I think you got it backwards. Successful business with scale leads to technical innovations in many consumer-facing companies. Did Facebook in its early days have technical innovation? Once the traffic of Facebook picks up, though, they innovated like crazy. They invented Hive. They made HBase great again. They created Cassandra. They built Scuba and Gorilla. They turned Zookeeper into amazing Zeus. They are running massive stream processing systems. Their MySQL clusters are world class. The list could go on and on. It's same for successful Chinese companies. Did Alibaba innovate technically when it was a mere online whitepage? Probably not. Is it innovating now? You bet. How many companies in the world could handle the traffic as Alibaba does today, especially in 11.11 every year? As a result, Alibaba is a major player in MySQL community and Hadoop community. It ended up rewriting Storm because it had to run Storm cluster of thousands of machines. It invented its own database called OceanDB. It made substantial improvements to Flink. It created its own file system called Tair. It has massive deployment of container-based infrastructure. Its technical blogs are worth studying carefully. The list could also go on as well. We can talk about Tencent in the same way: do you really think handling hundreds of millions of daily active users does not require significant technical innovation?
On the other hand, how many YC companies are innovating technically? How many so-called unicorns have real technical innovations? Does Airbnb really have amazing technologies? Excellent execution and awesome engineers, for sure. But technical innovation on at most a few millions of listings that can be easily handled with a small database cluster? I doubt it. Or maybe they do, but at least it's not that obvious from their technical blogs. Does Postmates have technical innovations? I would even argue that it should not even be their focus.
I don't know about Weibo, but WeChat is available in 200 nations and 20 languages. Over 70 mil people use WeChat outside of China. They seem strongest in south and south-east asia. Wechat penetration into the mobile markets are: Malaysia 38%, India 22%, Philipines 19%, etc. My understanding is that they have aggressive inititatives underway in Brazil and South Africa.
So, not super-awesome, but respectable.
Edit: That's incorrect. I was thinking of WhatsApp.
That's a strawman really. The article never made any mention of tech-innovation, only innovation of all kinds. And marketplace innovations that cater to the Chinese market, count just as much as marketplace innovations that cater to the American market, by the likes of FB and Uber.
Regarding whether this point even needs to be made: I think it does. As someone who's lived in SF, I can't quantify it, but I've felt the general perception that many people have, regarding Chinese goods/companies being cheap knock-offs of American ones.
Some of this perception is understandable: due to lack of IP enforcement, there certainly are many Chinese companies on the low-end that make an entire business out of copying American products pixel-for-pixel, and then selling it at a lower price. However, this perception is still flawed in that there are numerous companies at the high-end doing great work. As Americans, we don't hear much about, or interact with these high-end companies, because they aren't trying to cater to us. Hence why articles like this one are very educational.
Not to say that I think China can't innovate, just that I don't think the article gives any examples of it.
Please, leave your virtue-signalling to reddit. We come here for a break from the partisan poo-throwing.
As an aside, the article is about China, which, like much of Asia, isn't that welcoming of outsiders. In even the most die-hard 'conservative' circles, you can become an 'honorary' Texan/American/whatever and be privy to all dealings and goings-on, but it's really, really hard to do the same in China (especially if you're black or white, and doubly so if your mandarin isn't native). You just won't get into many circles.
I leave with this: the US election, to an outsider like myself, is interesting in that many Americans claim any supporters of the other candidate must support their platform 100%. Such an ignorant view. Some people choose Trump for trade, some choose Hillary for a no-surprises, effective office from day 1 (whether or not they see themselves agreeing with the results of her work).
I don't know how much this has to do with Trump or any other politician.
"America is the global leader in innovation and creativity." We've nourished ourselves on that narrative for many decades. It makes us feel secure and important.
We also like to tell ourselves that we're the world's only superpower and that we're the guardian of democracy.
And Soviets were not so good innovators, actually. Their innovations were mostly in military and due to enormous R&D financing (which, in turn, lead to their fall).
Innovation is instead about having a system structured in a way that encourages and rewards risktaking (in expectation).
You had an intelligent response until you decided to generalize people who hold a political view different to your own.
PS: I don't support either major candidate. But, the non-xenophobic trump supporters seem more reasonable.
Touchwood. Back in early 2000s, a lot of people laughed at the idea of Mandarin being taught in schools.
>>Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace
They don't have to go global. Jack Ma: “eBay May Be a Shark in the Ocean, But I Am a Crocodile in the Yangtze River.”
Anyway an extra one billion internet users don't necessarily mean great things ... commercially maybe it gets a lot greyer in other areas like social.
I don't think that's actually true. In fact, I remember in the early 2000s a lot of people were telling students that they should learn Mandarin because it would be easy for them to find a good paying job if they did. For the most part, this seems to have been very poor advice.
https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingred...
There's always cracks when you have incumbents resting on their laurels.
> This usually happens when things are in flux and it's very much what is happening in China today.
There are key differences. 1. When you have to worry about what you think, what you say, and what you do; it has a toll on collaboration and creativity, 2. There's a different perception of failure. It's not as well tolerated as it is in the US, which limits experimentation and creativity, and 3. the most important factor: When the group, specifically your family, is more important than the individual; again there's a toll on creativity. ie. why pursue a crazy dream instead of upholding your duty and responsibility to take care of your parents?
> yet how many have the time for rebellion in between a six-figure job and massive housing cost?
Even in ideal conditions there's never that many, just enough; which makes it even worse when the conditions aren't ideal. Why sail a ship to uncharted waters when you can be comfy at home? Can one even think about sailing when you don't have the imagination for the wonderful places you will go?
Really the only hope for innovation that places like China and Singapore have is with their immigration programs ie. Singapore actively encourages it. The only other things I can think of is how well policies are enforced and if the number of people who can circumvent the Great Firewall keeps steadily rising. Places where "the mountains are high and emperor is far away" may be able to produce something awesome one day if the authorities don't immediately interfere with things
He's been consistent too
But close to half though. http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-clinton-t...
(I am not saying they are all xenophobic)
You go on Facebook and you can’t even buy anything, but on WeChat and Weibo you can buy anything you see
A more recent trend: live-streaming sites where people pay real money to reward performers with virtual gifts. (You sang beautifully, here’s a digital Lamborghini, dear.)
I might grant the first (with reservations), but the second is laughable (and was tried without success here in the early days of social networking). I can't help but think this article should be titled "Chinese internet companies flourish in Chinese market". Well duh - even aside from the "virtual protectionism" of the GFW, Chinese companies are more likely to understand the preferences of Chinese consumers than non-Chinese companies. This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation.
How many HN startups are localizing to Mandarin? Language alone provides a massive market barrier that leaves opportunity for regional companies to thrive. But that barrier works both ways - what Chinese internet companies are thriving in the world marketplace? The best example I can think of is Alibaba, but that is strongly tied to Chinese manufacturing. Is anyone using WeChat or Weibo outside mainland China?
I personally am very excited and encouraged by the emergence of China as a modern, educated populace. Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace - tech is one of the great positive-sum games. I'm looking forward to it! But this article is a pretty poor illustration.
Also, as a Norteamericano, I'm deeply offended by statements like "America want's to believe China can't..." - we're not all xenophobic Trump supporters, not even most of us.