One year ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the stage at the tech industry’s premier gadget show to showcase a Windows tablet computer to an audience that had yet to meet the iPad.
This year, with tablets the hottest items at the show and Windows lagging far behind Apple Inc.’s popular iPad, the stakes were higher. Microsoft’s status as a technology oracle, which guaranteed its spot delivering the trade show’s night-before keynote each year, is slipping.
On Wednesday evening, Ballmer spent more time talking about such existing products as the Xbox video game system and Windows Phone 7 smartphone software than he did about tablets. Even Surface, Microsoft’s giant coffee table-sized touch-screen computing system, got more attention.
Beyond tablets, there are other major themes emerging at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Among them: smartphones and Internet television, two areas where Google and Apple, two companies that aren’t even attending the trade show, are getting most of the buzz.
Gadget-makers including AsusTek Computer and Vizio, the TV company, have already unveiled new tablet computers this week, and more were expected from the likes of Motorola, Dell and Toshiba. Many of the new tablets will use Android, Google’s operating software that was initially designed for smartphones.
So far, none of the tablets running Microsoft’s Windows 7 have made waves with mainstream consumers. That may be true for a while longer, given that tablets seemed to be almost an afterthought for Ballmer on Wednesday. The CEO left it to an employee to demonstrate a Windows 7 tablet from Taiwan’s Asus that responds to touch and a special pen, and that comes with a wireless keyboard.
While Windows 7 remains a question mark for its prospects as a tablet system, Microsoft began talking Wednesday about the next version, which is expected to be called Windows 8 and to launch in 2012.
