Steve Jobs is great at making "luxury" products and marketing them. Marketing high-end products is not what China is good at. China is good at other things, like actually building the products that Jobs markets.
But, the article isn't about who will be the next Steve Jobs - it is about who is going to fund the next Steve Jobs. Given China's economic growth, there is a good chance that the next Steve jobs could be funded by investors from/in China.
You're thinking of Steve Jobs circa 2008, who makes pretty white luxury boxes.
But the Steve Jobs that counts for is Steve Jobs circa 1978, the Steve Jobs that was making cheap ugly boxes that plugged into your TV. (And of course it was really Woz, but let's leave that aside for the moment.) The point is that Apple started and became big by being a low-end company, and only turned high-end once they were already huge.
Hmm. The Apple I/II wasn't just a cheap and ugly knock-off of another product though, it was an innovative machine that changed the way computers were built. It challenged the existing notions of what a computer had to be and how much it had to cost.
The closest analogue I can think of in recent years is the Eee PC, which interestingly comes not from China but from Taiwan. (Support for the notion that innovation comes more easily in democracies? It's only one data point, but still...)
"... But the Steve Jobs that counts for is Steve Jobs circa 1978, the Steve Jobs that was making cheap ugly boxes that plugged into your TV ..."
The (production) Apples you refer to have never really been ugly nor cheap. If I remember they had sleek design with easy to get at insides so you could add slots. They always seemed to be on, around the magical $2-3K dollar mark no matter what country you lived in. Who needs monitors when you could use a spare tv? I remember getting my first PC and asking if they had a card to support TV and got blank stares... "no you need a high quality CGA screen instead or an EGA for $$$ more"
Not historically. China used to be the go-to place for fine textiles and luxury in general. There's even a saying in Spanish - "un lujo asiático" (an Asian luxury). It describes hyperbolic opulence.
"The way things are going" ... someone must be watching TV news. :)
While America is having problems in the housing and financial sectors, it still has the best environments for fostering innovation. Can you name any new industries created in China in the last 20 years?
China's main advantages are a huge (and increasingly skilled), labor force, excellent infrastructure, an eroding cost advantage, a great environment for foreign investment, and a government that can get things done. Which one of those things is critical to creating a revolutionary company? And which of them are unavailable to entrepreneurs in the US?
If I had to be on the next big industry to be created outside the US, I'd bet on India rather than China.
One huge impediment of starting up in China is the legal hurdle. YC tries to help young hackers navigate the relatively easy legal formalities in the States, but China is ten times worse. Not only does it require much more money, but it also often requires political connections. Young hackers cannot even think about doing a startup without first considering funding and finding connections.
Also, working for Microsoft or Google, you can make very very good salary (perhaps multitude more than your folks), so if you're a capable young hacker, the typical path is going corporate or study abroad for grad school.
Before we can get a Chinese Jobs, we need a Chinese PG to insulate the potential Jobses from the legal mess, provide key connections and offer validation to family and friends.
Historical bias? When China creates a new industry rather than improving and reducing the cost structure of existing industries, then I'll be a believer.
BTW, Are we talking about two different things? The article was talking about venture investment in general (which you seem to be talking about) but the title (and your original comment) was about "Who will fund the next Steve Jobs?". While I think China's rise in wealth, middle class, political influence, etc are nearly unstoppable, I doubt that the next Steve Jobs will come from there (or if he is Chinese, he will work in the US).
My interpretation of "the next Steve Jobs" is:
1) starts a many billion dollar company
2) that company creates (ie Apple and the PC) or matures (Google and search) a big, new industry
3) retains control of that company and is the global face of that company (ie Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Phil Knight, Oprah, Larry + Sergei, Buffet, Bezos, heck even Astor, Carnegie, JP Morgan, Hughes, etc)
I can't make any useful predictions about where someone like that would come from because I can't predict the new industry, but the safe bet for those criteria would still be the US.
4) success of personality and company make them widely known and recognized outside of their industry and their country
China is the next big empire and money is starting to flow more and more into China. In US, there is a credit crunch and in China, there is a dearth of companies to fund. Clearly, it's easier to fix the latter. I see China eclipsing US entrepreneurship scene in less than 10 years.
Sure, number of companies may be easy to fix with population and money, but the number of good companies is a lot harder. Just ask all the VCs with fat funds and sleepy portfolios.
They'll doubtless continue to do well - that's a good thing - but they have plenty of issues of their own to deal with, including ethnic minorities, and a big democracy deficit that will likely become more irritating to a rising middle class.
I tend to agree with this. What matters to the "rising middle class" isn't so much democracy or not, but how much individual freedom and lifestyle they can have. Once the sustenance issue is solved, people want higher ends - more personal freedom, rights, information, opportunities, expression, etc. That being said, most Chinese are still poor and historically, it's been the peasant class that has caused the most problems for governments. It'll be interesting to see how the Chinese government balances the needs of the two groups.
well its pretty simple really, China is going in overdrive towards having the largest middle class population in the world. In the article I read I think it said something like 5 years before there are more of Chinese Middle Class, than there are in United States.
So you have a very large market that continues to grow(unlike USA), of people who are willing to spend the extra money for Apple like status symbols, who are VERY nationalistic, and who have no problem buying U.S. knock offs. And since chinese have no problem copy pasting ideas/products, it would make sense that the uPod, uPhone, uNextProductFromApple will be copied, which will then fly off the shelf, and will make the chinese version of Steve Jobs rich.
But if anyone can produce knockoffs, how will any one of them grow a giant company with global reach and influence? That's what I think of when I think of Jobs. It's like the difference between being Toyota and being the company that manufactures their dashboards. You can definitely get rich owning a dashboard company, but you're not going to gain Jobs' influence and wealth.
How is "middle class" defined in that classification?
In the US, for instance, you'd need to earn at least, say, (picking a random number without wanting to start arguments and well-it-depends-where-you-live threads) $35,000 a year to be 'middle class', whereas China's per capita income is still less than $2000.
There are a lot of side effects of the burgeoning middle class, and I'm not sure it can continue at this rate unchecked. However, it's true that more and more Chinese will be able to buy nicer things.
