We'll wait for Barcelona for Zune, mobile news
Bill Gates skipped the Consumer Electronics Show this year, leaving the coveted opening-night keynote spot to CEO Steve Ballmer.
While Ballmer's always an engaging and funny speaker, the company didn't have much to say: a couple long-rumored deals for Live Search, some Windows 7 features that have already been shown at the Professional Developers' Conference and reviewed all over the Web (the beta will be publicly available by the end of the week), and Kodu, a Microsoft Research project moved to the Xbox 360 (pretty cool, but it's been around for a couple years).
But no Zune for Windows Mobile. No Zune news at all, in fact. And not much on the mobile front, either. I guess we'll have to wait for the GSMA Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona, Spain, in February.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
