You go on Facebook and you can’t even buy anything, but on WeChat and Weibo you can buy anything you see
A more recent trend: live-streaming sites where people pay real money to reward performers with virtual gifts. (You sang beautifully, here’s a digital Lamborghini, dear.)
I might grant the first (with reservations), but the second is laughable (and was tried without success here in the early days of social networking). I can't help but think this article should be titled "Chinese internet companies flourish in Chinese market". Well duh - even aside from the "virtual protectionism" of the GFW, Chinese companies are more likely to understand the preferences of Chinese consumers than non-Chinese companies. This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation.
How many HN startups are localizing to Mandarin? Language alone provides a massive market barrier that leaves opportunity for regional companies to thrive. But that barrier works both ways - what Chinese internet companies are thriving in the world marketplace? The best example I can think of is Alibaba, but that is strongly tied to Chinese manufacturing. Is anyone using WeChat or Weibo outside mainland China?
I personally am very excited and encouraged by the emergence of China as a modern, educated populace. Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace - tech is one of the great positive-sum games. I'm looking forward to it! But this article is a pretty poor illustration.
Also, as a Norteamericano, I'm deeply offended by statements like "America want's to believe China can't..." - we're not all xenophobic Trump supporters, not even most of us.
This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation.
I think you got it backwards. Successful business with scale leads to technical innovations in many consumer-facing companies. Did Facebook in its early days have technical innovation? Once the traffic of Facebook picks up, though, they innovated like crazy. They invented Hive. They made HBase great again. They created Cassandra. They built Scuba and Gorilla. They turned Zookeeper into amazing Zeus. They are running massive stream processing systems. Their MySQL clusters are world class. The list could go on and on. It's same for successful Chinese companies. Did Alibaba innovate technically when it was a mere online whitepage? Probably not. Is it innovating now? You bet. How many companies in the world could handle the traffic as Alibaba does today, especially in 11.11 every year? As a result, Alibaba is a major player in MySQL community and Hadoop community. It ended up rewriting Storm because it had to run Storm cluster of thousands of machines. It invented its own database called OceanDB. It made substantial improvements to Flink. It created its own file system called Tair. It has massive deployment of container-based infrastructure. Its technical blogs are worth studying carefully. The list could also go on as well. We can talk about Tencent in the same way: do you really think handling hundreds of millions of daily active users does not require significant technical innovation?
On the other hand, how many YC companies are innovating technically? How many so-called unicorns have real technical innovations? Does Airbnb really have amazing technologies? Excellent execution and awesome engineers, for sure. But technical innovation on at most a few millions of listings that can be easily handled with a small database cluster? I doubt it. Or maybe they do, but at least it's not that obvious from their technical blogs. Does Postmates have technical innovations? I would even argue that it should not even be their focus.
"Is anyone using WeChat or Weibo outside mainland China?"
I don't know about Weibo, but WeChat is available in 200 nations and 20 languages. Over 70 mil people use WeChat outside of China. They seem strongest in south and south-east asia. Wechat penetration into the mobile markets are: Malaysia 38%, India 22%, Philipines 19%, etc. My understanding is that they have aggressive inititatives underway in Brazil and South Africa.
> "This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation."
That's a strawman really. The article never made any mention of tech-innovation, only innovation of all kinds. And marketplace innovations that cater to the Chinese market, count just as much as marketplace innovations that cater to the American market, by the likes of FB and Uber.
Regarding whether this point even needs to be made: I think it does. As someone who's lived in SF, I can't quantify it, but I've felt the general perception that many people have, regarding Chinese goods/companies being cheap knock-offs of American ones.
Some of this perception is understandable: due to lack of IP enforcement, there certainly are many Chinese companies on the low-end that make an entire business out of copying American products pixel-for-pixel, and then selling it at a lower price. However, this perception is still flawed in that there are numerous companies at the high-end doing great work. As Americans, we don't hear much about, or interact with these high-end companies, because they aren't trying to cater to us. Hence why articles like this one are very educational.
> we're not all xenophobic Trump supporters, not even most of us.
Please, leave your virtue-signalling to reddit. We come here for a break from the partisan poo-throwing.
As an aside, the article is about China, which, like much of Asia, isn't that welcoming of outsiders. In even the most die-hard 'conservative' circles, you can become an 'honorary' Texan/American/whatever and be privy to all dealings and goings-on, but it's really, really hard to do the same in China (especially if you're black or white, and doubly so if your mandarin isn't native). You just won't get into many circles.
I leave with this: the US election, to an outsider like myself, is interesting in that many Americans claim any supporters of the other candidate must support their platform 100%. Such an ignorant view. Some people choose Trump for trade, some choose Hillary for a no-surprises, effective office from day 1 (whether or not they see themselves agreeing with the results of her work).
In the 1980's America wanted to believe that Japan couldn't innovate too. Something similar was said about the Soviet Union before that.
I don't know how much this has to do with Trump or any other politician.
"America is the global leader in innovation and creativity." We've nourished ourselves on that narrative for many decades. It makes us feel secure and important.
We also like to tell ourselves that we're the world's only superpower and that we're the guardian of democracy.
Yeah the idea that there could be a country innately incapable of innovation is absurd. Sometimes people ask me if I am worried about India taking my job (programmer) and I always say no....not yet.
I think you misunderstand, or at least the article misunderstands. It's not innovation as such, it's the ecosystem. Even without network effects Chinese companies are starting to stand on their own. Xiaomi is maybe even second to Apple in the consumer electronics industry (especially with western brands, like Nokia, folding), DJI is probably the leading drone manufacturer, Taobao (while not really available worldwide) is far better than eBay.
For the most part I agree with what you wrote, but I want to add to it. Like others, I disagree with the article. How can you change an entrenched mindset and way of doing things unless you can overthrow them? I strongly feel that mainland Chinese won't be able to consistently innovate (without the crutch of side stepping the Great Firewall to see ) until one major change happens: mainland Chinese need both the freedom and cultural acceptance for rebellion
Could you tell me what's the biggest innovation of FB? the greatest newsfeed?! using real names in Internet?! Why you can chat with a bot in FB messenger would be a great innovation, but ignore that it already appeared in wechat few years ago and widely used nowday?
I said the same exact thing in much fewer words. Yours is the most upvoted, mine is the most downvoted. I don't care about karma, but that people here behave rationally. HN voting should be based on facts, but its often not. It's prone to the same knee-jerk subjectivity you find on low quality sites HN likes to deride. Stop the hypocrisy HN. You're better than this.
China may follow a similar development history path to Japan.
First the Japanese copied the west and made cheap bad quality items.
Then the Japanese innovated and made very high quality items.
"In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese goods were synonymous with cheapness and low quality, but over time their quality initiatives began to be successful, with Japan achieving very high levels of quality in products from the 1970s onward."
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_management
Where there are factories and competition, innovation will happen. When we started manufacturing in China, we had experience building and they didn't so we had to show them how to do everything. Now they manufacture without our oversight, have the relationships with suppliers, and figure out how to do things faster, cheaper, and higher quality because it directly benefits them.
Meanwhile, we don't have the experience building things that they do with their equipment and people.
The only problem is believing that other people innovating hurts us. It doesn't.
Though as a Chinese programmer, I have no doubt we will achieve some great innovation here, the author of this report apparently doesn't know internet industry well, for choosing a bad example. Xu Dandan himself is just a joke here, and himself is widely considered as a bragger.
Perhaps the reason there's a stigma of China not being able to innovate is because they're so widely known for blatantly copying existing products and designs (and selling them for a much lower price). In some cases, it’s a direct rip-off of an existing product (for example, search AliExpress for “TIAL Wastegate”), and in other cases, it’s a similar, but often cheaper (in both cost and quality) design.
The problem is that people love to generalize, and the fact of the matter is that when many people think of Chinese products, they think of cheap knock-offs being sold on eBay. Obviously, this is a pretty bad generalization considering many of the “legitimate” products we use every day were made in China, but we’re talking about perception amongst the general population. [Criticizes China for making knock-offs while typing on an iPhone…]
The point that needs to be made is that making cheap knock-offs does not preclude them from innovating. There are a lot of people there, and I’m sure the entire country isn’t composed of mindless assembly drones.
It’s a shame that this stigma exists, and it will take a while before it completely fades away.
I realize that some people might be offended by this (and my use of “cheap knock-offs”), but if you don’t believe me, just go ask around for yourself.
I was at the Alipay headquarters a few weeks ago. What caught my eye was a large IBM machine kept outside the office with lots of signatures on them. When I asked them what it was, they said this was the last piece of American technology the company used and they'd kept it as a trophy. They've replaced every thing else in the company with Chinese tech. That's quite something for a company which processes millions of transactions in a day.
When I saw the word innovation, I was expecting something a bit more than web/mobile chat and e-commerce apps. Not saying that the Chinese startup scene is in any way worse than SV, but I think we've put the bar for what constitutes innovation way too low everywhere...
In Marc Goodman's book "Future Crimes" he discusses the largest transfer of Human wealth to ever occur.
Through China's hacking efforts they have stolen Trillions of Dollars of US Tax Payer money that has gone into research and development of anything the Government has done including the F 35 fighter development.
They have also attacked US Industry and stolen trade secrets and software. Recipes for Carbon Steel, Stainless Steel, etc. Decades of R&D and 100's of millions of dollars gone. Chinese State Owned Sinovel Wind Group stole AMSC's computer code that was developed to run power generating Wind Mills. It cost the company almost a 1 billion dollars a year in lost revenue and all the money it took to develop it.
I can sit here and try to re-discover the fundamentals of physics from the ground up, or I can go to a library and read a textbook.
Discovering from first principles is the honorable path, but it is a colossal waste of time. To get to the state of the art, you have to steal knowledge. Only then can you begin to understand and improve it.
I think we need to figure out how to bring manufacturing closer to North America. For example, getting a prototype batch of PCB's from Advanced Circuits cost ~$400 for 5-10 pieces. Whereas it costs ~$30 from Seeed Studio.
The quality is obviously better from Advanced Circuits, and it doesn't take a whole month as it would from Seeed (I've heard good things about OSH Park and they're US Based).
The quality of Chinese products is improving, and the parallels with the history of Japanese tech are strikingly similar.
In terms of software expertise, I think the talent is still in North America. The hardware expertise though is somewhat non-existent. I'm surprised there's no city like Shenzen here.
Check out DirtyPCBs too. Based in Shenzhen but offers next-day DHL. Usually a 4 to 6 day turn-around time for me; great prices and good quality too.
If you're in a bigger city, also check out some smaller shops near you. There are a few nearby in the suburbs of Chicago for me and sometimes I go to them for quick turn-around time and a price that's higher than DirtyPCBs/Seeed's, but much closer than Advanced Circuits'.
Do engineers in China view software engineering as a kind of "second best" or even "third best" pursuit when compared to hardware engineering and manufacture?
Talking to some hardware engineers from Japan gave me the sense that they really think of hardware as the more "noble" or "higher" pursuit when compared to software engineering. They don't necessarily think of software as a really interesting challenge. Or something like that.
I know this is all very vague. I'm not sure about these attitudes at all. Curious about your take on it.
The problem with innovation in China is the same problem it has in most areas namely corruption. In an actual free market innovation has huge dividends, but when success is arbitrary and often based on outside connections it's far less useful. That's not to say the people are not innovative and there is plenty of innovation in smaller more competitive markets.
In the end they will continue to innovate, but as long as it's fighting both the government and social norms things are going to be bottleneck.
> “There’s this strange belief that you can’t build a mobile app if you don’t know the truth about what happened in Tiananmen Square,” said Kaiser Kuo, who recently stepped down as head of international communications for Baidu, one of China’s leading tech companies, and hosts Sinica, a popular podcast. “Trouble is, it’s not true.”
There's something that's hilarious, delightful, and depressing about the above statement, all at the same time.
Let's play write the article that should have been written!
Here's my favorite example of Chinese innovation: the ESP8266. It is original hardware and 1/10th the price of the equivalent offering from TI (their CC3000), with more speed, more features and better reliability.
Of course Chinese entrepreneurs can innovate. That being said, the CCP has been making it more difficult. As of this month every single mobile game needs government approval at cost to the developer.
Chinese companies are certainly innovating and they are picking up R&D teams anywhere on the planet.
For example you have Andrew Ng as Chief Scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley even though Baidu pretty much only operates solely in the Chinese market.
> The United States wants to believe that the scourge of censorship thwarts online innovation, but China is challenging the idea in ways that frighten and confound.
As an American, I do believe that a culture of censorship and phenomena like the Great Firewall stifle an economy's capacity to innovate. That's not to say that innovation is impossible in such an environment, just more difficult.
> “It doesn’t matter how the car is capable of traveling. Once it gets on the highway, you can imagine what the end result will be,” he said.
> The implication is that China’s government is happy to have companies build shiny, fast things as long as regulators can put up roadblocks as they please. So far, they’ve mostly targeted foreign firms.
Exactly, so far! What happens when the state determines that your blooming startup threatens their agenda?
In general a nation's ability to copy technology is a very good indication of its ability to innovate. Back in the day the USA copied British technology and art shamelessly. Later Japan was known for copying technology. Both went on to be great innovators.
Copying well, figuring out what to copy and what isn't needed, is hard.
I've been hearing people say "the Chinese can't innovate" for many many years now, and I've seen "the Japanese can't innovate" in older sources, and once I saw a reprinted claim from a Brit in the 19th century that "the Germans can't innovate".
I think that's why Chinese leadership want to separate themselves from the west, because they don't want western-style capitalism to influence their country, and end up negotiating economic advantages with developed countries. That's what state-capitalism is all about.
I think they want to have both the benefits of isolationism, and the benefits of exports.
Ultimately it's very easy to play with anti-US views. Much easier to blame the US than to blame the chinese government. For example the vietnam war, iraq war or japan nukes might sound much worse than the tiananmen square for a chinese.
But in the long run, a country like china should be able to catch up with how late they have developed. I believe they have excellent human capital. Not sure if they will be able to compete in very high tech fields, but they might one day.
[+] [-] stickfigure|9 years ago|reply
You go on Facebook and you can’t even buy anything, but on WeChat and Weibo you can buy anything you see
A more recent trend: live-streaming sites where people pay real money to reward performers with virtual gifts. (You sang beautifully, here’s a digital Lamborghini, dear.)
I might grant the first (with reservations), but the second is laughable (and was tried without success here in the early days of social networking). I can't help but think this article should be titled "Chinese internet companies flourish in Chinese market". Well duh - even aside from the "virtual protectionism" of the GFW, Chinese companies are more likely to understand the preferences of Chinese consumers than non-Chinese companies. This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation.
How many HN startups are localizing to Mandarin? Language alone provides a massive market barrier that leaves opportunity for regional companies to thrive. But that barrier works both ways - what Chinese internet companies are thriving in the world marketplace? The best example I can think of is Alibaba, but that is strongly tied to Chinese manufacturing. Is anyone using WeChat or Weibo outside mainland China?
I personally am very excited and encouraged by the emergence of China as a modern, educated populace. Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace - tech is one of the great positive-sum games. I'm looking forward to it! But this article is a pretty poor illustration.
Also, as a Norteamericano, I'm deeply offended by statements like "America want's to believe China can't..." - we're not all xenophobic Trump supporters, not even most of us.
[+] [-] g9yuayon|9 years ago|reply
I think you got it backwards. Successful business with scale leads to technical innovations in many consumer-facing companies. Did Facebook in its early days have technical innovation? Once the traffic of Facebook picks up, though, they innovated like crazy. They invented Hive. They made HBase great again. They created Cassandra. They built Scuba and Gorilla. They turned Zookeeper into amazing Zeus. They are running massive stream processing systems. Their MySQL clusters are world class. The list could go on and on. It's same for successful Chinese companies. Did Alibaba innovate technically when it was a mere online whitepage? Probably not. Is it innovating now? You bet. How many companies in the world could handle the traffic as Alibaba does today, especially in 11.11 every year? As a result, Alibaba is a major player in MySQL community and Hadoop community. It ended up rewriting Storm because it had to run Storm cluster of thousands of machines. It invented its own database called OceanDB. It made substantial improvements to Flink. It created its own file system called Tair. It has massive deployment of container-based infrastructure. Its technical blogs are worth studying carefully. The list could also go on as well. We can talk about Tencent in the same way: do you really think handling hundreds of millions of daily active users does not require significant technical innovation?
On the other hand, how many YC companies are innovating technically? How many so-called unicorns have real technical innovations? Does Airbnb really have amazing technologies? Excellent execution and awesome engineers, for sure. But technical innovation on at most a few millions of listings that can be easily handled with a small database cluster? I doubt it. Or maybe they do, but at least it's not that obvious from their technical blogs. Does Postmates have technical innovations? I would even argue that it should not even be their focus.
[+] [-] rmah|9 years ago|reply
I don't know about Weibo, but WeChat is available in 200 nations and 20 languages. Over 70 mil people use WeChat outside of China. They seem strongest in south and south-east asia. Wechat penetration into the mobile markets are: Malaysia 38%, India 22%, Philipines 19%, etc. My understanding is that they have aggressive inititatives underway in Brazil and South Africa.
So, not super-awesome, but respectable.
[+] [-] whack|9 years ago|reply
That's a strawman really. The article never made any mention of tech-innovation, only innovation of all kinds. And marketplace innovations that cater to the Chinese market, count just as much as marketplace innovations that cater to the American market, by the likes of FB and Uber.
Regarding whether this point even needs to be made: I think it does. As someone who's lived in SF, I can't quantify it, but I've felt the general perception that many people have, regarding Chinese goods/companies being cheap knock-offs of American ones.
Some of this perception is understandable: due to lack of IP enforcement, there certainly are many Chinese companies on the low-end that make an entire business out of copying American products pixel-for-pixel, and then selling it at a lower price. However, this perception is still flawed in that there are numerous companies at the high-end doing great work. As Americans, we don't hear much about, or interact with these high-end companies, because they aren't trying to cater to us. Hence why articles like this one are very educational.
[+] [-] redrummr|9 years ago|reply
Please, leave your virtue-signalling to reddit. We come here for a break from the partisan poo-throwing.
As an aside, the article is about China, which, like much of Asia, isn't that welcoming of outsiders. In even the most die-hard 'conservative' circles, you can become an 'honorary' Texan/American/whatever and be privy to all dealings and goings-on, but it's really, really hard to do the same in China (especially if you're black or white, and doubly so if your mandarin isn't native). You just won't get into many circles.
I leave with this: the US election, to an outsider like myself, is interesting in that many Americans claim any supporters of the other candidate must support their platform 100%. Such an ignorant view. Some people choose Trump for trade, some choose Hillary for a no-surprises, effective office from day 1 (whether or not they see themselves agreeing with the results of her work).
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
I don't know how much this has to do with Trump or any other politician.
"America is the global leader in innovation and creativity." We've nourished ourselves on that narrative for many decades. It makes us feel secure and important.
We also like to tell ourselves that we're the world's only superpower and that we're the guardian of democracy.
[+] [-] jackmott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uola|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dennisnedry|9 years ago|reply
You had an intelligent response until you decided to generalize people who hold a political view different to your own.
[+] [-] rthomas6|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junko|9 years ago|reply
Touchwood. Back in early 2000s, a lot of people laughed at the idea of Mandarin being taught in schools.
>>Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace
They don't have to go global. Jack Ma: “eBay May Be a Shark in the Ocean, But I Am a Crocodile in the Yangtze River.”
Anyway an extra one billion internet users don't necessarily mean great things ... commercially maybe it gets a lot greyer in other areas like social.
[+] [-] chaostheory|9 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingred...
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] SixSigma|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cttet|9 years ago|reply
But close to half though. http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-clinton-t...
(I am not saying they are all xenophobic)
[+] [-] taobility|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] untilHellbanned|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acd|9 years ago|reply
http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/history-of-quality/overvi...
"In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese goods were synonymous with cheapness and low quality, but over time their quality initiatives began to be successful, with Japan achieving very high levels of quality in products from the 1970s onward." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_management
Top500 super computer list, the fastest super computer now has a Chinese CPU Sunway SW26010 which has 260 cores. https://www.top500.org/lists/2016/06/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW26010
List of inventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
[+] [-] spodek|9 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, we don't have the experience building things that they do with their equipment and people.
The only problem is believing that other people innovating hurts us. It doesn't.
[+] [-] halfelf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Unklejoe|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that people love to generalize, and the fact of the matter is that when many people think of Chinese products, they think of cheap knock-offs being sold on eBay. Obviously, this is a pretty bad generalization considering many of the “legitimate” products we use every day were made in China, but we’re talking about perception amongst the general population. [Criticizes China for making knock-offs while typing on an iPhone…]
The point that needs to be made is that making cheap knock-offs does not preclude them from innovating. There are a lot of people there, and I’m sure the entire country isn’t composed of mindless assembly drones.
It’s a shame that this stigma exists, and it will take a while before it completely fades away.
I realize that some people might be offended by this (and my use of “cheap knock-offs”), but if you don’t believe me, just go ask around for yourself.
[+] [-] jayadevan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamespo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerohp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazylizard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PopsiclePete|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pzh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hourislate|9 years ago|reply
Through China's hacking efforts they have stolen Trillions of Dollars of US Tax Payer money that has gone into research and development of anything the Government has done including the F 35 fighter development.
They have also attacked US Industry and stolen trade secrets and software. Recipes for Carbon Steel, Stainless Steel, etc. Decades of R&D and 100's of millions of dollars gone. Chinese State Owned Sinovel Wind Group stole AMSC's computer code that was developed to run power generating Wind Mills. It cost the company almost a 1 billion dollars a year in lost revenue and all the money it took to develop it.
Here is an article regarding the F 35 Program.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/o...
Is it really innovation when all you do is steal and copy from the west?
[+] [-] james-watson|9 years ago|reply
I can sit here and try to re-discover the fundamentals of physics from the ground up, or I can go to a library and read a textbook.
Discovering from first principles is the honorable path, but it is a colossal waste of time. To get to the state of the art, you have to steal knowledge. Only then can you begin to understand and improve it.
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|9 years ago|reply
The quality is obviously better from Advanced Circuits, and it doesn't take a whole month as it would from Seeed (I've heard good things about OSH Park and they're US Based).
The quality of Chinese products is improving, and the parallels with the history of Japanese tech are strikingly similar.
In terms of software expertise, I think the talent is still in North America. The hardware expertise though is somewhat non-existent. I'm surprised there's no city like Shenzen here.
[+] [-] nemik|9 years ago|reply
If you're in a bigger city, also check out some smaller shops near you. There are a few nearby in the suburbs of Chicago for me and sometimes I go to them for quick turn-around time and a price that's higher than DirtyPCBs/Seeed's, but much closer than Advanced Circuits'.
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
Talking to some hardware engineers from Japan gave me the sense that they really think of hardware as the more "noble" or "higher" pursuit when compared to software engineering. They don't necessarily think of software as a really interesting challenge. Or something like that.
I know this is all very vague. I'm not sure about these attitudes at all. Curious about your take on it.
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
In the end they will continue to innovate, but as long as it's fighting both the government and social norms things are going to be bottleneck.
[+] [-] whack|9 years ago|reply
There's something that's hilarious, delightful, and depressing about the above statement, all at the same time.
[+] [-] keenerd|9 years ago|reply
Here's my favorite example of Chinese innovation: the ESP8266. It is original hardware and 1/10th the price of the equivalent offering from TI (their CC3000), with more speed, more features and better reliability.
[+] [-] kosmic_k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenfinch|9 years ago|reply
For example you have Andrew Ng as Chief Scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley even though Baidu pretty much only operates solely in the Chinese market.
[+] [-] chvid|9 years ago|reply
Will be interesting to see when/if some of the Chinese social networks become popular outside China.
[+] [-] Unklejoe|9 years ago|reply
I don't necessarily agree or disagree, because it's really out of my realm, but it seems like a similar approach.
Block competition from outside the country...
[+] [-] yolesaber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fumplethumb|9 years ago|reply
As an American, I do believe that a culture of censorship and phenomena like the Great Firewall stifle an economy's capacity to innovate. That's not to say that innovation is impossible in such an environment, just more difficult.
> “It doesn’t matter how the car is capable of traveling. Once it gets on the highway, you can imagine what the end result will be,” he said.
> The implication is that China’s government is happy to have companies build shiny, fast things as long as regulators can put up roadblocks as they please. So far, they’ve mostly targeted foreign firms.
Exactly, so far! What happens when the state determines that your blooming startup threatens their agenda?
[+] [-] Nokinside|9 years ago|reply
China has markets, opportunities and innovative people. Things are just all somewhat different.
[+] [-] Symmetry|9 years ago|reply
Copying well, figuring out what to copy and what isn't needed, is hard.
[+] [-] GFK_of_xmaspast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|9 years ago|reply
I think they want to have both the benefits of isolationism, and the benefits of exports.
Ultimately it's very easy to play with anti-US views. Much easier to blame the US than to blame the chinese government. For example the vietnam war, iraq war or japan nukes might sound much worse than the tiananmen square for a chinese.
But in the long run, a country like china should be able to catch up with how late they have developed. I believe they have excellent human capital. Not sure if they will be able to compete in very high tech fields, but they might one day.