Hardware tech, to be specific. Plenty of room left in software services still. The east can compete on price but user experience is incomparable.
Give it another generation and if China will not walk off the ledge with either government or societal issues (which, granted, is where they are slowly going IMO) they will own the UX and design as well. My 2c.
Given that the US has been number one for a really long time now it doesn’t sit well with a lot of the patriotic identity people have about the US. People either can’t accept reality or the make up some excuse about unfair economic practices.
The last thing they want to admit is that China is more competent or more superior.
Organically, sure. If a company has an opportunity to build higher value components profitably it would likely take it. But that is slow.
What I mean is state pouring massive amounts of money, every year for many years, into as-is unprofitable areas to build not just the products but education, infrastructure and support needed for the local companies to become competitive.
WSJ had a good article in the last few days on China's containership building which AFACR said the government poured over 10 billion at the time to become the world's shipbuilder. This is the time of effort I am talking about and, as far as I know, it is fairly new.
You can’t buy back entire supply chains and a workforce, it takes generations.
Previously I always thought democracy was a slow but eventually correct system of producing wisdom. And to a degree there’s been truth to this. However the missing ingredient has been what do we do with that success once we’ve had it.
The west would never have the guts to delete a billion dollar industry even if they realized it was a net negative. We simply don’t know how to guard against our passions, pleasures, and handle success in a responsible way. I think cccp has many flaws but taking bold action against this kind of problem isn’t one of them.
I do hope that I’m wrong about this though and that a democratic system can see its way out of a local maximum built upon an unsustainable way of doing things. I think the belief in the market as some kind of oracle that knows value and price is its language has a lot to do with this track we’re on.
But let's not pretend China is perfect. The purge had much more to do with a) eliminating a potential competing power to the CCCP, and b) Xi's boomer-era gut instinct that new media forms are bad.
Eliminating businesses competing with state power sounds like something that we too should have done when we still could.
It's not a better grasp on philosophy. It's a logistical issue. A centralized government can wipe this out because control is centralized. In a democracy the control is spread out among people who understand, people who don't understand and among people who have business interest in said topic.
Think about it this way. The very people responsible for the unicorn social media companies in a democracy have a say in whether or not there own companies can be wiped out. If they're rich they can influence the game even more with advertising and propaganda. They influence the outcome and thus self interest actually pollutes the decision making process in a democracy.
It's not about guts. It's literally that in a democracy even the conflicting business interests can stop the right thing from happening because of they are self interested in the bad thing to happen. It is a logistical issue. When business interests influence government then government decisions favor business interests. It's that simple. And right now since businesses are more centralized and have more power then individuals then the government actually favors big corporations. That's the eventual outcome of most capitalist societies.
In a dictatorship, the dictator is usually well removed from such things and thus can make decisions very impartially and with no resistance. But like an evil dictator can do stuff like behead your entire family if you talk shit about him. Good sides and bad sides. The problem is you live in a democracy so everyone talks about how shitty the alternative is because of bias. The reality is democracy and dictatorship are simply two sides of a coin.
So really nothing will change, Americans will keep thinking they're number one and life will go on as usual.
Google. Facebook.
Global reach.
Oh yeah Mac OS. Global reach. iOS global reach. Android global reach.
Minecraft global reach. I know Minecraft was from Sweden but since Microsoft bought it Europe can’t take credit for it.
Time to start learning Chinese.
So to compete on software West might encounter unexpected difficulties. You need good platform docs to develop good software.
Probably not a problem for big companies.
在中文和任何拉丁-德语语言之间进行转换是机器翻译仍然难以完成的任务；我不知道为什么，但它比英语-西班牙语或英语-C 等语言的转换要困难得多。