Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got on stage at D6 with Walt and Kara to talk… Microsoft, of course. While the company is still being rather coy about Windows 7 — some have blamed loose lips early on in Vista development for saddling the OS with too high of expectations and making things difficult for developers — they were nice enough to show off what Ballmer called “the smallest snippet” of Windows 7. The big reveal was multi-touch support, which utilizes technology developed by the Surface team. The taskbar seems to have been reworked a bit, and the demo was running live on a Dell Latitude XT tablet. Apparently Microsoft is reworking the whole user interface with a multitouch experience in mind. Steve reiterated the “three years after Vista” mantra for availability. Not exactly earth-shattering, but we’ll take what we can get at this point.

Update: Video added after the break. Enjoy! [Thanks, Dan Z.]

Microsoft turned a few heads at its Advance ‘08 advertising conference by announcing a type of ads for its Zune platform, in addition to those web, TV and Xbox “branding experiences” it already delivers. The primary method described merely involved corporate sponsorships of celebrity playlists, with the “ad” being consigned to branding on that musician’s Social card — and you’d have to have friended the musician to see any of it at all. Apocalyptic stuff, eh? Microsoft also promises to keep the ads appropriate for the audience, so we’re not going to start panicking just yet, but the first DAP builder to make us sit through a minute of ads every time we try to sync with our computer is sure score the (oh, hey, thanks for the $100, Microsoft!) scorn and vitriol love and affection of its customers for years to come.