CES kicks off tomorrow in Vegas and I'm already tired just thinking about the flood of press releases that's about to hit my inbox. But tonight's the thing I actually care about: Microsoft is doing the CES keynote one more time, and apparently it's the last one they're ever going to do.
I didn't believe this when I first read it a couple weeks back. Microsoft has opened CES for something like fourteen years running. Bill Gates up there in a sweater vest, then Ballmer sweating through slides and yelling about "developers developers developers" (different keynote, I know, but you get the vibe). It's just been a fixture, like the CES pass lanyard or the overpriced show floor coffee. And now they're stepping back after tonight. Steve Ballmer is doing the honors one last time, and then Microsoft's done with it.
Here's the thing though, and I think this is actually the real story under the story: Microsoft pulling out of CES isn't really about CES. It's about what CES even is anymore for a company like Microsoft. CES used to be where you announced Windows, showed off Media Center PCs, did the big consumer tech state-of-the-union. But Microsoft's whole calendar has shifted. They do their own events now. E3 is where the Xbox stuff lives. And with Windows 8 coming later this year (whatever it ends up looking like — we still haven't seen much of it publicly), it feels like Microsoft would rather control the room themselves than share a stage with a thousand ultrabook demos and a rotating cast of "smart fridge" gimmicks.
Because let's be honest about what CES has actually turned into the last few years: it's not really a place where the big platform decisions get made anymore. It's a trade show for accessories, TVs, and buzzwords. And this year the buzzword is already locked in before the show floor even opens — "ultrabook." Intel's been pushing this term hard since last summer, basically willing a category into existence in response to the MacBook Air, and I'd bet real money that half the keynotes and booth banners this week use the word so many times it stops meaning anything by Thursday. I actually kind of like thin laptops! I just don't need a marketing category invented for me to like them.
Anyway. Back to Microsoft. Part of me is going to miss this being a thing, honestly, even though I've made fun of these keynotes plenty on here before. There's something almost quaint about a tech giant standing up at a Vegas convention center and doing the big consumer pitch in front of a room full of reporters and bloggers instead of just dropping a slick video online. Apple stopped doing Macworld keynotes years ago and went their own way, and now Microsoft's doing the same thing in reverse — leaving the shared stage to go build their own. Feels like the last of the old guard checking out of the neighborhood.
I don't know exactly what Ballmer's going to show tonight. Probably some Windows Phone numbers that sound better than they are, maybe an Xbox update, possibly something about Windows 8 that doesn't actually tell us anything new. I'll be honest, my expectations are low, mostly because Microsoft keynotes over the last few years have had this pattern where the actual news is thin and the demo videos do all the heavy lifting. But I'll be watching anyway, because it's the last one, and there's something worth paying attention to just for that alone.
Tomorrow the real show starts and I expect we'll be drowning in ultrabooks, curved TVs, weird prototype tablets nobody will remember by March, and at least one company trying to convince us our thermostat needs an app. Standard CES stuff. I'll try to write up whatever actually looks real once the dust settles, instead of just repeating whatever the press releases say, which is basically half of what tech blogs do during this week every year and it drives me up the wall.
For now though, it's just kind of a strange feeling watching an era end on a Monday night in January. No big fanfare, no farewell tour, just a quiet last time doing the thing they've always done at the start of the tech year.