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Mobius 2006 Thailand: Day Two

 
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Jason Dunn
Executive Editor


Joined: 30 Jun 2003
Posts: 1477
Location: Calgary, CANADA

PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 6:00 pm    Post subject: Mobius 2006 Thailand: Day Two Reply with quote

After publishing my Mobius 2006 Thailand Day One article immediately after the first day, I have to admit I was proud of myself - normally it takes me many days to transform my session notes into a complete article, so this was a big improvement over previous Mobius events. Well, you know what they say about being proud of yourself - here I am publishing the day two article (a much shorter piece to begin with) a full week after it happened. I was essentially busy and/or travelling from the second day of Mobius through until Tuesday AM, and have been catching up on email and other tasks ever since. So you'll have to pardon the lateness, but here's the Mobius day two article.

Derek Brown, BMO Director (Marketing Director) for Microsoft Thailand, started day two with a session called "Emerging Markets & The Next Billion PCs". His introduction was a brief overview of how the Pocket PC launched and how the first "Pocket PC Wireless and Beyond" event came to be (the precursor to Mobius). There was some wistful (and wincing) talk about the Palm-size PC evolution into the Pocket PC, and the things that Derek oversaw during his time on the Windows Mobile team in Redmond (including the infamous Mobile Experience Tour). Living in Thailand, Derek had a unique perspective on the military coup that occurred, and he showed us some photos of what things were like in Bangkok. Soldiers, tanks, and guns – but everything was peaceful, people were posing for photos with the soldiers, citizens handing out flowers and cheering for the military. It's about as benign as a coup can be.



Thailand is an emerging market, with 65 million people, and most of the population still lives in rural communities. Piracy is a concern Thailand – Microsoft believes in bringing technology to people, but as a business they also want to sell software. Respect for intellectual property is lacking in Thailand – there's about 79% piracy rate, which includes software piracy, movie piracy, and other forms of IP theft. He discussed open source and governments – Microsoft is happy to compete with open source solutions, but they dislike government edicts that give an unfair advantage to open source solutions.
The average monthly salary for a middle class person is between 5000 and 10,000 Thai Baht. A copy of Windows XP costs about 3500 Thai Baht, so asking someone to pay 2-3 weeks salary is a significant sacrifice. Windows XP Starter Edition came about from a government proposal in Thailand – the government was going to go with an open source deployment, and Microsoft came back with a very aggressive proposal with a lower-cost deployment of Windows. They got the contract, but they also set a precedent for Windows pricing, and thus Starter Edition was born. It will be carried through into Windows Vista as well, though again only in emerging markets.

The mobile phone market in Thailand is about 80% pre-paid due to lower, and erratic, income. That presents a huge challenge for selling PCs, so they're working on a solution called FlexGo where the PCs are "pay as you go" similar to mobile phone plans. Pilots have been done in India with micro-Internet Cafes – they put a PC in someone's home in a small village, and they watch how people use it and what business models emerge around it. Microsoft also makes efforts to address the pricing market in Thailand – they have Office installs that cost $2.50 USD per PC per year. Derek then discussed the "$100 laptop" from Nicholas Negroponte, and expressed his personal opinion that a "good enough" solution for emerging markets might be doing a disservice to the poor people they are trying to help. There's also the question of whether or not technology is really what developing countries need the most: India apparently declined to participate in the Negroponte "One Laptop" per child, largely because they feel books and teachers are more important than laptops.

Discussion then ensued around what was really important when it comes to learning computing technology. Alex discussed how in Japan the mobile device trend is so strong that some complain that teenagers don't actually know how to use desktop computers with keyboards. Another Mobian brought up the issue that transit time is a huge driving factor in how people use computing devices – in Japan the average time is three hours, thus making mobile devices very critical. In Taipei, if you have a 15 minute commute, mobile devices are less important and PC access is more mainstream. It was very interesting to get opinions from so many varied cultures.

Looking Toward the Future
Chris Sorenson, John Starkweather's counterpart in SE Asia, then gave a presentation on Crossbow, the next release of Windows Mobile. Although there are no NDAs at Mobius, we were asked to not share what we were shown. Crossbow originally started out as more of a "service pack" type release (think 2003 SE), but after all I was shown about Crossbow, it's looking quite impressive - definitely upgrade-worthy. Devices running Crossbow will be appearing in the second half of 2007.

Next up, we had a presentation from Horace Luke about Photon, the really-far-away version of Windows Mobile that is even more secretive than Crossbow. I can't say much, but I'll say that Photon continues to change, and what I saw at Mobius 2006 is more evolved than what I saw at Mobius 2005 (in a good way). And those that were seeing Photon for the first time had their jaws on the floor - there were audible gasps in more than one part of the demo. Design matters, and with Photon you can really see that Microsoft understands that. The design first approach is what drove much of Windows Vista, though I'm willing to bet that it's much easier to re-design a Windows Mobile OS than a desktop OS. I've heard Horace Luke speak three times now, and he's brilliant - he understands users and what they need in a way that no other person in the Windows Mobile group does, at least from what I've seen over the past nine years. It makes me confident about the future of Windows Mobile knowing that someone like Horace is working to make it better.

The Mobius Project
We spent the rest of the afternoon working on The Mobius Project, which is an audacious concept: using the experiences and skills of Mobius group members, we would come up with device concepts (both hardware and software) that we can use to help shape the future of mobility. The idea of the Mobius project is to collect and focus our own personal experiences, and the experiences of the communities we represent. I was part of a team that focused on delivering a hardware and software solution that met the needs of a business professional. My group came up with some concepts, and Horace Luke made some sketches to help us flesh out the design. I don't want to ruin the surprise, because if I understand correctly what will happen next, Horace's design team will help develop the idea further. Everything we discussed and created is considered public intellectual property, so Microsoft isn't using us to generate ideas for them to patent. Though if they do use some of our ideas, I'm sure none of us would mind. The other two groups each focused on a different concept: creating a solution for "social butterfly" users, and for the average users who are intimidated by technology and are more solutions based.



Our group won the "Most Creative End to End Solution" prize, which was a pair of Ultimate Ears super.fi 5 Pro headphones for each of us. In typical Mobius fashion, every person there got a pair anyway. Wink I haven't tried mine out yet, but I've heard other people raving about them - I'm impressed with the single-driver super.fi 3 Studio headphones I was sent just in time for my trip, so I'm looking forward to trying out the double-driver model. Look for a review on The Two Inch View and a giveaway as well (I have two pairs of the super.fi 3's to give away).

Thailand in Pictures
I thought I'd end off with a few of my pictures from Thailand - I took around 3700 photos, came home with 3500, and have been slowly but surely deleting my way downward - I'm at 1469 photos at the time of this writing. Thailand is a beautiful, interesting place - here's some of what I saw when I was there:

























Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog Keiko. He loved Thailand, but enjoys being home in a less humid climate where he's not constantly sweating.
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Mike Temporale
Managing Editor


Joined: 07 Jul 2003
Posts: 8577
Location: Toronto, Canada

PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 9:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow, those are some staggering numbers on piracy. At that amount, I'm sure a large percentage are not even aware that they are buying pirated material.

Nice pictures, by the way! Cool
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Darius Wey
Rogue Pocket PC Thoughts Editor


Joined: 24 Oct 2004
Posts: 170
Location: Australia

PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 10:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mike Temporale wrote:
Wow, those are some staggering numbers on piracy. At that amount, I'm sure a large percentage are not even aware that they are buying pirated material.


It used to be a lot worse before Asian governments started clamping down. The numbers were off the charts. Shocked
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