There's a fascinating podcast / interview here with Clay Shirky. It focuses on his book about Xiaomi, which is very good and doesn't seem to have been read enough.
Some little thoughts that struck me:
He's the CIO of NYU Shanghai in China. That's really interesting, the perfect example of having an internet person in charge of technology. Every educational institution is going to have to do that.
O to O - "online to offline" is a new coinage I'd not heard before. It's the way you can "interpolate a service layer between anything you can do offline and your computer." Basically delivering stuff and services in the real world. It hadn't occurred to me before that this wasn't most developed in big Amazony Western markets. Naive of me. The descriptions of it happening in 'Tier One' Chinese cities are fascinating.
He suggests that Chinese businesses might find it difficult to get good at the Internet of Things because their censored and constrained version of the internet means it can't be guaranteed to be always on. So they won't be designing for a world where your devices can always access the internet.
I wonder if the opposite of that might be true.
I remember Matt and Tom of Thington talking very persuasively about that 'always connected' assumption makes for products that struggle in most of the real world. You have to design IoT things that can cope with interruptions. China might force you to be good at that.