While the title of Tim's essay (which is not all matching with the title) is wrong so is your conclusion.

> Silicon Valley will never die.

Silicon valley is already dead in many sense. It has long stopped being the place where bunch of nerds could meet and make interesting stuff purely for the soul in the game. In last 20 years it is replaced by "i want to get rich" crowd who are building crappy products, VCs in suites who just get lucky every now and then, Big Tech which is a bog in itself, greedy and corrupt politicians squeezing people. The joy of building stuff is replaced with pressure of white board coding, and folks are large cos are not really solving interesting problems but haggling over promos and TC on teamblind.com.

SV of today is just another wall street where people spend their 20s and 30s doing back breaking work so they could get out of this place in their 40s. It is a soul less place.

I think SV will die eventually (so will NY, London or any other city) over sufficiently long period.

> Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.

Tel Aviv has it. Beijing has it. SV’s big advantage over them is the internal market and Beijing will acquire that soon enough.

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US.

True enough in software but see SAP. DeepMind was British, no? Give it time. Germany was the epicenter of the chemical industry before and to a large extent after WW1. It's still a big deal but Detroit is still a big deal in the automotive industry too.

> Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out.

There is no credible interpretation of this. In CS the US’ dominance in research is so great I’m not even sure what the best non-US university even is, perhaps ETH Zürich?

> Beijing will acquire that soon enough.

I very much doubt it. Israel and china have something in common like all rising powers do, strong nationalism. Foreigners getting funded before locals is I am sure completely unthinkable.

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US.

Probably the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN.

This sentiment crops up semi-frequently here and I find it really odd. The USA has a lot going for it, but they don’t have a monopoly on impactful tech.

Instead of calling OP ignorant, can you help us with world-leading tech companies that are not in the US?

I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is confined to China instead of the world.

I’ll bite: Leadership in chip manufacturing is firmly in TSMC’s hands. Chip design is dominated by ARM and Qualcomm. Display tech by Samsung and LG.

Today, if you have an idea for a new gadget and you need fast prototyping, you’re far better off setting up shop in Shenzen than San Jose.

I’ll give you one thing: When it comes to software, by far SV has still the most influence. But when you include the whole tech space I think one should differentiate.

Not saying you're wrong, but isn't Qualcomm an American company?

you could say that, but certainly not an SV company.

I would even add that only a handful of companies out of SV did add real societal value and many of them with their dark engagement patterns are even detrimental.

There's dozens already listed - but just to name a few off the top of my head - ARM, TSMC, Spotify, Sony, Nintendo, DJI, TikTok (ByteDance), Atlassian, Skype (pre-MS), Canva, Nubank.

And that's also ignoring the dozens of Chinese companies that dwarf their US counterparts but don't really do much outside China (Ant/Alibaba/Jingdong/DiDi/etc).

"Only the US can produce world-leading tech companies" is the type of thing you say when you get all your news from TechCrunch and have never been outside the US.

Spotify came from Sweden. Not sure they’re a world leading tech company but they definitely fit the SV startup mould.

I agree completely with what you mean, but this was an unnecessary, extremely insulting way to say it.

What the OP wrote is considerably more offensive than what I responded with (and I also was originally going to respond with something FAR less polite, but decided against it).

Sugarcoating it any more would just dilute the message. I stand by what I said.

> Silicon Valley will never die.

Over what time period? It’s absurd to say this and mean forever, if you have ever opened a history book. Even America itself will pass out of dominance, as all superpowers have. Rome, Britain, etc. Change is the rule, not the exception. It is the natural way.

https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/

The research at Los Alamos that Geoffrey West has summarized most recently in his book Scale demonstrates different dynamics are at work. Creatures and companies grow and age and die. Cities are a completely different construct. Rome and Londinium are both still large and influential. Two particularly stark demonstrations of this effect are Hiroshima and Nagasaki both of which were wiped off the map with nukes yet in roughly 30 years were back to being thriving urban conurbations. Times change, but influence remains more consistent than most expect. The startup scenes in Detroit and Cleveland are other examples of boom towns that were written off yet remain significant contributors.

Sure, there is still innovation coming out of Detroit and Cleveland, but I still think if SF/SV became like one of those cities that would qualify as "dying" to a lot of people who currently live there.

Many places have plenty of talent, capital is increasingly global, and greed is a human constant. None of these are meaningfully unique to Silicon Valley these days. What traditionally has been unique is the culture, the importance of which should never be underestimated. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, that culture now exists in many pockets outside of Silicon Valley, often brought there by former denizens of The Valley. And those people are bring a lot more wealth with them due to making loads of money.

To your point, I do think the amount of money being thrown at employees in Silicon Valley (and Seattle, and...) has been detrimental to the ability to build hardcore technology startups. The cost of building a critical mass of highly qualified employees has made doing so effectively unachievable in many domains that require such employees to have any chance of executing successfully. This has created an arguably pathological selection bias for the kinds of startups that can be funded or the kinds of founders that can plausibly start a given company.

Silicon Valley isn’t dead but as a place to build a tech company it is looking less differentiated with each passing year. Some critical future software deep tech is now developed almost entirely outside of Silicon Valley (cloud, AI, etc) even at companies headquartered in the Valley.

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US.

A few examples:

Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :))

Nordic Semiconductor

The Qt Company

Unity Technologies

I might be influenced by living in Scandinavia. :)

> Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :))

There is a nice little scene of companies in Espoo filled with some incredibily talented technologists who all got their start at Nokia.

Even if Nokia itself doesn't return, I expect at least one or two major technology developments out of there. I have my eye on ICEYE and have even thought of maybe working there.

Also Nintendo, Sony, Ericsson, and Samsung

Wasn’t Opera, Nokia, and QT all within the same building too in Oslo? Maybe something’s in the water

Not Nokia, but yes I used to work for opera and trolltech was just a floor above us. We did a lot of work for Nokia device so maybe that’s what you were thinking of.

Nokia itself was a giant corporation with multiple buildings around Finland.

TSMC

ASML

SV will exist for as long as the US is in the position it is in the world. Money will flow while USD is the worlds reserve currency.

The US is however rotting from within. The political disfunction will eventually destroy everything.

The US has a lot of democratic risk but I have more hope for the country than Europe or Africa, because our economic policy is so much better. Europeans love their post-WW2 welfare states, but in practice their current governments react to everything with more austerity, and they're really anti-immigration.

US economic policy is a result of the dollar being a world reserve currency. This is a unique privilege (usd being overvalued and liquid) and also a curse (inequality).

Europe has quite a lot of internal migration and the US largely benefits from highly educated european and asian immigrants to SV. What makes europeans move is access to capital. It all comes down to the dollar.

Well, that's a theory, but it's not proven and we'd have to lose the status to do the experiment.

There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think, and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.

> There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both.

All irrelevant.

> Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think

It is safer when your currency is the one most other countries are indebted in and buy their goods in. USD increasing in value causes economic crises around the world, USD decreasing in value causes economic booms around the world. All because countries are paying their debts in dollars.

> and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.

A whole lot of things happened in the 70s. Like the USD going off the gold standard completely, other countries starting to get rid of it for this reason and the establishment of the petro dollar to get it under control again. The 70s showed how things start unraveling when USD status is threatened.

The root cause is people around the world still trust the US organization as a country, at least more than the others.

Yeah and the terrirists hate you for your freedom.

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US.

Young people might not remember but 10+ years ago, Nokia used to be the market leader in mobile phones.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mobile-phone-mark...

I agree, but never say never.

The Chinese will for sure have their own version of Silicon Valley and their giants will rival ours, no doubt.

I think there will be other critical centers of tech innovation, similar to how Hollywood is Hollywood but NYC has an industry as well.

Also it's very much worth nothing that Silicon Valley no longer has the monopoly on talent that it once had. In fact in some of the more important development areas now, it's shifted to places like Boston or elsewhere.

Not to mention that a lot of talent are moving to Austin, Miami, or literally anywhere thanks to the teleconferencing technology that Silicon Valley invented.

Which raises the question if Silicon Valley isn’t geographical but is rather a catch-all for the cutting edge and dumb money aspects of the U.S. tech industry. Is the Amazon/Microsoft/Valve tech scene in Seattle any less Silicon Valley than SV itself? Is Austin, which had techbros since the 90s with the likes of Trilogy [0], and an ongoing rush of new blood flowing out of the Bay Area, any less SV? Will VCs moving to Miami turn it into the funding operations center of SV?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620848

I've found that as much as the technical folks have spread out to Seattle & Austin (and now elsewhere as those are getting too expensive), nearly all of the business folks stick to the Valley. Both the brilliant and the parasites.

As the capital cycle has shifted away from VC towards companies consolidating and needing to make real returns, it's going to be interesting to see if SV can stay what it is until things turn around again.

During the dotcom correction, it was still possible for some people to stick around and eek out a living. Today that's not possible without technologist wages.

Business folks are mostly trend followers now and "leaving California" is a trendy thing to do.

Zoom is mostly developed in China, not even SV.

I think you’re not looking far enough back in the history of computer technology to think it’s _recently_ shifted to places like Boston. There’s always been companies outside SV, and especially in Boston. And there’s always been ebb and flow.

I'm well aware, but my point is this time that there are entire fields where the _hub_ is Boston and not SV.

The fear of China "overtaking" the US is like the fear of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Real, but with no substance. A system built on top of paranoia is very unlikely to succeed.

Downplaying China and their potential is exactly how China got to the level of prominence they have today. I don't see the Soviet Union as a good comparison. I think China could still fail, of course, but they're much more likely than the Soviets (from whom they no doubt learned some of what not to do) to succeed in the longer term.

The biggest problem is that the West is allowing them to win, by being addicted to cheap goods and losing the ability to manufacture many things (cost-effectively or at all) ourselves, while China doesn't open up their markets to outsiders, at least nowhere near the same degree as we give them access.

No one said they would over take - merely they that are a formidable foe and will have a presence no doubt.

The kind of hubris in this thread tells me despite how asinine these articles are they hit HNs nerve.

I wouldn't say "no one"; my personal opinion is that if the West doesn't wake up, they'll quite easily overtake in a few decades, if not sooner. We continue to enable their rise, while ignoring their bad behavior, all because we need access to their manufacturing capability... capability we've willingly ceded to them over the past decades.

you oversimplify their model, for most people in Schenchzen(Chinese silicon valley) the motivation is the same as it was in US

I'm sorry, but China is much stronger economically than the USSR ever was

》But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come

Why should I come to SV? Living standard, taxes, workforce cost, housing... I may get $5m funding, but that would only buy an office and couple of employees for a few years. And if I ever make it, VC and California taxes would eat 90% of my profit.

And do not even let me start on family and children cost and friendliness. Buying $3m house, so homeless guy can expose himself in front of my daughter... :(

Raising funds is not that big deal, there is so much free capital now. New trend is residency in tax heaven (UAE, Singapore, Cyprus) and globally distributed team.

California doesn't have a high tax burden. If you manage to get a house you're actually set, it's a feudal system where you essentially never have to pay taxes again, since your property tax will be below inflation forever.

Prop 13 allows for 2% increase every year[0]. That's more than the (supposed) inflation rate in many years[1], though agreed that feels inaccurate.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_...

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

Compared to what? California is not exactly known as tax heaven.

That’s because the only people who complain about “taxes” in general terms are propagandists like Grover Norquist who don’t care about reality. People actually trying to skip on their tax bills like Musk tend to do it quietly and make up excuses.

Anyone who lives here knows perfectly well that their neighbor who bought a house in the 80s has a property tax bill 10x lower than theirs - actually I live next to several car dealerships who’d pay less than I would if I could afford a house here. That’s the power of Prop 13.

Besides that, CA residents are probably getting a tax refund this year because the state has a budget surplus.

So rant about local politics and shaming people who decide to leave.

I am sure California tax rate is under 70%, but I find it highly non transparent and unpredictable.

> Buying $3m house, so homeless guy can expose himself in front of my daughter... :(

You’re talking about a few limited neighborhoods out of an entire metropolitan area.

that it's normalized is his point

shame on us for that

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US.

Spotify, ATI, ARM, BlackBerry?

Canonical and the part of AWS built in SA?

I love this take. It’s true, after the rise of modern tech post-2008, the top talent got rich off RSUs and lost their greediness. Greed made this industry what it is, in every innovation cycle (hardware, software, dotcom, mobile).

We need a return to greed and a rise in hunger and competitiveness, which creates innovation. Too many talented individuals resting on their laurels cashing RSUs instead of starting a company.

I think it’s a massive success that tech has been able to share as much of its profits with its workers, and I think that’s because of stock comp creating a race to the top with wage growth. We need more of that, not less.

> If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that people since 2010 have made too much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've worked on.

No they're not. A multi-thousandaire maybe.

You can get to millionaire status if you buy a house and pay off the loan, but for that you need more than 10 years of working in SV or an inheritance.

> That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed.

> Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.

Nothing lasts forever. Some time ago, Detroit would have been on your list, too:

"so tired of random writers trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. It's like saying Detroit is doomed. Detroit has the critical mass of talent and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world."

> or Wall Street is doomed

IDK Wall Street seems pretty irrelevant to me. The only thing that matters these days is the Fed.

Did you even read the article? Because you seem to be addressing a generic “Silicon Valley the place is dead” clickbait article rather than an in-depth thoughtful essay about the state of the tech industry and how it might transform as more sciences beyond computing come to prominence.

As detailed as your comment is, it doesn’t seem germane to the OP at all and appears to be responding to merely the title and the identity of the author.

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Very well, next time I will simply state “the article doesn’t mention any of that, you have clearly not read it, and you are using this comment thread as a personal soapbox to broadcast your own opinions about a subject that is orthogonal to the actual link, sucking up valuable discussion that could be actually relevant and addresses the article at hand.”

Ok, I see what you mean and realize that I didn't really read your comment beyond the trigger phrase at the beginning. Yes, generic top subthreads that don't really address the article, but rather get sucked straight into $predictable-thing-people-always-argue-about, are indeed one of the biggest problems on HN and I'm constantly trying to convince people not to go there.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Still, please don't "Did you even read the article"—it doesn't help. However, if you (or anyone) notice one of these generic subthreads sitting at the top of a thread, gathering mass and choking out more interesting discussion, there actually is something super helpful you can do: email [email protected] to let us know. We downweight those, and doing that is perhaps the single best moderation thing we can do in large threads. It makes a huge difference.

Just please remember that the problem is a co-creation, and the bulk of it is caused not by the root generic comment but by the upvotes they routinely attract. It's more a tragedy-of-the-commons thing and not worth taking out on any individual user. The solution is moderation, i.e. a module whose job it is to watch over the main system and jiggle it out of its failure modes.

I plan to add software so that users can help identify and downweight these generic subthreads. Pending that, though, emails [email protected] alerting us to these are greatly, fabulously appreciated.

I understand, it’s incredibly dispiriting to see long written comments that grab a bunch of upvotes yet have absolutely nothing to do with the OP kill off all the interest in the actual article. Can they simply be flagged?

Though admittedly this article would probably be easier to approach if it was broken up into four parts that could each be addressed in different threads.

You can flag them because generic tangents are against the site guidelines. It might help, but when they're at the top of a thread, the upvotes will most likely dominate the flags. That's why moderator intervention is needed.

Btw, a lot of the time these comments are perfectly fine as long as they're halfway down the page. Humans like to talk and we naturally talk about what we already know, and repeat things we've said or felt many times before—it's just the way we are. The problem comes more because people upvote the familiar (because hey! I feel that way too!), and then suddenly the more boring category (regurgitating the familiar) chokes out the more interesting one (new and unpredictable information). In most cases that wasn't the commenter's intention. The solution is for a countervailing mechanism, like downweights, to dampen the effect of this suboptimal one. Unfortunately that still requires moderator intervention, which is a bottleneck.

> the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out.

So where was WeChat and ubiquitous QR codes for everything stolen from? Silicon Valley still haven't figured out how to do Ubiquitous contactless payment... it's like going back in time every time I travel there, and I have to swipe a credit card and sign with a pen.

Or Taiwan's COVID/PPE Supply tracking system's?

Sorry... Silicon Valley is dying.

You've listed literally 4 things.

You can't really believe that compares to the innovations to come out of Silicon Valley, right?

Sorry, your right:

- largest electric vehicle manufacturer and adoption

- 5G (still no SV grown solution there)

- Most advanced solar manufacture

- biggest investor in renewable energy and nuclear

- biggest investor in space based technology and delivery

If you’d like more I can keep going. I was responding to: “they steal everything”... I pointed out the most widely used social network that was homegrown and unique.

> - 5G (still no SV grown solution there)

Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what it was supposed to mean yet.

Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high margin business.

Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It’s really fast and awesome!

It involves both improvements in hardware and software. Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the narrative that China just copies everyone)

5G FR2 is certainly fast but we already had "fast" (5Ghz Wi-Fi or wired Internet), and it's pretty harsh on mobile batteries. 5G FR1 is somewhat better than LTE but not really enough to enable new uses.

The real issue preventing new consumer uses is that wireless plans are expensive and have data limits. Driving that down presumably involves investing in the wireless ISP backend, which doesn't have much to do with the radio technology.

Define awesome. How will it improve my life? Please don't mention high speed. Or if you do, mention applications where it makes difference.

I do share your skepticism overall, 5G is being pushed more aggressively than its value would warrant. But there are parts of 5G suite that are indeed valuable and go beyond the mere "moar speed" mantra.

Network slicing is not consumer facing, but is a big deal in business-to-business connectivity, likely enabling business models that just aren't possible today. It's a bit like renting virtual machines in the cloud, but instead you're renting connectivity, tailored to your SLA needs.

Higher bandwidth, lower latency and lower power consumption are not exciting in isolation, but improving all of them at the same time does bring notably better user experience (see the raving reviews of M1 Mac for the same phenomenon).

This list includes no genuinely new innovations except for maybe 5G. You are listing that China is a major manufacturer, which is true. The OPs point was that China has a record of stealing IP from the US, which is also true. Listing manufacturers in China doesn't disprove this point.

So please, if you'd like, a list of genuine technologies who's origins can be traced to China... I'll be waiting.

So WeChat, and 5G. Should be discounted because they don’t support your point, and you will wait for others? Got it!

- Facial recognition on banking transactions.

- Tele Health rolled out via their ubiquitous home grown social network

- AI drones policing temperature and mask wearing

- real-time automatic translation hardware and software.

- Chinese based text input via keyboards

- Chinese voice recognition (a different problem to tonal languages)

By all means point out where they stole those things from

Then when you can’t do that, check out their space program, their capability easily surpasses NASA and is competitive with space X. Which given they are banned from even the iss where did they steal that from?

Most of the things you've listed here use WESTERN TECH just re-applied for a Chinese market, and you're calling that innovation? The fact that you had to list "Chinese based text input via keyboards" as a genuine Chinese innovation is telling.

Done with this discussion. You can't seem to come up with even 2 genuine Chinese innovations and instead refer to the reapplication of tech developed in the western world.

Nobody is saying China can't take what others have done and improve on it. That is happening more and more. It used to be China just straight up copied and stole intellectual property. I'll admit that line is beginning to blur. But genuine novel innovation is still very lacking.

I started with 5G. I know it's devastating to your case so you'll ignore it, but that is where I started.

The great firewall?

Social credit system?

Automated J-walking tickets based on facial recognition?

Tell me where those were copied from in the west.

Everyone just straight up and copies and steals intellectual property (Xerox, Apple, Windows)... But when china does, it's some how "china just steals everything".

Also there is piles of innovation in the "boring stuff" like "how to actually make a battery" or "smart phone manufacture" that is almost exclusively in Asia (and predominantly china). Or in BYDs case (the company that was making mass produced electric cars long before Tesla "innovated"), making batteries that are environmentally friendly when disposed of.

But hey, you're done with this discussion. So enjoy the blissful ignorance.

edit: forgot i was done. damnit.

From what I can find, 5G wasn't invented in China, nor was the concept of electromagnetic information transfer. Nor were transitors. Nor were micro processors. Nor were personal cell phones...

The list goes on, and it goes DEEP right down to the fundamental physics of these innovations which all did NOT come out of China.

Devistating as this all is to your point, you'll probably never accept it. China has a long history of stealing from the West, where the true innovation has occurred over the years.

Yes, I do think this is starting to change and I applaud China where it has introduced improvements to technology instead of raw copying (which it has a long, long history of doing). The unfortunate reality is that cheating for years has tainted their image, and try as you might to point out one or two examples of how it's changed, doesn't make it so.

Gosh, you know... I think you've left a very novel innovation from China off your list.

https://youtu.be/dnY2OtnTOcA

QR codes are Japanese not Chinese.

Contactless payment systems are everywhere now, the big push being COVID.

Taiwan isn't China, any Taiwanese will tell you that. Taiwan did a lot of things right when it came to the COVID response, but it's easy to do when you have a population of 23 million on a tiny island. I have several friends who are living in Taiwan and I've been jealous of them throughout the pandemic because their government handled it correctly. However, the US vaccination response is the best in the world. Even I have been vaccinated.

Silicon Valley isn't dying. It's literally the biggest creator of wealth in the world, and it's so much that it's causing a horrible amount of income inequality, especially in the Bay Area itself. It's almost being a victim of its own success, as I already mentioned.

I never said Taiwan was part of China... in fact I mentioned them both separately by name... which would be weird if I was saying they were the same right? #strawman

>biggest creator of wealth in the world

Amazon you mean? Or do you mean Tesla? Or Microsoft?... oh wait... none of them are from SV.

Yes, it was weird that you mentioned Taiwan when I mentioned China.

Tesla is in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Uber, Twitter, the list goes on and on. China takes US ideas and copies them, and then releases them in China where they don't have to compete against the US originals. It's a simple fact.

So what is Tencent a copy of?

And which application does wechat copy? Or Weibo?

What is Huawei a copy of?

Your simple fact, sounds awfully like racism.

Tencent started as a rip-off of ICQ. Their application name was literally called OICQ. Then they became a rip off of Zynga. Tencent succeeds because it's safely protected by China, but it would never have gained enough marketshare without that monopoly. That's my entire point.

Huawei is a ripoff of Cisco. It's another company protected by the Chinese government.

And you forget Didi, which is a simple rip off of Uber. Uber was competing against Didi and would have won, except the Chinese government backed Didi and Uber decided it couldn't survive its source of money so they gave up. Didi even engaged in corporate spying, by sending their workers into Uber China to work there, sabotage it, and steal internal data. Didi couldn't win without cheating.

The fact you pull the race card is very sad. It means you're losing the argument.

So Wechat...?

Also msn messenger was a copy of icq as well... as was AOL instant messenger. But China at the copy-cats?

Huawei are a copy of Cisco!? Yet Huawei make half the worlds telecoms and Cisco don’t.

Uber was always shit in China. Didi was more like Uber X and Uber copied them... Didi won from the beginning.

No, not a race card. You are being racist. Applying a higher standard to Chinese than you apply to Americans. That’s called prejudice, and racial prejudice is racism.

Edit: To be clear, I’m referring to Ubers original Premium service in China. I’m not sure they even got to Uber X in China.

I'm Asian, so it looks like you're the racist for assuming I'm white. I'm not even American.

Anyway, you keep thinking what you want to think, you're entitled to your opinion. But it's not backed up by actual facts, so you're not living in reality, but that's also your right.

I never assumed you were white. Just pointed out you were racist. You’ve now double downed on it with some strange implication that Asians can’t be racist.

Actually everything I’ve said is backed by fact, please point out where I’m factually incorrect.

Crappy payments isn't a tech problem, it's a market problem. Consumers and merchants can't be bothered to adopt contactless technologies that were introduced half a decade ago.

Companies have tried QR codes and other payment schemes long before that (including the unfortunately named ISIS), but again, no traction.

Americans don’t like contactless payment?

Or (more Likely), unlike their Chinese counterparts, American banks are way more conservative with adopting new technologies. Hence why y’all still get paid with paper cheques :)

We have contactless payment with EMVpay/Apple Pay. There are some QR code systems like Venmo but I don't know what the value add of scanning a code is supposed to be.

Nobody gets paid with paper checks unless they want to, although if you're poor and have been blacklisted by the bank system you might take it so you can use a check cashing service.

People have their habits. I do increasingly use my Apple Watch (or a contactless credit card) to pay but my observation on the outskirts of a large East Coast metro is that effectively no one does.

I still use checks for service people and some other purposes, e.g. when there's a fee for online payment.