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Comment by fqye | Hacker News Reader

You couldn't be wronger.

Alibaba wasn't protected by the government at all. Ebay's then CEO bought a local e-biz site eachnet and relocated to Shanghai but still failed at competing with Alibaba.

Amazon bought some local e-biz site too and failed at competing with Alibaba too.

MSN was a huge player in China with far more users than QQ when it was taking off. ICQ was in China too. At the time IM wans't a big deal for big players. Tencent went IPO as very small startup, far less than Sina, Sohu etc., China's portals.

Chinese internet giants could win because they adapted fast to local market.

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Wrong! How come same companies you mentioned are doing well every other place except in China? Don't you see this as odd?

This isn't an argument. In most countries you have some local competitors that do better than global brands. Not every app has to be a global success to be highly profitable

Korea has KakaoTalk that's undefeated as the defacto chat app (and now search engine and payment provider). It's not doing well in every other place except Korea.

Japan has LINE as it's primary messenger, payment app, etc. It has some foot in other south-east asian countries but the strongpoint is still Japan.

I am not ruling out your points, they are sound and I agree with them. But look at it this way, you have 100 companies and all of them failed woefully in only one particular market. This doesn't look like natural event , it looks more like a biased coin.

LINE is owned by a South Korean company, so it's not really a good example of a local brand.

No. China's internet market has always been extremely competitive.

And there were some debates about why China could produce some big internet players and eventually it was generally accepted that for one China has a big, or is THE biggest single language market and the other one was because in the early 90s or 200s China's authorities, who were mostly older guys in their 40s or 50s and didn't know anything of internet at the time so they didn't regulate it but let China's and overseas players compete. It was then so many talented people returned from silicon valley like Charles Zhang and Robin Zhang and also some local guys like Jack Ma and Pony Ma of Tencent kicked off their startups. And it was those local guys who grew really big because they knew China better.

The local start ups even couldn't list in China's stock exchanges but had to go list in Nasdaq, HKEx or NYSE.

It was only when China's younger regulators took power they started to setup the GFW and all other policies. Until then it was wild west.

Your last statement re-echoes my statement.

you seem to miss the point, the Chinese companies were already winning by a large margin before the laws came into existence.

So the laws didn't help them to sustain their winning way?

You are shifting the debate.

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