I think part of the reason is that the story is being positioned incorrectly. Yahoo owns 24% of Alibaba, so it's not China vs. Silicon Valley, or any such nonsense.
It's definitely news worthy that they're going to IPO here in the US and they have a HUGE market in China/Asia... Even so, will they be able to crack the US consumer market? Time will tell, but so far, their efforts haven't born fruit.
They have a stealth 'target vertical' shopping experience that's developing right now in the Bay Area, however, they're significantly behind schedule, having trouble integrating teams from several locals and their product is dubiously "useful" at this stage of the game.
All of that being said, eventually they'll find some combination to get a foothold of the US market and it will be interesting to see what happens then as competition heats up.
I doubt many people on HN check that frequently during the work day. I know I generally only check a couple times.
I'd say the reason most don't care much is there is massive cultural differences in the way the US and Chinese markets operate. Successful US companies have failed to penetrate China and many probably expect the reverse to be true as well.
The Alibaba story touches on a bunch of interesting things.
1st, there is somethingto do with the definition of "startups" as used on this site, techcrunch etc. Al lot of it is cultural-superficial.
Soylent, is creating a new product that one might find at a pharmacy. It's startupiness is mostly it's cultural context: Kickstarter, Andreesson-Horowtiz, change-the-world ambition, SV brashness. A similar company & product coming out of Europe and selling in pharmacies and supplement stores probably wouldn't register as a "startup" to most people.
I don't really know how to articulate this, so I suppose my thoughts are not all that cohesive. I think there's something here.
A completely unrelated 2nd, are the "problems" Alibaba is solving. About 10 years, just out of college I was wring in ecommerce. I learning about affiliate marketing & drop shipping. I talked to someone with an ecommerce "store" where all items were being drop shipped and the site was being populated by a feed. He wanted affiliates to drive all traffic to the site.
Joel Spolsky (2001)- Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything. - I was one of the quacks.
I knew that between the factory door and a consumer was where most of the cost (value add) is. Things got bought, sold, shipped, exported, warehoused again, warehoused, wholesaled, retailed... It seemed that these virtual businesses were part of an unstoppable economic change where the internet would automate and eliminate most of the work between the consumer and the manufacturer.
I thought everything between manufacturers and consumers would melt into a very thin layer of technology, RSS mostly. I mustn'd have been the only one because a lot of the dark ages startups (2002-2005) seemed to be building parts of this upcoming world. Product search engines, for example were considered important.
It didn't happen, but it still might. A lot of the dotcom ideas were poorly executed 10 years too early but ultimately decent ideas. Maybe this one was 30 years to early.
Alibaba is focused further down the manufacturing chain, where stuff actually gets made. We know that all our stuff is made in China. We kind of assumed that was a solved problem, trivial. Try to buy something on Alibaba and you will find that international commerce is still a lot closer Marco Polo's days than you might think.
Amazon has been working on the retail side of things for 20 years. Product research, discovery, shipping, customer service. Every aspect of that has turned out to be a bigger and more difficult problem that I would have anticipated in 1999.
Alibaba is innovating mostly below the point that Amazon starts.
I am skeptical that they will be able to crack the US markets. On the other hand, Chinese companies will probably be big competitors in emerging markets since they might also control the infrastructure.
For all of those that have asked the question, "Why don't you trust Google with your data?" Replace Google with Alibaba and you have your answer. Google has set a dangerous precedent in in how much data it has asked users to provide based on the assumption that their actions based their best intentions would be the rule and not the exception. It was a matter of time.
A somewhat tangential question that I'm genuinely curious about: Would anyone happen to know why the New York media always puts the periods in I.P.O. and I.B.M. and presumably N.Y.T. too?
It's so different from what I'm accustomed to, and seems to definitely be a New York thing. Everywhere else it would be IPO, IBM, and NYT.
[+] [-] jobu|12 years ago|reply
Zero comments on this article after an hour on the front page of HN seems to prove the author's point.
[+] [-] bitcrusher|12 years ago|reply
It's definitely news worthy that they're going to IPO here in the US and they have a HUGE market in China/Asia... Even so, will they be able to crack the US consumer market? Time will tell, but so far, their efforts haven't born fruit.
They have a stealth 'target vertical' shopping experience that's developing right now in the Bay Area, however, they're significantly behind schedule, having trouble integrating teams from several locals and their product is dubiously "useful" at this stage of the game.
All of that being said, eventually they'll find some combination to get a foothold of the US market and it will be interesting to see what happens then as competition heats up.
[+] [-] opendais|12 years ago|reply
I'd say the reason most don't care much is there is massive cultural differences in the way the US and Chinese markets operate. Successful US companies have failed to penetrate China and many probably expect the reverse to be true as well.
How many people here buy from http://www.alibaba.com/ despite it being 15 years old?
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
1st, there is somethingto do with the definition of "startups" as used on this site, techcrunch etc. Al lot of it is cultural-superficial.
Soylent, is creating a new product that one might find at a pharmacy. It's startupiness is mostly it's cultural context: Kickstarter, Andreesson-Horowtiz, change-the-world ambition, SV brashness. A similar company & product coming out of Europe and selling in pharmacies and supplement stores probably wouldn't register as a "startup" to most people.
I don't really know how to articulate this, so I suppose my thoughts are not all that cohesive. I think there's something here.
A completely unrelated 2nd, are the "problems" Alibaba is solving. About 10 years, just out of college I was wring in ecommerce. I learning about affiliate marketing & drop shipping. I talked to someone with an ecommerce "store" where all items were being drop shipped and the site was being populated by a feed. He wanted affiliates to drive all traffic to the site.
Joel Spolsky (2001)- Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything. - I was one of the quacks.
I knew that between the factory door and a consumer was where most of the cost (value add) is. Things got bought, sold, shipped, exported, warehoused again, warehoused, wholesaled, retailed... It seemed that these virtual businesses were part of an unstoppable economic change where the internet would automate and eliminate most of the work between the consumer and the manufacturer.
I thought everything between manufacturers and consumers would melt into a very thin layer of technology, RSS mostly. I mustn'd have been the only one because a lot of the dark ages startups (2002-2005) seemed to be building parts of this upcoming world. Product search engines, for example were considered important.
It didn't happen, but it still might. A lot of the dotcom ideas were poorly executed 10 years too early but ultimately decent ideas. Maybe this one was 30 years to early.
Alibaba is focused further down the manufacturing chain, where stuff actually gets made. We know that all our stuff is made in China. We kind of assumed that was a solved problem, trivial. Try to buy something on Alibaba and you will find that international commerce is still a lot closer Marco Polo's days than you might think.
Amazon has been working on the retail side of things for 20 years. Product research, discovery, shipping, customer service. Every aspect of that has turned out to be a bigger and more difficult problem that I would have anticipated in 1999.
Alibaba is innovating mostly below the point that Amazon starts.
I think Alibaba is a big deal.
[+] [-] bckrasnow|12 years ago|reply
Though you could probably say that about American companies in Europe now as well.
[+] [-] whoismua|12 years ago|reply
really, most US users better be worried about NSA and local PD, they can jail you, China can't.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reuwsaat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reuwsaat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comlonq|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|12 years ago|reply
It's so different from what I'm accustomed to, and seems to definitely be a New York thing. Everywhere else it would be IPO, IBM, and NYT.
So why does the N.Y. media do this?