Sunday, August 8, 2004

A billion PCs? $100 PCs? [ZDnet]: By the end of the decade, a billion people will be clicking away at computers, but generating a profit out of newly wired portions of the world is going to take a lot of work. This is the begining of the unfolding of the 'B24B' vision charted by Prahalad and Hart, among others, HP's eInclusion initiatives (I had the good fortune - and in truth the honor - to contribute to initial business strategy & plans), and the many 'digital divide' initaitiaves of other players. My personal belief: we can't even begin to imagine what the next phase of global connectivity will look like. Remember Metcalfe's Law: the value of a communication system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system 10:31:16 PM    comment []  trackback []

'The most profitable criminal venture on earth' [60 Minutes]: We know that 15 to 20 percent of all goods in China are counterfeit. Plenty of money's at stake in this burgeoning economy and market, of course. And cracking down could put people out of work, which could be destabilizing, which is not something the government is fond of. Trouble is, it's not just a problem for American companies. Consumers beware. 'You won't die from purchasing a pair of counterfeit blue jeans or a counterfeit golf club. You can die from taking counterfeit pharmaceutical products,' says John Theriault, head of global security for the American pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer. 'And there's no doubt that people have died in China from bad medicine.' We haven't begun to envision how much the global economy will change this century, IMHO. Here's one more data point. 7:36:03 PM    comment []  trackback []