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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Nations, communities, individuals: they value autonomy. Building their own networks rather than submitting to whatever is being fed by silicon valley is not a pointless job.

Apparently not, otherwise they would have used the locally produced. But they didn't, they chose the freebie SV tools.

The problem is the world is divided into factions, and China is a massive country that just happens to be a separate faction, which means they can't divide labor with the US, they have to compete head on, or else they won't get a fare share of the pie.

US had a head start on development, which means these two factions didn't have a level playing ground to compete for a piece of the pie. Therefore China must protect to get back on level playing ground.

The pie is not a fixed size. The Chinese could produce something new and innovative instead of clones and sell those to the US, making the pie bigger for everyone.

Protectionism is bad in general - it works until everyone starts doing it, then everyone is worse off. But the benefits of protectionism in the short term is not equally distributed and China definitely has greater incentive.

It worked for their manufacturing ecosystem, maybe it'll work for tech too.

They tried, and US government bans Huawei

The US government banned Huawei for many reasons.

One of the reasons that should hit home to the HN crowd is that Huawei simply up and 100% cloned some of the highest-end Cisco routers in their early days.

While I'm no fan of patents, when you clone something down to the bugs (which is how Cisco demonstrated the cloning) you deserve to get some penalty.

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.

So where do you draw the line? Should there be one computer company, one car company, one airplane company, one movie studio, one agriculture company, etc? That's the natural conclusion of your logic. Either you add a bunch of special cases (that doesn't work in X, Y, and Z industries, or in country A's economy or culture), or your logic is flawed. And if you add special cases, you have to justify them.

So either you think that there really should be one company per thing (for whatever definition of thing), in which case that's a whole 'nother ballgame, or your theory is logically inconsistent.

The problem is, say you have developed an app that is on par with Slack.

You launch and are trying to grow your business.

Then Slack shows up and is giving away a similar product because they have VC money to burn. How do you compete?

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