Mon - April 11, 2005
Ads in Videogames - Making Pirates Pay
The Silicon Hutong
Suite
Intercontinental Hotel
Singapore
2325 Hours
Intercontinental Hotel
Singapore
2325 Hours
Massive, an advertising company that focuses on
ad and product placement in videogames, is now off the ground in New York with high hopes and
some skepticism from the folks at Electronic
Arts
If I were to really get into gamer mode on this, I would say "put advertising in my games? Give me games for free."
But if I were to get into business mode, I would say that this might finally, somehow, hold the key to getting paid for all of those pirated copies out there.
If only they could figure out some way to do realtime measurement.
If I were to really get into gamer mode on this, I would say "put advertising in my games? Give me games for free."
But if I were to get into business mode, I would say that this might finally, somehow, hold the key to getting paid for all of those pirated copies out there.
If only they could figure out some way to do realtime measurement.
Posted at 11:57 PM
Microsoft Shifting to a Service-driven Model?
The Silicon Hutong
Suite
Intercontinental Hotel
Singapore
2250 hrs
Intercontinental Hotel
Singapore
2250 hrs
In an article in the Seattle Times, Brier Dudley
interviewed Martin Taylor, leader of Microsoft's 18-man A-Team that spends their
days publicly spreading Redmond's own brand of disinfo and counter-disinfo
against The Penguin and his legions of Linux fans.
Taylor's a very well-spoken guy and makes some remarks that you will either find convincing, bogus, or slightly credible depending on where you stand on Linux.
But it's what he said at the end of the article that was interesting. Now remember, this is a guy who sits at Steve "Monkeyboy" Ballmer's right hand.
"My belief is that open-source software is going to help drive the acquisition cost of software down toward zero" he [Taylor] said, a shift that will require software companies to move "over to a maintenance and support model."
You can see this a couple of ways. First, you can see it as a trial balloon being floated by Microsoft about a movement toward a service model. Personally, given what Taylor does for a living, I'm much more inclined to file this under more disinfo. Microsoft still sees Linux as a bugfart in a typhoon, and there is no way it is going to readily hand over it's massive margins willingly - certainly not on the desktop.
I think what we CAN expect is for Microsoft to start limiting all but highly limited tech support for paid software to those who buy maintenance agreements - say, after 90 days. Hmm. Nice new income stream. And I'm sure that much of that service would be handled not from Redmond, Washington or Lexington, Kentucky, but from Bangalore and Manila.
I can hear the Wipro guys drooling already.
Taylor's a very well-spoken guy and makes some remarks that you will either find convincing, bogus, or slightly credible depending on where you stand on Linux.
But it's what he said at the end of the article that was interesting. Now remember, this is a guy who sits at Steve "Monkeyboy" Ballmer's right hand.
"My belief is that open-source software is going to help drive the acquisition cost of software down toward zero" he [Taylor] said, a shift that will require software companies to move "over to a maintenance and support model."
You can see this a couple of ways. First, you can see it as a trial balloon being floated by Microsoft about a movement toward a service model. Personally, given what Taylor does for a living, I'm much more inclined to file this under more disinfo. Microsoft still sees Linux as a bugfart in a typhoon, and there is no way it is going to readily hand over it's massive margins willingly - certainly not on the desktop.
I think what we CAN expect is for Microsoft to start limiting all but highly limited tech support for paid software to those who buy maintenance agreements - say, after 90 days. Hmm. Nice new income stream. And I'm sure that much of that service would be handled not from Redmond, Washington or Lexington, Kentucky, but from Bangalore and Manila.
I can hear the Wipro guys drooling already.
Posted at 11:24 PM
Tue - March 29, 2005
BCG - Wharton Report: A Worthy Read
Perched 9 Floors Above the
Hutong
1320 hrs
1320 hrs
I have hardly in the past to nail the folks at
Wharton when I felt they were wrong about issues in China, so in all fairness I
need to compliment them when they get something right.
The recent report by the Boston Consulting Group and Knowledge@Wharton on Overcoming Challenges in China Operations has come up with some very poignant conclusions that are worth reviewing in detail. While it pussyfoots around some critical issues in the name of political correctness (they stopped just short of saying that most Chinese managers aren't ready to take the top local job in MNCs, as an example) and there are some notable omissions, they come up with a set of of "uniquely China" observations about MNCs who have succeeded in China.
It's hard to argue with things like:
1. Giving China high visibility at headquarters;
2. Personal CEO involvement and regular visits by the CEO to China;
3. Clear, bold targets;
4. Give China a high priority regardless of what it would be assigned under normal internal systems;
5. Create China-specific products;
6. Bring the entire value chain to China, including R&D;
7. Nurture managers for the long term;
8. Emphasize government relations and public relations;
9. The China operation is given a genuine "value-added" role in the organization; and
10. Make China a global or regional center for key responsibilities.
Clearly, these alone won't make an MNC successful in China, but they're a good start.
The recent report by the Boston Consulting Group and Knowledge@Wharton on Overcoming Challenges in China Operations has come up with some very poignant conclusions that are worth reviewing in detail. While it pussyfoots around some critical issues in the name of political correctness (they stopped just short of saying that most Chinese managers aren't ready to take the top local job in MNCs, as an example) and there are some notable omissions, they come up with a set of of "uniquely China" observations about MNCs who have succeeded in China.
It's hard to argue with things like:
1. Giving China high visibility at headquarters;
2. Personal CEO involvement and regular visits by the CEO to China;
3. Clear, bold targets;
4. Give China a high priority regardless of what it would be assigned under normal internal systems;
5. Create China-specific products;
6. Bring the entire value chain to China, including R&D;
7. Nurture managers for the long term;
8. Emphasize government relations and public relations;
9. The China operation is given a genuine "value-added" role in the organization; and
10. Make China a global or regional center for key responsibilities.
Clearly, these alone won't make an MNC successful in China, but they're a good start.
Posted at 01:51 PM
Sun - March 20, 2005
Video Game Wars: How Long Before the Chinese Catch Up
Headquarters
Silicon
Hutong
Beijing
So the United States Air Force wants to take a big step toward retiring the $2
million pilots flying $100 million jets, replacing them with smart kids sitting
in air conditioned trailers outside of Las Vegas flying $4 million recon drones.
The pilot of the future is the video
gamer of today. Technology changing air
combat.
Now, how long before the PLA figures out they can stop buying Su-27s and Su-30s from the Russians at $34
million a pop, then deal with spares, then deal with the headaches they're
having integrating them into the force, and start buying projectable power on
the cheap?
Posted at 09:11 PM
Spooky Moment
Hangover Recovery
Unit
Silicon Hutong
Clinic
Beijing
Watching
The Devil's
Own on HBO Asia. There's
this one spooky moment when the Irish terrorist arrives in New York, and his
U.S. sympathizer is driving him over the Brooklyn Bridge. He looks at the World
Trade Center towers and says "and there it is."
Hair rises on back of
neck.
Posted at 08:50 PM
Tue - March 8, 2005
Boeing Boss Allegedly Gets Caught with Pants Down. Party in
Toulouse!
In the
Hutong
Beneath the Departure Path
for PEK Rwy 18R
Harry Stonecipher's abrupt departure from Boeing -
and its salacious cause - will certainly garner much
mirth around the world, but nowhere more so than Airbus headquarters in
Toulouse.
The French and Germans must
be laughing their heads off. The Germans are laughing because they have learned
the hard way the cost of relieving a competent commander in the middle of a
fight, regardless of his
peccadilloes.
And of course, the French
are laughing because if one of them had done what Stonecipher is accused of
doing, they'd expect a promotion or a raise.
Stonecipher won't be missed by
the Boeing rank and file, but you know what? It's nice if the troops
like you, but I would worry about a leader eager to curry favor with the
troops.
I just hope they
replace him, and soon. Airbus has had a ridiculously good romp, and it's been by
default - Boeing achieved almost nothing of note in the 14-year long dry spell
twixt the 777 and the 787 , while Airbus has done what Boeing used to
be quite good at - mixing experience, leading technology, and deep customer
relations to create great products.
It's high time Boeing had a leader who
can brilliantly synthesize all of that great raw material into the aerospace
powerhouse the company should be. Clearly, ol' Harry (whose previous claim to
fame as CEO was to sell McDonnell-Douglas to Boeing) was not the guy.
Over the next 20 years, China is
collectively sitting atop orders for 2,300 or so aircraft, equivalent to about six
years production of either Boeing or Airbus. By fundamentally rejecting Russian
designs, the government and the airlines are essentially saying they want more
technologically robust aircraft. While both Airbus and Boeing will both get
orders, somebody will own the larger chunk of the purchases. The only way Boeing
will do that is by being perceived as the stronger player. And right now, from
Beijing, Boeing not only looks weak, it looks lame.
Posted at 03:47 PM
Sun - March 6, 2005
China, India, and Technology
In the Hutong
The India vs. China thing has become something of
a fetish among global executives, business analysts, government officials, and
think tankers, and now The Economist.
As a strategic issue, the India/China
issue is totally irrelevant. Any senior executive anywhere in the world who is
still
saying "hmm, should we go with China or India" is out of touch and a danger to
his company and its shareholders.
India
is given far too much credit for its IT industry, which is a good thing for the
country, no doubt, but is not the answer to the country's ills. It makes up a
mere 4% of GDP, and is going to find its long term upside as a mass employer
sorely limited as the country runs out of trained graduates. Worse, as we are
discovering worldwide, the IT revolution has two distinct phases. In the first,
a company creates an industry, first in assembling machines, then designing
them, then providing services, then writing software, then designing the whole
deal.
In the second, traditional
industries in agriculture, manufacturing, and services begin to absorb
increasingly sophisticated doses of IT, radically transforming the industry and
raising its productivity and profitability. This is where the big payoff comes -
when the entire industry is fundamentally
changed.
With its English-speaking
masses, its technical universities, and a global community of Indian engineers,
the company will certainly do well with the
first.
But India's challenge is
education beyond this elite, because that is where the nation struggles, and its
lack of inward foreign direct investment. Without the inward FDI, traditional
industries find making the major investments to transform and modernize their
businesses a major, often insurmountable challenge. And without a large pool of
labor with an elementary and secondary education, where is the workforce
trainable to operate in those modern transformed enterprises? Literacy runs at
57% (vs. China's 91%), and an appalling 45% of adult women are functionally illiterate
in India.
So India is set to hit a
wall in this second phase unless it begins redressing some fundamental problems.
Building hardware, writing software, and even creating services will only absorb
part of the population and make a few sectors globally competitive. China, on
the other hand, is already starting to transform its
industries.
That can all change in a
heartbeat. All India needs to do is begin taking a chainsaw to the license raj, and it will suddenly look like a
great bet - even if companies have to provide their own workers with basic
instruction. I expect it will happen, but not
soon.
BTW - check out Silicon Hutong's
India soulmate - The Sepia Mutiny.
Posted at 01:29 AM
Sun - February 27, 2005
Nokia's Grand Strategy: China. Silicon Hutong's Verdict: Ollila's
Waterloo
In the Silicon Hutong Command Post,
Shunyi
Jorma Olilla, prancing around China in a fit of
self congratulation that Nokia has managed to be in business in China for 20
years (and please explain why anyone NOT on Nokia's payroll should care?), is
promising his shareholders two
things:
1. No more price cuts this
year; and
2. Sales growth in China is
the key to the company's
future.
There's a ton of coverage on
this, a good example being Alan McEwen's piece in the Scotsman, one of the
few article I've seen that is not either a) a dutiful reproduction of Nokia's
press release, or b) a re-print of the Reuters wire
story.
There are a couple of problems
with both parts of that
strategy.
No More Price Cuts?
Check Mr. Ollila's Medications,
Please
Jorma admits that price
reductions in the industry are going to continue driven by increased
competition. He maintains that Nokia will not reduce prices
and yet will grow 25% faster than the
rest of the industry because Nokia will be
focusing on high-end phones.
That's
fine, but how does that explain how Nokia will grow faster than the rest of the
industry and grow market share without matching price cuts at the low-end and
mid-range, where the majority of sales take place?
Answer: it doesn't. Nokia will still
be in a price war at the low end, because at that level consumers are focused on
price, and if Nokia won't match falling prices, it won't sell. Their only hope
at the low end is market share domination that will allow them to squeeze
competitors through superior economies of scale. Want to maintain market share?
Cut your price.
Pressure at the
mid-range won't be quite as intense, but let's understand something: there is
little evidence to suggest that consumers are going to stop looking for the best
combination of price and relevant features. While there is some brand premium in
this segment, it won't hold up if prices drop precipitously in this
region.
China is the Future? Be
Afraid...
Nowhere in the world is
pricing pressure more intense than in China. Local manufacturers - and there are
close to 20 of them now, not counting those doing exclusively contract assembly
- continue to drive prices down. And they're not doing it for fun - they're
doing it because they have to.
Which
brings us to the core of Nokia's strategy to drive growth in China - break out
of the major cities and into the lower-tier cities and rural areas. These are
regions where the competition is strongest, where the price pressure is the
highest, and where Nokia and its global pedigree mean the least. Taking market
share in these regions is going to be about cutting
price.
The news gets worse. Prices in
the mid- and upper range are dropping rapidly as well, and China's carriers are
starting to pressure Nokia for special treatment, like coming up with exclusive models with distinct software and
hardware. Interesting as this sounds, this will increase Nokia's costs, and you
can bet the operators will be cutting the same deals with everyone, neutralizing
the marginal value of the deal and squeezing profits even further in the
critical mid-range.
China's dirty
little secret is how bloody small the high-end is. So don't count on the high
end.
Expect 3G to be the savior for
margins? Think again. Most experts see the potential of a
$50 retail price on a color W-CDMA phone within
12-18 months, driven in no small part by Chinese manufacturers, and possibly
even a sub-$30 GSM phone in China.
So
Nokia doesn't want to cut prices, but it's primary growth in its most important
market is going to require extreme pricing
competition.
Hello...?
This
kind of unconscionable denial is why Nokia's troubles are just beginning, and
will not end until the company wakes up, discards Ollila, and navigates itself
onto a course that is more in keeping with the current realities of the
industry, rather than those of ten years ago.
Posted at 02:33 PM
Mon - February 14, 2005
Games in for a Rough Ride in China
In The Hutong,
Supercomputing
The Chinese government's recently issued list of
50 banned video and computer games is going to
grow, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of more aggressive moves against
this genre of entertainment.
The
problem with games goes beyond this current banning, which primarily content and
anti-piracy focused. (I mean, come on - anybody who has played Command &
Conquer: Generals can understand why the content nannies in the Beijing
government might have a tiny problem with
it.)
The real problem is that there is
a growing sentiment in the market among parents, teachers, policymakers, and
journalists that games are little more than an addictive, anti-social form of
time wastage, like gambling without the cash, and that they have no redeeming
social value. This sort of perception makes it difficult to build any kind of
opposition to these sorts of administrative action, and they make the lives of
game manufacturers uncomfortable.
The
industry can either say "hey - parents, teachers, and policymakers: bite my game
controller," and deal with the results of that kind of approach, or they can
take a more proactive approach to improve the image of gaming among those
groups.
Guaranteed, if the industry
DOESN'T do anything, these problems will grow. Soon.
You read it here first.
Posted at 02:36 PM
Sat
- January 22, 2005
Digital Times 18 January 05
The PowerPoint Chamber, Swissotel
Beijing
Article in Korea's
Digital
Times from the 18th of January. Talking about
mobile comms in China. If anybody has a link to this, I'd prefer to run the link
rather than a photocopy of the
article.
Though I love the
mugshot.
Posted at 02:02 PM
Street Fighting in the Hutong
In the Bunker
Been out of it for a while. The book is starting
to take up lots of time. Some good news coming next week on a related
front.
Posted at 09:12 AM
Sun - December
5, 2004
NOK NOK. Anybody home? More Empty Offices in the Glass House in
Espoo
In the Hutong, Looking Toward the
West
The executive suite in the Glass House is
starting to look like the Bush Cabinet: the first team leaves, the second team
is left to carry the can. Here's the
Reuters story filed late
Friday.
Nokia is a walking corpse. You
heard it on the Silicon Hutong over a year ago. Now that chunks are starting to
fall off the cadaver, will people start believing? Mobile networks Chief Sari
Baldauf and senior staffer Jukka Bergqvist, also of the networking unit, join
Matti Alahuhta, the company's head of
strategy.
Nokia is spinning this as
natural progression. But wait...Matti and Sari were supposedly leading the pack
for CEO Jormo Ollila's job when he steps down in 2006. Leave on the verge of
possibly getting The Big Chair? Stretches credulity a bit.
Posted at 10:57 PM
Tue - November 30, 2004
Memo to Tom Ridge: Thanks, really, but fix the bloody visa approval
problem. Now.
Inside the Bunker in the Silicon
Hutong
Let me start by complimenting the dedicated men
and women in the various divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Created out of nothing 36 months ago, these people have a thankless, almost
impossible task: building a wall around the U.S.A. to keep terrorists out.
But the denial
by the Immigration authorities under the DHS of visas to 3 key members of a
Chinese delegation to a WLAN conference is just plain wrong. We could
dismiss this as a horrible mistake perpetrated by well-meaning but
over-enthusiastic consular officials. But I think that might be a bit
simplistic.
This incident is not
isolated: it is the latest in a long string of visa denials to Chinese nationals
that is gradually sapping the ability of U.S. companies to do business in China.
The visibility of this mistake makes it clear that something is fundamentally
broken in the system that governs visa applications and processes, and that
needs to be fixed. NOW.
What's at
stake? Well, let's look at this one incident.
Getting the Chinese to the table to
participate in the creation of global standards around wireless LANs (rather
than creating needlessly disruptive national standards that gratuitously
deviated from global norms) required over a year of concerted effort and letters
of protest from Colin Powell and the White House. China's agreement last April
to play by global rules was a huge step forward for China and for the industry -
and was a huge boost to Intel, Cisco, and a dozen U.S.
companies.
Now that we have these guys
at the table, we stop them at the door and say "sorry. Can't come in. No reason
given."
From here in the Hutong, it
looks a lot like the Americans are playing games.
Political meddling in regulatory and
administrative processes is a bad M.O. for any government. That said, I'm
delighted that I wasn't within the blast radius when Craig Barrett, John
Chambers, and Colin Powell heard about this. These men are going to be
sharpening their knives for some poor bureaucrat's
head.
But the problem is not bad
aparatchiks:
it's lousy procedure. And we American businessmen have stood by far too long and
accepted the "tough s***" attitude Immigration officials adopt when we try to
explain that they are shooting American business in the kneecaps by doing
this.
Great job, DHS. But really - this
is a problem. Fix it before the backlash gets so huge it hampers your ability to
do your main job: protect Americans.
Posted at 10:03 PM
Fri - November 19, 2004
Richard Edelman tells PR people "blog on, dudes."
In the Hutong, trying not to
look...
Richard Edelman, of the eponymous Edelman PR
Worldwide, has gone on CNBC Asia and called on PR people to blog so they can
communicate to the medium.
What?
"Communicate to the medium?" Ya know, Richard, if you want to do a blog, great,
but at least come up with a reasonably intelligent sounding
rationale...
Posted at 08:49 AM
Wed - October 20, 2004
Television Powershift from Hollywood to Redmond? Somebody PLEASE wake up
Bill before he hurts himself...
Back in the Hutong
As a (what I thought) carefully controlled
reaction to the megalomaniacal
nonsense Bill Gates gave The
Hollywood Reporter about the future of TV, I
penned
this little sucker for
ChinaTechNews
to underscore that Bill's vision, even if
workable in the U.S.A. (and I have doubts about that), is a long way from prime
time in the World's Largest Television
Market.
Andrew Orlowski of
The Register
wrote a flat-out
brilliant piece that takes gates gently but firmly to task for his
delusions, and I
quote:
"But Gates' belief
in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom
threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As
Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear
assumptions.
Gates'
presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely
shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the
population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of
the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the
format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not
to click more.
But in
addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a
dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!",
there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He
thinks broadcasters are stupid,
too."
Assuming stupidity on the part of
a potential adversary is dangerous. And after reading both articles it was
pretty clear that Gates has sunk enough fingers in enough pies to be clearly
looking to dis-intermediate everyone in the industry between the content creator
and the content user. Which is fine - if you can find a better highway (a
two-way highway, no less) between the two sides. But it looks increasingly like
Microsoft is simply interested in building any highway, as long as the tolls go
to Redmond.
This is not the old days,
Bill. We're not going to sit back and let you steamroller us into sending larger
and larger chunks of our disposable income in your
direction.
Are we?
Posted at 03:25 PM
Business Week Prognosticates, Dvorak Preens.
FedEx: How Green is my China?
Wow. WSJ agrees with Silicon Hutong about Big Oil
China Radio International Gets Greedy; Branson says "Sod Off"
Nokia's Advertising
Sony's Makeover
Getting Real with TV Reform in China
China: Want to Succeed in WTO? Get Off the Defensive
China and the Final Frontier
The Future of TV in China
AOL in Deal to Bring Channel to China
Capitalism in China
Mmmm. The Three Represents. Good eating.
Foreign Firms Cautious of China Telecoms
China Unicom Leads CDMA
Video Game Wars: How Long Before the Chinese Catch Up
Headquarters
Silicon Hutong
Beijing
Silicon Hutong
Beijing
So the United States Air Force wants to take a big step toward retiring the $2
million pilots flying $100 million jets, replacing them with smart kids sitting
in air conditioned trailers outside of Las Vegas flying $4 million recon drones.
The pilot of the future is the video gamer of today. Technology changing air combat.
Now, how long before the PLA figures out they can stop buying Su-27s and Su-30s from the Russians at $34 million a pop, then deal with spares, then deal with the headaches they're having integrating them into the force, and start buying projectable power on the cheap?
The pilot of the future is the video gamer of today. Technology changing air combat.
Now, how long before the PLA figures out they can stop buying Su-27s and Su-30s from the Russians at $34 million a pop, then deal with spares, then deal with the headaches they're having integrating them into the force, and start buying projectable power on the cheap?
Posted at 09:11 PM
Spooky Moment
Hangover Recovery
Unit
Silicon Hutong Clinic
Beijing
Silicon Hutong Clinic
Beijing
Watching
The Devil's
Own on HBO Asia. There's
this one spooky moment when the Irish terrorist arrives in New York, and his
U.S. sympathizer is driving him over the Brooklyn Bridge. He looks at the World
Trade Center towers and says "and there it is."
Hair rises on back of neck.
Hair rises on back of neck.
Posted at 08:50 PM
Tue - March 8, 2005
Boeing Boss Allegedly Gets Caught with Pants Down. Party in Toulouse!
In the
Hutong
Beneath the Departure Path for PEK Rwy 18R
Beneath the Departure Path for PEK Rwy 18R
Harry Stonecipher's abrupt departure from Boeing -
and its salacious cause - will certainly garner much
mirth around the world, but nowhere more so than Airbus headquarters in
Toulouse.
The French and Germans must be laughing their heads off. The Germans are laughing because they have learned the hard way the cost of relieving a competent commander in the middle of a fight, regardless of his peccadilloes.
And of course, the French are laughing because if one of them had done what Stonecipher is accused of doing, they'd expect a promotion or a raise.
Stonecipher won't be missed by the Boeing rank and file, but you know what? It's nice if the troops like you, but I would worry about a leader eager to curry favor with the troops.
I just hope they replace him, and soon. Airbus has had a ridiculously good romp, and it's been by default - Boeing achieved almost nothing of note in the 14-year long dry spell twixt the 777 and the 787 , while Airbus has done what Boeing used to be quite good at - mixing experience, leading technology, and deep customer relations to create great products.
It's high time Boeing had a leader who can brilliantly synthesize all of that great raw material into the aerospace powerhouse the company should be. Clearly, ol' Harry (whose previous claim to fame as CEO was to sell McDonnell-Douglas to Boeing) was not the guy.
Over the next 20 years, China is collectively sitting atop orders for 2,300 or so aircraft, equivalent to about six years production of either Boeing or Airbus. By fundamentally rejecting Russian designs, the government and the airlines are essentially saying they want more technologically robust aircraft. While both Airbus and Boeing will both get orders, somebody will own the larger chunk of the purchases. The only way Boeing will do that is by being perceived as the stronger player. And right now, from Beijing, Boeing not only looks weak, it looks lame.
The French and Germans must be laughing their heads off. The Germans are laughing because they have learned the hard way the cost of relieving a competent commander in the middle of a fight, regardless of his peccadilloes.
And of course, the French are laughing because if one of them had done what Stonecipher is accused of doing, they'd expect a promotion or a raise.
Stonecipher won't be missed by the Boeing rank and file, but you know what? It's nice if the troops like you, but I would worry about a leader eager to curry favor with the troops.
I just hope they replace him, and soon. Airbus has had a ridiculously good romp, and it's been by default - Boeing achieved almost nothing of note in the 14-year long dry spell twixt the 777 and the 787 , while Airbus has done what Boeing used to be quite good at - mixing experience, leading technology, and deep customer relations to create great products.
It's high time Boeing had a leader who can brilliantly synthesize all of that great raw material into the aerospace powerhouse the company should be. Clearly, ol' Harry (whose previous claim to fame as CEO was to sell McDonnell-Douglas to Boeing) was not the guy.
Over the next 20 years, China is collectively sitting atop orders for 2,300 or so aircraft, equivalent to about six years production of either Boeing or Airbus. By fundamentally rejecting Russian designs, the government and the airlines are essentially saying they want more technologically robust aircraft. While both Airbus and Boeing will both get orders, somebody will own the larger chunk of the purchases. The only way Boeing will do that is by being perceived as the stronger player. And right now, from Beijing, Boeing not only looks weak, it looks lame.
Posted at 03:47 PM
Sun - March 6, 2005
China, India, and Technology
In the Hutong
The India vs. China thing has become something of
a fetish among global executives, business analysts, government officials, and
think tankers, and now The Economist.
As a strategic issue, the India/China
issue is totally irrelevant. Any senior executive anywhere in the world who is
still
saying "hmm, should we go with China or India" is out of touch and a danger to
his company and its shareholders.
India
is given far too much credit for its IT industry, which is a good thing for the
country, no doubt, but is not the answer to the country's ills. It makes up a
mere 4% of GDP, and is going to find its long term upside as a mass employer
sorely limited as the country runs out of trained graduates. Worse, as we are
discovering worldwide, the IT revolution has two distinct phases. In the first,
a company creates an industry, first in assembling machines, then designing
them, then providing services, then writing software, then designing the whole
deal.
In the second, traditional
industries in agriculture, manufacturing, and services begin to absorb
increasingly sophisticated doses of IT, radically transforming the industry and
raising its productivity and profitability. This is where the big payoff comes -
when the entire industry is fundamentally
changed.
With its English-speaking
masses, its technical universities, and a global community of Indian engineers,
the company will certainly do well with the
first.
But India's challenge is
education beyond this elite, because that is where the nation struggles, and its
lack of inward foreign direct investment. Without the inward FDI, traditional
industries find making the major investments to transform and modernize their
businesses a major, often insurmountable challenge. And without a large pool of
labor with an elementary and secondary education, where is the workforce
trainable to operate in those modern transformed enterprises? Literacy runs at
57% (vs. China's 91%), and an appalling 45% of adult women are functionally illiterate
in India.
So India is set to hit a
wall in this second phase unless it begins redressing some fundamental problems.
Building hardware, writing software, and even creating services will only absorb
part of the population and make a few sectors globally competitive. China, on
the other hand, is already starting to transform its
industries.
That can all change in a
heartbeat. All India needs to do is begin taking a chainsaw to the license raj, and it will suddenly look like a
great bet - even if companies have to provide their own workers with basic
instruction. I expect it will happen, but not
soon.
BTW - check out Silicon Hutong's
India soulmate - The Sepia Mutiny.
Posted at 01:29 AM
Sun - February 27, 2005
Nokia's Grand Strategy: China. Silicon Hutong's Verdict: Ollila's
Waterloo
In the Silicon Hutong Command Post,
Shunyi
Jorma Olilla, prancing around China in a fit of
self congratulation that Nokia has managed to be in business in China for 20
years (and please explain why anyone NOT on Nokia's payroll should care?), is
promising his shareholders two
things:
1. No more price cuts this
year; and
2. Sales growth in China is
the key to the company's
future.
There's a ton of coverage on
this, a good example being Alan McEwen's piece in the Scotsman, one of the
few article I've seen that is not either a) a dutiful reproduction of Nokia's
press release, or b) a re-print of the Reuters wire
story.
There are a couple of problems
with both parts of that
strategy.
No More Price Cuts?
Check Mr. Ollila's Medications,
Please
Jorma admits that price
reductions in the industry are going to continue driven by increased
competition. He maintains that Nokia will not reduce prices
and yet will grow 25% faster than the
rest of the industry because Nokia will be
focusing on high-end phones.
That's
fine, but how does that explain how Nokia will grow faster than the rest of the
industry and grow market share without matching price cuts at the low-end and
mid-range, where the majority of sales take place?
Answer: it doesn't. Nokia will still
be in a price war at the low end, because at that level consumers are focused on
price, and if Nokia won't match falling prices, it won't sell. Their only hope
at the low end is market share domination that will allow them to squeeze
competitors through superior economies of scale. Want to maintain market share?
Cut your price.
Pressure at the
mid-range won't be quite as intense, but let's understand something: there is
little evidence to suggest that consumers are going to stop looking for the best
combination of price and relevant features. While there is some brand premium in
this segment, it won't hold up if prices drop precipitously in this
region.
China is the Future? Be
Afraid...
Nowhere in the world is
pricing pressure more intense than in China. Local manufacturers - and there are
close to 20 of them now, not counting those doing exclusively contract assembly
- continue to drive prices down. And they're not doing it for fun - they're
doing it because they have to.
Which
brings us to the core of Nokia's strategy to drive growth in China - break out
of the major cities and into the lower-tier cities and rural areas. These are
regions where the competition is strongest, where the price pressure is the
highest, and where Nokia and its global pedigree mean the least. Taking market
share in these regions is going to be about cutting
price.
The news gets worse. Prices in
the mid- and upper range are dropping rapidly as well, and China's carriers are
starting to pressure Nokia for special treatment, like coming up with exclusive models with distinct software and
hardware. Interesting as this sounds, this will increase Nokia's costs, and you
can bet the operators will be cutting the same deals with everyone, neutralizing
the marginal value of the deal and squeezing profits even further in the
critical mid-range.
China's dirty
little secret is how bloody small the high-end is. So don't count on the high
end.
Expect 3G to be the savior for
margins? Think again. Most experts see the potential of a
$50 retail price on a color W-CDMA phone within
12-18 months, driven in no small part by Chinese manufacturers, and possibly
even a sub-$30 GSM phone in China.
So
Nokia doesn't want to cut prices, but it's primary growth in its most important
market is going to require extreme pricing
competition.
Hello...?
This
kind of unconscionable denial is why Nokia's troubles are just beginning, and
will not end until the company wakes up, discards Ollila, and navigates itself
onto a course that is more in keeping with the current realities of the
industry, rather than those of ten years ago.
Posted at 02:33 PM
Mon - February 14, 2005
Games in for a Rough Ride in China
In The Hutong,
Supercomputing
The Chinese government's recently issued list of
50 banned video and computer games is going to
grow, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of more aggressive moves against
this genre of entertainment.
The
problem with games goes beyond this current banning, which primarily content and
anti-piracy focused. (I mean, come on - anybody who has played Command &
Conquer: Generals can understand why the content nannies in the Beijing
government might have a tiny problem with
it.)
The real problem is that there is
a growing sentiment in the market among parents, teachers, policymakers, and
journalists that games are little more than an addictive, anti-social form of
time wastage, like gambling without the cash, and that they have no redeeming
social value. This sort of perception makes it difficult to build any kind of
opposition to these sorts of administrative action, and they make the lives of
game manufacturers uncomfortable.
The
industry can either say "hey - parents, teachers, and policymakers: bite my game
controller," and deal with the results of that kind of approach, or they can
take a more proactive approach to improve the image of gaming among those
groups.
Guaranteed, if the industry
DOESN'T do anything, these problems will grow. Soon.
You read it here first.
Posted at 02:36 PM
Sat
- January 22, 2005
Digital Times 18 January 05
The PowerPoint Chamber, Swissotel
Beijing
Article in Korea's
Digital
Times from the 18th of January. Talking about
mobile comms in China. If anybody has a link to this, I'd prefer to run the link
rather than a photocopy of the
article.
Though I love the
mugshot.
Posted at 02:02 PM
Street Fighting in the Hutong
In the Bunker
Been out of it for a while. The book is starting
to take up lots of time. Some good news coming next week on a related
front.
Posted at 09:12 AM
Sun - December
5, 2004
NOK NOK. Anybody home? More Empty Offices in the Glass House in
Espoo
In the Hutong, Looking Toward the
West
The executive suite in the Glass House is
starting to look like the Bush Cabinet: the first team leaves, the second team
is left to carry the can. Here's the
Reuters story filed late
Friday.
Nokia is a walking corpse. You
heard it on the Silicon Hutong over a year ago. Now that chunks are starting to
fall off the cadaver, will people start believing? Mobile networks Chief Sari
Baldauf and senior staffer Jukka Bergqvist, also of the networking unit, join
Matti Alahuhta, the company's head of
strategy.
Nokia is spinning this as
natural progression. But wait...Matti and Sari were supposedly leading the pack
for CEO Jormo Ollila's job when he steps down in 2006. Leave on the verge of
possibly getting The Big Chair? Stretches credulity a bit.
Posted at 10:57 PM
Tue - November 30, 2004
Memo to Tom Ridge: Thanks, really, but fix the bloody visa approval
problem. Now.
Inside the Bunker in the Silicon
Hutong
Let me start by complimenting the dedicated men
and women in the various divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Created out of nothing 36 months ago, these people have a thankless, almost
impossible task: building a wall around the U.S.A. to keep terrorists out.
But the denial
by the Immigration authorities under the DHS of visas to 3 key members of a
Chinese delegation to a WLAN conference is just plain wrong. We could
dismiss this as a horrible mistake perpetrated by well-meaning but
over-enthusiastic consular officials. But I think that might be a bit
simplistic.
This incident is not
isolated: it is the latest in a long string of visa denials to Chinese nationals
that is gradually sapping the ability of U.S. companies to do business in China.
The visibility of this mistake makes it clear that something is fundamentally
broken in the system that governs visa applications and processes, and that
needs to be fixed. NOW.
What's at
stake? Well, let's look at this one incident.
Getting the Chinese to the table to
participate in the creation of global standards around wireless LANs (rather
than creating needlessly disruptive national standards that gratuitously
deviated from global norms) required over a year of concerted effort and letters
of protest from Colin Powell and the White House. China's agreement last April
to play by global rules was a huge step forward for China and for the industry -
and was a huge boost to Intel, Cisco, and a dozen U.S.
companies.
Now that we have these guys
at the table, we stop them at the door and say "sorry. Can't come in. No reason
given."
From here in the Hutong, it
looks a lot like the Americans are playing games.
Political meddling in regulatory and
administrative processes is a bad M.O. for any government. That said, I'm
delighted that I wasn't within the blast radius when Craig Barrett, John
Chambers, and Colin Powell heard about this. These men are going to be
sharpening their knives for some poor bureaucrat's
head.
But the problem is not bad
aparatchiks:
it's lousy procedure. And we American businessmen have stood by far too long and
accepted the "tough s***" attitude Immigration officials adopt when we try to
explain that they are shooting American business in the kneecaps by doing
this.
Great job, DHS. But really - this
is a problem. Fix it before the backlash gets so huge it hampers your ability to
do your main job: protect Americans.
Posted at 10:03 PM
Fri - November 19, 2004
Richard Edelman tells PR people "blog on, dudes."
In the Hutong, trying not to
look...
Richard Edelman, of the eponymous Edelman PR
Worldwide, has gone on CNBC Asia and called on PR people to blog so they can
communicate to the medium.
What?
"Communicate to the medium?" Ya know, Richard, if you want to do a blog, great,
but at least come up with a reasonably intelligent sounding
rationale...
Posted at 08:49 AM
Wed - October 20, 2004
Television Powershift from Hollywood to Redmond? Somebody PLEASE wake up
Bill before he hurts himself...
Back in the Hutong
As a (what I thought) carefully controlled
reaction to the megalomaniacal
nonsense Bill Gates gave The
Hollywood Reporter about the future of TV, I
penned
this little sucker for
ChinaTechNews
to underscore that Bill's vision, even if
workable in the U.S.A. (and I have doubts about that), is a long way from prime
time in the World's Largest Television
Market.
Andrew Orlowski of
The Register
wrote a flat-out
brilliant piece that takes gates gently but firmly to task for his
delusions, and I
quote:
"But Gates' belief
in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom
threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As
Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear
assumptions.
Gates'
presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely
shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the
population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of
the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the
format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not
to click more.
But in
addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a
dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!",
there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He
thinks broadcasters are stupid,
too."
Assuming stupidity on the part of
a potential adversary is dangerous. And after reading both articles it was
pretty clear that Gates has sunk enough fingers in enough pies to be clearly
looking to dis-intermediate everyone in the industry between the content creator
and the content user. Which is fine - if you can find a better highway (a
two-way highway, no less) between the two sides. But it looks increasingly like
Microsoft is simply interested in building any highway, as long as the tolls go
to Redmond.
This is not the old days,
Bill. We're not going to sit back and let you steamroller us into sending larger
and larger chunks of our disposable income in your
direction.
Are we?
Posted at 03:25 PM
Business Week Prognosticates, Dvorak Preens.
FedEx: How Green is my China?
Wow. WSJ agrees with Silicon Hutong about Big Oil
China Radio International Gets Greedy; Branson says "Sod Off"
Nokia's Advertising
Sony's Makeover
Getting Real with TV Reform in China
China: Want to Succeed in WTO? Get Off the Defensive
China and the Final Frontier
The Future of TV in China
AOL in Deal to Bring Channel to China
Capitalism in China
Mmmm. The Three Represents. Good eating.
Foreign Firms Cautious of China Telecoms
China Unicom Leads CDMA
China, India, and Technology
In the Hutong
The India vs. China thing has become something of
a fetish among global executives, business analysts, government officials, and
think tankers, and now The Economist.
As a strategic issue, the India/China issue is totally irrelevant. Any senior executive anywhere in the world who is still saying "hmm, should we go with China or India" is out of touch and a danger to his company and its shareholders.
India is given far too much credit for its IT industry, which is a good thing for the country, no doubt, but is not the answer to the country's ills. It makes up a mere 4% of GDP, and is going to find its long term upside as a mass employer sorely limited as the country runs out of trained graduates. Worse, as we are discovering worldwide, the IT revolution has two distinct phases. In the first, a company creates an industry, first in assembling machines, then designing them, then providing services, then writing software, then designing the whole deal.
In the second, traditional industries in agriculture, manufacturing, and services begin to absorb increasingly sophisticated doses of IT, radically transforming the industry and raising its productivity and profitability. This is where the big payoff comes - when the entire industry is fundamentally changed.
With its English-speaking masses, its technical universities, and a global community of Indian engineers, the company will certainly do well with the first.
But India's challenge is education beyond this elite, because that is where the nation struggles, and its lack of inward foreign direct investment. Without the inward FDI, traditional industries find making the major investments to transform and modernize their businesses a major, often insurmountable challenge. And without a large pool of labor with an elementary and secondary education, where is the workforce trainable to operate in those modern transformed enterprises? Literacy runs at 57% (vs. China's 91%), and an appalling 45% of adult women are functionally illiterate in India.
So India is set to hit a wall in this second phase unless it begins redressing some fundamental problems. Building hardware, writing software, and even creating services will only absorb part of the population and make a few sectors globally competitive. China, on the other hand, is already starting to transform its industries.
That can all change in a heartbeat. All India needs to do is begin taking a chainsaw to the license raj, and it will suddenly look like a great bet - even if companies have to provide their own workers with basic instruction. I expect it will happen, but not soon.
BTW - check out Silicon Hutong's India soulmate - The Sepia Mutiny.
As a strategic issue, the India/China issue is totally irrelevant. Any senior executive anywhere in the world who is still saying "hmm, should we go with China or India" is out of touch and a danger to his company and its shareholders.
India is given far too much credit for its IT industry, which is a good thing for the country, no doubt, but is not the answer to the country's ills. It makes up a mere 4% of GDP, and is going to find its long term upside as a mass employer sorely limited as the country runs out of trained graduates. Worse, as we are discovering worldwide, the IT revolution has two distinct phases. In the first, a company creates an industry, first in assembling machines, then designing them, then providing services, then writing software, then designing the whole deal.
In the second, traditional industries in agriculture, manufacturing, and services begin to absorb increasingly sophisticated doses of IT, radically transforming the industry and raising its productivity and profitability. This is where the big payoff comes - when the entire industry is fundamentally changed.
With its English-speaking masses, its technical universities, and a global community of Indian engineers, the company will certainly do well with the first.
But India's challenge is education beyond this elite, because that is where the nation struggles, and its lack of inward foreign direct investment. Without the inward FDI, traditional industries find making the major investments to transform and modernize their businesses a major, often insurmountable challenge. And without a large pool of labor with an elementary and secondary education, where is the workforce trainable to operate in those modern transformed enterprises? Literacy runs at 57% (vs. China's 91%), and an appalling 45% of adult women are functionally illiterate in India.
So India is set to hit a wall in this second phase unless it begins redressing some fundamental problems. Building hardware, writing software, and even creating services will only absorb part of the population and make a few sectors globally competitive. China, on the other hand, is already starting to transform its industries.
That can all change in a heartbeat. All India needs to do is begin taking a chainsaw to the license raj, and it will suddenly look like a great bet - even if companies have to provide their own workers with basic instruction. I expect it will happen, but not soon.
BTW - check out Silicon Hutong's India soulmate - The Sepia Mutiny.
Posted at 01:29 AM
Sun - February 27, 2005
Nokia's Grand Strategy: China. Silicon Hutong's Verdict: Ollila's
Waterloo
In the Silicon Hutong Command Post,
Shunyi
Jorma Olilla, prancing around China in a fit of
self congratulation that Nokia has managed to be in business in China for 20
years (and please explain why anyone NOT on Nokia's payroll should care?), is
promising his shareholders two
things:
1. No more price cuts this
year; and
2. Sales growth in China is
the key to the company's
future.
There's a ton of coverage on
this, a good example being Alan McEwen's piece in the Scotsman, one of the
few article I've seen that is not either a) a dutiful reproduction of Nokia's
press release, or b) a re-print of the Reuters wire
story.
There are a couple of problems
with both parts of that
strategy.
No More Price Cuts?
Check Mr. Ollila's Medications,
Please
Jorma admits that price
reductions in the industry are going to continue driven by increased
competition. He maintains that Nokia will not reduce prices
and yet will grow 25% faster than the
rest of the industry because Nokia will be
focusing on high-end phones.
That's
fine, but how does that explain how Nokia will grow faster than the rest of the
industry and grow market share without matching price cuts at the low-end and
mid-range, where the majority of sales take place?
Answer: it doesn't. Nokia will still
be in a price war at the low end, because at that level consumers are focused on
price, and if Nokia won't match falling prices, it won't sell. Their only hope
at the low end is market share domination that will allow them to squeeze
competitors through superior economies of scale. Want to maintain market share?
Cut your price.
Pressure at the
mid-range won't be quite as intense, but let's understand something: there is
little evidence to suggest that consumers are going to stop looking for the best
combination of price and relevant features. While there is some brand premium in
this segment, it won't hold up if prices drop precipitously in this
region.
China is the Future? Be
Afraid...
Nowhere in the world is
pricing pressure more intense than in China. Local manufacturers - and there are
close to 20 of them now, not counting those doing exclusively contract assembly
- continue to drive prices down. And they're not doing it for fun - they're
doing it because they have to.
Which
brings us to the core of Nokia's strategy to drive growth in China - break out
of the major cities and into the lower-tier cities and rural areas. These are
regions where the competition is strongest, where the price pressure is the
highest, and where Nokia and its global pedigree mean the least. Taking market
share in these regions is going to be about cutting
price.
The news gets worse. Prices in
the mid- and upper range are dropping rapidly as well, and China's carriers are
starting to pressure Nokia for special treatment, like coming up with exclusive models with distinct software and
hardware. Interesting as this sounds, this will increase Nokia's costs, and you
can bet the operators will be cutting the same deals with everyone, neutralizing
the marginal value of the deal and squeezing profits even further in the
critical mid-range.
China's dirty
little secret is how bloody small the high-end is. So don't count on the high
end.
Expect 3G to be the savior for
margins? Think again. Most experts see the potential of a
$50 retail price on a color W-CDMA phone within
12-18 months, driven in no small part by Chinese manufacturers, and possibly
even a sub-$30 GSM phone in China.
So
Nokia doesn't want to cut prices, but it's primary growth in its most important
market is going to require extreme pricing
competition.
Hello...?
This
kind of unconscionable denial is why Nokia's troubles are just beginning, and
will not end until the company wakes up, discards Ollila, and navigates itself
onto a course that is more in keeping with the current realities of the
industry, rather than those of ten years ago.
Posted at 02:33 PM
Mon - February 14, 2005
Games in for a Rough Ride in China
In The Hutong,
Supercomputing
The Chinese government's recently issued list of
50 banned video and computer games is going to
grow, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of more aggressive moves against
this genre of entertainment.
The
problem with games goes beyond this current banning, which primarily content and
anti-piracy focused. (I mean, come on - anybody who has played Command &
Conquer: Generals can understand why the content nannies in the Beijing
government might have a tiny problem with
it.)
The real problem is that there is
a growing sentiment in the market among parents, teachers, policymakers, and
journalists that games are little more than an addictive, anti-social form of
time wastage, like gambling without the cash, and that they have no redeeming
social value. This sort of perception makes it difficult to build any kind of
opposition to these sorts of administrative action, and they make the lives of
game manufacturers uncomfortable.
The
industry can either say "hey - parents, teachers, and policymakers: bite my game
controller," and deal with the results of that kind of approach, or they can
take a more proactive approach to improve the image of gaming among those
groups.
Guaranteed, if the industry
DOESN'T do anything, these problems will grow. Soon.
You read it here first.
Posted at 02:36 PM
Sat
- January 22, 2005
Digital Times 18 January 05
The PowerPoint Chamber, Swissotel
Beijing
Article in Korea's
Digital
Times from the 18th of January. Talking about
mobile comms in China. If anybody has a link to this, I'd prefer to run the link
rather than a photocopy of the
article.
Though I love the
mugshot.
Posted at 02:02 PM
Street Fighting in the Hutong
In the Bunker
Been out of it for a while. The book is starting
to take up lots of time. Some good news coming next week on a related
front.
Posted at 09:12 AM
Sun - December
5, 2004
NOK NOK. Anybody home? More Empty Offices in the Glass House in
Espoo
In the Hutong, Looking Toward the
West
The executive suite in the Glass House is
starting to look like the Bush Cabinet: the first team leaves, the second team
is left to carry the can. Here's the
Reuters story filed late
Friday.
Nokia is a walking corpse. You
heard it on the Silicon Hutong over a year ago. Now that chunks are starting to
fall off the cadaver, will people start believing? Mobile networks Chief Sari
Baldauf and senior staffer Jukka Bergqvist, also of the networking unit, join
Matti Alahuhta, the company's head of
strategy.
Nokia is spinning this as
natural progression. But wait...Matti and Sari were supposedly leading the pack
for CEO Jormo Ollila's job when he steps down in 2006. Leave on the verge of
possibly getting The Big Chair? Stretches credulity a bit.
Posted at 10:57 PM
Tue - November 30, 2004
Memo to Tom Ridge: Thanks, really, but fix the bloody visa approval
problem. Now.
Inside the Bunker in the Silicon
Hutong
Let me start by complimenting the dedicated men
and women in the various divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Created out of nothing 36 months ago, these people have a thankless, almost
impossible task: building a wall around the U.S.A. to keep terrorists out.
But the denial
by the Immigration authorities under the DHS of visas to 3 key members of a
Chinese delegation to a WLAN conference is just plain wrong. We could
dismiss this as a horrible mistake perpetrated by well-meaning but
over-enthusiastic consular officials. But I think that might be a bit
simplistic.
This incident is not
isolated: it is the latest in a long string of visa denials to Chinese nationals
that is gradually sapping the ability of U.S. companies to do business in China.
The visibility of this mistake makes it clear that something is fundamentally
broken in the system that governs visa applications and processes, and that
needs to be fixed. NOW.
What's at
stake? Well, let's look at this one incident.
Getting the Chinese to the table to
participate in the creation of global standards around wireless LANs (rather
than creating needlessly disruptive national standards that gratuitously
deviated from global norms) required over a year of concerted effort and letters
of protest from Colin Powell and the White House. China's agreement last April
to play by global rules was a huge step forward for China and for the industry -
and was a huge boost to Intel, Cisco, and a dozen U.S.
companies.
Now that we have these guys
at the table, we stop them at the door and say "sorry. Can't come in. No reason
given."
From here in the Hutong, it
looks a lot like the Americans are playing games.
Political meddling in regulatory and
administrative processes is a bad M.O. for any government. That said, I'm
delighted that I wasn't within the blast radius when Craig Barrett, John
Chambers, and Colin Powell heard about this. These men are going to be
sharpening their knives for some poor bureaucrat's
head.
But the problem is not bad
aparatchiks:
it's lousy procedure. And we American businessmen have stood by far too long and
accepted the "tough s***" attitude Immigration officials adopt when we try to
explain that they are shooting American business in the kneecaps by doing
this.
Great job, DHS. But really - this
is a problem. Fix it before the backlash gets so huge it hampers your ability to
do your main job: protect Americans.
Posted at 10:03 PM
Fri - November 19, 2004
Richard Edelman tells PR people "blog on, dudes."
In the Hutong, trying not to
look...
Richard Edelman, of the eponymous Edelman PR
Worldwide, has gone on CNBC Asia and called on PR people to blog so they can
communicate to the medium.
What?
"Communicate to the medium?" Ya know, Richard, if you want to do a blog, great,
but at least come up with a reasonably intelligent sounding
rationale...
Posted at 08:49 AM
Wed - October 20, 2004
Television Powershift from Hollywood to Redmond? Somebody PLEASE wake up
Bill before he hurts himself...
Back in the Hutong
As a (what I thought) carefully controlled
reaction to the megalomaniacal
nonsense Bill Gates gave The
Hollywood Reporter about the future of TV, I
penned
this little sucker for
ChinaTechNews
to underscore that Bill's vision, even if
workable in the U.S.A. (and I have doubts about that), is a long way from prime
time in the World's Largest Television
Market.
Andrew Orlowski of
The Register
wrote a flat-out
brilliant piece that takes gates gently but firmly to task for his
delusions, and I
quote:
"But Gates' belief
in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom
threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As
Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear
assumptions.
Gates'
presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely
shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the
population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of
the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the
format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not
to click more.
But in
addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a
dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!",
there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He
thinks broadcasters are stupid,
too."
Assuming stupidity on the part of
a potential adversary is dangerous. And after reading both articles it was
pretty clear that Gates has sunk enough fingers in enough pies to be clearly
looking to dis-intermediate everyone in the industry between the content creator
and the content user. Which is fine - if you can find a better highway (a
two-way highway, no less) between the two sides. But it looks increasingly like
Microsoft is simply interested in building any highway, as long as the tolls go
to Redmond.
This is not the old days,
Bill. We're not going to sit back and let you steamroller us into sending larger
and larger chunks of our disposable income in your
direction.
Are we?
Posted at 03:25 PM
Business Week Prognosticates, Dvorak Preens.
FedEx: How Green is my China?
Wow. WSJ agrees with Silicon Hutong about Big Oil
China Radio International Gets Greedy; Branson says "Sod Off"
Nokia's Advertising
Sony's Makeover
Getting Real with TV Reform in China
China: Want to Succeed in WTO? Get Off the Defensive
China and the Final Frontier
The Future of TV in China
AOL in Deal to Bring Channel to China
Capitalism in China
Mmmm. The Three Represents. Good eating.
Foreign Firms Cautious of China Telecoms
China Unicom Leads CDMA
Nokia's Grand Strategy: China. Silicon Hutong's Verdict: Ollila's Waterloo
In the Silicon Hutong Command Post,
Shunyi
Jorma Olilla, prancing around China in a fit of
self congratulation that Nokia has managed to be in business in China for 20
years (and please explain why anyone NOT on Nokia's payroll should care?), is
promising his shareholders two
things:
1. No more price cuts this year; and
2. Sales growth in China is the key to the company's future.
There's a ton of coverage on this, a good example being Alan McEwen's piece in the Scotsman, one of the few article I've seen that is not either a) a dutiful reproduction of Nokia's press release, or b) a re-print of the Reuters wire story.
There are a couple of problems with both parts of that strategy.
No More Price Cuts? Check Mr. Ollila's Medications, Please
Jorma admits that price reductions in the industry are going to continue driven by increased competition. He maintains that Nokia will not reduce prices and yet will grow 25% faster than the rest of the industry because Nokia will be focusing on high-end phones.
That's fine, but how does that explain how Nokia will grow faster than the rest of the industry and grow market share without matching price cuts at the low-end and mid-range, where the majority of sales take place?
Answer: it doesn't. Nokia will still be in a price war at the low end, because at that level consumers are focused on price, and if Nokia won't match falling prices, it won't sell. Their only hope at the low end is market share domination that will allow them to squeeze competitors through superior economies of scale. Want to maintain market share? Cut your price.
Pressure at the mid-range won't be quite as intense, but let's understand something: there is little evidence to suggest that consumers are going to stop looking for the best combination of price and relevant features. While there is some brand premium in this segment, it won't hold up if prices drop precipitously in this region.
China is the Future? Be Afraid...
Nowhere in the world is pricing pressure more intense than in China. Local manufacturers - and there are close to 20 of them now, not counting those doing exclusively contract assembly - continue to drive prices down. And they're not doing it for fun - they're doing it because they have to.
Which brings us to the core of Nokia's strategy to drive growth in China - break out of the major cities and into the lower-tier cities and rural areas. These are regions where the competition is strongest, where the price pressure is the highest, and where Nokia and its global pedigree mean the least. Taking market share in these regions is going to be about cutting price.
The news gets worse. Prices in the mid- and upper range are dropping rapidly as well, and China's carriers are starting to pressure Nokia for special treatment, like coming up with exclusive models with distinct software and hardware. Interesting as this sounds, this will increase Nokia's costs, and you can bet the operators will be cutting the same deals with everyone, neutralizing the marginal value of the deal and squeezing profits even further in the critical mid-range.
China's dirty little secret is how bloody small the high-end is. So don't count on the high end.
Expect 3G to be the savior for margins? Think again. Most experts see the potential of a $50 retail price on a color W-CDMA phone within 12-18 months, driven in no small part by Chinese manufacturers, and possibly even a sub-$30 GSM phone in China.
So Nokia doesn't want to cut prices, but it's primary growth in its most important market is going to require extreme pricing competition.
Hello...?
This kind of unconscionable denial is why Nokia's troubles are just beginning, and will not end until the company wakes up, discards Ollila, and navigates itself onto a course that is more in keeping with the current realities of the industry, rather than those of ten years ago.
1. No more price cuts this year; and
2. Sales growth in China is the key to the company's future.
There's a ton of coverage on this, a good example being Alan McEwen's piece in the Scotsman, one of the few article I've seen that is not either a) a dutiful reproduction of Nokia's press release, or b) a re-print of the Reuters wire story.
There are a couple of problems with both parts of that strategy.
No More Price Cuts? Check Mr. Ollila's Medications, Please
Jorma admits that price reductions in the industry are going to continue driven by increased competition. He maintains that Nokia will not reduce prices and yet will grow 25% faster than the rest of the industry because Nokia will be focusing on high-end phones.
That's fine, but how does that explain how Nokia will grow faster than the rest of the industry and grow market share without matching price cuts at the low-end and mid-range, where the majority of sales take place?
Answer: it doesn't. Nokia will still be in a price war at the low end, because at that level consumers are focused on price, and if Nokia won't match falling prices, it won't sell. Their only hope at the low end is market share domination that will allow them to squeeze competitors through superior economies of scale. Want to maintain market share? Cut your price.
Pressure at the mid-range won't be quite as intense, but let's understand something: there is little evidence to suggest that consumers are going to stop looking for the best combination of price and relevant features. While there is some brand premium in this segment, it won't hold up if prices drop precipitously in this region.
China is the Future? Be Afraid...
Nowhere in the world is pricing pressure more intense than in China. Local manufacturers - and there are close to 20 of them now, not counting those doing exclusively contract assembly - continue to drive prices down. And they're not doing it for fun - they're doing it because they have to.
Which brings us to the core of Nokia's strategy to drive growth in China - break out of the major cities and into the lower-tier cities and rural areas. These are regions where the competition is strongest, where the price pressure is the highest, and where Nokia and its global pedigree mean the least. Taking market share in these regions is going to be about cutting price.
The news gets worse. Prices in the mid- and upper range are dropping rapidly as well, and China's carriers are starting to pressure Nokia for special treatment, like coming up with exclusive models with distinct software and hardware. Interesting as this sounds, this will increase Nokia's costs, and you can bet the operators will be cutting the same deals with everyone, neutralizing the marginal value of the deal and squeezing profits even further in the critical mid-range.
China's dirty little secret is how bloody small the high-end is. So don't count on the high end.
Expect 3G to be the savior for margins? Think again. Most experts see the potential of a $50 retail price on a color W-CDMA phone within 12-18 months, driven in no small part by Chinese manufacturers, and possibly even a sub-$30 GSM phone in China.
So Nokia doesn't want to cut prices, but it's primary growth in its most important market is going to require extreme pricing competition.
Hello...?
This kind of unconscionable denial is why Nokia's troubles are just beginning, and will not end until the company wakes up, discards Ollila, and navigates itself onto a course that is more in keeping with the current realities of the industry, rather than those of ten years ago.
Posted at 02:33 PM
Mon - February 14, 2005
Games in for a Rough Ride in China
In The Hutong,
Supercomputing
The Chinese government's recently issued list of
50 banned video and computer games is going to
grow, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of more aggressive moves against
this genre of entertainment.
The problem with games goes beyond this current banning, which primarily content and anti-piracy focused. (I mean, come on - anybody who has played Command & Conquer: Generals can understand why the content nannies in the Beijing government might have a tiny problem with it.)
The real problem is that there is a growing sentiment in the market among parents, teachers, policymakers, and journalists that games are little more than an addictive, anti-social form of time wastage, like gambling without the cash, and that they have no redeeming social value. This sort of perception makes it difficult to build any kind of opposition to these sorts of administrative action, and they make the lives of game manufacturers uncomfortable.
The industry can either say "hey - parents, teachers, and policymakers: bite my game controller," and deal with the results of that kind of approach, or they can take a more proactive approach to improve the image of gaming among those groups.
Guaranteed, if the industry DOESN'T do anything, these problems will grow. Soon.
You read it here first.
The problem with games goes beyond this current banning, which primarily content and anti-piracy focused. (I mean, come on - anybody who has played Command & Conquer: Generals can understand why the content nannies in the Beijing government might have a tiny problem with it.)
The real problem is that there is a growing sentiment in the market among parents, teachers, policymakers, and journalists that games are little more than an addictive, anti-social form of time wastage, like gambling without the cash, and that they have no redeeming social value. This sort of perception makes it difficult to build any kind of opposition to these sorts of administrative action, and they make the lives of game manufacturers uncomfortable.
The industry can either say "hey - parents, teachers, and policymakers: bite my game controller," and deal with the results of that kind of approach, or they can take a more proactive approach to improve the image of gaming among those groups.
Guaranteed, if the industry DOESN'T do anything, these problems will grow. Soon.
You read it here first.
Posted at 02:36 PM
Sat
- January 22, 2005
Digital Times 18 January 05
The PowerPoint Chamber, Swissotel
Beijing
Article in Korea's
Digital
Times from the 18th of January. Talking about
mobile comms in China. If anybody has a link to this, I'd prefer to run the link
rather than a photocopy of the
article.
Though I love the
mugshot.
Posted at 02:02 PM
Street Fighting in the Hutong
In the Bunker
Been out of it for a while. The book is starting
to take up lots of time. Some good news coming next week on a related
front.
Posted at 09:12 AM
Sun - December
5, 2004
NOK NOK. Anybody home? More Empty Offices in the Glass House in
Espoo
In the Hutong, Looking Toward the
West
The executive suite in the Glass House is
starting to look like the Bush Cabinet: the first team leaves, the second team
is left to carry the can. Here's the
Reuters story filed late
Friday.
Nokia is a walking corpse. You
heard it on the Silicon Hutong over a year ago. Now that chunks are starting to
fall off the cadaver, will people start believing? Mobile networks Chief Sari
Baldauf and senior staffer Jukka Bergqvist, also of the networking unit, join
Matti Alahuhta, the company's head of
strategy.
Nokia is spinning this as
natural progression. But wait...Matti and Sari were supposedly leading the pack
for CEO Jormo Ollila's job when he steps down in 2006. Leave on the verge of
possibly getting The Big Chair? Stretches credulity a bit.
Posted at 10:57 PM
Tue - November 30, 2004
Memo to Tom Ridge: Thanks, really, but fix the bloody visa approval
problem. Now.
Inside the Bunker in the Silicon
Hutong
Let me start by complimenting the dedicated men
and women in the various divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Created out of nothing 36 months ago, these people have a thankless, almost
impossible task: building a wall around the U.S.A. to keep terrorists out.
But the denial
by the Immigration authorities under the DHS of visas to 3 key members of a
Chinese delegation to a WLAN conference is just plain wrong. We could
dismiss this as a horrible mistake perpetrated by well-meaning but
over-enthusiastic consular officials. But I think that might be a bit
simplistic.
This incident is not
isolated: it is the latest in a long string of visa denials to Chinese nationals
that is gradually sapping the ability of U.S. companies to do business in China.
The visibility of this mistake makes it clear that something is fundamentally
broken in the system that governs visa applications and processes, and that
needs to be fixed. NOW.
What's at
stake? Well, let's look at this one incident.
Getting the Chinese to the table to
participate in the creation of global standards around wireless LANs (rather
than creating needlessly disruptive national standards that gratuitously
deviated from global norms) required over a year of concerted effort and letters
of protest from Colin Powell and the White House. China's agreement last April
to play by global rules was a huge step forward for China and for the industry -
and was a huge boost to Intel, Cisco, and a dozen U.S.
companies.
Now that we have these guys
at the table, we stop them at the door and say "sorry. Can't come in. No reason
given."
From here in the Hutong, it
looks a lot like the Americans are playing games.
Political meddling in regulatory and
administrative processes is a bad M.O. for any government. That said, I'm
delighted that I wasn't within the blast radius when Craig Barrett, John
Chambers, and Colin Powell heard about this. These men are going to be
sharpening their knives for some poor bureaucrat's
head.
But the problem is not bad
aparatchiks:
it's lousy procedure. And we American businessmen have stood by far too long and
accepted the "tough s***" attitude Immigration officials adopt when we try to
explain that they are shooting American business in the kneecaps by doing
this.
Great job, DHS. But really - this
is a problem. Fix it before the backlash gets so huge it hampers your ability to
do your main job: protect Americans.
Posted at 10:03 PM
Fri - November 19, 2004
Richard Edelman tells PR people "blog on, dudes."
In the Hutong, trying not to
look...
Richard Edelman, of the eponymous Edelman PR
Worldwide, has gone on CNBC Asia and called on PR people to blog so they can
communicate to the medium.
What?
"Communicate to the medium?" Ya know, Richard, if you want to do a blog, great,
but at least come up with a reasonably intelligent sounding
rationale...
Posted at 08:49 AM
Wed - October 20, 2004
Television Powershift from Hollywood to Redmond? Somebody PLEASE wake up
Bill before he hurts himself...
Back in the Hutong
As a (what I thought) carefully controlled
reaction to the megalomaniacal
nonsense Bill Gates gave The
Hollywood Reporter about the future of TV, I
penned
this little sucker for
ChinaTechNews
to underscore that Bill's vision, even if
workable in the U.S.A. (and I have doubts about that), is a long way from prime
time in the World's Largest Television
Market.
Andrew Orlowski of
The Register
wrote a flat-out
brilliant piece that takes gates gently but firmly to task for his
delusions, and I
quote:
"But Gates' belief
in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom
threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As
Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear
assumptions.
Gates'
presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely
shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the
population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of
the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the
format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not
to click more.
But in
addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a
dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!",
there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He
thinks broadcasters are stupid,
too."
Assuming stupidity on the part of
a potential adversary is dangerous. And after reading both articles it was
pretty clear that Gates has sunk enough fingers in enough pies to be clearly
looking to dis-intermediate everyone in the industry between the content creator
and the content user. Which is fine - if you can find a better highway (a
two-way highway, no less) between the two sides. But it looks increasingly like
Microsoft is simply interested in building any highway, as long as the tolls go
to Redmond.
This is not the old days,
Bill. We're not going to sit back and let you steamroller us into sending larger
and larger chunks of our disposable income in your
direction.
Are we?
Posted at 03:25 PM
Business Week Prognosticates, Dvorak Preens.
FedEx: How Green is my China?
Wow. WSJ agrees with Silicon Hutong about Big Oil
China Radio International Gets Greedy; Branson says "Sod Off"
Nokia's Advertising
Sony's Makeover
Getting Real with TV Reform in China
China: Want to Succeed in WTO? Get Off the Defensive
China and the Final Frontier
The Future of TV in China
AOL in Deal to Bring Channel to China
Capitalism in China
Mmmm. The Three Represents. Good eating.
Foreign Firms Cautious of China Telecoms
China Unicom Leads CDMA
Digital Times 18 January 05
The PowerPoint Chamber, Swissotel
Beijing
Article in Korea's
Digital
Times from the 18th of January. Talking about
mobile comms in China. If anybody has a link to this, I'd prefer to run the link
rather than a photocopy of the
article.
Though I love the mugshot.
Though I love the mugshot.
Posted at 02:02 PM
Street Fighting in the Hutong
In the Bunker
Been out of it for a while. The book is starting
to take up lots of time. Some good news coming next week on a related
front.
Posted at 09:12 AM
Sun - December
5, 2004
NOK NOK. Anybody home? More Empty Offices in the Glass House in
Espoo
In the Hutong, Looking Toward the
West
The executive suite in the Glass House is
starting to look like the Bush Cabinet: the first team leaves, the second team
is left to carry the can. Here's the
Reuters story filed late
Friday.
Nokia is a walking corpse. You
heard it on the Silicon Hutong over a year ago. Now that chunks are starting to
fall off the cadaver, will people start believing? Mobile networks Chief Sari
Baldauf and senior staffer Jukka Bergqvist, also of the networking unit, join
Matti Alahuhta, the company's head of
strategy.
Nokia is spinning this as
natural progression. But wait...Matti and Sari were supposedly leading the pack
for CEO Jormo Ollila's job when he steps down in 2006. Leave on the verge of
possibly getting The Big Chair? Stretches credulity a bit.
Posted at 10:57 PM
Tue - November 30, 2004
Memo to Tom Ridge: Thanks, really, but fix the bloody visa approval
problem. Now.
Inside the Bunker in the Silicon
Hutong
Let me start by complimenting the dedicated men
and women in the various divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Created out of nothing 36 months ago, these people have a thankless, almost
impossible task: building a wall around the U.S.A. to keep terrorists out.
But the denial
by the Immigration authorities under the DHS of visas to 3 key members of a
Chinese delegation to a WLAN conference is just plain wrong. We could
dismiss this as a horrible mistake perpetrated by well-meaning but
over-enthusiastic consular officials. But I think that might be a bit
simplistic.
This incident is not
isolated: it is the latest in a long string of visa denials to Chinese nationals
that is gradually sapping the ability of U.S. companies to do business in China.
The visibility of this mistake makes it clear that something is fundamentally
broken in the system that governs visa applications and processes, and that
needs to be fixed. NOW.
What's at
stake? Well, let's look at this one incident.
Getting the Chinese to the table to
participate in the creation of global standards around wireless LANs (rather
than creating needlessly disruptive national standards that gratuitously
deviated from global norms) required over a year of concerted effort and letters
of protest from Colin Powell and the White House. China's agreement last April
to play by global rules was a huge step forward for China and for the industry -
and was a huge boost to Intel, Cisco, and a dozen U.S.
companies.
Now that we have these guys
at the table, we stop them at the door and say "sorry. Can't come in. No reason
given."
From here in the Hutong, it
looks a lot like the Americans are playing games.
Political meddling in regulatory and
administrative processes is a bad M.O. for any government. That said, I'm
delighted that I wasn't within the blast radius when Craig Barrett, John
Chambers, and Colin Powell heard about this. These men are going to be
sharpening their knives for some poor bureaucrat's
head.
But the problem is not bad
aparatchiks:
it's lousy procedure. And we American businessmen have stood by far too long and
accepted the "tough s***" attitude Immigration officials adopt when we try to
explain that they are shooting American business in the kneecaps by doing
this.
Great job, DHS. But really - this
is a problem. Fix it before the backlash gets so huge it hampers your ability to
do your main job: protect Americans.
Posted at 10:03 PM
Fri - November 19, 2004
Richard Edelman tells PR people "blog on, dudes."
In the Hutong, trying not to
look...
Richard Edelman, of the eponymous Edelman PR
Worldwide, has gone on CNBC Asia and called on PR people to blog so they can
communicate to the medium.
What?
"Communicate to the medium?" Ya know, Richard, if you want to do a blog, great,
but at least come up with a reasonably intelligent sounding
rationale...
Posted at 08:49 AM
Wed - October 20, 2004
Television Powershift from Hollywood to Redmond? Somebody PLEASE wake up
Bill before he hurts himself...
Back in the Hutong
As a (what I thought) carefully controlled
reaction to the megalomaniacal
nonsense Bill Gates gave The
Hollywood Reporter about the future of TV, I
penned
this little sucker for
ChinaTechNews
to underscore that Bill's vision, even if
workable in the U.S.A. (and I have doubts about that), is a long way from prime
time in the World's Largest Television
Market.
Andrew Orlowski of
The Register
wrote a flat-out
brilliant piece that takes gates gently but firmly to task for his
delusions, and I
quote:
"But Gates' belief
in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom
threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As
Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear
assumptions.
Gates'
presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely
shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the
population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of
the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the
format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not
to click more.
But in
addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a
dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!",
there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He
thinks broadcasters are stupid,
too."
Assuming stupidity on the part of
a potential adversary is dangerous. And after reading both articles it was
pretty clear that Gates has sunk enough fingers in enough pies to be clearly
looking to dis-intermediate everyone in the industry between the content creator
and the content user. Which is fine - if you can find a better highway (a
two-way highway, no less) between the two sides. But it looks increasingly like
Microsoft is simply interested in building any highway, as long as the tolls go
to Redmond.
This is not the old days,
Bill. We're not going to sit back and let you steamroller us into sending larger
and larger chunks of our disposable income in your
direction.
Are we?
Posted at 03:25 PM
Business Week Prognosticates, Dvorak Preens.
FedEx: How Green is my China?
Wow. WSJ agrees with Silicon Hutong about Big Oil
China Radio International Gets Greedy; Branson says "Sod Off"
Nokia's Advertising
Sony's Makeover
Getting Real with TV Reform in China
China: Want to Succeed in WTO? Get Off the Defensive
China and the Final Frontier
The Future of TV in China
AOL in Deal to Bring Channel to China
Capitalism in China
Mmmm. The Three Represents. Good eating.
Foreign Firms Cautious of China Telecoms
China Unicom Leads CDMA
NOK NOK. Anybody home? More Empty Offices in the Glass House in Espoo
In the Hutong, Looking Toward the
West
The executive suite in the Glass House is
starting to look like the Bush Cabinet: the first team leaves, the second team
is left to carry the can. Here's the
Reuters story filed late
Friday.
Nokia is a walking corpse. You heard it on the Silicon Hutong over a year ago. Now that chunks are starting to fall off the cadaver, will people start believing? Mobile networks Chief Sari Baldauf and senior staffer Jukka Bergqvist, also of the networking unit, join Matti Alahuhta, the company's head of strategy.
Nokia is spinning this as natural progression. But wait...Matti and Sari were supposedly leading the pack for CEO Jormo Ollila's job when he steps down in 2006. Leave on the verge of possibly getting The Big Chair? Stretches credulity a bit.
Nokia is a walking corpse. You heard it on the Silicon Hutong over a year ago. Now that chunks are starting to fall off the cadaver, will people start believing? Mobile networks Chief Sari Baldauf and senior staffer Jukka Bergqvist, also of the networking unit, join Matti Alahuhta, the company's head of strategy.
Nokia is spinning this as natural progression. But wait...Matti and Sari were supposedly leading the pack for CEO Jormo Ollila's job when he steps down in 2006. Leave on the verge of possibly getting The Big Chair? Stretches credulity a bit.
Posted at 10:57 PM
Tue - November 30, 2004
Memo to Tom Ridge: Thanks, really, but fix the bloody visa approval problem. Now.
Inside the Bunker in the Silicon
Hutong
Let me start by complimenting the dedicated men
and women in the various divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Created out of nothing 36 months ago, these people have a thankless, almost
impossible task: building a wall around the U.S.A. to keep terrorists out.
But the denial by the Immigration authorities under the DHS of visas to 3 key members of a Chinese delegation to a WLAN conference is just plain wrong. We could dismiss this as a horrible mistake perpetrated by well-meaning but over-enthusiastic consular officials. But I think that might be a bit simplistic.
This incident is not isolated: it is the latest in a long string of visa denials to Chinese nationals that is gradually sapping the ability of U.S. companies to do business in China. The visibility of this mistake makes it clear that something is fundamentally broken in the system that governs visa applications and processes, and that needs to be fixed. NOW.
What's at stake? Well, let's look at this one incident.
Getting the Chinese to the table to participate in the creation of global standards around wireless LANs (rather than creating needlessly disruptive national standards that gratuitously deviated from global norms) required over a year of concerted effort and letters of protest from Colin Powell and the White House. China's agreement last April to play by global rules was a huge step forward for China and for the industry - and was a huge boost to Intel, Cisco, and a dozen U.S. companies.
Now that we have these guys at the table, we stop them at the door and say "sorry. Can't come in. No reason given."
From here in the Hutong, it looks a lot like the Americans are playing games.
Political meddling in regulatory and administrative processes is a bad M.O. for any government. That said, I'm delighted that I wasn't within the blast radius when Craig Barrett, John Chambers, and Colin Powell heard about this. These men are going to be sharpening their knives for some poor bureaucrat's head.
But the problem is not bad aparatchiks: it's lousy procedure. And we American businessmen have stood by far too long and accepted the "tough s***" attitude Immigration officials adopt when we try to explain that they are shooting American business in the kneecaps by doing this.
Great job, DHS. But really - this is a problem. Fix it before the backlash gets so huge it hampers your ability to do your main job: protect Americans.
But the denial by the Immigration authorities under the DHS of visas to 3 key members of a Chinese delegation to a WLAN conference is just plain wrong. We could dismiss this as a horrible mistake perpetrated by well-meaning but over-enthusiastic consular officials. But I think that might be a bit simplistic.
This incident is not isolated: it is the latest in a long string of visa denials to Chinese nationals that is gradually sapping the ability of U.S. companies to do business in China. The visibility of this mistake makes it clear that something is fundamentally broken in the system that governs visa applications and processes, and that needs to be fixed. NOW.
What's at stake? Well, let's look at this one incident.
Getting the Chinese to the table to participate in the creation of global standards around wireless LANs (rather than creating needlessly disruptive national standards that gratuitously deviated from global norms) required over a year of concerted effort and letters of protest from Colin Powell and the White House. China's agreement last April to play by global rules was a huge step forward for China and for the industry - and was a huge boost to Intel, Cisco, and a dozen U.S. companies.
Now that we have these guys at the table, we stop them at the door and say "sorry. Can't come in. No reason given."
From here in the Hutong, it looks a lot like the Americans are playing games.
Political meddling in regulatory and administrative processes is a bad M.O. for any government. That said, I'm delighted that I wasn't within the blast radius when Craig Barrett, John Chambers, and Colin Powell heard about this. These men are going to be sharpening their knives for some poor bureaucrat's head.
But the problem is not bad aparatchiks: it's lousy procedure. And we American businessmen have stood by far too long and accepted the "tough s***" attitude Immigration officials adopt when we try to explain that they are shooting American business in the kneecaps by doing this.
Great job, DHS. But really - this is a problem. Fix it before the backlash gets so huge it hampers your ability to do your main job: protect Americans.
Posted at 10:03 PM
Fri - November 19, 2004
Richard Edelman tells PR people "blog on, dudes."
In the Hutong, trying not to
look...
Richard Edelman, of the eponymous Edelman PR
Worldwide, has gone on CNBC Asia and called on PR people to blog so they can
communicate to the medium.
What? "Communicate to the medium?" Ya know, Richard, if you want to do a blog, great, but at least come up with a reasonably intelligent sounding rationale...
What? "Communicate to the medium?" Ya know, Richard, if you want to do a blog, great, but at least come up with a reasonably intelligent sounding rationale...
Posted at 08:49 AM
Wed - October 20, 2004
Television Powershift from Hollywood to Redmond? Somebody PLEASE wake up Bill before he hurts himself...
Back in the Hutong
As a (what I thought) carefully controlled
reaction to the megalomaniacal
nonsense Bill Gates gave The
Hollywood Reporter about the future of TV, I
penned
this little sucker for
ChinaTechNews
to underscore that Bill's vision, even if
workable in the U.S.A. (and I have doubts about that), is a long way from prime
time in the World's Largest Television
Market.
Andrew Orlowski of The Register wrote a flat-out brilliant piece that takes gates gently but firmly to task for his delusions, and I quote:
"But Gates' belief in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear assumptions.
Gates' presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not to click more.
But in addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!", there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He thinks broadcasters are stupid, too."
Assuming stupidity on the part of a potential adversary is dangerous. And after reading both articles it was pretty clear that Gates has sunk enough fingers in enough pies to be clearly looking to dis-intermediate everyone in the industry between the content creator and the content user. Which is fine - if you can find a better highway (a two-way highway, no less) between the two sides. But it looks increasingly like Microsoft is simply interested in building any highway, as long as the tolls go to Redmond.
This is not the old days, Bill. We're not going to sit back and let you steamroller us into sending larger and larger chunks of our disposable income in your direction.
Are we?
Andrew Orlowski of The Register wrote a flat-out brilliant piece that takes gates gently but firmly to task for his delusions, and I quote:
"But Gates' belief in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear assumptions.
Gates' presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not to click more.
But in addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!", there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He thinks broadcasters are stupid, too."
Assuming stupidity on the part of a potential adversary is dangerous. And after reading both articles it was pretty clear that Gates has sunk enough fingers in enough pies to be clearly looking to dis-intermediate everyone in the industry between the content creator and the content user. Which is fine - if you can find a better highway (a two-way highway, no less) between the two sides. But it looks increasingly like Microsoft is simply interested in building any highway, as long as the tolls go to Redmond.
This is not the old days, Bill. We're not going to sit back and let you steamroller us into sending larger and larger chunks of our disposable income in your direction.
Are we?
Posted at 03:25 PM
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Published On: Apr 11, 2005 11:57 PM
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Published On: Apr 11, 2005 11:57 PM