Big in China

I was in China for a couple of weeks (mostly on vacation) but I was also able to spend a few days on business in Beijing meeting with our partner there, Great Open Source, some local press and customers.

This was my first trip to China and other than the fact that it conflicted with the recent OSBC conference, it was a pretty amazing visit. (No, Matt, I did not time this in order to get out of a panel –it just worked out that way! Honest.) My wife had been to Beijing just 5 years earlier and the changes in that short time have been significant. There’s a much larger middle class now, more luxury retailers, more western brands, more cars, more of everything. In fact, everywhere you look, you see the signs of a rapidly developing economy. There are 88 floor skyscrapers going up left and right (with bamboo scaffolding, no less) causing our tour guide to joke that the iron crane is the national bird of China.

What struck me most about China was three things:

1. Everything is on a large scale.

With 25% of the world’s population in one country, things are big here. (That also leads to the proverbial “Chinese math” used by MBA students. e.g. if we can get just 1% of the Chinese market…)

2. There’s a great “Can-do” spirit.

The people I met were hard working and proud of their country and their accomplishments over the last thirty years. The 2008 Beijing Olympics will be a huge coming out party for China to show the world that they are ready for their close up.

3. There’s a long-term horizon that spans decades.

In the US especially, companies are often constrained by quarterly thinking. Companies are sometimes afraid to take bold initiatives because the share price might take a hit in the short term. In China, they look at things not over a quarter or a year, but tens of years or even life times. (Think about this: when Hong Kong was turned over to mainland China they established a provision for 50 more years of Hong Kong continuing more or less as-is, under the idea of “2 systems one country.)

If you combine these factors together, then you start to see some pretty interesting possibilities. No wonder China has been able to take on some large scale feats that would be impossible elsewhere, whether it’s the Great Wall of China, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river.

I saw plenty of use of open source software in China. (In fact, you could say that China considered pretty much all software to be open source previously! The price differential of getting a bootleg copy of Windows at a market is not much different than the price of a download of Linux.) Still, there is a growing population of open source developers using Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL and others.

What’s interesting to consider is that China has more graduates in Computer Science than any other country in the world. They have over 144 million Internet users and are beating the US companies in their own market with sites like www.baidu.com (search) and www.sina.com (portal). The IT industry is still very young. Everyone I met in IT was in their 30s or younger.

Stephe Walli has some other observations on open source in China at a posting on his blog from a summit held there in April.

Ok, not everything is perfect in China. It’s still not an open society. But if you haven’t been to China, it’s worth investigating. It may take many more years before you can build a software business there, but if I was in my 20s and starting my career, that’s where I’d go.

For those who have been to China, or thinking of it, let me know your observations or questions. This is my first guest posting here at Infoworld, so let me know what you’d like to hear about in the weeks and months ahead.