MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

Last night Steve Ballmer took the stage to a packed audience to kick of CES 2009.   Ballmer gave a solid keynote, but without the “flash” of prior gates keynotes with more focus on the new products.  Gates in the past has had Slash join him on stage, this year there were no celebrity appearances only a 12 year old that did a blazing fast game creator demonstration flawlessly.  You can watch all or part of the keynote here.  If you don’t have time for the full thing, you can just jump to the sections you want to watch.

Ballmer was rather candid on the economy and its effects, but emphasized the need to innovate in tough economic times.  Despite broad rumors of possible layoffs at Microsoft circulating the Internet, Ballmer talked about how Microsoft was still focused in investing during tough times.

Most of the keynote focused on the connected experience, and attempted to drive home how Microsoft will help connect the “3 screens” Phone, TV and computer to work together with the “cloud” being the connector.  Despite a lot of talk, I really do think we are starting to see some of these connectors come to live with things like Live Mesh and the other cloud offerings starting to take shape.

Live Essentials is now released as a final version – this includes things I use like Live Writer and Live Messenger. 

If your buying a Dell, expect to see these on the default install based on a new deal announced to pre-install on most consumer and small-biz computers.

More interesting related to Live was the announcement was the upcoming integration to show Facebook as one of the 50+ partners on their web activities.  Microsoft continues to try to become a bigger player in the social network arena attempting to be the portal to collect from all the sites that keep popping up.  In this area they seem to be heading towards direct competition with FriendFeed ability to pull together different feeds.  FriendFeed however seems to be pushing more towards encouraging social collaboration on the consolidated view time will tell if Microsoft can engage that level of community participation. On my list to-do is to check out if access to the consolidated what’s new can be accessed via any of the Live APIs.

Windows 7 Beta was officially announced which I don’t think was really much of a surprise given the leaks leading up to CES.  If you have MSDN or TechNet you can download it now, otherwise it will be available to anyone who wants to try it Friday Jan 9th at http://www.microsoft.com/windows7  The PDC build in October of Windows 7 was amazingly stable and I expect this one to continue on that trend.  I plan to put in on at least one of my computers I use everyday when I get back from CES.  Don’t forget if you do decide to kick the tires it is beta and you will have to (or want to) rebuild most likely  once it releases – the beta will be time bombed.

On the XBox live front, in addition to talking about record sales and usage of the XBox, Kodu a game creator was announced.  The idea behind Kodu is to make creation of XBox games require only the Xbox controller.  Using what looked to be a real slick user experience the “game creator” would take their ideas and build up a game using the 200+ game building blocks.  You can read more here .

A flawless demo of the XBox was given on stage by a 12 year old making everyone in the audience amazed as she buzzed through the screens on the game creator.

The keynote wasn’t complete without Microsoft Research highlight some of the future collaboration using various devices including combing surface and mobile.   MSR demo’d visualization that also connected to the “cloud” to pull additional information sources.  In what could almost be a slight of hand magic trick, if you look below at how the visualization is on a paper thin presentation. 

Today the exhibit area opens and I can only imagine it will be packed with people.  I will be posting periodic updates to Twitter at http://twitter.com/davidyack and will try to post some interesting highlights form the show over the next few days.