China - interesting opportunities!
Ni Hao!
I was in China a couple of weeks ago (Shanghai specifically) and had the opportunity to spend a day with our team there. It was very exciting to see the team coming into shape from scratch in just over a year and working on a breadth of initiatives and technologies for the products that we are working on in Developer Division.
I had a chance to see demos of some of the work that the team is doing – C++ support for the class designer, a set of VB controls, enhancements to our architect tools, etc. I also saw some of the early adopters that had built games, rich media advertisements and HD Video players using Expression Blend, Visual Studio, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This was the result of some good collaboration between our team, the Developer Platform Evangelism Team at Microsoft and our partners.
The other thing that was fascinating for me is the rapid increase in the number of developers in China – some estimates peg this increase at 13% annually. There are more than 300,000 EE/CS majors graduating in China per year and that is going to ensure a healthy increase in the developer community in China for the foreseeable future. With 162M internet users across China, it is second only to the US (211M internet users) and is becoming a huge adopter of technology. The opportunities are incredible in China – as a consumer market, as a potential customer base, as a large developer base, as a strong partner ecosystem and as a large talent pool.
My team in China has kindly volunteered to translate my blog in Chinese. As that starts happening, I will provide a link for those of you who want to read the Chinese version of my blog.
Namaste!
