alt Hacker News>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.
Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.
Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
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> I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.
This is replication.
THe Chinese seem to be extremely good at taking western products and just layering on tons of incremental improvements, which make their versions that much better. It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
Because that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products.
It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably.
By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.