Computex on Taipei 101

I didn’t have a lot of time to explore the trade show but in the few minutes I was there I didn’t see anything that caught my eye. Furthermore I think we visited the worst pavilion because none of the big Taiwanese companies where there. Indeed it was the pavilion where the Microsoft booth was. Of course I took a picture with one cute Taiwanese Microsoft hostess. You can see in the picture the interesting slogan Microsoft had in the Computex: “Better with windows!” encouraging people to use Windows on the sub 300 USD laptops.

Microsoft’s Taiwanese Hostess

Microsoft knows that they have a problem. As more of our time in front of computers is using web applications instead of desktop ones, more and more people will start using small cheap laptops. A huge chunk of the market is going to be on this small form laptops and they will probably replace all the normal laptops in the future. Microsoft is in a position where Linux is going to be eroding their user base. The problem is that vista will never run properly on these laptops (plus nobody likes vista) and must rely on Windows XP to compete with modern Linux distributions.

As LCDs are not anymore the stars in the trade shows, the manufacturers try
to attract attention showing ballistic missiles from the neighbor North Korea.
Next year they will try porn.

It will take time though because most of the cheap laptops in Computex were running Windows. I assume Microsoft marketing has something to be here, probably giving away for free or close to nothing the windows licences to the Taiwanese manufacturers. An intelligent positioning or a desperate move depending on your point of view but a sign that they are worried anyway.

A trade show is interesting these days not to see new products (we know the products perfectly the same day they are released to market thought the internet) but because they give you the opportunity to see who is the real person you had been communicating via email in the last months and because it provides you with a hands-on with the technology.

I went with Antonio and Ignacio (as in the old days). As usual, we arrived super late and all the parking lots on the exhibition center were full so we needed around 1 extra hour to park the car.

When we finally arrived at the IFEMA, we realized that there were lots of different trade shows at the same time in the exhibition center. There were one focusing on solar energy, another about office furniture, a trade show about physical security, one about digital storage and the Siti/asLAN. The funny thing is that the Siti only needed half a pavilion while the normal trade shows needed several pavilions. Plus we needed to go to an area we never had been before that was instantly named “the low cost area of the exhibition center” because it was clearly half-finished.

But the trade show was interesting indeed, for example we received a fast class about optical connectors and a demonstration of how to use mechanical fiber connectors. We also discover a very interesting Portuguese company with a working solution for Wifi localization inside buildings (and we are invited to go to see a demo in a hospital in Oporto) and lots and lots of surveillance cameras.

There were several non-techie interesting things, I lost a wii tennis match against Antonio (How it could be? I can’t understand…) and I gave a kiss… to a wireless robot. Yeah, this is the first time I gave a kiss to a robot. In public