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US Tech Companies Start To Become Copycats of Chinese Peers (foxbusiness.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the internationa-innovation dept.

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."

15 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Wow, two examples! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And they're both common sense ideas with zero evidence that they were copied from the Chinese!

    1. Re:Wow, two examples! by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 2

      In fact Apple almost certainly added that feature FOR the Chinese market. It remains to be seen if it will be used in the US, where everyone is set up to accept payment via credit cards and there's a significant amount of money behind them.

  2. Who copied who? by Dan+East · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Also, Apple Inc. recently added payment services to its iMessage chat service, taking a page from Tencent's playbook.

    A number of messaging services in the US have had this feature for many years. Facebook's Messenger is one example. If you want to get pedantic, a more accurate headline is "Apple copies Facebook Messenger's payment feature".

    Having a software feature in common, or offering a similar kind of rental service, is nothing like the kind of copying that the Chinese government run industries have been doing, which is more akin to reverse engineering a physical product in order to manufacture it themselves.

    --
    Better known as 318230.
    1. Re:Who copied who? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      WeChat pay predates Facebook Messenger's payment system, and is much more advanced. It's actually more like PayPal, but if your PayPal account was also your instant messenger account and your social media account...

      I've noticed that some western products are starting to copy cost reduction features that Chinese companies first started using too. One example would be running everything from USB power. As well as the connectors being cheap it means they can get a standard PSU at extremely low cost, or just omit the PSU entirely because people likely already have a dozen of the things.

      In any case, a lot of former US brands are Chinese now. For example, Skil, makers of the SKILSAW that "build America", is Chinese owned. If you look carefully at their current products, there are clear signs of them adopting some Chinese cost reduction innovations in areas where it isn't likely to affect longevity or performance. This video (NSFW language!) shows it in detail: https://youtu.be/G6fJ8xFDYSM

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Who copied who? by hackingbear · · Score: 2

      Facebook Messenger has long been known as a copycat of the Chinese messengers, especially the payment features.

      https://walkthechat.com/facebo...

  3. 1965 Holland made "dockless bike sharing" known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:1965 Holland made "dockless bike sharing" known by slashdice · · Score: 2

      ChiComs have been secretly funding pro-Chinese propoganda in the US, starting a few years ago. Things like Chinese classes at public (and private) schools, pro-China festivals (Chinese New Year), and even journalism. I guess they're funding Slashdot because it's a copy-cat of reddit, but without the democracy :)

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    2. Re:1965 Holland made "dockless bike sharing" known by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      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?

      It's more like trying to counter the propaganda that China and India are full of uneducated village peasants whose only talent is stealing western ideas. I think it reached a low point with that story claiming that most of them couldn't write code that compiled.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. What? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
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  5. This was expected by houghi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just after WWII Japan made things cheap and they where made fun of that they kopied everything, but made lousy quality.

    It is almost the same. Th difference is that the reason things are made so bad is because we, as customers want it cheap,

    They are able to make higher quality. They already do and don't you think theat a few of the almost 1.4 billion people in China are able to come up with ideas on how to do new things?

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    1. Re:This was expected by sinij · · Score: 2

      It is easy to create high-quality product if cost is not constrained - just over-over engineer everything. It is making high-quality cheap goods that is difficult.

      For example, making a cheap car is easy. Making a cheap car that is safe, clean, and reliable is challenging for even large manufacturers. This is why making a car like Bolt at $35K is much harder than making Tesla S at $100K.

    2. Re:This was expected by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:This was expected by hey! · · Score: 2

      They already do and don't you think that a few of the almost 1.4 billion people in China are able to come up with ideas on how to do new things?

      This is an extremely important point to remember: population may not always be equivalent to total brainpower, but it certainly helps when it comes finding genius. Consider: the current US population of 341 million represents only 4.5 % of the world's 7.5 billion people. Even if we have more than our share of genius, most of the genius in the world comes from somewhere else.

      Sometimes I think the Moon landing wasn't such a good thing for the US. While the rest of the world looked back at that blue marble in the black expanse and was humbled, the US was swallowing a dose of ego validation that would choke a politician. But Apollo really ought to tell us a different story, not of American winning solely because of native genius, but because its native genius working with immigrants like Werner von Braun on the largest public works program ever.

      And it's not just space; from the 30s to the 70s many of the best minds in the world poured into the US. John von Neumann, who conceived of the basic design which underlies nearly all modern computers, was born in Hungary. He came to the US because of a job offer and because America was safe for Jews and intellectuals. Same for Einstein. When I was a student at MIT back in the early 80s many of our most important professors were WW2 refugees.

      That infusion of European intellect helped fuel America's rise to global scientific dominance after the 1930s. Of the two dozen Physics Nobel laureates in the 40s-60s, nearly half were immigrants or children of immigrants; of the remaining dozen, half won for work performed with immigrant scientists.

      US science and tech dominance is highly artificial; the product of jobs for intellectuals, tolerance for unpopular groups, openness to immigrants and refugees, and massive investments in research and education. And on that rests our economic and military dominance. Take that away, and we're just 5% of the world's population.

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  6. If true, it'll help both sides by DeplorableCodeMonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. DJI drones are a better example by Cyberax · · Score: 4, Informative

    DJI is a much better example. They pretty much invented the whole "consumer drone" niche and now are the dominant player there. All completely from scratch.