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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.
The way games are getting better visual wise, and tech is getting more powerful, I have a feeling we might see at least an early version of a Holodeck in our lifetimes.
Now I ALSO hope that by that time Linux will be the OS of choice for the manufacturer, I simply will not survive a BSOD in glorious Holodeck VR...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I worked with a guy who had that book. Is it the one with a CD that wouldn't work in Windows NT?
We've "read it on Slashdot" every year for the past 10. Just like "Linux on the desktop THIS year," it isn't happening any time soon.
My blog
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.
that video made me want to puke, what a geek! oh wait nvm....
Is he really stepping down? The link in the article asks me to install Silverlight and I can't read it as such.... The other links don't say anything like it. (My mistake: this one does) A Google search yields this, though.
;-)
Anyway, if I'd been him, I'd have retired years ago
If it's any of you guys, hands off.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Grandparent is putting words in my mouth. I never said that 2008 (or any year) would be the year of Linux on the desktop. I think Linux on the desktop will continue to play a role in certain niche market segments, notably geek desktops, low-end desktops, some so-called "thin-client" solutions, in point-of-sale systems and so forth. Beyond that the future is still uncertain -- OS X has gained a lot of traction, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for Linux desktops. I see more of a mixed market. We don't need one desktop to rule them all. In the end, I doubt it will matter much what your desktop OS is as more and more you will see Internet-based and network centric applications running with platform transparency. Don't necessarily think browser apps or "Google Apps", but think more Google Earth with data to be stored both locally and on the Internet/intranet.
My blog
...was through someone else's monitor.
Who knows, maybe MS would take another look at Windows if sales started plummeting.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
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.
Video of Bill Gates last day at Microsoft - CES 2008
Well, it was supposed to be the Xbox 360 Ultimate, but after what happened over the weekend it's now being used to prop open a door.
Summation 2
clip of bill gs last day at the office
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."
I am guessing Bill is not trying to conquer Linux this year I see?
2007 was also the Year of Linux for me too! Earlier attempts had been too difficult to install Linux, this time it was easier then XP.
... your predictions always sucked and they do now. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Oh, and thanks for nothing!
Ballmer has proven to be a big mouthed dead weight, Bill might want to go but he is stuck, Ballmer would be the death of any company if he was left solely in charge and running on bull shit and ego. Vista and office2007, xbox360 (poor build engineering) really do have the ballmer mark of failure on them.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
End of line
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.
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I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Gosh, I knew he'd become irrelevant some time ago, but isn't a bit harsh to just drop him like that? Oh! Oh! You mean he's retiring! My bad, my bad . . . (tee hee, hee, heee).
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.
Same here, and never looked back (except for work -- damn simulation software!)
I was running the MES site at Microsoft under a virtual machine, and the task manager inside the VM was at 70-90% cpu usage running only the one firefox window! (as shown on a 3.2Ghz intel processor with 2GB of RAM running Ubuntu)
Awesome book. My mom got it for me because it's a computer book, after all, and she knew I somewhat disliked Gates. I love the part where he invents the Mac. Great stuff.
It's too bad it's over. Bill making fun of his own nerd personality never got old. I could watch him pretend to play Guitar Hero for many more years. That was so funny. I wish the keynote was just Bill sitting there pretending to play a video game.
Like rebadged Logitech mice or are you talking about other rebadged products? It was nice that they took a niche product and made it a standard but they don't actually make or design many of the things with their name on it.
Am I the only one who has trouble with the sound? I checked three versions of the video and all had the same disturbed, distorted sound ...
just sayin'
i'm loving my Nokia Nseries Linux tablets!
Vista's doing better than XP did, so how is it flopping?
Five years on, because there are more new computers (pre-loaded with Vista) going into the system than when XP rolled out, Vista is labelled as a smashing success? Sounds like a business plan with lots of longevity!
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
This is what I worry about.
As it is I'm not enamoured with FLASH. I usually disable it so I don't have to watch a lot of crappy whizzy ads distracting me. It also keeps my bandwidth fairly low. I honestly do not understand why so many sites open up with a FLASH Splash. It really does nothing for me and means I have to wait for all this junk to download. Now with Silverlight I can look forward to more of the same. Another plugin to manage. Yay.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm not the first to bring this point, surely, but I'll say it anyway.
In 1985, the home computing world was Commodore's oyster. I mean really, it can't be understated. Jack Trameil's "Computer's for the Masses, not the Classes" outsold all others by two or three times. Many forget they were the biggest baddest computer company out there. Unfortunately, they did a pitiful amount of R&D in the latter years and had HORRIBLE management.
If Apple, who has some business sense, can merge Jack's paradigm into their own, that would be exciting. Maybe they can do the inverse of the Toyota / Lexus thing; start a new company.
But I don't think they will. I don't see OSX penetrating todays $299 PC market, unfortunately. And it's not really even price point, it's the perception of Apple being expensive. They need to change that perception.
I can't drive anywhere short of 300 miles and buy a cheap Mac in a store.
I'm not sure, while this didn't seem intentionally funny, it did make me laugh quite a bit. Perhaps a -1, Funny? The 'hail satan' bit really cinched it for me.
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
Considering what Flash tends to do in VNC/RDP/similar settings, and with no info on what kind of VM you used, a severe lack of accelerated video might explain something.
You can bag microsoft all you want, but for all the things tech companies want to be, microsoft actually did it. Does microsoft get everything right? No, but they are nothing short of impressive when it comes to going back to fix mistakes and completely destroying the competition. Gates doesnt deny this, you win by destroying your competition, not creating the best product. Is bill gates the smartest person who ever lived? No, but hes a very smart guy none the less. Is bill gates the nicest person who ever lived? No, hes an asshole if you are competing with him. But how many people get to the top by counting raindrops and kissing kittens? Steve jobs is exactly the same. It requires drive and single mindedness, even if you are wrong, to do anything of this scale. Im still unsure why microsoft caused a lack of inovation in the computer market, for one, how big were pc's before windows 95? For a guy who gets so many things wrong, microsoft didn't do too bad. We will look back at google in 20 years and see how holy they are then, but I get the feeling you can replace m$ with g$$gle on most comments and it will be pretty close to the mark.
XP won't install on my PC. It locks up on a black screen after I "press any key to boot from CD." Linux installs no problem. Both Ubuntu and Fedora install like a breeze.
Yes,because being a monopolist is the same as being a murderer.
Oh, wait its not.
Dumbass.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Mod me down all you want, but the truth still is that MS is a company of promises and "next version" dreams, while other companies out there (and by far not only Apple) actually deliver.
Hot air may drive a wind-energy power generator, but it doesn't drive technology, IT or even a single website, home-business or enterprise.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They are selling like hot cakes.
So your momentous judgment may be quite premature.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... with wealth obtained by devious ways.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He helped popularize desktop computing.
By means of:
-Blatantly stealing ideas from true innovators.
-Strongarming business partners.
-Leveraging their monopoly to spread their tentacles.
-Stalling the progress of computing and stifling competition in the field.
-Firmly establishing the abomination of closing the source code to your clients.
I could continue, but I hope you get the idea.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But only stupid people would canonize him.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But some degree of intelligence is assumed about the reader of such a post.
Obviously the poster is an uncompromising optimist.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.