On Sunday, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates gave his 11th, and last, keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas; in future he will focus his efforts on the Gates Foundation and its fight against disease. So, after 14 years, we can look back and ask: how did he do?
Well, he gets a mixed report. He did well for the show, reasonably well in tracking the industry, and badly when launching new products. (Transcripts of Gates's speeches from 1996 to 2008 are on Microsoft's site at tinyurl.com/2a8nox; the first from CES is the 1998 one.)
Gates was very successful in attracting large audiences, and in helping to get CES reported - which is basically how he got the gig in the first place. Plenty of people wanted to see the world's richest man (as he became in 1995). And if they didn't find his boyish geekiness compelling, they could still enjoy his spoof videos and celebrity guests, from wrestler The Rock to Slash, the Guns N' Roses guitarist.
Trend spotter - if not setter
Gates has also done pretty well at predicting industry trends, particularly the success of personal computers. Microsoft's stated aim was to get one on every desk and in every home, which few people thought possible, even in the US. But by the mid-90s, Gates was predicting a proliferation of smart devices, and Microsoft developed a new operating system, Windows CE, to run them.
A decade ago, for example, he told his CES audience: "But I don't believe the personal computer will be the only tool of the information age. It will be one of the most important with its full-size screen, and its ability to run rich applications, but I think there are going to be a variety of form factors. People want information everywhere they go. They want it on a small device. They want it in their car. They want it combined with their wireless telephone. And so we are going to see quite a large number of devices come along that tie together. None of these devices will succeed if it's a standalone device. None of them will succeed if they don't move the information easily between each other and with the PC."
That's mostly right, though he didn't suggest that information could be moved over the net. However, a couple of years later, Microsoft launched Microsoft.net, and "web services" became a new mantra. In his keynotes at the Comdex Fall exhibition in Las Vegas in 1999 and 2000 - a sort of business version of CES - Gates also backed XML, a superset of HTML, as the key to doing it. He was right about that, too.
This year, Gates mentioned "the cloud" several times, incorporating the new reality. He said: "No longer will users have to bridge between the devices, and they're the ones who have to remember what's where. By having essentially the master of what's going on stored up in the cloud, things like docking up, connecting, searching across devices will be very simple, and the information, of course, can be shared across many users."
Windows CE was supposed to run on vast numbers of small connected devices, including set-top boxes and games consoles. Microsoft produced special versions for cars (Auto PC), PDAs (Pocket PC) and phones (Windows Mobile). The fact is, though, it doesn't. The vision was largely right, but again, either it didn't fit the market, or the execution was lacking.
Where Gates often came unstuck was in product launches. The most famous example was Microsoft Bob, a pictorial front end that was supposed to make PCs easier to use. Gates unveiled it at CES in 1995, and it is still a running joke. Another failure was the Mira "smart display screen", also a CE-based device, demonstrated at CES in 2002. The idea was that you could use the screen wirelessly, away from your PC. It died almost as soon as it shipped.
Even clunkier was the Spot ("smart personal objects technology") watch. The idea was that lots of different types of Spot device could be updated with weather, news, sports and other information via local radio broadcasts. Gates showed Spot devices at Comdex in 2002 and CES in 2003. They failed to take off.
A less well known example came in the Comdex keynote in 1999, where Gates showed an online version of Microsoft Office. It was offered as a service hosted by ASPs (application service providers); again, it didn't catch on.
Another of Gates's pet ideas is the Tablet PC, which appeals to him because it encourages the "natural" use of a pen on a touch-sensitive screen. Gates announced the idea in his Comdex keynote in 2000 and showed prototypes a year later, saying "It's a PC that is virtually without limits - and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." Six years on, they have yet to become a significant market.
Branching out
Gates's one success outside of the business arena was the Xbox games console, which he launched during his CES speech at the start of 2001. It wasn't a huge success, but did well enough for Microsoft to play in the next round of the console wars with the Xbox 360. Even if it never makes any money, it has given Microsoft valuable experience in running in a vertically integrated consumer business - where, like Apple, it controls the hardware, software and online service - instead of providing software platforms for hardware manufacturers to build on.
And so Microsoft used that expertise to launch ... Zune! Again, that came from Microsoft's consumer-oriented Entertainment and Devices division, which last year contributed only $6bn (£3bn) to the company's $51bn in annual revenues, and lost $1.9bn. It's less than impressive.
However, if that were the whole story, Gates wouldn't be leaving his day job as one of the world's richest men. Which just goes to show: you can be bad at predictions and still get it right in the long term.
Bobbie Johnson is roaming the halls in Las Vegas with our video team. On our site you'll find daily videos on the latest gadgets and how they work, plus analysis of some of the major themes emerging from CES, including an interview with the head of Warner Home Entertainment on its switch to the Blu-ray high-definition DVD format - which may kill its rival, HD-DVD.
