How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao • Hacker News Board

Re: How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao

#71

Post by mahranch » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

forkLding wrote: post #49

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/... See above for a more full analysis, Chinese govt. could have given preferential treatment but it was Ebay that had adverts all over Chinese buses and had blocked Taobao from advertising on Chinese web platforms through exclusive partnerships.

> Chinese govt. could have given preferential treatment

How do we know they didn't? They could have just decided "Now that Taobao is up and running, we can get rid of ebay". They've done worse before, so it's not a stretch.

It's interesting that there are no massive web properties in China with the bulk market share (google, facebook, ebay, amazon, twitter, etc) that aren't Chinese owned. Yet, in the entire rest of the world, those same websites are #1. That's not just some coincidence or one-off, that's clearly governmental manipulation and control.

If it was just one or two web properties, I could understand. Like how it is with Yahoo! Japan. But all of them? Sorry, China doesn't want western companies running the show within their country. Articles like this are moot since there was no future with eBay in the #1 spot thanks to the CCP.

Re: How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao

#72

Post by jdietrich » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 11:08 PM UTC

not_that_noob wrote: post #39

Some of this is of course the Chinese government placing its thumb on the scales in favor of local businesses. It does this for a lot of reasons, but it's clear it happens. However, compare the situation to other more open countries (e.g. India, Japan, Indonesia ) There are culture, social and language specific nuances that local entrepreneurs understand far better than outsiders, and that accounts for a significant…

I'm not sure that 'copycat' is entirely fair. Google wasn't the first search engine, Facebook wasn't the first social network, Amazon wasn't the first online retailer. Flipkart or Taobao have some similarities to certain western retail platforms, but are profoundly different in many important ways.

WeChat might have had the advantage of the Great Firewall, but they have also built a genuinely innovative platform that is better suited to the Chinese market and in many respects much more sophisticated than any Western equivalent. No western company would have grasped the importance of hongbao or implemented it so skilfully. No western company could have anticipated the hugely positive reaction to WeChat Moments advertising and the remarkably high CPM.

I think there's a certain "not invented here" attitude prevalent in Silicon Valley. We do iteration, they do copycats. We build a better mousetrap, they make shitty knock-offs.

Re: How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao

#73

Post by tehlike » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 1:07 AM UTC

ionwake wrote: post #16

docker_up wrote: post #9

Competing against eBay is like saying you're competing in a 100m race against someone in a wheelchair. eBay has done nothing to make itself better in the last 15 years. New "features" routinely fail, and their APIs are a graveyard of dropped ideas. I hope Taobao expands to the US, eBay needs real competition, anyone working there should be embarrassed for themselves, more importantly the Directors and above.

I remember after deving a 50 player 3d networked multiplayer game in nodejs, that they became interested in interviewing me ( at the time node was only about 2 years old ). Unfortunately in the 4 hour pre-interview demo they wanted me to code, there was a deprecated call to a function I referenced later. Due to the time constraint I missed that one line of code. App worked flawlessly as I had tested it. Thing is I ev…

It was 99% not because of deprecated method, unless they explicitly told you so. Deprecated code detection is compile/build tools job, not yours.

Re: How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao

#74

Post by masonic » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 9:19 AM UTC

techwizrd wrote: post #31

docker_up wrote: post #9

Competing against eBay is like saying you're competing in a 100m race against someone in a wheelchair. eBay has done nothing to make itself better in the last 15 years. New "features" routinely fail, and their APIs are a graveyard of dropped ideas. I hope Taobao expands to the US, eBay needs real competition, anyone working there should be embarrassed for themselves, more importantly the Directors and above.

When I was interning at eBay a few years ago, they were doing some amazing work. I worked with the machine translation team and they were doing cutting edge research all over the place with new patents being awarded regularly (even to interns!). Many of their algorithms like spelling correction were significantly better than the state of the art, in part due to their unique data set. They were also actively rebuildin…

  Many of their algorithms like spelling correction

And yet I see the same stupid typo every day for 15+ years running: "You have choosen (sic) to end your item..."

Re: How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao

#75

Post by forkLding » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

mahranch wrote: post #71

forkLding wrote: post #49

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/... See above for a more full analysis, Chinese govt. could have given preferential treatment but it was Ebay that had adverts all over Chinese buses and had blocked Taobao from advertising on Chinese web platforms through exclusive partnerships.

> Chinese govt. could have given preferential treatment How do we know they didn't? They could have just decided "Now that Taobao is up and running, we can get rid of ebay". They've done worse before, so it's not a stretch. It's interesting that there are no massive web properties in China with the bulk market share (google, facebook, ebay, amazon, twitter, etc) that aren't Chinese owned. Yet, in the entire rest of t…

Those tech companies are the result of censorship and definitely Chinese preferential treatment and national security, etc. Chinese preferential treatment by a Chinese govt is normal like the US prefers US companies such as US bailing out Ford and GM because of jobs. China would much prefer chinese companies and workers instead of international because it provides jobs and income.

US companies also dominate in China, see McDonalds or Starbucks or Apple in China. A lot of international companies dominate China, just not all of technology, also Apple is a tech company last time I checked. Even if it was a democratic Chinese govt, whats stopping it from supporting a Chinese company over a US one, whos to say that the democratic govt wont go China for the Chinese like Trump?