DETROIT INVADES Las Vegas; The Motor City is out in force at CES.(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Bill Gates may be the patron saint, but Detroit's auto industry played its largest supporting role ever at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Gates gave his annual keynote address, not unlike the pope addressing the faithful at St. Peter's Square, except that the pope doesn't try to get people to buy more electronics.

"Applications will run not only on the PC, they'll run up in the Internet, or in the cloud, as we say, on the phone, in the car, in the TV,'' said the Microsoft chairman. "The first digital decade was largely driven by the keyboard and the mouse. Just in the last two years, we've started to see the emergence of other modes of interaction. Touch on the Windows PC, touch on the iPhone, the Surface device that we're talking about. We started to see speech-the Tellme-built into the phone, the Ford Sync, where you get to talk and interact with your media or your phone capabilities.''

Yes, the car world is being sucked up into the cloud along with everything else.

The entire North Hall of the massive Las Vegas Convention Center was given over to automotive electronics. And two days after Gates gave his opening address, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner gave another keynote, the first time in the show's 41 years that a car executive had been asked to do so.

Wagoner rehashed familiar themes-ethanol, OnStar, E-Flex and the Volt hybrid electric-but the mere fact that he was there shows the extent to which cars have become one more peripheral electronic device for our amusement and benefit.