Microsoft webcast from CES -- Windows Vista, content, devices

It went on with some sort of Vista group product manager showing off different neat things in Vista.

I liked live app preview in Alt-Tab and when floating over toolbar buttons. It’s the Mac fans who always pride themselves in having 128pixel ultrasmooth icons when switching apps. Well guess what, when I’m switching apps, I couldn’t care less about the icon, I need to see the actual app to feel the context better. So that was kinda handy.

Another thing related to app switching was “flip3d” — your apps are cascated onto each other in a 3d view, and you can scroll through them with the live content. So these both do what Mac OS X-s Expose has been doing for a while.

The sidebar had an RSS feed and “gadgets” (a certain fruit OS calls them “widgets”). It was at this moment where I started having flashbacks. A long time ago (and the feature has always been there), MS introduced “Active Desktop” where you could have a web page on your desktop. I haven’t anyone ever seen using that. RSS on your sidebar is kinda the same thing but I bet it’s gonna be immensely more popular because it’s simpler to understand.

Then there was “sideshow”. This was an extra LCD screen that will be on laptops, where you can access some of those “gadgets” without powering up your laptop. One of the apps mentioned that would support this was the calendar. (I thought you had a PDA for this? I was missing the point here.)

Then the browser. Search box in top right a la Firefox, and then tabbed browsing “with a twist”. The twist was that you could have a preview of all your tabs thumbnailed into one window. It was at this point where I realized there are inconsistencies. Why this view? Weren’t you just spending a whole lot of time speaking about live app previews and flip3d’s? Why is a separate view needed here?

Another Vista thing was parental controls. It’s apparently gonna have a lot of those. Including locking your child’s account down to certain ESRB ratings.

On to “experiences” theme. Show of MS Flight Simulator helicopter flight. Photo gallery — start the show with a screen full of zilliion 10x10 unintelligible thumbnails. You can tag and keyword your pics. When you crop or do anything else to your photos, it always saves the original so years later you can go back to where you started. Slideshows, combining photos and videos much like iPhoto and iMovie.

Music — next-gen Windows Media Player. You can filter by artist or by year or do spotlight search. Then some MTV Networks dude walked in and started talking about URGE which is basically an iTunes Music Store inside the Media Player. There was Gates, the Vista product manager and MTV dude who had given their nice talks and then started acting out a conversation where they talked what music each other likes. This is the point where the whole show was getting really surreal. The MTV dude said he likes Justin Timberlake, so they put on a show. This is a moment which Steve Jobs should use in one of his next keynotes. The Jobs keynotes music is always done with style and elegant glamour. It’s not embarrassing to watch and the music is “cool”. But now here you have 3 middle-aged dorks standing stiff and acting out like they’re listening to the Justin Timberlake song. And the next thing you know… hey… Timberlake himself walks on to the stage! Yay! He said he is interested in the newest and coolest stuff and URGE is basically going to be it. And on his next album they will do a duet with Gates. Or something. I like how urge.com has Netscape icon as favicon. Very flashback historic and echoes “well” with talk about the future media. (favicon has been updated since then.)

So Gates was solo again to talk about Tablet PC and Windows Mobile. Currently there are more than 100 Smartphone products with 93 operators in 55 countries. In 2006 they will sell 5M devices wihich is 36% increase. He demoed a partnership with Palm — does this mean PalmOS is dead and Palm is now device maker for Windows? Anyway, the device looked kinda interesting and reportedly “great for single-hand operation”. He also announced two Messenger phones, one from Philips, which function like Skype USB cordless phones, showing your Messenger contact list and statuses and working through Windows Live Call Services through MCI.

Then there was TV. How you can personalize and navigate it and do a whole lot more of bull with it. There are 6.5M copies of Media Center out there.

Some new VP of Media Center/Windows now demoed how Media Center is a platform and there are many online services where you can get content. One of them being Comedy Central MotherLoad — like an interactive TV channel. You can see previews and archives of shows. Total of 110 online apps in MediaCenter. … and here we go with the inconsistency talk again. So now you have not only URGE but also this MotherLoad thing which you must pick from. Instead of referring to one single iTunes.

Demos of hardware, some small Averatec el cheapo media center PC with or without tuner. Lots of iPod-like things which run Media Center in your palm. Music, pics, videos, broadcasts, downloaded videos, blah blah… Hey, new content service too! Starz Vongo this time where you can buy and get movies and stuff. (And of course from URGE and MotherLoad too. So there are damn many services.) An LG portable media center device had killer widescreen and looked kinda nice.

How services can make the content user experience better. live.com recommendaton service can recommend you stuff based on your history, and you can rate what services and genres you like or don’t like.

BUT: it suddenly became interesting when he brought Windows Live Messenger to the mix. One buddy there is TV service. Of course the first time he said hello to the service, it didn’t work “Let’s just close this and try again” . Good old Microsoft. So it started a TV service “activity”. “these are the shows your friends like”. “I have a strong recommendation for you and a trailer to watch.” This almost-human communication and learning and interaction looked interesting. Live Messenger is going to be one hot fox, that’s for sure.

He kept saying how we now “change gears a little bit”.

Then all the chutzpah about high-def, or HD DVD-s. Toshiba HD-DVD player will be on sale for $499. HD-DVD on Vista Media Center PC. One of the things you can do is during movie, you can see scene previews while the movie is still running, and one function is “Recent actors” where it shows you bios and pics and names of actors who were in the scene you just watched. And it ofcourse syncs with the Internet. Plus you can get producer commentaries not only with voiceover, but the actual face or gestures overlayed to the movie. And you can copy the movie to your hard drive with of course DRM in place. (I wish I had time to watch DVD-s — first regularly and then with commentary. And then go through all the actors bios and extras. But apparently the rest of the world does and buys this kind of things.) They really should come up with better names. HD-DVD TV… try saying that.

One cool thing about future Media Center devices is supposed to be that they will be natively receiving digital cable and you’ll be plugging in your cable card straight to the Media Center device.

Then Xbox 360 with yet another VP or something. You could tell it was America because the most important thing everyone did when walking on to the stage is that they were announcing scores of some sports game that was going on somewhere. “First things first. Current standing is Texas 17, someotherplace 16… ok on to my talk now.” That was weird. Already now, if I dig sports, I can just pull the news to my mobile? No? Yes? No? Ahh those Americans.

Aaaanyway.. There are more than 2M Xbox Live members. Halo 2 made 125M $ sales in a day. Now they are going from thought leadership in consoles to market leadership. Xbox 360 was launched in 90 days in 30 countries. There will be 4.5-5.5M consoles by June 2006. There are 4 games per console sold, 3 accessories per console, which is double the previous record. Xbox — 10% connected to Internet. Xbox 360 — more than 50%. Access to HD (highdef, not hard disk content. Xbox Live Marketplace (yet another? OH NO! what about URGE and MotherLoad and Starz Vongo? It’s almost like every VP had made a deal with a separate content distributor and was pushing that over others…) — access (you guessed it) games, movies. More than 4M downloads in 3 months. Mission Impossible 3 trailer premiere was distributed there. Xbox Live Arcade — casual games. Will launch Xbox 360 HD-DVD external drive (they should call it XD for eXternal Drive, so it would be HD-DVD XD. I think that would rock.) later in 2006. Driving HDTV sales. 9 out of 10 will purchase HDTV. By June, there will be 50 HD games.

They finished with the EA Sports Fight Night Round 3, which is a boxing game. Some actual boxing commentary dude was commenting, and the fight was of course Gates vs Ballmer with the controls, one was playing Mohammad Ali and the other was also some famous boxer. Ballmer said “30 years Ive been training for this” (we need a new HD-DVD TV Xbox game “Chairfighter Master Pro” for him), Gates beat Ballmer and Ballmer smashed his controller onto the stage (didn’t break). The product manager said “Don’t throw controllers at home.”

So that was it and Gates wrapped up the themes of content, partners and work across devices. They are investing in privacy, security, speech recognition, video recognition.

It was certainly educational to watch, I haven’t watched MS keynotes that much. A lot of packed content, but MS is a packed company doing everything, so they must do it this way. No brilliant moments, a lot of dorkness in presentation, some fun too. Some interesting product directions but of course keynotes and actual products on the market may be far apart so we’ll see. 2006 will be interesting with Vista coming out (?).