Blackberries don't grow in Far East

IF YOU HAPPENED to fancy a pound of blackberries and ventured into a mid-range supermarket in Singapore, Hong Kong or Taipei, chances are you won't find any at all - raspberries and blueberries might be a bit easier to find, but even they'll be overpriced, to put it mildly.

The Blackberry handheld gadget suffered a similar fate here in the Far East. While the US has even hordes of Blackberry addicts, over here the only time you'll notice a Blackberry (device, not fruit) is either when a friend working for a large US company pops over (they use them like company badges, I guess) or a desperate salesman in the local mobile shop begs you to take one at any price before the complete unsold stock goes worthless.

Just because a gadget catches on in the US or Europe, doesn't mean it will be a crowd-puller in the world's fastest-growing IT (and not just it) region.

At last week's IDC Asia Pacific Directions conference in Singapore, a presentation by one of the conference directors, Bryan Ma, covered this particular topic - and some of the statistics shared are quite fun to look at.

Want that funny Media Centre box under your TV, running that even more funny M$ Windows XP Media Centre edition, infected with all the DRM stuff, and disabled in many ways (like, for instance, easy DVD copying)? Oh yeah? 15% of Americans did want it, and actually bought it, last year - according to IDC.

Hmm, either American "food" contains enough mind suppressants like fluoride, MSG and aspartame to dumb down much of the populace sufficiently to actually pay for this, or, more likely, M$, in collaboration with the DRM mafia, did a "nice" combination of slick marketing and "gentle arm-twisting" with the vendors to make sure the stuff's in the front shelves, always.

In Asia-Pacific including Japan, only 1% (yes, one percent!) of all PCs were shipped with XP MCE! Now, to my mind, that is one smart decision by the 99% of the buyers. Far Eastern wisdom indeed.

The computer-buying habits here really differ. For instance, the US desktop to notebook shipment proportion last year was 66% to 34%, while, in space-restricted "Tropical Victorian-London" Singapore, it was 42% to 58%.

The US seems kinda on the back-burner in more ways than just the food (I should have said "feed") index - look at the mobile phones.

Korea leads the world in phone photography, as 89% of all phones sold last year sported a built-in camera. In the US, only 41% of phones sold were able to take photos. IDC said tough local regulations and a generally slow take-up rate were to blame.

In the 'technological powerhouse' that is India, only 17% of mobiles had that darn camera in 2005. I guess they need to fix many, many more things before camera phones are taken seriously anyway - cities, roads, airports, toilets...

Another interesting observation - the more 'advanced' a county's economy is, the greater proportion of expensive, fashionable ultraportables appears among its notebook purchases. For instance, 22% in Hong Kong vs 5% in India - and 5% in Australia! Hmm, how come? Aussies are advanced, aren't they?

Or, watching TV on your PC? From Singapore's 6% to Korea's 36% - what a difference! Singaporeans have a dedicated TV in every room while Koreans, well, seem to have purchased most of those Win XP MCE boxes out of the 1% in APAC. The Net there is darn fast - the whole country is on multi-Gigabit fibre optic to every corner, and broadband HDTV over that Net is a given, so why not? Good ole Taipei is at 20% sharp here, by the way.

China may still be on the fast upward developing spiral, but, within China, there are vast differences already. Let's take a look at two of its smallest regions out of five: the Central provinces (where Mao Ze Dong comes from) and South provinces (where Cantonese cuisine comes from): they are similar in population - 127 million and 136 million, or each roughly equal to France and Germany combined (and these are the smallest regions, keep in mind!). The Central ones only purchased 900,000 PCs last year, while the more developed South purchased some 2.6 million PC systems in the same period.

In summary, Asia had different requirements and preferences in IT, compared to the US and Europe - in some case slightly, in many others vastly. And, within Asia, the differences between countries and regions are way, way higher than within EU or US. So, when you create a product for this market, remember - what works over there may not work here, and what works up there, may not work down here!

A final thought: in the US, the most preferred format for music listening is still CD, at 67%, while in Far East (Asia Pacific including Japan and Oz) it's only at 47%. However, free music downloads make for only 2% in the US (OK, there may have been at least some liars there!) while they are at much more respectable (and RIAA-annoying) 27% in the Far East! Or, maybe, the respondents here were much more comfortable to state the truth? µ