Macworld's Not for Everybody
Digital divide persists in the midst of iPhones and globalization
By Kim Singh

Now that Steve Jobs has spoken and thousands of fans are now hanging on to his latest pronouncements. Lets get real.

It is a fact that when the iPhone was launched in 07 most of Asia let out a collective yawn, as none of iPhone's features were new or on the cutting edge from the Asian perspective. Japan and South Korea have had phones with similar and often with far more advanced features for several years now.

But the iPhone fascination continues worldwide. I keep receiving e-mails from my Asian contacts imploring me to buy and ship iPhones to them. This is irrespective of the fact that they cannot use these iPhones in any meaningful way as Apple has not tied up with an Asian carrier yet. Talks with China Mobile have failed. Apple has also failed to strike deals with NTT DoCoMo in Japan.

Taking a macro perspective on technology one wonders if all these marketing dollars are being squandered to prop up fluff and an absence of substance. Walking down Macworld's aisles is akin to walking down Main street in a wild west town, where all the storefronts are props with there is nothing behind the props.

China Mobile has 350 million subscribers. That exceeds the population of the US. What these subscribers need are not pretty pictures, glitzy facades and fluff.

You have to just visit Asia to see cell phones being used to make micro-payments to buy a can of coke at a vending machine or to buy movie tickets. TV is available on your cell phone in real-time and not as streaming video.

One looks around and sees fellow Americans getting more and more obese. As we guzzle our lattes and devour Steve Jobs's latest marketing marvels, as we zip down in our green Prisuses, we need to pause and remember that the US economy is spiraling into a recession while both China and India still have very impressive growth rates.

The digital divide continues unabated worldwide. Why even here in Silicon Valley and across San Francisco live hundreds if not thousands with no internet access.     

So I guess that is the shape of what our collective digital fates will look like for the geeks and the Macworld denizens. Let all the really hard creative programming work be done in India, China and Vietnam. Let all the computer hardware be manufactured in China. We can do all the fluff stuff -- the marketing, the financing, the PR -- essentially putting a pretty face on an industry that feeds off itself and addresses precious few real life problems and issues.