As Forbes reports,

Some 4,000 people gathered on Sunday evening at the Venetian Hotel’s Palazzo Ballroom in Las Vegas to hear Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates give his final speech to the high-tech world’s mega-conference. Gates has traditionally used the speech as a pulpit for predicting the techno-future or for unveiling an ambitious new product line from Microsoft. This year, he clearly had more on his mind than just the next gadget.

“Do You Believe in Magic?” sang the sound track, as a video warm up flashed through images of people having fun with digital gear, from Xbox games to music-playing Zunes and PCs. A battalion of Microsoft’s industry partners, including Randy Fry, chairman of Fry’s Electronics, filed into front-row seats at the last minute from side doors.

At 6:40 p.m., Gates stepped onto the stage, clad in a lavender sweater and check shirt and black slacks to a very warm, but not excessively long round of applause. He went straight to talk of his legacy.

“My first keynote was in 1994,” Gates began, “and within a few years of that we entered the first digital decade.” He ticked off the ways the industry has changed: PCs are everywhere. Broadband Internet access went from zero to practically ubiquitous. Now there are just as many music CDs sold (618 million) as digital song downloads (614 million). Mobile devices are practically as smart now as PCs were back then. Microsoft’s Sync technology in Ford (nyse: F - news - people ) vehicles is winning raves, as was promised in the same speech last year. Gates also talked in years past of the television merging with the Internet, a vision that has become reality in an interactive TV service called Microsoft Mediaroom, in use by one million customers of British Telecom (nyse: BT - news - people ), AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) and Deutsche Telekom (nyse: DT - news - people ).

“This is just a beginning,” Gates said. “Nothing is holding us back from going much faster and further in the second digital decade.”

Even so, Gates conceded that he won’t have as much of a hand in the next phase of the Internet.

“This is my last keynote,” said Gates, who turned 52 in October. “This will be the first time since I was 17 that I won’t have my first full time job at Microsoft.

“I’m still not sure how I’m going to feel when that day comes,” he conceded.

Here is the Bill Gates CES 2008 video.