[mkstowegnv]

Mostly off topic. Why has China produced most of the serious competition to US software titans? In particular, given that South Korea was way ahead of the rest of the world in cell phone and broadband universality for it's population, why haven't they been the birthplace of any social media or other internet companies that expanded abroad (instead they adopted YouTube and Facebook)?

[pcr0]

1) Large, mostly homogeneous nation. 2) Government bans foreign internet/social media services, protecting local companies from foreign competition.

[paradite]

1. Korea is much more homogeneous than China. China has a wide diversity of ethnicities. (Before you downvote, check Wikipedia first)

2. China doesn't "ban foreign internet/social media". LinkedIn is in China, so is Bing. It bans companies that do not follow Chinese law. If you want to argue that the Chinese law is bad, you should know that Korea bans Google map because of law.

[khuey]

China is 91.5% Han. That's not what most people think of as "wide diversity".

[pchristensen]

I'm reading AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (MS Research China, Google China, Sinovation) now - https://aisuperpowers.com/

His version of the story: 1) China's wild-west, copyright ignoring culture forced Chinese entrepreneurs to out work, out hustle, out spend their competitors because there was no IP moat. 3 decades of that environment allowed China to develop many levels of development, management, etc talent. Now they have a large, well educated, experienced, seasoned technical workforce.

2) China's culture, just 2 generations removed from mass starvation and poverty, is very hungry and chases business and money as opposed to Silicon Valley vision startups.

3) American tech companies want to make a product that can be used in all countries, but Chinese tech companies tailored to the distinct behavior of Chinese internet users, most of whom are a) smartphone only, and b) on the internet for the first time, and therefore have very different behaviors. Also, because of no IP protection, they built moats through deep, expensive, messy integration into cities, shops, physical assets, etc, whatever gives them some defensibility. American companies, less willing to adapt their products, were poorly received and outcompeted.

4) China's government (national, state, city) has a system of incentives that can align lots of money, compliance, resources, and attention very quickly. In 2013, the Chinese government announced "mass entrepreneurship" plans, and after AlphaGo's victory in 2016, they made a similar plan to make China an AI superpower. This led to a nationwide flood of venture capital, office space, social perks, etc. They're willing to tolerate inefficiency in order to capture a huge new industry. Contrast with the US, where Republican beat up on Obama and Dems for years because of Solyndra, even though the overall renewal energy stimulus made money.

5) China is huge - its urban population is larger than the entire USA, while South Korea's population is about the same as the US West Coast. So a portion of their labor force can tip the global scales of man-hours in a field.

Also, I believe WeChat is popular outside of China, but not so much in USA/Europe. Alibaba is globally influential in manufacturing and ecommerce.

I'm going deep into Chinese tech, particularly AI, and I'd love to talk more about it.

[logicchains]

Anyone who wants an example of Chinese engineering at its best should try downloading the desktop Wechat client. Super smooth, fast and lightweight, currently just using 40mb in my task manager. Using it highlights how much software like Skype has lost its way. Or the Slack desktop client, which won't even start on my Linux laptop without 3gb of free ram, due to being packed so full with memory bloat and disregard for its users in the name of faster development time (or maybe management being too cheap to hire people capable of developing efficient GUIs in a lower-level language).

[yongjik]

- South Korea has the fortune of understanding the importance of internet "infrastructure", and being a dense country, manages to roll out first-class internet before most other nations.

- Burgeoning domestic services start to take root.

- Government sets up various crazy laws that make doing internet business extremely painful, killing innovation. Large carriers (KT, SKT, LG) exert tight control of the market, killing innovation in the mobile space.

- Only a few giant corporations survive (e.g., Naver and Kakaotalk). When foreign products (Youtube, iPhone, etc.) eventually break into the market, there's no meaningful domestic competitor.

There was a time when everybody had a Cyworld account: you never heard about it, because it was acquired by SKT, and they didn't want it to cannibalize their mobile services. Nobody uses it any more. We all moved to Facebook.

I heard it's somewhat getting better these days.

[forkLding]

Because Korea never protected its internet/software industries or never adopted an infant industry argument for their software, they chose instead to consolidate and protect the powers of chaebols who focused on hardware applications and those industries that it was already good at because they were already making money and likely to do so in the future.

Moreover, the chaebols probably out-competed and bought out any software competitors in their protected status.

[tanilama]

No technological gap in between China/The West. Open source gives everyone the same levelled playground.

Chinese engineers are cheaper

Their internal competition is fierce.

[jnbiche]

> Why has China produced most of the serious competition to US software titans?

In a word, Chinese protectionism. However, given how our software titans are dominating our society, I'm not sure it's a bad thing that competitors have emerged, even if it was from the cradle of market manipulation.

[forkLding]

Chinese protectionism wasn't bad in the first place, Americans adopted the infant industry argument articulated by Alexander Hamilton and American tariffs were highest in the world from 1816 through 1945, other countries are just now adopting whats working from the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument