李开复：中国即将迎来信息技术的黄金时代

China Is Poised for an I.T. Golden Age

李开复：中国即将迎来信息技术的黄金时代

BEIJING — Chinese universities graduate more than 600,000 engineering students a year. China has consistently placed at or near the top of programming competitions. And while we have not seen China become a leader in information technology and computing, I expect that this will change in the coming decade.

北京：每年在中国的大学毕业生中，有60万的工科学生。在各项程序设计的竞赛中，中国学生也始终名列前茅甚至高居榜首。但是中国并没有成为信息技术和计算机工程领域的领头羊，所以我希望在未来的十年内，这一状况会有所改变。

Since the Internet revolution of the late 1990s, many successful companies have been built by taking American ideas and localizing them for China. These companies may have “copied” from the United States at first, but they acted swiftly, focused on their customers and developed their products, adding more and more local innovations.

自上世纪90年代末的互联网革命以来，许多中国企业成功地吸收了美国的创意概念并实现了其在中国的本地化策略。刚开始，他们只是“复制”美国概念，但他们行动迅速，专注于自己的顾客，发展自己的产品，增加了越来越多的本地化创意。

For example, Tencent, one of China’s three Internet juggernauts, started with an instant-messaging product named QQ, which was a replica of the same system on which Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger were based. But today, QQ has evolved to become a very different product — a combination of instant messaging, social networking, universal ID and gaming center. QQ has built the world’s largest online community (about 700 million active accounts), while its American counterparts continue to build instant messaging as loss leaders.

中国互联网三巨头之一的腾讯公司就是一个很好的例子。腾讯的发展始自即时通讯产品QQ，可以说是雅虎通和MSN等软件使用的系统的翻版。但是如今的QQ已经发展成为一个完全不同的产品：集即时消息、社交网路、通用帐号和游戏大厅于一身。腾讯QQ已经成为世界上最大的在线社区（有7亿多的活跃用户），而美国的即时通讯服务同类产品却都在亏损经营。

I expect this type of innovation to proliferate, for three reasons.

我期待看到这种形式的创新会在未来出现大幅增加，我有以下三个原因：

First, we are entering the age of open platforms, mobile computing, pad devices, open-source and cloud computing. These will create many opportunities for talented Chinese I.T. professionals.

首先，我们正在进入这样一个时代：开放平台、移动计算、平板设备、开放源码和云计算。这些都会为有天赋的中国IT人才提供大显身手的好机会。

Second, development costs are the lowest in history. On the open platforms, four or five good engineers can build an application and validate it in just a few months.

第二，现在的开发成本达到历史最低，就开放平台而言，四五个优秀的工程师可以在短短几个月内就编写好应用程序并验证它的可行性。

Finally, the Chinese market is growing very rapidly, and more innovations will come out of such large markets. We expect the country to have 500 million mobile Internet users by 2017, and perhaps twice that in five years. Great innovative mobile companies are sure to follow.

最后，中国的市场发展特别迅速，这样的一个大市场环境将会催生更多的创新出现。到2017年，中国有望拥有5亿的手机上网用户，并可能在五年内翻一番。优秀创新的手机公司也将会应运而生。

An ancient Western adage — necessity is the mother of invention — is appropriate here. The Year of the Dragon begins on Jan. 23, and hundreds of millions of people will want to watch the New Year’s gala on their computers. That has provided the impetus for inventing P2P, or person-to-person, technologies to handle the surge.

有一句古老的西方谚语是这样说的：“需求是创新之母”，这句话很适合用在这里。2017龙年将于1月23日开始，亿万观众会想在手机上观看春节联欢晚会，为了应对观看人数激增的问题，点对点技术创新也势在必行。

Chinese users have never had the habit of paying for software or digital content, but Chinese companies have come up with many clever micropayment strategies. For example, a Chinese e-book is free at first, but once you read half of it and get hooked, you have to pay a nominal charge per thousand words.

中国的用户从未养成软件或数字内容付费的习惯，但是中国公司却想出了很多绝妙的小额支付策略。比如中国的电子书一开始会是免费提供，但等到你阅读到一半对书的内容着迷了之后，你就得为后面的内容每千字支付少量的费用。

Traditional Chinese media have limited information, so sites like Sina Weibo have emerged, combining the viral propagation of Twitter and the rich media of Facebook.

传统中国媒体提供的信息资源有限，所以类似新浪微博这样的网站就纷纷涌现，这些网站结合了推特的病毒式信息传播与社交网络的丰富多元媒体资源。

What else might we look forward to? Chinese parents care deeply about education, yet schools in poorer cities are inadequate. Can China invent effective distance-learning solutions? There are more than 160 cities in China with more than a million people. These urban environments are the perfect places to develop “solomo” (social, local, mobile) applications: for example, finding a fast-food restaurant offering a discount within walking distance. Most Chinese people don’t have credit cards. Can Chinese phones leapfrog those in the United States and become our electronic wallets?

那我们还可以期待些什么？中国家长对孩子的教育殷殷关切，但是较贫困地区的学校资源却并不完备。中国能否提出有效的远程学习解决方案？在中国，有160多个城市拥有超过百万人口，这些城市环境是开发“社交本地移动”（solomo）应用程序的绝佳地点，例如在步行距离范围内寻找打折的快餐店。大部分的中国人都不用信用卡，中国的手机能否超越美国成为我们的电子钱包？

Which of these speculations will come true in China first? I’m not sure, but I am sure that I have missed many other “killer applications” from China. In a country full of energy, desire, talent and ideas, there is no doubt that China will become a world leader in information technology.

我的这些猜想，哪一项会在中国率先实现？我并不确定，但我很确定的是，我已经错过了中国很多其他的“杀手级应用程序“（指绝大部分用户会用到的应用）。在这样一个充满活力、需求、天赋和创意的国家，中国无疑会成为世界信息技术的领导者。

Kai-Fu Lee is the former head of Google China and the founder of Innovation Works, a Chinese incubator and investment firm.

李开复：谷歌中国区前任总裁，2009年9月宣布离职并创办孵化计划投资公司创新工场任董事长兼首席执行官。