Posted on 01/06/2005 4:52:59 PM PST by Paleo Conservative
Despite suffering technical glitches that prompted jokes and guffaws, Bill Gates promised Wednesday that Microsoft Corp. would help millions of consumers stay seamlessly plugged into a world of digital music, movies, video games and television shows.
In his seventh annual keynote speech at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft's chairman explained that the proliferation of broadband Internet access and the falling price of data storage are compelling people to put music, photos, movies and other aspects of their life into a digital format.
"We predicted at the beginning of this decade that this would be a decade where the digital approach would be taken for granted," Gates told hundreds of technologists who gathered for his kickoff to the world's largest electronics show. "It's going even faster than we expected." But while promoting what he calls the "digital lifestyle," Gates showed how vulnerable all consumers - even the world's richest man - are to hardware and software bugs.
During a demonstration of digital photography with a soon-to-be-released Nikon camera, a Windows Media Center PC froze and wouldn't respond to Gates' pushing of the remote control.
Later in the 90-minute presentation, a product manager demonstrated the ostensible user-friendliness of a video game expected to hit retail stores in April, Forza Motor Sport. But instead of configuring a custom-designed race car, the computer monitor displayed the dreaded "blue screen of death" and warned, "out of system memory."
The errors which came during what's usually an ode to Microsoft's dominance of the software industry and its increasing control of consumer electronics - prompted the celebrity host, NBC comedian Conan O'Brien, to quip, "Who's in charge of Microsoft, anyway?"
Gates, who was sitting next to O'Brien on a set staged to look like NBC's Late Night set, smiled dryly and continued with his discussion.
Gates also announced several partnerships with telecommunication companies such as SBC Communications Inc. and television networks.
Microsoft and music network MTV last month inked a deal that will eventually allow people to send cable programs from rock, pop and country music channels and Comedy Central to their laptops, hand-held computers and other devices.
Gates also announced that Korea's LG Electronics SA, the owner of Zenith Electronics, would build a DVD player recorder using Microsoft's digital video recording software. The product, which will be available in the fall, will attach to a television so users can record live shows onto a DVD.
Although he accepted guffaws from audience members in the theater, the technical hiccups didn't prompt Gates to engage in a hard-hitting analysis of computer reliability and security. Power outages, hardware failures and software bugs often inexplicably humble those who strive for a Windows-based digital lifestyle, and world's most popular operating system is also a favorite target of hackers, virus writers, spies and spammers.
"We've had a fair share of success and a fair share of things we've had to do version two and three of," said Gates.
Gates downplaying his company's shortcomings isn't surprising. He founded the company to create software for the budding niche of personal computers in the early '80s.
But now senior executives are eager to get a piece of the $108 billion consumer electronics market in the United States, now dominated by Asian brands such as Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and LG Electronics. It will likely take Microsoft years to understand the consumer electronics market and produce simple, glitch-free products for consumers' living rooms, analysts say.
"Microsoft was founded by programmers and is still run by programmers, and the bias of programmers is that software can do anything," said Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. "While Microsoft's goal is to turn the PC into a superhub that does everything - plays music, works as a cell phone, stores your photos - they're running up against the fact that most people buy discreet components that do particular things."
© 2005 Associated Press.
Hey Bill, welcome to *our* world.
That's happened to him before. There's a pic out there with him standing in front of a BSOD on the mainscreen.
Wasn't it with a Win98 debut?
Isn't there a video of Gates demostrating how Windows 98 can crash when plugging in a USB device?
I saw the exact same thing happen to Steve Jobs during an Apple key note address a couple of years ago. Turns out the batteries in Job's remote were dead. Pretty embarrassing for him, though.
Imagine that! My Windows programs never freeze.
Big difference in dead batteries causing a remote to fail and software that is so buggy one considers it a good day when something doesn't go wrong. However, we all love to see CEO's go down at a marketing event (unless of course it happens to be you or your boss using your gear!!)
I miss my Amiga.
Win95 debut... just a small preview of what was later to come.
I find it interesting that MS doesn't have Gates' major presentations on redundant "hot spare" systems so that if one fails the other seamlessly handles the task.
Love the hubris bug, too. But I agree with Gates that
cheap digital is the tsunami of tech.
If he'd been savvy (not just smart), he would have turned
his ''wardrobe/machine malfunction'' into a positive, saying
how he identifies with the common guy.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy....
Yeppir. I forget exactly what he's demonstrating, but there's a video of it on the net. USB ports were what finally drove me away from Windows. After I started digital photography, I had to plug and unplug USB ports a lot for downloading. Win98 couldn't deal with it, 2000 didn't have decent support at the time, so I upgraded to ME, which was probably the worst iteration of Windows ever made. Every time I'd unplug a USB device, the system would lock up or it would lose connection with the USB ports. I'd have to delete the USB ports and then reboot the system, because trying to install the device through the device manager didn't work.
I switched to Mac, and have not been sorry. It was a pretty scary step, considering I had to buy either new or upgrades to Photoshop, Illustrator, Office, and Macromedia, but it's been the most cost-effective computer purchase I've ever made. I've been using the system coming up on two years, and except for installing an Airport extreme card, I haven't had to spend another penny on it.
That being said, I have a lot of respect for MS. Nobody builds a company that big without doing a lot of things correctly. I just don't like their products.
Windows Media Center is a good operating system for high end laptops. My brother has a Toshiba that came with Pentium IV, a gigabyte of RAM, and Windows Media Center. It is great for giving presentations and as an entertainment center on the road.
But it has some annoying features. Even on multiprocessor systems, you can't just launch a process like printing a large document and continue using the computer for something else. The next version of Windows needs to handle multithreading better.
Are you running XP on 300mhz Celerons?
LOL!!!
Why would anyone want to run a celery processor?
I do, he does, I'm sure he did. The rest of us have it even worse!
Turning on the firewall in XP, modifying the firewall in XP, and turning off the firewall in XP...all things that most users need to do regularly...are lessons in just how poorly designed you can make a system if you really, really try.
I had the video at one time. When I read this today I thought it could have been old news.
It's happened several times. I don't think itwas Bill gates unveling it, but the Xbox crashed when it was unveiled at the E3 Expo several years back.
I am beginning to think that Bill Gates does this to humor the jealous.
This happens every year, at least once.
But then --- considering the amount of time he is on a computer, odds are it will crash about that often - LINUX, Apple core, XENIX, whatever operating system ... there is no one chip set fits all OS's.
Looks like these people need to learn how to do a dry run. Reminds me of one time when I was working for Blackhawk in Milwaukee. Blackhawk made hydraulic jacks, and Sears (Sears!) was our biggest customer. One day my boss had me paint up a jack real nice-looking. It was from our "test" cabinet, so I asked him if it needed to work, in which case I would have to do some additional work on it. "No," he said. So when the jack was shown to the bigshots in Chicago a day or two later, apparently one of the bigshots tried to pump up the jack. And now you know the rest of the story!
The $1000 do everything home system you buy today is obsolete junk according to the industry next year. That may be fine for people making $100K with nice benefits packages but it sucks for the parents struggling on $50K trying to be sure their children have the computer they're told is needed to succeed.
I miss my Amiga, too! (Actually, I still have my first Amiga 500 -Tetris is still challenging)Also have P4 laptop with XP.
Chopped celery is a requirement for good potato salad.
Revenge of the Nerds. That explains it.
The system I'm using right now, I built 5 or 6 years ago and it runs everything I have thrown at it. It started it's life with Win98, moved up toWin2K, then finally XP pro. I have also had several Linux distros installed at various times. The trick is to do your homework and get the best price/performance ratio you can afford.
No, that would be like getting Johnson wax stripper for free.
He, he, he. True. Right now we purchase Microsoft software that includes Outlook and Explorer et al and then get the spam, spyware, and viruses for free.
Hardly. But seeing how the Windows directory on this machine is 2.39 gigabytes, I can see why you need a rocket engine to run Gates' bloatware.
Yep, you're invested. There's a whooole lotta techies like you that help MS sales a great deal.
From my selfish point of view, I'd like to see more intuitive, innovative, bugfree and userproof computing.
But I hope you will apply your great talents in even more successful endeavors.
They tried to show pictures and load a video game from the same computer? While having drivers for a remote control, sound and video card installed?
Well it's obvious that they have too many programs on this computer, causing conflicts and crashing the system when changing programs.
This happens to me just about every other day.
Maybe adding on another service pack will help.
The Amiga 500 was, dollar for dollar, the best PC ever made.
I had the original Amiga and it was Crash City. When one application died, it brought the whole machine down with it. Even Windows 3.1 wasn't as crashy; it would crash as much but you could usually save your changes from other programs before it died completely.
Reactionary, if you don't have Panther installed on your Titanium PowerBook, give it a shot. I have a 400mhz PowerBook G4 and it runs like a champ with Panther, but it was pretty sluggish with earlier versions. I was amazed when I tried it, since in the Windows world operating system upgrades are generally not compatible with anything but the most modern hardware, and they're significantly slower than their predecessors. Not Panther; it rocks. Definitely worth a shot before becoming too frustrated.
Hope that helps.
D
Whatever became of your obsession to own a Sun Workstation?
Slide rules never crashed.
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