CES - Bill Gates Final Keynote

Tonight at CES Bill Gates delivered his final CES Keynote (and perhaps final in the industry).

The crowd pleasers were a very self-deprecating video where Bill was turned down for jobs by celebrities and notables from Hilary Clinton to Bono to John Stewart, and a Guitar Hero contest where Gates brought in "Slash" -playing live- as his Guitar Hero proxy to win a bet.

The key business announcements included a partnership with NBC to deliver video online for *every single sport* at the Olympics - some 3600 hours in total and I think he indicated close to real time. Also impressive was Microsoft’s work with partner “Tellme” and MS mapping to bring powerful voice and map navigation capabilities to the mobile space. They noted that mobile advertising will be some (11 billion?) by 2011, and that although MS feels PCs will remain very important it’s clearly the mobile phone space where a lot of key innovation will be seen.

Back at Microsoft's MIX06 I noted that Microsoft had not yet embraced the social media revolution that clearly was going to come to dominate the online experience. I think they have now done so, but they may be too late. The demos of something called “Zune Social” were neat, but I noted the key feature was the ability to integrated with a Facebook profile. I’d argue that Open Social (or some variation on that theme), that is very largely company agnostic, will ultimately prevail. I didn’t get the idea Zune Social would be a big winner over time.

(posted from the CES Bloghaus! Thanks Seagate and Podtech!)