Like Robert Scoble, I’d also encourage you to read this posting from my good friend Nicole Simon. What’s interesting about the timing of her post/Robert’s comments is that I’m sitting in the breakfast room of the First Hotel Marin, here in Bergen, Norway.
As I’m zipping through the blog feeds, a nice elderly women and her husband (from Finland) sitting next to me, asks me about the Tablet PC I have and, of all things Microsoft Office. It seems she wanted to get a new computer but, like Nicole, didn’t feel like much software/services were really for her. She wanted to see if I would show her Gmail (she heard google mail was nice) so she could talk to her grand kids. When you are elderly, you can ask for anything. I spent a few minutes showing her. She mentioned, a couple of times, things about technology being too much english and not enough what people in Europe (Finland) wanted. It was interesting.
From Nicole:
“Flickr? Well, the interface is not in German, so why use it instead of some nicer German websites? Yahoo and all those web Web 2.0 applications? All of them focused on the American market. On the english market. Why use them / talk about them etc when you alianate us from the start?”
and
“Oh and in case you cared: Germany has about 82 million inhibitants, as well as other countries around it speaking German. We do have money too.”
There a ton of opportunities out here folks. The siren song of “the Valley”, the American market, etc, is a strong one and a potentially rich one, but there are customers in every country, looking for your solution tailored to them.
Read Nicole’s full piece, it’s a good one.
Wonderful example. She did not care about the fact that searching is limited to 20 mails which makes you nuts when you want to handle the spam quickly. She heard it was nice. :)
And she is likely to pay (a bit) of money for some easy solution which is again nice. And not tons of features. Earn money on those people guys, so you can fulfill the wishes of the beasts! ;)
Posted by: Nicole Simon | June 08, 2006 at 03:19