Just voted and the result tells all.

It’s quality that matter, end.

1. Geography barrier is a perception. Welcome to the psychological game.

2. The determinant factor that devalues that perception barrier is quality.

3. “You stay where your friends are” leans toward the concept of social graph than community.
Thoai’s point was about quality of product and service, rather than social graph.

Social graph is important, but still, not as important as quality.

One example was how I persuaded my Yahoo! 360 to migrate to Facebook. The key factor I depended on in my arguments was Facebook’s quality, when at that time my friends had only me as friend on FB.

On the Internet, there are only languages, not nationalities

Just a fact, 80% of my 360 social graph migrated to Facebook.

About Quality vs. Social Graph

Think on a longer-term:

1. Users now have certain wisdom of products

2. Users have options

3. Because of (1) and (2), they will evaluate

Scenario: A group of friend divide into 2 groups. Group 1 find the fair product_A and stay. Group 2 find the good product_B and stay. Conflict will occur as the two groups discuss and defend the product of their choice. Group 1 will try B out, and group 2 will try A out. What do you think is the result?

Now, expand the scenario from 2 to N products.

I worked in the software / IT industry for years from engineering to management as well as business development, and I can testify that you get what you pay for. Vietnamese products are poorly designed, developed, and tested hence geared towards lower expectations. Of course, if you talk about mass local users then Vietnamese products would fit fine.

Usually early adapters are well educated and have much higher demands of quality, stability, safety, interoperability, and value added services (exotic features).

Sometimes, a security gap of 2% between 98% and 100% is great.Would you like to run a 24 hours machine that might break just by a tiny chance when you need it during the high peak of a business day?
Would you like to select from a variety of pastas or just plain traditional spaghetti?
Would you like to feed certified formulated milk to your child instead of milk from an unknown brand?
Would you like your query to be answered instantly when you have serious concerns or problems with the product?

If you answer Yes to all these, Vietnamese products are not for you.

High end users and and businesses aren’t ignorant. They make smart decisions based on the aforementioned. If the selected products do not satisfy their needs or there’s something else better within budget, they will be replaced as quickly as they were “early adapted”.

I’d suggest taking Mr. Minh’s points as one framework to analyze quality of Vietnamese products.

@Taitran:

The relationship between Group A and B is a big factor for your answer.

Most of the time, I am in Group B and I spends my time to convince ppl to move to my group.

As usual, marketers call group B : Opinion Leader. Since they are leader, they tend to persuade other group to join them.

Take exclusive Blogger network for example. It is hard to get in unless you are qualified. Once you get in, you are proud of yourself as a Group B members.

Recalling the time when I looked at Cyvee users and smiled coz I have been Linkedin for long time.

Once we expand to N products or N groups, the loudest group wins or the product paying most will win.

For VN market, most of web 2.0 services are developed by programmers not marketers hence we doesn’t have a chance to see a massive marketing campaign.

However, VNG is a big player who use Cash wisely. Every new products from VNG, we can see VNG banners at all top 100 Alexa websites/forums.

So…that’s the end of my 2000vnd. I am going to my bed, coughing again

I do have some point here.

1. Most of Vietnamese are using Yahoo for chatting, and 360 is kinda simple (but not flexible and fun, though). Therefore, people are a little bit hesitated with Facebook. Thus, FB is very very new to Vietnamese, so it takes time for the whole Vietnamese community to migrate from 360 to FB. However, absolutely, they will.

2. It is hard for one to use domestic (Vietnamese) products if they dont have good quality. Sorry guys, in fact, people don’t have the morality to do good stuff for the community. We are selfish, therefore, we all want to buy good products at the least costs. Therefore, our companies must be competitive with foreign products if they want to sell these to domestic consumers. Companies have to hit us economically but not morally.

3. There is a chance for us to do so. Since, foreign companies such as Google and Facebook do have difficulties to understand Vietnamese culture and trends, therefore, Vietnamese companies have greater advantages in using those information for competition.

My point is, quality is what matter to the game of competition. There is not morality for Vietnamese to use Vietnamese goods here. Government and business have to invest smartly and efficiently to produce good goods and hence, we will buy it as the result. Remember, we do have much more advantage compared with foreign corporations.