For more than a decade, Bill Gates has set the agenda for the technology industry at the start of every year with the speech he makes to open up the Consumer Electronics Show.

In his final such speech before taking on a more limited role in running Microsoft Corp later this year, Gates laid out on Sunday his vision of the big changes in store over the next decade thanks to digital technology.

Highlights included demonstrations of Microsoft’s coffee table-shaped Surface computer, a prototype of the company’s vision of a mobile device of the future and updates on Microsoft’s various businesses ranging from Xbox to Windows Vista.

Here are comments from the Microsoft leader’s final CES keynote speech:

Gates opened by looking back to his first CES keynote in 1994 and the years since then, when high-speed Internet access and mobile phones have joined personal computers as mainstream tools for consumers. He defined these years as “the start of the first digital decade.”

“The trend here is clear, all media and entertainment will be digitally driven,” Gates said. “The first digital decade has been tremendously successful,” he declared.
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The presentation featured a self-mocking video in which Gates asked celebrity actors, politicians and news reporters what he should do with his life once he steps aside from full-time work for the company he co-founded more than 30 years ago.

One scene showed him working out at a gym with beefcake actor Matthew McConaughey. “Can I take off my shirt yet?” Gates quips.

Another segment interviews NBC Television news anchor Brian Williams, who says of the world’s richest man: “On a personal note, all of us here at NBC will miss reporting daily on this brilliant … man who just doesn’t believe in paying more than $7 for a haircut.”

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Looking ahead, he declared: “The second digital decade will be more focused on connecting people.”

Moving beyond the personal computer era, “High-definition experience (will be) everywhere,” he predicted.

“Not just high definition displays, but projections on every wall. Displays not on the desk, but in the desk. It will just be there and easy to manipulate and have multiple people connect up,” he said.

“You’ll just take it for granted,” Gates said.
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Gates was joined on stage by Robbie Bach, the head of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division. Bach said the company had signed up 10 million members for its Xbox Live online gaming service and was growing faster than it had previously estimated.

The two Microsoft executives then showcased a prototype of a potential Microsoft phone of the future that featured the ability to shoot video or still pictures of nearby people or places and have the phone’s software recognize the images and provide related contact or location information to the phone user.

“This will be in the phone that you carry around. It can carry the video, the stills, the information you access,” Gates said of the demonstration project.

Bach then jibed his notoriously geeky boss about whether he’d gotten around to playing the popular rock band simulation game Guitar Hero 3.

Gates protested that he had played the game over the holidays. Suddenly the two donned plastic guitar instruments used to pound out chords in the video game.

Bach and Gates were joined on stage by the top-hat-wearing guitar legend, Slash, of the rock group Guns & Roses. They played a 30-second noisefest partly obscured by the obligatory dry-ice fog of rock concerts. On that note, Gates said goodbye to thousands of his industry peers.

Additional reporting by Scott Hillis and Daisuke Wakabayashi

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(Photos: Reuters/Eric Auchard)