So I just got back from Bill Gates@UW. They said that there would be metal detectors on site and you couldn’t bring anything with you (no bags, cameras, laptops, etc) but the entry process consisted of waiting an hour outside and then a swipe of your watcard. Oh and there were empty seats in the balcony (and I could only see a corner of the balcony), some big organizational issues there!

While waiting outside, I saw media from CTV, A Channel, and 570 news (analogous to 680 news in this area?). I also saw some shy girl turn down an interview, OMG a chance to be on TV! Actually I was in the background of a CTV interview which might make it on, but who knows.

Anyways, the talk itself was kind of dry but at least it wasn’t blatantly about getting people to join Microsoft. The demos that he did were neat, he showed a next generation photo browser, the music/pictures functionality of XBox 360 and Project Gotham Racing 3. PGR looked really nice, especially considering it was being played on a big screen. He also showed some interesting contraption that I guess is coming out of Microsoft Research that incorporates image recognition to store business cards and hand writing onto your cellphone.

Bill mentioned as an aside how in the future there might not be (TV) channels anymore. I guess he is thinking about how we can just search/buy content kind of like in iTunes 6. That’s big news if you are a content distributor since you basically have to change your business model.

Finally, the questions that were asked were pretty decent. There was one guy who asked what he thought of Apple moving to x86 but all the other questions weren’t that stupid. Oh yeah he showed a couple of videos too, one that he said was for recruiting but was really a Napolean Dynamite spot for Office. Oh well, at least it was funny.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: microsoft, uwaterloo.ca