His presentation shows you why US Internet companies continously lose battles in China to local entrepreneurs.
Kai-Fu Lee, ex-President of Google Greater China’s excellent presentation in Carnegie Mellon
December 15, 2009 by shkadmin
His presentation shows you why US Internet companies continously lose battles in China to local entrepreneurs.
Hey, Carnegie Mellon, my alma mater.
Around 14:30, there is a good list of top issues of why global companies have failed in the China market.
At 29:00, there is a comparison of Google’s approach to R&D vs. what they see is typical in China.
Hey, your alum is now running the largest angel fund and incubation center in Beijing. Let’s find him some day 😉
I guess what Mr Lee is trying to say is that you have to reinvent what you have to appeal to the Chinese market.
Stepping back from the whole thing and looking at it, as a black box problem, I still think that people developing products for the China market (or any other similar market) would be successful as long as they identified who their customers are and interacted with them to provide something they need and want. It sounds like the failures have come from established players in other markets coming in and assuming that they know how to do whatever it is since they have been successful in other markets.
The 3rd slide “China is different” is one of the key slides but can be expanded much more in terms of content. For product manager or marketing professional, the framework to think about difference is there but “devil is in the detail”. Twitter (or Twitter like websites)’s recent development in China is a great case to show off the difference, in product design, in marketing, in regulatory environment and etc. Would be happy to share when meeting next time.