Microsoft's man in China defects to search powerhouse Baidu
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Is the man somehow conscripted and should he be shot on sight for joining the enemy? Really, he should be free to change jobs at the level, just as it is ok for other high level people to change jobs without using such incredibly loaded language. A job change is never a defection.
It's catchy enough that you are talking about it on a message board.
Nevertheless, the good days for the foreign companies' division in China have come to an end. They can no longer easily grab the top talents without direct confrontation with the local giants. And they are restricted in decision making process for having to taking order from oversee headquarter, thus losing to the local companies in terms of faster response to the market.
I did agree the point a lot of Chinese companies start with copying their western counterparts. But it is also not true to say that those formulas could succeed if stay unmodified. In fact, those successful Chinese copy-cats take very different approaches after forking the original one.
Take WeChat for example, it is blatant copy of WhatsApp from the very beginning. Now, it has so much more functionalities to offer than WhatsApp: it has a private social network called Friend Circle; it has a gaming center; you can even make mobile payment through it. And arguably, WeChat has better UI that is more friendly to Chinese users, like better emoji support. The difference is so significant, it is fair enough to say they are on their own track, and I sincerely doubt if there is something more WeChat can copy from WhatsApp, if not vice versa.
As to your question about Xiaomi, it is infamous even in mainland China for violation of copyrights and open source licenses. But again, it is not the most important thing that makes Xiaomi successful. The reason is simple: there are 100 or more companies out there, trying to make money by copying the western ideas. If copying the only thing Xiaomi did, it definitely cannot achieve what it has now. Actually, one key factor that leads Xiaomi to its current success is marketing: setting up online forums for cultivating its own fanbase; introducing flash sales with limited supplies in an effort to tantalize the consumers. I could go on with a lot more, but the point is, Xiaomi takes a grass-root approach to maximize its brand awareness, greatly leveraging the power of internet and social network, without paying huge amount of money to the traditional advertisers like what the western companies always do. In turn, it allows Xiaomi to offer phones with competitive specs at lower price. This idea has been back ported to US recently by OnePlus, and have been successful to some degree.
To be honest, Chinese companies have a hell lot to improve. However, IMO, they deserve some praises of their own for accounting their success. Attributing everything for being copycats might seem easy and politically right, but it is oversimplified and preventing people from looking at the bigger picture.
Don't forget the anticompetive policies of the Chinese government which are strongly tied to need for easily controlled alternatives to Western internet with its politically dangerous messages.
And lets be serious: the US and EU would never accept or allow that a Chinese social network is as successful in the US/EU as Facebook is right now, with all the private data potentially getting into the hands of the Chinese government. If something like that happened, I'm pretty sure we'd just block those websites.
Just look at the US paranoia that Huawei had to deal with. The US senate (and UK/Australia) restricted their business and subjected them to additional oversight. Also, they warned South Korea to prevent a deal between Huawei and a South Korean telecommunication company.
They didn't even show any evidence for their suspicion of backdoors, it's sufficient that it could be possible.
If you think US censorship is even in the same league as Chinese censorship, you need to come visit for a few weeks.
That is _exactly_ the same way China justifies its censorship. It doesn't matter that the US censors less, since once the laws are in place to censor opinions, the government can always expand censorship activities later.
I stand by my opinion, that Chinese social networks would be censored here, if they were as widely used as Facebook. Just imagine the NSA being unable to reach all your private data while China can. This wouldn't be tolerated.
Now you talking about what the states could or would do, even though they haven't done it yet. Actions are much stronger than paranoia.
Half the stuff coming into the US is made in China, so its hard to speak about protectionist economics.
Social networks from any country do not threaten the political order, but are rather used by politicians and interest groups to gather supporters. In China social media is used to highlight broken promises between unelected government officials and those who they supposedly serve. In the US you could elect different politician, but in China the only remedy for a lack of accountability is revolution. To state the obvious, social media is a vehicle for democracy, and this has left the Chinese government terrified.
In the Enterprise space, where a lot of development is done in China, the top universities are often avoided, and have been so for quite some time, and purposely so. The reason is staff attrition: People freshly versed in the company's systems and applications often leave when they realise they don't want to develop tiny incremental changes in JAVA, or merge a COBOL codebase, and this is the case for top talent. Recruitment for many big enterprise firms is purposefully targeted at mid to lower ranking universities.
Is Microsoft running bing at a loss?
Microsoft.eat(Nokia)