That one day, a typical American tourist from Atlanta, GA would be walking along the Great Wall of China and be able to send Tweets along the way? I’m not impressed by the technology, but just the fact that I was updating Twitter from the GREAT WALL OF CHINA! My perceptions of China have changed forever and I believe the future of the WORLD will change significantly based on what China does.
The leading mobile provider China Mobile has more customers than the entire population of the USA, well north of 375M. The last I heard, the largest mobile provider in the USA had less than 50M. Everyone is using a mobile phone here in China. I rode on a boat through the city of Zhouzhuang and the “granny” who was the [insert the word for boat operators like in Venice] on her mobile heading back up stream for more tourists. There is a mass collision of hyper growth and significant poverty in the areas that I have seen over the past two weeks. That hyper growth bleeds into poverty stricken areas throughout Shanghai and Beijing. Cellular phones are everywhere. Handset technology that is very “cool and hip” with the younger generations today blows ours away.
I challenged my IBM host yesterday to think about what China would be like when his two year old son turns 15 or 20. The largest bank in China (ICBC – 1984) and the largest mobile provider in China (China Mobile – 2000) were founded in radically brief timeframes compared to similar US companies. The Chinese government is considering establishing a market for start up companies to get funding, build their businesses, IPO, etc. What will China look like in 15 years? What will China have to do to operate successful companies at this hyper scale that is very unfamiliar to most US companies? How will technology have to adapt? What technology needs to be created? What software will need to be developed to manage 500M – 1B mobile users, mobile content, mobile applications (banking, etc)?
I don’t think that the acceptable answer will be segmentation, regionalization, geo-localization of technology. This is the answer for technology that can’t scale. If you’re following John Willis as he dives into cloud computing, might this be a possible answer? Maybe we need to think in terms of how we all learned about the solar system here and orbiting planets around the sun. If the utility compute cloud is the core of the hyper scale architecture of the future, each orbiting “planet” around the compute core is more compute clouds for hyper scale applications, and then more for hyper scale transactions, and hyper scale services. Additional compute cloud “moons” would be hyper scale resources for managing at mass scale. Sometimes there are multiple “moons” required to provide more fine grained mass scale management, additional services, functions, etc. Wow, I’m rambling here but my mind is in some sort of hyper mode thinking about all of this stuff. Can you name a US company that could on-board (acct mgmt, provisioning, billing, etc.) over 7M new customers in a single month as China Mobile did in January 2008?
China is big. China will be bigger than we can ever imagine. I think we need to be seriously reconsidering how we do things today to prepare for what China will require in 3, 5, 10 + years. China needs progressive, abstract thought leaders who can challenge the status quo to help them continue to meet hyper growth requirements. China needs highly skilled practitioners and business partners who can help show them the way. From there, they’ll dedicate their own resources to carry things forward. (what’s possible when you have THOUSANDS of skilled resources in development centers…ANYTHING).