CES 2009 Steve Ballmer CEO from Microsoft “It’s in the Cloud”

CES 2009 Steve Ballmer CEO from Microsoft “It’s in the Cloud”

By Robert McMillen- Koin’s Tech Guru

The 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is happening this week! I boarded a jam packed plane Wednesday afternoon from rainy Portland and met lots of the Northwest’s elite techno geeks. As usual, Las Vegas is sunny and a little warmer, but don’t hate me, I already lost at the slots and Blackjack.

The big thing that happened Wednesday was the keynote speech from Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. It’s the first year he took over keynote duties from Bill Gates and you could tell this guy is a pro. With all the flash of a Las Vegas show, Steve outlined Microsoft’s plans for 2009 at CES.

The event was in the Venetian Hotel, which unfortunately had all the “odiferous odor of le cake de urinal”. For some reason it smelled bad. They pipe in some smell that research has shown to make people happy and feel like spending money. I just wanted to run out wheezing.

My radio co-host Andy Young and I were racing to get to the speech after zooming through the airport and hunting down the elusive Mr. Ballmer. We made it just in time as a “rap” artist was finishing spit-filled drum beats into a microphone.

Steve’s outline was simple. There are three devices we all use on a daily basis: the computer, cell phone, and television. Microsoft can tie all those together seamlessly using cloud computing. This is accomplished by signing up for the free Live Mesh service from Microsoft. Live Mesh can sync all your pictures and data between all three devices provided you run Windows not just on your PC, but also on your phone and your television. Although it sounds funny, Microsoft has been running successfully on smart phones for years, and now television manufacturers are starting to make TVs internet capable.

It only makes sense that Microsoft gives Live Mesh away so you’ll buy three operating systems from them. 

We then had a great presentation on Windows 7, which is Vista’s replacement. The big announcement was that Windows 7 is available for general download in the beta version as of this Friday. I have to admit this operating system fixed Vista’s problems, ran faster, didn’t crash, and had a slew of new features. I think they might have hit a home run here, and businesses might actually decide to start retiring Windows XP after seeing this operating system.

During Steve’s speech I took his picture with my Apple iPhone. Oh the irony.

I will be at CES until the last gasp so stay tuned for updates on the best of the best new gadgets from the show.

For more great tips, check back here and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at 9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com.

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column I will always answer by email.