TeddyK
on - last edited on by
ElizabethS
This year’s CES is Microsoft’s last, and instead of going out with a bang, their swan song at the show has looked like more of a whimper. Behind closed doors, there may have been more shown under private auspices, but out on the floor, it was a lot of ‘been there, done that’. Windows 8? Nope. Windows Phone with Nokia and other handset makers? Nada. New and unique software or apps? Not really.
Except for the company’s vision of Kinect working with Windows PCs, it looks increasingly likely that Microsoft opted to hold back on making any kind of noise as they bow out of the show.
Perhaps it’s not surprising the Microsoft booth wasn’t all that inspiring. Steve Ballmer’s keynote was essentially a 90-minute pep talk with a Ryan Seacrest appearance thrown in. But in fairness to Ballmer and his company, they may have preferred not to really show anything now opting instead to do so at an event of their own later this year.
Still, Kinect for PC is new, and it offers some interesting questions about how consumers will be interacting with their Windows PCs. It also shows that, at least in this respect, the company’s focus is on the hardware product, and not the software running on it. Opening it up to other developers is not that far off from what Apple did with the iPhone. The iPhone’s explosion in popularity largely happened with the birth of the App Store. Maybe Kinect will go through a similar process.
It’s true that Kinect seems a natural fit for Windows 8 and its tile-based interface. Just using Kinect with the recent Xbox 360 update is a prime example of what’s possible now. Whether or not Kinect’s voice-activation will find its way to mobile devices like Windows Phone is anyone’s guess, but if there was anything to take from Microsoft at the show, it’s that Kinect is likely to be a big part of the company’s future plans.
And we can probably expect SkyDrive to be positioned as an iCloud competitor. It’s been around longer than iCloud (including on the iPhone), but it wasn’t something that you could use on every device. For all its advantages, Microsoft arguably hasn’t pushed SkyDrive enough as an alternative, or as a general cloud-based solution for consumers. It’s not every day that you see a vendor offer 25GB of free storage.
Somewhere, somehow, all these elements might come together but it’s been obvious the last four days that it wasn’t meant to be outlined here at CES.
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