Bill Gates – Key Note Address

Not surprisingly this presentation was dominated by Vista. Bill did however wish to consider related issues such as “digital lifestyle” in the “digital decade”. In his opinion the key element that is still missing to make digital living a complete experience is links.

Microsoft Vista will be launched at the end of January 2007. He claimed that it it is the most complete OS developed by the company and the most tested. Bill is confident that people will enjoy the experience and together with related technology (such as Office which is also being relaunched at the same time) which will be able to use 64 bit working (where hardware is available) and wanted to use Vista to offer a new user interface and a more connected experience.

Vista features such as PC Search have already been mentioned before but this can now also be extended to search on all PCs connected behind a home hub. The ability for applications to roll back to previous versions will also enable users to recover inadvertently removed or amended content. The image editing application will enable photos to be edited – even within a document. Also the fonts for a document can be previewed before confirming a change. Also watch out for Sports Lounge – an extension to Media Center - which will integrate with a users sports interests e.g. favorite teams (initially US football, baseball, basket ball etc) with future TV schedules, on-line result services and sports news sites and can be set-up to deliver messages when content of potential interest is available.

Xbox360 has been an extremely successful game platform launch targeting an estimated 200 million gamers. New gaming software such as Halo3 and Uno are some of the first high definition games - about 160 which will become available during 2007. This application is now being extended with Windows Earth 3D. Xbox live already offers a new social community to 5 million users – they can see what their friends are playing on line and either join them or invite them to join another game. Using IP-TV via Media Center applications Xbox can now stream TV whilst still enabling users to IM or voice chat on-line. 30 million “Media Center” enabled PCs have also been sold in recent months.

Partnerships were also a key element of the presentation. A number of companies are currently preparing to launch new PCs to take advantage of the Vista OS – some during next few days. Bill later introduced the HP Home Server which will be launched in second half of 2007. This will offer automated back-ups, connectivity, remote connectivity, and terra-bytes of storage. Finally Bill revealed a partnership with Ford motor cars. This is resulting in new standard OS for auto engineering. This OS will offer voice activated phone and data services through the vehicles audio and entertainment system. This will enable synchronization of address book (including ring tone options and diverts etc), IM text to voice translation, entertainment management etc and should be launched in 12 vehicle models during 2007.