Gates new vision is an awful lot like the old one

BILL GATES' keno speech at the CES show last night is based on the idea that the man has got a new vision. Bill has visions like you and I might pop peanuts in our gobs.

This "new" vision is about seamless computing and the boundaries between them, and Bill opened by saying that in the 1980s people "were stunned" by the PC. It's fair to say we were.

When IBM introduced its first PC, us old timers couldn't believe what a crock it was at the price it commanded, and it took Lotus, with 1-2-3, to make it a winner compared to the vast PCs that were out there at the time.

He claimed last night that Microsoft built his firm around that PC "vision" that would happen, and the software his firm built during the 1980s caught on. Not quite, of course. Back in the mid 1980s and for some years on, people preferred Lotus, Borland software, and Ashton Tate. It is fair to say that when Microsoft fell out with IBM in the late 1980s, Excel and Word were a sight better than Wordstar, or, ekk, Wordcraft and easier to use.

I worked for a corporate reseller of PC software back in 1986/1987, and Bill in those days spent a great deal of his time trying to persuade us people and large corporations to move to his firm's application software rather than the then opposition. Lotus, Ashton-Tate and Borland all did their fare share in the shape of product delays and mis-launches to ensure that Microsoft did better than anyone expected then.

And IBM provided the rocket fuel to boost both Microsoft and Intel into the stratosphere. Not the one in Vegas.

The new vision is, as no doubt Intel's Otellini will tell the world later on today, that all your music and other stuff you watch will be on a PC.

What the vision really means is that the boundaries between all the little hardware devices will be bridged by Microsoft. That's something that the hardware manufacturers themselves - out in Taiwan anyway - look at with some horror. Intel likes the idea. It's all grist to its chip mill.

As we've pointed out before, there's a way to go before we're convinced that our home entertainment system should be run by the "stunning" PC. While the whole weight of the PC industry is being put behind these moves, with everyone jazzing it up on the media bandwagon, we'd kind of prefer that the PC platform itself was still a little bit more stable, and had a robust operating system.

The vision remains the same. Microsoft wins. It's the same old dream but just wearing new seamless stockings. µ