Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_that_noob | Hacker News Reader

Some of this is of course the Chinese government placing its thumb on the scales in favor of local businesses. It does this for a lot of reasons, but it's clear it happens.

However, compare the situation to other more open countries (e.g. India, Japan, Indonesia ) There are culture, social and language specific nuances that local entrepreneurs understand far better than outsiders, and that accounts for a significant portion of these copycat business success.

I think American business generally have a tough time accounting for the latter into account when they go overseas. IOW, not all of Jack Ma's success stems from the government being on his side.

View on HN

I'm not sure that 'copycat' is entirely fair. Google wasn't the first search engine, Facebook wasn't the first social network, Amazon wasn't the first online retailer. Flipkart or Taobao have some similarities to certain western retail platforms, but are profoundly different in many important ways.

WeChat might have had the advantage of the Great Firewall, but they have also built a genuinely innovative platform that is better suited to the Chinese market and in many respects much more sophisticated than any Western equivalent. No western company would have grasped the importance of hongbao or implemented it so skilfully. No western company could have anticipated the hugely positive reaction to WeChat Moments advertising and the remarkably high CPM.

I think there's a certain "not invented here" attitude prevalent in Silicon Valley. We do iteration, they do copycats. We build a better mousetrap, they make shitty knock-offs.

Look at Walmart's disastrous attempts at expansion in Germany, for instance.

I think people are being lazy. Of course it is harder to operate in China than in e.g. Europe were US companies were able to avoid local regulation, make sweet heart deals to pay a lot less tax and engage in anti-competitive behavior. Still essentially all mayor tech companies, except Google and Facebook, are there.

The large reason for Chinas success is that for every segment that FAANG casts its shadow in the west there is at least half a dozen companies in China. Europe doesn't lack e.g. map providers that even today could compete with Google if it wasn't for the Google's dominance in the overall market.

Taobao is also a lot better than eBay. (And I don't see that in itself being a factor of anti-competitive behavior like in some other cases).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com