From the BusinessWeek (link)
When Harry Shum arrived in Beijing seven years ago to start a research center in China for Microsoft, he had low expectations about what he would be able to achieve. Shum, who was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, knew that skeptics considered it an impossible mission. “At that time, very few people believed we could do first-class research here,” he says.
Among the critics was the man whose job it was to launch the center — Shum. “I myself didn’t believe,” he says. “The level of research when I grew up here was very, very low. Technology innovation is not something that China has been known for.”
Today, Microsoft’s Beijing center has 200 people — 40 from overseas and the rest from China — working on a range of advanced technologies. Among them: a digital pen that allows composers to write their music on paper but have the composition immediately appear on their PC, and a new type of software that lets computer gamers appear in the game, courtesy of a video camera which inserts their images in real time into the computer’s reality.
