It's always been sort of an open secret that Bill Gates is a terrible public speaker, and his traditional role as presenter of the opening keynote at the massive Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has nearly always provided additional examples of stutters, gaffs, and stumbles... and, as fellow geeks, we have loved him all the more for it even as many of us have disagreed with his technical or business aspirations. Bill and his uncomfortable cadence, his self-deprecating humor and clever videos, has never been more one of our own than in these moments, and this year's keynote was no exception.

You can expect a year filled with these sorts of moments as Bill winds down his career at Microsoft (which in fact won't be over until July) and it's probably only natural that we look for something profound out of them. So the generally flat reviews this year aren't unexpected. In fact, there isn't really much new and exciting to talk about that hasn't already been talked about ad nauseum; improvements this year are likely to be incremental and not conceptual... better integration, smoother interfaces, more stability, not new magical gadgets. In fact, Bill's themes at this year's CES were not significantly different from those he has covered in past years: more integration of technology into day to day life, better interfaces with that technology, and a lot of cool things that you can do with all of it. It's to his credit that he has been consistent in tracking these trends and orienting Microsoft's consumer electronics in those directions all these years, but this is still a dream in the midst of building, not a new one or a realization of the old.

Bill and a bevy of other Microsoft presenters did their best to push Vista, the Zune, and other Microsoft technologies while trying to pretend that they didn't need any push at all, but all that was beside the point: the point, for most of us, was Bill up there one last time, geeking it up with a video full of celebrity cameos, Jamming to Guitar Hero, and making awkward disclaimers about it all. We'll miss ya up there, Bill, even if we thought the keynote sucked. It always sucked, but we always looked forward to it anyway.