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That seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is k

That seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is kicking ass. I remember when GoPro did a drone and it simply wasn’t good. Or American carmakers are trying to turn back the clock on electric instead of embracing it.

bamboozled 11mo ago
Like Japan 40-50 years ago.,
devsda 11mo ago
I know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act. Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason they are not competitive.
- LightBug1 11mo ago
  Yeah, "Chinese companies just copies" was 10-15 years or beyond. No way is that relevant now. I've been wondering about why this is. With no evidence, I wondered if one of the reasons is the long term result of the many design and engineering graduates (I notice an incredible amount in the industry I work in) who were educated in the "best western uni's" and have now returned home and grown up. They were a honeypot for said uni's for so long. But the end result may now mean they're kicking all asses in product markets. It can't just be cheap labour ... or maybe it's the combination.
  - 6510 11mo ago
    While I would love to attribute it to their culture of hard work I believe the credit should go to the combined effect of poor choices made in the west. You cant begin to list our spending on bullshit directly nor instances of money intended for useful things that was lost in bureaucracy. China does this too of course but we are so much better at it.
  - djmips 11mo ago
    I feel like there is a hypothesis that open source and open science has helped the West but the IP laws have slowed innovation whereas China is kind of an open source culture internally which confera an advantage.
  - zdragnar 11mo ago
    It is definitely still relevant. A friend showed me two products- one from a US manufacturing company he worked for, and one on alibaba- that were practically identical. One was designed and developed, the other an illegal rip off. The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
- p0pularopinion 11mo ago
  I generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look. Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this. Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets). Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration). „Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
  - MangoToupe 11mo ago
    That's how it is today. The R&D will follow the manufacturing capacity, where it's cheaper and more efficient in every way. The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.
  - mlrtime 11mo ago
    That makes sense, are there any expamples of the Chinese leading in a market + R&D yet?
    - typewithrhythm 11mo ago
      Every category I can think of where China is near-first there is some international manufacturer that has a better product. Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
      - anomaly_ 11mo ago
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  > I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product And be there no mistake, this has been Apple's formula for success for decades.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- avianlyric 11mo ago
  > Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete. The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further. China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit. This creates few interesting side-effects. * One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves. * Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time. * Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return. All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
- indymike 11mo ago
  > American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means. Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on. Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence. See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  Pretty much every American company is just a bank with extra steps. The big boys would rather own real estate and balance books than sink money into R&D. And acquiring companies is simply easier, and it's basically a broken strategy. If you just keep consolidating you just get a higher and higher valuation, while doing literally nothing.
cluckindan 11mo ago
The Chinese government is heavily subsidizing 3D printers by granting tax deductions up to 200%. https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-printing-is-dead/ https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
- jhanschoo 11mo ago
  So why would 3D printer companies in China bother innovating rather than sit back and cash the government check?
  - 6510 11mo ago
    Because there are over 200 competing 3d printing companies in China.
  - typewithrhythm 11mo ago
    Why does anyone innovate? When I sell something I don't care if the dollars come from the end user or the subsidy, I just want more of them.
  - expedition32 11mo ago
    Because China is actually a capitalist free market economy not a communist one. Chinese companies compete with eachother ferociously. And Chinese society itself is dog eat dog. Everyone wants to make money.
    - cluckindan 11mo ago
      Well, save for the part where the government directs the parts of the economy they care about.
  - komali2 11mo ago
    Because the owners want to get rich, not live as pensioners.
- lm28469 11mo ago
  Same for drones, and you know why? Because all of these civilian technologies can be easily leveraged for military... so a) they get the good stuff first because they're leading the sector and b) western countries buy their shit instead of making their own, which means we don't develop the tech and we effectively subsidise theirs Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
wccrawford 11mo ago
The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain. Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.
- mosura 11mo ago
  > The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. Everything wrong with the western tech academic/industrial complex in two sentences.
  - spockz 11mo ago
    Being that “Making something work really,really well” isn’t seen as innovation?
    - mosura 11mo ago
      Important use of “just” to downplay it too.
- tbrownaw 11mo ago
  > didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. I thought that was the difference between "invention" and "innovation"?
  - wccrawford 11mo ago
    "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." according to Oxford. It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.
baggachipz 11mo ago
Chinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.
- lm28469 11mo ago
  They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially. We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years. I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
  - baggachipz 11mo ago
    Totally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say: > playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" 5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker. The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.

bamboozled 11mo ago

Like Japan 40-50 years ago.,

devsda 11mo ago

I know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act. Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason they are not competitive.

LightBug1 11mo ago
Yeah, "Chinese companies just copies" was 10-15 years or beyond. No way is that relevant now. I've been wondering about why this is. With no evidence, I wondered if one of the reasons is the long term result of the many design and engineering graduates (I notice an incredible amount in the industry I work in) who were educated in the "best western uni's" and have now returned home and grown up. They were a honeypot for said uni's for so long. But the end result may now mean they're kicking all asses in product markets. It can't just be cheap labour ... or maybe it's the combination.
- 6510 11mo ago
  While I would love to attribute it to their culture of hard work I believe the credit should go to the combined effect of poor choices made in the west. You cant begin to list our spending on bullshit directly nor instances of money intended for useful things that was lost in bureaucracy. China does this too of course but we are so much better at it.
- djmips 11mo ago
  I feel like there is a hypothesis that open source and open science has helped the West but the IP laws have slowed innovation whereas China is kind of an open source culture internally which confera an advantage.
- zdragnar 11mo ago
  It is definitely still relevant. A friend showed me two products- one from a US manufacturing company he worked for, and one on alibaba- that were practically identical. One was designed and developed, the other an illegal rip off. The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
p0pularopinion 11mo ago
I generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look. Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this. Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets). Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration). „Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
- MangoToupe 11mo ago
  That's how it is today. The R&D will follow the manufacturing capacity, where it's cheaper and more efficient in every way. The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  That makes sense, are there any expamples of the Chinese leading in a market + R&D yet?
  - typewithrhythm 11mo ago
    Every category I can think of where China is near-first there is some international manufacturer that has a better product. Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
    - anomaly_ 11mo ago
dotancohen 11mo ago
> I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product And be there no mistake, this has been Apple's formula for success for decades.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
avianlyric 11mo ago
> Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete. The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further. China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit. This creates few interesting side-effects. * One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves. * Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time. * Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return. All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
indymike 11mo ago
> American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means. Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on. Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence. See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
array_key_first 11mo ago
Pretty much every American company is just a bank with extra steps. The big boys would rather own real estate and balance books than sink money into R&D. And acquiring companies is simply easier, and it's basically a broken strategy. If you just keep consolidating you just get a higher and higher valuation, while doing literally nothing.

cluckindan 11mo ago

The Chinese government is heavily subsidizing 3D printers by granting tax deductions up to 200%. https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-printing-is-dead/ https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...

jhanschoo 11mo ago
So why would 3D printer companies in China bother innovating rather than sit back and cash the government check?
- 6510 11mo ago
  Because there are over 200 competing 3d printing companies in China.
- typewithrhythm 11mo ago
  Why does anyone innovate? When I sell something I don't care if the dollars come from the end user or the subsidy, I just want more of them.
- expedition32 11mo ago
  Because China is actually a capitalist free market economy not a communist one. Chinese companies compete with eachother ferociously. And Chinese society itself is dog eat dog. Everyone wants to make money.
  - cluckindan 11mo ago
    Well, save for the part where the government directs the parts of the economy they care about.
- komali2 11mo ago
  Because the owners want to get rich, not live as pensioners.
lm28469 11mo ago
Same for drones, and you know why? Because all of these civilian technologies can be easily leveraged for military... so a) they get the good stuff first because they're leading the sector and b) western countries buy their shit instead of making their own, which means we don't develop the tech and we effectively subsidise theirs Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.

wccrawford 11mo ago

The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain. Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.

mosura 11mo ago
> The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. Everything wrong with the western tech academic/industrial complex in two sentences.
- spockz 11mo ago
  Being that “Making something work really,really well” isn’t seen as innovation?
  - mosura 11mo ago
    Important use of “just” to downplay it too.
tbrownaw 11mo ago
> didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. I thought that was the difference between "invention" and "innovation"?
- wccrawford 11mo ago
  "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." according to Oxford. It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.

baggachipz 11mo ago

Chinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.

lm28469 11mo ago
They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially. We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years. I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
- baggachipz 11mo ago
  Totally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say: > playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" 5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker. The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.