We went to CES in Las Vegas to check out what kind of tech toy all those companies try to sell this year. Usually the first keynote is supposed to pave the way for all the others and to give some hints. Not this time. Steve Ballmer from Microsoft had the opportunity to show the world how the mighty gigant will cope with the ever growing pressure coming from the competition called Apple, Google and the likes. They failed.

The keynote started with a power outage and this has been the best part of the event since we could talk with others about tech news (i came from a nice Samsung event with lots of sparkling ideas). After about 20 minutes Ballmer finally was able to start his keynote. And he talked about Windows 7 (the one which does what Vista was supposed to do years ago). And he’d talk about Windows Mobile (the old new and long delayed 6.5 that is). No news about Windows 7 Mobile, which is expected to be announced/showed off in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress in february.

We heard about how successful that mighty Xbox360 (some years old) is including the info that the rumored new version may be in the shops this holiday season (including the project Natal natural gesture recognition stuff which actually IS interesting). Then we saw a nice demo of a new version of Halo. We saw and heard that the good ol’ arcade games are now officially supported on the XBox and will be released in the thousands as a current stream of excitement for us arcade afficionados over the next years. Arcade games from the 80’s as the game winning idea? Gotta kidding me.

We heard about the Mediaroom software which could be used on PCs now. Capable of streaming 4 HD streams – if the streaming source could provide this feature at all.

And we could get a glimpse of a new “slate” device product family. Ballmer did not mention any activity from Microsoft directly but showed just 3 prototypes from third party devices. One from HP seems to actually work, but runs plain Windows 7 for now. He had the chance to lead the slate crowd with a real announcement including convincing ideas. Failed. Will it now be Apple with the iSlate announcement end of the month which gets the attention? We would not be surprised.

I must admit that i usually had fun watching a Microsoft keynote at CES in the recent history once in a while. I liked how Conan O’Brien has been chatting with Bill Gates some years ago for example (i remember that some demos did not work either). Or Bill doing the first Mobile/CE announcements some more years back.

This latest keynote with Ballmer has been a boring experience from start to finish. At least i was out fast catching the Monorail which got me outta there fast an easy. The power outage is the only thing people will remember.