Comdex all starts with the Sunday night Bill Gates keynote. We barely caught all of it, not that it doesn't get enough coverage. Afterwards, we got a jump on the announcement of the NV17M from Nvidia, a powerful, mighty powerful entrant in the mobile graphics market.

Bill Gates - Keynote Speech Was...... Uhm

Far be it from us to say that the world's richest man needs a makeover, but while the Microsoft PR machine talked up his Comdex opening keynote on Sunday night as being "upbeat", it sounded a lot like nerdy smugness to us. Time for Bill G to get some of that legendary brain power of his around something of substance, and to demonstrate some true visionary-ness, rather than delivering the kind of patter reserved for Dot Com founders of yore, in days of yore.

"The appetite of businesses and consumers worldwide for innovative PC technologies is stronger than ever," said he.

"A key reason for the early success of Windows XP is its incredibly strong security - it has literally hundreds of security improvements over Windows 98, making it the most secure Windows operating system ever." Was another nice one.

A little better was, "Despite the current slowdown, we'll see at least a thirty fold increase in e-commerce spending over the next 10 years, a quadrupling of the number of e-mail addresses, and even faster growth in instant messaging. Today, more than half of America's homes have PCs; by 2010, three-quarters will have at least one, and many will have two or three. In this Digital Decade, computing technology will transform every part of our lives - and fulfill the promise of truly secure, truly personal computing." Our only criticism would be, how many of those multiple PC households are going to be cannibalizing their second or third PC for parts for the one they actually use? I think you know what we're talking about.

To be fair, this is rote PR stuff that gets put out every year at this time, and we lap it up. And to be even more evenhanded, Microsoft bashing is equally as boring as listening to Microsoft executives, but we have to say, "Bill, you need to get better handlers. Try bashing Larry Ellison, or making fun of StarOffice. Something to get us in the fighting mood."