My first Bill Gates keynote today.  It's amazing to sit amongst 7,000 developers watching this.  There are 16 massive video screens display shots of the presenters and the PowerPoint slides.

Here are some points that struck me from Bill's speech:

• Microsoft are serious about using software to help them improve any aspect of the user experience that in unsatisfactory.
• The crash reports have helped Microsoft work with video driver makes and computer manufacturers to improve the quality of drivers that ship on machine.  There was a graph showing a reduction from 80,000 crash reports to under a couple of thousand for a particular driver.  It's great to think that this number of computer crashes are being reduced.
• The application crash reports that are sent to Microsoft are available to application developers at winqual.microsoft.com
• The personal computer in 2006 will be a 4-6 GHz machine with 2GB of RAM a 1 TB disk with 1GB networking and 54 Mb wireless.  I'm already excited about asking for a new laptop with this spec from my boss.

A great video was shown on the history of the software  "Software Futures" with Bill Clinton (talking about the number of websites when he was present), Warren Buffet (on Bill Gates missing the software boat) and the inventor of the Newton (on how the modern handhelds).  He ended with a joke about a future episode showing the dangerous, challenging world of database development, over a shot of the Oracle yacht.