Designs Aimed at the Rest of the World Will Do Us Good Too

For years tech giants have designed products and services for connected Westerners and then adapted them for the rest of the planet. But that’s changing, because the users coming online around the world—Silicon Valley calls them the Next Billion—are not like you. And their relationship with technology is fundamentally different from yours. Consider India. In 2015 the country surpassed a billion mobile phone subscriptions, but most users still endure download speeds hundreds of times slower than connections in the US. To Google, this problem looked like an opportunity, so it sent a team to India to reimagine YouTube with simple menus, large video thumbnails, and lively and responsive sharing functions that work even without a connection. Last September, in Delhi, it launched YouTube Go, a nimble app with a dead-simple interface that lets users view and share videos phone-to-phone, sans internet. “I call it reverse innovation—designing specifically for the developing world and doing it there first,” says business strategy expert Vijay Govindarajan. “The way automobiles changed America 100 years ago, the mobile revolution is going to change India.” Eventually these better, smarter projects will find their way back to the West, making them good for the Next Billion—and good for you too.