Oliver Bell’s Weblog

In my last role for Microsoft I was based in Redmond and I was no stranger to long haul flights. Flying from Seattle it was always around five hours to anywhere on the the east coast of the United States, or the first leg of any international flight would be around ten hours.

I’m currently heading back to the USA for a few days, and the journey back has left me pondering the life that was, and the one that is just beginning.

Living and working in Singapore has brought some unexpected side benefits, not least of which has been the fact that most of the countries in South East Asia are either right on my doorstep, or at worst only a small number of hours away. The result is much less time spent waiting to be somewhere else, along with the counterbalance of much more time being available to engage directly with people or projects.

The change in travel patterns are dramatic, but not the only change in lifestyle that comes with a move half way around the globe.

It has been fascinating to see how the patterns of technology adoption differ just as significantly between my old home and my new one. Of course, anything I write from here will be a disputable generalization.. so take the follow text as nothing more than my own observations.

In the United States the demand for personal technology, in my personal view, frequently seemed to be driven by the demands for entertainment in the home. As a general rule homes built in the USA today will probably have CAT5 or CAT6 points in every room, and the occupants will plug an array of devices into those points that deliver common media platforms that serve voice, video, data, music and other communications to the entire home.

After less than a year in Singapore I would describe the demands of technology users in Asia as having a different focus, and I’ll give it a high level banner of “social efficiency and productivity”.

First and foremost the mobile phone (or hand phone) plays a much more significant role in day to day life, text messaging is only just gathering momentum in the USA, while in Singapore it is the general rule that somebody will walk into me as I come off the MRT due to their single focus of tapping out a message on their phone.

The services that emerge as a result of the focus on the smart phone are pretty much taken for granted by the average Singaporean, but have been exciting to discover for somebody just arriving in the country. The idea of being able to order a meal, summon a taxi or check in for a flight using just a text message was an amazing revelation to me - while I watch many around me take these types of service for granted. 

The net result is that advanced technologies are probably a much more pervasive part of day to day life in Singapore than they have been in places I have lived in the past.

The array of devices that people carry in their pockets, the amount of data that the average member of Singaporean society can summon up from from those devices along with the speed at which people exchange information and communicate is nothing short of amazing.

Of course folks in the US get excited about cell phones and the technology that you can find there, and of course folks in Singapore build common media platforms in their homes. However, the technology that you find in stores and in pervasive use appear on the surface to represent different core contexts and use cases.

What does all this mean.

Well, the obvious point is that we live in a diverse world, where people will always use technology for whatever drives society. A more complex point for me personally really involves watching and learning over the coming few years as I settle into the region, and working out how I represent these significant differences to the many product groups that I work with at Microsoft.

There probably are no significant revelations or world changing ideas in these observations, but they are an interesting overlay to decisions I get involved with on a day to day basis and in my interactions with people in the region.

I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the world is not quite as flat as I was led to believe…