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by Johnwbh 2672 days ago
The analogy with tencent and alibaba seems instructive, but not necessarily in a good way. They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains subprograms for games, payment, flight bookings, etc you can't turn off. They only continue to exist because of network effects, and because they play nice with the Chinese government.

If Recruit works on the same model then they will have the same problem moving abroad that there is no one thing they are better at than an existing company
2 comments
Barrin92 2672 days ago
>They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains subprograms for games, payment, flight bookings, etc you can't turn off

In an age where bringing users together and building ecosystems seems to count for more and more this isn't necessarily a downside. We're used to the startup and "move quick" mentality but conglomerates have been making somewhat of a comeback for a while now, and Google and Amazon aren't exactly 'non bloated' either, because I'm sure for many of their services there's some small company somewhere that does it better. (case in point, DeepL's translation is actually astonishingly good).

So maybe being a big scary monolith with government support is a good strategy to be a dominating internet company in this day and age and in the years to come.

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ian0 2671 days ago
I think your misunderstanding the goals of alibaba / Tencent. The derive their value precisely from their strategy of doing lots of things ok instead of one thing well. They are "platforms" not applications. And if they stuck to what they each did well in the beginning they likely wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful as they are now.

Also I think it's too early to tell whether how their worldwide expansion plans will play out. It's worth noting that between them they own a slice of most major tech companies in SEA. I wouldn't be surprised if thats not the only part of the world either..

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