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January 8, 2007

rivals

CES ‘07: Stranger in a strange land at the Bill Gates keynote

Posted Jan. 8, ’07, 9:43 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Apple » Rivals

Bill Gates KeynoteThe thronging crowds were so thick that I had to double check my ticket to make sure that the keynote didn’t say Steve Jobs. A cold sweat broke out over my brow as the name burned into my brain…Bill Gates. This couldn’t be right, could it? A panicky look at the people around me suggested that this wasn’t that recurring dream I’d been having, but rather the far more frightening reality.

Truth be told, the Bill Gates keynote was not bad. While Gates may not have honed his showmanship skills like Steve-o, he’s a very natural speaker, and he’s willing to poke fun at himself and his image, as an opening series of highlights showed (Bill Gates with Napoleon Dynamite, Bill Gates as Austin Powers, Bill and Steve Ballmer as the boors from A Night at the Roxbury).

The show revolved largely around Vista, with sidelines into Office and the Xbox. I ended up sitting next to trio of friendly guys from Microsoft. When a picture of the Zune showed up onscreen, I leaned over to one of them to crack that this was probably the only place in the world you could swap songs with another Zune user, which garnered an “ouch.”

While Apple and the Mac were never mentioned by name, astute Mac users would have caught a few references. Justin Hutchinson, a Microsoft Product Manager, showed off Vista’s search capability with the remark that “Vista isn’t about searching; it’s about finding.” The quick look at improving the look of your Word document made me think that Word had begun to look a lot like Pages. And when Hutchinson demoed Vista’s versioning feature, Shadow Copy, he took the opportunity to quip “it’s better than going back in time.” That comment elicited an “ooh” from the maybe twenty people in the audience who actually got it.

All in all, not a bad presentation, but every once in a while I found my attention wander. Some of the things they showed off were cool (a Sports Lounge feature of Windows Media Center that provides you up to the moment scores while you’re watching the game, and lets you track your favorite players for your fantasy leagues), but nothing generated the same sort of excitement that you’d see for an Apple product launch.

Let’s put it this way: nobody’s ever going to come up with Bill Gates keynote bingo.


3 Comments

James said:

I agree with you on the Microsoft keynote as I had watched the stream, it wasn't a bad keynote - they took a few jabs at Apple, but whatever. The one thing I do disagree with though is that Gates is a good speaker. I've always felt his speaches seem forced and I feel that is largely due to his talking style and the 500,000+ uhs, ums, he used just in the course of one segment, alone...

January 8, 2007 9:51 AM
shadownight said:

I think Bill Gates is natural when he speaks, but very boring. I watched the first part of the stream, and I was more often bored than impressed. Some cool stuff were: the Live map thing, the Sports section in Media Center, the XBox demoes... apart from that, I was falling asleep.

January 8, 2007 2:40 PM
James said:

I think it is very hard to be a public speaker and present a good presentation...

Especially if the admin who put the slides together was using PowerPoint instead of Keynote.

I used to create terrible presentations, and Keynote made me a presentation god (compared to the rest of my company). The key is being able to learn how to present a Keynote-like presentation when you only have PowerPoint on your desktop.

January 9, 2007 6:13 AM

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