The Big Bang

WATCHING BILL GATES' annual Comdex keynote is an eerie exercise. For starters, it takes place at the MGM Grand amphitheater, the site of heavyweight bouts and bites. But instead of seeing Joe Frasier climbing into the ring to wish the champ well, you see heads swivel as Carly Fiorina is escorted to her front-row seat.

The keynote's content is no surprise, having been telegraphed by the Times and the Journal in the morning editions. It's Tablet PC III: The This Time We Really Mean It Tour. But there is other news as well: Dell's entry in the Pocket PC sweepstakes with a $200 model, a slick small Palm-killer iPaq from HP, and a smart alarm clock from Microsoft Research. Don't ask; I don't get it. But Bill does, and that's what counts, or will.

Last year's keynote took the usual path of keeping Gates onstage through a series of product demos and alpha glimpses of new code. This strategy produced the dubious resource allocation of the world's richest hand model, with deadly scripted stage patter punctuated by moments of stark terror as product managers watched their careers blue-screening.

This year's model is a hybrid of Disney's autoanimatronic It's A Small, Small World rotating stage and David Letterman's Viewer Mail segments, where Dave rubs his chin as we flash back to a vignette. Bill sets up the demo, then strides offstage as scenarios roll into view. Only once in a sketch about Viewsonics' Wi-Fi-enabled Smart Screen does Bill drop in to watch TV like Norton on the Honeymooners.

This scenario-based approach insulates Gates from the dropped cues and the "It worked perfectly in rehearsal" asides, but it also has the counterintuitive effect of filtering out Gates' fierce vision of the loosely coupled digital architecture. And in a parade of smart wireless devices -- kitchen magnets, wristwatches, key chains, Wi-Fi base stations, Tablets, Pocket PC Phone edition, even Kinko's virtual printer Web Service bureau -- you wonder whether the company should be renamed Microhard.

Lost in this shuffle is OneNote, a powerful idea processor from the Office group. Mark my words: OneNote is the new center of the Office universe, relegating Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the edges of the architecture in a single leap. Billed as an Office add-on, in reality it's a smart device programmed to transform Office from a suite of applications to a grid of interactive components.

OneNote -- stupid name, so let's call it Note for short -- derives from Steve Ballmer's directive to focus not on product groups but on scenarios. Scenario No. 1 for me has been capturing and manipulating ideas. Whether it's writing this column, brainstorming, prototyping business plans, or retaining the myriad bits of information that keep my marriage intact, it all starts with a note.

These days we live in the e-mail client. I estimate my time splits up about 60 percent in e-mail, 20 percent in the browser, 10 percent in Word, and the rest staring out the window, trying to retrieve a semblance of a good idea. When (or if) an idea arrives, I typically capture it in the most inelegant way -- as an email to myself.

It's the same thing with Web pages. If you're Jon Udell, tethered to your Titanium and a broadband connection, Web data is effectively persistent in the Cloud. If you're me, on an airplane or playing thumb tennis with my BlackBerry, capturing Web pages is a constant issue.