After some on-and-off viewing of press videos during the day from CES, which opens to the public tomorrow, I watched the live, online keynote address by Steve Ballmer. Except for maybe a few minutes of the Xbox 360 presentation (which I don’t play or even own), I would have to say that it was one of the most underwhelming and at times even embarrassing keynotes I have ever seen. From host Ryan Seacrest’s lack of interest and Ballmer’s boisterous, used-car-salesman, carnival-barking, sweaty-pits style (does anyone else think he looks Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein?), to the boring Windows 8 and companion hardware demonstrations, there was nothing that kept my interest or nothing that hasn’t already been shown. Bing was heavily promoted but Office Cloud, IE9 and Skype were only mentioned in passing. Not sure why they thought a Sesame Street demo with a kid for a room full of geeky nerds looking for tech details was a good idea. Even the two TWiT commentators, both die-hard Windows users, kept shaking their heads and snickering. This is of course only my opinion, but this was an embarrassing performance for Microsoft at their final CES appearance.
