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There was a huge amount of work behind the scenes over the past 3-4 years to pull this off, by both CloudFlare people and Baidu. There will be some engineering

by rdl 11y ago

There was a huge amount of work behind the scenes over the past 3-4 years to pull this off, by both CloudFlare people and Baidu. There will be some engineering posts about it. I personally wasn't particularly involved in this, but met some of the Baidu engineers. What amazed me was just how smart they were -- they were basically indistinguishable from the engineers I've met at top-tier US companies. I'm really looking forward to the great Internet services for everyone which will come out of companies in China over the next decade. People outside China really underestimate the potential there. It will mean more competition, but also a lot more awesome products and tools, and will make the world a better place for everyone.

steve19 11y ago
In the very long term, sure. In the medium term no. If Chinese firms were to start competing with Western firms, then the legality of Chinese protectionism would be called into question. The fact that CloudFlare even needs to partner with Baidu, rather than just put some servers into a local datacenter, is an example of this protectionism. Until the Chinese internet market is saturated with Chinese products, the government is not going to encourage internet startups to compete in Western markets, and even then they might decide that trade sanctions/WTO rulings against them are not worth it (compared to having total control of what internet services their citizens use)
- rdl 11y ago
  There are definitely protectionist aspects to some of China's policies (just like there are protectionist aspects to many US policies, especially outside IT), but there is also a lot of complexity to the market on its own. It is one of the few large, developed markets for Internet products where it makes a lot of sense for outsiders to partner. Also, it's changing rapidly, so "very long term" might be 5 years, and "medium term" might be 1 year, for anything. Some of the biggest companies in China are less than 5 years old.
  - steve19 11y ago
    > There are definitely protectionist aspects Do I read it correctly that you are arguing it is significantly less about protectionism and mostly about state censorship/control?
    - rdl 11y ago
      No. It's primarily about the market just being unique. We have maybe 10 people in the company who speak Chinese; trying to build a Chinese-language product alone would be challenging. The language portion is the smallest aspect to localizing a service like ours. The Chinese Internet has evolved differently -- for us to learn how it works on our own, even with full access, would take forever (5y maybe to where it is now, by which point it would have evolved -- would never catch up.) It's secondarily about regulation for its own sake -- governments regulate because they think they should, especially communications. Communications is one of the most highly regulated sectors of the economy around the world, even in countries which are relatively free market. It's tertiarily about protectionism. That might have been more true 5-10 years ago, but I'd be amazed if a non-Chinese company could go into the Chinese market directly and out-compete on services built by local companies. There are definitely products (high-end machine tools, luxury goods) where foreign companies are preferred, but Internet services aren't one of them. It's only minimally about censorship. If you're operating in a country, you're subject to their laws, which doesn't really matter if you're in a partnership vs. have your own servers in that country.
    - steve19 11y ago
      @rdl Thanks for your reply. It is interesting to hear the perspective of someone dealing with a different sector of the China. For what I do (security/defense) everything is censored by the Great Firewall.
eps 11y ago
> What amazed me was just how smart they were -- they were basically indistinguishable from the engineers I've met at top-tier US companies. I'd probably try and rephrase that, because you are basically saying that you were expecting them to be unskilled and unprofessional, but, shockingly, they weren't.
- rdl 11y ago
  It was that I was expecting them to have different motivations or styles of working. The "conventional" wisdom in the US is that Chinese companies don't innovate, and just do great work copying. The reality is they're just as innovative as anyone in SV. Companies like FB end up building new amazing technology because of challenges at scale, not because it's necessarily core to the user experience for a single user, and the same thing happened in China.
zht 11y ago
Baidu is actually one of the more SV-like in culture tech companies in China. There's also quite a large number of engineers there who worked in SV and have now returned (bringing some of those engineer skills and culture with them).

by rdl 11y ago

steve19 11y ago

In the very long term, sure. In the medium term no. If Chinese firms were to start competing with Western firms, then the legality of Chinese protectionism would be called into question. The fact that CloudFlare even needs to partner with Baidu, rather than just put some servers into a local datacenter, is an example of this protectionism. Until the Chinese internet market is saturated with Chinese products, the government is not going to encourage internet startups to compete in Western markets, and even then they might decide that trade sanctions/WTO rulings against them are not worth it (compared to having total control of what internet services their citizens use)

rdl 11y ago
There are definitely protectionist aspects to some of China's policies (just like there are protectionist aspects to many US policies, especially outside IT), but there is also a lot of complexity to the market on its own. It is one of the few large, developed markets for Internet products where it makes a lot of sense for outsiders to partner. Also, it's changing rapidly, so "very long term" might be 5 years, and "medium term" might be 1 year, for anything. Some of the biggest companies in China are less than 5 years old.
- steve19 11y ago
  > There are definitely protectionist aspects Do I read it correctly that you are arguing it is significantly less about protectionism and mostly about state censorship/control?
  - rdl 11y ago
    No. It's primarily about the market just being unique. We have maybe 10 people in the company who speak Chinese; trying to build a Chinese-language product alone would be challenging. The language portion is the smallest aspect to localizing a service like ours. The Chinese Internet has evolved differently -- for us to learn how it works on our own, even with full access, would take forever (5y maybe to where it is now, by which point it would have evolved -- would never catch up.) It's secondarily about regulation for its own sake -- governments regulate because they think they should, especially communications. Communications is one of the most highly regulated sectors of the economy around the world, even in countries which are relatively free market. It's tertiarily about protectionism. That might have been more true 5-10 years ago, but I'd be amazed if a non-Chinese company could go into the Chinese market directly and out-compete on services built by local companies. There are definitely products (high-end machine tools, luxury goods) where foreign companies are preferred, but Internet services aren't one of them. It's only minimally about censorship. If you're operating in a country, you're subject to their laws, which doesn't really matter if you're in a partnership vs. have your own servers in that country.
  - steve19 11y ago
    @rdl Thanks for your reply. It is interesting to hear the perspective of someone dealing with a different sector of the China. For what I do (security/defense) everything is censored by the Great Firewall.

eps 11y ago

> What amazed me was just how smart they were -- they were basically indistinguishable from the engineers I've met at top-tier US companies. I'd probably try and rephrase that, because you are basically saying that you were expecting them to be unskilled and unprofessional, but, shockingly, they weren't.

rdl 11y ago
It was that I was expecting them to have different motivations or styles of working. The "conventional" wisdom in the US is that Chinese companies don't innovate, and just do great work copying. The reality is they're just as innovative as anyone in SV. Companies like FB end up building new amazing technology because of challenges at scale, not because it's necessarily core to the user experience for a single user, and the same thing happened in China.

zht 11y ago

Baidu is actually one of the more SV-like in culture tech companies in China. There's also quite a large number of engineers there who worked in SV and have now returned (bringing some of those engineer skills and culture with them).