This week, I'm honored to deliver the opening keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas for the second year in a row. I love CES because it's an incredible annual happening where all of us in the consumer electronics industry share a peek at what lies just ahead for consumers -- everything from hot new gadgets to groundbreaking video games, the latest state-of-the-art PCs, devices, phones, TVs, and much more.
But while technology plays an increasingly central role in entertaining us and making our lives easier and more convenient, its role as a global force for good is still relatively nascent. I firmly believe that we are just at the very beginning of discovering what technology can do to transform the lives of billions of people around the world for the better.
But what a beginning it has been! In the last 35 years, technology has advanced more quickly and more profoundly than it did in the previous 3,500 years. Almost everything we ever thought might happen is happening -- and more. What was science fiction a few years ago is now reality.
And while you can have a lot of fun with it all, the truth is that technology is also a powerful engine for social and economic progress. At the center of this progress and transformation is the ability to access information and reach each other across many screens -- from the largest screen in your living room to the smallest screen in your pocket -- at any time and from almost any location. Today, nearly a billion of us take this ability for granted. In all likelihood, by 2035 we will reach 4 billion people and eventually just about every person on the planet will be connected.
All of this connection and convergence -- made possible by the combination of rich software and intuitive services accessed via the cloud -- has a new purpose, creating community and increasing human interaction. Technology is rapidly becoming the fundamental foundation that shapes and enables our social lives, both locally and globally. Increasingly, it's how we find a date -- or a mate -- locate old college roommates, share our interests, and meet people in new places.
Think of how this has changed the nature of friendships. When I was a kid, I had six or seven friends and they mostly lived on the same street as me. Today, kids have an average of 232 friends on Facebook and those friends can come from every corner of the globe.
Powerful social networks are emerging from this drive for connection. Of course they serve as a catalyst for cultural trends and help us create demand for products, but that is just the beginning. In a disaster, they enable us to get help to people who need it; and they sometimes help us prod our politicians -- or get them elected.
But in the next decade I think that the real story will be even bigger as technology assumes a central role in helping us tackle three of the biggest issues we face: providing quality affordable health care, taking care of our planet, and educating our children.
For instance, one thing emerging from the health care debate is the realization that moving medical records online has the potential to improve the way health care is delivered. The potential savings are enormous -- tens of billions of dollars a year. Even more important are the opportunities to improve care and reduce errors by giving consumers access to their own health care information, while ensuring that doctors can quickly see the patient information they need to make the best patient care decisions -- medication history, test results, and evidence-based treatment recommendations based on the most current research for a given medical issue.
But the opportunities don't end there -- we are developing the capabilities to provide remote-monitoring for patients with chronic diseases that need daily management and provide health care to people who live in remote locations beyond the reach of the nearest doctor or clinic. In every area I think you will see computing deliver greater efficiency to medicine at a time when the number one issue we face in health care is keeping quality high while reducing costs.
The wider availability of computing will also play a role in protecting our planet from climate change and other environmental issues. There are over 4 billion light bulbs in this country -- and if you want to get them turned on and turned off to save power, it's time to get more of them under computer control. There are over 250 million cars in the U.S. alone and the latest ones have more computing power on them than our first manned rocket ships providing opportunities to help drivers avoid traffic jams, offering real-time tips for efficient driving, and programming electric vehicles to recharge at optimal times. And as we add more computing capability to automate our homes we also need to ensure that we improve the efficiency of PCs. At Microsoft, we have built new energy saving software features into our Windows 7 operating system. If fully implemented the software would cut the power consumption of PCs by over 30 percent worldwide. On a billion PCs globally, that's a lot of savings.
On the education front, today, many classrooms are the same as they were a hundred years ago: students still sit in rows, take notes (or scribble and IM notes to friends) while the teacher talks at them from the front of the room. That industrial era model was designed to churn out manufacturing labor. But we are now seeing new models emerge that shed the old structures. Thomas Friedman summed it up very well in his book "The World is Flat," when he calls for "a policy that seeks to move from a culture of lifetime employment, which was the old industrial model, to one of lifetime employability." Students graduating from schools today and in the future need very different skills -- they need to know how to collaborate, to solve abstract problems, to communicate, to be digitally literate and more. But the way in which to best "teach" those skills is to recognize that each of the 1.4 billion students in the world is different and that schools need to adapt education to meet individual student needs, helping them to learn what, when, where, and how they choose.
Around the world, we are now seeing the beginnings of this technology-assisted transformation. While still in its infancy, Internet-based education is growing rapidly. Forward-thinking institutions are harnessing the power of information and communications technology to work more efficiently, forge deeper connections with their communities and achieve ambitious learning goals. It is easy to imagine that because of what technology delivers, within the next 50 years, everyone everywhere will have access to a quality -- and personalized -- education and that the graduates from schools will be well equipped for jobs well into the future.
So while there is a lot of fun and games at CES, that is not all that's taking place in our industry today. We are creating technologies that will transform the next generation of health care, help make it possible to save energy on a massive scale, and foster new tools for education that will open up opportunities for tens of millions. As we close out the first decade of the 21st century, the next decade offers the promise of touching everyone on the planet in bold and new ways.
Tom Matzzie: CES 2010: A Taxonomy of the Crowd
The "types" of people here at CES 2010? Pitchman. Gadget Nut. Association Type. Buyers. Engineers. Trainer. Townie. PR Flak. Japanese. Hustlers. Wave-Riders. Bloggers.
Anatomy (and Meaning) of the "Did You Know?" Video Series (VIDEOS, PHOTOS)
Kill Your Web 2.0 Self -- Or Change It? (VIDEO)
Obama Online -- Using Technology, It's the Electorate That Has Changed, Too
At CES 2010, VIZIO Goes 'Beyond TV,' Revealing Exciting Upcoming Technologies
CES 2010: Apple Gets Trumped By Amazing Lenovo Tablet!!
CES 2010: Three Trends To Look For At This Year's Consumer Electronics Show
Loading comments… 
However, many of the vendors who would normally be there (Netgear, Nero, Real Networks) did not have any presence at all this year, and the show was smaller than last year's.
For everybody.
Unless they harden the infrastruc
MS while being a hugely successful company, has done more to hinder progress then it has to help it in the last 15 yrs. The companies monopolist
Far be it for a goof like me to imagine/cr
But to be on such a horse, after your insistence to not cooperate with internet standards, taking advantage of an all but forced monopoly, and to release such flawed software and devices, is equally unimaginab
And vision? Money quote...
"Ha, Ha, people will never pay that much for a phone".
Peace.
LOL. "Friends".
The domination of Friedman economics by every administra
Changing topic, its odd, but then again not really, that Mr. Ballmer did not mention the use of Internet voting. Implemente
There's a flaw in that logic. It doesn't really matter if one has lifetime employabil
What is the risk that this very personal informatio
Here in France, video phone is certainly possible via mobile and through PC to PC as well. For most french people with internet service at home, they can call most landlines in almost (80%) all of the countries in the world for FREE.
I had worked for the phone company a long time ago when it first was under AT&T, then it got broken up into baby bells, then as I noticed is back again under AT&T. Throughout the years, the local phone companies were always considered utility companies and were subjected to regulation
Internet and phone service in France just another thing they got right and we didn't. We are still focussed first in allowing corporatio
so your old... 2 months old, phone can go to a land field
the benefits from your new video phone can finance a private army/gueri
I'm dead-set against software patents, and do not support the mis-applic
Free Software is important, and I'm interested to see how Microsoft will adapt to the growing popularity of free software.
When we move off of a Microsoft platform, we take a lot of people with us, which in turn encourages others to go, as well. Firefox is a perfect example. That leads to programmin
Firefox ate IE's lunch, as an example, because it became impossible to secure IE. That condition lasted so long, everyone discovered it was better to just switch to an open source model and be done with it. People who fled that platform also became responsibl
The problem is that the door is open now, and MS isn't doing much to impress the right people. They have done way too much chasing of high level partners while forgetting the low level ones that actually buy, implement and support the entire reason for those partnershi
Even Nobel (inventor of the dynamite) realized this many years ago.