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Spent last week in Helsinki, planning for the S60 Ambassador rollout this Spring. I have some notes on our proceedings and am in the process of putting them into PowerPoint decks, as nothing gets done in Nokia unless it is first documented in a PowerPoint deck.
Of course, all work and no play makes Helsinki a very dull place, and I did manage to grab a beer with a co-worker on Friday. Grand opening of a German-Finnish beerhouse downtown...they featured very large beer mugs, here's a shot, taken with an N82, or yours truly enjoying a *liter* sized beer:
I figured at least Stefan and Ricky would be proud :-)
Had an opportunity to travel to China last week. One of my favorite places in the world. Though the time change always kills me. Anyway we did a customer meeting plus some strategy related stuff. And some good old fashioned team building. Lots of fun was had: Beautiful scenery:
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great food:
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And of course Karaoke.
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Towards the end of the trip we saw this sign:
They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. In this case Starbucks has a strong enough brand that just creating a facsimile of the logo creates the same feelings of warmth, taste, convenience that Starbucks itself creates. Or at least the owner of this particular shop hopes.
There are those who say that way back in the 1990s, when MS Windows was being pirated and thus propagated throughout mainland China, Microsoft benefited. Windows became ubiquitous, and when Bill Gates eventually went to China to meet with the Premier, the groundwork was in place for MS to start capitalizing on a huge user base.
We saw lots of 3rd party apps for sale in the mobile phone stores in Southern China. I guess most, if not all of them, were pirated. I wonder how 3rd party developers feel about piracy of 3rd party apps for S60 in China? I've heard that even official, state-sanctoined publications include instructions/hacks that teach users to how install and run licensed software w/o paying for licenses. Is there real concern about this among our developer community? Is piracy eating into revenues? Are there developers out there who are happy just to have the word spread about their applications, even if it does come at short term cost?