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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

> For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else.

> Simply put, in a strictly hierarchical society, proposing a solution missed by your superiors is at the very least perceived as arrogant. You’re just as likely to be penalized in some way for making whoever is responsible for the current solution lose face as you are to benefit in any way from proposing a better way.

Is this generally true in other industries as well? How do Chinese companies try to be innovative, if people are discouraged from suggesting ideas?

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Surely it's not true everywhere. Most of us have known plenty of Chinese engineers who are unafraid to report bugs and suggest solutions.

But in the broad sense you mean: yeah, kinda. Chinese companies (in the PRC in particular of course, but also outfits the stem from Hong Kong and Taiwan) tend not to be particularly innovative. It's a lagging market, filled with well-implemented but fundamentally cloned products first pioneered elsewhere. China has products that can compete well against, say, Google and Samsung's offerings, but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs.

> but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs

There is no american or european WeChat.

Facebook arguably attempts to. The markets are different, and people prefer separate apps, rather than using facebook apps in the facebook app, but facebook still does the core part of all the different things.

Before WeChat people also "prefered" separate apps. That is why I'm calling it a true innovation.

People outside of mainland china (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) still prefer separate apps, and WeChat has been unable to acquire any significant marketshare outside of mainland Chinese users. Heck, even newly opened Myanmar is already dominated by google and Facebook.

The GFW has severely crippled the web, coupled with the lack of card usage, created a situation that made wechat work for mainland china and can't really be replicated anywhere else.

> The GFW has severely crippled the web, coupled with the lack of card usage, created a situation that made wechat work for mainland china and can't really be replicated anywhere else.

Until it can. This happens in tech regularly.

Wechat simply has never had to compete with worldwide services. We can say it beat Facebook and google, but that would be stupid because both of those are blocked and have been for a long time. The fact that Chinese internet services are spurned in China's own backyard is telling.

Facebook & Google has never had to compete with worldwide services, too. Only US services.

Completely untrue.

I guess. There's no one app, but nothing that WeChat does is serving a market that didn't exist in the west first. It's a triumph of integration, not so much innovation.

So... sure. In some sense that makes it an exception that proves the rule. If China can be successful with WeChat where is its Tesla or Pfizer or Intel or Fujitsu or...

I mean, there are times where a single counterexample can disprove a point. I don't know that this is one of them.

> It's a triumph of integration, not so much innovation.

So which system did they clone to become like this? Because if they are the first, I guess it is a lot of innovation.

Oh come on. I said it was good. It's just... not exactly the planar transistor or a CRISPR-CAS editing therapy, or even Android or iOS. It's a good company doing important but fundamentally simple stuff really well.

Wechat is more innovative than Android and iOS.

> where is its Tesla or Pfizer or Intel or Fujitsu or

This is the same argument people made about Japanese companies 40 years ago and then Korean companies 20 years ago.

For the record:

http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/IP.PAT.RESD/compa...

Which is surprising. There's DoCoMo in Japan, but they're a phone company. WeChat didn't have that edge. Facebook could go that way if they wanted, but they haven't.

To be honest I am surprised WeChat is even allowed in the iOS app store with its all-in-one multi app experience, since app experiences of that type are explicitly called out as disallowed in the app store guidelines section 2.5.8 - https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

(Actually, I'm not that surprised, they're probably too big to fail and Apple really wants to sell iOS devices in China)

Uh, Huawei?

Samsung is a strange choice of example. It also mostly follows a "well made clone" business model and Korean work culture isn't much different from Chinese.

Samsung is one of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturers on the planet. You're just thinking of phones.

That used be the case. But now you have companies like DJI and others that have learned the pages out of the Western playbook and now out-innovate everyone.

Speaking from direct experience in the west, pretty much contemporary Google.

In Seattle, a similar phrase I've heard is "I've invested quite a bit of ego in X" when one challenges assumptions about X.

All IMO of course...

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