Alibaba I.P.O. May Unleash Global Fight Over Users
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Zero comments on this article after an hour on the front page of HN seems to prove the author's point.
I'd say the reason most don't care much is there is massive cultural differences in the way the US and Chinese markets operate. Successful US companies have failed to penetrate China and many probably expect the reverse to be true as well.
How many people here buy from http://www.alibaba.com/ despite it being 15 years old?
Alibaba does, though, run other sites as mentioned in the article that are more along the lines of an eBay or Amazon and you would be right that those haven't caught on outside of China.
Not much to say. Shipping overseas is slow. I would have preferred amazon if it was an option.
Sina (a 'Chinese' internet company) was recently the target of regulatory action (suspension of a key licence) because they fell foul of those censorship laws. Action isn't targeted solely at non-Chinese companies. However, non-Chinese companies are less likely to want to comply (either due to the cost/complexity of doing so, or because to do so would be at odds with their core mission).
As an example of a company with a different approach, look at LinkedIn, which recently launched a Chinese interface to target mainland Chinese users.
The government selectively cracksdown on Internet companies when it wants to make a point, and turns blind eyes on others, arbitrarily, porn is quite common in the China market and very available...and even necessary for these companies to make a profit. They just choose one to slap on the wrists occasionally to make sure they don't get out of control.
In contrast, you'll find less porn on Facebook, G+, and YouTube then you will on RenRen, YouKu, Sina, and so on. Heck, WeChat is well known as the hookup app (so my wife won't let me go near it). But then this is similar to how prostitution is ubiquitous in the PRC vs. how it is very much underground in the US.
How would a legalistic American company operate in such an environment? China is not yet very much governed by rule of (impartial, fairly applied) law, so it is just impossible to do much without being able to live in the grayness (as most Chinese internet companies are able to do!).
Hah what? This is the first time I've heard this, so I asked a male, mainland chinese friend, using Wechat itself. His reply:
"Ew nope,kinda of.but I think all the social media tool has this function of hookup it really depends on the intention of users"
It's pretty much the default messaging tool for my social group in China. Married people, university students, even a mid-50s government official. If you're not on Wechat you're missing out!
Also a lot of even educated professionals don't realize what is going on around them. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance as well as successful propaganda ("these western problems can't happen here") going around, but entire huge subcultures that are out of control (like the mid-50s government official with 5 mistresses).
If I was going to point out a Chinese app for basically hookups and nothing else, it'd be 陌陌。That thing is pure, 100% Tinder/Grindr.
I'm scared to install it!
1. Checking where a group of friends is meeting or telling them they'll be a few mins late.
2. Sending groups of friends photos they've just taken of themselves and/or food.
3. Ordering taxis, which they will later pay for using the wechat payment feature, as that way both the passenger and taxi driver get a small subsidy from Tencent.
Simply not true. Some companies, Google for example, choose not to comply to Chinese governments' requests (I agree that's quite a lot of work), because they don't think that Chinese market is significant enough for them.
> There is no such restriction for Chinese companies wanting to operate in the west.
Think about Huawei.
It's definitely news worthy that they're going to IPO here in the US and they have a HUGE market in China/Asia... Even so, will they be able to crack the US consumer market? Time will tell, but so far, their efforts haven't born fruit.
They have a stealth 'target vertical' shopping experience that's developing right now in the Bay Area, however, they're significantly behind schedule, having trouble integrating teams from several locals and their product is dubiously "useful" at this stage of the game.
All of that being said, eventually they'll find some combination to get a foothold of the US market and it will be interesting to see what happens then as competition heats up.
Can you provide any more information on this, or pointers to sources? I'm v curious.
1st, there is somethingto do with the definition of "startups" as used on this site, techcrunch etc. Al lot of it is cultural-superficial.
Soylent, is creating a new product that one might find at a pharmacy. It's startupiness is mostly it's cultural context: Kickstarter, Andreesson-Horowtiz, change-the-world ambition, SV brashness. A similar company & product coming out of Europe and selling in pharmacies and supplement stores probably wouldn't register as a "startup" to most people.
I don't really know how to articulate this, so I suppose my thoughts are not all that cohesive. I think there's something here.
A completely unrelated 2nd, are the "problems" Alibaba is solving. About 10 years, just out of college I was wring in ecommerce. I learning about affiliate marketing & drop shipping. I talked to someone with an ecommerce "store" where all items were being drop shipped and the site was being populated by a feed. He wanted affiliates to drive all traffic to the site.
Joel Spolsky (2001)- Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything. - I was one of the quacks.
I knew that between the factory door and a consumer was where most of the cost (value add) is. Things got bought, sold, shipped, exported, warehoused again, warehoused, wholesaled, retailed... It seemed that these virtual businesses were part of an unstoppable economic change where the internet would automate and eliminate most of the work between the consumer and the manufacturer.
I thought everything between manufacturers and consumers would melt into a very thin layer of technology, RSS mostly. I mustn'd have been the only one because a lot of the dark ages startups (2002-2005) seemed to be building parts of this upcoming world. Product search engines, for example were considered important.
It didn't happen, but it still might. A lot of the dotcom ideas were poorly executed 10 years too early but ultimately decent ideas. Maybe this one was 30 years to early.
Alibaba is focused further down the manufacturing chain, where stuff actually gets made. We know that all our stuff is made in China. We kind of assumed that was a solved problem, trivial. Try to buy something on Alibaba and you will find that international commerce is still a lot closer Marco Polo's days than you might think.
Amazon has been working on the retail side of things for 20 years. Product research, discovery, shipping, customer service. Every aspect of that has turned out to be a bigger and more difficult problem that I would have anticipated in 1999.
Alibaba is innovating mostly below the point that Amazon starts.
I think Alibaba is a big deal.
Though you could probably say that about American companies in Europe now as well.
really, most US users better be worried about NSA and local PD, they can jail you, China can't.
It's so different from what I'm accustomed to, and seems to definitely be a New York thing. Everywhere else it would be IPO, IBM, and NYT.
So why does the N.Y. media do this?