There Are Chinese, Then There Are Chinese

February 10th, 2008

crowd.jpeg

For many westerners and western companies, it’s hard to figure out why some Chinese have gone to the US for their graduate degrees, worked at name technology companies such as Intel and Microsoft, then come back to China, their homeland, start their own businesses, and fall flat on their faces.

How is this possible? They had everything going for them; they had the best education the US had to offer, worked in a great company, were smart and entrepreneurial, know the language, have connections, and they failed.

More often than not, these people have been away from China for a long time. Over time, they have become used to the American way of life, and while they keep up with what is going on in China, their knowledge and understanding of the country has gone stale. Gradually, they are more at home in America than in China. They jump on the China bandwagon because it is in the media all the time, and they hope to strike it rich.

Then they return to China and discover a country which is not the China which they grew up in. Compared to when they left, the role of the government is much smaller, the country has become more market-oriented in most sectors, and they may have lost many of their former connections. Worst of all, they look at the country through American-tinted glasses and use American society as a point of reference, something which does not work in China at all.

For any business or individual to succeed in China, you must understand China on Chinese terms.

This failure to understand China on Chinese terms is, in my opinion, why so many western Internet companies have failed in China. Moreover, the constant need of local management to report to headquarters outside of China, and to report every purchase they make, and more often, to explain what they are doing, puts a fatal hindrance on the decision-making process because the management is constantly tied up in knots educating someone in headquarters about China.

This makes for another very important point: No successful company in China can be successfully run from outside China; the key decisions and decision-makers must live, breathe, work and sweat in China every single day to make it work.

The single most important bad decision western companies make in China is to force the local China management to consult with headquarters about every matter; this makes the local management look weak in the eyes of their own staff. After all, what is the point in staying with a company if they do not have the power to make decisions even if they are sitting in the corner office?

It all comes down to how empowered people are to make their own decisions, and to be held responsible and accountable for them.

It makes much more sense for them to break out and start their own company, often taking the idea the western company had, but was not able to implement in China because they were constrained by headquarters’ indecision. In the Internet sector, where change is happening so fast, it makes no sense to sue and countersue; that would only make the lawyers happy and not solve the basic issues.

This just scratches the surface of why being Chinese is no guarantee of success in today’s China. Put simply, the society has changed too much too fast, and unless outsiders live here and deal with local Chinese who have never been outside China and speak only Chinese on a daily basis, they will fail.

In business, success cannot be guaranteed, but failure can…

Is It Possible For A Western-Managed Business To Succeed In China?

February 8th, 2008

China’s increasingly important global role means that more and more businesses are coming to China. While there has been a significant presence among multinationals for nearly 30 years, now companies are coming in at earlier stages. Now some startups are even choosing to start in China instead of Silicon Valley.

This trend has been encouraged by venture capitalists, who now give a premium valuation to companies based in China.

This raises a very interesting question: “Is it possible for a western-managed business to succeed in China?”

First of all, a few qualifications. While there are many western multinationals in China, most of them have heavily localized their staff and management. The general trend in these companies is to localize staff and management as quickly as possible without sacrificing necessary management skills in the process. So, for the most part, while they are western companies, they are largely Chinese-managed.

Since most of my work is with startups, I’ll drill down in this field. Now the trend is for more American startups to start in China, even though they may not see China as their main market. In the gaming field, for example, China has a huge pool of people with talent and experience in the gaming field. This means that there is a pool of people with talent in programming and art, and understand gaming culture. The areas where the local Chinese population are weak is in product management. Chinese tend to gravitate to managing other people; there is a serious attraction to being able to say that a manager manages x number of people. Product management is more about managing resources, and coaxing cooperation from different stakeholders in the organization. Naturally, this requires more in the area of soft skills. And soft skills are an area where most technical people feel less comfortable with, and generally do not do as well in.

And unlike in the US, product management people in China are generally expected to be much more technical. So there is a difference here.

Hence the shortage of good product management people.

Naturally, this gives an advantage to startups which have experienced product management people. One mainly western-managed startup in Beijing which is strong in this area is ECitySky.

What about other kinds of companies, and what about the market for talent?

It all depends on what you are trying to do, and what audience you are trying to reach.

One tendency in the Internet field is that as the technology tools become more mature, the technology plays second fiddle to product marketing and marketing. Since the Internet has had just as long a history in China as it has in the west, it is getting harder for an experienced technology person to differentiate himself purely on technical skills alone. Increasingly he has to bring soft skills to the table, especially team management skills, to the table to be seriously considered. This means that for most technical people in China, the opportunities are becoming fewer, especially when you consider their significantly higher costs.

On the management and marketing side, it becomes more important to know how to communicate with your main audience in China. If the audience you are trying to reach is mainland Chinese, this means you must be keenly aware of social trends, the different social groups in Chinese society, government policy, what the different groups are thinking about, and the dynamics affecting the different groups.

The only way to get a deep feel and grasp is to know the language on a native level, including speaking reading and writing Mandarin Chinese. Basically, you need to become local. Assistants, translators and PR agencies will only get you so far because they cannot provide the social context to digest and understand the raw data to make good business decisions.

And then, even if you have a native command of Mandarin, that is no guarantee of success. I sum it up this way:

  • If you don’t know Chinese (spoken, reading and written) and have not lived long in China, you don’t even know what are the right questions to ask.
  • If you speak, read and write Mandarin on a native level, but do not socialize with mainland Chinese except on special occasions, you may know what you don’t know. More importantly, the most capable and intelligent mainland Chinese will not join the startup, instead choosing to start their own startup, often competing with the company they just left. (I’m thinking of many American-born Chinese, Taiwan and Hong Kong Chinese-managed companies which claim to be Chinese, but do not include mainland Chinese who have grown up in China in their management ranks. For the most part, they do not trust mainland Chinese and in private meetings, it is not unusual to hear them complain about things in China. In my opinion, they are doomed from the start.)
  • If you have a startup which breathes, by which I mean that management does not have an inner circle dominated by any regional group or background, and freely allows people into senior and executive management based on their creativity, communication skills and ability to execute, then your startup will have the greatest chance of success. This is because a startup depends on moving quickly, and rapidly adapting to changes and competition in the marketplace.

So, in my opinion, when you get past the government regulatory issues, which are slanted to favor Chinese-owned companies in some sectors (especially media, where foreign companies are not allowed), it really is not any harder in China than many other parts of the world.

The biggest barrier for many startups is to get the management right so that it does breathe. Management needs to set the right tone from day one.

The best management hires the best people, empowers them, and let’s them go. At that point, it’s no longer a western- or Chinese-managed company; it’s just well-managed.

Get that right and China’s your oyster.

Risk Is In The Eyes of the Beholder Part I

January 24th, 2008

Africa map

In the west, there is a whole industry called “risk consultancy”. Basically, this industry is built around informing large- and medium-sized corporations about risk. Originally, this was built around business risk and would answer questions like “How safe is it to invest $500M in an industrial diamond mine in the Congo (formerly Zaire)?” The consulting firm would then send practice consultants to the target country, where they would study sunk costs (including bribes which were never written about in the report, regulations, who was related to the president, political opposition, major competing firms, etc.) Most of these questions were positioned as questions which any board would ask the CEOs before they would greenlight an investment.

Underlying all this is the belief, at least in west and among western corporations that “risk” is something which can be quantified and measured objectively.

One of the big topics in the west now is China’s investments in Africa. What is fascinating about China’s investments in Africa is that while the amounts of money and people who go to Africa are huge, China really doesn’t have risk consultancies, and Chinese really have not yet started thinking in terms of quantifying risk in the ways western corporations have.

So how have the Chinese judged risk so far, and will the present method change over time to something more akin to the western way of thinking? When it comes to Chinese investments in Africa, many of the early-stage investments were a part of Chinese foreign policy aimed at securing raw materials for manufacturing, and more importantly, energy sources. The typical model has been to find a country, build a new palace for the president and a new sports stadium to win over the people. This would help state-owned construction firms to gain a footing in the country, which were then quickly followed by Chinese logistics firms and wholesale distribution firms which would sell products to the local African population.

Viewing the local African population as customers were one area where Chinese viewed Africa fundamentally differently from the west. While Beijing, Shanghai and the Chinese tier one and tier two cities are relatively modern, it is very easy to forget that when it comes to pervasive poverty, China is only 10-20 years removed from the levels of African poverty. Basically, Chinese companies know how to sell to poor people because they had lots of practice in China.

When you are working from a low cost basis, there really is not a whole lot of need to measure risk because the only way to go is up. Remember, in China labor is still very cheap compared to the west, and the Chinese government is always interested in keeping people employed in the interests of social stability. On the other hand, when you have large risks but your investments are backed by the Chinese government, there is not a need to measure them either. But things get complicated when you are in the middle, and are a mid-sized Chinese company (US50M-1B) which is private and are looking at Africa, as many are now.

Right now, the path many are taking is to send executives, management and staff wholesale to Africa, and basically telling them to figure things out on the ground. This is the Chinese version of “Let’s throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach. But what happens when you don’t really have the protection of the Chinese government and local Chinese embassy, and the Africans start complaining that Chinese companies aren’t creating enough local jobs for local Africans? Obviously, these are the sorts of questions which are very complicated, since they include a social factor, in addition to the corporate and economic equation.

Will the Chinese companies turn to the western risk consultancies? Not likely. First of all, they are too expensive by Chinese standards; Chinese management is still very price-sensitive and is not likely to be willing to spend the large amounts which these companies charge. Also, they are not likely to entrust this kind of sensitive information to an outside firm which may recirculate some of the data for a competitor. Most Chinese companies are very tightly held, and risk is whatever the CEO thinks it is at that moment in time.

For western corporations which work from a high-cost basis, risk consulting is an item on “research” for executives, even though it may easily run into the millions of dollars.

For the Chinese, that’s way too much…

Chinese Face, Chinese Heart Part I

January 24th, 2008

Zhengtu gaming title

One of the frequent questions I run into in China is how western Internet companies coming into China should position themselves for growth in China.

Should they try to be western, or should they try in the shortest possible time, try to become Chinese, hiring Chinese for their local staff and management? Under what circumstances is it best to be western, and under what circumstances is it best to be Chinese? And what if a company has been in Taiwan, Hong Kong and/or the US; how should they position themselves for future growth in the Chinese market?

Their positions are made more complicated because it is now hard to find good management people they can trust locally in China; as an organization becomes larger the camaraderie and culture which forms in the management team becomes increasingly important. Over time, this builds into trust, especially if they need to deal with problems and challenges which need to be overcome on a daily basis. This comes face to face with another China reality: it simply is not easy to find people you can trust in China. Backgrounds can be fudged, headhunters want to push their candidates; the list goes on and on.

Internet businesses are especially complicated; most founders come from technology backgrounds, even today, and they have very little understanding of marketing, company positioning, and yes, national and corporate culture. Many still have dreams of serving the world from one virtual data center in Redmond, Mountain View, Beijing, Hong Kong or elsewhere, and letting more junior management deal with the soft and fuzzy stuff like “culture” and “marketing”. Even relying on ethnic Chinese management from Taiwan or Hong Kong has not really worked, as China is littered with Internet startup failures led by Taiwan and Hong Kong management teams who really did not understand the dynamics of the market in China. There have been many western executives who have said “How was I supposed to know that they didn’t understand China; they told me that they were from Hong Kong/Taiwan?”

For anyone from established business service sectors, such as banking, these ideas seem silly, even foolish. And they are. A simple reality of the Internet is that it is going to come under more national jurisdictions and regulations as it becomes a more important part of peoples’ lives. Just as it is inconceivable that banking would not be government regulated (unless you count the ongoing subprime mortgage crisis as a failure of the government’s regulatory system), it is becoming inconceivable that the Chinese, US or other governments would not want to have a say in how the Internet is run.

These established sectors know only too well how important it is to somehow find a way to live with government regulatory bodies. In China, successful new startups have almost always come from new areas which the Chinese government has not figured out regulations about and does not yet know how to regulate.

The perfect example is the online gaming industry. This industry was basically an import from South Korea, and took root in China because gaming consoles are technically illegal. (Sony PS2 and 3, Nintendo Wii and xBox360 are all freely sold; that law is seldom enforced, and all of the games sold are cracked versions.) The Chinese government’s rationale for that law was because way back in the nineties, the Chinese government saw PCs as a valuable educational tool, but considered gaming consoles to be expensive frivolous tools for kids to waste their time. At a time when the Chinese had much less buying power than they do today, it seemed like a good idea to ban gaming consoles.

This created an opportunity for Shanda, which was the first company to launch online games (almost all from South Korea) in the Chinese market. This idea caught fire with many younger Chinese and spawned the Internet cafe industry, where many younger Chinese choose to spend/waste their time and has also popularized QQ, the ultimate social networking application if there ever was one, and which for many Chinese, is the Internet.

This industry has swiftly matured, and with success has come regulation. Online gaming companies have tried to adapt, some have adapted (or tried to adapt) by moving into the online game publishing business from online game distribution. The transition from online game distribution to online game publishing has been a rocky road for companies like Shanda. The company has in the past acquired studios and titles, but many of the creative pros have left post-acquisition. A new wave of game publishers with strong titles have come up, led by Perfect World and the highly-contentious Giant Interactive.

On the regulatory and marketing fronts, the online game publishing company has become a victim of its own success: the huge amount of revenue it generates has created something the government and other regulators call a “social problem”, and it has fallen into a rut on the creative side, adding more titles in what are basically the same genre with very little to differentiate each other. The result: titles with diminishing shelf lives and ROI. People who are not addicted to games (i.e. people who have lives) have an increasingly bad view of the industry and game titles.

Unless you have some way to break out of your core audience, which is exactly what Nintendo did with the Wii. The greatest contribution of the Wii is that it has forced people to take a second look at gaming, as something other than just frivolous entertainment which wastes a lot of time and is anti-social for people who do not play games. (Heavy game players would argue that game players are social; they are just online.)

So the Nintendo Wii is halfway there; it has offered a new paradigm for games and gaming.

Now, if gaming is going to really succeed, it will have to get non-gamers to think that they are not playing a game. Then we are talking breakout.

And the game publishers (creative people) will have to learn how to get along and work with the marketing pros, and will have to understand that there is much more to marketing than press releases, press conferences, paying off the media to pick up their stories, planting stories and fake planted conversations on Chinese BBSes, etc.

To really go big, they will rely on a new class of professional and and a new kind of strike force.

We’re not there yet, and we’re not moving fast enough. But there is a way.

I believe in the value of history, but I also believe that there are times when we have to stop referencing the past for what we do in the future.

This is one of those times.

Facebook’s Beacon and Valuing Social Networks

December 5th, 2007

Social Networks

There has been a lot of talk lately about valuing social networks and Facebook's management knows that, which is why they try to track everyones' activities across the Internet with Facebook Beacon.

There has been a lot of discussion
if/how/when/who Facebook will acquire a social network company in China. As usual, I will jump out to offer my often contrarian views on social networking.

Let me put it this way, I don’t think that there is a way to value social networks, even though this is what advertisers would very much like to see happen. And the reason that social networks cannot be valued in a top-down/corporate/advertising way is because they are entirely subjective and dynamic according to each individual at any given moment in time.

That’s why it makes much more sense for each individual to assign a value for _access_ to his network, and anyone who wants to access it has to pay an access fee. If you don’t like the access fee, then don’t pay. If you like the fee, pay, and you will get access.

It’s that simple. Nobody owns the network except me. Not Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or anyone else. I own my relationships, just as you own your relationships. They only exist on Facebook insomuch as I’m active on Facebook now, but that is no guarantee that I will be there tomorrow.

That is why it doesn’t matter if Facebook owns all my data; if I no longer go there, it’s dead, out-of-date data. My data is only valuable as long as I’m active there.

I talked about the idea before, let me fill it out some more.

Here is my problem with Facebook’s Beacon:

  1. If Facebook wants to track my activities across the Internet, they should explicity ask me first, and give me an opt-out option.
  2. If I say “Yes”, they should ask me how much I want to be paid for access to my network activities on a 24-hour basis
  3. I go in and set my fee for 24 hour access beginning immediately and click submit.
  4. Facebook’s servers churn and return “yes” or “no”. If “yes”, they will be directed to my payment gateway. After confirmation, Facebook will say something like “Thank you for giving Facebook access to your network activities for 24 hours. After 24 hours, the cookie installed in your browser will automatically expire. (More blahblahblah from corporate and legal departments.)

In this model, each user has control over his/her activities, and is paid for access to their data by each social network.

Now wouldn’t this be a much better world than the current free-for-all where everybody is playing “Let’s screw the users and see how much we can get for free?” The current valuations on social networks are based on not paying users for access to their data.

How would you value social networks if they had to pay users for access to their data?

And since the Internet is all about pushing power to the edge, then why shouldn’t users have the power to earn money from having their activities and relationships tracked?

It would be great to hear what Seth Godin, Dare Obasanjo, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have to say about the idea.

UPDATE: It’s been three hours since I posted this article, and I wanted to see if Facebook had imported this article into Facebook Notes so that I could tell my Facebook friends about it. (I have set Facebook to automatically import my posts here.)

Guess what? Facebook has not imported this article. Now what have I done to get that kind of treatment? I seem to have some recollection about “empowering users” and all that stuff.

Charming. Did their PR and marketing people go to the “Khmer Rouge Charm School of How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I guess I should be so grateful to Facebook and their management where they can watch all our moves and try to monetize it without passing anything down to us dumb users who haven’t figured out the shill yet.

I’m a great believer that if you fail, you should fail fast. In this respect, Mark Zuckerberg and his flaks have done a great job in record time. Mark, what are your chances now that you will hit that 15B valuation?

Scott Karp has written a great piece “Facebook’s Crisis Demonstrates That People Matter More Than Technology”. Be sure to read it.

Dell and WPP: Will DaVinci Work?

December 4th, 2007

HP 2710p

When an ailing computer company which has lost a lot of its shine teams up with one of the leading ad agency groups, WPP, to form a new marketing agency called DaVinci to spend $4.5B in marketing money, I am, naturally, more than a little skeptical.

Consolidating adspend under one roof makes sense sometimes; it made sense for IBM in the nineties when it chose my former employer, Ogilvy, also a part of WPP, to handle all its accounts. IBM was able to consolidate its image, and Lou Gerstner, then IBM’s CEO was able to make a dramatic turnaround and a nice exit for himself.

More than 10 years later though, the challenge for Dell is more complex. Dell is a company which has surpassed at squeezing costs out of the system, making cheap computers for the office masses. The problem now for Dell is that it is getting challenged on this front by Lenovo, the Chinese computer manufacturing giant and Acer, the Taiwan company which has made a dramatic comeback after a near-death experience. And then there is the US giant, HP, which is doing some very interesting stuff.

When it comes to buzz, Apple sets the bar. After switching to Intel architecture, then using the iPod as a platform to generate buzz for the iPhone globally, Apple is on a roll. Dell has been left in the dust. Add to that recent customer complaints about quality, and Dell is not in a good situation.

So can DaVinci turn things around for Dell?

My initial reaction is that it doesn’t go far enough; it is made up of Dell and WPP people, and can serve as a buffer to any agency conflicts. But the problems which afflict Dell run much deeper than just quality problems.

They are management and perception problems.

One of the big problems marketing people run into is how to turn a product which is a stinker into something which people want to buy. The Internet has made the challenge even greater, because anyone who has the time, motivation and interest can find anything about a product.

It doesn’t matter how you spin a turd, when it stops spinning, it’s still a turd.

The problem is that once a company starts thinking that it’s all about an agency, or it’s all about the creative, the ground is set to place the marketing people and agency as the fall guys, when actually the problem is with bad management decisions. Then as the management panics because of falling share price, bad buzz, and everything else, their decisions get increasingly short-sighted and the options get worse and worse. When the management starts thinking in these terms, the company is basically in a death spiral; it’s all ends when it hits the ground and bursts into flames.

The problem with Dell is that they are very good at cutting costs, but they have not shown customers how they can ADD value. So naturally, Dell attracts the customers which are at the bottom of the value chain. Dell’s management has effectively commoditized their own product line. This is never a wise thing to do. If your own products have effectively become commodities, how do you position them against anything else?

The answer is you can’t.

Cutting internal manufacturing and component costs is something every computer maker should do internally, but you never want to make it the message you tell your customers and IT departments.

For the past several months, I have been debating what I should get for my next computer. It has been a match between the Santa Rosa Macbook Pro and the HP 2710p. The 2710p is a Tablet PC and has received some excellent reviews. It was the only PC I have been seriously considering.

Why? Because I have never owned a Tablet PC, and it looked like it had reached the right balance of functionality and design. Other HP lines, Dell and the other PC makers never entered the equation.

HP obviously likes the 2710p a lot, they have made it the centerpiece of a TV ad campaign in Asia.

That is why I say that the integration of Dell and WPP do not go deep enough. Instead of trying to flog a lot of commodity products which the market has tired of, instead they should think of how to come up with new products and a product line which actually make a person excited. We’re not talking about marketing anymore; we’re talking design marketing, the kind of stuff Apple excels at.

They should start with one product, then take it to a product line, then expand it, then kill all the boring stuff. Just like Apple did with the iPod, which expanded into the iPhone line.

Of course, in order to do all that, you need to be a dictator like Steve Jobs. The question is whether Michael Dell can be that kind of dictator, even if his own name is on the line.

Biz Opportunity: Rolling Up and Franchising China’s Internet Cafes

October 11th, 2007

In my previous post, I talked about the dark side of China’s Internet cafes. I was surprised at how quickly I got responses to the posting; there were more than six comments in less than two hours.

Now, I would like to talk about a business opportunity in China’s Internet cafes. One of the biggest problems with Internet cafes is the uneven quality of the management; most are terribly managed, some are managed pretty well. Overall, the well-managed cafes suffer from the poor image problem associated with the whole industry. In a comment following my post, Fons Tuinstra says that the numbers of people going to Internet cafes are falling sharply, citing CNNIC figures. I suspect that this is because of a combination of factors:

  • Educated Chinese families don’t like them because of their bad reputation
  • With laptop computer prices coming down to 7,000-8,000 yuan for a fully equipped notebook, prices are coming with the range of most urban Chinese
  • With monthly DSL prices between 100-200 yuan; broadband access is now affordable

In spite of all this, the Internet cafe still has attraction as a social and recreation area for young people who are looking for places to meet which don’t cost too much.

So why hasn’t someone come in with a roll-up strategy, buying up the good Internet cafes, offering professional management and a franchise package, and turning the whole thing into a franchise like Starbucks, McDonald’s or KFC? After all, that is how Ray Kroc started with McDonald’s in the 50s in the US.

These Internet cafes should offer clean well-lit areas which are frequently cleaned, fresh food and drink, clean bathrooms and a good overall experience. Just think of what could be done if a Chinese Internet cafe experience could be as good as an Apple store! Yes, prices would be higher but it would attract a much better demographic group. And a better demographic would make for a better advertising market.

Events could be planned for the stores educating people about online buying and selling, and to demo new products and services. Game contests could be held in a much better environment than are available now.

If I were an advertiser, I would really love to reach this demographic group. They would be upwardly mobile, not like the permanent urban underclass we now see in so many Internet cafes.

In short, make the Internet cafe a place where Chinese parents would not be ashamed of letting their child go to, and a place where the child could tell his parents he is at, without having to lie or admit to shamefully.

This would help to clean up the image of an industry which badly needs to improve its image. It would even make sense for an advertising company to get into it, as the advertising opportunities in a wholesome Internet cafe franchise are huge. I can think of several companies which should seriously consider doing an Internet cafe franchise in China:

And now, here’s the company I’d really like to see do a Internet cafe franchise in China because it really knows about making cool stuff and it understands lifestyle marketing. If they did it, and did it right, they would own the Chinese Internet cafe experience.

Now wouldn’t that be something! You saw it here first.

I can always wish…

Report: Cory Doctorow of Boingboing Speaks in Beijing

September 13th, 2007

Cory Doctorow, open-source advocate and publisher of the Boingboing blog, spoke in Beijing yesterday on Sept. 12. The Boingboing blog was one of the first blogs on the Internet, and now reportedly has more than 600K subscribers. The venue for the event was the Beijing Bookworm bookclub/bookstore in Sanlitun. Many members of Beijing’s English-blogging digerati were there including Jeremy Goldkorn of danwei.org who served as host, William Moss of ImageThief and Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy China Digital Watch.

Cory opened his talk by reading a short story he had written. The story was set in 2027, where a VC was trying to talk a woman into letting him invest 600K in her company, which created customized mobile devices from junk, which she would then sell to customers. It was a perfect case of mass customization; this time, the VC had become commoditized, he was now part of a venture capital franchise and was looking for places to put his money. Trouble was, he had more cash to invest than what he knew to do with. The woman complained saying that she had tried to get money from Sand Hill Road in 1999, but she was blown off because her business did not, as the VCs put it then, scale. Now the tables were turned, and the woman was able to buy her raw materials for very cheap prices, and taking advantage of new technology design software and equipment, was able to design unique devices very quickly. At the end of the story, the poor VC was reduced to asking if he could work a shift on her assembly line so that he could have one of the devices.

After the reading of the story, Cory proceeded to talk about the issue of DRM (digital rights management) and copyright. He related the story of how Google had recently stopped selling videos from Google Video, disabling the ability of people who had paid for downloads to watch videos they had already paid money to buy. For this reason, many had turned to the Google search engine to find unauthorized downloads of those same videos which they did not have to pay money to buy, and which they could play anytime they wanted. This was a perfect example of how screwed up the whole copyright issue had become; it encouraged unlawful behavior by punishing those who acted lawfully, but now changes forced people to adopt and use products which were not “lawful”.

He then proceeded to talk about the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown request, which was used to remove content from Internet websites. He recounted the experience of one publisher, the Science Fiction Writers Society, of which Cory is a member, which asked that all references to Isaac Asimov be removed from a document publishing website. As a result, even high school reading lists had to be removed.

All this was done without any need for proof of ownership to be submitted to a court, or seeking of an injunction. His point was that the copyright laws are much more strict on the Internet, and do not need “proof”. In a twisted way, this has encouraged the proliferation of online piracy because the laws are unreasonable and unenforceable.

He then talked about how changes in technology had helped the publishing industry as a whole. Whereas before, major book hits needed to sell 50,000 copies, now many books became profitable by selling only 3,000 books. Technology has lowered the threshold of costs and profitability for small niche publishers, which are now able to reach a wider audience through the Internet, and later through mobile search and applications.

When the US was founded, for the first hundred years of its history, the US pirated all books written by English authors, and refused to honor British copyright laws. Cory added that the American founding fathers knew what they were doing; they were not prepared to have US dollars go into the pockets of the English treasury. It was only Mark Twain, an American author, became famous, did Americans become interested in copyright laws.

Now, Cory noted, China wants to become an accepted member of WTO and the international business community, and is seeking to honor international copyright laws. He warned that it is important for China to think through what its own interests are so that the country’s own best interests are not sacrificed to globalization.

Cory made it very clear that he believes that the current copyright laws are formulated to favor current copyright owners, at the expense of consumers. He noted that the current US copyright law, introduced some thirty years ago, has gone through eleven revisions, and that literally no one, including judges, lawyers and politicians understands it completely.

If there was a theme to his discussion, it is that the Internet has opened up a whole new world for those who are savvy enough to use it intelligently, and use it to reach niche audiences and interest groups all over the world, without being restricted by geography and language.

It’s great to know that we are all tied into our own interest groups through the power of the Internet. If we are willing to reach out, we can find people with similiar interests without any restrictions at all.

It’s all in our hands now.

Andrew Lih has posted a photo of the event on his blog and Frank Yu has posted photos of the event on Flickr. Search for “cory doctorow beijing”

Updated 9/15/07: Danwei has posted a video of Cory’s talk.

Apple’s iPhone Marketing in China Leverages Global Buzz

September 5th, 2007

Apple’s iPhone

What do you call it when people pay nearly double current sales price to buy a product which is basically crippled of its most important function, and the maker has spent zero marketing dollars to sell the product?

I’d call that pretty powerful buzz marketing.

According to this USA Today story, some Chinese are willing to part with 8800 yuan to own an iPhone which doesn’t have working phone capabilities in China, because Apple has not yet signed a partnership agreement with a carrier. (Presumably, Apple would part with China’s leading mobile service provider, China Mobile, to launch iPhone service in China.)

Any way you look at it, Apple’s iPhone has had a successful launch in the US. Apple has taken its legendary experience in hardware/software design and integration and applied it to a whole new product, the mobile phone, bringing good design sense and functionality to a product which has confounded most users for years. On the marketing side, Steve Jobs has put the reality distortion field into overdrive, convincing many Americans who have never used smartphones before to part with their money. A few analysts have gone so far as to predict that Apple will replace Microsoft in the mobile space, becoming the leading player for a new category combining hardware and software design and integration in mobile computing. A report which came out on Sept. 4 has claimed that iPhone sales in the US in July have already beaten smartphone sales.

In China, mobile phones are very popular and are more than just communications devices. Often, with the Chinese concern for social rank, they are indicators of social status. On the business side, this translates into frequent replacements of handsets among China’s rising urban middle class as users want to have the latest devices. Mainly for this reason, handset makers have placed most of their research and development in China, to lower costs and to be close to trends for their single largest market.

But could Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and LG have missed something Steve Jobs and Apple saw, an opportunity which Jobs’ gang could not pass up? And could the high rate of handset sales belie not only a desire to have the latest mobile device, but be an indicator that Chinese users were not satisfied with any of the handsets made by any of the major hardware makers?

Moreover, could this represent an opportunity for Apple, which has never had major market presence in China for its computer business, but has made limited inroads with its iPod business? And is this a major opportunity for iPhone in a major emerging market?

First of all, let’s take a look at what Apple has done differently. In typical Steve Jobs style, Apple has played God, giving buyers a complete final sealed package and solution, including software (a version of OS X) by Apple, and a hardware design by Jonathan Ive, Apple’s superdesigner who has been largely responsible for the elegance factor in Apple’s products. To the consternation of a new generation of software developers, Apple has provided only very limited support and documentation for designers of third-party applications for the iPhone. But even with this very limited support, something interesting has happened: the developers have organized themselves to develop new apps for the iPhone.

When was the last time you heard of a large group of developers organizing themselves to develop and extend apps for new Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and LG phones? And for nothing?

While Apple and Steve Jobs try to create consumer reverence somewhere along the lines of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the fact is that the first iteration of Apple’s products still are far from perfect. But the products always gets better. This reveals something about Steve Jobs which he strives to keep from the market: he listens and acts on intelligent customer input.

Uniquely among major hardware/software companies, Apple does not use focus groups. Designers design for Steve Jobs: designs and features Steve Jobs likes are kept; designs and features he dislikes are tossed away. There are no focus groups by marketing groups for senior management to use as crutches for their decisions.

If you look at it closely, what is happening with all the buzz for the iPhone is a mirror copy of what happened when the iPhone was announced on Jan. 7 at Macworld in San Francisco. The six month waiting period created a huge amount of pent-up demand and free buzz for the iPhone in the US, which translated into record sales for the product when it was launched on June 29.

Now, it’s happening even in China.

Genius. Pure genius.

BarCamp Beijing 2007 Summary

September 2nd, 2007

Yesterday I participated in Barcamp Beijing 2007, which was held at the France Telecom Research and Development Building in Haidian district in Beijing. There were more than 100 participants with some 24 sessions held in three different languages.

It is hard to describe the firehose of information from Barcamp, but I will try to offer some of the highlights.

Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House, first spoke about how to raise financing for startups. Based in Calgary Canada, Cambrian House offers a business platform for service providers, and Michael has successfully transitioned from being a tech person to a business person. I was immediately impressed by his praise of Paul Graham, founder of the Y Combinator seed-funding group. Paul Graham is the smartest tech guy who has transitioned to business, and Michael showed how Y Combinator has introduced a new VC business model of seeding startups by mentoring them through the startup process.

I have spoken frequently with Frank Yu about the need to bring something similiar to the Y Combinator seed capital model to Beijing. Chinese startups badly need mentoring, especially in their early phases because most of the founders do not know how to build teams. This is something Paul Graham’s Y Combinator organization has been able to address very well, teaching business smarts to founders from tech backgrounds.

The other main takeaway from Michael’s talk was that it was important for new companies to be “investor-centric” as opposed to “founder-centric”. If a company is set up to be friendly to investors up-front, then it is much easier for it to scale.

Andrew Lih, who is now living in Beijing, spoke about the Wikipedia movement. Andrew is a researcher in new media, and is now working on a book on Wikipedia due for publication sometime next year.

In the afternoon sessions, Karl Mattson, president of Medium Cool based in San Francisco, talked about what kinds of people were needed to build a good company. He put special emphasis on need for background diversity. When most Americans hear the word “diversity”, then tend to think in terms of racial, religious and sexual diversity. What Karl was talking about was the need to get people from different parts of the world, social and educational backgrounds so that they can exchange views by looking at a business proposition from different angles. Failure to do so meant that companies would often have “blind spots” and result in “group-think”, where the same group of people have a narrower and narrower vision.

I have noticed this tendency even in very large and successful US companies such as Microsoft and Google, where the definition of a smart person fits very closely with the founders’ definition of smart. This has resulted in a form of inbreeding, where the companies’ blind spots get bigger and bigger, creating opportunities for new challengers and startups.

Following his talk, Robert Scales, founder and CEO of Raincity Studios, talked about his company’s experience working with Drupal, the open-source community web framework. Robert talked about how Drupal has matured into an excellent solution for all kinds of businesses, with new modules being added on a regular basis. Previously, companies had been wary of using open-source as a solution because of security cares, but now he found that they had gone past those issues and had come to embrace it as a development platform. The best part for his 12-person team based in Vancouver was that because the software is regularly updated, his company only has to concentrate on basic functionality, design and configuration issues for his clients. And if his company cannot perform the work, design and feature requests can just as easily be addressed by another team which is familiar with Drupal. Now, his company is so busy that he has come to China to look for designers and coders to augment his Vancouver team; he mentioned that he is so busy that he has had to turn away business.

In reply to a question from me, Robert mentioned that the average billing amount and timeframe for a project is 3-6 months and 50-100k (Canadian dollars) per project.

My session was on the topic of “Building Management Teams” for startups. I focused on some of the problems which I found most Chinese startups to have:

  • Founders fall in love with their own ideas too much, take criticism personally. This makes companies too slow to ditch old bad ideas.
  • Chinese companies tend to be “founder-centric” instead of “investor-centric”, which means it is very difficult for a company to grow past US5B market cap in size (with the exceptions being Chinese state-owned enterprises or SOEs).
  • Healthy startups have a technology founder, product founder and a bizdev founder, forming a tripod. Most startups in China do not have this setup; instead relying on one person to drive growth and vision. This model does not scale well, and feeds the founder’s ego too much. This puts a cap on future growth.
  • There are too few original ideas; companies tend to copy each other.
  • China has a high-competition, low-trust society. This also puts a cap on Chinese companies’ growth. If someone can successfully address the issue of how to build trust in the online/offline world, they will have something very interesting.

Many photos were taken, including many by Kris Krug, president of Bryght, one of the event sponsors. You can find the list of sponsors from my previous pre-event posting. If you would like to see photos from the event, you can find them on Flickr.

Many participants will be going to Shanghai where Barcamp Shanghai 2007 will be held at the offices of Tudou on Sept 8.

Barcamp Beijing 2007 was a very interesting and exciting event for those interested in technology. It provided an excellent opportunity to meet some of the participants and drivers in open-source and Web 2.0, and gave those from outside China a chance to learn about the Chinese market, and a chance for Chinese to mix with outsiders.

All in all, an excellent experience.