Gates opens windows to boredom

Las Vegas: Apple CEO Steve Jobs will sleep peacefully knowing that he has to do very little at MacWorld on Tuesday to overshadow Bill Gates' keynote, which served as the curtain raiser for the Consumer Electronics Show that officially kicks off on Monday (Vegas time).

It's not that the Microsoft Chairman was wearing an unusually dull sweater and had no celebrity guests on stage in his eleventh annual keynote to the biggest tech show of 'em all. Neither was it that Vista had already been flogged to death and some of the big X-box news was leaked onto the web before his speech. It's just that the overall theme of the perfect "home sweet converged home" seemed a bit tiresome and towards the end bordered on the psychedelic.

To be fair, some of us in the press may have been put off by the long winded procedure to secure keynote passes, the insanely long lines and the shortage of good seating. But a stunning new announcement or two from Gates in his penultimate annual address at this forum would have rendered all that irrelevant. Unfortunately the fireworks never really came.

Gates had absolutely nothing new to say about Windows Mobile for cellphones and even less about Windows Live on the internet.

The Vista demo was nice with search, widgets and media editing-burning smoothly integrated into the operating system but murmurs of "its all been in the Mac for ages" were easily audible.

One or two new features were indeed eye-popping like the ability to click on an address in a Word document and have it open up as a satellite image in Windows Live. "Nothing great", you say? So did the press, until an X-box controller was plugged into the PC and used to actually fly through an entire 3-D map of the street, block and even city in real time. Many a jaw thudded to the ground on seeing that.

In fact the Xbox was probably the saving grace of the keynote with big promises of seamless integration with Microsoft Media Center and Vista.

The Xbox Live online gaming platform was shown to be seamlessly accessible through either the gaming console itself or a Vista equipped PC and users on both the platforms were able to see what the other was upto. The X-box was shown to smoothly switch between a game, the internet and an HD movie.

The big new addition to the X-box arsenal though was clearly IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) which in the demo at least, had absolutely zero lag when switching between channels and some fantastic Picture-in-Picture features with lots of bells and whistles attached to the content.

This move comes in the wake of MS having dismantled its IPTV team for Windows Media Center and shifting most of the key people on that project to the Xbox division.

When the slide with MS' global telecom partners for IPTV came up though, I couldn't help but laugh.

There in one corner was the logo (albeit the pre-ADA old one) of our very own Reliance Telecom which has done sweet nothing on this front since the grand announcement of a massive IPTV pilot deployment ... in 2003!

Definitely an opportunity missed since it would have been an ideal time to debut the service in C-ASpiring India where people are already looking for better alternatives to DTH and Set Top Boxes.

A slick sneak-peek at the much awaited Halo 3 title for the X-box had the audience in raptures and may just have turned the tide but the ensuing demo of the "home of the future" was boring, hard to believe and had most of the disinterested audience walking out to beat the rush at the end of the keynote.

There was something about a Windows Home Server running on HP hardware - yipee! The exciting world of servers is now coming to your home to further complicate your digital existence!! Oh yes, there was also something about a high definition sports content module in Media Center - the kind of games that the Yanks like to play 'world championships' for with Canada being the only other country involved - and a tie-up with Ford for in-car entertainment but they were purely targetted at an American audience.

Lets not bore you with those details lest this piece be guilty of what it accuses Mr Gates of being today - underwhelming!