“Apple's announcement vis-à-vis China is a non-event. The payment items that Apple introduced are not innovative at all compared to China. It’s not a breakthrough announcement,” said venture capitalist Gary Rieschel of Qiming Ventures on Silicon Dragon Talk. “None of the companies competing with Apple in China need to be afraid.” He pointed out that Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent already have payment features for mobile.
While not earning the highest marks for creativity advancements, the new iPhones “do reinforce Apple as best in class in phones,” said Rieschel who is based in Shanghai but travels regularly to Silicon Valley. Customers upgrading to the new iPhones will keep Apple’s revenue stream going upward since at least half of the iPhones in use are two years old, he added.
Chris Evdemon, a San Francisco-based partner at Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works, pointed out that he’s starting to see a reverse tide of innovation coming into the U.S. from China, particularly in the consumer mobile segment. “Chinese mobile applications have leapfrogged their western counterparts, and that’s because the developers are dealing with probably the toughest consumer market in the world who want things for free and have little loyalty.” On the flip side, Chinese developers are behind their U.S. counterparts in the B2B enterprise market, said Evdemon, who until last year worked in Beijing.
The flow of ideas between China and the U.S. is ongoing due to the large number of Chinese engineers who are working in Silicon Valley companies. “They are monitoring what is going on back at their homes in China,” he observed.
Rieschel pointed out that the lag time between innovations crossing the Pacific is the speed of the Internet.
