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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.
Ahh, but the genius of it all... In 10 years, people will point to Bill G. stepping down as the cause of the MS implosion, completely forgetting about the Vista flop. Or the MS apologists will just cry "Perfect Storm" with the rise of OSX and Linux alternatives over the next several years.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
He is not completely mistaken, actually...
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar