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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

Just a small reminder that the reason WeChat (and Baidu) are so popular in China is because Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Google are blocked there. It's easier to grab a local market when free competition is made illegal. I'd be more impressed if they were forced to compete with the rest of the world and in fact, they are doing pretty badly in most of the rest of the world where they are forced to compete.

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Not necessarily true. Baidu was popular even before Google was blocked in China. Taobao is more successful than Ebay and Amazon in China, even Ebay and Amazon have never been blocked in China.

My personal experience of buying a book from amazon.cn is much worse than from Taobao. It took Amazon a week to deliver the book to a small town in the rural area but Taobao a day.

Many successful enterprises from outside fail to succeed in China, even they are not blocked.

For businesses, understand your customers' needs is essential to the success. Sadly many of them, both from western and China failed to realise this.

The same business model or user experience might works like magic in a market but fails horribly in another.

Yes and no. KakaoTalk, LINE, and WhatsApp were not blocked in China at the time, and WeChat was, in its early stages, essentially a Chinese clone of those others. WeChat's success had a lot more to do with

* Being able to login with your QQ account and import your QQ friends (WeChat and QQ are made by the same company, and for many people, WeChat replaced QQ)

* Catering to Chinese users, including Chinese payment systems, Chinese train/plane tickets, Chinese taxis, and pretty much everything else local

* Network effects within the Chinese community

* Aggressively targeting Chinese distribution channels

Note that QQ itself was popular because facebook messenger and msn before were blocked, and so was twitter. Chinese payment systems were themselves blocking foreign competition. The digital economy is basically a walled garden where only local companies can thrive with very few exceptions.

I hope it was true, but no.

In 2006, I have both QQ, Skype, MSN, Yahoo messenger installed and they all work in China at that time. QQ for friends and family, Skype for Voip calls, MSN for friends in university, well, Yahoo messenger, mostly was used to chat with people outside of China, to practice English.

QQ was huge popular among younger populations at that time, in way I could not understand.

I used MSN most of the time to communicate with my friends in university, but almost all my friends or relatives that were below 20 at that time, who have an IM, is on QQ.

But now most people in China are on WeChat, people are moving away from QQ. And WeChat becomes many people's first IM, for example, my mother in-law who is retired, does not know how to use a computer or how to use QQ, knows how to use WeChat.

I have to say these guys are onto something. Yes, they were copycats in the beginning, and yes, their current counterparts outside are blocked in China, but I strongly doubt the theory that if facebook, google etc are not blocked in China right now, they would be successful in China. After all, they had their chance before, and they blew it.

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