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Comment by singularity2001 | Hacker News Reader

singularity2001

This Chinese company has an almost indistinguishable western'ish web presence.

Top notch products, both hardware and software, at reasonable prices, very well tested and stable. That's why they steamrolled all competition, ie US gopro creator.

GoPro was very late to the game and isn't really an R&D company, they're a marketing company that gets others to design their cameras IIRC, so they had almost no chance of taking on a company like DJI that had a very strong R&D culture and a big head start.

I really like my DJI drone, it's almost too good to the point it's boring. But it's still easy to be concerned about the political issues with the company, and in some cases the company has overstepped it's boundaries a bit too far in terms of choosing safety. Their setup is basically setup for false positives where a false positive means you can't use the drone at all in a place where it is actually legal to fly if you follow the local laws.

"This Chinese company", meaning DJI? They're the world's biggest consumer drone manufacturer, and dominated the industry over the last decade and killed off all their American competitors because their hardware and software were really good, especially at their price point. These days you can find them at Costco, Best Buy, etc.

To me what's scary about this isn't that they're Chinese, but that American manufacturing had fallen so far behind that in a few short years a college student with some $100k in funding from a family friend, plus a bit of marketing, was able to create, defend, and expand a global drone empire while all our companies tried and died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI?wprov=sfla1

They seem to be one of the companies that believes you have to spend money to make money. Rather than trying to have some google translate type of service, they hired an actual professional marketing team using native speakers.

Agreed, this feels like a propaganda pushback against rising concerns and restrictions over DJI drones.

This is 0% different from ANY western capitalist company putting out a puffery "we donated an infinitesimal amount of our money or effort to a charity we arguably control anyway" piece. This is just a normal part of marketing and PR for western style companies. No need to try and attribute extra malice to this.

If you want to discuss the bad things about DJI, talk about their abhorrent privacy, or how they provided Russia with tools to locate and target Ukrainian DJI drone users.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely right. Can't speak to anywhere else but where I live, Apple's primary marketing campaign for the Apple Watch has been its ability to detect that the user is in peril and call emergency services. Strangely, I have yet to meet anyone who believes it's an American imperialist psy-op.

That's because DJI was founded in Shenzhen, a "Special Economic Zone" which "have province-level authority on economic administration." "SEZ's local congress and government have authority to legislate."[1]

In essence, it walks, talks, and acts like a Western company because it was founded in a part of China explicitly designed to encourage Western-style capitalism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin...

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