Orlando - The doors opened and dozens of people ran into the huge room, each seeking a seat as close to the front as possible. Was this a Who concert? An appearance by the Pope?
Nah. It was just that the richest man in America was about to give a speech about the future of the PC before engineers who slave away building those computers and peripherals.
Still, the showgoers at WinHEC didn't miss out on the heavy metal - some crushing, annoying Van Halen to loosen them up before Gates bounded onto stage wearing a loose red WinHEC shirt. His delivery may lack ooomph, but the message was gleefully absorbed by more than a thousand audience members.
Gates, as usual, was excited about the PC market. Unit volumes are up, prices are down, and new uses, such as digital photography are taking hold. "The pace is faster than ever, and all this makes the PC a much better tool," Gates gushed.
Gates was also impressed with all the power packed into today's PCs. "We have some people asking, 'do we need all that capability' We need all that power to make the PC a simple device, a natural device to work with," Gates argued. In fact the overall message at the WinHEC confab was that PCs should be fatter, not thinner clients. The battle cry was for faster CPUs, and more memory, moving to 64M-bytes as the norm, and then onto 128.
Gates also sees new device types. One he is most excited about, some five years out, is a high resolution tablet. This way, people could actually do most of their reading on a PC, without going buggy.
The ebullient Gates has one major worry though - the state of high speed access for consumers. While some progress has been made by cable modems and DSL trials, the vast majority of home connections are still a paltry 28.8K. Gates believes that the Universal DSL standard will drive consumer demand and create a high volume market, but that carriers are still constrained by government regulation, which will slow the rollout.
If we can solve that problem, we can all move on to leading Web lifestyles, where the ‘Net is always on, and is the main source for news and information. Gates claims to already lead one, as his home has a 45Mbit connection and is littered with flat panel displays.
Beside Gates cherished tablet, PCs will come in other forms. While the dominant form will remain today's box with monitor and keyboard, small devices will be designed just to browse, hand held and palm devices will sell like flapjacks, and cars will be equipped with AutoPCs that have speech recognition and give directions, traffic info, and names and address books. He claims the AutoPC will be available this year.
But mainly Gates stressed ease of use and configuration. He expressed user frustration through a variety of videos that were actually funny.
One had Gates and his longtime business partner Steve Ballmer pretending to be the two guys from the VW commercial who pick up and then ditch a smelly old chair. But in this case they pick up the chair and a Sun workstation. After smelling something fishy, they ditch the Sun, but keep the chair. Baboomp boomp. Another has Martha Stewart configuring an SMP server, and adding a larger cache, all before dinner. But the best was Newman from Seinfeld as an overly eager cable installer who ends up shorting a consumer's house with a massive array of communications and entertainment gear. I only wish they had cast Jim Carey.
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