Before he rolled out the keynote speech at CES, Bill Gates went out to warm up the crowd.
Here are a few interesting notes from a chat he had with CNet:
"[On the Media Center] There's a thing that we can do for the advertisers that is critical for them, which is to allow the advertising to be targeted. That's what you've seen with our IPTV (Internet Protocol television) effort... With that infrastructure, even for people watching the same show, you can insert just in a perfect way an ad targeted to that individual."
"[On whether music sales are important] In and of itself, it's not going to be a big source of a profit because there will be lots of people with stores out there, but then in terms of making it simple, having it work on all the devices, work with all the stores - that is important to us.
It's mainly what you'd expect from somebody who's about to make a big speech - nothing too unexpected, a few hints at what we might hear today. But I think one of the most interesting things he says is about Firefox:
"Well, people get confused about browsers. You can have as many browsers as you want on your PC, just like you can have tons of music players and things like that.
So when people say Firefox is being downloaded onto people's systems, that's true, but IE is also on those systems. Firefox is new, and people are trying it out. There's a certain percentage of people who do that - it's very easy to download.
He's noting two phenomena in the same breath: adoption and usage. Lots of people may be adopting Firefox because it's new, and different to IE. The figures may indeed drop off over time.
But lots of the stats I've seen relate not to "how many people have dowloaded FF" but to "how many people are using it as their main web browser". That information's easy to gather for websites who keep track of their visitors.
Let's not forget, IE is still massively dominant in the browser market. Microsoft still has, in most studies I've seen, a share that's more than 90% share.
But then again IE is already built in to any PC running Windows (I seem to remember an antitrust case about this very thing, perhaps Bill's forgotten it). So saying "IE is also on those systems" seems like a bit of a red herring, since IE is on those systems *without* the user choosing it, whereas Firefox is a proactive decision. Still, where would we be without a bit of semantics, eh?
Anyway, roll on the keynote: it seems his main plank could well be pushing harder to get Microsoft running your home entertainment.
