Microsoft ReMixSEA07 (Final Summary)

The cleanup is finally done – with slightly more grammatical English, a few more pictures links and videos. You can now read them in order:

Part 1 – Keynote

Part 2 – Panel

Part 3 – Developer track

Part 4 – Business track

Part 5 – Design track

There was this final session too where “industry leaders” came together to discuss Web 2.0 (again!) – but I didn’t attend it as I was too busy trying to collect the new MS keyboard / mouse in Funan (won from PC Show – yey!). I got so bored after I came back (for the lucky draw), I decided to open up the really really well wrapped Expression Studio box they gave us. Here’s what’s inside:

From top left clock wise: the box, a flip-over that has all the shortcut keys for manipulating the 4 tools, 4 Quick Start Guides and a bunch of CD installers. Now you know why you should always attend MS events?

Well, software is useless until one uses it. Too bad my laptop ran out of space otherwise I would have started working on it right away. Maybe after my Maya tutorial is done…

Some final thoughts (after sleeping through 2 days and going mad at my company family day) about REMIXSEA07 in general:

• The audience maybe less eager than MIX – or is it yet again a national culture thing? I thought mix is supposed to be a conversation about technology, but if you look clearly, yeah the local MS folks and their US counterparts were deep in discussions, with a few sort of like “newbie” questions being raised here and there, but the rest of the my eavesdropping  of other people’s conversation doesn’t seem to show that people are passionate about it (or other stuff they are doing). I mean, shouldn’t there be like a gang of Flash loyalist going around comparing Silverlight? If everyone’s just here to say “Wow, ok I’ll install and try it at home”, then it’s not MIX, it’s YAMME (Yet Another Microsoft Marketing Event).
• I’m hoping the audience gets the message that Silverlight is in Alpha/Beta (depends on which version you’re talking about) – don’t expect to go live with it soon. This means incubation, product building, sure, no problem, can recompile later after release and go live together. End consumer, be ready for a bugging run. Systems Integrator, watch out – there will be no support when things fail. The developer and platform evangelism team is notorious for doing this: they will tell you how cool things are (I Know!!) with no idea what their other teams doing support can or cannot do about it when things go wrong.
• I see a lot of key innovations in Orcas – and after more reading online, I think I’ll be willing to put my own startup behind this one. Yeah it’s costly, like all MS products (when compared to open-source), but talking about rapidly bringing something to market and doing all these customization for small shops, this one has all the bits. From a Singapore industry standpoint, we shouldn’t be putting so much services dollars to actually building the pieces that’s going to be the SAME throughout the world. Just like I told students years back when I was teaching: you shouldn’t ever have to reimplement a linked-list. This was when people were like “huh, why is Java’s linked-list so slow – I will implement my own!!”
• The Art House is a really nice place to hold this function – but maybe a smaller crowd would be more comfortable. There’s something about doing these things in historical places, as SKW was eluding to in the opening – it’s about the continuity, the legacy of innovating and bringing new things into our lives. Everyone who went was or is going to be a pioneer in some respect, and when they can draw a link to what was done in the past that gives what they do a whole lot more meaning.

Time to do “real work”. Hope you’ll see my spanking new Made-By-Expression app by the time I post my next blog entry.