There's money to be made.
There's no doubt that digital natives are a vast market. Though I don't have any
statistics on subject, it's a fair guess that they're not only the people buying
(with their parents' money?) those third generation cellphones, they're also the
ones purchasing mp3 and mp4 players, Playstations and Wiis and the like. I'm certainly
not - my simple cellphone is still enough for my needs, and though I'd love an
iPod, I have to admit that I've got a very large collection of music that I love,
and very little opportunity to sit down and listen to it, a situation which I
doubt that an iPod would solve.
But I wouldn't write off immigrants as a lucrative market quite so easily. The
natives are a captive market. They're going to be buying whatever gets put out
for them. By sheer numbers alone (and not only because we're dealing with the
baby boom generation) immigrants are a larger market than those born into computer
use. They have immense buying potential. They may not be buying the add-ons and
updates and whatever else new that comes along, but they're the ones that read
the manuals. An awful lot of money can be made selling the guidebooks and offering
instruction on using new tools. Maybe instead of a series of "... for Dummies",
someone will produce a series of "...for Immigrants", and make a fortune.
Go to: Carrying cognitive baggage from the old
country