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The Final CES Keynote From Bill Gates
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.
What the fuck is Silverlight and why do I have to download yet another plugin to see the CES page? Hasn't Microsoft ever heard of Flash?
If you believe this put your money where your mouth is and short MSFT.
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No kidding... It is actually getting a bit tedious...
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.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." - Gates at COMDEX 2001
And unlike the 640K story, there's an actual source for this quote.
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.
My work here is dung.
Who knows, maybe MS would take another look at Windows if sales started plummeting.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
I think we need to cut Bill some slack as he rides off into the sunset. No one can dispute the impact that Microsoft and Gates has had on the world of computers and technology in general. I get it, for many of you "Microsoft is Evil" but let us use this opportunity to acknowledge what Bill has done for Tech, especially now that he is going to be focusing more on his humanitarian work. So from me, Thanks Bill and good luck.
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Nobody in their right mind is falling for the mono trap. Microsoft tech is "a cancer that seeks to attach itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches".
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.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Uptake has been slow, but when you're Microsoft, you can afford a slow adoption rate. Especially for a technology like this. Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. This is going to be a major component of their web strategy, I'm sure.
.Net, you can port it to silverlight without a terrible amount of work. ESPECIALLY if it was designed using an MVC pattern (or, at least, a 2-tiered approach that would allow you to reuse the model & controller code).
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.
Touch screens work on the iPhone because users are going to be doing the same thing anyway if the buttons were physical. Using touch technology exclusively on large areas has been around for years and years, and it is proven to be tiresome (the whole 'gorilla arms' thing). Moving images of photos around on a coffee table? Possibly, but organising a photo collection on such a huge screen by stretching around to touch the things I want? No thanks, I'd prefer a mouse because it's less effort. Use touch-based input for things not possible with other technology, or when people would be doing the same kind of thing anyway (like pressing buttons on a 'phone's keypad or a computer's keyboard), not because it is "natural" (walking is natural, but the wheel is one of the best discoveries yet made). Microsoft's dug themselves quite a firmly entrenched computing world BTW, so getting any significant numbers of people away from generic x86 + Windows XP + VisualBasic + generic USB mouse will be difficult unless they come up with something more impressive than specifying expensive customisation of items via a fingerpainting-accurate interface. In my opinion, if touchscreens were the only kind of pointing device people had thought of up until now then there would be a company like Microsoft doing exactly the same flashy (sorry, Silverlighty) demos as they are now, but replacing "new touch technology" with "new mouse technology" and replacing "natural" with "efficient".
You can bag microsoft all you want, but for all the things tech companies want to be, microsoft actually did it. Does microsoft get everything right? No, but they are nothing short of impressive when it comes to going back to fix mistakes and completely destroying the competition. Gates doesnt deny this, you win by destroying your competition, not creating the best product. Is bill gates the smartest person who ever lived? No, but hes a very smart guy none the less. Is bill gates the nicest person who ever lived? No, hes an asshole if you are competing with him. But how many people get to the top by counting raindrops and kissing kittens? Steve jobs is exactly the same. It requires drive and single mindedness, even if you are wrong, to do anything of this scale. Im still unsure why microsoft caused a lack of inovation in the computer market, for one, how big were pc's before windows 95? For a guy who gets so many things wrong, microsoft didn't do too bad. We will look back at google in 20 years and see how holy they are then, but I get the feeling you can replace m$ with g$$gle on most comments and it will be pretty close to the mark.