Long line for Gates
Lining up for the Bill Gates keynote. — Each year I write about the insane lines and crowds at CES. The only place I don't have to wait is the women's bathroom because the female to male ratio is about 1 to 100. — With Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates set …
Context & Ripple Effects
The queues outside the Gates keynote have become a CES ritual — he was already drawing them two years ago when Engadget sat down with him after the 2006 CES media alert, and the crowd this morning is no smaller. What has changed is the stakes: an October CNET piece on Gates' long to-do list framed this as a chairman with unfinished business, and the syndication footprint on this keynote is unusually broad — BBC, Associated Press, PC World, ZDNet and Microsoft's own "Next Digital Decade" framing all picked it up within a day.
The substance behind the lines is a slate of confirmed entertainment deals announced alongside the speech: partnerships with NBC Universal, MGM and Disney-ABC Television Group, plus Silverlight winning the hosting job for NBC's Beijing Olympics video portal at NBCOlympics.com. A separate report of an internal document pointing to a touch-and-motion-focused Windows Mobile 7 remains unconfirmed.
First-order effects
- Microsoft converts keynote attention into distribution wins on the spot: Silverlight gets the single largest live-streaming audience available in 2008 via NBCOlympics.com, and NBC Universal, MGM and Disney-ABC become launch partners for its entertainment push.
- Attendees and press treat the Gates speech as the show's anchor event, giving Microsoft the opening slot in the news cycle that competitors must then respond to.
Second-order effects
- Silverlight's Olympics deal puts it head-to-head with Adobe's Flash for premium video workloads, forcing Adobe to defend the browser-plugin market it currently dominates.
- Content owners gain a second bidding platform beyond Apple's ecosystem, shifting leverage in digital-entertainment licensing negotiations toward whoever can promise scale across Windows, Xbox and the web.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, CES keynotes consolidate into platform declarations rather than product demos — software companies buying content partnerships to validate their stacks, with hardware makers relegated to the exhibit floor.
- With Gates' day-to-day exit looming per the October reporting, Microsoft is positioning its post-Gates identity around connected entertainment and services, while the unconfirmed Windows Mobile 7 rumors suggest the mobile gap is the acknowledged weak point in that story.
The trend: Consumer-electronics keynotes are becoming stagecraft for platform alliances, as Microsoft trades keynote gravity for content-partner commitments that test whether its software stack can carry mainstream entertainment.