It's pretty much a collaborative and social experiment where I wanted to explore the concept of using in-browser cryptocurrency mining as a monetization and bot fighting method (something I had a problem with in the original Ludum Dare entry it's based on). That's a different discussion though. (You need to manually start the mining and you can explore the map without doing it. It's only when digging and chatting it's required.)
I'm actually planning on rewriting the whole backend in a more traditional Node.js + WebSockets stack so no, I probably wouldn't do it again for this type of application. However, I will probably use it again for other things.
It would've been nice if the article covered the successes and failures of the Chinese corp's international operations. If you look at Alibaba, they have been very active in acquiring international companies to compliment their homegrown international offerings. Aliexpress & Alipay are both international offerings. They bought Lazada to cover Southeast Asia ecommerce. And they are trying to buy a large US remittance company in MoneyGram. I'm sure there are many others.
My point is, yes, they enjoy large advantage in mainland that could possibly make it hard for them overseas. But has it actually? Are they failing or succeeding?
Completely agree with you. The article looks at just a few companies and use them to claim Chinese brands as a whole won't succeed internationally ever. Very myopic.
The conclusion would be different if the author analyzed Chinese smartphone brands instead. Five years ago, even the domestic market was dominated by foreign brands like HTC and Samsung; now the domestic market is the complete opposite. Looking at the supply chain, back then all China provided was low-paid final assembly. Now, Chinese companies are very competitive in supplying most of the parts: displays, camera modules, fingerprint scanners, enclosures, sound components, RF components, batteries, SOC, etc. Only high-end semiconductor components (RAM, NAND, application processors) are lacking but Chinese industrial policy will rapidly help this area catch up.
Chinese smartphones (phones with a Chinese brand not just manufactured there) have seen massive success internationally in the past couple of years and now make up HALF of global marketshare. In India, OnePlus has higher customer loyalty and sales than Apple in the high-end and Xiaomi is neck in neck with Samsung as the marketshare leader starting from zero two years ago.
Now remember, all of this happened in just the last five years. What other industries will break out in the next 5 years?
Do the economics of food delivery change drastically when 1) there is no driver, 2) the car runs on electricity? Maybe this is their way to establish a food delivery brand ahead of what they to believe to be the inevitable driverless vehicle era.
It just makes sense that eventually we will create systems that do the work that is currently manual. That has been human history (printing press, manufacturing, etc). The good thing is that we are crafty buggers and will always find a new job to do even when we've just replaced the manual labor that was oh so painful to perform before.
I like the other posts. Another thing you could do is break the market down even further. Find a niche that the other companies aren't serving. Serve that customer better than anyone. Then when you "win" the majority market share for that niche you can expand (a la crossing the chasm).
You might also go all out lean on these mo fos and put up a landing page, then start reaching out to customers and have one on one conversations to see if anyone will even buy your product. There's nothing like a real life customer willing to buy your product to get you back in the right mindset.
Exactly; it's not so much about building a "better" product so much as being able to find a key differentiator (though to be fair, overall quality WOULD be a strong one).
