Gates' last CES keynote: Long on sales claims, short on futures

For the past ten years, the best part of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' Consumer Electronics Show keynotes, to me, have been the futuristic look-aheads.

I haven't been as  wowed by the partnership deals set to kick in over the next year or so. Nor the new PCs, devices, software (and, as of late, services) that have just started to ship or will in a matter of months. But I always looked forward to the way-out there, long-term, pie-in-the-sky computing scenarios that made audiences oooh and aaah.

At this year's keynote -- which will be Gates' last (at least for the foreseeable future) -- there were not many hints about Microsoft's view of the coming digital decade. Instead, the focus was on sales tallies for Windows Vista (100 million retail copies sold); Xbox Live members (10 million); Xbox 360 gaming consoles (17.7 million sold to date); Windows Live users (420 million worldwide) and MediaRoom IPTV setboxes installed (1 million).

In part, the de-emphasis on what Microsoft envisions for the longer term may have been intentional. Microsoft may have wanted to give Gates a chance to bask in the glow of keynotes of years past. Or perhaps it's a sign of the new Microsoft: One where discussions of futures are going to be severely curtailed.

The only truly futuristic technology that Gates showed during his hour-plus CES appearance was a piece of visual-recognition software under development by Microsoft Research that, some day, may be integrated into cell phones and other devices. Gates pointed a black-box mock-up device at faces and the software instantly recognized and identified them, providing all kinds of related information (like how much money they owe you). Point the device at a theater and it provided the theater name, address and a list of movies playing. Gates showed a slick, 3D interactive interface that would act as the central focal point for all of the visual data stored on a device, organizing it into browseable categories.

I was hoping Gates would pull a Steve Jobs and say at the very end of his remarks, "We have one more thing..." and show off Windows Live "Horizon" or a sneak peek of Windows Mobile 7, or the "Pink and Purple" project's Zune phone, or -- heck, even just a glimpse of "Fiji."

But nope. That was all, folks.

What did you think of Gates' last CES hurrah?