Bill Gates gives his final CES keynote as a full-time Microsoft employee this year, and even with the usual goofy video gags, it lands like a hinge moment. The face of the PC era is stepping back just as the ground starts shifting under the whole industry.
The format war ends
The big resolved story is the disc war. Warner throws its weight behind Blu-ray right before the show, and you can feel HD DVD deflating in real time on the floor. I will call it now: that fight is basically over. For my lens, though, this is a holding-pattern year. The phones here are still catalog filler, and the interesting hardware is being saved for events that are not CES.
The trend for the year ahead
The living room finishes settling its disc war just as all the energy quietly drains toward mobile. The companies that notice early will be fine. The ones still optimizing for the TV stand may wake up in a year wondering where the excitement went.
A transitional CES, the kind you suspect matters more than it looks right now. Gates walking off that stage is the image that sticks with me.
Part of 20 Years of CES Through My Lens, my year-by-year diary of the show.