SNS: SNS: Three China Strategies: Lenovo, Dell, and Apple

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“Here’s another fascinating issue of SNS that you should read. Mark has an amazing way of calling out critical signals that we should be paying attention to, that we don’t notice within the background noise of day to day business.” – Curtis Wong, Principal Researcher in eScience at Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington

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SNS MEMBERS: This year’s theme for the Future in Review (FiRe) Conference is “Technology Driving Global Economics.” We have just begun posting participants and speakers, which you can find on the site, at www.futureinreview.com. Although not yet publicized, I am very pleased to announce that we have added a fascinating, and scientific, discussion on monitoring and controlling personal health, a real-life story told by Calit2 Director Larry Smarr. Larry has shown this to a very few audiences, including at Stanford, Johnson & Johnson, and the Singularity Institute, and it is incredible.

We’ve also added the world’s expert on measuring the volume of polar ice (not just its area), and the world’s expert on carbon control strategies, which ought to give you a sense of where our CTO Design Challenge is headed this year.. Is there something more important than planetary carbon control?

Our opening evening will be a conversation between myself and Richard Marshall, Director of Global Cyber Security Management, Department of Homeland Security, on the subject of “Economic Cyberwar.” Since our first conversation on this subject at the New York Dinner in December, this has become perhaps the hottest topic in security, and I look forward to providing our participants with the latest information on how this will impact their countries and companies.

As members probably know, our work at SNS seems to have taken us into a global leadership position on this issue. BloombergTV has already run two interviews with me on the subject, with a longer one now in pre-production. This month, I will be leading a prolonged discussion on this subject at the Symantec Board Retreat; and SNS is designing a morning program for Accenture, taking place in London on July 8th, on the same topic.

Members may recall much of this territory being laid out in the issue “SNS: Economic Cyberwar: The New Security Mandate” (1/5/11). We are hereby giving all members the right to freely distribute that issue without constraint. Please feel free to share it with your colleagues, inside and beyond your company.

Ford’s CTO, Paul Mascarenas, has just signed up to talk with us about the Ford Co.’s leadership drive in telematics, in-dash content and communications, SYNC and its related technologies, and – well – the revolution in Car Computing.

Of course, our Global Energy Partner Tesla Motors and its team will be there as well, with the new all-electric sedan (haven’t seen that one yet, eh?); fast, silent cars to drive; and a new 17-inch hi-res dash screen that you’ll drool over.

Both our headcount and our sponsorships are ahead of last year, and, one should add, Yes, we’re having fun.

Here is the current themes list for FiRe 2011, growing daily:

Economic Cyberwar

Data Privacy: Global Policies

Online Privacy: Enabling Technologies

Investing in China

Improving Cloud Infrastructure

The New (CarryAlong) Pads

IPTV: Hardware and Software

Telepresence Entertainment

The New Car-Computing Revolution

Next-Generation Voice Recognition

Embedded Machine Vision

The EU’s Business Model

Financial Risk in the Global Economy

The Next Security Designs: Protecting Intellectual Property

The (now-famous) Annual FiRe CTO Design Challenge

4G Devices

New Targets in Venture Investing

Investing in Films

--- and lots more.

Join us May 24th-27th, at the beautiful Montage Laguna Beach Hotel, and see why FiRe remains “the best technology conference in the world.” (The Economist)

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Thank you to our FiRe 2011 sponsors and supporters:

Global Silver Sponsor of SNS Events:

Thunderbird SNS Internship Sponsor:

Tesla Motors, SNS’ Global Clean Energy Partner:

– and SNS Communications Partner Nyhus Communications:

» Three China Strategies: Dell, Apple, and Lenovo

It takes many things to make a success in the hyper-competitive computer hardware market. This is even more true for the sub-categories of personal computers, desktops, CarryAlongs (pads and netbooks), media players, and smartphones.

There is no obvious single strategy that predicts a winner worldwide, and each country’s marketplaces are different in how they see, accept, or even reject products.

While these differences can be found between almost all major countries in the world, China is – by self-declaration, practice, and vision – different. The fact of its potential market size was the initial lever by which it was able to afford these differences, and the country has not missed out on opportunities to convert this gross leverage into many other business pressures and practices that remain unique to China.

For all these reasons, it struck me that looking at three companies that have chosen three different strategies in dealing with China’s unique behaviors and controls would be helpful to those inside these companies, as well as to their colleagues in other technology-related industries considering doing business in, or with, China.

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