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When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

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Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#51

> Uber felt it was treated fairly by a government > my guess is that if [...] had been more successful, China would have put a Mao-sized thumb on the scales. This is how it lost me, it shows how light he is on facts. I do agree with the 2 statements "China is protectionist" and "protectionism is bad". But I am cynical enough to see that everyone carefully pics which protectionism they complain about. As a Brazilian I…

As an American: the US's protectionism and agricultural subsidies are shameful, and should be stopped.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#52
post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, coolin…

Are you kidding me ? Do you seriously have a clue what you are talking about ?

Lets ignore that almost every company sources components from china and loses its know-how in a process.

But did you actually know that Chinese research on CPU greatly benefitted from OPEN SPARC and OPEN POWER projects ? Both coming from the WEST ?

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#54
post #27

Are there any cast studies on multinational companies that were successful in China and outlined why? Companies like Danone?

Sure. There are tons. Starbucks is everywhere, KFC, McDonalds, Walmart is doing okay along with Carrefour. Apple ofcourse is completely crushing the phone market (and it's not just so they can employ a few factories of manual laborers) Car comapnies do just fine. I'm sure there is a ton of industrial espionage and technology transfer from government to local companies (hard to explain some advances otherwise.. ), but articles screaming about Chinese protectionism mostly stink of "bad sportsmanship". Some of these companies just blew it (Uber and Ebay) or they're social media platforms. The reality is that the government wants control over the media and what 99% of people hear and read. So platforms like Facebook or Google (with their vague moral obligation about not being "evil") make them very nervous. I talked to a Malaysia Chinese guy who supported the censorship and he explained it this way. In the third world (esp if you look at the middle east) there is a huge problem of misinformation and hysteria. People eat up all sorts of conspiracy theories and factoids gets spun out of control and can't get contained. In a country with lots of superstitions like China that's almost doubly worrying. So the government seems it in it's interest to control that kind feedback loop (obviously in part to keep itself in power... you could see some local protest about some minor issue blowing up into a national protest) So in general once some social media platform seems to get a critical mass it gets either brought down a peg or brought into the fold somehow (like Tencent buying League of Legend and some Android game)

I'm not condoning their policies, but they have their own internal consistency that's a little more nuanced then just "fuck the foreigner companies"

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.

They are running in startup mode. Things can be done very quickly as long as red tape doesn't hinder the speed of development. With having experience building everything for everyone, it's not surprising that they can build very quickly. They have ridiculous manpower at their factories working 24/7 to make billions of phones, utilizing that type of experience to fabricate couple hundreds of thousands of chips to buil…

If they want to do it very inefficiently, and have near infinite sums of money to throw at it, yes.

China does not have semiconductor fabs capable of producing anything close to a current generation Intel 14nm process Core i7 or Xeon CPU.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#56
post #27

Are there any cast studies on multinational companies that were successful in China and outlined why? Companies like Danone?

Sure. There are tons. Starbucks is everywhere, KFC, McDonalds, Walmart is doing okay along with Carrefour. Apple ofcourse is completely crushing the phone market (and it's not just so they can employ a few factories of manual laborers) Car comapnies do just fine. I'm sure there is a ton of industrial espionage and technology transfer from government to local companies (hard to explain some advances otherwise.. ), but…

Car companies do fine in weird ways: Buick is a super luxury prestigious brand in mainland China because 100 years ago, some of the first cars imported were Buicks... In the USA it's seen as your grandfather's land yacht.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#57
Making deals with someone who has an entirely different value system is dangerous, especially when there is no neutral institution to enforce those deals. Western companies doing business in China are lead by a mixture of braveness, greed and naiveness, I guess.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#58
post #47

> As late as this past June, Uber was predicting it would pass its rival within a year. This is simply not true (edit: not going to happen). I'm a fan of Uber, but using Uber is kinda like a exotic thing to do (while Didi is more common). Uber can be only used in major cities, on the other hand Didi can be used almost anywhere. Didi simply expand faster in China. (Uber is available in less than 20 Chinese cities whil…

> > > As late as this past June, Uber was predicting it would pass its rival within a year. > This is simply not true. Yes it is true. Kalanick's investor updates from 24-12 months ago were all gung ho on China and how Uber was seeing as much or more success there as any Western country ever had. Their explicit goal was to outcompete Didi and become the #1 on-demand service in China ( on-demand generally... not just…

> What evidence have you that this is "simply not true." Some of these statements to investors have become public knowledge, which you'll see with a simple google search.

I'm not saying Kalanick didn't say that, what I meant is it's not going to happen based on my observation. Sorry if it was misleading.

> No. A peace treaty or truce means each side remains independent but they agree to stop warring with each other. This is an outright purchase.

What you said make sense, but I see this as a truce between Didi and Uber per se, not just Uber China. Uber lose a battle on Chinese turf to Didi and sold this branch in exchange to some share of Didi. But Uber still exists. I don't view this as a victory of Didi either, they simply defended their home turf. What we may see next is maybe they will compete in SE Asia or India. It seems like Didi is more ambitious on things like this.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#59
post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, coolin…

> It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer

A buggy supercomputer that's down most of the time. In practice, Titan is still the world's fastest supercomputer. This isn't to say that China won't pass the US for real in supercomputing; it's just at the current moment their supercomputer is really only the best on paper.

EDIT: Actually, I didn't notice that the Sunway TaihuLight became active in June. I don't much about this supercomputer, so my comment only applies to the Tianhe-2.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#60
post #49
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin. For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. I think this was a combination of fear that isolating China vs creating a high degree of economic interdependence could lead to war down the line, and a lack of control over Western companie…

> It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin. Don't worry, the game is not over yet. >For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. Yes. But this could be changed by Trump in one day. (Sorry, I know that this is an extremely liberal board). Chinese don't believe in win-win. They…

> Yes. But this could be changed by Trump in one day.

OH really? How will he do that?

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