A Micro-Softening Arvo - "Sembang"

Before I ran off for the "Sembang Tech.Ed" -- A sneak peak of the Microsoft Tech.Ed SEA 2007 organized by Microsoft in collaboration with Lensa Malaysia & Nuffnang Malaysia, I was having a chat with David:

(01:09:02 PM) yc - and skies..: I'm attending something M$
(01:09:09 PM) dchui: You're the dark side
(01:09:11 PM) dchui: Omg

Whether if I have turned to the dark side, that's not really important. If I'm to put a summary of this afternoon in one sentence, it would be:

"Microsoft builds software for the human beings."

The three-hour (which eventually went four) session demonstrated how nicely applications are packaged, how Web 2.0 is being implemented, and most importantly (at least, that I care of), the concern of usability/developablity for end-users, designers and application developers. An example regarding developability is, Silverlight applications can be developed using the Expression Studio and any development kits (which you should not expect designers to use) such as Visual Studio. It wasn't a concern of Macromedia (now Adobe) that the application developers struggled with Flash program until around these years that they come out with Flex. Of course, there're a lot of reasons behind such scenario, e.g. financial capability.

A brief run-down on what that had presented:

• Silverlight - Multimedia runtime for browser-based rich internet application. Microsoft seems very confident to compete with the dominating Flash. Also worth mentioning is the cool but very slow Sun's JavaFX.
  
  
• Popfly - Rich internet content (called the "mashup") creator. It has impressive visualization and can be easily integrated with your services such as Flickr, Facebook, etc. It comes with some cool geotagging feature too.
  
  I like this one.
  
  
• Home Server - A solution for homes to centralize computers and files. Great simplicity so that your parents know how to use it.
  
  
• Robotics Studio - Robot control and simulation tool so that your kids know how to make the legos move remotely. I'm definitely not a fan of robotics though, maybe you are, so digg or bury this -- Bill Gates' "A Robot in a Home".
  
  

I am one of the contributors to why the event ran out of time as I have been asking questions. Anyway, it was, of course, a great occasion to talk to people like Oliver, Chewy, Steven from Fortune Fountain, and some short chats with bloggers like June, Timothy, Jason, ES, Jeff, Nat, ..

P/S: Maybe you did not notice, there're some alphabets hanging on top of the ceiling of the stage, reads "Sinfully Yours". I'm sure Microsoft haters love this.

- yc, micro-softened