I agree that the most critical weakeness of Silicon Valley is real estate costs. I find it hard to imagine Beijing as a serious competitor though. If it were going to be anywhere in China I would expect it to be Shenzhen.
Shenzhen is a very different thing. It's important but not a challenger to SV. Huge startups come out of Beijing because it's the hub where the top students, founders, investors and regulators are.
If you look at Fortune's list of unicorns, 3 of the top 10 are in Beijing. As they build, they're strengthening the founder/techie/investor ecosystem in the city even further.
And yet Boston has some of the highest real estate prices in the country these days. (Fortunately you can commute out of it easier than in the Bay Area.) The Tech world doesn't begin and end with web/social/mobile.
I'd say the Research Universities, Medical Technology, Robotics, and Travel Technology that comes out of Boston is significantly ahead of Silicon Valley.
Automotive and related tech is quite small even with Tesla in the bay area. The number of automotive technology jobs is quite small. Automation technology from cars is picking up, but I doubt the number of jobs is very high in comparison to Detroit, Stuttgart, or Nagoya
There are a lot more aerospace outside of Silicon Valley with Aerobus and Boeing having little presence in California.
Google is #3 in cloud technology compared to Seattle/Redmond with AWS and Azure with significant marketshare advantage.
Amazon is 45% marketshare in US for online commerce. Logistics technology for them is mainly built in Seattle and Boston. Not much for Amazon going on in Silicon Valley. Alexa not made in Silicon Valley.
I'm still quite surprised people still believe Silicon Valley + SF lead in technology.
Beijing? Right with the Great Firewall, it's a ridiculous place to run a tech company. With the air pollution it's a ridiculous place to live. I lived for many years in Shanghai but ultimately moved because it was nearly impossible to do anything tech related that relied on standard tools such as Github or marketing venues such as Facebook, etc.
That's just an example that i find interesting enough, that quite a few US companies tried to solve, but still have a long way to go.
As for self-driving cars, Chinese companies like Baidu are not unlike Google, and they are investing/researching heavily in these fields. The only twist is that self-driving in China would be a lot harder to solve because the roads are a lot messy there :) At the same time, many of these companies directly invests in US companies as well
>That's just an example that i find interesting enough, that quite a few US companies tried to solve, but still have a long way to go.
Because it's not a technical problem. Nobody cares about the ability to pay with their phone in the US when a credit card works so well and doesn't have a battery that dies.
Android and Apple pay work perfectly fine but almost nobody in my tech circles feels the urge to use them, let alone normal citizens. The credit card infrastructure in the US is so prevalent and reliable that there needs to be some serious perks to unseat the dominance.
Spoken as the incumbent. Of course it's a technical problem, as least as much as other SV companies. Hard tech hasn't been the edge for SV for many decades and it's getting even less important today. All the big companies has tried to tackle payments, but with lackluster results. What's "perfectly fine" for the US isn't in most of the rest of the world. Some of the more prominent startups in the UK, Germany and Sweden are payment related exactly because SV is weak in this area. There's a great opportunity for Chinese companies here if they ever decide to go outside their own borders.
I don't see how that is adding anything to the discussion. If you want to be the leader you actually have to lead. You have to be the one that figures out "the future" and have the solution people didn't know they wanted before other people do. The "perks" of mobile payments should be fairly obvious to anyone who has experienced it, I suspect you and the parent just aren't one of those people. No one is going to stop the US to remain dysfunctional in infrastructure, but it still has a price.
My (admittedly snarky) point was that there are clear differences between countries in their preferences for payment systems that can't be chalked up to "dysfunctional infrastructure." And it's not a US vs. rest of world thing. Even across Europe there are clear differences in cash vs. debit card vs. credit card vs. etc. acceptance. And stored value cards (for use outside of transit systems) seems mostly to be an Asian thing. I have certainly used mobile phone payments in Europe where chip without PIN can sometimes be a bit of a pain because it's not part of the normal checkout process. In the US, I find just using a credit card is a bit easier even if I know a store accepts mobile payments.
Something like WeChat really isn't like cards though. It's more like cash, cards and bank transfers in one. Like if most everyone would accept Paypal for everything without fees and it was integrated everywhere (web, store, phone, chat etc).
