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Last night was the kickoff of the D6 conference and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were the opening act. Aside from a little light comedy and some reminiscences, the big news was a teaser for Windows 7 which will have multi-touch support for PCs with the requisite touch screen hardware.
The applications shown seem to be PC versions (e.g. no bar coded foreign objects) of those demonstrated with Microsoft’s Surface table kiosk system (aka "Big ass table") which was demoed last year at D5. Touch screens have been around for Windows seemingly forever via third parties and while it may be useful for kiosk builders to have the support baked into Windows 7, it is hardly the kind of thing that will draw the crowds. Still, it makes a nice demo and that’s the point after all.
Bill Gates delivered his last Microsoft keynote at the International Consumer Electronics Show yesterday and it was fortunately missing a lot of the goofy geek tech of recent years although the more staid and occasionally self-congratulatory tone has drawn some complaints about lack of Microsoft innovation ([1], [ 2]). You can catch the replay video online, but here’s a rundown of the new announcements:
Microsoft yesterday announced a press event on October 16 featuring Bill Gates and Jeff Raikes to launch the next generation of unified communications software or more precisely, “to highlight the general availability of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 and Microsoft Office Live Meeting.”
Last night was the night for the Bill Gates-Steve Jobs joint interview at the D5 conference and not unexpectedly it turned out to be a love-in between the two industry pioneers: (more…)
