Microsoft Gives Audience the Bird, Unveils “Tweet Choir” in Last Ever CES keynote

CES, the Consumer Electronics Show held each January in Las Vegas, is known for two things:

1. Being the first look at the new gadget technology we can expect to see in the year ahead.

2. It’s invariably across the road from the annual porn industry convention held in Las Vegas at the same time.

Microsoft, as big dog in the yard, have commanded the keynote address spot for the entire show since 1997. Once upon a time, this was Bill Gates’ time to shine. Since Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO, the address has usually been delivered by Steve Ballmer. Steve “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Ballmer. Steve “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards” Ballmer. Steve “I once won an Uncle Fester lookalike contest” Ballmer. I only made one of those quotes up. The last one.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end and Microsoft have decided that this is the last year they’ll exhibit at CES, following the lead of Apple which decided from 1997 that it preferred to launch new products at its own carefully controlled events rather than jockey for position at the big trade shows.

Back to this year’s keynote, though: Microsoft had to fill two hours without much in the way of actual news to announce. Things got off to a great start when Ballmer brought out Ryan Seacrest to share the embarrassment, something that Seacrest may just do better than anyone on Earth.

After talking about existing products, and re-capping the news about Windows 8 (which is: it exists and will be based on that highly popular Windows Phone product which is dominating the market, right? Steve “You have to be a computer scientist to use Android” Ballmer couldn’t be wrong?), Microsoft figured it might as well display what it really thought of CES.

First, Microsoft turned to a tried and true farce: the product demonstration which doesn’t work. For this one, they did a voice recognition demo, always a good way to fail in front of a live audience. Not some clever new voice recognition app like Apple’s Siri, even. Just… proof that you can still run dodgy voice recognition software on Windows products, really. In case anyone had forgotten and was dying to know.

Second of all, Microsoft did a lengthy product demonstration of… the Xbox 360. Not a new Xbox. The one that was launched in November 2005. Steve mentioned they have shipped 66 million Xboxes. No mention of how many of those were warranty replacements for broken Xboxes afflicted with the infamous Red Ring of Doom, but I’m guessing that would account for about 55 million of them. Many media sources, possibly worn down by all this farce, have reported it as there being 66 million Xboxes “in the wild”. That’s only true if Microsoft dump all the broken Xboxes in a national park.

Finally, at 10:20pm and with the audience really wishing they were across the street at the sex convention, Steve Ballmer introduced the “tweet choir” to sing a selection of tweets related to Microsoft’s keynote. Yes, this was what one of the biggest companies on Earth decided was appropriate to entertain the media and spectators at a major trade show keynote address. Still, it could be worse. It could have been the Gawker comment choir.

Oh, and just in case anyone was thinking that Microsoft was not so much the evil empire anymore, there was one piece of new news. Microsoft is partnering with News Corporation to bring Fox News and other pieces of propagandacontent to the Xbox. Given the high number of homophobic, sexist and racist slurs used by the average Xbox Live player (present company excepted), this partnership is a natural fit and I expect it to be a huge success.

I leave with you a video of Ballmer going absolutely off his nut before another speech a few years back. Sadly, the infamous incident where Ballmer threw a chair across the room and swore he would kill Google was not caught on camera.

Photos via jdlasica @ Flickr
and lorenjavier @ Flickr

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