[beorno]

My take after 20+ years in China living with WeChat and Alipay:

1) Green field: no or few incumbents or legacy platforms or regulatory capture to deal with - infrastructure in the West is antiquated and fossilized in comparison.

2) Open to change: People and businesses are living in a world that's extremely cut-throat and dynamic, and so they expect change, and are willing to try new things - the West is more conservative in comparison (e.g., the proliferation of QR code use cases seamlessly bridging offline/online that never took off in the West except when force by CVOID).

3) Free pass from platforms: Due to "be nice to China" Apple has turn a blind eye towards WeChat and Alipay running an app store inside of an app (which has always been against their regulations, and which MANY companies would like to do).

4) Hard work and (used to be) cheaper labor: 996 super-hard work ethic means they churn out features and blitz scale really well - they're just more aggressive.

5) In touch with the offline world: Companies in China have to deal with the reality of an extreme variety of users, from cities to countryside, from young to old, from rich to poor. They often build out big sales and support orgs of people walking around from store to store, across the country, whereas I think many startups in the West (often due to cost reasons) tend to do almost everything online.

And increasingly:

6) Government support. WeChat is pretty much the ERP system of China today. You can do everything through/on it. In some ways it's a utility. I guess every country could benefit enormously in terms of control and efficiency by having an platform that provides authentication, authorization, and payments as a base layer for all other apps. The government puts people / teams / divisions inside of organizations to ensure things are "running smoothly", but this works best if they have a few big companies to deal with - not a myriad of small startups. WeChat and Alipay are becoming more and more nationalized, and are already "too big to fail".

I miss not having WeChat in the West, though I'd of course wish it was done in a less 1984-ish way. Life has ballooned in complexity, and bureaucracy has gotten out of hand in the West... We need a radical streamlining in order to regain back our productivity (and not waste time filling out checks, waiting in line, calling/faxing, filling out forms, etc). Super apps, if done well like in WeChat's case, can offer that .

(I grew up in Europe, spent 20 years in China, and now living in North America.)

[actionablefiber]

Does 996 yield better results than typical 9-5 work? I can't help but think that at that level of time investment, particularly for knowledge work, you are getting negative marginal benefits on time spent at work.

[Macha]

The 4-day workday movement is testing the opposite hypothesis, and I've heard of a few tech companies testing the waters with e.g. time limited half day fridays (marketed as a post-covid recovery or summer perk). The questions are what they took from the results and whether they'd be willing to be seen to take risks with their biggest cost when the expectation is for a recession.

[urthor]

Exactly.

Companies are absolutely across this trend. They are simply building data on it and not releasing it to the wider scientific ecosystem.

[jhatemyjob]

It's just (3). Apple doesn't allow them outside of China, so they only work in China. That's all there is to it.

[btbuildem]

I think (6) is the quiet but giant reason -- having the "superapp" achieve utility status guarantees adoption and lock-in, and pretty much eliminates competition.

[asim]

As a thought experiment it would be interesting to plot out a strategy to achieve something like this in the west in a way that's totally open.