If you aren’t aware that the world’s population hit 7 billion people on October 31 2011, I don’t know what you’ve been doing or where you’ve been for the last few days. But chances are you’ve heard about it unless you’re stranded in a desert or lonely island somewhere and only have access to this blog. And if that’s the case, then I just told you that it has hit 7 billion people and you should believe me. Either way, you should realize it’s a big milestone. Milestones can be good or bad, but I’d like to assume they’re good. People who like to believe that Earth is creating too many babies too soon should also consider that it’s part of human nature to reproduce. After all, what matters most are the people. As an Earthling, I can say that nothing is more paramount than our species. Not Mars, not robots, not the time-space continuum, not Tigers, and not even Mother Nature.
Now, that might piss a lot of you off. Sure, go ahead and call me a solipsist but I think we as a society are inherently solipsist. It’s not just me. We care the most about ourselves than anything else, and it won’t change, at least not anytime soon – we’re just hard-coded that way, get over it. Of course, don’t get me wrong, I don’t encourage producing kids if you can’t afford to sustainably provide them a decent education and a lifestyle that you’d like them to have. So, I feel sort of significant and insignificant at the same time. Significant because I was alive when the population was less than 6 billion, and I’m still alive when we have surpassed 7 billion – and there’s only about 6,999,999,999 others. I mean, think about what it’s going to be like a thousand years from now. Who knows what’s going to happen – I just feel lucky that I can be safe and sound, and I can have the freedom to do whatever I want in life. That makes me feel like a significant dweller of this era which has, in fact, spanned two millennia. I feel insignificant because (now the irony will be thick here) there’s fucking 6.9 billion of you – I am essentially a speck of dust to anyone who’s creeping our planet from somewhere far away in our galaxy (btw, if you are that person on that planet, you should totally add me on Facebook, or whatever you guys call it over there). The thought of me being so tiny in the big picture of things is just depressing.
But, anyway, I didn’t write this post to convey my emotional misgivings about our planet reaching 7 billion people. Fuck that. I wrote it because I would like to highlight what this means for hackers, designers and entrepreneurs.
7 billion people means 7 billion potential users if you build consumer products. Of course that’s not a reality right now, but one day it will be. Out of those 7 billion potential users, 36.3% live in India and China. A whopping 36.3%! That means, you need to have some sort of product strategy for these emerging markets. And the biggest mistake that I think anyone could make is to think that emerging markets are exactly the same as Western markets. They’re not. I was reading somewhere about Groupon’s failure in China and I think that’s the best example how products just fail if you don’t build a strategy that is geared exclusively towards an emerging market. It also can’t be the same strategy for India and China – they have to be two different ones, though, they will be similar in many respects due to the culture overlap. I really hope to get an opportunity to come up with these strategies for a real company someday.