Advanced Micro Devices commissioned a survey from Benchmark Research in September of this year to back their belief that the centre of our digital home is the PC, not the mobile phone or hand held organizer. I can't find the original survey but a summary of the results is given by an article in the International Herald Tribune and also The Inquirer.
The respondents were over 500 home PC users from Sweden, Germany, France, the UK and Italy.
When asked which digital device they would most willingly give up, only 1 percent said they would give up their PC, and most opted to chuck their personal digital assistants out , although the British were the most reluctant to bin their PDAs (not this Brit. Biggest waste of 300 quid I ever spent). Landline phones were also high on the list of least wanted, with the Germans being most attached to their landlines. The French and Italians valued their digital music players, the Italians and Swedes their mobile phones and the French and Italians most wanted to keep their digital cameras. So the British are the road warriors, the Germans the homebodies and the Italians and French living up to their artistic stereotype?
The Italian respondents were the most likely to be offended by people sending large or badly formatted files according to the International Herald Tribune interpretation (The Inquirer read the research as being about badly formatted e-mails) and were the most eager for help with digital etiquette (82% saying they would appreciate it, compared to the average of 56%). The French were the most concerned about how they were perceived every time they send something, and the Germans and Swedes the least concerned. So the high context cultures (French and Italian) worry about the hidden messages in the way that electronic communications look whereas the low context German and Swedes don't see any hidden messages, and believe that what counts are the words themselves, however badly formatted or presented.
More confirmation of cultural stereotypes: The French don't like the fact people can get hold of them more easily (high power distance) while Brits and Swedes complain most about the time they waste waiting for the computer to do what it's told (so are the most monochronic).
Anthroplogists are helping companies such as Intel, Microsoft and Xerox to question their culturally specific approaches to various markets, according to an article in the Financial Times recently (subscription only).
For example , Chinese parents do not see computers as having the desired educational benefit of helping their children to learn Mandarin, and instead see PCs as a distraction because of uncontrollable access to the internet. This contrasts with American parents who think that buying a computer for your child early on is helpful to their education.
As a result of this research Intel launched a PC aimed at the Chinese home education market which has a touch sensitive screen that allows users to write in Mandarin, and even checks the stroke order that the character is being written in. Also, thanks to the anthropologist's analysis, Intel included a physical locking mechanism on the PC, visible from elsewhere in the room, as locks and keys have symbolism in China as manifestations of authority. The physical locking mechanism has more meaning than a software-based key.
No surprises when you think about it in this article from Fortune, about using IT in developing countries, specifically in healthcare in South Africa. Current successes include Personal Digital Assistants for doctors (PCs get stolen) to access up to date information and one clinic that sends out automated text messages to patients who don't even have addresses but have mobile phones, to remind them to take their medicine. But it seems that there are still big stumbling blocks - not only is it almost impossible to get hold of PDAs in Africa outside of South Africa, governments are obstructing wireless developments by protecting national phone monopolies and of course technical support is a huge issue, particularly for open source.
But as one of the interviewees said - "Our calculation is that 84 different countries worldwide have had their IT assessed more than 10 times." So no more assessments please consultants, now we need action!
More data on mobile usage in Africa courtesy of BWCS (no permanent link to the article - look for the link on the home page to 'Mobile Starting to Take Off in Africa', dated April 29 2004).
"Mobile technology is the Information Society in Africa," says Michael Minges, Head of ITU's Market, Economics and Finance Unit. "It is a technology that has permeated more widely than any other into new areas, and we must examine how we can utilise this technology going forward, to help narrow the digital divide."
I mostly felt antipathy towards my laptop - I never seemed to get it to work in any of the ways I wanted to, as it was configured by my then employer's IT department to be nothing more than a mobile slide carousel. Also I never really bought into the idea that it was portable - especially after packing all the other bits and pieces needed to make it work. Maybe whether you travel everywhere by car or use public transport is a factor in explaining differing popularities of laptops. In Tokyo you definitely want to keep what you carry to a minimum.
Check out the queue (Quicktime video - over 30MB, starts playing after about 9MB downloaded) for the new Apple store in Ginza, Tokyo. (Link from Joi Ito.) Apparently Apple were giving away a few thousand T-shirts but even so, that's quite a queue. It's the kind of thing that makes first time foreign visitors to Tokyo say "what recession?!"
Makes me nostalgic (natsukashii) for Tokyo and brings back memories of when I was working at Mitsubishi Corp in Tokyo in 1992, and for some reason one of our lines of business was sales of Powerbooks. It didn't do very well I seem to remember, but I did buy a very basic Powerbook at close to wholesale price. I've still got it somewhere. And then I got myself a 14.4kbps modem I think, and started participating in newsgroups, about sumo, Monty Python - all done via the ISP's cache, rather than directly reading or posting to them. It seemed very exciting at the time.
Other random observations on seeing that video:
In order not to ruin the austere grey clean lines of the Apple building, they shunted all the garish floral decorations that you send to new businesses if you're a supplier in Japan to the other side of the pavement.
The queue is of course mostly trendy young men, but a gratifying number of ordinary looking older people, women and even some young children.
Hurrah for mobile phones and the Japanese mobile internet - the only way to keep sane in queues like that I'd have thought!
It looks like crosscultural IT marketing success for Apple, even if Mitsubishi's initial forays were not very promising.