> But Uber is not really blocked in China at all. They worked really actively with their government and even throw in a DC in China.
Uber is not blocked, for now. That can change in a whim. The Chinese government can simply create regulations that apply to them that do not apply to their local competitors. This has happened many times before in the past....
>Unlike the fact that China still cannot make a smart phone as good as iPhone, or cannot make their own OS like windows, that's they Apple and MS thrived.
While the Chinese did not design the iPhone to say that they "cannot make a smart phone as good" is completely false. For one, the iPhone is largely manufactured in China and has been for a few generations now. Second, some of the best iphone competitors / android devices are being made by Chinese companies.
>Second, some of the best iphone competitors / android devices are being made by Chinese companies.
Such as? Even if true they are running non-chinese OS software...
Making the iPhone in China means they could make iPhones, not necessarily that they can design and build their own full stack phone without "borrowing" heavily from foreign cpetitors.
> Such as? Even if true they are running non-chinese OS software...
Huawei M8 is nice and well made.
> Making the iPhone in China means they could make iPhones, not necessarily that they can design and build their own full stack phone without "borrowing" heavily from foreign cpetitors.
I generally agree with this, but you may be underestimating how quickly others can catch up in this globalized world.
Plus the blueprint has been well established by the other big Asian tech companies. Look at how quickly Samsung "caught up".
> You really think Travis is going to lose in China? This isn't Google China in 2009. Travis partnered with the crazy guy who got Google kicked out of China.
You really think the Chinese government is going to hand over the country's taxi market to a foreign led/managed/owned company? LOL
The fact that you are comparing Travis to the CCP in the same sentence is laughable, as if he has some magical power that will allow him to defy papa Xi in his own country!
China is merely allowing Uber to experiment and establish the concept of ride-sharing in China. Once that happens they will steamroll them over using every trick in the book, including ironically, lots of regulation!
Sure why not? Microsoft is the leading computer operating system in China. Android and iOS are the top mobile operating systems. All are U.S. led/managed/owned companies.
To address your second point about regulation, Didi Kuaidi doesn't escape regulation any more than Uber does.
Uber raised $2B from Chinese investors and is partnered with Baidu. I never said Uber will win the taxi market in China, because that's incredibly hard, but to "LOL" and call my statement "laughable" I believe is a little off considering their strategy.
It's laughable not because of "their strategy", but because your statement displays a lack of understanding (complete imo) about how business is done (and has always been done) in China. It is a very naive view, made especially so by your "do you really think Travis would _allow_ ..." as if Travis has ANY control in China.
MS, Android, etc. those are outliers and every story has one. The reality is, the vast majority of foreign companies looking to dominate Chinese market share have met their demise.
I would say _especially_ so for companies that are displacing local operators.
Just think how mad the US taxi industry is about Uber. Now imagine if Uber is owned/operated by Jose in Mexico City. You think our politicians wouldn't regulate the hell out of it? You expect less from the Chinese?
In regards to Didi Kuaidi. Sure they'll be regulated too, but when it comes down to the wire who do you think the government will side with?
I agree to disagree. It's impossible to predict the future but if I was forecasting Uber's future in China, I believe they have a good chance of succeeding. That's just my opinion.
I respect that you have a different opinion but you shouldn't assume so easily.
I recently worked for a Chinese software company for over three years. I helped them IPO in China last year before the Chinese stock market collapsed. I know how hard it is to breakthrough in China because my last company had more success in North America and EMEA than APAC. Chinese regulation is hard but I'll side with Uber any day because I believe in Travis and his team, even if you don't.
> I respect that you have a different opinion but you shouldn't assume so easily.
You are assuming my opinion is easily formed, when it is based off of lots of experience in China and discussions with a wide network of people with even more experience in China.
Uber may succeed in China, but it will be at the blessing of the CCP (another HN commentator raises one possibility: if Chinese investors own a majority of the company). To think "Travis and his team" have any real control in China is - no offense - totally naive.
I think your view is naive because you think Travis and his "strategy" have any bearing on Uber's long-term success in China.
The only strategy that matters is how to curry favor with, and kowtow to, the Chinese leadership and central to that strategy, unfortunately, is not being majority foreign owned/operated (especially by Americans).
> My statements aren't "laughable" or "totally naive." You just want to be right huh?
Now you're just projecting.
Your view is in the minority, even here on HN. If you were to take this view to more China-centric online communities, you'll find even fewer supporters.
"Laughable" is mean-spirited, but "naive" is a fitting description.
I'm not projecting. You just think you're right because you're Chinese.
You know honestly I didn't have an issue with your feedback except that you overreached when you said my comments were "LOL", "naive" and "laughable." That's offensive and arrogant. But you don't stop there, you keep attacking me!
"Your view is in the minority, even here on HN. If you were to take this view to more China-centric online communities, you'll find even fewer supporters."
You don't think I have Chinese friends? You're assuming once again.
And my view is the minority according to YOU! You don't have census data of the world, just your network, so stop attacking every response I have to prove your point!
Wait five years and we'll see who's right about Uber in China. You don't need to keep attacking me every time. It's rude.
Xiaomi employs Hugo barras, former head of android. China has the source code to Windows (not sure if current versions). And on top of all that no Chinese person uses googles ecosystem on android and they cannot use many of iOS features like Apple Pay. They jailbreak and side load apps.
For Chinese (and Indian) economies, the recent VC boom has been a significant conduit to siphon foreign dollars directly into consumer economies. The govt's have mostly kept a handsoff approach as long it's basically acting as a consumer economy stimulus funded by the VC. If any of these businesses become significant profit drivers, you can bet your last dime that local competition will find ways win those markets using whatever means necessary (more easily in China than India... but still).
HN commentators are missing the point. Uber's strategy is lifted straight from Groupons playbook: they're expanding aggressively internationally to drive home the message that "HEY LOOK WE'RE A GLOBAL PLAY. WE'RE IN 42 CITIES IN CHINA!"
This will drive up the IPO value. By the time they get steamrolled by the local competitors or by the local regulators (likely both) they'll have sold off their shares to the dumb retail investor.
The fact that the heads of Uber China and its main local competitor are literally family members is very telling....
Wow. After reading that I personally call fraud. Even if there is any real tech behind the scenes, these people obviously didn't ship it to their Kickstarter backers. They hoodwinked Kickstarter as a source of easy money and then immediately turned that into VC backing.
Using people that way is textbook sociopathy. People are rungs on a ladder to be stomped on. Unfortunately it works. People fall for it again and again because they don't scratch the surface enough to see what's actually there.
Anyone interested in investing should take note of a few things here: highfalutin college degrees, patents (you can patent a cheese sandwich) or "patent pending" (which is trivial and meaningless), and unsupported claims of novelty are not reliable indicators of anything.
> - They recruit their favorite McKinsey strategist - J Pearson - as CEO to change.
Oh and I'm sure he drove tons of money into consulting projects w/ McK. Who do you think helped him identify which companies to take over, build the pricing models to maximize profit, and devise the financial schemes needed to drive up the price of its share?
Behind every Enron, Valeant, etc. is a team of consultants...
India has a long ways to go before it catches up to China. Have you ever been? The differences in development are pretty stark.... even more so when you compare secondary cities. It's really night and day... not at all even comparable. Many Indian cities still lack decent plumbing. Westerners seem to equate India with China, some even seem to think that India is more developed on account of the english language skills and the growth of their services based economy. Couldn't be further from the truth.
Indians I know that have been to both are always surprised by how developed China is.
Westerners should travel more. It'll really open your eyes...
I've heard this view echoed by friends who've visited China (I'm Indian). A major reason for this difference might be the fact that China opened up its markets in the late 1970's while India's market liberalization happened only in 1991.
Agreed. Have visited both and driven all over India and across southern / SE China.
China is cleaner, more developed, more organised, things work, better roads / facilities and generally less chaotic with less signs of extreme poverty.
I have not been to China, have been to india. Something gives me hope for india: http://forum.hindivichar.com
Looks like the Hindi speaking part of the country is finally discovering the internet.
Naysayers have been predicting the demise of China for the past thirty years. See Gordon Chang, idiot extraordinaire.
The reality is that growth, in the long-run, is now in Asia (think of the hundreds of millions of Chinese still living in the countryside...).
This round of modernization (the third wave, after England, America+Western Europe) involves 4BN people led by India and China and they're just getting started. Take a pause and think of what that means. Four billion. BILLION.
We're entering the age of Asia. Just wait and see.
I think the bigger fear in China (at least amongst the leadership) is some crazy environmental disaster. Think of the hundreds of millions that live on the Yangtze... a massive flooding event that wipes up power/clean water is much more likely cause of revolution than an economic meltdown.
The US can barely handle Katrina... China is 10x more dense. Something like that would be death knell for CCP control.
Naysayers have been predicting the demise of everything for the whole of human history. They've been almost entirely wrong, because even when they happen to be correct about the date they're almost always wrong about the specific details.
Nevertheless, most institutions that have existed through human history no longer exist.
Naysayers being wrong isn't a data point. It's barely even noise.
There's no realistic world where China rises smoothly with no setbacks along the way. It's all but mathematically impossible by the nature of complex systems. It is reasonable to be concerned that their rise up to this point has also been unrealistically smooth. Communism has a track record of producing this apparent growth curve, after all.
> Nevertheless, most institutions that have existed through human history no longer exist.
Interesting that you say that. I believe the China is the longest surviving political entity. It's been around for two thousand years...
>There's no realistic world where China rises smoothly with no setbacks along the way. It's all but mathematically impossible by the nature of complex systems. It is reasonable to be concerned that their rise up to this point has also been unrealistically smooth. Communism has a track record of producing this apparent growth curve, after all.
Very true. My point is simply that growth is now in Asia. This is merely a bump in the road. The economic tide has changed in favor of the east. As an American its sad to state this, but its the truth.
Just look at tech. China has caught up in many many ways and starting to out innovate even the US. And they're just getting started.
"I believe the China is the longest surviving political entity."
By my standards, what we today call China dates to the 1949 Communist revolution. For China to be able to claim continuity, the other side would have had to have won. "Polities located vaguely in the Chinese landmass area" is not an institution.
"China has caught up in many many ways and starting to out innovate even the US. And they're just getting started."
I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of innovation. What I see is a Communist country doing what Communist countries do, living off of the innovation of others while pouring a lot of effort into PR that confuses credulous Westerners who really want to believe. I believe the Chinese people are capable of innovating, but until they structure their society differently, it isn't going to happen. It is an interesting question as to whether the Chinese people could tolerate and/or adjust to a truly high-innovation culture, but that's a PhD-thesis-sized topic.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and not to downplay China's incredible advances in the last few decades or so but hasn't a lot of China's "tech advancement" been copying, sending their citizens abroad to learn and hoping they come back, and in many instances down right espionage?
To be fair, whenever I try to learn something new, I generally have to do a decent amount of "copying" in a sense to get started before I can improve and make my own contributions to whatever it is that I'm doing and learning so I suppose that's to be expected and is even a sensical approach at a societal level. Why invent a touch screen when several implementations exist? Reverse engineer or find research papers and build the same one. From there you can have the experience to tweak and make your own contributions to the touch screen world, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum until you're making contributions all over the place.
Don't worry, Americans will make sure to get a piece of the pie. Either that or we will find a way to screw the country unti they will let us have a piece of the pie.
They're living the environmental disaster every day by the looks of the air pollution in their cities (and also soil contamination). I really hope they sort that out quickly or it could have seriously far reaching effects globally.
Well, 1999 just called, and wants its New Economy religion back.
Most economists have never placed a foot inside a datacenter. It's easy to understand how they imagine music (or books, software, etc) does not involve a physical process.
Do you think its more likely that all economists are shills who don't understand that datacenters consume power, or that economists model things on a shorter time scale than physicists?
By this time, the current relevance of those inputs they ignore is big enough that their predictions' time horizon is somewhere on the last decades of the last century.
China is not likely to experience "demise" because it is a huge region of the world, an ethnicity, and a culture all at once.
However, its path toward growth can be interrupted and slowed. It has happened at least twice in the few hundred years: first by the late Qing dynasty, and then again in the Great Leap Forward.
That's what people are worried about with China: that the tension between its "communist" government and its growth-pacified population will not be resolved without serious interruption to its progress.
In the U.S. there are mechanisms to relieve such tension. George W Bush mismanaged Katrina and Iraq, and the Republicans got booted from office shortly thereafter. If the Chinese leadership starts to lose the populations' confidence, how do the people pick new leadership?
As for booting the Republicans, the American people have now happily elected the GOP into power in both houses of Congress, and they've sent a bill to the White House repealing ObamaCara/ACA. Of course, it was vetoed by Obama, but given that the GOP controls most state legislatures and governorships and Congress, I fully expect a Republican to win in the 2016 election, so we can look forward to more Bush-style mismanagement.
Over 200%. That number is China's debt relative to its GDP, and its an unsustainably high number. In 10 to 15 years China's debt will be insurmountable unless painful steps are taken now to rebalance the Chinese economy. The possibility of demise for China is the intersection between those painful steps, and the CCP's fear those steps will threaten its hold on power - the entire political system actually. Great disparity in China has always led to great upheaval, which I suppose is what is really meant when people use the word "Demise".
> Naysayers have been predicting the demise of China for the past thirty years.
Yes. They even use the same sentence and arguments every six months since 30 years. I live in China and keep my eyes open, and what I see here is that people go to work, big trucks deliver bunches of new cars from the factories to the cities, universities produce an increasing number of highly skilled engineers, et cetera.
I've yet to not be astonished by the pace of development and change in China, despite my frequent trips there since the mid-90s.
Especially in the hinterland... it's really night and day. Literally in a year you go from farms to skyscrapers. Crazy fast development.
The world is starting to notice though... now you see more Chinese middle-class tourists, more Chinese students (not the smart ones who just goto the ivies, but the rich mediocre students in community / for-profit / tertiary colleges), and real estate investors (which is starting to be a huge problem in Cali, PNW, etc.).
This is nothing but a road bump for China. The Chinese are hungry as hell. I don't really think the west fully appreciates their cultural drive.
The bigger story I don't see much mention of in the press is the growing dilemma facing Europe. Do they ally themselves with America or the growing East. This will grow to become a key political concern for the EU in the next 10-20-30 years.
Yes it's a road bump, yes China is back in the front row, yes they're hungry. But once the U.S. has accepted this reality that its not a solo play anymore, there should be no need for Europe to choose, because the battle we will have to fight is against a big chunk of the planet sinking back in the dark, and we can win this battle only if we go together, U.S., Europe and China.
Expanding on the battle we civilized humans (US + EU + China) need to fight together: this is not a battle for tanks, drones and helicopters (if it was, the US would do it well enopugh), it is a fight where the weapons are words, values and time.
>The bigger story I don't see much mention of in the press is the growing dilemma facing Europe. Do they ally themselves with America or the growing East.
From what I see, it looks like they're going to ally themselves with the middle east/north Africa and adopt the culture from there.
So you are saying that this time things really are different? I would be surprised if it really is. USA couldn't prevent a crash what makes you think China can?
Well they should at least be forthright with customers/patients. There are lots of anecdotal blog posts (one by former Apple vp of engineering) about the accuracy of their tests for example. Remember this is about people's health, so you can imagine the sensitivity here compared to your usual consumer type of startup.
In regards to the rest of your comment (as well as your other posts littering this thread), your not being difficult as so much as lazy :P
A quick Google search and 15 mins of reading will catch you up to speed about Theranos and all the (negative) attention they are currently receiving in the press. Start with the series of recent WSJ articles about Theranos.
Think how many more cycles a plane goes through a day / month / year / decade. Times that by the number of models of that plane out there.