6 ms·
don't race to the bottom as a foreign firm against locals in China. you won't win. they will go much lower and harder and longer than you will. they will turn t
by nrser 11y ago
don't race to the bottom as a foreign firm against locals in China. you won't win. they will go much lower and harder and longer than you will. they will turn the heat off in the -12C winter and have people coding in their parkas to save cash.
i hung out with some of the Uber e-staff and founders when they were in China. i think the most memorable quote was "there's what works for every other country in the world and then there's China".
i think they stood a chance if they had positioned themselves as an upscale service. foreign brands convey status. they could have had something there that the locals didn't. but that's not what they're doing everywhere else in the world, and i understand them not being willing to split their strategy for the market.
so i guess they went with firepower. and i would guess they knew it had a low chance of success. entry into China is hard. that trail is lined with bodies, every drop of blood sucked dry.
it's difficult understand until you see it for yourself. there are people arranging fake uber rides online to split the subsidies. but they had some idea. it's a big market and Uber has a lot of cash, but $1B is still a big bet with such bad odds.
- randycupertino 11y ago"Never get involved in a land war (or car service price war) in Asia."
- tosseraccount 11y agoDouglas Macarthur said this ... (or part of it) and then wound up fighting the Korean War ... which we won. So ... never say never, I guess.
- Swizec 11y agoI think it might have been meant as a Princess Bride quote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mTlnrXFAXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mTlnrXFAXE
- novaleaf 11y agoPrincess Bride gets the quote from Mcarthur. (and I'm not the one(s) downvoting you btw)
- Swizec 11y agoAfter some digging, it looks like either McArthur or Montgomery expressed the general sentiment first. But the specific formulation in GP is a direct quote from Vizzini in Princess Bride.
- ojbyrne 11y agoDunno if I'd say "we won." Technically North and South Korea are still at war. And apparently MacArthur said that _after_ the Korean War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
- tosseraccount 11y agoCan you find a definitive link? I find this ... "MacArthur articulated his most famous dictum—“never get involved in a land war in Asia”—after the Japanese surrender, because he believed that Japan’s simultaneous war in China made his Philippines victory possible. Japan had annexed Manchuria in 1931, then invaded China in 1937" [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/rethinking-douglas-macarthur-106397_Page2.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/rethinking-do...] We acheived our goals of stopping the Communists from conquering a friendly nation; so it's a victory.
- ojbyrne 11y agoNo, we intervened in a civil war between two groups, one that we decided was more in our interests to support. And we opened 2 markets for arms to be sold to, that would be healthy vibrant markets (for arms) for the next seventy years.
- Htsthbjig 11y agoDid you win the korean war? Nobody won the korean war. It was a draw,a stalemate. The US won on the South, they won on the North. The war officially never ended.
- adventured 11y agoGiven how South Korea has turned out compared to North Korea; given the US saved South Korea from an unbelievable amount of death and suffering that would have come with the North's domination; compared to the disaster that Mao's China was, and Stalin's Russia, due to Communist rule; considering South Korea became a tremendous ally; yeah, we very clearly won.
- kafkaesq 11y agoGiven how South Korea has turned out compared to North Korea; Shifting the goalposts. The fact is, both sides pledged to fight until the other was (politically) annihilated. Both sides failed to meet that goal, or even come close to it. Despite 2.5m+ killed or wounded, and a landscape in ruins.
- vacri 11y agoThe socio-politics won, not the war. By your own measure, only half of Korea won - the other half didn't win.
- yongjik 11y agoFun fact: until 1960s, North Korea had a higher GDP per capita than South Korea. Somehow I can't find any definite source on the web, but here's one phrase I found: https://books.google.com/books?id=D1dOCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA191&dq=dprk+economy+1960&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi24O6rh4PLAhVI-GMKHWosAI0Q6AEILzAC#v=onepage&q=dprk%20economy%201960&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=D1dOCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA191&dq=d... > By the beginning of the 1960s, North Korea's economic development was much more impressive than was South Korea's and would remain so until at least the mid-1970s. (...) As these data make abundantly clear, without foreign aid, the DPRK could not have achieved its ambitious post-war reconstruction. Another fun fact: even with all the help from the US (for which I'm grateful), South Korea went though an unbelievable amount of death and suffering all the same, and our first president was a first-class mass murderer who would have been quite at home in the company of his Northern counterparts. So, yeah, somehow we ended up all right (after decades of tyrants and struggles), but the history is a lot more complicated than good guys saving half of the population from bad guys.
- kamaal 11y agoIn my native tongue(Urdu) and region(South India), we have a saying that goes like this- "If you wish to destroy a persons fortunes, advice him to start a transportation business".
- mikeash 11y agoReminds me of a similar English saying: "How do you make a small fortune in the airline business? Start with a large fortune!" I imagine we can generalize that to transportation in general.