Chairman of Microsoft Bill Gates made his last keynote speech at CES this year. Starting in July, he will leave his day job at Microsoft to focus on philanthropy. Gates showed the audience a humorous mockumentary depicting his last days as a full-time Microsoft employee. The seven-minute video had Gates playing with toy figurines, lifting weights and rapping. Quite a few celebrities and politicians made cameo appearances, including Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Al Gore. Copies of this video can be found on sites such as YouTube.
On the floor of CES this year, manufacturers proudly displayed their new products. Pioneer introduced a 9-mm thin plasma display that has amazing contrast. At its blackest, the screen was invisible when the presenters turned off the lights.
An interesting product with an even more interesting marketing campaign is Windows Home Server. The potential market for home servers is huge, and Microsoft’s is trying to plant a stake early. To push the product through humor, the creative marketers at Microsoft have made a faux children’s book entitled “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?” An excerpt reads: “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift. So he buys a ‘stay-at-home’ server.”
CES is an ideal place to look for future trends in technology. Some trends to look forward to in the coming year are solid-state hard drives and OLED displays. Solid-state drives have the advantage of no moving parts and low power consumption, but are currently more expensive and have lower capacity than regular hard drives. Organic LED displays are the future. Among other advantages over LCD technology, OLEDs can be printed on thin flexible substrates and have lower operational costs. However, manufacturers still need to work on expanding the lifespan of the organic compounds used in OLEDs.
Never one to abstain from snobbery, the Apple community holds a separate trade show for itself, around the same time as CES. At the MacWorld Expo this year, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, presented the world with the MacBook Air.
As the world’s new thinnest notebook, it measures .76” near the hinges down to .16” at the latch. Sleek and elegantly designed, the notebook should appeal to the computing traveler or businessperson who greatly agonizes over size. Jobs explained that diminutive size can still have impressive functions when implemented correctly. The MacBook Air has a 13.3” screen, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, back-lit keyboard, Bluetooth and 802.11n wireless, one USB port, one audio port and one micro-DVI port.
At an impressive three pounds, the Macbook Air still lacks an optical disk drive. In addition, the five-hour battery is not user replaceable. For $1,800, the MacBook comes with a mere 80 GB hard drive and 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo Processor. To upgrade to a 64 GB solid-state drive and a 1.8 GHz processor, add $1,300 (that’s right—$1,300 more). The question here is whether the demographic that Macbook Air is targeting is really that concerned with size, especially considering the prices and the lack of an optical drive. My guess is that that demographic is very small.
These two trade shows should be able to stir up enough excitement in the consumer market to effectively mitigate the recent downturn in the economy, which many analysts fear might be in the midst of a recession.