For most Americans,
despite Détente and Perestroika and blinis and borsch, Russia remains behind at
least a heavy velvet curtain. As a technology analyst/forecaster/reporter,
Russia remains a fascinating mystery. But a recent visit Moscow and St.
Petersburg solved some of the Russian technology mystery.
It turns out the
state of Russian consumer electronics isn't that much different than anywhere
else in the west, with one glaring difference.
First, Russia isn't
as big a market as we think (okay, as I thought). While the largest country
geographically on the planet, the Russian Federation doesn't even have half the
U.S. population – 143.2 million according to one
Russian source,
with nearly half in the western Central and Volga areas.
In the 20-plus years
since the fall of communism, Moscow has been transformed from a gray city in
both physical color and emotion (according to several denizens I spoke to old
enough to remember) into a typical modern colorful Western capital. The
sprinkling of archaic remnants of the hammer and sickle adorned either somber
monolithic official buildings or on gleefully mocking cheap tourist souvenirs
(Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev reduced to crude nesting dolls).
In addition to
discovering there are no pews in the spectacular Russian Orthodox churches, I
was surprised at how westernized Moscow and St. Petersburg have become and how
quickly – within a generation – the metropolitan areas have adopted Western capitalism,
at least as far as technology are concerned.
Digital Russia
There is a preponderance
of mobile phone stores in Russia as there are everywhere. The most ubiquitous are
what could be deemed the Radio Shack of Russia, the massive 13-year-old,
4,700-store Euroset (EBPOCETb in Cyrillic),
the fifth largest retailer in Russia and Belarus. There
are large neat store-sized mall-based Euroset locations and smaller more hectic
street stores and kiosks selling both mobile phones and portable computers and
software.
While I spied a
higher percentage of iPhones among the populace than I expected, there are only
Apple resellers in Russia, including Euroset; Apple has been
expanding its Russian distribution and is reportedly looking to open its
first Russian location, in Moscow, sometime next year.
Ably serving Russia's
more general consumer electronics and appliance needs is M.video (M.buqeo in Russian), a 20-year-old chain with more than
260 locations throughout the country. I visited a couple of stores and, other
than prices labeled in the Cyrillic "p" denoting rubles rather than
euros or dollars, discovered I could have been in a smaller version of any
suburban Best Buy – same product arrays, same brand names, same hovering
semi-helpful polo-shirt-wearing sales staff.
…with one exception:
Blu-ray.
Where's the Russian Blu-ray?
Blu-ray isn't that
popular in Russia, for reasons I've yet to discern.
M.video's Web site incorrectly
labels Blu-ray players "DVD player Blu-ray." In the M.video stores I
visited, 10 times as much shelf space was devoted to DVD hardware – including a
surprisingly high percentage of DVD karaoke decks (including many from Russian
DVD brand BBK) and DVD HTiB systems – than to
Blu-ray players.
Why isn't Blu-ray
more popular? Perhaps there remains a residual subconscious Russian loyalty to
red – DVD is a red laser technology and "blue" often denotes the U.S.
Okay, maybe not. But
it's not the cost. I found the comparative Blu-ray vs. DVD deck pricing
differential is less severe than elsewhere. Perhaps it's the seeming Russian
fondness for karaoke – I saw no karaoke Blu-ray decks, perhaps creating an
opening for some enterprising Blu-ray deck maker.
Both the Euroset and
M.video chains continue to grow, illustrating the vitality and youthful
demographic of the still neophyte capitalistic society looking to become as
westernized as New York, LA, London, Berlin, Paris and even Tokyo. We conquer
not with armies, but with culture and economy.
Oh, and in Russia, "borsch"
is spelled sans the final "t" we use in the U.S. Another velvet
curtain parted.
