Yeah, so we talked and I promised that I give a good answer. I re-read what I said, and I think I still agree with what I said. To rephrase it in a more business like language: you can’t do technology for technology sake. This has nothing to do with Microsoft not having a business model. It has to do with the huge number of enthusiast that pretty stuff is going to create, and these enthusiast are going to go off to try to make things happen without thinking through how to actually build something to solve a problem.

So yeah, unless your job is to evangelize the technology per say, most of us will be envisioning taking Silverlight and all the Expression capabilities as a platform, as a tool. And my argument was that we “should” be. I say this because the panel session (and later the industry leader session) tend to jumble up these two things together – on the one hand it’s MS’s own business model, i.e. how does MS make money, like all the discussion on Flash dominance and MS’s strategy. On the other hand, it’s how the people in the audience make money. This is why demos like Serm’s thestar offline reader is so important to us (although it doesn’t look half as impressive as Top Banana) – because it is actually something that will directly benefit their customers (like me, coming from Malaysia and staying in overseas for a long time).

Hmm. Am I making sense… it’s 2.22am and I’m still not done cleaning all my grammatical errors in the post.

–Leon