With the weight of Microsoft’s security problems on his shoulders, Bill Gates delivered a Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2002 keynote in early January that focused on the future, not the past. And that future consisted of new types of PCs and other devices, all powered by Microsoft software.
This was a fundamental shift, he claimed. To that day, consumer electronics was “mostly about hardware.” But going forward, microprocessors would be everywhere, and those microprocessors would need software to realize their full potential.