How does Chinese tech stack up against American tech?
economist.com
economist.com
I came across two examples recently. First, in China e-books have taken over paper books, not just in volume, but in publishers' minds [1]. Second, payment systems like AliPay are becoming the dominant in just a few years, completely circumventing credit cards [2].
Now, neither of these are technological breakthroughs in themselves. The Kindle has been around for over 10 years, and Apple Pay and its precursors are not news, either. However, neither of those technologies has had the impact on their respective markets that the creators hoped for. Paper books are still frequently cheaper than their Kindle versions, and there have hardly been any noteworthy straight-to-Kindle publications. Likewise, Apple Pay, which is only a replacement for your physical card, but still a transaction mostly owned by Visa/MasterCard, and not Apple, is still far from a dominant purchase mechanism, even in the Bay Area. All in all, the pace of adoption of disruptive technologies in the US is pretty poor.
So, as an entrepreneur, I'd be much more worried not about inventing the cool new tech before China, but actually getting people hooked on it.
[1] https://www.economist.com/news/business/21731860-tencents-ch... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/
It is insane but greed has made the above commonplace across all aspects of the digital world.
Personally I think ebooks are still worth it, even if I have to buy it, strip the DRM (which is illegal) before reading it (on an eink display of course). But it has never been ready for mainstream (will it ever?) and it is not the techs fault.
We still don't even have a decent movie streaming service, and even if one existed it wouldn't matter because the content you want to watch makes that choice for you.
A decade ago we had awesome home theater software, they still exist but they aren't compatible with the media that is offered today. For that we need another device (chromecast) which is probably the dumbest device you can buy but somehow that is the best option available for consumers in 2018.
1. Yarr, pirate it. Easier to consume things when you have few qualms as to how to obtain it.
2. Nothing lasts forever. Lock-in only exists if you can't let go for the next thing that comes along.
3. Upward mobility in quality of life and social class leads to a renaissance.
Don't some e-Book readers disallow you from reading things that you didn't download from them (or they don't support epub)?
> 2. Nothing lasts forever. Lock-in only exists if you can't let go for the next thing that comes along.
But you also can't migrate your old library to the new one, which is the main problem with lock-in (the issue isn't that you physically cannot switch away, it's that you cannot switch away without losing things that you've bought into).
If theory 1 is true, then the readers without this user hostile approach will thrive. Obviously pirates don't care for DRM locked devices.
> But you also can't migrate your old library to the new one, which is the main problem with lock-in (the issue isn't that you physically cannot switch away, it's that you cannot switch away without losing things that you've bought into).
My point was mental, not physical. People might naturally just drop old stuff for new shiny things. If things appear plentiful compared to the old ways, this attitude is easier to adopt. Do you regret throwing away your coffee cup in the morning?
The main issue with piracy is that both Amazon and Apple have far more advanced typesetting systems in the custom file types (Kindle Format 8 and iBook format) that you get when you buy from their store.
The .epub format its still based on what, XML? .epub makes up most of what you see when you pirate. If you look closely you can see that most epubs actually are really badly typeset compared to the versions of the store.
I bought the Kindle version of A Deepness In The Sky recently and it's full of what seem like OCR errors. Missing punctuation, spelling errors like "A1" instead of "AI", the word "hands" mysteriously in italics for a chunk of the book... There's no way anyone read it before putting it up for sale. I wrote to them in their formatting feedback form thing but that's just gone into the void.
2. China still uses more cash on a percentage basis than the USA and most western countries. China basically skipped credit cards. I still prefer the new UnionPay tap-to-pay NFC cards, much better than scanning a QR code on your phone.
Contrast this to America where an enormously large and powerful rentier class have come to completely dominate not just the economy but the government itself. These corporations have managed to carefully stifle and misdirect innovation in order to ensure their rents aren't threatened. Old school media and publishers have neutered ebooks and tried again and again to kill Netflix and any distribution vector they don't control. Banks have made it so Americans are only now just getting payment flexibility that others have enjoyed for decades. ISPs have killed net neutrality and will do their best to become the new railroads, making sure to take a piece of every pie even if it sets the country back. Note that these corporations didn't do it alone. Every step of the way the government was there to help powerful rentiers.
Tell that to the dying startups that have to stand up against Tencent and Alibaba. Beijing is littered with them. Let's not forget the various Chinese state-owned enterprises.
This has little to do with Chinese policy, and a lot to do with the fact that Chinese life is moving from extremely rural/poor to middle class and thus, had no prior opportunities to do things like reading physical books, so no habits or preexisting preferences to overcome.
Not to mention the burning of books and disdaining of intellectual pursuit in the cultural revolution.
Does it mean China is more vital? Not necessarily, it simply means they are filling a gap.
What makes people feel that <insert developed country name> is lagging behind is not really credit cards, but legacy tech surrounding it. This is inevitable since credit cards have been around for a long time. China, starting from a clean slate, might seem to be in a better state currently, but moving from credit cards to Alipay is like re-writing your Objective-C app with React Native because it used some legacy APIs and no longer compiles. The problem is teal, but the solution is totally wrong.
Lately I've been floored by the fact that ARM Cortex-M0 and -M3 development boards (48-72MHz, 8-20KB RAM, 64-256KB flash) cost less than $2 each. They blow 'Arduinos' out of the water by an order of magnitude on both cost and capability, as do the similarly-cheap ESP8266 WiFi development boards.
What ever happened to making useful things?
Lots of things.
- The patent debacle that started in the Clinton administration
- Not enforcing anti-competition laws allowing companies to consolidate.
- Companies giving away all their IP to China in exchange for cheap labor.
- Allowing our tech manufacturing sector to rot on the vine.
I've yet to see one startup which is America's answer to some chinese/indian startup. I hope that day comes soon.
It's more than just a messaging app - it's more like a mash-up of WhatsApp, PayPal, Twitter and Facebook.
Things that WeChat had before WhatsApp were things like "Moments" which WhatsApp adopted quite recently (and in a more simpler way) as "Status"[0] and they also had very strong business integration which WhatsApp only recently began to flirt with through WhatsApp for Business[1].
[0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000031/
[1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000637/Introducing-the-WhatsApp-...
Weixin Pay's pricing for money handling seems pretty competitive compared to Western systems. 0.1% to transfer out of their system to your bank if you are transferring >$3200 USD, and 0.6% to process a payment [1]. I wonder when Weixin Pay and startups like Payoneer [2] will get tired of the friction imposed by the current banking interchange systems, and set up their own identity and interchange solution to start breaking 1% on all of a transaction life cycle's service fees (from payer removing from their account and paying, to payee accepting and debiting to their account, perhaps including forex conversion, to final settlement).
[1] https://chinachannel.co/take-wechat-payments-small-business/
For example, Apple's iMessage and Facebook's Messenger development over the past few years has basically been to become increasingly like WeChat. Whether it's stickers or payments or animations, etc.
I'm not familiar with payments being a feature on iMessage or Messenger, though. Unless you mean just the money transfers to friends, which existed on Facebook's desktop Messenger first IIRC, so it doesn't appear to be ripping off WeChat (which in my experience doesn't really support money transfers in quite the same way, unless we're talking about hongbao).
Also, weren't stickers a thing on Kakao Talk and LINE before WeChat?
surprised to see Line everywhere else in asia though (seems initial popularity decides a lot for these messenger apps - or some extremely unique features that can't be copied)
What about Twitch, which makes its money from sponsorship and virtual gifts to streamers, a model pioneered in China and then Korea? Or the US esports leagues which copy, again Korea and China?
There are many technologies which appear later in the US but Americans think are indigenous (and the reverse as well -- I don't mean to pick on the US, simply responding to your comment). Consider chip cards (commonplace in Europe for 20+ years, still not well adopted in the US) or text messaging (adopted very late in the US).
Although nowadays I don't think that's so much the case. Currently, I think America has more ideas coming out because it really is more innovative
1. Survivor bias. It's always easier to adapt a successful business model to your regional market by applying minor tweaks to it, than to create something completely from scratch.
2. Market size. The U.S. GDP is almost 10x the size in the Indian one. If you are creating an online business based on some non-regionally-specific idea, there is just no reason for you not to target U.S. first.
Speaking of American startups copying from China, I’ll give you an example: https://www.spin.pm
the huge income gap (pretty surprising given it's "communism" and everything lol) between peasants-workers-in-cities and the others is...
> But now the number of cited AI papers by Chinese scientists is already at 89% of the American level
Every article that wants to claim that China AI is on par with American AI claims this. But US has 10X the amount of AI scientists as China, which means Chinese AI scientists produces 10X amount of papers as American scientists. Quantity over quality, spurred by government cash rewards. Lots of noise, no bite.
> China’s e-commerce sales are double America’s. Chinese firms are collectively 53% as big as America’s, measured by market value
That's because China has 1.3B population, about 4X times more than America's 350B. However, it is projected that China will have peak population in this decade, and will be around 800M population sometimes in 2100. America has alot better demographics, vs China who has one of the oldest, and whose working population will contract by a few hundred millions by 2050
> Chinese non-tech firms are relatively primitive and only 26% as digitised as American ones. As for investment, Chinese tech’s absolute budget is only 30% as big as that of American tech. And it is still small abroad, with foreign sales of 18% of the total that American firms make.
that's the gist of the article. China is nowhere near as big as America's tech currently. And China is on its way to the lost decade (that's why xijingping recently wanted the provinces to focus on things other than GDP, since the local governments are levered to the hill with debt)
> AMERICANS, and friends of America, often reassure themselves about its relative decline in the following way
The decline is a myth; US is doing really well. US has a 3% gdp growth, which is huge when you realize the base is 19 Trillion! Contrast that with China, whose provinces just announced 20-30% fake revenue and putting the funny consistent 7% gdp growth in realm of accounting fraud.
> Uncle Sam may have ceded the top spot to China in exports in 2007, and manufacturing in 2011
Not with all of the protectionism and tariffs coming to hit China, from US, EU, and Japan. China can't get around import tariffs by shipping from Vietnam, South Korea, or Africa anymore. Solar panel and refrigerators now, steel and aluminum next. Apple's 300B investment amongst others will revitalize US manufacturing.
> China’s unicorns, a proxy for the next generation of giants, are in total worth 69% of America’s,
Xiaomi's 40B unicorn valuation is all the way from 2014. It's losing to Oppo and Huawei in China. Meituan Dianping is burning cash rapidly like Uber, same as Didi Chuxing.
WOW! Population declines have hugely negative effects on economics like GDP. I don't know if that has been factored into their GDP estimates but that makes me extremely question their GDP growth.