[jack_tripper]

>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.

Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.

Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.

Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".

[pmontra]

Because that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products.

It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably.

By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.

[wewxjfq]

> I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".

Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.

[IAmBroom]

miki123211 made almost that exact claim in a sibling comment to yours, and is presumably a westerner.

[miki123211]

This is replication.

THe Chinese seem to be extremely good at taking western products and just layering on tons of incremental improvements, which make their versions that much better. It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.

[skandinaff]

Well, allow me to make a suggestion, that the US came up with the original idea, in 1947 - the transistor, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Similar to how Germany had been capitalizing on the invention of combustion engine and various chemical processes for a century. Now, the curve of innovation on top of the fundamental invention (of the transistor) is in the flattening out region, where all the low hanging fruits had been taken down, and now it's about the remaining 5% of polishing - something that the labor force of well fed and comfortable nation is not really motivated to do.

[leoedin]

> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.

I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Certainly it's true that for most major technologies so far, western countries were first - but that's probably mainly because China's been busy playing catch up. But now the Chinese have huge numbers of factories, suppliers big and small, machine shops, PCB fabs and experienced engineers. You really think they're not coming up with original ideas?

Any engineer will tell you a new product is a little bit of idea and a lot of execution. The Chinese are able to execute in a way that the west isn't any more.

[MangoToupe]

> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.

Nah, they just had access to more capital. That hasn't been true in a while tho.

[dv_dt]

That's a generalization with some truth, but in this case it was blatantly obvious that iRobot was not putting much effort into improvement - or was not effective at improvement. They basically ignored the moat and relied on their headstart to the point that even brand new entrants to the market could equal or overtake them in an initial product offering.

And the business model aspects they relied on for their protective moat - e.g. mass commercial electronic production - was generalized and massively optimized in China (not just for vacuum robots but mass commercial electronics).