Steve Ballmer Microsoft Keynote Speech

by Taylor Flatt on January 7th, 2009 at 11:06 pm EDT - 451 views

Just hours ago Steve Ballmer, Microsofts CEO, gave the Microsoft Keynote speech which lays out the upcoming year. With this year so full of economic depressions I couldn’t way to find out what was in store for all of us consumers.

At the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas Ballmer announced a lot of interesting things like partnerships with Dell that will add preloaded Windows Live programs to Dell computers before shipment. Another partnership is with Verizon which will reload Windows Live on the cellphones before sale. Finally, another partnership with Facebook allows users to hookup their Facebook with MSN Live profile.

Alright folks, here is the biggest let down probably of the entire year. There will be no new Zune. Sadly, they decided to revamp their Live Search rather than come out with tangible items.

Windows 7 was also announced to be out this friday for Beta testing. Hurry and get it because they said they will be capping the downloads at 2.5 million downloads. The recommended hardware requirements are as follows:

• 1GHz processor
• 1GB of system memory
• 16GB of available disk space and support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (to enable the Aero theme)

Essentially, Windows 7 is just a face lift and bug fixes compared to Vista (which it is basically modeled after). However, I am going to try it out anyway and see how it runs. I will be interested in the quality and speed of it if it is indeed any better than Vista as they say.

Also, he let out that there will be a new Halo to the famous Halo Series. It is set to release later this year and be called Halo 3 ODST.

In my mind, the biggest things that he had to say were the partnerships. They were all in response to Google’s gaining of power in the marketplace. I believe that Microsoft is in for a great year if it can deliver on all these things and in good time. To watch the keynote video, visit this link.

Source: PCW, Tech-Olive 
Image courtesy of CrunchGear