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Next year is one of those years that can’t come soon enough for Microsoft.

It’s not that 2011 was a particularly difficult year. The company posted record revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30. And its 2-year-old PC operating system, Windows 7, hit 500 million copies sold, further embedding it as the most widely used operating system in the world. But 2011 had few big product launches at the company, Office 365 and Internet Explorer 9 notwithstanding.

Back in 2005, Switched On dubbed its first full year of existence “The Year of the Switch” as IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo, Apple announced plans to leave the PowerPC platform for Macs and Microsoft moved to PowerPC processors for the XBox 360. But the dramatic reversals we saw in 2011 made even some of those decisions look tame by comparison. HP. Perhaps no tech company exhibited as much public expression of regret and uncertainty than the company often identified as the founding rock of Silicon Valley.

Although the keynote headliners may be changing, in our opinion, CES won’t lose its appeal. Be honest - are you heading to CES to hear the keynotes or to see the products?

Don’t get me wrong, the keynotes are an important part of the overall event, but for our site, it’s not the primary reason we’ve been attending the Las Vegas event for almost 10 years now.

The fact that we can see so many new products and talk with so many representatives and other press in such a short period of time makes CES the show that we need to attend every year. Nothing makes more sense.