And then a still, small voice -- OK, a loquacious Australian voice -- gets up on stage and says no. Hold on. The world is far more exotic than you ever imagined, and pretending otherwise is folly.
That still small voice of Oz is Dr Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist and part of a ten-person team at Intel called the People and Practices Research group. Her job is to find out how people tick. To be more precise, she goes out to visit people who may be future Intel consumers around the world, and finds out whether what they actually do is what Intel fondly imagines. For the past two years she's been living urban life in Asia, testing whether there really is an emerging global middle class, increasingly affluent and increasingly convergent, moving towards a common lifestyle. A hundred households in nineteen cities across seven countries -- India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, China, Korea, Singapore -- got the Bell at the door. She came back with twenty gigabytes of digital photographs (let her in and this woman will snap the inside of your fridge, the stuff on your bedside table and the contents of your sock drawer) and a cubic yard of notes.
She's still analysing her haul, but what she's found out so far is intriguing -- and as important for Intel as how to make silicon pipe light or speed data. No, people aren't the same. The USA holds the individual in the highest regard: Asia has social structures that override that. Technology there is shared -- one cellphone lives with many people, one computer is part of many people's lives. In America, technology either makes business more efficient or entertainment more accessible: in Asia, it binds people together, brings education, even merges with religious practices. This isn't an issue of disposable income: this is how people choose to live.
Even the most basic of statistics are revealing. American houses are big: 2,200 square feet on average, with many rooms per person; Asians live in less space -- 800 square feet, say -- shared between much larger households. An American engineer might design a wireless network to cover the average American home: the same box in Singapore could flood three families. An American mobile phone will live in the warmth of a jacket pocket: a Malaysian mobile may get dropped in a monsoon and be drowned in an instant.
There are no overriding engineering problems, she says, just those of awareness. If Intel wants to carry on growing -- and have places to sell the silicon that it says will do anything the exotic technologies can do -- it has to understand that what might seem like exotic human behaviour from the perspective of the West Coast is the norm for the rest of the planet. Twenty-five percent of the Earth's crust may be silicon, but a hundred percent of Intel's market is the diverse mass of humanity. Even Intel's engineers can't override that.
