I attended In-Stat China 2008 last Friday (2007/11/9) in Shenzhen. Eric Chang (Director of ATC) is one the speakers of the panel “New Technology and Market Summit-Converged Device”, he shared the views of Microsoft about “M-Phone” which means future phone should be Multi-Network, Multi-Modal and Multi-Functional.

In-Stat China 2008 is a close-door conference with about 40 attendees from carriers such as China Mobile and Orange, mobile phone manufactures such as Nokia and Sony Ericson, telecom equipment manufacturers such as UT Starcom and Huawei, silicon vendors, Intel, Tencent and etc. Eric and I are from Microsoft, but I found 3 ex-Microsoft employees there. Jason Yin, Managing Director of In-Stat China used work in Microsoft (China)as License Manager; Peter Zhang – Director of Education Business Program of Nokia and Bruce Zhou – Solution Center Director of Motorola (China) also have working experience in Microsoft (China). Fancy meeting so many Microsoft related friends in this meeting.

This conference has 4 panels, Digital Media, Broadband, Converged Device and Wireless Internet. In this emerging market, 3 big players are taking the lead on the stage. Putting consumers as its core and innovating on technologies for better user experience, all of them take the model of Device + Connected Services. iPhone of Apple compete with Nokia which has more than 300M units sold; Service & Software of Nokia go to the area of Google; will gPhone be more exciting than iPhone?

Making Windows Mobile more consumer-oriented (WM is more business-oriented) and with Microsoft’s Software + Service strategy, Microsoft will also do well in this rapid change market.