Angus Kidman09 January 2009, 1:15 AM
Like a proud parent seeing his kid off into the big wide world, Steve Ballmer has handed over the keys to the Windows 7 beta to the world. (Or will in a few days).
Steve Ballmer's debut appearance as the opening keynote speaker for CES featured the announcement everyone expected: Windows 7 will be available in a general public beta by the end of the week.
As was widely anticipated, Ballmer announced that the first official beta of Windows 7 would be immediately available to Microsoft Technet and MSDN subscribers. A general release will follow on Friday US time.
"We will make the beta available worldwide so that users can come online and try out Windows 7 on their PC s at home," Ballmer said, adding: "I encourage you all to get out and download."
The speech marked Ballmer's debut as the public face of Microsoft at CES, taking over the pre-show keynote slot occupied by Bill Gates for the past 15 years. As APC predicted, Ballmer did not indulge in his infamous monkey dance, though his trademark booming volume was very much in evidence.
While offering experiences that span PCs, phones and televisions was the ostensible theme of Ballmer's presentation, it was when promoting the continued central role of Windows in Microsoft's strategy that he got really excited.
"The lynchpin for bringing all this together for you should be Windows, I believe," Ballmer boomed. "Windows will remain at the centre of people's technology solar system. It will work across all three screen seamlessly, it will increasingly accept natural input and it will tie all your applications together through the cloud. The choice, the power and the value of the PC is unmatched and better today than ever Windows has become the language that over a billion people speak."
Much of the keynote was given over to a demonstration of Windows 7, though no new features were disclosed. The only fresh disclosure of that kind came in a demonstration of Windows Live by product manager Charlotte Jones. Jones showed off Quick Add, a feature that allows searching for basic information (such as restaurant names or show locations) in a sidebar on the Windows Live mail screen and automatically pasting it into a message, eliminating the typical open new tab-search-copy-paste routine often used in organising meetings.
"Quick Add is coming soon and it brings the content that you want into the conversations you;re already having," Jones said.
The feature looked potentially useful, but details such as the source of such information (and whether Microsoft expects advertising dollars to appear there) haven't yet been disclosed.
Jones also made what looked like a mocking Macworld reference, remarking "I can't leave the stage without showing you one more thing" before demonstrating Live Messenger's dynamic display picture feature, which changes user avatars based on the emoticons used in messages.
Other rumoured new products, such as a phone based on the Zune platform, singularly failed to materialise. A prototype education tablet which uses Microsoft's surface technology was also demonstrated, though no time frame for release was suggested.
Microsoft entertainment division head (and relative CES veteran) Robbie Bach discussed Microsoft's plans for Primetime, scheduled "programming" for Xbox Live that will include quizzes and other interactive elements. Disturbingly, one of the central elements of Primetime is 1 Vs 100, the show which flopped in its Australian TV version hosted by Eddie 'Everywhere' McGuire. Bach's demonstration marked the only minor technical glitch during the keynote, when his wireless controller briefly failed to respond.