Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by usaar333 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 1:10 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #31

usaar333 wrote: post #4

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…

For 1 & 2: when was that as for the last 1.5 years at least they use Baidu and it works fine. 3 yes indeed, very annoying. 4. In the west support is good: from China they just do not respond unless a driver screwed me on purpose (doing the ride without me in the car which happened a few time): I would receive no mail but the amount paid would be set to 0 rmb. 5. Even most car brand names are in Chinese now it seems.…

1/2: Are you on iPhone or Android? I was there a month ago and my Google Playstore downloaded variant only used Google Maps.

Great point on the driver calling being an issue for non-Mandarin speakers. I also experienced this. I actually asked drivers why they do this and apparently riders seem to put incorrect location information in -- this in itself indicates there is some problem.

Regardless, I don't begrudge Uber much here; the driver call culture is hard to fix (even in America, I'm called sometimes) and it's not unreasonable to require your customer base speak the local language. (It is unreasonable though for the phone app to assume your locale matches the local language [help screen problem] or to assume that you've downloaded the app from a completely local source [Google maps source issue])

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

#42

Post by usaar333 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 1:14 AM UTC

smitherfield wrote: post #24

3pt14159 wrote: post #3

This is just a Bloomberg PR piece. China has a plan for the internet: Don't let outsiders control critical IT infrastructure / personal data. > It was widely suggested in press accounts that the Chinese government helped Didi in its battle against Uber. Cheng rejects that, noting that as the largest ride-hailing company, Didi had to shoulder most of the regulatory burden and paid tens of millions of yuan to cover dri…

A thought that occurred to me recently, is that the main purpose of China's "Great Firewall" isn't so much silencing dissent[0], as it is protectionism. By making it effectively impossible for foreign (i.e. American) internet companies to operate in China, they've ensured that the spaces occupied by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Uber, and even to some extent Microsoft have been filled by Chinese-owned and China-…

Oh definitely.

The interesting trade-off though (as with all protectionism) is where the boundary between promoting and hindering innovation is.

VPN blocking Facebook probably has good ROI for generating internal social networks (which in turn can be monitored).

Blocking Google, even more so GitHub, seems far more dangerous economically as you impair innovators' abilities to obtain research done abroad. (Google is especially bad since a large percent of English language sites have Google dependencies (css/js hosting) -- effectively most of the English internet has become unusable in China without a VPN since the complete *google.com block went in).

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

#43

Post by tluyben2 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 1:19 AM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #41

tluyben2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 1 & 2: when was that as for the last 1.5 years at least they use Baidu and it works fine. 3 yes indeed, very annoying. 4. In the west support is good: from China they just do not respond unless a driver screwed me on purpose (doing the ride without me in the car which happened a few time): I would receive no mail but the amount paid would be set to 0 rmb. 5. Even most car brand names are in Chinese now it seems.…

1/2: Are you on iPhone or Android? I was there a month ago and my Google Playstore downloaded variant only used Google Maps. Great point on the driver calling being an issue for non-Mandarin speakers. I also experienced this. I actually asked drivers why they do this and apparently riders seem to put incorrect location information in -- this in itself indicates there is some problem. Regardless, I don't begrudge Uber…

> 1/2: Are you on iPhone or Android? I was there a month ago and my Google Playstore downloaded variant only used Google Maps.

Android. But my wife has iOS and that works as well?

> egardless, I don't begrudge Uber much here; the driver call culture is hard to fix (even in America, I'm called sometimes) and it's not unreasonable to require your customer base speak the local language. (It is unreasonable though for the phone app to assume your locale matches the local language [help screen problem] or to assume that you've downloaded the app from a completely local source [Google maps source issue])

Agree, but not being able to SMS while you can in every other country IS something to begrudge Uber for. If I could immediately SMS with a perfect Chinese sentence explaining where I am, which is how I always do it in countries I don't speak the language (well), then this saves all the hassle. They should put that back immediately. In Hongkong it has it (as it has it everywhere else) and the driver never calls...

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

#44

Post by usaar333 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 1:20 AM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #3

This is just a Bloomberg PR piece. China has a plan for the internet: Don't let outsiders control critical IT infrastructure / personal data. > It was widely suggested in press accounts that the Chinese government helped Didi in its battle against Uber. Cheng rejects that, noting that as the largest ride-hailing company, Didi had to shoulder most of the regulatory burden and paid tens of millions of yuan to cover dri…

To be fair, Uber is heavily subsidizing rides in China (below cost). Even in the US, a foreign company doing this could have anti-dumping tariffs slapped on them.

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

#45

Post by tluyben2 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:30 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #31

usaar333 wrote: post #4

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…

For 1 & 2: when was that as for the last 1.5 years at least they use Baidu and it works fine. 3 yes indeed, very annoying. 4. In the west support is good: from China they just do not respond unless a driver screwed me on purpose (doing the ride without me in the car which happened a few time): I would receive no mail but the amount paid would be set to 0 rmb. 5. Even most car brand names are in Chinese now it seems.…

Tried Netguard; doesn't work. Apparently Translate does not check the network, it checks if the network is on. While it it is on, it will try to reach Google for the translation. Meaning I need a separate offline device just for translate I guess.

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

#46

Post by tomtang0514 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 3:30 AM UTC

prebrov wrote: post #36

tomtang0514 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried, and US government bans Huawei

Huawei was banned from government contracts, not from the U.S. [edit: afaik] Also, it appropriated so much of Cisco's IP (quite poorly), at least as it was establishing itself as a network equipment vendor, that I wouldn't call Huawei innovative, not back then. It was a pretty clear case of cloning very expensive tech for a dime with MASSIVE government support.

Not only from government contracts. I remember watched a news clip years ago which interviewed the owner of a local ISP in midwest, who tried to use huawei's equipments and got FBI knocking his door.

I see your point of huawei cloning cisco's IP back when it first started. But today it's the biggest applicant for IP globally.

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

#47

Post by dylz » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 3:38 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

dylz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty standard, we block all "cloud" ranges for end-user-facing things (antifraud, etc) Bots on EC2 scraping and bruteforcing and whatnot, free tier being abused for free proxies

Good to know for future projects.

Understandably this is something you should make the correct choice for yourself, you might want to be scraped on readonly articles or public pages for things like thumbnails on reddit from EC2, but deny all `HTTPS POST /register` or something from EC2.

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

#48

Post by chrischen » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 7:30 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #22

chrischen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Uber invests most of their money on US soil, on US engineers, that go back into the US economy. They just want to release an app that harvests money from Chinese consumers. So if China can protect a local company that will clone uber, but with the difference of investing in local human capital and infrastructure, why not take that opportunity?

Why shouldn't the US begin very aggressively promoting its own domestic corporations, directly, at the expense of foreign companies as well then? Using all means available to the US Government to do so. Nobody here that is saying it's great for China to protect its local ecosystem, will think it's ok for the US Government to do likewise and doing everything in its means to leverage its particular advantages in favor…

This is Trump's campaign platform, which is to start protectionism for the US. And I agree, it would be a necessary step. You can bitch and whine about other countries being protectionist, but the appropriate response is to actually do it yourself (in the US).