61–70 of 80 posts
It disturbs me that with each day, it seems like the Great Chinese Firewall was a good solution. You keep out the foreign competition letting internal competition foster and you stop a capital drain. Imagine if the EU had it’s own Alibaba, Baidu or WeChat... That is a lot of taxpaying money...
If Europe wants to compete, why not simply create an ecosystem where Europeans companies can succeed?
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I wonder about this. China has its own app ecosystem, as does Russia. India is pushing towards having its own as well. What about Europe? Is it harder because you have to localize to so many languages?
It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market, it's competition from other companies. If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch. The same dynamic also…
Then acquire it.
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> I mean there isn't even any research on it. No one talks about it. Neither of these statements can be true, as I've seen multiple examples of both. For what it's worth, one of the search terms you are looking for is "time theft" (as opposed to "wage theft"), the literature on this is also well developed as you might expect. And of course there are various types of related fraud (both in favor of employer and employ…
So if you take some studies on time theft, it looks like it amounts to $400 billion annually, which is far and away in excess of the figure that the original poster said was the largest type of theft. This proves my original point.
Regardless , that wasn’t my point - far from being a novel idea there are lots of people looking at and arguing about it. Hell there is an industry around mitigations.
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It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market, it's competition from other companies. If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch. The same dynamic also…
>It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market It very much is about localization - both language and to some extent also culture. Both are notable problems with b2c, and there are no "good enough" automated solutions. My point of reference is the success of Polish domestic "Allegro" ecommerce platform, which was able to out-fox EBay, and later on Amazon, and still mai…
Were eBay and Amazon unable to translate their websites into Polish quickly enough for some reason? I just checked https://ebay.pl and http://www.amazon.pl , the latter of which redirects to amazon.de with language set to pl_PL, but nonetheless appears fully translated into Polish.
> There were no significant technological advantages, nor any notable political connections. The platform won purely on being local.
To be clear, I'm not saying that being local doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that localization (in the sense of translating and adapting the website to local preferences) is the least hurdle in becoming local. The much bigger hurdle is acquiring local customers who are already used to local services. Either you have an obviously superior product that local competitors can't match (unlikely for run-of-the-mill online stores) or you're fighting an uphill battle.
> In spite all the local success the platform could not expand to the west of Poland due to localization (language and partly culture). It did expand a little bit to Ukraine and Czech Republic.
My guess is that there are Czechs and Ukrainians in Poland who got familiar with Allegro there and spread it via word of mouth. (I could not find a Czech or Ukrainian version of allegro.pl, so are they using the Polish site?) On the other hand there are likely many more Poles in Germany than Germans in Poland, so Poles would be more familiar with German services than Germans with Polish services. (Case in point: the redirect from amazon.pl to .de)
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Uber is just a different rent seeker, though. Over time the situation will likely just keep getting worse until it is as bad as the system it is replacing (many things about the ride-sharing ecosystem are already not great...) While it's always nice to see a broken rent-seeking system in our world become eroded we should not laude the transfer to another fiat regency.
By that statement, you can claim TaskRabbit and the like are also rent-seekers.
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It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market, it's competition from other companies. If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch. The same dynamic also…
> If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch. Then acquire it.
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> Uber broke the back of your local city's taxi medallion scheme. Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it a…
Uber is just a different rent seeker, though. Over time the situation will likely just keep getting worse until it is as bad as the system it is replacing (many things about the ride-sharing ecosystem are already not great...) While it's always nice to see a broken rent-seeking system in our world become eroded we should not laude the transfer to another fiat regency.
Creating and maintaining software that connects a person with a device to a driver with a device and routes them from point A (driver) => A' (person) => B (destination) isn't some trivial nothing that you can just rent-seek into existence. I believe 'wealth' was added to the economy that did not previously exist when people had to deal with hailing cab drivers, not have a map of their route, and not know an approximation of their fare ahead of time.
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Uber is just a different rent seeker, though. Over time the situation will likely just keep getting worse until it is as bad as the system it is replacing (many things about the ride-sharing ecosystem are already not great...) While it's always nice to see a broken rent-seeking system in our world become eroded we should not laude the transfer to another fiat regency.
Rent-seeking means, roughly, trying to extract wealth without creating any wealth. Creating and maintaining software that connects a person with a device to a driver with a device and routes them from point A (driver) => A' (person) => B (destination) isn't some trivial nothing that you can just rent-seek into existence. I believe 'wealth' was added to the economy that did not previously exist when people had to deal…
Remember the sign on cabs that said they accept all major cards, only to find out the "card reader doesn't work?".
I'm starting to think the reason why tech companies are so well-valued is purely due to regulatory evasion skills and a dash of political engineering. Effectively, every tech company has been given a pass on something . Facebook doesn't have to worry about defamation lawsuits. Google doesn't have to worry (as much) about copyright. Amazon built it's business on evading sales tax. Uber broke the back of your local cit…
> Uber broke the back of your local city's taxi medallion scheme. Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it a…
Uber in particular is interesting, as it's a vastly superior service built by somehow even more morally deficient individuals.
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I am not sure why Amazon should care about anyone other than itself. To make profits though they have to serve an ordinary blok like me.
we all know what happens when companies sacrifice everything for profit - not good!
Amazon is working hard to get things to our doorstep for real low prices, is that a sacrifice ?