Video: Microsoft boss wheels out Clinton, Obama and Bono for spoof film

Bill Gates last night described the home of the future where all the power of the home computer will be available in every room on touchscreens embedded in the furniture.

The vision was one of his annual predictions of future trends in technology at the launch of the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which opens today in Las Vegas.

But don't plan on rushing out to buy the hardware any time soon - the co-founder of Microsoft has been wrong as often as he has been right in his forecasts and in the company products he has touted. Some of the moments he might like to forget include:

1995 Mr Gates launches Microsoft Bob, an attempt to out-Apple Apple with a desktop that looked like a house, and software represented as cartoon characters, such as Java the caffeine-crazed dragon. Gates called it a way to make "the computing experience better", but the product bombed as it needed twice as much memory as the average PC had back then, so didn't work on most people's computers.

2001 He predicts - correctly - that by 2010 there will be a PC in 75 per cent of US homes. But he also said that the most popular form of computer would be the tablet, a handheld device which the user writes on with a stylus. Last year tablets accounted for just 1.2 per cent of all PC sales.

2002 Still fascinated with mobile technology, Mr Gates tells CES that Mira, a wireless monitor for the user to carry about, allowing them to access the internet and music files anywhere in the house, meant that "entertainment will never be the same". It didn't catch on because it wasn't compatible with the home version of Windows XP, couldn't show video, and cost more than $1,000 a go. It was abandoned in 2004.

2002 The Microsoft boss predicts that Smart Personal Objects Technology (Spot), in which pens, watches, coffee-makers and other everyday items are internet-enabled to allow them to relay information such as weather forecasts and sports scores, would be part of the computing revolution. So far it hasn't been, though it is beginning to show promise for navigation devices.

2004 Mr Gates tells the World Economic Forum that spam will be "solved" by 2006. Er hem.

In his defence, he has also used CES to launch the XBox in 2001, which is Microsoft's most successful piece of hardware, and correctly predicted that networked mobile technology would become massively more important.

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