Table of Contents:

When you shouldn't go Global:

• see our discussion on international expansion ...specifically the section on OLI theory....and make sure you have ALL 3 ....not just one or two of the advantages needed to go global.
• See also:  article from Harvard HBR
• Three questions to ask:
1. Are there potential benefits for our company? (dont just follow competitors.  Dont overestimate the benefits)
2. Do we have the necessary management skills? (do you REALLY have the skills?)
3. Will the costs outweigh the benefits? (extra coordination costs, setup costs, etc)
• Examples of failed globalization strategies:
• ABN AMRO
• AES - (US power company)
• Daimler- Chrysler merger
• BTR - industrial conglomerate
• TCL - chinese maker of electronics
• Kelda - a UK water utility
• Deutsche Telekom (Tmobile)
• Deutsche Post - overpaid for DHL and Airborne
• AXA - French insurance group
• BenQ- acquisition of Siemens mobie device business
•  
• Good examples of well executed globalization strategies:
• Telefonica
• GE commercial finance devision
• Renault + Nissan

Globalization of technology

Yes, you come up with a great idea in the USA, and it works well...and then...someone in Germany copies it, but offers it in multiple languages (which Europeans are good at doing), and next thing you know, they are selling well all across Europe, Latin America, Asia...and are doing better than the original.  This is an accelerated product life cycle.  Recommendation...launch world wide right from the start.  Go with multiple languages.  Dont give the clones a chance to beat you at your own game.

Five hundred ways to customize stuff — Startups or VCs toying with the idea of mass customization in a business may want to take a look at the cyLEDGE International Configurator Database. The people behind it have managed to collect what looks like every product customization tool on the internet, providing a handy reference to those building their own. 

The iPhone dominates, here and abroad — This year’s-end Zeitgeist reflects both the most popular and the fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com over the past year. To see the results, visit http://www.google.com/zeitgeist.

Examples:

• MySpace Gives Up On The Netherlands
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/14/web-2-in-germany-copy-paste-innovation-or-more/

• Geni Clone Growing A Lot Faster Than Geni

• Koornk Blatantly Rips Off Twitter
• Yelp’s European Counterpart Qype Continues Global Expansion

MySpace vs. Facebook

Facebook is now the largest social network in the world. But they continue to trail MySpace by a massive 36 million users in the U.S., and at current growth rates it will take them 18 years to overtake them.  Most of Facebook’s growth is international, where they’ve executed on a brilliant strategy for quickly rolling out localized versions of sites by getting their users to do the translation work for them (MySpace, by contrast, expands via a command-and-control infrastructure that puts people on the ground in each new international market). But the commercial value of some of those international users is far less than the U.S., the UK, Japan and a handful of other countries with robust online advertising markets.

Success Stories:

please visit our discussion on international expansion