卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

Sorry, I need to rant a bit here…

I got an email the other day from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. I’d been checking out their website a couple of months ago, and noticed their “Buy one, donate one” scheme, which at that time had yet to commence. It sounded interesting, the offer was affordable, and I was quite interested in getting hold of one of these famous little critters. So I signed up. Of course, I’m in Singapore - and it seems this offer was only available to residents of the USA and Canada. This fact wasn’t at all apparent from the page I read, and the reminder email I received didn’t mention it either. So, no new laptop for me. I’m not sure why this would be - I managed to buy my retro clamshell iBook from Australia without difficulty, so it’s not a logistical problem Could it be… that the Foundation just hadn’t thought about the world outside North America? It wasn’t a good sign.

Another bad sign reminded me of an episode from my childhood. I’m from a small country town, and when I was in my pre- and early teens, lots of residents didn’t really travel much. Once, a travelling theatre group came to perform a play in our community youth centre. I still remember one scene in which the cast stood packed close together, each with one hand raised, swaying rhythmically. I had at that point been to London a couple of times, and knew that they were portraying strap-hanging commuters on the Underground. The whispered questions around me revealed that many in the audience had no idea what was meant to be happening: they’d never seen the real thing. I thought of that episode when I read that Electronic Arts have donated The Sims to be pre-loaded on OLPC computers. Is this really sensible when - correct me if I’ve got this wrong - the laptop is intended for poor rural children in developing countries? Who may perhaps have seen small towns? Are the concepts of the Sims really appropriate, or even comprehensible, for this market?

This reminded me of another childhood lesson. As a boy during the British 1970s, a backward-looking period obsessed with the Second World War, I was saturated with comics, stories, and biographies of that period. I learned the lesson of the tank battles on the Russian front. The Germans built intensively designed, high-precision, finely constructed panzers, which were the match or superior of any other tank in the world - on a one-to-one basis in ideal conditions, when manned by a highly-trained crew. They were extremely expensive to build, maintain, and repair - so there weren’t very many of them, and they often didn’t work very well in the conditions of the Russian winter. The Soviets, in contrast, built crude, but extremely functional T34s, which were ideal for the environment, cheap to build and run, easy to repair, and which could be deployed in large numbers with peasants fresh from the farms at the wheel. We all know who won.

Something similar seems to be happening in the computer market for the developing world. The OLPC computer is being highly- (even over-) designed for a very narrow market, in very specific conditions. It’s not like anything else on the market (read: which everybody else is using). It seems to be aimed at an ideal user, rather than the real people of the poorer regions of the world.

I can’t really talk about the conditions in contemporary Africa, for example. I can see how something of this design might work in the rural African villages I knew in Lesotho twenty years ago. But is this the market we need to worry most about? That could sound callous, I don’t mean it to, but aren’t there vastly more children or others in need of accessible computing in less remote areas, small towns, urban shanty zones, etc - where there is access to electricity, etc?

The OLPC means well, is driving important innovations, and is publicizing an important need - but it’s still the equivalent of those German Panzers. In the campaign to bring affordable computing to rural areas, I suspect they will be swamped by the T34 equivalents, such as the Chinese Longmen computer, or the Sinomanic. I’ve seen these while I was in China: cheap, cheerful, using commodity parts, and cut-down versions of the same software everyone else is using. Specifically aimed at poor students or rural farmers, they will swamp the OLPC - and I wouldn’t be surprised if its these models, or ones like them, that win the day for the developing markets in Africa and elsewhere…

Just-good-enough in large numbers and low price will win out over expensively over-designed, no?

Losing my phone recently has focused my attention on design issues in the industry; as I’ve mentioned, I’m hanging on and using my old Nokia 6108 while I wait for my chosen new model - the Meizu M8 - to arrive on the market. The 6108 was the first Nokia model to be designed in China, in Beijing to be exact. Meizu are based in south China, in Guangdong, and seem to be quietly building up a global following, based on the number of web sites dedicated to their products. A couple of weeks ago I also wrote about CECT, another Chinese phone company, and their model with biometric security features - and again, judging from the number of comments, it seems that without the company apparently trying very hard, they seem to be building up a global customer base attracted by the feature sets of the phones, which aren’t provided by the global brands. I know from my own time spent in Beijing, that mobile phone shops are everywhere, and there are many, many local brands.

Given this context, I found an article I just read in Asia Times Online extremely interesting. In China’s phone makers in speed dial mode, Olivia Chung mentions that the Chinese government has just liberalised the rules on phone handset manufacturing and distribution. This means that local manufacturers will be released from a bottleneck that’s been inhibiting their activity. The key market is the rural Chinese population, who are extremely price-sensitive, and have little or no brand loyalty. This means that to makes sales, manufacturers will have to design low-cost phones with very diverse feature sets.

For years, we’ve seen Japan held up as the main source of innovation in the phone sector, with technologies and phone-based activities far in advance of anything we get in ‘the West’. Japan, however, is a very local market: not so many of its innovations actually transfer to other locales. China, however, is different: it’s using the same technologies as ‘the rest of the world’. This means that very soon we’re going to see the fast-forward innovations of Chinese manufacturers, honed in the frantic fight for domestic market share, producing phones that people elsewhere in the world will find highly desireable.

These foreign buyers may not be all that numerous for any given manufacturer or model, just part of the Long Tail. However, it’s inevitable that some will become evangelists for their phones, and brand awareness will spread. It’s also pretty inevitable that there will come a breakthrough product, one that just happens to meet an unexpected demand, and that will really bring Chinese phones to global attention.

The global brands, especially Nokia - through the activities of Jan Chipchase and his colleagues - have been taking an anthropological approach to user needs for a long time, with the aim of designing phones to meet social and psychological niches. (Nokia recently opened the world’s largest Flagship Store in Shanghai, an indication of how seriously they take the Chinese market). Chinese manufacturers will be doing the same by designing a multitude of handsets, letting them loose in the market, and seeing which ones sell: design through survival of the fittest, rather than design by research. I wonder which will be more effective..?

Heh, I’m guessing there’s a niche to be filled by someone: distributing information on new Chinese phone models, and translating the user manuals…

Update 25 Nov 2007:

For some more background information, see this summary of a 2005 report on the Chinese mobile phone design market.

I was writing recently about losing my Nokia 6708, and was talking about it off-line with Niti. One of the annoying things about it was the lack of a password, meaning that the handset can be sold on and re-used by whoever’s got it now. The only security measure available was for the SIM card, not the phone itself; we were wondering why such an obvious and needed feature wasn’t available for what was quite an expensive smartphone.

Happily, my new iPod does have password-protection, so at least if this goes AWOL, no-one will be able to benefit from it…

Anyway, I read an article today on Virtual China, about a Chinese-designed phone that seems to be pretty well-protected, with fingerprint-ID required. This is the CECT T100 (heh, sci-fi fans will be smirking at that). By the way, beware the CECT website - every link seems to open in a new window, and they have horrible background music on every page. But if they can’t do web design, their phones seem to be done very well - to me, it’s a reasonably nice-looking phone, with an interesting set of features that will suit the Chinese businessman on the go! (Not necessarily what I would want in a phone myself, but it features streaming TV and Karaoke as well as the usual multimedia features). Most important, though, is the biometric access control. Pretty cool…

When China Tech News reviewed the T100, the comments list seems to indicate that it already has a substantial global following; the most common query is about the lack of a manual in English. This suggests to me that people are buying it from Chinese suppliers based on its design, but that the company isn’t actively marketing it outside China.

I know from my time living in Beijing that the phone shops are very well-stocked with locally-designed handphones, and it would appear that their quality is just getting better and better. China definitely seems to be innovating fast in this sector, and once they start making a serious effort to market internationally, they would seem set to transform the market - particularly as here in Asia there’s none of this ridiculous locking of handsets to one particular network, as I read about in the US and Europe…