Musing from China
Had an opportunity to travel to China last week. One of my favorite places in the world. Though the time change always kills me. Anyway we did a customer meeting plus some strategy related stuff. And some good old fashioned team building. Lots of fun was had: Beautiful scenery:
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great food:
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And of course Karaoke.
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Towards the end of the trip we saw this sign:
They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. In this case Starbucks has a strong enough brand that just creating a facsimile of the logo creates the same feelings of warmth, taste, convenience that Starbucks itself creates. Or at least the owner of this particular shop hopes.
There are those who say that way back in the 1990s, when MS Windows was being pirated and thus propagated throughout mainland China, Microsoft benefited. Windows became ubiquitous, and when Bill Gates eventually went to China to meet with the Premier, the groundwork was in place for MS to start capitalizing on a huge user base.
We saw lots of 3rd party apps for sale in the mobile phone stores in Southern China. I guess most, if not all of them, were pirated. I wonder how 3rd party developers feel about piracy of 3rd party apps for S60 in China? I’ve heard that even official, state-sanctoined publications include instructions/hacks that teach users to how install and run licensed software w/o paying for licenses. Is there real concern about this among our developer community? Is piracy eating into revenues? Are there developers out there who are happy just to have the word spread about their applications, even if it does come at short term cost?
hi dear author,
harryl dot byread at gmail dot com
i am an s60 3rd party app developer in china. and i am very glad you like the scene, food, and KTV here. your question is very reasonable, however, i would give you a simple answer: its complicated.
i don’t know if i considered the problem too complex, but the truth is, at present, developers/isvs could only ignore this or finding alternative solutions against pirating. now the consumers will feel very very common/normal/moral to use pirated/free of charge/unlicensed software, there isn’t any copyright sense in normal end consumers’ minds. so developers here are developing online-games, online-apps, and anti-virus apps which could not be pirated at some level.
if you are interested in this market, feel free talking with me in email
Hi Harry — So if I understand you, the problem is that Consumers are too comfortable using pirated software, and thus there is not much hope of changing their behavior. The only way way to limit piracy is to develop services (online) rather than apps. Yes?
Hi dshugrue,
for short term, the answer will be probably “Yes”. yet for long period, i believe that this is not a nation of thieves/pirates. gradually, with something changing the nation taken place, they will become feeling ashamed when heard “hey boy, you are using someone’s masterpiece without paying him, so…”. and the earlier “complicated” means how they won’t feel ashame now, and how to make the progress going better for now, its complicated
i also have a faith of more open future. open source software will play a very important part in future world. so copyright is not just paying, and the information industry is evolving all time too. its still a little uncertain about future business model or copyright rules, but what we always believe in are “respect”, “moral” and “justice”.
Agree with Harry that developers in China are between rock and a hard place. On one hand, it is impossible to moneitize from stand-alone apps due to piracy and inefficient distribution; on the other hand, consumers are shunning online apps due to the high GPRS/EDGE charged by the monopolistic operators.
Call me a pessimist, I don’t think the situation will improve in the near to mid term. If you look at the music industry, the stuff is becoming free, and in China totally free. Baidu, a Nesdaq listed company, is helping the trend big time. The telecom market will continue to be dominated by monopoly, so no urge to lower the data plan.
But I argue that Nokia can do something about the efficiency of the distribution of the apps. Yes, nowadays technology leaders are getting stuff free online. But it is still a quite difficult process of downloading and signing apps for the less tech savvy crowd. If Nokia can make the purchasing process easier and seamless, there is still money to be made in the mass market for the developers, and also for Nokia or whoever can do it.
I think we need to remember that just a handful of years ago there was no such thing as private property in China. The concept of intellectual property will bloom and thrive there, but it will take some time. It will be a slow and sometimes painful process, but one well worth the investment of both the time and money that will be required. That concept gets lost even in the U.S., a nation built on free enterprise, so expecting an overnight reversal in China is unrealistic. The key is to keep out eyes on the eventual prize: a market of almost 2 billion consumers and an economic expansion in it’s infancy.