Microsoft ReMixSEA07 (part 2)

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Power outlet found! Back to the Panel discussion, just some quotable quotes from them.

Saw (Moderator): Web 2.0 is a deja vu!

Ram (CGH): Web 2.0 or not, in hospitals, delivering information is always important. In today’s hospital, if IT goes down, hospitals shut down. Doctors and nurses all pokes at their gadget to get their work done.

Roderick (Game): Technology needs to be appealing to the buyer. For example, when we sell al these web services, SOAP protocols (what!? you want to wash my computer?) buyers don’t see what it is like. It’s now easier with better front-end presentation. (Actually I wanted to say that ILOG’s JViews have been in the market for quite sometime solving all these vertical’s visualization that might be more useful…)

Saw: So would you put money in property or in Web 2.0? (What kind of question is that…)

Pierre (VC): Funding is currently not coming to Singapore because of the size of the market. The current challenge is to get people online, onto the platform. Singapore should just focus on generating the best content. (Well, that’s not much content to be generated – people’s creative mild can’t go that wild when the living circumstances are so normalized here)

Chin Chau: From IDM (yay). Government try to do too much centrally. So one of IDM’s effort is to just give you money and get you do something yourself. $50,000 no questions ask, but will pair you up with a mentor. None of us can predict what is the next big thing – so IDM wants to let a thousand flowers bloom on its own.

Dr. Chan (IDC): Is Web 2.0 real this time?

Chin Chau: IDM is optimistic that this time it is real. We’re now all dependent on the Internet for our lifestyle. There’s a need to make it Easy to use! (You mean you want to spend even MORE time on the Internet?)

Roderick: The previous dot com crash happened because the model is such that web companies supply their own content. But one entity cannot provide for everyone. Web 2.0 technologies facilitated content creation – more sustainable. Web 2.0 is profitable this round, not just an attempt to “e” everything or “i” everything. For example, his wedding is 1 week away but he’s not worried, because he can just e-mail and get response. (You think? Hey people have their own lives as well!)

Pierre: For these new business models to work, designers and technology will have to come together. It no longer just dumping data to the customer, but actually creating custom applications for these groups to experience something. (Frankly, I really dunno what he is talking about… maybe I really need to be a VC to be smarter)

Pierre: (Answering to a weird question about Dubai) build it and they will come. However, the advantage that S’pore has is the 40 years of maturing in her economy. Nevertheless, there are lots of S’porean sales offices in Dubai trying to invest.

Ram: Visualization is still very important (to be able to see things and make life and death decisions without blood being thrown on the face). Healthcare still waiting for the right application to show up.

Conclusion (JJ to himself sipping coffee). We are all disillusioned. It is either because this is a Microsoft sponsored event (Thank you for the VIP pass!) that everyone is a bit reserved, or the panel and the audience are just all still skeptical with the promise of the technology launched today. Cool demos is good, keep those coming, but cool demos with no solid business behind is just a cool demo – MS can’t live on that, of all people they should know. So I think, beyond all the cool demos we have seen today, it still falls back to the incremental innovations on the basic businesses that already exists in S’pore, with perhaps better interfaces and shorter delivery cycle. Winning ground breaking businesses (which is entirely just Web 2.0 technologies) will still feel like winning the jackpot for businesses to venture into.

Breaking into sessions – designer / developer / businessman. Will update later in the day.

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4 Responses

  1. Don’t understand the comment “…no solid business behind…” . Can you please elaborate?

    –Leon

  2. Uh, hi Leon 🙂

    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.

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