One problem may also be this - the links between African countries is weak. For example, if I have an office in Singapore, I am basically covering all of South East Asian very effectively. I can move people and resources across SE Asia from this office.<p>If you have an office in Lagos, your reach is limited to Nigeria, Ghana and a few other West African countries. The link between Nigeria and Cameroun is weak, and Nigeria to Congo is a difficult journey. To make a trip from Cameroun to Angola, it is probably cheaper to first fly to Portugal and then back.<p>Africa is a huge place and there are regional circles. So if you bother to make an office in a particular country, you are not covering the whole of Africa (which, combined, probably comprise a good chunk of customers), you are covering just the regional zone that has relationships with that country, and these are probably a much smaller group of people, making it not worth it to have such an office.
Some cities are pretty much first world, but 100km out of town you're in the 3rd world. Cellphone coverage over my whole country, I'm typing this on a notebook attached to a 23" LED screen and a docked iPhone. I'm writing C# for the day job while telecommuting from home. My guide up Kilimanjaro friended me on Facebook the other day. But I'll be donating blankets to some very cold people this winter - people who have never typed on a keyboard. Huge differences.
Africa's an awfully big place to make generalisations about. Some cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town for instance, are near first world in their sophistication and living standards and have well-established tech industries, quite different from the stereotypical villages without running water, electricity or any tech whatsoever.<p>Making blanket statements and offering one-size-fits-all solutions for the entire continent are as silly as pretending that the US and Western Europe share the same problems and need the same solutions as the poorest corner of Madagascar. The problems Johannesburg faces and the solutions it needs are closer to that of any major Western city and are light years removed from the problems and solutions of your average rural village.<p>South Africa more than 2 million Facebook users, its own Google search, YouTube, Maps, Street View (launching Tuesday) domains and services, its own Apple AppStore, its start-up industry is growing and has produced at various points the 3rd largest payment processing software supplier and 2nd largest Certificate Authority and Amazon's EC2 was developed mostly at its Development Centre in Cape Town. I recently did some work for a local team that wrote and maintains pretty much the entire software infrastructure for a large British retailer, a product they're now expanding to other international retailers. Not hugely impressive by most standards, I'll admit, but surely its evidence that Africans are definitely on the tech map. And that's not even taking into account the thriving tech communities in places like Kampala and Nairobi or other tech-related industries in Africa.<p>Point being, I think some of the people commenting missed the point of the article because of their misconception about what Africa is about.
So yes - the western consumer machine has not penetrated so well.<p>But that does not mean they are not on the map at all - if you saw any of the recent "Africa" season on BBC 4 in the uk it was clear that mobile phone usage is high, there are big cities (like Lagos) with loads going on, film industry, music industry.<p>It all seems a bit chaotic to my western eyes but its clearly vibrant and resourceful and there is a huge amount of drive. In the Lagos programs a lot of the people featured had the endless inventiveness and ability to rise to challenges we would all think was fantastic in an entrepreneur.<p>I suspect that Africa will emerge with its own technology ecosystem - not dissimilar to ours but with an African slant. I also suspect it has probably had enough of the west coming and telling it how and what to do.
According to Max Seybold (cherrypal), over the years, there have been lots of "bring technology to Africa" efforts which resulted lots of unused equipment. However, it's starting to get used, especially as locals figure out how to make money from it.<p>He tells of one guy who makes a living sending e-mail for his village. During the week, said e-mail is entered into his laptop. He then walks to a bigger town, uploads and delivers the new mail, downloads e-mail to folks in his down, and walks back to his town. He then delivers what he downloaded.
This article bugs me a bit, since it seems to be a "Big Tech Hates Africa" article, whereas I think the reality is more "all large companies are spending minimal resources on poorer areas of the world". It certainly does make Africa look a left out on a map, but large areas of Asia are equally not targeted by large companies, but the geo-political layout is different.<p>While it is odd that so many large tech companies haven't highlighted their presence in Africa, there are some notable omissions from that list. Microsoft, for example, have clearly listed contact points and targeted support pages all over Africa, including Kenya[1], and SAP has a number of operations across Africa[2].<p>The reason for Google not listing their Kenya office seems to be to do with the type of office it is[3]. They do have quite a few jobs listed in both Kenya, and the author's own city: Kampala in Uganda[4].<p>Perhaps when the tech industry matures, we'll see the kind of coverage a large manufacturing company has[5].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/phone/contact.aspx?country=Kenya" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/phone/contact.aspx?countr...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.sap.com/contactsap/countries/index.epx" rel="nofollow">http://www.sap.com/contactsap/countries/index.epx</a>
[3] <a href="http://whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-google-global-cache/" rel="nofollow">http://whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-goog...</a>
[4] <a href="http://www.google.com/jobs/africa/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/jobs/africa/</a>
[5] <a href="http://toyota-africa.com/cars/new_cars/index.asp" rel="nofollow">http://toyota-africa.com/cars/new_cars/index.asp</a>
Note that there is a Google data center in Uganda. When I was there a few years ago, uplinks back to the US were incredibly slow; however, any time I wanted to hit Google, it was pretty damn fast (considering it was a 64k shared DSL line that served an entire business park).