On September 4, 2009, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (http://blog.sina.com.cn/kaifulee) left Google. The Creative Factory site surfaced. This should have been a great thing, but it kicked off an argument on a few IT blogs. http://initiative.yo2.cn/archives/642502 That post blew up. Just in case it gets “harmonized,” here’s a copy:
http://www.innovation-works.com/New.asp 1. ASP — is that innovation? 2. In English, “news” and “new” are two completely different words, right? New.asp shows just what a knockoff job the outsourcing firm that built the site did. 3. I won’t even mention the td-based page layout; the real kicker is content=”text/html; charset=gb2312” — that alone deserves a good rant. 4. Under Media Contact, there’s actually a .doc file. Honestly, I can’t be bothered to install Word these days, and if it were installed I couldn’t be bothered to open it — I just drag everything into G Docs. Good thing it isn’t .docx. 5. Fine, the English version is UTF-8, but http://en.innovation-works.com/new.asp?page=1‘ throws an error.
A few signs suggest kaifulee was in a hurry this time — maybe his “20% time” all went into the student site. But also, I get the feeling that *.google.* is blocked, that the XXXXXX at Google’s Beijing headquarters was XXXXXX (credit here to the big shots at T University for the tip), that Kai-Fu Lee was “resigned” within 24 hours, and finally that some Twitter account muttered to itself, “After XXX, XXX is more obedient.” It’s not as if there’s no causal link between all of it.
Innovation Works — well, the site is just so-so… On the art side, the clean style is quite nice, but look closely at the details and you’ll find plenty of blurry spots, which shows whoever did the design just phoned it in. The front end uses the transitional standard, the layout uses tables… in this day and age. The ASP and mojibake problems really threw me. And the main body of the site being stuffed with tons of .doc files always makes me think of some PR=10 department that has screwed over countless webmasters…
hidecloud Says: September 7th, 2009 at 19:36
Google Docs supports docx now. The site was outsourced by Kai-Fu Lee’s assistant to a university — 7,500 yuan for development plus a year of maintenance. I don’t know why Tsinghua students’ English has gotten this bad…
Later, Lonely Volcano jumped in to flame the OP:
If you’re so badass, go invent some XXP technology yourself — that’s what you’d call innovation! You use tech someone else invented, and just because the tech you use is a bit trendier, you think you’re innovative?!
Kai-Fu Lee’s goal is to give other people opportunities to innovate and start businesses — he’s not the one who’s supposed to be innovating. Everyone get that straight, OK? China finally has someone with that kind of ideal, and you, as Chinese, not only don’t support him, you sit here sneering at him. What’s going on in your heads? What do you get out of tearing him down like this? You’re not trying to make China’s IT industry, and China’s environment for young entrepreneurs, as bad as Chinese soccer, are you? Why is it as hard as a man milking to say a few words of encouragement, while sarcasm just rolls off your tongue?
It’s such a simple website — why fuss over the newest tech? Kai-Fu Lee isn’t a professional web developer anyway! Some of the commenters above even brought up LUA. Are you nuts? Your heads are stuck on nothing but tech — you’ve forgotten why technology exists in the first place!
Support Chinese innovation, support Chinese youth entrepreneurship, support every view and action that helps! So I support Kai-Fu Lee! And if anyone else wants to pool a few hundred million to do something similar, I’d support that too!
All the comments so far: 
Personally, I think chasing tech for tech’s sake is pretty extreme, and unnecessary. And the people being sarcastic aren’t mocking Dr. Kai-Fu — they’re mocking the quality of today’s university students, with a real “wanting iron to become steel” flavor to it. If that site really was outsourced to Tsinghua students, it says a lot about the caliber of today’s college students.
Also, under everyone’s “criticism and encouragement,” the site keeps getting improved. Today I saw that new.asp has been changed to news.asp.