9 ms·

How does Chinese tech stack up against American tech?

70 points by YouAreGreat 9y ago

superasn 9y ago
I think Silicon valley's biggest contribution is innovation. All the Chinese or Indian startups I see (no matter how big their size) are generally China's answer to Uber/WhatsApp/Facebook or India's answer to Amazon. I've yet to see one startup which is America's answer to some chinese/indian startup. I hope that day comes soon.
- faitswulff 9y ago
  ...perhaps except for messaging apps. Messaging apps in America are almost all trying to emulate WeChat's success as a standalone platform in China.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - superasn 9y ago
    I did a quick Google search and see that Whatsapp was founded in 2009, one year before wechat, which has similar features (but please correct me if I'm wrong).
    - airza 9y ago
      No, they don't have the same features. That's why he described WeChat as a platform rather than a messaging client- the extent to which it dominates online life in China has no analogue in the US.
    - stevenjohns 9y ago
      WeChat is crazy big in China, to the point where you use it to pay for almost anything. It has allowed even the extremely rural to digitise their payments - every stall has a QR code that you can scan and transfer money to. The payment feature scales up very quickly, allowing you to do everything from book cabs through the app through to splitting restaurant bills with other people. It's more than just a messaging app - it's more like a mash-up of WhatsApp, PayPal, Twitter and Facebook. Things that WeChat had before WhatsApp were things like "Moments" which WhatsApp adopted quite recently (and in a more simpler way) as "Status"[0] and they also had very strong business integration which WhatsApp only recently began to flirt with through WhatsApp for Business[1]. [0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000031/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000031/ [1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000637/Introducing-the-WhatsApp-Business-App https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000637/Introducing-the-WhatsApp-...
      - yourapostasy 9y ago
        > The payment feature scales up very quickly, allowing you to do everything from book cabs through the app through to splitting restaurant bills with other people. Weixin Pay's pricing for money handling seems pretty competitive compared to Western systems. 0.1% to transfer out of their system to your bank if you are transferring >$3200 USD, and 0.6% to process a payment [1]. I wonder when Weixin Pay and startups like Payoneer [2] will get tired of the friction imposed by the current banking interchange systems, and set up their own identity and interchange solution to start breaking 1% on all of a transaction life cycle's service fees (from payer removing from their account and paying, to payee accepting and debiting to their account, perhaps including forex conversion, to final settlement). [1] https://chinachannel.co/take-wechat-payments-small-business/ https://chinachannel.co/take-wechat-payments-small-business/ [2] https://www.payoneer.com/fees/ https://www.payoneer.com/fees/
    - addicted 9y ago
      WhatsApp didnt have the features WeChat did. For example, Apple's iMessage and Facebook's Messenger development over the past few years has basically been to become increasingly like WeChat. Whether it's stickers or payments or animations, etc.
      - taoistextremist 9y ago
        Facebook is ripping off a larger variety of apps than WeChat, it seems more like they're trying to push into Snapchat's market share. I'm not familiar with payments being a feature on iMessage or Messenger, though. Unless you mean just the money transfers to friends, which existed on Facebook's desktop Messenger first IIRC, so it doesn't appear to be ripping off WeChat (which in my experience doesn't really support money transfers in quite the same way, unless we're talking about hongbao). Also, weren't stickers a thing on Kakao Talk and LINE before WeChat?
        seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Wechat supposedly ripped off a lot of features from LINE, but since LINE is a Japanese/Asian thing, most Americans know even less about that than WeChat.
        devsafrun 9y ago
        line is from naver (korean company), but apparently no one in korea uses line... (100% kakao) surprised to see Line everywhere else in asia though (seems initial popularity decides a lot for these messenger apps - or some extremely unique features that can't be copied)
        taoistextremist 9y ago
        Line was originally Japanese, it was just acquired by a Korean company, explaining the lack of market share in that country. I think Kakao predates pretty much all modern messengers, including Kik, so it's kind of surprising they never reached out of Korea very much.
    - forkLding 9y ago
      wechat is a bit different, not a good one to talk about, it was started by Tencent QQ Messenger (From back in the period when everyone had a messenger client like MSN, Yahoo, etc.) and was based on similar communication principles with a mobile twist.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Isn't WeChat a LINE clone, which wasn't exactly innovating but simply taking advantage of a cultural niche.
- gumby 9y ago
  > I've yet to see one startup which is America's answer to some chinese/indian startup. I hope that day comes soon. What about Twitch, which makes its money from sponsorship and virtual gifts to streamers, a model pioneered in China and then Korea? Or the US esports leagues which copy, again Korea and China? There are many technologies which appear later in the US but Americans think are indigenous (and the reverse as well -- I don't mean to pick on the US, simply responding to your comment). Consider chip cards (commonplace in Europe for 20+ years, still not well adopted in the US) or text messaging (adopted very late in the US).
  - plopz 9y ago
    I know of AfreecaTV that launched in 2005, and Twitch (Justin.tv) which launched in 2007. But what was the pioneering China platform?
    - nimbyest 9y ago
      yy.com I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YY.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YY.com
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - maruhan2 9y ago
    Very true. As a Korean, it really annoyed me that there were products that Korea or Japan had the first foot out on but could not go globally because it's not based on USA. Although nowadays I don't think that's so much the case. Currently, I think America has more ideas coming out because it really is more innovative
- john_moscow 9y ago
  I think there are 2 things at play here: 1. Survivor bias. It's always easier to adapt a successful business model to your regional market by applying minor tweaks to it, than to create something completely from scratch. 2. Market size. The U.S. GDP is almost 10x the size in the Indian one. If you are creating an online business based on some non-regionally-specific idea, there is just no reason for you not to target U.S. first.
- m3talsmith 9y ago
  That's practically died. Startups that come out now are mainly seeking luxury crowds or user attrition from facebook/whatsapp/etc. We are innovation saturated with the few areas left to innovate taking more time and funding than investors are willing to invest in. You can see this pattern in the demands to work faster/harder for the glory of being an entrepreneur, or fail and lose it all until your next quick idea...
- echevil 9y ago
  Well if you ever used any Chinese apps recently you’ll find they are nothing like anything you’re familiar with. Many major Chinese companies might have started with copying some idea from Silicon Valley, but that was long time ago. China now has an entire ecosystem of softaware/hardware/services that’s different from the rest of the world. Speaking of American startups copying from China, I’ll give you an example: https://www.spin.pm https://www.spin.pm
andr 9y ago
One thing I think every Silicon Valley startup and investor should be afraid of is the incredible rate and depth of adoption of new technologies in China. I came across two examples recently. First, in China e-books have taken over paper books, not just in volume, but in publishers' minds [1]. Second, payment systems like AliPay are becoming the dominant in just a few years, completely circumventing credit cards [2]. Now, neither of these are technological breakthroughs in themselves. The Kindle has been around for over 10 years, and Apple Pay and its precursors are not news, either. However, neither of those technologies has had the impact on their respective markets that the creators hoped for. Paper books are still frequently cheaper than their Kindle versions, and there have hardly been any noteworthy straight-to-Kindle publications. Likewise, Apple Pay, which is only a replacement for your physical card, but still a transaction mostly owned by Visa/MasterCard, and not Apple, is still far from a dominant purchase mechanism, even in the Bay Area. All in all, the pace of adoption of disruptive technologies in the US is pretty poor. So, as an entrepreneur, I'd be much more worried not about inventing the cool new tech before China, but actually getting people hooked on it. [1] https://www.economist.com/news/business/21731860-tencents-china-literature-should-profit-millions-chinese-smartphone-bookworms-chinas https://www.economist.com/news/business/21731860-tencents-ch... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/ https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/
- tjoff 9y ago
  Vendor lockin is a big issue. Why should I buy a book that I can't use the way I want because of DRM, I can't get in my native language and is completely tied to a company? Oh, and it also costs more... It is insane but greed has made the above commonplace across all aspects of the digital world. Personally I think ebooks are still worth it, even if I have to buy it, strip the DRM (which is illegal) before reading it (on an eink display of course). But it has never been ready for mainstream (will it ever?) and it is not the techs fault. We still don't even have a decent movie streaming service, and even if one existed it wouldn't matter because the content you want to watch makes that choice for you. A decade ago we had awesome home theater software, they still exist but they aren't compatible with the media that is offered today. For that we need another device (chromecast) which is probably the dumbest device you can buy but somehow that is the best option available for consumers in 2018.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
Yeah so much great high quality software coming out of China. Many of these apps aren’t even a national security risk!
- landryraccoon 9y ago
  They're not a national security risk for China though.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    A backdoor's a backdoor, whether it's in an American product or a Chinese one.
    - lopmotr 9y ago
      That's a political rhetoric. But most popular software has backdoors in the form of automatic updates.
mobilemidget 9y ago
China can only “win” if English usage gets better there. Because to win means to get Europe e.g. to see them as example. But we understand too little of Chinese in general, the culture and the language. We do however almost all get taught murican, I mean English at high school (have to note that few year after my high school time, you can now study Chinese and do some exams on it)
- echevil 9y ago
  Well, China itself has more than 1 billion people, and there is still plenty of room to grow its domestic market. That market is large enough to sustain tons of companies. More and more Chinese actually feel they’ve wasted too much time learning English, which is only need for a small number of jobs
  - devsafrun 9y ago
    ...but 1 billion ppl != 1 billion consumers... the huge income gap (pretty surprising given it's "communism" and everything lol) between peasants-workers-in-cities and the others is...
    - echevil 9y ago
      that's why there's huge room to improve
yusuke10 9y ago
The paper cites a few things > But now the number of cited AI papers by Chinese scientists is already at 89% of the American level Every article that wants to claim that China AI is on par with American AI claims this. But US has 10X the amount of AI scientists as China, which means Chinese AI scientists produces 10X amount of papers as American scientists. Quantity over quality, spurred by government cash rewards. Lots of noise, no bite. > China’s e-commerce sales are double America’s. Chinese firms are collectively 53% as big as America’s, measured by market value That's because China has 1.3B population, about 4X times more than America's 350B. However, it is projected that China will have peak population in this decade, and will be around 800M population sometimes in 2100. America has alot better demographics, vs China who has one of the oldest, and whose working population will contract by a few hundred millions by 2050 > Chinese non-tech firms are relatively primitive and only 26% as digitised as American ones. As for investment, Chinese tech’s absolute budget is only 30% as big as that of American tech. And it is still small abroad, with foreign sales of 18% of the total that American firms make. that's the gist of the article. China is nowhere near as big as America's tech currently. And China is on its way to the lost decade (that's why xijingping recently wanted the provinces to focus on things other than GDP, since the local governments are levered to the hill with debt)
- yusuke10 9y ago
  Other things in the paper > AMERICANS, and friends of America, often reassure themselves about its relative decline in the following way The decline is a myth; US is doing really well. US has a 3% gdp growth, which is huge when you realize the base is 19 Trillion! Contrast that with China, whose provinces just announced 20-30% fake revenue and putting the funny consistent 7% gdp growth in realm of accounting fraud. > Uncle Sam may have ceded the top spot to China in exports in 2007, and manufacturing in 2011 Not with all of the protectionism and tariffs coming to hit China, from US, EU, and Japan. China can't get around import tariffs by shipping from Vietnam, South Korea, or Africa anymore. Solar panel and refrigerators now, steel and aluminum next. Apple's 300B investment amongst others will revitalize US manufacturing. > China’s unicorns, a proxy for the next generation of giants, are in total worth 69% of America’s, Xiaomi's 40B unicorn valuation is all the way from 2014. It's losing to Oppo and Huawei in China. Meituan Dianping is burning cash rapidly like Uber, same as Didi Chuxing.
peter303 9y ago
I read similar stories about Japan in the 1980s
- obscurantist 9y ago
  I also remember Back to the Future Part II
leggomylibro 9y ago
Everyone is talking about software, and maybe that's because this goes without saying, but China's hardware production capabilities are just staggering. Embedded development has a hugely promising future, especially as microchips continue to add richer feature sets for lower power (and money) costs. And China has been taking that idea of the future and sprinting with it. 'IoT' is a popular buzzword, but IMO the success of companies like DJI better reflects China's growing expertise in blending together a broad range of technical disciplines, many of which are comparatively scorned by educational institutions in the US. Lately I've been floored by the fact that ARM Cortex-M0 and -M3 development boards (48-72MHz, 8-20KB RAM, 64-256KB flash) cost less than $2 each. They blow 'Arduinos' out of the water by an order of magnitude on both cost and capability, as do the similarly-cheap ESP8266 WiFi development boards. What ever happened to making useful things?
- Clubber 9y ago
  >What ever happened to making useful things? Lots of things. - The patent debacle that started in the Clinton administration - Not enforcing anti-competition laws allowing companies to consolidate. - Companies giving away all their IP to China in exchange for cheap labor. - Allowing our tech manufacturing sector to rot on the vine. The US still makes lots of useful things, they just can't make them within our borders.

70 points by YouAreGreat 9y ago

I think Silicon valley's biggest contribution is innovation. All the Chinese or Indian startups I see (no matter how big their size) are generally China's answer to Uber/WhatsApp/Facebook or India's answer to Amazon. I've yet to see one startup which is America's answer to some chinese/indian startup. I hope that day comes soon.

faitswulff 9y ago
...perhaps except for messaging apps. Messaging apps in America are almost all trying to emulate WeChat's success as a standalone platform in China.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- superasn 9y ago
  I did a quick Google search and see that Whatsapp was founded in 2009, one year before wechat, which has similar features (but please correct me if I'm wrong).
  - airza 9y ago
    No, they don't have the same features. That's why he described WeChat as a platform rather than a messaging client- the extent to which it dominates online life in China has no analogue in the US.
  - stevenjohns 9y ago
    WeChat is crazy big in China, to the point where you use it to pay for almost anything. It has allowed even the extremely rural to digitise their payments - every stall has a QR code that you can scan and transfer money to. The payment feature scales up very quickly, allowing you to do everything from book cabs through the app through to splitting restaurant bills with other people. It's more than just a messaging app - it's more like a mash-up of WhatsApp, PayPal, Twitter and Facebook. Things that WeChat had before WhatsApp were things like "Moments" which WhatsApp adopted quite recently (and in a more simpler way) as "Status"[0] and they also had very strong business integration which WhatsApp only recently began to flirt with through WhatsApp for Business[1]. [0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000031/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000031/ [1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000637/Introducing-the-WhatsApp-Business-App https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000637/Introducing-the-WhatsApp-...
    - yourapostasy 9y ago
      > The payment feature scales up very quickly, allowing you to do everything from book cabs through the app through to splitting restaurant bills with other people. Weixin Pay's pricing for money handling seems pretty competitive compared to Western systems. 0.1% to transfer out of their system to your bank if you are transferring >$3200 USD, and 0.6% to process a payment [1]. I wonder when Weixin Pay and startups like Payoneer [2] will get tired of the friction imposed by the current banking interchange systems, and set up their own identity and interchange solution to start breaking 1% on all of a transaction life cycle's service fees (from payer removing from their account and paying, to payee accepting and debiting to their account, perhaps including forex conversion, to final settlement). [1] https://chinachannel.co/take-wechat-payments-small-business/ https://chinachannel.co/take-wechat-payments-small-business/ [2] https://www.payoneer.com/fees/ https://www.payoneer.com/fees/
  - addicted 9y ago
    WhatsApp didnt have the features WeChat did. For example, Apple's iMessage and Facebook's Messenger development over the past few years has basically been to become increasingly like WeChat. Whether it's stickers or payments or animations, etc.
    - taoistextremist 9y ago
      Facebook is ripping off a larger variety of apps than WeChat, it seems more like they're trying to push into Snapchat's market share. I'm not familiar with payments being a feature on iMessage or Messenger, though. Unless you mean just the money transfers to friends, which existed on Facebook's desktop Messenger first IIRC, so it doesn't appear to be ripping off WeChat (which in my experience doesn't really support money transfers in quite the same way, unless we're talking about hongbao). Also, weren't stickers a thing on Kakao Talk and LINE before WeChat?
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Wechat supposedly ripped off a lot of features from LINE, but since LINE is a Japanese/Asian thing, most Americans know even less about that than WeChat.
        devsafrun 9y ago
        line is from naver (korean company), but apparently no one in korea uses line... (100% kakao) surprised to see Line everywhere else in asia though (seems initial popularity decides a lot for these messenger apps - or some extremely unique features that can't be copied)
        taoistextremist 9y ago
        Line was originally Japanese, it was just acquired by a Korean company, explaining the lack of market share in that country. I think Kakao predates pretty much all modern messengers, including Kik, so it's kind of surprising they never reached out of Korea very much.
  - forkLding 9y ago
    wechat is a bit different, not a good one to talk about, it was started by Tencent QQ Messenger (From back in the period when everyone had a messenger client like MSN, Yahoo, etc.) and was based on similar communication principles with a mobile twist.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  Isn't WeChat a LINE clone, which wasn't exactly innovating but simply taking advantage of a cultural niche.
gumby 9y ago
> I've yet to see one startup which is America's answer to some chinese/indian startup. I hope that day comes soon. What about Twitch, which makes its money from sponsorship and virtual gifts to streamers, a model pioneered in China and then Korea? Or the US esports leagues which copy, again Korea and China? There are many technologies which appear later in the US but Americans think are indigenous (and the reverse as well -- I don't mean to pick on the US, simply responding to your comment). Consider chip cards (commonplace in Europe for 20+ years, still not well adopted in the US) or text messaging (adopted very late in the US).
- plopz 9y ago
  I know of AfreecaTV that launched in 2005, and Twitch (Justin.tv) which launched in 2007. But what was the pioneering China platform?
  - nimbyest 9y ago
    yy.com I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YY.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YY.com
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- maruhan2 9y ago
  Very true. As a Korean, it really annoyed me that there were products that Korea or Japan had the first foot out on but could not go globally because it's not based on USA. Although nowadays I don't think that's so much the case. Currently, I think America has more ideas coming out because it really is more innovative
john_moscow 9y ago
I think there are 2 things at play here: 1. Survivor bias. It's always easier to adapt a successful business model to your regional market by applying minor tweaks to it, than to create something completely from scratch. 2. Market size. The U.S. GDP is almost 10x the size in the Indian one. If you are creating an online business based on some non-regionally-specific idea, there is just no reason for you not to target U.S. first.
m3talsmith 9y ago
That's practically died. Startups that come out now are mainly seeking luxury crowds or user attrition from facebook/whatsapp/etc. We are innovation saturated with the few areas left to innovate taking more time and funding than investors are willing to invest in. You can see this pattern in the demands to work faster/harder for the glory of being an entrepreneur, or fail and lose it all until your next quick idea...
echevil 9y ago
Well if you ever used any Chinese apps recently you’ll find they are nothing like anything you’re familiar with. Many major Chinese companies might have started with copying some idea from Silicon Valley, but that was long time ago. China now has an entire ecosystem of softaware/hardware/services that’s different from the rest of the world. Speaking of American startups copying from China, I’ll give you an example: https://www.spin.pm https://www.spin.pm

andr 9y ago

One thing I think every Silicon Valley startup and investor should be afraid of is the incredible rate and depth of adoption of new technologies in China. I came across two examples recently. First, in China e-books have taken over paper books, not just in volume, but in publishers' minds [1]. Second, payment systems like AliPay are becoming the dominant in just a few years, completely circumventing credit cards [2]. Now, neither of these are technological breakthroughs in themselves. The Kindle has been around for over 10 years, and Apple Pay and its precursors are not news, either. However, neither of those technologies has had the impact on their respective markets that the creators hoped for. Paper books are still frequently cheaper than their Kindle versions, and there have hardly been any noteworthy straight-to-Kindle publications. Likewise, Apple Pay, which is only a replacement for your physical card, but still a transaction mostly owned by Visa/MasterCard, and not Apple, is still far from a dominant purchase mechanism, even in the Bay Area. All in all, the pace of adoption of disruptive technologies in the US is pretty poor. So, as an entrepreneur, I'd be much more worried not about inventing the cool new tech before China, but actually getting people hooked on it. [1] https://www.economist.com/news/business/21731860-tencents-china-literature-should-profit-millions-chinese-smartphone-bookworms-chinas https://www.economist.com/news/business/21731860-tencents-ch... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/ https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/

tjoff 9y ago
Vendor lockin is a big issue. Why should I buy a book that I can't use the way I want because of DRM, I can't get in my native language and is completely tied to a company? Oh, and it also costs more... It is insane but greed has made the above commonplace across all aspects of the digital world. Personally I think ebooks are still worth it, even if I have to buy it, strip the DRM (which is illegal) before reading it (on an eink display of course). But it has never been ready for mainstream (will it ever?) and it is not the techs fault. We still don't even have a decent movie streaming service, and even if one existed it wouldn't matter because the content you want to watch makes that choice for you. A decade ago we had awesome home theater software, they still exist but they aren't compatible with the media that is offered today. For that we need another device (chromecast) which is probably the dumbest device you can buy but somehow that is the best option available for consumers in 2018.

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

Yeah so much great high quality software coming out of China. Many of these apps aren’t even a national security risk!

landryraccoon 9y ago
They're not a national security risk for China though.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  A backdoor's a backdoor, whether it's in an American product or a Chinese one.
  - lopmotr 9y ago
    That's a political rhetoric. But most popular software has backdoors in the form of automatic updates.

mobilemidget 9y ago

China can only “win” if English usage gets better there. Because to win means to get Europe e.g. to see them as example. But we understand too little of Chinese in general, the culture and the language. We do however almost all get taught murican, I mean English at high school (have to note that few year after my high school time, you can now study Chinese and do some exams on it)

echevil 9y ago
Well, China itself has more than 1 billion people, and there is still plenty of room to grow its domestic market. That market is large enough to sustain tons of companies. More and more Chinese actually feel they’ve wasted too much time learning English, which is only need for a small number of jobs
- devsafrun 9y ago
  ...but 1 billion ppl != 1 billion consumers... the huge income gap (pretty surprising given it's "communism" and everything lol) between peasants-workers-in-cities and the others is...
  - echevil 9y ago
    that's why there's huge room to improve

yusuke10 9y ago

The paper cites a few things > But now the number of cited AI papers by Chinese scientists is already at 89% of the American level Every article that wants to claim that China AI is on par with American AI claims this. But US has 10X the amount of AI scientists as China, which means Chinese AI scientists produces 10X amount of papers as American scientists. Quantity over quality, spurred by government cash rewards. Lots of noise, no bite. > China’s e-commerce sales are double America’s. Chinese firms are collectively 53% as big as America’s, measured by market value That's because China has 1.3B population, about 4X times more than America's 350B. However, it is projected that China will have peak population in this decade, and will be around 800M population sometimes in 2100. America has alot better demographics, vs China who has one of the oldest, and whose working population will contract by a few hundred millions by 2050 > Chinese non-tech firms are relatively primitive and only 26% as digitised as American ones. As for investment, Chinese tech’s absolute budget is only 30% as big as that of American tech. And it is still small abroad, with foreign sales of 18% of the total that American firms make. that's the gist of the article. China is nowhere near as big as America's tech currently. And China is on its way to the lost decade (that's why xijingping recently wanted the provinces to focus on things other than GDP, since the local governments are levered to the hill with debt)

yusuke10 9y ago
Other things in the paper > AMERICANS, and friends of America, often reassure themselves about its relative decline in the following way The decline is a myth; US is doing really well. US has a 3% gdp growth, which is huge when you realize the base is 19 Trillion! Contrast that with China, whose provinces just announced 20-30% fake revenue and putting the funny consistent 7% gdp growth in realm of accounting fraud. > Uncle Sam may have ceded the top spot to China in exports in 2007, and manufacturing in 2011 Not with all of the protectionism and tariffs coming to hit China, from US, EU, and Japan. China can't get around import tariffs by shipping from Vietnam, South Korea, or Africa anymore. Solar panel and refrigerators now, steel and aluminum next. Apple's 300B investment amongst others will revitalize US manufacturing. > China’s unicorns, a proxy for the next generation of giants, are in total worth 69% of America’s, Xiaomi's 40B unicorn valuation is all the way from 2014. It's losing to Oppo and Huawei in China. Meituan Dianping is burning cash rapidly like Uber, same as Didi Chuxing.

peter303 9y ago

I read similar stories about Japan in the 1980s

obscurantist 9y ago
I also remember Back to the Future Part II

leggomylibro 9y ago

Everyone is talking about software, and maybe that's because this goes without saying, but China's hardware production capabilities are just staggering. Embedded development has a hugely promising future, especially as microchips continue to add richer feature sets for lower power (and money) costs. And China has been taking that idea of the future and sprinting with it. 'IoT' is a popular buzzword, but IMO the success of companies like DJI better reflects China's growing expertise in blending together a broad range of technical disciplines, many of which are comparatively scorned by educational institutions in the US. Lately I've been floored by the fact that ARM Cortex-M0 and -M3 development boards (48-72MHz, 8-20KB RAM, 64-256KB flash) cost less than $2 each. They blow 'Arduinos' out of the water by an order of magnitude on both cost and capability, as do the similarly-cheap ESP8266 WiFi development boards. What ever happened to making useful things?

Clubber 9y ago
>What ever happened to making useful things? Lots of things. - The patent debacle that started in the Clinton administration - Not enforcing anti-competition laws allowing companies to consolidate. - Companies giving away all their IP to China in exchange for cheap labor. - Allowing our tech manufacturing sector to rot on the vine. The US still makes lots of useful things, they just can't make them within our borders.