Every Street in California

California is specific. And so is almost the entire North American continent. Everything is the same there. Oh I mean there are mountains and desserts and lakes and there is even Canada in the north, a country that is a little bit different. But generally, once you learn the rules how the world works there, it works the same everywhere. I mean everywhere across America. North America, that is.

Travel and meeting cultures is the biggest payback from my hectic business travel schedule. And I bless that work I've been doing partially because it offers this enormous opportunity to visit variety of places and meet variety of different people, religions, and cultures. And that gives me a really great perspective.

Yes America is a big country and a big market. Probably big enough to support variety of products and services that are doing extremely well just serving that market. And then it is still surprising how many American products and services have conquered the world. In computers it is just about everything: Windows, Apple, Google, ... it is hard to find a major global IT company that is not American.

But, what is not clearly visible at a first glance, these global American companies invested huge to morph their products in a way that these products fit other geographies and cultures. And it was not always easy. I remember in the early iPhone days, it was not selling well in Asia. And the reason was entirely cultural, not understood by Apple at that time: early iPhones required iTunes to start. In other words they required a personal computer. Which did not exist in Asia, where, like in Japan, people even don't have their own desks at homes, not to mention personal computers.

Similar reaction I had recently when reading the article on Waymo. "we had this car driving on pretty much every street in California" :) Boy, how far that is from the real world. Driving in the US, including California, is extremely simple. Roads are wide. Crossings have 4-way stops. Everything is predictable and there are very little emotions. Enter Europe and in each little country on that crowded continent things are different. Paris, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Bucharest are each totally different when it comes to driving. You don't do things "because this is the law" or "these are the rules", but so often you just join traffic by looking into the eyes of the incoming driver and judging her/his reaction (in America there typically is no reaction). BTW I wonder how a self-driving car is supposed to look into the eyes of the other self-driving car (and figure out the reaction...).

It is fascinating like, despite the Internet and air travel, the cultures, behaviors, people are different. And it is fascinating to work on designing a product or a service that is aiming to be global (hint: it must have the ability to morph to become at least a little bit "local"). Sometimes it is a little bit, sometimes much more is required. I remain skeptical on self driving cars, although admit California may be getting them much sooner than the rest of the World.