LAS VEGAS — Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates on Sunday used his final keynote address at the tech industry's top trade show to tout some of the same futuristic technologies he ballyhooed at his first more than a decade ago.
Gates, who plans to stop working full time at Microsoft this summer to focus on philanthropy, used his 11th International Consumer Electronics Show keynote here to predict that more Microsoft programs would come pre-installed in cars, more entertainment would be delivered via computer and personal computers would get easier to use.
Those ideas aren't as outlandish as when Gates aired them during his first CES speech in 1994. At least the first two are demonstrably true.
But Gates also made his typical CES entry into more exotic territory, portraying a world in which commands spoken into a smart phone can find the closest showing of a movie and buy tickets to it. Look Ma, no hands.
Gates said the world had completed its first "digital decade," one in which innovation had centered on the keyboard and the mouse.
"The second digital decade will be more focused on connecting people," he said. He predicted it also would feature progress in training machines to react as people do, with "natural user interfaces" that respond to speech and touch.
Yet even some of the far-out felt familiar. Gates said intelligent mobile devices would serve as guides to everyday tasks, which is pretty much what he said in 2003. That's when Gates previewed "smart personal objects technology," or SPOT, which allowed watches to suck personalized news out of the air. It was a commercial flop.
Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, said in an interview Friday that the track record of the substance of Gates' predictions was "quite good -- though you can quibble with the track record of the timing."
"Microsoft does not give up on these things," said Bach, who shared the stage with Gates on Sunday and is expected to take over the keynote slot in the years to come. "We're very persistent."
When Gates gave his first talk at CES, computers were in a minority of homes and were essentially isolated there because Web browsers hadn't made the Internet an easy place to roam.
The intervening years saw Microsoft rise to become one of the most powerful companies on the planet. Although revenue and profit have continued to grow alongside computer sales and Microsoft is the third-largest U.S. company by stock market value, it has in the last few years lost the aura of invincibility.
