To be fair, best of best Chinese programmers, I see, a considerable of them, come to US for better pay...
But could you elaborate on your claim a little bit? Amazon is not as incompetent as you might think, they have cutting edge logistics and mechanics in terms of delivery, the degree of automation is both futuristic and mind-blowing. Also AWS is definitely the market leading player, Aliyun outside of China has zero chance going against it.
Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon employee, visit the fulfillment center once.
The vast majority of people in China can't come to the US no matter how good of programmers they might be due to immigration reasons. Even if that weren't a barrier, the vast majority of Chinese people don't have the language skills to work in the US. As with many other places, the best coders often aren't the best language students. Think of some of the most well-known and respected programmers in the US. How many of them could function professionally in another language? Very few excluding immigrants.
A lot of the best engineers in the US don't want to work for a huge company. They want to join a start-up or start their own. This isn't usually the case in China. Kaifu Lee has struggled greatly trying to get top talent to consider anything other than a large company like Alibaba or Tencent (or for the government). The Chinese people you meet who are working in the US aren't a very representative segment of the market.
I wasn't speaking specifically of AWS. The territory occupied by Chinese companies is divvied up a bit differently than in the US. Shengda (a gaming company) was a relatively early cloud provider for example, and Alibaba is late to that market. On the other hand, Alibaba also does a variety of things that Amazon doesn't, and its e-commerce is beating Amazon in multiple countries that aren't China.
Alibaba's pace of expansion in developing countries is brisk, they dominate Chinese e-commerce much more thoroughly than Amazon does US e-commerce (80% to ~30%) and most importantly their business model is less capitally intensive than Amazon's. In fact, according to their annual reports, their net margins are clocking it at over 40%!
The one possible caveat that will be interesting to watch is Amazon India. That model is much closer to how Alibaba operates and could be key to winning in other international markets.
Amazon and Alibaba have a lot of of similarities and I don't at all think Amazon is incompetent. Amazon is terrifyingly competent, but just has some problems around reputation amongst prospective employees, partners and pretty much everyone except for customers. Alibaba is also terrifyingly competent, but loved and even leaner and even more efficient.
But could you elaborate on your claim a little bit? Amazon is not as incompetent as you might think, they have cutting edge logistics and mechanics in terms of delivery, the degree of automation is both futuristic and mind-blowing. Also AWS is definitely the market leading player, Aliyun outside of China has zero chance going against it.
Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon employee, visit the fulfillment center once.