Thoughts on Steve Ballmer’s Keynote

As I have done in the last few years I thought I would post my thoughts on Steve Ballmer’s keynote tonight at CES. My initial impressions where a bit flat. Probably the biggest news was already talked about at a Microsoft press conference his afternoon where Steven Sinofsky talked about the next version of Windows being ported to ARM so there was nothing new to show off at this keynote. As has become the norm the keynote is really about showing the progress Microsoft has made in the last year and so they focused on Xbox, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7.

On the Xbox much was made about the success of Kinect, shipping over 8 million sensors since launch and Microsoft can be very pleased with how well the Xbox 360 ecosystem is doing. They showed off the new AvatarKinect which looks really fun and should be coming soon as well talking about the new 360 console and the games. On the Windows Phone 7 they didn’t talk about numbers sold as many people had hoped they would but they did show off new Copy and Paste features, the presenter from the Windows Phone team was very excited about it all and looked like she had one to many expressos before coming on stage.

Steve Ballmer talked about the continuing success of Windows 7 and a variety of form factors where shown including a double touchscreen, sliders and a few slates, hopefully I should get to take a look at these later in the week. The small Samsung Slider was actually running Windows Media Center but that was the only glimpse of it today, I was hoping to see Windows Embedded being shown with some cool Windows TV set top box but alas there was nothing to be seen. The new Microsoft Surface was shown which is much slimmer than the old table and maybe we will see more of them in retail environments.

Finaly Steve wrapped up with talking about the next version of Windows supporting System On a Chip and the ARM processor, he showed off some prototype hardware running the next version of Windows (which Microsoft now seem to be going out of their way not to call Windows 8 at the moment). This should bring some interesting form factors and devices but it’s going to be some time until we see the fruits of this work.

So overall a bit flat and nothing new but still good to see the Windows ecosystem moving forward.

You can watch the watch the on-demand version of the keynote at Microsoft.com and read our live blog here