[jdietrich]

I'm not sure that 'copycat' is entirely fair. Google wasn't the first search engine, Facebook wasn't the first social network, Amazon wasn't the first online retailer. Flipkart or Taobao have some similarities to certain western retail platforms, but are profoundly different in many important ways.

WeChat might have had the advantage of the Great Firewall, but they have also built a genuinely innovative platform that is better suited to the Chinese market and in many respects much more sophisticated than any Western equivalent. No western company would have grasped the importance of hongbao or implemented it so skilfully. No western company could have anticipated the hugely positive reaction to WeChat Moments advertising and the remarkably high CPM.

I think there's a certain "not invented here" attitude prevalent in Silicon Valley. We do iteration, they do copycats. We build a better mousetrap, they make shitty knock-offs.