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Alibaba breaks itself up in six

economist.com

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Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#161

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #101
bioemerl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is also the source of all their monopolistic behavior. Apple hardware should be incentivized to make great hardware for any operating system. Apple software should be incentivized to sell to many manufacturers and also to not obey apple hardware's demands for locks to prevent things like the replacement of batteries. Their union could be a great thing, but apple decided to use it to be a bunch of m…

> Unfortunately this is also the source of all their monopolistic behavior. How can you be showing “monopolistic behavior” when you’re neither the only player in the game, nor the biggest?

monopolistic behavior doesn't require a monopoly

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#162

Post by PutinPoopin »

ptx wrote: post #148
SilverBirch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert on this, but from what I gather this all leads back to a power struggle between Jack Ma and Xi Jinping. Ma was ready to go public with AliPay and in the build up to it made a speech that criticised the government regulation as being out of date. This was viewed as a challenge to the governments power. Over the next few months the government moved to tighten regulations on companies like AliPay and d…

Wasn't there also something about Alibaba specifically working on a money lending scheme which circumvented banking regulations and which regulators feared would create vast amounts of unsecured debt and destabilize the economy?

That happened in China tho without Alibaba?

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#163

Post by the_af »

mistrial9 wrote: post #158
the_af wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you basically understand the US is guilty, but somehow assumed I was saying the people on Latin America who used this training to murder their own people are innocent? Of course it requires two things: murderers and those willing to train and support them. PS: "nice try" my ass. This piece of history I'm telling you is widely acknowledged, this is not some kind of conspiracy theory.

I apologize if I offended you or others, it is an upsetting chapter in history yes.

Apology accepted.

To be clear: I do consider our dictators and murderers as worse people than those who trained them in the School of the Americas. Because, like you rightly put it, "who chooses this path?".

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#164

Post by philipov »

midasuni wrote: post #144
andy_ppp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.

Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels. However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech…

People thought he had some engineering skills, until he took over Twitter and started talking about all the idiotic engineering decisions he was making.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#166

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #160
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why don’t people buy those over apple products? If you change Apple into that, I would be sad because now you’ve taken away a choice I had before.

it's an interesting question (whether Apple's monopolistic behavior has produced any good), but entirely orthogonal to the underlying question, whether Apple is behaving monopolistically (they are).

Apple has a monopoly on Apple products, and even though there are plenty of non-Apple products to buy, they are behaving like a monopoly?

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#167

Post by FpUser »

midasuni wrote: post #144
andy_ppp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.

Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels. However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech…

>"less interested in the tech and more in the politics"

Once you have x dollars and own companies government is aware of it comes as no surprise

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#168

Post by RobotToaster »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #68
SilverBirch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert on this, but from what I gather this all leads back to a power struggle between Jack Ma and Xi Jinping. Ma was ready to go public with AliPay and in the build up to it made a speech that criticised the government regulation as being out of date. This was viewed as a challenge to the governments power. Over the next few months the government moved to tighten regulations on companies like AliPay and d…

Also, one of Ma’s last public appearances was at an American conference, maybe TechCrunch but I’m not sure, where he said in an on stage interview something to the effect of, “I’m not afraid of the CCP”, in relation to recent revelations he was a CCP member. Then he got disappeared shortly after. He was really clueless about what kind of org he was dealing with.

Given China's, (and to some extent, Asia's), obsession with face, his actions do all seem pretty clueless. I wonder, could it all be part of some performance?

The fact that they let Ali "voluntarily" restructure, and save face from having it be enforced, is interesting on it's own. I'm not really sure what to make of it.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#169

Post by mschuster91 »

midasuni wrote: post #144
andy_ppp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.

Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels. However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech…

> However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame.

He's a narcissist. People used to worship him - and given just how hard Tesla kicked the butts of the ICE car industry or how SpaceX just completely obliterated Boeing/ULA, rightfully. But let's be honest, both are mainstream now and don't get as much attention as they once did... and then, his wife leaves him for Chelsea Manning and one of his children comes out as trans and sticks the finger to him.

A bad enough combination of events for normal people to handle (getting dumped by a partner is one of the chief causes that sends people into depression and other mental health disaster loops), but for a narcissist with no real support structure to fall back on and already on the edge? No surprise he blames everyone but himself and allies with those that are against those whom he feels "wronged" by: the far-right.

Note, this doesn't excuse any of his actions. He needs to come out of this rabbit hole either by himself or, when he finally hits rock bottom and commits something that he can't just buy himself out of prison, by the government.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#170

Post by eloff »

crop_rotation wrote: post #100

The media and HN seem to be seeing this as a AT&T style breakup, which is not. It is starting with an Alphabet style restructuring, which sounds big in theory but nothing big might happen in practice. The biggest unit (Taobao/Tmall) will be fully owned by Alibaba and would not seek any external investment (Taobao/Tmall is responsible for >70% of their profits). The new Unit CEOs were not even invited to speak at the…

Also the reason the stock jumped on the news is the company is potentially worth more this way, by breaking out higher margin / faster growth units from the big retail business. A lot of Amazon investors would love to see the same with AWS.

It sounds silly since nothing really changes, but it has to do with the way investors calculate the value of public companies.

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