Onemanbandwidth reports that Dell has plans to market a super cheap computer for countries with massive populations like China, India and Brazil.
Dell’s “EC280″ model is looking to cash in on volume demand in the world’s second largest market and beyond. Smart thinking. It is good to see the West adapting to the China market instead of floundering like Google, Yahoo and others have done here using strategies unattractive to the Chinese. The Internet in China may well be the last real entrepreneurial frontier for a while
Back in December in my post déjà vu I speculated that half of the Chinese population would connect to the web, representing 35% of all users. With cheap hardware and creative financing deals the target seems a lot closer.
Of course it will be interesting to see what influence such a large user base will have on the types of applications that become popular. We can’t just assume that the needs of this segment will be the same of the Occidental web user.
No, I don’t think we CAN assume — however, neither would I think it would be smart to assume that “Western” culture won’t appeal to the Chinese webuser, either.
The Chinese have a favorite old peasant saying: “Be like the reed, bend with the wind, do not break.” It’s enabled the Chinese to recover from emperors, revolution, dictators, fire, flood, and earthquake. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see them take the same broad outlook on the Net.