Gates Wows Crowd With '06 Plans
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.
One impressive feature is built-in photo editing software as well as a way of displaying photos within the operating system that makes it much easier to find the picture you're looking for. Windows already has a slide show function but the Vista slide show will be much snazzier and include the ability to play video alongside still pictures.
Microsoft is also improving the way Windows handles music files, allowing users to more quickly sort through and get a snapshot of what's in their collections by "stacking" their albums by genre, artist and other categories.
Gates also touted the Media Center Edition of Vista which will play high-definition DVDs and show high definition cable TV programming.
Microsoft is also claiming fast improvements in PC gaming. The company used Gates' speech to demonstrate a very impressive looking upcoming version of Microsoft Flight Simulator running on a PC that looked as good as if it were running on an Xbox 360 which, of course, is optimized for game playing.
Although the "A" (Apple) word was never mentioned, it's pretty obvious to me that Microsoft is trying to catch-up and surpass the Macintosh's elegant OS X "Tiger" operating system. Like Apple's Spotlight feature, the new Windows will have a very fast and intuitive desktop search function and users will be able to see live snapshots of open windows that are running in the background, making it much easier to navigate between applications.
Windows Internet Explorer will also get a makeover; finally being able to display Web pages in tabs like Mozilla Firefox. There there's "a twist." A "Quick Tabs" feature will show the contents of all the tabs (separate Web pages) on a single page which will make it a lot easier to navigate between tabs. That strikes me as a useful feature.
Gates also showed off some products from its partner hardware makers. A small lightweight Averatec PC is said to be very quiet and able to run Windows Media Center software for a price tag of $499 without a tuner and "under $1,000" with a TV tuner.
Another interesting product is the Toshiba Gigabeat, a video and music player with a 30 gigabyte hard drive and, according to Microsoft, the ability play four hours of video on a single battery charge. Taking a cue from Apple's playbook, the device has an intuitive use interface that is very similar to that of a full sized Windows Media Center PC.
Microsoft's entertainment PC plans come at the same time Intel is launching its new Viiv initiative which will feature PCs optimized to be as comfortable in the living room as they are in the office. PCs base on Intel's Viiv platform will run the Media Center Edition of Windows.
I have no doubt that the combined efforts of Microsoft, Intel and the PC makers will help to create products that are better than what we have today, but it will take more than a few impressive demonstrations to convince me that Microsoft and its partners have turned the corner and are poised to release products that are truly reliable, easy to use and safe.
I've been to enough Consumer Electronics Shows and Bill Gates keynotes to know that what looks great on a Las Vegas stage may not perform quite so well are your house.