But the normally unassuming software tycoon also appeared to have been infected by the glamour of Las Vegas, opening the world’s largest technology conference on Sunday by parading a sequence of high-profile friends and international celebrities.

Among the names wheeled out during his keynote address to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) were movie legends Steven Spielberg and George Clooney, music stars Jay-Z and Bono – and even White House hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

All contributed to a comic video speculating on what Gates might do later this year when he steps down from his day-to-day responsibilities with the software giant he co-founded 33 years ago. Jokes about a potential political or musical career were contrasted with the reality, that he will be spending more time on his philanthropic activities at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

His address to a crowd of several thousand industry insiders on Sunday evening was a farewell to the computing business in which he has, arguably, been the most important figure for the past 20 years. “The transition has been going very well and I’ll have a few projects,” he said, adding that “this will be the first time since I was 17 that I won’t have my full-time Microsoft job.”

For now, however, Gates is still very much a Microsoft man and he took the opportunity to announce a series of deals between the software giant and other technology companies. Samsung and Hewlett-Packard have both agreed to produce television sets with Microsoft programs built in, allowing people to link their living-room screens directly to their PCs. Meanwhile Gates and Microsoft vice president Robbie Bach announced that users of the company’s Xbox 360 games console would be able to download more movies over the internet thanks to a deal with movie studio MGM.

Gates outlined a vision of where society might be in several years’ time, predicting that the next “digital decade” would be centred around different hi-tech devices all connecting together.
To illustrate his vision, Gates once again demonstrated the Surface computer, a touchscreen coffee table gizmo that can interact with devices placed on it such as mobile phones, computers and even household objects.
“The first digital decade was built on the keyboard and the mouse, but in the last two years we’ve seen touch appear on Windows PCs, touch on the iPhone,” he said. It is 15 years since Gates first made a speech at the CES, and his keynote speech on the opening night has become a fixture in the technology calendar.