Arriving in Las Vegas
I attend the CES 2008 this year, with the French Office for Science and Technology.
We arrived on Sunday, 6th, in the morning after a very nice flight from San Francisco.
We went to our hotel, on the strip and then headed to the Venetian Hotel in order to see Bill Gates’ keynote.
After a long wait, we entered and listen/watch to the Gates’ keynote.
Bill Gates’ keynote
One word is enough: BORING!
I hoped that this visionnaire still had great ideas… It doesn’t seem so anymore.
The first half hour was poor jokes and non-surprising and Video-Gag-like humour. Politically correct and marketing… Great. The topic was the fact that B.Gates will leave Microsoft in July, and this was his last keynote in the CES (so this was kind of special). So it was to be fun and more about M.Gates than Microsoft.
Well, there was a part about Microsoft future: HD everywhere, Net/Soft convergence and more games. Hello Mr. obvious!
Then, great innovations: Zune social (last.fm revisited), Zune in your car using wireless (waouw… sigh), Windows Live (webservices on a centralised ID) and Silverlight (flash revisited…).
Great news: Vista is a success, 100 millions sold this year ( how many without computers? how many choose it ?)
Great news 2: XBox made more money than PS3 or Wii! Ok. What about the margins ?
Well, as you can see, this was not the best thing ever, but the CES public is a bit more marketing people than tech, so they didn’t really see the problem.
Night
After, I went out and started to visit a few casinos. This was really interesting.