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Those pesky Chinese and their great firewall. GAFAM would love to make inroads there but they can't even get a toehold. The China model destroys the Calinforn

by platz 9y ago

Those pesky Chinese and their great firewall. GAFAM would love to make inroads there but they can't even get a toehold. The China model destroys the Calinfornian model. What you do with the internet now in this age (walled gardens), are things the Chinese are doing at a national level. i digress. TLDR: “China is like a startup. The U.S. is like a big corporation... China runs very fast, tweaking along the way. The U.S. runs at a steady pace, doing a lot of research and development. It’s hard to tell who will win in the end.”

icobaron 9y ago
> What you do with the internet now in this age (walled gardens), are things the Chinese are doing at a national level. When the walled garden is that big its not really a garden anymore. Us Americans focus on really irrelevant things about other cultures, things people in those cultures don't find limiting at all.
contingencies 9y ago
To the downvoters: this is actually pretty close to the truth.
usaar333 9y ago
That quote might be true for large corporations, but I'm not seeing obvious examples (from the article or elsewhere) where this is clearly true for start-ups.
jxramos 9y ago
I wonder what the figures of the ratio of the number of startups to the number of large companies would look like between the two countries normalized by their urban populations.
qiqing 9y ago
In contrast to GAFAM, consider the counterexamples -- Western companies who have done well in China. Including: LinkedIn, Coursera, Evernote, Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, Coach, Airbnb, GM, Coca-cola, Flipboard, Pocket, ... list goes on. There's something really interesting about connecting with your customers and understanding how they use your products as opposed to assuming they are the same as your North American customers. The ones who succeed tend to do a good job on localization, not just translation but local product market fit research. (McDonalds, Starbucks, and Evernote are great examples.)

by platz 9y ago

icobaron 9y ago

> What you do with the internet now in this age (walled gardens), are things the Chinese are doing at a national level. When the walled garden is that big its not really a garden anymore. Us Americans focus on really irrelevant things about other cultures, things people in those cultures don't find limiting at all.

contingencies 9y ago

To the downvoters: this is actually pretty close to the truth.

usaar333 9y ago

That quote might be true for large corporations, but I'm not seeing obvious examples (from the article or elsewhere) where this is clearly true for start-ups.

jxramos 9y ago

I wonder what the figures of the ratio of the number of startups to the number of large companies would look like between the two countries normalized by their urban populations.

qiqing 9y ago

In contrast to GAFAM, consider the counterexamples -- Western companies who have done well in China. Including: LinkedIn, Coursera, Evernote, Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, Coach, Airbnb, GM, Coca-cola, Flipboard, Pocket, ... list goes on. There's something really interesting about connecting with your customers and understanding how they use your products as opposed to assuming they are the same as your North American customers. The ones who succeed tend to do a good job on localization, not just translation but local product market fit research. (McDonalds, Starbucks, and Evernote are great examples.)