David Leblond

Bill Gates — out of touch with reality?

So I watched part of the CES keynote the other day. Bill came out and shared with everyone his vision of what future computers will be like. His example was the “family computer” being a huge touch-screen monitor that had television and a glorified RSS reader on it. You can then say “oh! I want to watch that developing story on CNN some more” and press a magic button. Then you can watch the broadcast in the car from your cellphone. Yeah, he said that. And then the broadcast would magically be available on your computer when you got to work. He said he foresees this kind of technology being available by the end of this decade! Wow!

Wait a minute… tracking stories… why, I can do that with Safari’s RSS reader. Watching video on my cell phone… well I could do that too (although I wouldn’t do it IN THE CAR)… I can already do this stuff. So basically we can look forward from nothing new from Microsoft in the next 4 years. Great!

Also everything would be touch screen this and touch screen that! I gotta be the first to say, I HATE touch screens. And the tablet PC that Bill claims is going to take over? Yeah, I know ONE person with a tablet PC.

The one interesting thing I saw out of that keynote was IE7’s tab-browsing-preview thingy, but I’m told Opera can do that already. Oh well.

I don’t think we can expect anything good come from that company anyway, as I believe they do their development using Visual Studio 2005 which is the bane of my existence.

You can see that keynote here.

EDIT: Ok, it was Omniweb I was thinking about, not Opera. And it looks like Safari can do this too. Cool.