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Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

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Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#81

Post by tluyben2 »

uola wrote: post #66
api wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…

Europe has done pretty much everything the US wants, from spying on our citizens to foreign companies paying little to no tax. All you hear these days is how lame Europe is because we don't have a Facebook and how we should all move to the overpriced small town of SV. China doesn't only have a Facebook, it has a Google, an Amazon and an Uber. Which are in many ways surpassing their US counterparts. Since when was tra…

They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's not only me though; my wife and I are learning Chinese and we use songs, tv shows and movies a lot for that; when we ask 'can we use X' to the teacher (who is in Hangzhou) she always answers 'I searched but cannot find it' while the first hits on Google are it it including a video on Youtube (not in China) or Tudou (in China). Not because it's banned but because the search doesn't work.

Besides that you are right; especially things they do better; they have Facebook but the messenger (Wechat) is really were it is at; I use Wechat now instead of Messenger and it is superior even when you are not in China. Mainly because it just always 'works' and it's always fast unlike Messenger. Didi is better than Uber in many ways especially for the Chinese; for foreigners it's fine but Uber is more convenient for us as support is in English and most drivers for Uber speak a bit (enough) of English in China while the Didi ones speak no English at all usually.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#82

Post by golergka »

sangnoir wrote: post #67
argonaut wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every nation has protectionism. Every single one . What's important is the degree of protectionism . So pointing out examples of a nation engaging in protectionism contributes little to the discussion unless you compare it to other nations.

> What's important is the degree of protectionism The US complaining about China's protectionism is hypocritical. Let's talk about America's farm subsidies. How is that not competing unfairly? It leads to American agricultural produce being dumped on foreign markets at subsidized prices, destroying entire countries' agricultural base. What would you say is the degree of protectionism here?

Farm subsidies is not only about business, it's about national security: you subside food industry so that when you suddenly find yourself in the big war with trade routes cut, your population doesn't starve.

I'm not saying that these subsidies are necessary; I'm just saying that they should be analyzed with a different framework.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#83

Post by Hondor »

argonaut wrote: post #57
Hondor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear if many of these things are good or bad or if they're any worse than silicon valley. I wouldn't count any of them as serious obstacles for Beijing tech success. Focused on the local market. I often run into SV companies that I'd like to use as a customer but can't because they only serve America. Either because of IP restrictions, money transfer, shipping, or they just haven't figured out other countri…

You're rebutting almost all of seanmcdirmid's arguments by essentially saying "it's not a problem because some SV startups/companies do it too." But: 1) You don't become the next Silicon Valley through cargo-cult entrepreneurship. 2) SV is successful in spite of those things, not because of it, because SV is starting from a position of strength and inertia. SV succeeds in spite of its current problems because of the…

Well yes, I suppose you're right. I think I'm just a bit jaded seeing every positive story about China filled with comments like "they'll fail because they're not doing it like us". There are plenty of ways they're different and most of them probably seem bad. Maybe most of them really are bad, but somehow they're still doing pretty well. It must be a complicated combination of factors. I don't think it's fair to predict failure just because some things are worse. They do have much stronger protectionism provided by the government, which is surely a massive advantage over American companies. They also have a cheaper yet well educated workforce.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#84

Post by golergka »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #7

Spend 3 weeks in China, and maybe it is clear that it is, but spend 8 years in China, and it is overwhelming clear that it is not. > Yes, they clone where they can. But cloning is starting to reach its max — there are just not enough successful ideas to clone. In addition, clones often fail in the local market due to different consumer behavior and needs. China is still fairly closed, startups here in Beijing are 99%…

> pre-00s when 6 day work weeks/12 hour days were expected from everyone

Was that really the case in US and Europe? Honestly curious.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#85

Post by hunglee2 »

api wrote: post #8
supster wrote: post #4

It must help Chinese startups that many SV companies are blocked from competing in China. For example no competition from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud... more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...

I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…

Excellent point. The net beneficiaries of 'free trade' rarely have cause to question the policies that have given them great returns. The last 200 years of Chinese history is describes very clearly the impact of the imposition of free trading principles, where the freedom to say 'no' to free trade (of opium) was overturned at the barrel of a gun. To this day, China refers to the 'century of humiliation' and is hyper conscious of being the unequal trading partner of the Western world ever again.

China will no doubt have also learnt from the speed of economic development of the original Asian Tigers (S.Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) whose post WWII protectionist policies allowed domestic manufacturers the time to grow, compete, and in some case super cede with more mature foreign businesses when the time to open up finally came. We would not have Samsung, LG, Sony or Nintendo today if those governments did not protect their own industries from German, Italian, UK and US electronics manufacturers of that era.

It seems that China is one of the few countries to apply these lessons to the internet era, and has the political control and consumer base to make it work.

Whatever the personal agendas involved, it's a fascinating experiment. Perversely, it might even lead to a greater consumer choice in the end - sign up to WeChat, use Baidu - with innovation cycling faster due to the eco-system wide competition created by the firewall

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#86

Post by cm3 »

bx_ wrote: post #43
50CNT wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been proselytizing linux over here. Ubuntu Kylin is pretty cool to set up for people, but the wifi cards on a lot of laptops don't take too well to it.

Why Kylin and not Xubuntu or Lubuntu?

The difference between Ubuntu and the two variants you mentioned is solely on the application layer and as long as they don't use the buggy KDE5 connection manager applet, WiFi won't be affected by Xubuntu or Lubuntu. So this boils down to preferences of desktop environments. I've always wondered why, instead of full distros, these variants weren't just supported more officially as flavors to choose or change to. Yes, you can install lubuntu-desktop from inside a stock Ubuntu install, but there's always some configuration and setup that's missing.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#87

Post by sangnoir »

argonaut wrote: post #68
sangnoir wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's important is the degree of protectionism The US complaining about China's protectionism is hypocritical. Let's talk about America's farm subsidies. How is that not competing unfairly? It leads to American agricultural produce being dumped on foreign markets at subsidized prices, destroying entire countries' agricultural base. What would you say is the degree of protectionism here?

I'll just repeat my extremely short comment: > pointing out examples of a nation engaging in protectionism contributes little to the discussion unless you compare it to other nations.

I thought the implicit comparison to any country was obvious and well known - maybe not to Americans[1]. Can you think of any country that practices protectionism on agriculture at the same level as the US?

1. I would have thought post-"corn-syrup-gate" more Americans would at least know corn is heavily subsidized.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#88

Post by wrong_variable »

golergka wrote: post #82
sangnoir wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's important is the degree of protectionism The US complaining about China's protectionism is hypocritical. Let's talk about America's farm subsidies. How is that not competing unfairly? It leads to American agricultural produce being dumped on foreign markets at subsidized prices, destroying entire countries' agricultural base. What would you say is the degree of protectionism here?

Farm subsidies is not only about business, it's about national security: you subside food industry so that when you suddenly find yourself in the big war with trade routes cut, your population doesn't starve. I'm not saying that these subsidies are necessary; I'm just saying that they should be analyzed with a different framework.

Not really,

Being self sufficient for war and producing excess agriculture product and dumping it on foreign markets are two completely different things.

And two can play at that game - china can make the same 'national security' nonsense argument about information espionage when it comes to the internet.

And in the modern world - the internet is more useful then food for a nation state - america can lose 30 million people and still win a total war as long as its nukes are functional.

Its all about protectionism.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#89

Post by stephenr »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #75
uola wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has done pretty much everything the US wants, from spying on our citizens to foreign companies paying little to no tax. All you hear these days is how lame Europe is because we don't have a Facebook and how we should all move to the overpriced small town of SV. China doesn't only have a Facebook, it has a Google, an Amazon and an Uber. Which are in many ways surpassing their US counterparts. Since when was tra…

Agreed that it's overpriced in terms of real estate, but I wouldn't call it small; the Bay Area is home to over 7 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area The weather is also pretty nice in the South Bay (over 300 days of sunshine according to Wikipedia for San Jose). San Francisco technically gets a lot of sun, but anecdotally they get a lot of fog and shade as well, especially in certain area…

> Left Coast

Please don't do that.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#90

Post by bayesian_horse »

bnegreve wrote: post #55
api wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…

Interesting point, but to be fair China is not the only one to find ways to implement protectionism. The F35 program or even Nasa contracting SpaceX could be seen as examples of the US implementing some level of protectionism.

SpaceX has better and cheaper rockets. I don't think they are exceptionally profiting from a "buy American" effect.

For the F-35 program, it contains a lot of technology which can't be found anywhere else in the world, and much of that technology was funded by the US government. For all the ridicule the project got, the corresponding projects in Russia and China are even worse off... If anything, the F-35 program is overpriced because there are no reasonable adversaries.

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