Comdex 1999: Las Vegas. Bill Gates Keynote.

Video Description

(November 14, 1999) Comdex celebrated their 20th anniversary in the fall of 1999, with their very first show taking place in Las Vegas back in December 1979. Since their celebratory milestone, they've sadly stagnated in attendance with their last show in the United States taking place in 2003, and ultimately collapsed by the end of 2005 making the Consumer Electronics Show its unofficial replacement. There was going to be another show held in Vegas during November 2004, but later got cancelled due to the aforementioned reasons. Still, Comdex has its place in history for being a reputable source on upcoming products and software, especially the performances that went along with it (notably the April '98 event with Windows 98). Opening up with some funky synthesized MIDI music, describing how far Comdex has come since two decades ago, when the first show attracted 4,000 attendees. After another uplifting speech by another person, Bill Gates enters the stage to the tune of Fatboy Slim's "Praise You", with an opening statement if the audience has heard any good lawyer jokes recently - to which the audience reacts with laughter and applause. This was during the time when Microsoft was facing the infamous DOJ trial about abuse of their monopoly. Throughout the event; they demonstrate the advanced capabilities of Windows 2000 Server, like being able to switch servers on the fly if one goes down or gets removed, and generating loads of information on over a hundred clients. During one of the slides, some rare box art for the Datacenter edition can be seen at 31:32. Since Bill admits to buying a new Ford every year at Comdex, they demonstrate the server racks with hosting the Ford site. (Side note: Ford also has/had ties with the Jaguar brand, with their logo also happening to be on an early iteration of the Chicago splash screen (SYSLOGO.RLE) when it still used the Windows 3.x format. Indicates how much Microsoft really cherished Ford and its allies.) Bill Gates then walks over to a whole smorgasbord of computer hardware, the industrial devices of which some form of Windows CE. The two tables have all kinds of hardware ranging from desktop PCs to portable devices like the Pocket PC and wireless phones. Some new models of laptops and computers that haven't made it to market yet are also showcased here. One such service shown off here is the MSN start page listing common activities that users of the Internet typically do - kind of similar to the scrapped Activity Centers from both Millennium and Neptune from around this time. The way everything is displayed in full screen is almost reminiscent of the basis for what Windows 8 would try to do with its new UI. A machine running Windows 98 is then displayed, shown to have no programs listed in the start menu other than Internet Explorer... that's just scary. But the real purpose for 98 being used here is to demonstrate the remote Office Online service running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. A touchscreen device with Windows CE is also used to remotely connect to the same Windows 2000 environment. After the closing statements, Bill Gates cites that the "Personal Web" is "The Best Tool Ever Invented" before cutting to a brief promotional video with "Keep Hope Alive" by "The Crystal Method" playing alongside it.