#futureWCM - some thoughts from China - part 2

1^st generation web content management was driven by the US and the desire for the dominant global organisations of the 90’s to embrace the commercial opportunities offered by the web

2^nd generation web content management was driven to a large extent by Europe and Scandinavia, who have needed to deal with many more language and cultural challenges across all types and tiers of organisations

3^rd generation web content management is being driven by web users themselves who have discovered the power of open source community development, online content creation and socially driven communications

4^th generation web content management will be driven by the East – simply because the West doesn’t understand the East well enough. An excellent recent TED presentation here by Devdutt Pattanaik emphasises some aspects of this lack of understanding

I’m not making this observation because I am currently writing this blog in China. My experiences in working for European brands with strong Asian presence in recent years has given me an insight into how business is done in the East at a grass routes level, how and where this is influencing information management requirements and how this is likely to impact web content management.

For product manufacturers, particularly those with some heritage, the web can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it has helped them create effective global sales operations. On the other, it erodes margins and polarises markets - with mass market low-cost products at one end and premium products at the other. The middle ground is not a comfortable place to be in today’s wired economy.

Sitting in meetings here in Hong Kong I have been struck by the contrast of presentations by the marketing folks. The European contingent’s slides are often peppered with the phrase ‘no internet’ – referring to efforts to prevent high-end, premium products being subjected to a price-led web war. So the unease in the room was apparent when the Chinese marketing folks presented. In contrast, their presentations were almost entirely about the web and it’s hard to forget that almost every single product being discussed, including competitive ones, is manufactured in China.

The more I listened, the more I got a sense of déjà vu. There was a lot of comment about sites like Taobao and Team Buy  . Although terms like social networking were being used liberally, the concepts they were talking about, such as ‘team buying’ sounded awfully familiar to web seminars I attended back in the late 90s where start-ups like letsbuyit.com were regular presenters. During the peak of the dotcom boom, their concept of people coming together to push down the price of an item made regular appearances on TV in the form of their ‘ant’ logo.

Letsbuyit.com was a high profile victim of the dotcom bust but it is making a comeback – this time as a membership orientated price comparison site

Given that the great firewall of China is blocking access to some of the familiar names of the ‘social media’ world, it appears there are no shortage of online ‘conversations’ happening amongst the countries many, many millions of web users. It looks like China is continuing to through it’s own dotcom boom within its firewall, with the types of irrational exuberance that continues to be a feature of the western world’s web usage, fueling a boom in online communications and shopping. Regardless of whether this bubble bursts any time soon, I think these developments are significant to the future of the web and web content management in the coming years.

At present, open-source software is not big in China – mainly because extensive pirating means that proprietary software is mainly free too. I imagine that Microsoft, in particular, is quite happy about this as it has helped indoctrinate the world’s largest population into the belief that the only way to operate a computer, deal with content and communicate online is via its software.

From what I've heard over here, China has big ambitions in software. Perhaps the recent resignation of Kai-Fu Lee from Google China (who originally headed Microsoft's Chinese Research operation) indicates things are gathering pace as one imagines he would have the background knowledge and insight to jump into the Chinese tech venture capital space at the right time. If China is to make an impact beyond its firewall, then it needs to look beyond what Google is doing to usurp Microsoft's desktop computing dominance. The netbook market development driven to a large extent by Taiwan's ASUS innovations has often been described as a threat to Microsoft's dominance because it has demonstrated that there is an alternative. ASUS and it's fellow Taiwanese manufacturer Acer's enthusiasm for netbooks is clear and I understand it shook Microsoft that these innovations were more popular in the western world than it believed they would be.

So, with Chinese companies innovating in hardware, it follows that they'll be innovating in software, in the first instance to deal with the obvious differences in language and culture close to home and secondly to help create a new world order.