Ep22 Why do 90% of web architects ignore "The China Problem?"

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to the Arbery Digital Experiences podcast where strategy meets technology. Got a topic, suggestion or want to see how Arbery can boost your digital presence? Let's talk. Visit arberrydigital.com or find us on LinkedIn. Now, on to today's episode. Welcome to Arbor Digital Experiences. This is a special episode that we're doing today with me, Ted Reese, principal architect at Arbor Digital, and Marta, who is the co founder of Streamx, which is a digital experience mesh, and she's come to me from Poland and I'm here in the United States and we're going to talk about web performance in China. [00:00:41] Speaker B: Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me. [00:00:43] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. And this is going to be really interesting convo because we're going to be presenting. Let's see, I'm going to be presenting with one of your principal engineers. Yes. In. In less than. Gosh, what is it, like two weeks away or something like that? Two and a half weeks away or something like that? I'm not nervous. [00:01:06] Speaker B: Why would you be? [00:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah, so. So we're going to be presenting at Adapt2 in Berlin and we're going to be presenting solutions for web performance in China. But we wanted to give a little bit more characterization that we could get done in that presentation, which is going to be a technical presentation to a technical audience, but we wanted to give a little bit more characterization as to why. Why it was that, why it is that this is a problem to solve. Why, what sort of a problem have we seen it be for other companies and other brands and stuff like that and why we even got in this in the first place? So. So there we go. [00:01:44] Speaker B: Yeah. I remember when Todd came over to our booth. Well, it will be a year and a half ago at the Ed of Summit. That's right, 2024. [00:01:53] Speaker A: Right? [00:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And you, well, while discussing the, you know, what's the solution and so on, you came over and oh, it should be a good solution for the China case. And we all were like, what China case? What is that? So, well, we did dig into that later on, but I'm super curious to learn more. What made you interested in that from the first place? [00:02:19] Speaker A: So, okay, well, here, a little bit of story time here. So I. So in addition to being an engineer, I had a brief attempt at an. At an e commerce business and we were going to. We were manufacturing things in China and bringing them in in the United States and selling them on econ platforms like Amazon. And so I had a couple trips to China as a part of. Of that and So I, I had already been an AEM engineer for some time when going into this and, and so I was obviously very familiar with, with China's firewall this. And I always assumed that this was limited to there were just some things that you couldn't get to. And so I was just assuming that this was just going to be like things being blocked. So I just, there'd be, I'd arrive to China and there would just be some sites that I couldn't get to and the rest of everything would be peachy and just, just or at least the same as any other global site. And I was entirely incorrect. All of my expectations were wrong. And it's, and it, it really shocked me how, how much of a different landscape entirely it is. It's almost as if it's two separate. Well, it's actually, you could say it is actually two separate Internets that, that, that are operating and with, with a, with a kind of a loose connection between them and the, but the amount of variability in performance and availability of normal sites. Like I was trying controversial sites was trying like things that would be controversial to the Chinese government that I was like, oh well this, this, this one surely will be blocked. You know, just going to like, you know, Facebook or Twitter or something like that and, and say it's going to be blocked. But the, the answer to the question of, of is it blocked? Was, was always. It wasn't just this site is blocked. Like, you know, when you go to a corporate firewall, like you're on, on a, on a, on, on a corporate VPN and it's like this, you know, contact your IT security. This, this site is blocked because it's totally not that it's. Sometimes they'll allow you through once and then they'll progressively block it. They do, they do rate limiting. They do progressive blocking. They do, they do just do slowdowns. There's all kinds of very interesting measures that they take that isn't just an outright block. In some cases it's an outright block, but in some cases it's entirely different. But then for normal sites, sites that aren't controversial, like I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna try to look and see about a new tractor or I'm gonna, I'm gonna browse a, I need a new watch to go with my suit or something like that, sometimes these are just also blocked or experiencing ridiculously slow performance. And so that's where I got interested in this as a problem because I went, this is not just a, this isn't just political isn't just oh well, because I want to share my controversial views, then therefore it's being blocked. This is a global problem that every single brand faces. So that, that's to me what made it an interesting problem. [00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that also goes back a little bit to what the great firewall indeed is because when we say it, it kind of brings in that maybe it's just like one system, but in, in reality it's like patchwork of technologies, of regulations and infrastructure layers that weld together their control, the traffic, the cross border traffic. Right. So. So the anatomy, which is of course unknown in its entirety is pretty complex. [00:06:03] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And so when you started looking into this though, because, because, because then, because then we both started doing our own independent technical like and also like what, what can be done about this? And I had my own, a couple of, I think three different brands that I, that I took through different journeys on am, both on premise and cloud service and how, how to go and assault this problem. From a, from a technical perspective, I had varying levels of success. Some of them I did better at than others. So. But when you were starting to look into this, what, what, what did you see brands doing about this, like both, both with AM and otherwise in terms of China? [00:06:48] Speaker B: Well, my first visits were kind of more driven by curiosity rather than proper research and me as a kind of, you know, I like my jewelry, I like my, you know, fashion thing. So I went there, I knew that there would be like, you know, rich assets. I was expecting that maybe some of that will be blocked or throttled or things like that. So, so like there would be like I would look at a jewelry product detail page from EU and it would give you, you know, like what's what, what else is in the set, what other people viewed, what you may want to add to that. And then I'd go into China, visit the same site, well, not the same site, but the same brand site for the same product and it would be just image, short info and that's it. I mean like very, very little experience. [00:07:44] Speaker A: Super bare bones. [00:07:46] Speaker B: Yeah, like, and then it got me thinking that you know, you to, to get that extra stuff you kind of have to do the request calls and those request calls they don't have, they have to go to the origin. And you know, building that experience from all those little bits and pieces is harder when that communication is not just a simple one that we have on this non restricted side of Internet. And it's much harder when you need to build it and not knowing whether you'll get a response or not. But the other things that I also saw, and sometimes the more deeper you go, it actually gets slightly better because you have less stuff to go through. But like, I had this again, fashion, brand. I liked it. The site that the homepage would be like one image, like two paragraphs of text and that's it on a Chinese domain. Well, right now they are actually not even working at all. I don't really know what happened in the last three or four weeks, but. Yeah, but when you go on their website on the western or eastern side of the wall, you'll have everything. You'll have, you know, those little movies, you'll have, you know, carousels with different clothing, everything. I mean, you would think like, oh my God, I like this, I like that. And when you go into the site where you have like one picture, two paragraphs of text, I'm like, I mean it's, is it broken? That's like the first thing you think, like, something's not right. [00:09:33] Speaker A: Right, yeah. And that, and the thing that, that. So from a technical perspective, we do, I mean there are some things that we know of why this could possibly be because we know that a lot of the global cloud vendors simply don't operate in China at all. And so when you have anybody who's created a solution around, around their site, whether they're using Dev, Experience Manager, they're using Shopify, they're using whatever, the WordPress or whatever, whatever the tool set that they're using to build their site, if they used any cloud services to provide things like search and relevant products or product information management or their commerce provider or whatever their, whatever it is that, that, that rounds out the whole experience. A lot of times that tool set that they used to develop it on the global site simply isn't available in China. And so, so which, which puts them at a crossroads of like, what do I do? Like, do I, do I make, do I make a brand new site? Do I make a terrible site? Do I make, do I try to recreate all the same functionality? Do I like what, what, what is, what is the thing that I should do on that? And, and, and I think that makes it, it puts them at a difficult technical crossroads. [00:10:55] Speaker B: I agree. And I think that quite often that happens at the very end of the project. Right? [00:11:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:02] Speaker B: Because like you would like, when you think from your seat, you think about it like any other market. I mean, if you have 30 or 40 markets, I mean, of course there might be some localization, you may Want to, you know, have a different campaign, you have, may have, Want to have different pictures, et cetera, but you wouldn't think that you have to think about a separate stack or you'd have to think about like a, like a separate solution for that or that, you know, things that work everywhere else will not work. [00:11:31] Speaker A: Right. Well, but I think that's the problem. I think that, that most folks, both product management and on the technical side and who are brand creatives and so forth, don't just simply don't know that there is a problem. It's almost as if like, okay, so this is one thing that I think is really interesting because I mean, you and I are both have been in the business long enough to know what it was like before mobile proliferated and before everybody had a mobile. And I remember. So I was doing web development and I was actually a website owner for a major brand at this point. And I had this epiphany. I'm like, so the iPhone just came out. I was like, the iPhone's out and it's so popular and everybody's loving it. What even does my website look like on an iPhone? Like, I have no idea what it looks like. I don't have an iPhone. I'm still using. I had like a Nextel or some flip phone or something like that. And I was like, I. Okay, what, what? So, so there was no visibility. So obviously, you know, I pull it up on an iPhone. I'm like, oh, this is completely unusable on an iPhone. All right, So I guess I. But nobody has an iPhone, so I don't need to deal with this right now. We obviously have analytics and so you can see when your, when your mobile spread starts to increase and you're like, eh, maybe it's a problem I should, I should look at. But that's, But I feel like it's a similar thing. It's almost like, I feel like brands are almost like if the brand was making a site and they're like, I don't have an iPhone, so I think my site is fine. You know what I mean? [00:13:15] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. And it's fine when you operate local, but if you're a global brand and you ignore, you know, 20% of your potential market, that's not necessarily a good approach. Right. [00:13:31] Speaker A: Or more than that. [00:13:32] Speaker B: Or more than that. [00:13:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah. You did, you did say that it's a kind of a visibility problem. So did you have like, you know, I can't see a problem situations that. [00:13:46] Speaker A: Well, so there's. Okay, I think there's various degrees of being aware of that this is a problem. So one of the things too that this and this hit me hard on the, on on the second time, second time I visited China, I actually visited more, more of China. And this just. If you've been in Europe or if you've been in the United States, there's absolutely nothing that prepares you for the physical scale of Chinese cities. They are so big. They are so big and there's so in the US and we're. This is, this is part of our problem of being so, you know, isolated from the rest of the world. In the US I don't know how much of this is a problem in Europe where the culture is so much more, you know, interwoven. But in the US we just have this like over there ism of things like that and we've got this idea of like China in the 1950s of like people in huts tending rice paddies or something like that. And that's. And there's a couple cities but most people are just attend. Are just tending rice paddies or some, there's some silly old outdated view. And you go there and you see, and you see just the size of this. You have. So okay, I was in a, I was one of these places where I had a factory which, or was. Was dealing with a factory was the city of Fujo. So Fuzhou. I could ask a thousand, I could ask a thousand people in the U.S. where's Fujo? And I guarantee you almost every single one of them doesn't know where this is. Fujo is, is a city that's larger than Berlin, it's larger than Paris. It's, it's like on par with like Chicago in terms of how big this city is. It's like Chicago slash like LA size in terms of people, it's massive. We're talking like you know, 4 to 6 million people in the city itself and nobody knows. And that's one of tons of these cities that are all over the place. Never mind something like, like. Oh yeah, or like Guangzhou, which, which is Guangzhou and Shenzhen. That's this, this like metropolis has more people than the entire country of France. [00:16:00] Speaker B: Yep. [00:16:01] Speaker A: Just one metro area. There's. It's. It, it is mind boggling. And these are people, they all have smartphones, they're driving around in Lexuses and stuff. There, there, there's a, it's fine. There's a lower class but there's lots and lots of middle class and upper class. There's so many customers that would buy People's things. I was so like, like I went to factories and I would see these people who were just working class kids, you know, 20 something with their, you know, their AirPods in and their smartphones. They're listening to stuff while they're making things. They're, they're obviously they would be customers of any global brand if the global brand had a presence. Yeah, right. [00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:16:43] Speaker A: And that's, and that's where I went like, like this whole idea that. Yeah. Like when people say, yeah, China's got all this, all these people, but they're not my customers. Like to me that's like a little, like a little, you know, comforting lie that you tell yourself to, to, to say keep ignoring that. That's right, that's right. [00:17:07] Speaker B: But the other thing is that if you look at the traffic on your website, you may continue to say that because, well, you know. [00:17:17] Speaker A: Right. And there's a, there's a lot of, so this is something that I was going to get into in, in detail in our, in our presentation too. But there's, there's, there's reasons for that because like so we, so we did a survey just to, to so, so some of, so we, and, and, and our teams work together on this survey. Right. So we surveyed a bunch of people on like what's, what's. Okay, what's the deal? Like why, why like what do you, what do you think? Presence. Right. So one of our questions was like, you know, in your project, do you know how your site performs for users in China? And, and the result was after all of our responses, like 80, 89.3% don't know. There's only 10, 10, just over 10% that actually track their China web performance. The rest of them are either in the category of we don't know, we've kind of spot checked it, or literally a statistically significant percentage is we'd prefer not to know. [00:18:20] Speaker B: So yeah, and you have to kind of want to know to know because if you're checking it from your machine. Right. I've been told more than once it works on my machine because, well, when you do connect with all those endpoints that are on, on your side of the Great Firewall from your machine in Frankfurt or you know, Atlanta or wherever it works. [00:18:48] Speaker A: Right. [00:18:48] Speaker B: Because you don't have to cross the great firewall. [00:18:51] Speaker A: That's right. [00:18:52] Speaker B: And your audience does. They do, they do have to cross it to access the endpoints that you're calling. So yeah, that's one another kind of thing that blows your mind that you may, you need to want to know, because otherwise you won't know. [00:19:13] Speaker A: Yeah, but. And the problem with that is that it's so, a lot of people, I think, have this idea that it's a firewall. And firewalls, if you've configured a firewall, they have a set of rules that always are followed. And so it's like if you go and you try to visit, you know, some, whatever. Let's say, let's say on your corporate firewall, Reddit's blocked. Every single time you go to Reddit, it will be blocked. Yeah, like, like. And you, you, you go from your laptop, you go from your boss's laptop, you go from anybody's laptop, Reddit's blocked. That's it. [00:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:49] Speaker A: Whereas in China, it's, it's so much more variable. It's totally variable. It's variable based on your location. It's variable based on whether or not you're in a hotel that is frequently frequented by Western guests. I experienced this too. Like, I had two different hotels in Guangzhou. One of them was, was people who were primarily going to the Canton Fair, which is all Western people going to buy stuff in China and sell it in the West. Right. So that hotel, I could get to everything. I could get to Google, I could get to YouTube, I could get to Twitter, I could get to Facebook, I could get to everything. Nothing was blocked. And then I went and I, I, that was an expensive hotel. And so I got one across the street and it was still a nice hotel, but it was mostly Chinese visitors. And I couldn't get to anything. Like, like gmail was blocked, YouTube was blocked, Facebook was blocked. Like, and it was like, and it would load like one image and then it would stop or it would, it would load it the first time and then it would refresh and then it would stop. It was, it was, it was a super variable experience. And then I, I tried it from a data center. I'm like, oh, I can't get to my own website. Let's see if it works. And I try WebpageTest. WebpageTest has all their, their, their servers in a, in a data center that, that they kick off browser sessions to go and hit things. And it worked on Webpage test, which I'm like, ah, here's the problem. Because, because if I'm, if I'm a site owner, I'm like, let's, let me try Webpage test and I'll see how my site performs in, in Beijing. And it tested. Oh, look, it looks good. It looks good. Good. We don't need to fix anything, guys. I don't know why, I don't know why we're not getting any traffic. It's probably just because people in China aren't interested in our site. When it's, that's like, and it's like. [00:21:39] Speaker B: A vicious circle, isn't it? [00:21:40] Speaker A: It is, it is. [00:21:41] Speaker B: Well, on one hand you're like, you're not getting traffic because you're getting blocked. You can't see that you're getting blocked because you're trying to see that with the tools that are not giving you. Because well, they are not. And then you think, well, okay, well maybe they are not interested. [00:22:00] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. When that's probably not. Because then the problem is even more multi layered than that. Because then you get into things like, well, I made a Chinese language page. It should theoretically be getting picked up. But like, so Google's not a thing in China. So they have Baidu and Baidu is their, baidu is their 800 pound gorilla search engine over there that everybody uses. You can't get a page. So in the rest of the world you just submit a link and Google will go index it. Baidu won't get, won't index your site unless you submit a link. And you can't submit a link unless you have a Chinese phone number. You can't get a Chinese phone number unless you have Chinese passport or unless you have a business license in China. So, so you're just not getting indexed because you're not there. Yeah, so, so you could say, oh, I'm just, I'm. People in China aren't interested in my site. Which is totally false. It's the wrong reason altogether. It doesn't open the door to people coming to your site. Yeah, so, so, okay, so, so for this, so the, the, I think the, the, the other, so the other bit on this is that I think there's, there's a, there's a standard that then people I feel, feel like it's okay. Like it, like, like because this is, because this is a problem. It's a multi layered problem. But it's like in 2008 also it was a problem to redesign your entire website for an iPhone. [00:23:45] Speaker B: Exactly right. [00:23:48] Speaker A: It's a huge expense. Right, of course. [00:23:51] Speaker B: And right now when you think about it like from a brand's perspective, I mean you do need this partner that will tell you that, well, you know, there are options or you know, there are ways to do that. And I think sometimes more often than we like to admit we rely on this market standard being, well, you know, it just doesn't really work that well over there because it's complicated and so on and there are, you know, like pretty expensive ways of making it work. So if it's not your prime primary market, let's not get into all those expenses. [00:24:30] Speaker A: Right? [00:24:30] Speaker B: And I think that's, well, that needs to change. [00:24:35] Speaker A: I think it needs to change. But I think also there's, because I remember similar, similar excuses because a lot of these are excuses, a lot of these are just little white lies you tell yourself to try to avoid work. Because I remember some of these excuses, like I even read articles of people saying nobody, okay, I'm not going to change my booking website for mobile because nobody's going to book a hotel on mobile. And of course these days nobody could get away with a, with a, with a, with a phrase like that, right? [00:25:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Who would, they'll call you out on that. I mean immediately, right? [00:25:20] Speaker A: Who's going to shop for, shop for and purchase new clothes on mobile? Who would do that? [00:25:28] Speaker B: Crazy people. [00:25:30] Speaker A: Right? Of course. Then you ask my 16 year old daughter, like I'm sure she doesn't even know what the Brandy Melville website looks like on desktop. Right? So, and how much, how much has she ordered on her mobile? Like that's, that is, you know, as soon as she had a job and could, could, could make money, it's like next thing I know there's things, there's. [00:25:50] Speaker B: Packages arriving just coming in. [00:25:54] Speaker A: So, so, but so obviously that's changed. So, but, but in terms of that market standard, I think that there's still this, like there's a lot of excuses and like, you know, it's pretty hard. But like what, like what, what, what do you, like, what do you think it would, it would take to start getting people to, to, to change that perception about, about what a market standard might be. [00:26:21] Speaker B: I mean, I think if we were to. Because it's not true that everybody has an awful digital experience in China. [00:26:32] Speaker A: That's true. [00:26:33] Speaker B: Because there are companies and there are brands that invest in that, There are brands that invest in local presence that you would be able to walk into a boutique or into a supermarket and interface with the brand and they do put the money there to build a separate website. But when you kind of like dissect what are the, why do they do that and whether it's necessary? Well, because they were not given any other choice, they think that that's necessary to have that very separate thing in there because well then none of the requests need to go through the great firewall. Your working in that isolated market with that isolated, isolated solution. But that gives you the reliability of that experience. So it is possible. Now I think what's important is to see how much we can make it also affordable kind of, you know, affordable. [00:27:38] Speaker A: Yes. [00:27:39] Speaker B: One is, yeah. [00:27:42] Speaker A: I think that's part of the defeatism that sometimes people have on that of like there's nothing that can be done about this, I can't fix this, I can't solve it or I can't solve it for any appreciable amount of money. Like any money. Amount of money that I'm going to be able to get approved. And I think like to me I almost feel like there's a little bit of a multi step like, like so I, I don't think it's true that every website needs to perform well in China. [00:28:13] Speaker B: I agree. [00:28:14] Speaker A: So, and I think you like, you could ask yourself like, like okay, if I gave you, if I waved a magic wand and I, I said good, you won the lottery and I said you just got 100 million this month. I just gave you 100 million well performing user sessions to your content from people in China. Did you did something. So these are real people, real browsers, real folks in China and I just gave you 100 million well performing user sessions. Is that, is that going to change. [00:28:57] Speaker B: That changing my business, Is that changing my life? Well, for us not so much. But if I were to have a brand that is for example selling to customers and I had a line of, I don't know, handmade jewelry that I am able to sell and ship to China. I mean, come on, give it. [00:29:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like for example, so, so like let's just say you are a, your business is a tax Preparer for the U.S. right? If your business is a tax preparer for the U.S. i could give you a hundred million user sessions in China and maybe a couple of them are visitors from the U.S. yeah. [00:29:42] Speaker B: On their vacation in China. [00:29:43] Speaker A: On their vacation. Right. Who are like oh, look at that. You know, tax preparation. You're right, I did forget to do my taxes. Like, like so that, that. But so, but, but it'd be very, very limited. And would you put money into that? You probably wouldn't like literally, literally none of those people are really going to transact in a meaningful way with your business. But, but so, so fine. So, so there's that percentage that are going to listen to this talk that you and I are doing and saying that's nice. That sounds Like a problem other people have. Too bad for them. But for so many others though, if you are. [00:30:21] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, like there are goods that are universal. I mean, when you're selling cars, you want to sell them both in Europe, America and China. Why not, why not introduce or keep well performing businesses that are global also in that part of the globe. [00:30:40] Speaker A: Yep. [00:30:41] Speaker B: But you have to make your offer visible. You have to make it enjoyable to, to kind of watch and to interact with. Otherwise, well, when your experience is kind of painful or feels broken, I mean, that's not how you build loyalty. That's not how you build, build, you know, customers. [00:31:03] Speaker A: That's right. And I think there's also, there's also another angle and I'm, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take 100% credit for this. This is. So Jody from Chinafy gave me this one when I was talking these things with her. But the, the, the. Sometimes it's, it's a, it's just a handful of really important visitors in China that you care about. It's not the masses. It is somebody with money. Sometimes it's an investor, sometimes it's somebody who, they're. Maybe they're not your target market, but maybe you sell industrial products and this is something that, that it's a specialty product that you make. And they want to know if you're for real because they want to potentially invest in your consultancy services and bring you over. Maybe you only do consultancy in Los Angeles and in Chicago and London, but they want to bring you over for a project. You're an architect or something like that. Right. They want to know if you're for real. And if your site is broken and doesn't load, then that one really important visitor gets turned away. Like, I've had this. So I've known this for a long time, that a lot of sites, you're viewing your web stats and we're like, oh, look at my, they're going up. And you're thinking in these aggregate masses of people. And you don't realize that sometimes it really just comes down to one person having a good user experience. And that person who was effectively communicated to that might, might feed your team for, for months. Like I had, I had, I had a, a post like this myself where I, I made a, I made a thing. I put a bunch of effort into a presentation and a blog post. I put it on Reddit and I got five upvotes. One of those upvotes was me and, and I'm like, all right, that flopped that was, it didn't go anywhere. Okay, good. Right. Try again, Tad. Like, and, but somebody, one of those upvotes also was somebody who saw the presentation and engaged the company. And so it's like, sometimes those few visitors, maybe they look statistically small, but are they potentially important and could they make a huge difference for you? So I think that that's something that, that when people are like, oh, look, only 6% of my traffic is, is, is, is coming from mainland China. I'm not going to invest. Like, but okay, are any of those people important to you? And, and, and you might want to reconsider? Yeah. [00:33:50] Speaker B: And I think that, like, that's one end of things. The other one is what I mentioned. Like, there are, there are brands that have their. Not digital but physical presence. They're investing huge amounts of money into those, you know, magazine stores with a lots of clothes or shoes or whatever. And you know, you try to access their website and for example, well, when you go, the only one that has Chinese is from Macau. So it's on the other side of the firewall. And the one that actually works pretty. Okay. Ish. Which would be your global one. For whatever reason, it defaults to French. So you don't really even know how to change the language. I mean, so, you know, I think like, for someone to kind of get that alignment of how people purchase and how the, the how often the journey starts with the digital journey, they don't come to the, to the, to the store before they have a kind of like almost intimate relationship with something that they're trying to buy when they can look at it at their, in their house, looking at it from different angles, getting to know what it is and you know, if that part is broken, you kind of have a not very good start. [00:35:21] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. And you'll never get off the ground. No, you'll never get off the ground. Yeah. So I guess, I guess that gets back to like, so what? So if I was a brand and I'm, and I'm like, let's just say, let's just say. Let's just say we've effectively made the point and they're like, okay, good, you know, maybe I should, maybe I should. I'm going to consider, I'm going to consider China. I'm not saying I'm going to actually handle it, but I'm going to consider China right now. So what, what, what would be steps that you would want to go about doing in terms of like, how, how to approach this? What would be your thought on that? [00:36:04] Speaker B: Well, my first. Well, my first idea and my. Like, the diagnosis that I've made from the observations that I had is that to effectively and reliably serve your audiences in China, the stack has to be. Or the site that you're building has to be entirely accessible without crossing the great firewall. And there are different ways to get that. I mean, apart from it. That. I mean, that's the. That's the foundation. I'd say how you get that is a different story. But that would be what I'd say is like a foolproof way of doing that. [00:36:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:36:52] Speaker B: That is also. Sorry. That does require you to obtain certain licenses like icp, Internet Content Provider. So you do have to put a little bit more effort. But if you are seriously interested in those audiences and that market means something to you and you do other investments over there to actually gain customers, this is something you should consider because, well, it feels like you. You do those 1, 2, 3, 4 things and then you do the one that is really important one halfway through. [00:37:33] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think, yeah, I think that, that, I mean, step. It's funny, I think to me, like step A even. Even before getting technical, because I love, I love just starting to talk networking and gear and stuff like that. Cause that's kind of who I am. But. But I almost think that that the. The precursor for that. Like, I'd want somebody to just go and just, you know, just go pull up some like 4K video streetscapes of like Shanghai and Guangzhou and Shenzhen and Shongsheng and like these big, big, big, like the bitty. The biggest city in the entire world right now. Everybody thinks it's Tokyo. It's not. It's this. It's this city that nobody's heard of in the center of China with like, depending on how you measure it, anywhere between 20 and 40 million people in it. And it's just. It looks like a sci fi movie with these monorails all over the place and bridges and skyscrapers and things going light. Everything's got LEDs and things like that. And it's just. It really looks like something out of a. Some crazy, you know, futuristic movie. Go look at that and just see if you can visualize any, any of your customers in those streetscapes. Because those are. These are people with means who, who, who are technically savvy who. Absolutely. Who. All of them have access to the Internet. All of them are on the Internet. So. And if you can visualize your customer being there, like once again, if you're a U.S. tax preparer and you're like, yeah, I didn't, I actually, I watched all the videos and I didn't, I couldn't spot any of my customers. Good, good. That made that easy. We, we stopped, we stopped before you got too deep. But then after that, like, then I think what you said is pretty much astute. Like, you gotta, you gotta measure what your customers are getting right now and it's gonna really, really shock you. It's really bad. It's worse than you think. That's the one thing too is it is already worse than you think. But I think that the conclusion that almost every single person's gonna come to is the same exact one, is that, is that without, without a physical presence where your gear is physically located inside China, it's gonna, the performance is gonna be unacceptable. Yeah, it's, I mean, you and I have done a bunch of testing on this. We test it again and again and again and it's just, it's, it's always. [00:40:00] Speaker B: Going to be unacceptable and it's, and I think it's worth to say that I think the worst experience is that it's like the worst part of it is that it's unreliable. I mean, one day it's okay. Ish, and the other day it's just, it doesn't load at all or, you know, and it's like, I mean, I visited like two days ago and it kind of worked and now I can't even go through like two or three clicks. [00:40:33] Speaker A: And that's, I think that's what makes it difficult. But also I think that, that, that understanding, that variability and understanding, like when I say, when somebody says bad, define bad, right? Like, it's not that a site that usually takes a second and a half to load in the US or two seconds to load in the US has taken six seconds in China. It took six seconds in China. They're still, they're still going to browse your site. It's a little, little slow, but they're still going to browse your site. What about, what about 120 seconds to timeout with broken images and buttons that don't work because your JS didn't load and all just like that is actually the experience that they're getting. I can tell you already, sites that I've made that I was super proud of in the US are just, don't load in China. They just, they take two minutes to fail. And I went and said it's not that bad for everybody. Can't Be that bad. I went through real use monitoring on it and I had to get real use monitoring hosted in China because if you use your new relic and stuff, it just doesn't work at all. Because new relic, they've got like, go, go Google it. Like they, they say, sorry, our stuff doesn't work in China. So I went and got some stuff from Ollie Cloud and I stuck it on my site and it's like, no real life. And I told a bunch of friends, I'm like, good, go browse this, tell me what you get. And then I'm going to compare the stats to, to what you're saying. And it's like, for real life, it was like, yeah, no, your site loaded. It took, it took one minute and nine seconds. [00:42:06] Speaker B: Okay. And there's a question, would you say, and I think I already know the answer, but would you say that people over there are just used to this kind of performance? They're okay with it. [00:42:19] Speaker A: Well, but that's the thing. That's the thing. So if you. There is no shortage of local competition. There is so much local competition for everything. [00:42:34] Speaker B: And, and it loads quickly. Right? [00:42:36] Speaker A: And it loads fast. They're all hosted in China. So if you're a global brand and you're like, you're selling whatever you're selling or you're, you're, you're trying to get across, whatever you're trying to get across there is, there is almost certainly a local brand who's hosted there, whose site is, is going to perform. And, and so I would say previously you might have had a little bit of an excuse because there was, there was, you know, in some brands, this might still be the case where, where they've got a real thing for foreign, for foreign things. So they're going to make excuses for you because you're, because you're. Oh, you're not. You're French or you're Swiss or you're American or whatever. And so therefore, you know, I'll wait for your thing. A lot of times there's, you know, the patriotic sort who just say, I'd rather buy from in China anyway. So you're already, you're already fighting at a disadvantage. So if you, if you don't. I don't think that they're making any really viable excuses for you when your site is terrible. [00:43:40] Speaker B: No, I don't think either. I think they are wired, you know, not to wait. I mean, like every other Internet user, we hate waiting. [00:43:53] Speaker A: Yep. [00:43:54] Speaker B: It's just something that is not a pleasant thing. It's not acceptable in terms of user experience. And you know, they're just not accepting that the same as we thought. Well, we, I don't stay loyal to a brand that makes me wait. I go and search elsewhere. [00:44:14] Speaker A: Oh yeah, even if you're a captive audience, like I've got a, I've got a, I've got a travel booking provider that I've been using for the last 20 years or 15 years or something like that. Their mobile performance is not good at all. And just now, just, I just had an experience just now where I had to wait, I was waiting for almost three minutes at a hotel desk for my reservation to load so that I could show them my reservation. And you know how many times I'm thinking I'm going to switch from these guys. This, this is the last straw. Right. But what, but that was this, that's experience that, that my own website gets in China presently. And they're not a captive audience. [00:45:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:45:03] Speaker A: So anyway, the positive end of all this, because the thing is is that, is that just because we need to stop any brand owners before they commit any like self harm as a result of this, this podcast. So, so because the, because the worst, because I feel like this came through in some of our survey results too is that a lot of times folks are like there's not something practical that I can do to solve this problem. So if there was something practical that was easy that we could do to solve this problem, then we would do it. But there's not something practical. Like when you're talking about Adobe Experience Manager, you're talking about a lot of these other big vendors. There's not something to do. We've got a solution that works pretty well right now. [00:45:53] Speaker B: It's neat, right? [00:45:55] Speaker A: It's very neat. It's very flexible. It's not just tied to one flavor or variant on the Adobe stack. It could be, it could be, it could be adapted effectively and, and from, and cost effectively for a number of different solutions. So I, so I think that the, the not to turn this into, into a sales pitch because that's not where I want to go with this. But the, the, the, I think the main thing that folks would need to know is that there's solutions. They're actually there, there are totally solutions and it's not, it's not, it's not the direction you should go to. Just say I'm, I'm really, I'm pretty sure I can't do anything about this right now. [00:46:38] Speaker B: Yeah, you can actually challenge that being said to you that you know, now I know that, you know, there are, there are ways to do it go get to know what it is. Well, if you really want to know, just watch Tats and Camille's presentation at the Adaptive. Well, you still have to wait to see that because that's into two and a half weeks. But be prepared to be amazed because they did it and it's working. It's something that is going to be solving this for different, different setups and. [00:47:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, this is, this is, this is going to be a fun new era. I really, I really want, I've got, I definitely got. So I, I, I had a decision that I made, whatever this was, 2018 or something like this that I really wanted to help global brands be able to get their sites to work in China. And I feel like this is going to be one of the first times where it's possible because, because, because right now, because here's the other thing too is that I've run into problems in the past of things like a roadblock of oh, but I can't do anything about it until I have a local office in China. That's, that, that's also surmountable. So there's a lot of, there's basically solutions for almost every business configuration. If you've got a desire to do it and you've got an audience that you want to reach, you can actually solve this problem. [00:48:22] Speaker B: Exactly. The technology has catched up and yeah, you can now expect a different standard. [00:48:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Which I think, I mean this will be interesting if you know, try to, try to do this podcast again in a couple years when, when, when we've turned the tide on this and we've got local, a lot of global brands that are, that are hosting there and, and achieving good results, then I think that this is, this is be good to have a different set of expectations for China. [00:48:56] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. I say a big yes to that. [00:49:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Well I think that, that, that wraps us up for right now and I guess one of the next times that we meet and talk about this, I'll be on and yes. And then we'll have to what we'll do our, we already have it on the books to do a, to do a wrap up after adapt to. In addition to that we're going to be doing a. Just because I was asked, we're going to be doing a pre adapt to bike ride and, and, and video. So, so for anybody who can make it to adapt to before the conference starts, we're going to be doing it on Sunday and so, so we'll do a little bike tour of Berlin and, and get people's pre. Pre adapt to feelings some brain pump. [00:49:45] Speaker B: Some blood through their brain so they can. [00:49:47] Speaker A: That's right. [00:49:47] Speaker B: You know, absorb all the great stuff that will be at the stage later on in the next three days. [00:49:55] Speaker A: That's right. Hasn't been there. It's like, it's like it is, it is so much more technical than Adobe Summit so you really like have to be like, like like ready to like receive. So. Yeah. [00:50:06] Speaker B: Yes, yes. There's a lot of meat there. [00:50:10] Speaker A: Yep, that's right. [00:50:11] Speaker B: Very, very little fluff. [00:50:14] Speaker A: No there's yeah, basically none and we, we aim to not change that with our, with our preso as well. [00:50:19] Speaker B: Cool. [00:50:21] Speaker A: All right, good. Well, thanks Marta for coming on and. [00:50:23] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. [00:50:24] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll be seeing you in person soon. [00:50:27] Speaker B: Yes. [00:50:28] Speaker A: All right. [00:50:28] Speaker B: Can't voice.