Old World's lag time (ntop/vonage innovation comment)
The International Herald Tribune
Victoria Shannon IHT
Saturday, March 27, 2004
iht.com
Patience is required for new products
PARIS When you think of brand names that dominate innovative consumer technology, it's easy to group the leaders by continent. Asia has Sony, DoCoMo, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Canon and Panasonic. The United States has Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Kodak. And IBM and Yahoo and Palm and AOL. Not to mention the entire Silicon Valley, a kind of brand name in its own right.
Europe has ... Well, Europe has a market of more than 40 countries, scores of languages, countless trade barriers, complex regulations and high labor costs. Perhaps those are some of the reasons that Europeans are usually on the short end of the stick when it comes time for the tech visionaries to introduce their new products and services.
This week brought a few examples: Apple, swarmed by U.S. orders for its new iPod, has put off overseas availability until July. Apple also isn't offering its iTunes service outside of the United States. Neither is Napster, although both say they are coming.
Vonage and Net2Phone are just getting around to making the effort to draw in European customers for their U.S.-created services that allow phone calls over the Internet. AT&T Wireless is about to allow its cellphone service to send text to British and Italian mobile phones. And Motorola promised this week it would make a "global phone," capable of using the main two cellular standards in the United States, Europe and Asia. European gamers must wait until at least the end of the year before trying out the next-generation PlayStation from Sony, called the PSX and already available in Japan.
It's too bad. Europeans have the money to support a gadget-rich lifestyle - just look at the 90-percent-plus penetration of mobile phones in many countries here.
And in fairness, Europe does have its own cutting-edge brands: Philips, Vivendi Universal and Vodafone. And Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Logitech. And Opera and Kazaa. And CERN, the Swiss birthplace of the World Wide Web, Bluetooth from Sweden's Ericsson, and Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of Linux (who is now a U.S. resident).
So it's not that innovation is lacking here. It's more that despite its geographical oneness, Europe is and will continue to be - especially after the expansion of the European Union on May 1 - a region where many voices speak, be they regulatory or linguistic. For any large company, there's nothing like selling into one market with one language and one currency, with the efficiency of a handful of nationwide TV networks to get the word out via advertising.
So for most of Europe's homegrown companies, home is not the most important market. And even if it is, boy, would they sure like to succeed in America, land of the free-spending consumer and home of the brave early adopter.
Not that there's anything European residents can do about it. Patience is a virtue, they say. The patient can now take advantage of online photo printing services from Kodak and Apple, for instance. Ofoto, from Kodak, arrived last summer, and iPhoto, from Apple, began last week. And Europeans who want to make phone calls over the Internet can try the homegrown Skype (offered by the same gents who created Kazaa).
Still, the world continues to contract, economically speaking, and the lag time will undoubtedly get shorter as well. Over time. |
