Just picked up my older daughter today. She gets out at a reasonable hour on Friday,
3:00PM. On Fridays all the boarding
students go home so the pick up is in the back.
We came in the rear and rode in along the dusty access road along side
the towering new building project to get there.
This complex will hold about forty thousand people if my rough math
holds, thumb nailing the number of apartments, times the number of buildings. These all went up in months’ worth of time. Some of them are now occupied. Most are still being finalized. They all stare down on my daughters’ school
now, infantry in the march of functional modernity.
The access road is
dusty. Imagine that. Below the towers are rows of functional
worker housing, torn signs, refuse and rubble.
What new markets and stores and facilities will also be added to
accommodate this dramatic new community?
The pioneers, who’ve already moved in to a few of the buildings, have
nothing, to-date. This is public housing for working families with Beijing
residence cards, all drawn from all the neighboring communities that have been
or are being systematically knocked down.
Government mandated upgrade on 衣食住行[1]
If that’s the bread,
we’re gonna need some circus. Sooner or
later someone up in one of those tens of thousands of apartments is going to
play some music with Ray Brown on bass.
Of this we can be sure. He recorded on over two hundred sessions over
the years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Brown_discography
I’ve got one on now “This is Ray Brown” from 1958 where the man from Pittsburgh
is the leader and his double bass is properly profiled as loud as an acoustic
bass can be on a jazz set. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Ray_Brown
He appears to have been quite a handsome gent and indeed, was married to Ella
Fitzgerald for at least five years or so there. I wonder what their fights
where like by the time they parted.
Anyway, I just know
someone up there in those countless apartments will be a jazz fan. I know it.
Perhaps there will be hundreds of them.
Perhaps there will be a quartet that plays in the courtyard, community
funded live music, but this may be asking too much from the circus. Regardless, one day, I’m willing to bet that
Ray Brown’s thumping will be felt if not heard, out of one of those countless,
nameless windows. As I mentioned
yesterday one area of true innovation in China is in the area of all this
building. Inimitable expertise is being
developed, throwing up all this housing, for projects such as this on such a
massive scale.
The Telecoms Media and Technology (TMT) business I’m in also has tremendous scale in China. Most things do. But disruptive innovation may be more illusive. Cloud business models that have had so much success in the U.S. have yet to really blow-up in China. I have a former colleague who now heads up a cloud delivery platform. His discussions with large players like Lenovo is that the broad deployments of cloud solutions for enterprise are still a year out. But they will come and it will disrupt the market thoroughly.
It is interesting to
consider what this means for the disruption of traditional sales models in
China. Willy Loman of “Death of a
Salesman” fame probably wouldn’t have thought that there was much future in
telesales in Yonkers, if he’d heard the pitch of a world where you “dial for
dollars,” let alone one where people are caught up in a frictionless internet
search funnel and buy things with a click-through. Willy figured you had to meet people and
press some flesh to close deals.
Certainly that is the default assumption for enterprise sales in China,
along with the requisite drinking and KTV involved to get a deal closed.
In America, this is
quickly becoming antiquated. The U.S. has
now adopted cloud delivery models broadly.
Salesforce, Workday have lead the way for thousands of new entrants that
are disrupting the way enterprise use software, on-demand, in the United
States. I’ve been involved in trying to
start such businesses in China and it is challenging. To my knowledge very few U.S.
Software-as-Service (SaaS) models have made efforts to build out their offering
form servers here in China. Evernote
comes to mind.
It doesn’t take a
crystal ball to know that it will happen here eventually. Any more than it would have taken to know
that mobile phones and search engines and user generated content, that first
blossomed elsewhere would eventually take off and grow in its own fashion in
China as well. Throughout that
progression legislation has created an environment here in China that favors
local entrants who often have me-too business models. But it is not fair to cite legislation
favoring local companies, as the sole reason for local companies success. Local players generally have a better sense
for local market tastes and user behavior.
Google is deliberately slowed in the PRC market. But in South Korea this is not the case and
they command only a small fraction of the search market behind Daum and Naver.
The “Great Fire
Wall” has certainly slowed down the adoption of foreign market entry for so
many businesses in China. And while it
creates a lag it also engenders a hothouse opportunity for local me-too
adaptations to flourish. In the post-Eric Snowden world though, it is no longer
just a lag or a suspicious posture about foreign and in particular U.S.
software (and it isn’t just China that has worries anymore either) but
downright prohibitive guidance against getting U.S. solutions adopted. The only way to navigate that for some
companies is to set up an OEM or license to a local entity or in some other
compelling way Sinosize what they do.
Like many, I’m wary
of this Balkanized world of multiple or national internets where the twain only
meet, through a rough, delayed interface.
And more often, don’t meet at all. But the disruptive innovation in TNT still
keeps disproportionately happening in the San Francisco Bay Area. It remains remarkable. There are more cities in the world that have
tried to mimic the success of the Bay Area, then there are Ray Brown recording
dates, and none of them have a compelling success story, of innovation. So even in a Balkanized world, China, and
Japan, and South Korea are still compelled to watch and learn as breakthroughs
are driven and money is invested in the Bay, and then consider if and how to
apply those solutions locally. There are
exceptions and I like many have my nose out in the air, looking for them. But this lag time continues to create
opportunities for the best companies to consider their solutions here, and for
companies here to experiment and anticipate, before international companies are
ready to make the crossing.
We’ll keep on this
topic of innovation for a while. It is
startling and refreshing in a way, how vexing it is proving to effectively
copy. It is one of the reasons, beyond
mere military power projection, that the U.S. really does have a role to play in
stewarding conflict resolution in North Asia.
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