Just when you're wondering why Clay Shirky's gone all quiet and up he pops with a new book and the splendid talk above.
Loosely tied to the story of the smart phone company Xiamoi, it's a collection of well-told tales about modern China, challenging assumptions, expanding understanding and drawing out the lessons that might be useful to everyone.
The big message for me : START WITH USERS
These are my Kindle highlights, not in the same order as in the book:
On the Chinese State, the internet and phones:
"China, remarkably, has managed to create an alternate path, building a country where information moves like people, in highly identified and constrained ways, with the government always reserving the right to refuse entry from elsewhere, along with the ability to apprehend rogue information locally. They have achieved this in part through deep technical competence, in part through consistent national investment, and in part because schemes that sound daft in an American context—hire an army of people to flood social media with positive comments about the government—are achievable given the availability of cheap labor"
"the Chinese spend more on internal security than on their military, and they have the largest standing army in the world"
"As Bill Bishop, a longtime China watcher, puts it, the party believes that if China can’t transform the internet, the internet will transform China"
"The government simultaneously recognizes that you can’t be a modern economy if your citizens don’t have networked computers in their pockets and that you can’t keep political coordination amongst your people at bay unless you can keep coordination at bay, full stop. All of this makes smartphones a special class of problem for the Chinese government, because phones help people replace planning with coordination. After people get mobile phones, they make fewer definite plans, preferring “call when you’re here” to “meet me at six.”
"For firms like Xiaomi, though, that aspire to sell to individual consumers, the assurance that the party considers their services secure and controllable will not offer much of a selling point outside China"
On China and the market:
"While communism’s pedigree stretches back to the early 1800s, a government that offers its people a dynamic market and great personal choice over how they live their lives, in return for political quietude, is an invention of the late twentieth century. Previously, the purchase of complacency has only happened in countries with extractive wealth, and particularly oil. Autocratic countries without extractive wealth have almost all used visible public threats as a way of keeping the citizens out of politics"
"Using the market to gradually fix a totalitarian government is like making a pot of tea by running a volcano through a glacier"
On starting with users:
"Given that the firm was founded by some of the best technical minds in China, it’s easy to wonder what Xiaomi got out of these first users. What could they have access to that the people inside the firm didn’t know, given that they were building the software? The simplest answer is that the user had access to reality—every company builds a bubble around itself, where the products get built and tested in a more controlled environment than they get used in. This is especially true of complex software"
"Though the so-called Internet of Things is still mostly in the future, it is already clear that one of the main business models will be Xiaomi’s: Any device with a network connection can generate enough revenue from services to offset the cost of the hardware. Their famous involvement of the first hundred users, and their constant soliciting of feedback, move the pattern of lead user innovation from edge-cases in open source software and athletic gear to feature suggestions and improvements for one of the most complex and widely desired products in the world. Xiaomi marks the end of “lead user innovation” as an interesting edge-case, and its arrival in the mainstream"
On phones and simplicity:
"In a reversal of the classic logic of business disruption, mobile phones are one of the few markets where the good products can get cheap faster than the cheap products can get good."
"Environments with rising complexity always create business opportunities for third parties to step in and manage that complexity"