Bill Gates talks Windows 7 ... Again

I want to qualify what I'm about to describe here with the following: Bill Gates is leaving (full-time) Microsoft. Soon. I get the feeling he doesn't necessarily ever accurately describe what's going on at the company. For example, he was recently (mis)quoted as saying that Windows 7 would ship as soon as "next year." (He didn't really say that, necessarily. See this post for details.) Anyhoo. Gates recently appeared at the Windows Digital Lifestyle Consortium in Japan where he gave a little talk. (See the complete transcript.) And since we're such tools, geeks the world over are hanging on every little mention of Windows 7, as if the seer of Redmond actually had something notable to say about a product that will ship two years after he leaves full-time work at the company. Here's what he says about Windows 7 in this speech: We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I'm very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don't have a lot of work to move that data back and forth. This is a description of Live Mesh, not Windows 7. And that alone should give you pause about the accuracy of his other comments here. For example: Lower power, take less memory, be more efficient. This is awfully vague and basically meaningless, but an implicit reaction to some of the criticism of Vista. Lots more connections up to the mobile phone. Today, Windows has zero connections "to the mobile phone." In fact, you have to download separate software, the Windows Mobile Device Center, in order to use a Windows Mobile-based phone with W