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Comment by krat0sprakhar | Hacker News Reader

"copying well-established international websites and derive their success from paying attention to the Indian market before the country "

I'm not sure if this is such a bad thing. Flipkart copied Amazon and its thriving in this country.

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I'm not saying it's a bad business goal. Obviously, a lot of companies have succeeded doing this. My point is that such a policy is not very attractive if you're an engineer who "wants to build cool stuff".

->Flipkart copied Amazon and its thriving in this country.

Would you say the same thing about Jet Airways? Did they copy Delta Air? Or did Tata Motors copy Ford? Or did Airtel copy AT&T?

Some companies are about management and execution, and not about idea.

Oh yeah, but the margins in arbitrage always come under pressure.

Very tangential, but I was just checking out Flipkart and some things are extremely inexpensive. Portal 2 and Crysis 2 are under $20 USD.

Most new PC games are prices less than Rs.999 in India (not just in Flipkart). Pre-order price of "Duke Nukem Forever" for example is just Rs.444 ($10).. I suppose it's one solution to rampant piracy of PC titles.

(XBOX 360 and PS3 titles are more or less priced the same as elsewhere)

what is even more interesting is that books are also much cheaper e.g. Algorithms by Cormen, et. al. cost only 6$. It would be interesting how eBooks are priced in India, as compared to US.

Unfortunately they only ship to India...

abebooks.com (and I'm sure plenty of others) frequently middle-man for sub-continent re-sellers.

these are generally titles meant for countries in the indian sub-continent e.g. india, pakistan, bangladesh etc. usually, paper quality, printing quality etc. takes a nose-dive. for example, i have a sedgewick book with almost translucent pages, which makes it next to impossible to read anything...

Flipkart did well because they executed the Idea well. They still have a long way to go. But last time I checked they too hire and give a lot of preferences for people from IIT's.

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