Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting how the unintended consequences roll out with this.

With Chinese companies already having Google free software/service stacks in China, being able to get adoption of those stacks internationally may allow the full bifurcation of the Android ecosystem, essentially eviscerating Google’s monopoly.

Long term it could be a turning point to deflating American dominance of the most important market in the modern world.

View on HN

"Long term it could be a turning point to deflating American dominance of the most important market in the modern world."

The most important market in the modern world is oil and gas.

Global digital ad spending (which is what these software/service stacks are proxies for) will be $327B in 2019. Compare this to $360B for a single oil producer, Saudi Aramco, in 2018.

Note that none of the FAANGs are even in the top 10 of this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

... and only 2 are in the top 20. And google is not on the list at all. 5 of those top 10 are oil and gas (and it would be 6 if Saudi Aramco were listed).

FAANG comes out on top if you reorder that list by market cap instead of revenue.

Oil and gas will shrink dramatically over the next few decades, while there are still many people that can't afford fancy technology yet.

Unlikely. There is ever-increasing year-on-year demand for plastic which a product of the Oil and Gas industry. Above 400 million metric of plastic produced every year - and this is growing. Aramco (which parent's comment refers to) just spent 69 billion in taking the majority take in Sabic.

About half of the oil is used for gasoline, another quarter for heating oil and another ten percent for jet fuel. All of these uses will likely go away completely or be dramatically reduced over the next twenty to thirty years.

You may be correct on the first two, but I am not sure how the jet fuel use is going to go away - wouldn't it be increasing ? Also, according to IEA, rising use of plastics will drive oil demand https://www.reuters.com/article/us-petrochemicals-iea/rising...

Even with a push in sustainability, plastics use is increasing not dropping: https://blogs.platts.com/2019/02/19/consumer-push-sustainabi...

It will split the internet, not so sure about hardware because there's less propaganda value in that.

In many ways the internet split is already done, there's hardly any overlap between the Chinese and US web. Probably because most of the non-chinese web is blocked in China.

Theoretically, this makes Chinese web companies less competitive. Many US companies are dominant worldwide, but the majority of popular Chinese tech companies are only popular in their captive market.

IMO it's similar to the captive markets of the Soviet Bloc. Strong protectionism and state sponsoring like China has done, and the Soviet Union did historically created companies that weren't globally competitive. The day the iron curtain fell, treasured trabants were abandoned on the side of the road.

Will history repeats itself? Who knows, but the situation is very similar. China produces a lot of good products, probably moreso than the USSR at it's peak. But China also engages in many practices that eventually made Soviet products inferior.

If you keep the training wheels on your economy forever it would certainly make it uncompetitive. The U.S. engaged in such practices too, and continues to do so in areas like pickup trucks. At the end of the day, you can’t really fudge leadership.

The U.S. has been fudging leadership for some time. Now it’s looking for someone to blame. It’s looking for a Plaza Accords 2.0. But China is not Japan, geopolitically.

Thing is, would you trust an appstore infrastructure based in China? If they had a more trustworthy 3rd party country like South Korea then they'd have a better shot.

I kind of wish they'd embrace something like Firefox OS.

> Would you trust appstore infrastructure in China?

No less than how much I trust the five eyes we have right now.

The only thing preventing me from using Chinese based stuff is the language barrier.

And Firefox OS, why would they embrace something nobody else has?

How about China blocking the sale of Apple products... possible/probable?

Wasn't that the case up until just a few years ago?

The government doesn't need to. The Chinese population will decide if they want to drop Apple themselves. They already have basically stopped buying Samsung after the S7 issue and the US military base.

The free market in action...

S7? Did you mean Note 7?

Yep.

http://fortune.com/2016/09/16/samsung-galaxy-recall-china/ The battery was different but had a similar problem - https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2026800/samsun...

The Chinese government already does. The state controlled media puts out massive amounts of propaganda railing foreign firms.

The same could be said for the US in the case of Hauwei but China is far worse on this front.

Just like oligarchy controlled media puts out massive amount of propaganda here.

Do you have any actual examples?

Chinese TV & newspapers spend most of their time speaking about how good China and Chinese companies are rather than caring about US companies. Lots of Chinese people are not aware of the "trade war".

I'm not asking for many just 1 recent example.

Mapping Huawei to a sudden Chinese dominance in some other area, and then to international dominance is taking several magic leaps in logic.

Also, there's nothing stopping China - or anyone else - from doing as they please with Android 'stack', hint: it's not the valuable thing.

More likely that I will sprout wings and learn to fly. China producing a global standard is just not going to happen.

A few decades ago, China becoming a global superpower just was not going to happen.

Never say never. A significant amount of the developing world has already embraced Huawei's network equipment.

Beyond that, I think Huawei is the #3 mobile phone seller in Europe (behind Apple and Samsung) and #2 in Canada.

I’ve no actual data, other than to note that “Japanese-made” went from being a sign of shoddiness to a sign of quality in a few decades.

If you look at the comment I replied to, they were talking about replacing the Apple store with some China-grown service. It's not happening, China is not in any way culturally compatible with the rest of the world enough to pull that off, just like Japan never managed to do that (and they were WAY more westernized than China is now).

Chinese businesses just fundamentally don't understand what western cultures want, they can just build cheap gadgets. For the next let's call it 35 years it's simply not going to happen.

Speaking of wings, try to buy a competitive western consumer drone. Good luck on that. GoPro tried and failed miserably.

The DJIs and Yuneecs etc of the world have already set the standard here.

I think it would be great if China accomplished some major software and hardware innovations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com