Sunday night I stayed up late to watch the CES keynote of Microsoft. At 3.45am it finally started and I don’t regret staying up for it. Obviously you must’ve read elsewhere already what has been said there, but here’s a small recap. The annual Las Vegas event allowed Bill Gates to showcase the tremendous innovation and progress there’s been made with Windows Vista, Windows Live and the 2007 Office system, while Robert Bach highlighted the success this holiday with selling Xbox 360, Zune, Games for Windows, and other Microsoft products.
Microsoft also unveiled offerings, including IPTV on Xbox 360, which will combine the best-in-class gaming platform with the best-in-class Microsoft IPTV Edition software. This new solution represents a shining example of Microsoft’s vision around “Connected Entertainment” and will ultimately provide consumers gaming, TV, movies, and more through their Xbox 360 console.
Gates also announced the launch of Windows Home Server, which will make it easier for people with multiple PCs and devices to store, protect, and share their expanding collections of digital documents, photographs, music, and videos. He also introduced “Sync.” Based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford Sync is an updatable, smart and safe solution for connecting your car with your life that will appear in new Ford automobiles later this year.
Here’s a 1 hour 16 minute clip from the keynote:
Then on Monday morning I had to go to the city hall to apply for a digital passport so I can travel to the TechReady event in Seattle in February. It took a while before it was all done, you know how that goes… taking a number and waiting in line… then dealing with the fastness of administration. Anyways, I arrived at the office at 11.30 AM and I got some good news before I had put down my laptop: the Vaios were here!
Joy! Now I can kickstart the program and start finding influentials in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and the UK/Ireland. If all goes well the project should find it’s way to the outside world around two weeks after TechReady. That’s umm, in the second or third week of February.
A lot of things need to be taken care of though, so I’ll have my hands full, since there’s a few other projects I’m working on as well.
The rest of the day we had fun uninstalling the WindowsXP that came with the Vaios and mounting the Vista on it, then tuning the Vaio with some nice tools and sidebar gadgets so it would be all set to go.
Today I had my first commitment meeting as well, where I had to plan and define my targets for this fiscal year. Now all I have to do is make the commitments official and kick it up the ladder so they’ll know ‘up there’ what I’ll be doing ‘down here’.
The CES info is based on a memo from Robert Bach. It sums up the event better than I could’ve done it.
For a drill-down of live coverage, see Inside Microsoft
