Inside Google's push in Indonesia, a key market for start of its Next One Billion Project
Sheera Frenkel / BuzzFeed : Tweets: @sarahcuda , @asim_fayaz , @jrichlive and @nitashatiku Tweets: Sarah Lacy / @sarahcuda : jesus. i reported on this in 2009 when google didn't give a f**k about that market. time change i guess.... http://twitter.com/... Asim Fayaz / @asim_fayaz : The next billion is not as westernized as the last billion so it needs to be served the local way. http://twitter.com/... Jeff Richards / @jrichlive : The next great battle for mobile consumers - SE Asia. Very complicated + challenging, big potential TAM. http://www.techmeme.com/... Nitasha Tiku / @nitashatiku : subtle shade from Google at Facebook giving India a “lesser version” of the internet http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Indonesia push is the operational phase of a bet Google had been assembling since late 2015, when it launched an equity-free accelerator spanning Brazil, India and Indonesia to seed the local mobile startup ecosystems it would eventually need as partners and suppliers of local knowledge. The reaction thread around the piece captures the shift: Sarah Lacy recalls covering the same market in 2009 when Google ignored it, while investor Jeff Richards frames Southeast Asia as the next great battle for mobile consumers with a large but complicated TAM.
What changed is the product philosophy, not just the marketing budget. As commentator Asim Fayaz puts it, the next billion is not as westernized as the last billion, so it has to be served the local way — which is why Indonesia matters as a launch market rather than a distribution stop.
First-order effects
- Google moves from porting Western products to co-developing with Indonesian startups, with its accelerator cohort effectively becoming an early pipeline for locally built features.
- First-time internet users in Indonesia become a design target in their own right, changing what Google ships there versus in mature markets.
Second-order effects
- Rivals competing for the same first-time users — Facebook among them — are pushed toward their own localized builds in Southeast Asia rather than global defaults.
- Local mobile startups gain leverage: a platform giant courting their markets raises the value of regional distribution know-how and local-language product expertise.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, localization stops being a side project and gets institutionalized — as it later did with Google's dedicated Next Billion Users team and its deepening India operations, where falling data prices turned new users into a scale business.
- The endgame visible in the corpus is frontier-market capital concentration: the same three-way contest that began with product launches matures into multibillion-dollar investment pledges across India by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
The trend: US consumer-internet platforms are shifting from exporting Western products to building market-specific products and committing direct capital in Asian growth markets, with Indonesia and India as the proving grounds.