China's Web 2.0 late followers are catching up

Like almost everybody in business, I have a love-hate relationship with McKinsey. You have to love the combination of brain power that has seen the company top the consulting charts for so long. The downside is what so often seems to be the carnage and company wrecking that accompanies their recommendations.

Anyway, on the positive side, their McKinsey Quarterly journal is often worth a read. A new article reports on a global survey on the adoption of Web 2.0 among senior managers in the executive suites of the big companies who can afford their fees. There is an Asian twist to this:

...executives from China and Latin America typically say that their companies are late followers or had invested cautiously, they now plan to invest at the same rate or even faster than companies in Europe and North America. The level of investment in each of the Web 2.0 technologies cited in this survey varies across regions, with China being a fast adopter.

The area of Web 2.0 which generated the most interest in China and India was peer to peer networks with 50% and 39% respectively either saying they are using or plan to make use of this technology. Second in China was "collective intelligence", followed by social networks. In India, equal second were social networks and blogs.