Ballmer kicked off this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) tonight… snore.  I’ll be the first to defend Microsoft and say they’ve had one hell of a year:  Windows 7 a success, XBox Kinect flying off the shelves, Windows Phone 7, Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, and on and on; but when I tune in to the opening keynote of CES I expect the bar to be set pretty high.

First, I still can’t take Ballmer seriously as a presenter.  Bill, please give Steve one of your sweaters to put on over his deshevled button-down.  Also, Steve, please learn to be more assertive with your hand gestures.  It’s ok to talk with your hands but it’s distracting to watch your hands flop around on limp wrists.

Second, no major announcements?  No big product launches on the horizon?  Sure, there were some interesting bits but nothing to really blow your socks off and get you excited for the coming year.  Here’s a rundown of the mildly exciting announcements:

  • Kinect-enabled Netflix and Hulu on the XBox so you don’t need to use a physical controller.
  • Windows phones coming to Verizon and Sprint in the first half of the year (better late than never).
  • A preview of some new laptops.  One had two touchscreens which looked nifty although I prefer a hardware keyboard.  Another was a small slider with completely passive cooling, great for controlling a media center pc.
  • The new generation of Surface — it has evolved from the $15K coffee table to a less expensive coffee-table-or-wall-mountable surface.  The new sensor technology for per-pixel touch and infrared “sight” are extremely impressive and in general these devices are awesome, but it’s not something I can really go out and buy.  I would love to see one in the wild though.
  • Lastly, some development samples of the next major release of Windows running on System-on-Chip architectures, including ARM.  Nothing actually cool was being presented other than “hey, we rebuilt Office and a printer driver to run natively on ARM, and look how fast it runs.”  I remember a professor I once had predicted that someday soon our computers would be the size of current (at that time) mobile phones and that’s exactly where this SoC initiative is headed.

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