Slashdot Mirror
US Tech Companies Start To Become Copycats of Chinese Peers (foxbusiness.com)
hackingbear quotes Dow Jones Newswire: Chinese technology companies have long had a reputation of being copycats of Western peers, but U.S. companies have recently begun to return the favor, said a partner at prominent venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz... China's internet titans such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. are influencing U.S. startups and majors alike, and many Chinese models are being replicated in the U.S., said Connie Chan, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture firm. LimeBike, a startup at San Mateo, Calif., adapted China's dockless bike-sharing model, first rolled out by Beijing-based Ofo Inc. and Beijing Mobike Technology Co., for U.S. consumers... Also, Apple Inc. recently added payment services to its iMessage chat service, taking a page from Tencent's playbook. "I love this reversal of what 'China copycat' can mean," she said. "It no longer just means a Chinese company copying the States, it can mean a U.S. company copying China."
Go look up witte fietsen aka "white bikes".
Good lord - what's with all the shameless propaganda lately on Slashdot trying to sell the ideas that India and China are great and wonderful innovators in technology, finance or industry?
LimeBike, a startup at San Mateo, Calif., adapted China's dockless bike-sharing model, first rolled out by Beijing-based Ofo Inc. and Beijing Mobike Technology Co., for U.S. consumers...
I, for one, have never docked a bike. If this is what passes for Chinese innovation, then we can safely say they still have no idea how to innovate since those heady days of two fucking millennia ago when they were actually doing new stuff. Last time something like this came up I went to wikipedia to look at a list of Chinese inventions and guess what? Half of them are outright bullshit, and the other half are fucking old.
China has a culture of hammering down protruding nails that retards creativity. What laid the groundwork for America to become an industrial power was its cottage industry. We knew how to make things, because nobody would stop you from doing it. We had a real can-do attitude, and we did. There's a lot more to the story, but it rapidly gets ultrapolitical and I've had that argument already. You can't do anything big in China without the blessing of the government. Of course, that's fairly true everywhere, but it's extra-true there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Chinese are starting to have real skin in the game, and so they're now in the position we were in in the 19th century. You can continue to play the pirate on a lot of IP issues or you can have other industrial states recognize your IP. You can't have both. If the US hadn't changed, the British and Germans would have repaid us by having government staff engineers regularly bulk shipping American patent applications back to London and Berlin, and we'd have been poorer for it.
I've been working in China for almost 7 years. The comparison between China and Japan is a bad one except for the starting with cheap knockoffs.
Japan has an ingrained culture of craftsmanship, as does Germany and (believe it or not) the USA. It was natural for them to shift rapidly to high quality products.
China does not have this culture. It was discouraged by dynastic rule and killed off by communist rule. There are exceptions, but the vast majority of engineers, managers, vendors, etc practice "chabuduo" or "good enough." It's a struggle to get them to admit flawed products are not ok. It's also a struggle to get them to not copy a competitor's product.
The hope has been this would change. Unfortunately, no. So we are expanding R&D and manufacturing into the USA to get the quality and innovation we want (and save money doing it). The kicker: I work for a Chinese company.