14 DAY TRIAL // Per the last few years’ tradition, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer delivered the opening keynote address at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 5th, 2011. With a lot of anticipation having built for this moment, I’m betting that many of you managed to watch Ballmer talk yesterday, especially with Microsoft streaming the speech live.
However, for those that didn’t, as well as for the users that might want to watch the whole thing or just fragments again, I embedded a video at the bottom of this article.
While it’s almost one hour long, Ballmer’s keynote is certainly worth watching, especially with the Redmond company providing a number of very juicy announcements.
As far as I’m concerned, I was waiting for the Microsoft CEO to reveal the first details about the successor of Windows 7, which he did.
While Ballmer did not utter the word ‘Windows 8,’ he did talk about the next version of Windows and the support it will feature for System on a Chip (SoC) architectures.
Microsoft even demoed an early release of Windows vNext at CES 2011, but this is about all that attendants got to see of the operating system.
In addition to the sneak peek at Windows 8, the keynote also focused on Windows Phone 7, Kinect for Xbox, Microsoft Surface, and some additional products.
"(It) was a very, very exciting year for our customers,” Ballmer said. “We launched Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, and Kinect, and we introduced Internet Explorer 9 and Office 365. We saw great growth in our Bing and Azure services, and with the amazing success of Windows 7, it’s truly been a year like none other."
"The products that I mentioned (above) resulted from big technology bets that we’ve made," Ballmer added. "Bets on the cloud, natural user interface, new smart client technology, machine learning."