Gates And Jobs Ride Into The Sunset

Next week, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs hand over their New Year’s speaking gigs to new blood.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Gates’ stage will be manned by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Sony chairman Howard Stringer. Over at Macworld, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller will run the show for the first time.

All three are entertaining presenters. But unlike Gates and Jobs, they all have something to prove.

Ballmer’s reign at Microsoft sees huge revenues from its core business, but chronic marketing woes at the periphery. A sequence of incompatible DRM platforms helped secure Apple’s dominance of digital music. Billions were spent losing console wars with Sony and Nintendo. Windows Vista, years late and mostly hated when it finally arrived, is Ballmer’s crowning achievement to date.

Many believe he’ll announce a Zune-phone next week. More certain is a standard yawnfest of corporate mythologizing and stuff we already know about, like Windows 7 and Home Server. It’ll be obvious when Ballmer, a naturally enthusiastic fellow, doesn’t care about something: viva Games for Windows!

Surprises to watch for: New haircut. Zunephone. Us staying to the end if there’s no Zunephone.

As captain of an ungainly ship that employs some 180,000 people, even after layoffs, Stringer’s got to make a convincing case that Sony does more than just make one of everything.

Trying economic circumstances recently put him back at square one after some successes. He unified a tech-zaibatsu that should be a dozen different companies, hired Spiderman to print money, and polished off maniacal rival Ken Kutaragi. However, Sony’s products are still pricey marvels ill-suited to hard times, and the company is still grossly over-manned. He’s been slow to unravel its engineering culture and instinct for self-destructive propriety. Vultures circle over the PlayStation 3 after dismal holiday sales.

Stringer won’t opt for a mere gadget show. He must articulate an all-encompassing vision of how we’ll all be using technology in years to come. He’ll pitch Sony’s gear as nodes of a cradle-to-grave entertainment ecosystem built around Home.

Read Rob Beschizza’s article, “Gates And Jobs Ride Into The Sunset” at BoingBoing.net