Posted on 01/06/2005 4:52:59 PM PST by Paleo Conservative
Despite suffering technical glitches that prompted jokes and guffaws, Bill Gates promised Wednesday that Microsoft Corp. would help millions of consumers stay seamlessly plugged into a world of digital music, movies, video games and television shows.
In his seventh annual keynote speech at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft's chairman explained that the proliferation of broadband Internet access and the falling price of data storage are compelling people to put music, photos, movies and other aspects of their life into a digital format.
"We predicted at the beginning of this decade that this would be a decade where the digital approach would be taken for granted," Gates told hundreds of technologists who gathered for his kickoff to the world's largest electronics show. "It's going even faster than we expected." But while promoting what he calls the "digital lifestyle," Gates showed how vulnerable all consumers - even the world's richest man - are to hardware and software bugs.
During a demonstration of digital photography with a soon-to-be-released Nikon camera, a Windows Media Center PC froze and wouldn't respond to Gates' pushing of the remote control.
Later in the 90-minute presentation, a product manager demonstrated the ostensible user-friendliness of a video game expected to hit retail stores in April, Forza Motor Sport. But instead of configuring a custom-designed race car, the computer monitor displayed the dreaded "blue screen of death" and warned, "out of system memory."
The errors which came during what's usually an ode to Microsoft's dominance of the software industry and its increasing control of consumer electronics - prompted the celebrity host, NBC comedian Conan O'Brien, to quip, "Who's in charge of Microsoft, anyway?"
Gates, who was sitting next to O'Brien on a set staged to look like NBC's Late Night set, smiled dryly and continued with his discussion.
Gates also announced several partnerships with telecommunication companies such as SBC Communications Inc. and television networks.
Microsoft and music network MTV last month inked a deal that will eventually allow people to send cable programs from rock, pop and country music channels and Comedy Central to their laptops, hand-held computers and other devices.
Gates also announced that Korea's LG Electronics SA, the owner of Zenith Electronics, would build a DVD player recorder using Microsoft's digital video recording software. The product, which will be available in the fall, will attach to a television so users can record live shows onto a DVD.
Although he accepted guffaws from audience members in the theater, the technical hiccups didn't prompt Gates to engage in a hard-hitting analysis of computer reliability and security. Power outages, hardware failures and software bugs often inexplicably humble those who strive for a Windows-based digital lifestyle, and world's most popular operating system is also a favorite target of hackers, virus writers, spies and spammers.
"We've had a fair share of success and a fair share of things we've had to do version two and three of," said Gates.
Gates downplaying his company's shortcomings isn't surprising. He founded the company to create software for the budding niche of personal computers in the early '80s.
But now senior executives are eager to get a piece of the $108 billion consumer electronics market in the United States, now dominated by Asian brands such as Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and LG Electronics. It will likely take Microsoft years to understand the consumer electronics market and produce simple, glitch-free products for consumers' living rooms, analysts say.
"Microsoft was founded by programmers and is still run by programmers, and the bias of programmers is that software can do anything," said Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. "While Microsoft's goal is to turn the PC into a superhub that does everything - plays music, works as a cell phone, stores your photos - they're running up against the fact that most people buy discreet components that do particular things."
© 2005 Associated Press.
Yep, you're invested. There's a whooole lotta techies like you that help MS sales a great deal.
From my selfish point of view, I'd like to see more intuitive, innovative, bugfree and userproof computing.
But I hope you will apply your great talents in even more successful endeavors.
They tried to show pictures and load a video game from the same computer? While having drivers for a remote control, sound and video card installed?
Well it's obvious that they have too many programs on this computer, causing conflicts and crashing the system when changing programs.
This happens to me just about every other day.
Maybe adding on another service pack will help.
The Amiga 500 was, dollar for dollar, the best PC ever made.
I had the original Amiga and it was Crash City. When one application died, it brought the whole machine down with it. Even Windows 3.1 wasn't as crashy; it would crash as much but you could usually save your changes from other programs before it died completely.
Reactionary, if you don't have Panther installed on your Titanium PowerBook, give it a shot. I have a 400mhz PowerBook G4 and it runs like a champ with Panther, but it was pretty sluggish with earlier versions. I was amazed when I tried it, since in the Windows world operating system upgrades are generally not compatible with anything but the most modern hardware, and they're significantly slower than their predecessors. Not Panther; it rocks. Definitely worth a shot before becoming too frustrated.
Hope that helps.
D
Whatever became of your obsession to own a Sun Workstation?
Slide rules never crashed.
My complaint with modern operating systems is that they're needlessly complex, and that complexity introduces a whole host of problems that make the whole experience of computing more negative than it should be.
Any os as a seperate purchase cost way too much.Mac os is expensive too but not quite as bad. Best deal is a pc you can afford and later max out the memory, etc when those parts are on sale. One of the stores has a special on a 2ghz minitower with XP for $199 after rebate ,the same cost as a XP os package by itself!!!!! Add your old but servicable monitor....I just can't justify the os upgrade expense .
"I know some people that know some people that stole from some people..."
LOL...Just kidding. My job supplies me OS upgrades. However, I am in the process of evaluating Mandrake Linux 10.1 as an alternative to Windows. It is a free (but huge) download. There are versions available for purchase, too. The cost is under $50. It will live or die depending on how much stuff I can do without command line work. My biggest complaint up to now was needing to configure way too much with shell commands. So far, everything works and I didn't have to do anything overly technical yet.
Downloaded Firefox and Thunderbird and had problems with unwanted interactions with IE and OE. Mozilla 1.7 and or Netscape 7 co-exist properly on Windows system with IE and OE. I may designate one box here for Linux after sorting out what's available-have xp,me,98se,95,nt4,3,11,3,1,3.0,2.11,systems6,7,7.6,8,9,OS/2warp2 and4,trsdos6,OS1.3,2.0,3.1,OS9 and probably a few others.
I actually owned one for a while, and SGI too.
SGI was my favourite hardware platform by far until MacOS X arrived. SGI's OS didn't get updated to grow with the times, and MacOS X did. So I switched from a mixed environment that had Windows PCs for commercial software (way too expensive under SGI) and SGI for my web serving and Unix client needs.
Now I'm all-Mac and happier than I've ever been with my computing environment.
D
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