Watched an incredibly weird CES keynote address live from Las Vegas, given by Dr. Paul Jacobs of San Diego’s own Qualcomm. First time in many years that Microsoft had not given the keynote.
Jacobs went through the usual upcoming product (processor) announcement gloating, which really did sound pretty impressive, but then things started to get strange. Three young actors, portraying Generation “M” characters, took to the stage to act out what being mobile was all about. They were meant to be hip and cool but came across as just really annoyingly awful people.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer literally ran onto the stage to take over and talk about Windows 8. Granted, I have never cared for Ballmer at all (always thought of him as a really horrible, sweaty huckster who would try to sell you anything, no matter how terribly made), but seeing him enter like that and start his pitch really irritated me.
Following him came writer/director Guillermo del Toro. I thought this was pretty cool especially since they showed a trailer for his upcoming sci-fi horror movie “Pacific Rim.” I do like him as a director, but they showed a particularly bloody vampire killing clip from Blade II. I couldn’t see the audience in the video but I could just tell that they all thought this very inappropriate.
After del Toro came probably the weirdest and most tweeted about portion of the keynote. Big Bird. He came out with a software developer…dressed in his own terrible Big Bird costume…to talk about a reading app for kids. The app was fine, but the interaction between the puppet and the human was just cringe-worthy. This part couldn’t end quickly enough.
Let’s see…who could possibly follow Big Bird? Why, the totally bald, larger-than-life head of archbishop Desmond Tutu on a video feed, of course! At least he brought some semblance of class back to the proceedings with his praise of Qualcomm’s involvement with world health initiatives.
Then came the attractive Alice Eve, who plays Carol Marcus in the soon-to-be-released new Star Trek movie. She was there to promote another app powered by a Qualcomm chip. A trailer for the Star Trek movie was also shown. This might be sexist, but compared to everything that had come before, at least she was some eye candy. Eye candy that very obviously did not want to be there. And the scripted banter between her and Jacobs was stilted and uncomfortable to watch.
This was then followed by someone driving a brand new, electric Rolls Royce onto the stage. This car had been driven around the world testing a new battery that was controlled by a Qualcomm processor. Nothing helps you relate to the average person more than a car as expensive as some people’s homes.
The video stream of the event could not have ended on a weirder note. Dr. Jacobs closed the keynote by introducing Maroon 5. That in itself is not the weird part. Once they took to the stage they prepared their instruments and mics and then started playing an acoustic version of one of their songs. At least that’s what it looked like since there was no sound! Then, oddly, a woman’s singing voice came over the stream. What the…? Turns out CES didn’t have the rights to rebroadcast the audio of the group so they dubbed a song by Dido over the video. They just should have cut the stream before the band started playing. This was just dumb.
And here I thought I wouldn’t have anything to right about watching a boring old keynote.
