It's hard to write about Microsoft's final Consumer Electronics Show keynote without feeling a little bit depressed. What should have been the company's CES swan song felt more like a rambling late night phone call from an old friend who just wants to talk about the way things used to be. During the company's 60 minute kick at the can, which started 30 minutes late, CEO Steve Ballmer and dreamy corporate shill Ryan Seacrest didn't provide the keynote's attendees with a single piece of information they didn't already have.
Touching briefly on the topics of the company's Windows Phone 7 smartphone platform and their partnership with Intel in rolling out 78 different iterations of Ultrabook ultra portable computers over the next year, Ballmer and Seacrest quickly moved on to focus on Windows 8.
Sadly, there wasn't much new here either. As we'd already heard late last year, the next version of Windows is being designed to operate on both ARM and x86 processors, paving the way for hardware manufacturers to install the OS on a wider variety of high-powered and ultra efficient low-powered personal computers, tablets and other devices than ever before. As Microsoft had previously indicated, Windows 8 will rely heavily on HTML5, not just for application design, but for playing video as well: Neither Flash nor the company's own SilverLight technology will be offered on Windows 8.
The fact that Windows 8 users, just like Mac owners, will have access to an app store was rehashed as well. The Windows Store for Windows 8 will go live on February 1, featuring a number of free applications that anyone using the Windows 8 Developer Preview will have access to. On the same day as the Windows Store comes online, PC users can also anticipate the arrival of a PC compatible version of Microsoft's Kinnect motion-control hardware, which up until now has only been available to users of the company's Xbox 360 console.
Remember all of those commercials during the holidays that featured friends and family using voice controls to search for and order videos and movies via embedded services in Xbox Live, like Netflix and ESPN? They riffed on that, too. There was some good news here for Xbox owners though: Microsoft has brokered deals with a number of new content providers. Verizon customers who own an Xbox will have access to 26 FIOS channels. Other services, such as Infinity on Demand, as well as content from News Corp. and Fox, will also be making an appearance on the gaming console as well. In addition to this, Ballmer noted that Microsoft was working with a number of companies such as American Express and Mattel to bring new Kinnect-enabled applications to market.
For a final showing at one of the largest tech-centric showcases in the world, we're sad to say that what Microsoft provided us with this year was weaker than we could have imagined. Here's hoping that moving forward, the company is able to not only deliver on what it rehashed last night, but also wow consumers with a something awesome in the weeks and months to come.
