Microsoft has rolled out stacks of new goodies at the CES show in Las Vegas but guess what most of them will not be available in Australia.
Attending a Bill Gates Keynote at the CES show can be so depressing for an Australian. Firstly there are all these goodies, Xbox receivers, new IPTV services, and new technology for the car along with a new generation of media centres.
The only problem is that none of them are available in Australia. We don’t have Microsoft’s new Zune player or the new IPTV service or the new car service from Ford. Neither can we access TV programs from an Xbox while playing games.
But the biggest and most noticeable difference is the lack of streaming content and fast bandwidth. In fact the situation is so bad that one has to question as to whether Microsoft Australia is serious about the CE market at all as they can’t even deliver a simple media centre EPG guide for TV programmes.
During the opening CES keynote Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced that Microsoft will turn its Xbox 360 into a receiver for an emerging form of digital television, seeking to expand the market for one of its key products.
They also announced that will offer a version of Windows for computer servers in the home. And it described plans to make its in-car information and entertainment system available for Ford vehicles starting later this year — its first such agreement with an automaker. But guess what it will not be available in Australia.
The Microsoft chairman spent much of his time trying to build buzz for the impending release of a product announced long ago: Windows Vista.
“This is by far the most important release of Windows ever,” Gates told the crowd at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, saying the PC operating system represented “the biggest investment ever put into a piece of software.”
The company showed computers from Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and others that will launch with Windows Vista’s retail release at the end of this month. The machines take advantage of new features in the operating system such as touch-screen capabilities and support for an auxiliary display in a computer’s casing.
Microsoft’s event was also notable for what was missing. The company didn’t detail plans for any new versions of its Zune music player, its attempt to rival Apple Computer’s dominant iPod portable players.
“We’re obviously busy working on things, but we’re not going to talk about things that we’re going to offer six, 12, 24 months from now, because we want to sell those things that we have today,” Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, said in an interview before the event.
Gates’ address launched a busy week of announcements in the world of computers and consumer electronics. In addition to the thousands of companies exhibiting at CES in Las Vegas, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs will take to the stage Tuesday at Macworld Expo in San Francisco.
News of several Microsoft announcements had leaked out in advance. As a result, the plan to turn the Xbox 360 game console into a receiver for Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV, was perhaps its biggest surprise of the evening.
IPTV uses telephone lines to deliver a high-quality television signal over a closed network. Starting later this year, Microsoft says, companies that use its IPTV system will be able to offer customers the option of getting an Xbox 360 instead of a traditional IPTV receiver.
The arrangement should benefit both the Xbox and IPTV businesses, Bach said.
“It enables us to reach a broader audience in the living room, ultimately,” Bach said, citing expected connections that the arrangement will create between the traditional gaming and TV experiences.
For example, IPTV users will be able to use Xbox features such as online voice chat and messaging while either gaming or watching television.
IPTV service providers will subsidize the cost of the console for their customers, said Microsoft spokesman Jim Brady, comparing it to mobile phone providers offering discounted devices with service plans.
The company says existing Xbox 360s will be capable of being used as IPTV receivers, through software upgrades. However, the service itself will only be available through telecom providers and other companies that use Microsoft’s underlying IPTV system.
Telecom firms including AT&T currently are rolling out Microsoft’s IPTV system in various cities in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, but for now, the service remains relatively hard to find. The company said it was too early to say which IPTV providers would offer Xbox 360s.
The Xbox 360 also will be able to serve as a digital video recorder for IPTV, although the current hard drive is only 20 gigabytes, meagre for storing large TV recordings. Microsoft is widely expected to ultimately offer a larger hard drive, but the company didn’t detail any of those plans Sunday night.
“It’s interesting in that they continue to move away from the Windows PC as the centre of the home and the end-all be-all of their consumer strategy,” said Matt Rosoff, analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft. “Xbox is taking on a bigger role.”
At the same time, Microsoft is seeking to expand the role of Windows in the home. The company announced Windows Home Server, a specialized version of the operating system for computer servers, designed for storing, backing up and distributing digital content.
Hewlett-Packard is expected to release the HP MediaSmart Server, the first machine to be based on the Windows Home Server software, in the second half of the year. Pricing for the machine wasn’t disclosed.
Ford will offer a system called “Sync,” based on Microsoft Auto software, that lets people control and interact with their portable music players and cell phones using buttons and voice commands inside the car. Microsoft struck a previous deal with Fiat.
Xbox 360 holiday sales over Xmas expectations, pushing cumulative sales to 10.4 million units since the November 2005 launch. That’s about 400,000 more units than the company previously projected.
Windows Vista Ultimate, the high-end version of the operating system, will come with a previously undisclosed feature called DreamScene that will let people run full-motion video as their background wallpaper on the computer.
All told, Microsoft’s CES event didn’t contain the level of headline-grabbing product unveilings and promises that the company has made at the event before, said analyst Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research.
“This might be perceived as a pretty slow keynote compared to past years … but I think Microsoft is tired of announcing new stuff that doesn’t materialize, or shows up in a form so different than was shown,” he said, calling the more pragmatic approach “probably a good thing.”
