
Baidu's CEO Declares He Can Beat Google Again - PeOe
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-07/baidu-s-billionaire-ceo-declares-he-can-beat-google-again
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EZ-E
He can and did beat Google because the Chinese government has and will never
let Google succeed in its domestic market against the local champions

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gonvaled
Which, to be fair, seeing how this megacorporations are behaving (data, taxes,
...) makes a lot of sense.

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PhDuck
How does it "make sense"? Are you implying that the local company will behave
more ethically? Baidu is also a mega corporation, that will surely allow the
government access to your data at a whim. Right now, it is merely stifling
competition leaving the users without choice.

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gonvaled
It will for sure comply with local tax rules, unless it is doing something
illegal.

As it stands, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, ... do not pay
adequate tax rates in the EU. If we had local companies, we would not lose
billions in tax revenues thanks to tax loopholes created by the US government,
to benefit US corporations.

Regarding data management: will that be any worse compared to what the big
five are doing? From the cuntry's point of view (and its citizens, one would
assume), is it better that your government is spying or you, or that foreign
corporations / governments are spying on you?

Put another way: are you more worried (as US citizen I assume) that the NSA /
FBI are spying on you, or that the russians / chinese are spying on you?

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Karunamon
At the risk of going off into the political weeds: define "adequate". The
proper tax rate for a company to pay is, by definition, the amount they are
required to by law. No more, no less.

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gonvaled
We have legal framework for taxes. Corporations work around it by creating
massive costs by paying phoney IP bills to their mother companies. The EU is
trying to end these practices, but it is taking time.

If the companies were local, it would be much easier. Said another way, none
of the big local companies in the EU are using this kind of setups.

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knorker
All you people saying all governments favour local companies are, in my
opinion, completely delusional.

Counter-evidence one: Google is #1 in Europe. That's sufficient to squash your
point.

But also: You seem to have no idea what China is like. Foreign companies will
get government-supported mobs to break into your office and trash the place,
during daylight hours for hours, and the police will refuse to show up.

The best you can do is call the police and say "this mob slamming at the doors
make me fear for my life. If you don't get me out of here I'll call my embassy
and say there's a hostage situation". Suddenly the… no the police doesn't show
up… the police tell you that the mob will disappear soon, and you have 5
minutes to leave before they come back.

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hackandtrip
That's the first time I read something like that, no sources on google seems
to pop-up, nothing on "mobs china foreign countries". It's obvious that
China's biggest companies are tied to government, but I would be surprised if
this didn't make to the news.

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edwinj99
who knew it wont be that hard to crush your competition when you have the
backing of your authoritarian government.

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_wmd
are we talking about Google or Baidu here?

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fastball
Google has the backing of the US Government?

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rapsey
Anyone thinking they don't are incredibly naive. It won't help them in the
Chinese market obviously.

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c3534l
Last I checked it was still legal to use Baidu in America, which can't be said
for Google in China. Please tell me how you think they're comparable, because
I guess I am one of those "incredibly naive" people.

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chvid
I betcha if Baidu were to get any significant traffic from the US it would be
a different story.

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cm2012
Just like we banned Toyota and Honda when they started destroying GM and
Ford's marketshare. Or like how we banned Samsung when they started competing
with Apple. Or...

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gonvaled
Let me continue that for you:

\- or when you apply illegal tariffs n steel, cars and whatnot

\- when you apply sanctions to a country respecting the commitments it signed

and so forth ...

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ulfw
I mean seriously, what else would any CEO say? 'Sorry, we give up. I
instructed our board to shut down the company?'

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ddorian43
Baidu has some (nice?) open source packages(google stack clone), like tera
(bigtable clone), bfs (hdfs clone) etc. Anybody tried using them ?

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bitxbit
You know “open source” has a very different meaning in China.

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gbraad
In China there exist several different terms. But hey, do most people even
know the difference between Free Software and Open Source? It depends really
on who you talk to; lets say a manager mostly will look at a cost perspective,
while a software engineer might see benefits for integration, and even then
mostly driven by the fact it is easily available, and perhaps even only
consuming it. this is can also be different for most other places; Europe is
more idealistic in the approach than America/US.

Note: European; Now I live in Beijing/China, help projects with consultancy
for open source, did this for many years for companies... and now work for Red
Hat.

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JohnTHaller
It's worth noting that Baidu having a global presence allows the Chinese
government to use it to attack their cyber enemies, so China has a vested
interest in growing Baidu. Last time, China used the Great Firewall to
weaponize Baidu's analytics worldwide for the largest DDoS in history against
github in 2015 because github hosted two projects that allowed Chinese
citizens to get around the Great Firewall and read the New York Times
uncensored.

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dna_polymerase
> The world is copying from China

Sure. Ask any customs officer. Like it or not, the free markets in the United
States created the greatest technological advances of mankind. China has
nothing on that. Some lousy chip makers and cheap labour won't be able to
compete with anything done in the US.

Also if Baidu was so great, try competing in the US or on neutral ground like
Europe.

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laumars
The free market in the US has created the biggest corporations known to
mankind. However a drive to monopolise an industry doesn't necessarily equate
to technological advancement. In fact often it can lead to the opposite effect
where there is a lack of motivation to innovate once market penetration
reaches a certain threshold.

The ironic thing is the free market in the US seems to be a one way street.
There's a push for deregulation whenever it allows corporations to behave with
moral ambiguity. However corporations often love legislation if it raises the
barrier for entry for new start ups wishing to compete.

But going back to your original point, there have been plenty of great
technological advances from China and Europe. Easily more than enough to
dismiss your insinuation that the US has a monopoly on technological
advancement, let alone the wider point regarding free markets.

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bitxbit
That’s bullshit. We have insanely large US corporations precisely because RoW
didn’t innovate. They (US-based tech) simply make better products.

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laumars
Size doesn't equate to quality though. eg even when Microsoft was at it's peak
it's fair to say they didn't keep pace with innovation (aside finding new ways
for their software to hog memory and CPU). All too often it takes an underdog
to shake things up.

However what the size of US corporations does prove is that the American
system is better for building dominating businesses. But I'd already said that
in my previous post.

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mozey
“We can now, with real knives and real guns, PK them again, win again,”

I read that as poesklap!

~~~
RikNieu
Dis 'n woord wat ek nooit gedink het ek sal ooit op HN lees nie...

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NicoJuicy
Dutch: Dat woord had ik nooit verwacht om op HN te lezen

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jacksmith21006
Thing is 86% of people in a recent China poll indicated they would use Google
instead of Baidu. Baidu has the market share but not the love of their users.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660364/baidu-ceo-
google-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660364/baidu-ceo-google-china)

