Bill Gates says farewell to the CES pit

You have to feel a little sorry for Bill Gates. For the past 10 years, every January, he has given the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Every year, it’s been an entertaining enough address, offering glimpses of what Bill Gates would like the future to entail: generally, some version of “every device you own runs Microsoft software”.

As I said, entertaining enough.

And every year, it’s completely overshadowed by what Steve Jobs says at the Macworld Expo keynote at roughly the same time. This year they’re a week apart so Bill gets to have a few days of buzz about what he said — or at least about the jokes with Jon Stewart and getting Slash to play Guitar Hero with him. I think he also had some stuff to say about the future, but can’t recall offhand. Something about how every device I own will run Microsoft software.

And therein lies the problem for Bill. Microsoft is a software company, not a consumer electronics company. The Consumer Electronics Show is, more or less, a consumer electronics show. People go to see gadgets, and Microsoft doesn’t make gadgets. The devices Bill shows off every year are almost invariably manufactured by someone else (occasional glimpses of XBoxes and Zunes notwithstanding) and therefore he has virtually no ability to deliver on any of the promises he makes. Thus, his address is regarded as little more than a mildly interesting curio, sometimes with jokes.

Maybe if he were a more charismatic guy he’d have a better chance. I think the only time a Microsoft keynote address managed to stay in the public consciousness for more than a day or two was that one at a developer conference where Steve Ballmer ran about on stage like a demented thing trying to gee up the crowd.

Steve Jobs doesn’t leap about screaming, he just stands there projecting calm like a guru, while frivolity rages around him. Apple’s customers are already excited about the company and its products. When you have a thoroughbred, you just have to ride it. When you have a dead horse, you have to flog.

And I don’t mean any disrespect to Microsoft. Bill’s company has achieved an enormous amount in the technology industry — arguably, more than Apple — it’s just done so in a rather unexciting way.

And that’s what I’m going to miss about Bill’s CES keynotes: their sheer dull, plodding achievement. A decade ago Bill was talking about how we’d all soon be taking digital photos and managing our photo libraries on our computers. He reckoned CDs were on the way out, and we’d all have our music collections on pocket-sized devices. It made a paragraph or two in the papers, if I recall.

I don’t remember off-hand what Bill showed off in this year’s keynote. But I reckon in 10 years or so I’ll be doing it.

Probably on a device made by Apple.

Matthew JC. Powell is old enough to remember when Bill Gates wasn’t a billionaire and was thought of as kind of nerdy. Reminisce on
mjcp@optusnet.com.au

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