LiweiZ

It's more of a show biz now. Its own ability of having one master player for a certain type can both benefit and cause damage to its business. Because master players of a certain type is not easy to find and once there comes one, the expectation for the same type would be pushed higher after the player left. Or customers would leave. So if there is a master player now, do business around him/her. After that, change the game and expect another master player in another type. More fans pay to see their hero in his/her prime.

Consumers in China do know iOS and iPhone are better. As I mentioned in another comment, it's just very hard for an outsider to get into China market as a service provider.

> In other words, people aren't buying iPhones for its integration with Apple services in China, which could lead to an increase in growth due to the halo effects. Instead, they run WeChat and they buy things through there, which leads to no growth in Apple's services and revenue. Which also means, the customers have no desire to buy another Apple device. They can do the same on any device that can run WeChat.

The root cause for this is it's a high-walled market. If you can compromise and be allowed to grab a spoon as an outsider. It's already a win. Just look at other big name service providers.

Apple is a huge winner among outsiders in China market since they can make nice profit through physical product alone.

Try zhihu.com. Though I don't think the quality is anywhere close to here.

They just want to meet a subgroup's needs first. When there is a traction, they can move forward from there. But it seems the subgroup did not buy in after serval attempts.

In that case, the market demand would sink. Everything needs recalculated.

What the GP mentioned is much closer to regional bias/stereotype. In my opinion, it's all about how much alignment a group of people can have while gearing towards making/producing something better. Japan has way more alignment, while everybody else in the crowded Asia is busy with taking a slightly better position and showing off to neighbours. People truly enjoy this kind of feelings.

I don't think most of readers on HN can get and care about mainlanders' feeling of being somewhat offended in this case. So I just chuckled originally. But I hope my comment can supply some context.

I forgot to mention the difference leaves different room for how much impact other factors can contribute to the final outcome, which, in my opinion, is more important.

You are correct.

Yes. I did not know her age. All I know was one young female member of their top management team is Lenovo founder's daughter. I have little knowledge about Didi.

Maybe USA has 45%, while China has 95%. If so, the 50% here is the difference.

I have to say it's a typical pattern for rich and connected kids in China to gain success. Top local college => top us college => join GS or whatever similar => trendy founder/CXO/etc. => Now it's their turn to have someone write articles to let ordinary people know they are not just rich, pretty/handsome, well-connected, but also they are super hard working, smart/intelligent, wise to earn their crowns all by themselves. We all know for well-connected in China, there are way more gates open to them. And the stake-holders in the western world can help them open other gates. As I said there is a long history of them doing all this kind of thing. Most people in China with enough experience in that society know that.

It's just a capital-intensive pretend play. They are the players and you have to watch them show off how good they played through mass media and your news feed. If there was an earthquake in that circle, new batch of players would show up.

You can google who her father is. It's a capital and guanxi/connection game, less about technology. Leveraging the direct/indirect capital resources they own and copycatting SV unicorn tech fashion in a walled huge market make them feel good. And they are really rich. It's their age now.

edit: added guanxi/connection

Driven by qq number, it preserved real social network since around 2000 or earlier across basically all age groups. Its competitors in mobile age tried to break into the market with sex/business/name card/phone number/whatever else relationship graph and nothing could beat the real one. Also the main force among urban hipsters, MSN, decided to leave the game, which led its users to fall back to what they used back in college (QQ). QQ users were laughed at by urban hipsters for being too rustic. So the missing piece of the network came back.

Being part of ruling party's operation unit is something to be proud of. And business can get onto the fast lane. I have to say this is the only business model to get strong and big in that market. Of course, you have to have some foundation to get into the short list.

As a native Chinese, I think the parent commenter knows China better (on the right track but far from being a real expert). The parent looks at this from an outsider's point of view with limited info resources. Now, many of us Chinese think we know ourselves better. But that's simply not the case. This age is one of the most reflection-less in our history. The progress of science constantly brought up different perspectives of the world and there is so little applied to how we Chinese look at ourselves and the world. And the groups reflect most are younger poor students and people involved in trading in finance. Those so called democracy movement leaders and thinkers/observers/writers are just jokes producing brain-dead bullshit begging for fundings from either the ruling party or its opponents, if not both. I ended up with giving up looking for real light from contemporary Chinese contents a few years ago since there was only silence. Probably talked too much here, haha.

One key factor is the way people act in groups are limited to basically one mode: master-slave. We don't have the environment to nuture other modes, which is crucial for innovation. Also avoiding people equipped with that ability is one of the fundamental work to make sure no group can emerge to do anything effective.

After n rounds of chaos and peace cycles and losting millions of lives in best case.

Location: Toronto, Canada

Remote: Ok

Technologies: Swift, Objective-C, Javascript, GoLang, Scala.

Skill level: Intermediate.

Recent Swift code: https://github.com/liweiz/DropboxWrapper.

GitHub: https://github.com/liweiz

CV: https://ca.linkedin.com/pub/liwei-zhang/2/51/344

Email: matt dot z dot lw at gmail dot com

I was thinking about having a service to mix a group of users' exposed information so that other parties could not figure out what a user did. Just like groups of animals do. Very similar to VPN in some way. Anything like this out there for us?

I don't think group conflict is a very well solved problem. I don't think we are able to achieve that, either. What I can see is when there is a group conflict, after the extra energy is vented, and the groups involved are still there, they look for mutual interests and fall back to that base and go from there. Race issue is one big example of this. We do have some system works better than others. But putting it into a bottle with absolute right mark on it may not be the best way to go under current situation.

I'm probably biased since I'm Chinese. I agree with most part of this report. The author did a lot of good homework. But I think his thoughts to work out those strategies need some update to better fit in the world today and tomorrow. There are similar parts and there are different parts.

Software is the path I chose to achieve many different short/mid term goals for my life. Finding an ok paid job, exploring another form of freedom of mind, the ability to create things I want, guiding/teaching my kids better with deeper understanding and know how of the development of human-control-machine-to-achieve-result (even though I only have a tiny piece of knowledge of it), sensing the new opportunities, etc.

While I'm still struggling with the first one, I found the rest are all very well achieved.

To all late starters: keep going as long as the resource is available and good luck to all of us.

edit: typo and replace "tech" with a more detailed description.

And the best way to learn, practice and improve for the last two levels is to get involved, which means the ones need more chances are more likely to be separated from the group and this is very discouraging. Instead, babies and toddlers generally get more patient guides. That's a more important reason for adult second language learners. The general solution I can think of is to have a private coach to help them learn with feedback and correction so that learners are more likely to catch the limited chances to begin to get involved with groups. High quality chat bot could be a more affordable option for most learners, if the bot is good enough, which I'm not familiar with.

edit: combined two sentences into one.

You know China very well. There is no genuine antipathy towards corruption in Chinese ruling group. However, there is genuine antipathy towards corruption benefiting opponents in Chinese ruling group.

Food logging is a main entrance for household "ERP". If being implemented right, there are so many potential use cases. But I guess it's easier to extend from those chained things behind the entrance to the entrance instead of extending from the entrance. Anyway, it's good to see there are someone working on the hard part of food logging.

Wow, you created this account to just say this (noticed based on 政治需要, to meet political needs in English, your username). Being very cautious is a good habit. Not seeing this often these days. People in Chinese community are quite aware of what can not be talked publicly and simply shut those topics down themselves by ignoring everything related.

edit: added English translation.

With a huge high-frequency userbase. Also, there are identity, trust, ready-to-go pay and enough information and offerings from sellers.

For a user, easy to use is how many barriers s/he has to deal with. Many of the barriers are not only reduced by better technologies and products.

Don't get me wrong. I personally expect better-tech-leads-the-way.

I think more specifically, the sentence before:

"As it becomes more powerful and self-contained, Chinese phone consumers will stop asking what phone and operating system they should buy, and start contemplating what phone best runs WeChat."

We Chinese call it "black money", too. But it sounds too harsh and directly pointing to crime when talking, esp. publicly. So the color is changed to gray meaning color between clear and black so that no one "overreacts" (when "black money" is normal, everywhere possible and most people deal with it do not end up in jail or are not being investigated"). Just a way people accept the reality.

In case you are not familiar with China, there are many such old ladies in China. Most of them in big cities are trying to dressed relatively clean and decent. There are some old ladies eat the remained food left on tables in student restaurants in universities.

Gaming with this system would be deadly dangerous for most players. Those in this business must be from the top. The sad thing is people are treated just like records in db and most of them have no anger toward this. Every once a while, there are topics tout China would be more powerful and innovative, you know, there is no foundation for it. What China really has is the buying power.