I think part of the reason is that the story is being positioned incorrectly. Yahoo owns 24% of Alibaba, so it's not China vs. Silicon Valley, or any such nonsense.
It's definitely news worthy that they're going to IPO here in the US and they have a HUGE market in China/Asia... Even so, will they be able to crack the US consumer market? Time will tell, but so far, their efforts haven't born fruit.
They have a stealth 'target vertical' shopping experience that's developing right now in the Bay Area, however, they're significantly behind schedule, having trouble integrating teams from several locals and their product is dubiously "useful" at this stage of the game.
All of that being said, eventually they'll find some combination to get a foothold of the US market and it will be interesting to see what happens then as competition heats up.
I doubt many people on HN check that frequently during the work day. I know I generally only check a couple times.
I'd say the reason most don't care much is there is massive cultural differences in the way the US and Chinese markets operate. Successful US companies have failed to penetrate China and many probably expect the reverse to be true as well.
You'd be quite surprised. Alibaba.com itself isn't a retailer in the same sense as amazon. Pretty much used for bulk goods, importing, manufacturing, and outsourcing. I know a lot of startups, in fact, that in the early stage source through Alibaba. The one I work at, for instance, gets our steady supply of infrared pens through Alibaba, but there are a lot of examples. I even had a friend back in high school who made a small fortune (relatively speaking) importing random things through it that he would sell at a tremendous markup here...
Alibaba does, though, run other sites as mentioned in the article that are more along the lines of an eBay or Amazon and you would be right that those haven't caught on outside of China.
I buy stuff semi-regularly from aliexpress.com which is their consumer-facing site. alibaba.com's their business-to-business site - useful if you're in the business of stocking and selling physical goods, but I doubt many people people on HN are.
Amazon works well in china and we use it often (alibaba taobao also, but not so much these days). Many internet companies that fail in china (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) do well in other open Chinese style markets (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore)...they are only failing in mainland because the government doesn't allow them to operate. There is no such restriction for Chinese companies wanting to operate in the west.
> they are only failing in mainland because the government doesn't allow them to operate.
Simply not true. Some companies, Google for example, choose not to comply to Chinese governments' requests (I agree that's quite a lot of work), because they don't think that Chinese market is significant enough for them.
> There is no such restriction for Chinese companies wanting to operate in the west.
Is it true that the government doesn't allow them to operate? My understanding is that, if these companies were to operate within China's laws and regulations, particularly as they relate to censorship of user-generated content, they would be allowed to operate.
Sina (a 'Chinese' internet company) was recently the target of regulatory action (suspension of a key licence) because they fell foul of those censorship laws. Action isn't targeted solely at non-Chinese companies. However, non-Chinese companies are less likely to want to comply (either due to the cost/complexity of doing so, or because to do so would be at odds with their core mission).
As an example of a company with a different approach, look at LinkedIn, which recently launched a Chinese interface to target mainland Chinese users.
The government doesn't acknowledge that the services are actually blocked in China. If you ask your ISP why Facebook isn't available, they'll tell you "it must be Facebook's fault." The government hasn't declared them illegal, so understanding how to make them "legal" is quite impossible.
The government selectively cracksdown on Internet companies when it wants to make a point, and turns blind eyes on others, arbitrarily, porn is quite common in the China market and very available...and even necessary for these companies to make a profit. They just choose one to slap on the wrists occasionally to make sure they don't get out of control.
In contrast, you'll find less porn on Facebook, G+, and YouTube then you will on RenRen, YouKu, Sina, and so on. Heck, WeChat is well known as the hookup app (so my wife won't let me go near it). But then this is similar to how prostitution is ubiquitous in the PRC vs. how it is very much underground in the US.
How would a legalistic American company operate in such an environment? China is not yet very much governed by rule of (impartial, fairly applied) law, so it is just impossible to do much without being able to live in the grayness (as most Chinese internet companies are able to do!).
Hah what? This is the first time I've heard this, so I asked a male, mainland chinese friend, using Wechat itself. His reply:
"Ew nope,kinda of.but I think all the social media tool has this function of hookup it really depends on the intention of users"
It's pretty much the default messaging tool for my social group in China. Married people, university students, even a mid-50s government official. If you're not on Wechat you're missing out!
Depends on the area (wechat has geo broadcast features); in Beijing's sanlitun it is mostly guys and girls looking for fun.
Also a lot of even educated professionals don't realize what is going on around them. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance as well as successful propaganda ("these western problems can't happen here") going around, but entire huge subcultures that are out of control (like the mid-50s government official with 5 mistresses).
I think you're overselling it as a hookup app, I presume you're referring to the 摇一摇 feature? In any case, it's a texting-first hookup-distant-third sort of thing. Like my contact said, it depends on the intent of the user. I'm so curious why your wife is so suspicious!
If I was going to point out a Chinese app for basically hookups and nothing else, it'd be 陌陌。That thing is pure, 100% Tinder/Grindr.
I always thought 陌陌 was only a hookup app, but was recently told that it started as a way to connect people with common interests (e.g. I could use it to find nearby python users or nearby HN users.)
Fair enough. My wife won't let me go near WeChat even if she uses it herself (I'm happy to oblige, I'm not much into chatting). Some of my expat colleagues on the other hand...
I think most of the people using the geo feature are looking to flirt or hook up. However, even in Sanlitun, I would imagine most people are using it for the same purposes elsewhere:
1. Checking where a group of friends is meeting or telling them they'll be a few mins late.
2. Sending groups of friends photos they've just taken of themselves and/or food.
3. Ordering taxis, which they will later pay for using the wechat payment feature, as that way both the passenger and taxi driver get a small subsidy from Tencent.
I feel like the implication is that there won't be much difficulty for Chinesse mega-services to have some success in the US as well, but the Japanese experience (especially Rakuten trying so hard to buy their ways into markets and not really succeeding) seems to show that there's probably other aspects too.
I've bought exactly one thing, a laptop computer internal fan that had died in a cheap laptop I had. I had the choice of ebay or alibaba and I don't trust ebay merchants these days.
Not much to say. Shipping overseas is slow. I would have preferred amazon if it was an option.
I am skeptical that they will be able to crack the US markets. On the other hand, Chinese companies will probably be big competitors in emerging markets since they might also control the infrastructure.
For all of those that have asked the question, "Why don't you trust Google with your data?" Replace Google with Alibaba and you have your answer. Google has set a dangerous precedent in in how much data it has asked users to provide based on the assumption that their actions based their best intentions would be the rule and not the exception. It was a matter of time.
The Alibaba story touches on a bunch of interesting things.
1st, there is somethingto do with the definition of "startups" as used on this site, techcrunch etc. Al lot of it is cultural-superficial.
Soylent, is creating a new product that one might find at a pharmacy. It's startupiness is mostly it's cultural context: Kickstarter, Andreesson-Horowtiz, change-the-world ambition, SV brashness. A similar company & product coming out of Europe and selling in pharmacies and supplement stores probably wouldn't register as a "startup" to most people.
I don't really know how to articulate this, so I suppose my thoughts are not all that cohesive. I think there's something here.
A completely unrelated 2nd, are the "problems" Alibaba is solving. About 10 years, just out of college I was wring in ecommerce. I learning about affiliate marketing & drop shipping. I talked to someone with an ecommerce "store" where all items were being drop shipped and the site was being populated by a feed. He wanted affiliates to drive all traffic to the site.
Joel Spolsky (2001)- Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything. - I was one of the quacks.
I knew that between the factory door and a consumer was where most of the cost (value add) is. Things got bought, sold, shipped, exported, warehoused again, warehoused, wholesaled, retailed... It seemed that these virtual businesses were part of an unstoppable economic change where the internet would automate and eliminate most of the work between the consumer and the manufacturer.
I thought everything between manufacturers and consumers would melt into a very thin layer of technology, RSS mostly. I mustn'd have been the only one because a lot of the dark ages startups (2002-2005) seemed to be building parts of this upcoming world. Product search engines, for example were considered important.
It didn't happen, but it still might. A lot of the dotcom ideas were poorly executed 10 years too early but ultimately decent ideas. Maybe this one was 30 years to early.
Alibaba is focused further down the manufacturing chain, where stuff actually gets made. We know that all our stuff is made in China. We kind of assumed that was a solved problem, trivial. Try to buy something on Alibaba and you will find that international commerce is still a lot closer Marco Polo's days than you might think.
Amazon has been working on the retail side of things for 20 years. Product research, discovery, shipping, customer service. Every aspect of that has turned out to be a bigger and more difficult problem that I would have anticipated in 1999.
Alibaba is innovating mostly below the point that Amazon starts.
A somewhat tangential question that I'm genuinely curious about: Would anyone happen to know why the New York media always puts the periods in I.P.O. and I.B.M. and presumably N.Y.T. too?
It's so different from what I'm accustomed to, and seems to definitely be a New York thing. Everywhere else it would be IPO, IBM, and NYT.
Zero comments on this article after an hour on the front page of HN seems to prove the author's point.