – htc titan 2 4g available now on at&t – 16mp camera
windows pc
impressive laptop promo video. who says pcs arent sexy.
- picture point based authentication — a concept I had presented on in grad school a few years ago
- x86 & ARM. still working on ARM…this is the same thing they said last year.
- promising all windows 7 pcs will run windows 8 on day 1. translation: buy PCs now, please!
xfinity on demand on xbox!
this seasame street demo is taking way too long. i have lost interest and overeager child actors make me uncomfortable.
no xbox 720
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