CES Keynote

I watched the annual CES opening keynote with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. Always interesting to see what they are doing, what is going well, and where they are playing catchup to innovators who are much more nimble than them.

The theme was really on three screens, the biggest screen (TV), the work screen (PC/Notebook), and the mobile screen. Microsoft wants us to know they have a presence on each.

Highlights for this year:

1. Mention of Bing and their cloud initiative Azure. Both major areas of catchup, Bing is probably credible now, Azure too much of an unknown. Also huge trust issues with Microsoft and your data in their cloud. All part of the "Cloud - we all in!" attitude, but people like Amazon have already established. Ray Ozzie getting the push means Azure has less appeal - as it was his focus.

2. TV through Xbox. The obligatory reference to TV actually had some credibility this year. Big content providers are now getting there with over the top offerings and catch up services. Of course Xbox is just the thing providing the browser playing back the video under your TV. But it means one device doing it and it's Microsoft's device. Interesting, no obvious revenue stream on top of selling boxes though (which are probably sold at not much profit margin). They have tie up deals bringing Hulu and Netflix to the platform in the US.

3. Kinect was a big area. Somehow Microsoft has developed an interesting hardware device that can detect motion/gesture and speech. I think this was pushed as "Natal" last year but now it is here. There was a demo of gesture and speech control in a TV experience, resuming of films, interacting with friends during sports games. Felt a bit contrived the speech control "Xbox : play" type instructions were issued by the presenter. Not much mention of the original intention of Kinect for gaming - take that to mean that games are currently in the pipeline only.

4. The social interaction through Kinect and "avatars" of your friends seemed crazy, given it's your friends why send an avatar to do your image! Also in the busy world people who have all this technology exist in, is there really going to be a time for an in circle avatar discussion with your friends? This felt like Microsoft catching up in social media by introducing something pointless.

5. Kinect sales 8 million over holidays, predicted to be 5 - so clearly no shipping or manufacturer capacity problems. Well done to the Chinese manufacturer, I hope it did not cost too many lives! 30 million Xbox live subscriptions, really popular. Xbox could become the hub of the living room, and a few STB manufacturers will be looking nervously at that.

6. Windows Phone 7, give Microsoft credit here they are in a catch up mode, doing mobile again like they have been with TV for years. But it looks like they have something credible in a short space of time. Hope it does not infringe too many competitor patents, although the collapse of tech industry patents is well overdue. Presented by a really manic woman who seemed just to edgy and enthused to really inspire the audience, clearly in her own reality distortion field. Still she showed off the features a neat front display, and quick picture taking. Had to smile at one of the coming upgrades being "copy and paste" which was laboriously demoed using search results that were skewed to location based queries for the nearest burger bar. Voice search and some cut down games linked to Xbox live. Do not rule out Microsoft doing well here, even though they are late to the game.

7. The cash cow of Windows got it's air time too. Some new devices and announcements of Windows running on Arm, NVIDIA - ultra small system on chip devices. So they showed Windows 7 and "Office" which had been ported to it, and printing to a printer with a ported device driver. But the problem, it's the porting! This is not like a virtual machine things need to be recompiled and where is the commercial interest in doing that for the vast world of shrink wrap software Microsoft hosts on it's platform. Anyone remember Windows on Alpha?

8. Windows 7 is doing well, 20% of all internet PCs, IE9 HTML 5 arguably they are ahead in this world. Good of them to back an open standard, although it took them to meander with Silverlight for a bit before realising the massive wrong turn.

9. Surface made a return, I remember seeing this long ago with a Google earth type application - it looked really good. But now it's back with better technology smaller form factor devices and hope to support "kiosk" like experiences in banks. Surface as well as hand control is also a scanning technology so makes interaction easier - they shows a banking app where you could scan your offer coupon in the bank. Interesting to see where this goes, could still be a dead end for them.

10. New hardware demoed, merging of CPU and GPU from intel and AMD, longer battery life results. This was really more a platform for the unsung hardware vendors. It drives Windows sales so important Microsoft tried to create a upgrade reason by showing hardware advances.

I had read beforehand that was Microsoft really the best opener for CES? They are not exactly an innovator than a monopoly holder. But it was a solid if slightly run of the mill type show, they are where you expect them to be and not much further than that. The company size and culture probably means they will never have that innovator feel about them.

Of course the now gone Robbie Bach (entertainment head) was missing - you get the feeling that the upper management there must be a power struggle and that must create ripples through the whole organisation.