18th Moon Station

I went to the Windows 7 tour event in Pondok Indah today. Since the first day is yesterday, I assume the representatives only came yesterday formally. But still, there’s a number of Microsoft Indonesia’s event crew on spot, I even met an acquaintance there. The stand looks interesting, at least better than Microsoft’s booth in Indocomtech 2009.

As expected, they had close cooperation with hardware partners like Acer and Gateway. The products shown are… well, the trend in Indonesia, notebook & netbook, and all-in-one PC (Gateway ZX series, although I like HP TouchSmart better). Anyone missed the day where they would showcase build up desktop PC and hung motherboards on the booth wall? I guess the visitors nowadays has been brainwashed to see those PC guts as too geeky to show.

But I do get the chance to play Virtual Earth using Surface interface (part of Windows 7 Touch Pack).

In the middle of the Gateway’s booth, there’s a small stand showcasing Windows Phone. They showed Samsung Omnia Pro, Sony Ericsson Xperia2 and Acer’s 3 units including one SnapDragon device.

The touch screen on both phone and PC is still unresponsive. But since I think even the iPhone’s display is not so responsive, I guess this is technology limitation.

Even so, on the other side, Windows Phone is never affordable (at least those that worth it). I avoid Standard device at all cost because of a simple reason. The popularity of touch screen devices made non-touch Windows Mobile into a marginal product not good enough for peoples that like to play with 3rd party applications. Developers want to ride the biggest bandwagon, touch screen devices. Non-HTC device is also not so worth it, because there’s not much ROM to be found in place like XDA Developers (yes, it’s shunned, but I’d rather pay for the OS than paying hardware tax just for software upgrade).

Anyway, the greatest story I heard today is that, they’re selling Windows 7 Ultimate at promo price of IDR 2.4M for 3 license key! Yup, gonna buy that. My desktop, my notebook. The other two, my dad’s notebook and my brother’s, which one should I install the 3rd ?

I’ve just realized when checking price again in a local online store.

Although Microsoft said that they would reduce the price of their most popular retail product for consumer… the keyword here is “retail” as in “FRP”. Yes they might have cheaper price, up to 31% (Indonesian price) for Windows Vista Ultimate. But again, “retail” is the keyword.

For example, although they cut 32% off Business/Pro (again, Indonesian price), there’s an 8% raise in the OEM price. How come ? Well they cut the price gap between FRP and OEM to 26% from the previously crazy 54% on Vista (add: Vista Ultimate had approx 40% price gap between OEM and FRP).
Which means, for us who buy the OEM version, that's not much of a good news.

The situation are as follow:

• You might not want to follow everyone. Imagine the mess your main timeline would become.
• You can only create list of peoples you followed.
• Although they might say “there’s a list for that”, some list are terribly personal, best bet is that you’re the only one who would make it.

Considering such points of inconvenience… it might be a nice idea to have an extra account, follow all those peoples related, and then create lists. Yes, account made to host lists of those newsmakers you might not want to bother following officially yet nobody else make list exactly as your requirements. Then subscribe to them from your real account.

So that be:

• List account, follow probably hundreds or thousands of peoples.
• Main account, follow peoples you’re actually interested enough, and subscribe to the lists from list account or other users.

The list account wouldn’t just benefit yourself, but also others. Example case, providing list of Twitter users in your community to others who don’t want to follow each and everyone but still need a convenient way to view their updates in single place..

There’s not much online store in Indonesia, especially for computer. The popular stores must be, Bhinneka (known for being more expensive than most Mangga Dua standard) and Rakitan/Quantum (more or less the same as other stores around).

Why? Maybe, just maybe…

• Taking care of online shop is troublesome and costly.
• Lack of interest in online shopping. Even if they’re interested, they would shop from personal importers in online forums with cheaper price.
• They know, their site will just become reference price list and the customer will still go to another stores and haggle the price down.

Culture… *knocks head*

Besides, unlike online shops in US, they don’t offer crazy bargain price or discount or rebates. Even if there’s discount, it’ll still be higher than the average price. Again, this might had to do with the culture.

The distributors play the game with lots of smaller partners (something in level of mom-pop shop). Because many end customer bought their retail from there, the distributor might not want to disappoint them by giving big players price advantage. While the shops… they had almost fixed price among one and another, like a cartel.

Disclaimer: done without formal research or observation and had to be taken as assumption.

And any other countries in the matter of fact.

Is it weird for adults there if they can’t drive? Regardless of if they could afford a car or not.

Maybe because of the corrupt system of getting driving license here, I sometime feel I’m getting weird look when saying I can’t drive and prefer taking public transport, or if I say one of my main requirement if looking for my own home would be how long it would take to reach bus stop by foot.