Gates Wows Crowd With '06 Plans

By: Sean Alfano

CBS News tech analyst Larry Magid reports from Las Vegas on this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

The Consumer Electronics Show gets underway in Las Vegas today but Wednesday night belonged to Microsoft. In his annual keynote kick-off speech, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates outlined his company's plans for the next 12 months.

This is the year Microsoft releases a new version of both its flagship Windows operating system and its cash-cow Microsoft Office suite. It's also the first full year of sales for the highly sought-after Xbox 360 that Microsoft released just before the holidays.

If the final product lives up to Microsoft hype here in Las Vegas, Vista will indeed be a major improvement over Windows XP. But that remains to be seen.

CBS News technology consultant Larry Magid reports from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

In keeping with one of the major themes of this year's show, Gates began his speech by talking about the connected world where "personnel preferences can be transferred between devices." Gates envisions a fully-connected home full of devices that communicate with each other. And, of course, your home will be networked with the gadgets in your car and in your pocket.

But, for this to happen, "people have to have confidence," Gates said. Technology, said the leader of Microsoft, must be easy to use, secure and safe.

That's a tall order coming from the chairman of a company that has to issue severe security alerts on an almost monthly basis. Earlier this week, Microsoft admitted that a recently discovered security flaw in Windows won't be fixed for at least another week.

In the world Gates envisions, PCs and other devices will turn on and off instantly and just work. But that's quite a contrast to the world that Gates presides over now. Wednesday evening, I had to reboot my laptop three times because of system problems related to Windows. Just getting the laptop to shut down can take two or three minutes if multiple programs are running. Getting it started again takes even more time.

But don't worry. Things will get better real soon now. Or so Gates says every year during his CES keynote.

Still, Windows Vista could turn out to be a real crowd pleaser based on a demo by Microsoft executive Aaron Woodman, who showed off Vista during Gates' keynote.