The Producer Electronics Revolution, Part II.
Doc's second report on CES. Power from the people. Power you can see.
We left Part I at the end of the CES keynotes, the last of which — Larry Page of Google — I gave a big thumbs-up, because it marked the turning point: when production started to outweigh consumption as the most important activity for customers of electronic goods.
But I don't want to leave the subject quite yet, because I want to challenge Google a bit.
It wasn't lost on me, or on any of the Linux folks also attending the show, that Google at CES had exactly nothing to offer users of clients other than Windows. The client products promoted at the company's booth were Windows-only. Worst of all, the new Google Video store not only protected sold content through exclusive Google DRM, but would sell that content only through Windows clients provided by Google. This seemed especially ironic after Larry busted the Consumer Electronics industry for making non-interoperable products, and touting MIT's Linux-based $100 laptop.
One of the first questions from the audience was mine, when I asked Larry to break loose with some non-Windows-only client product. To his credit, he said it was "a problem", and sounded sincere in his willingness to solve it.
Unfortunately, Google's transcript of Larry's talk doesn't include the Q&A, perhaps because it was aided by Robin Williams, and nothing of Williams' quite funny contributions to the keynote made it in the transcript. Draw your own conclusions about why that's the case.
Afterwards I attended a briefing for reporters in the green room.
Gear...
Garmin came out with Mac software.
My goals at CES was the same as ever:
Links:
CES Keynote Transcripts: http://www.cesweb.org/attendees/conferences/keynotes.asp
Where is Linux on Intel's desktop and laptop road map? http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000030