Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

through anti-competitive policies?

The article is rather light on details on what Didi actually did better, but from using Uber as a foreigner in China, I could see significant problems in Uber's product execution:

1. The Android app continues to use Google Maps which is Great Firewall blocked, meaning I had to use a VPN to load uncached tiles.

2. Uber in turn IP blocks EC2, preventing me from using my main VPN while in app.

3. Entities on the map are shifted by the GCJ-02 offset (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...), meaning entities on the map are shifted by 0.5 miles (look at those cars driving on parkland: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhkrjyka5uq0pfb/PeopleUber.png?dl=...)

4. User support was absolutely non-existent. After I responded to an automatic email from the local community manager inviting me to ask any questions, I only received an automated emails telling me I won't be helped.

5. Help pages in the app on Uber China tell me to see the Chinese translation, with no actual link to said translation.

While the foreigner use-case in China is niche, the sheer amount of obvious (and easily resolvable) problems I ran into suggests that Uber has organizational problems ensuring both drivers and customers have good experiences in foreign countries.

One blog from Jan 2014 highlights how bad the execution was at launch: https://www.larrysalibra.com/5-problems-with-uber-in-china-a... - the most absurd being that Uber (at that time) only accepted US-branded credit cards which few Chinese nationals hold.

I completely understand Chinese (or any other country) entrepreneurs, why let some foreign company come in and take all the money (ultimately a lot of it outside the country) when you can do the same internally. The idea is not a rocket science, all about execution. And locals know the specifics of China more than a bunch of silicon valley grads.

Cheers to these guys for making it work in China. And Good luck to Uber fighting strengthening competition all around the world.

For those crying wolf about protectionism...

In general, I think most nations should have more closed door policies like China. My country (which won't be named) does not have a startup ecosystem anymore and we have become a consumption ground for one silicon valley startup after another. Instead of fostering local startups and paying some money (since many bootstrap and do not have big pockets), all the companies just take the freebies of silicon valley startups. We had a local chat start up but slack ate their lunch. Everyone here just uses the slack free tier. How do you compete against free?

Eventually, this has led to all the data of individuals and companies on US soil (or wherever those startups feel like stashing the data). We have no control or say over it. If we are to look for alternatives, there is none in our own country.

And for those who think the world is one giant land where everyone can roam freely, it's impossible for me to move to any of the western world because of visa restrictions. And US has the harshest work visas on the plante.

> We had a local chat start up but slack ate their lunch. Everyone here just uses the slack free tier. How do you compete against free?

The point of division of labor (aka how civilization got built) is that it's not _necessary_ to spend time re-doing the same thing others are doing. Slack is giving you something for free that you don't _have_ to spend time or money building now.

Now you have X engineers free to work on something actually innovative, not just a clone of X, and getting a cheap/free service from slack.

The point of economic policy should not be to produce pointless jobs.