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.
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.
Immediately after independence this made sense, as those links back to Europe were already well-established and they were to countries with far higher trading capacities than neighbouring African countries, but in the long-run it retarded the growth of African trading regions and the diversification of industry in many parts of the continent.
South Africa has really transformed, but still a long way to go. I think the really interesting places are those that are emerging now. I've heard Ghana is fantastic - great people, very friendly.
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.
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.
Point being, I think some of the people commenting missed the point of the article because of their misconception about what Africa is about.
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.
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.
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.
could you pass a long a link for that program? I tried to do a search but nothing relevant came up.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s3vdm
(in fact it looks like it was already repeated on BBC 2 from that page but it will come up again).
Would also highly recommend:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/music/features/african-rock.sht...
Fascinating stuff on people like Youssou N'Dour (to pick one of many examples) who have gone back to Africa after western success and are now building Africa labels for African artists.
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.
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].
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].
Perhaps when the tech industry matures, we'll see the kind of coverage a large manufacturing company has[5].
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/phone/contact.aspx?countr... [2] http://www.sap.com/contactsap/countries/index.epx [3] http://whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-goog... [4] http://www.google.com/jobs/africa/ [5] http://toyota-africa.com/cars/new_cars/index.asp
I would argue that Africa actually will influence the future of the internet. Considering there's about 15% of the worlds population there, that's over 1 billion potential customers!
One of the problems in Africa as a market is that there is less than 1% broadband penetration and reliable electricity still only reaches 5%: http://appfrica.net/blog/2008/08/16/the-current-state-of-int...
Apple's products are surely too expensive for the vast majority in Africa, the products can be sold there but it doesn't mean they need offices there.
Google, Yahoo and Facebook need more computers there or to expand more into to mobile there.
