If you missed Bill Gates’s keynote from CES, you didn’t miss much — aside from an uncomfortably-close-to-Terminator image recognition demo, technology Microsoft says they won’t productize. (That’s good, because otherwise a robot from the future might have killed all the presenters on the spot.) But Microsoft did stage an Oscar-style spoof video, complete with celebrities, demonstrating what Gates might do after retirement from his full-time Chairman position later this year. The overwhelming trend: get into music making. Guitar Hero and Rock Band seem to be doing fine jobs of convincing people to make more music.
I had Chairman Bill running in a corner of my screen while I cleaned house, hoping for something interesting like gesture recognition in Windows 7, so I didn’t snag images quickly enough. Gizmodo has a good write-up with images and on-demand video from CES should be available soon. He did choose JayZ over Timbaland as his producer, I’m guessing because even Gates was offended about that whole Finnish chiptune controversy.
Since Gates is currently a Windows user, I suggest loading up the retirement laptop with platform-exclusives FL Studio and SONAR (alongside plenty of great cross-platform tools). And since presumably Gates still has a house filled with flat-screen projection surfaces, might I suggest a side order of VJing — especially if the music thing doesn’t work out?
Sadly, this leaves the rest of us dreaming for a gestural, multi-touch operating system that isn’t installed in a hotel lounge doing cool-looking but semi-pointless things.