Topics: Agora• Developer• Global by Nature•

What Does Agora ($API) Do?

(An audio, live-discussion version of this post can be found on the Interconnected YouTube channel): Agora is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company for developers to build apps with real-time audio and video capabilities. As a high-growth developer-focused firm, it’s a company I’ve been

Topics: Antitrust• Alibaba• Google•

Google, Alibaba, Global Antitrust Standard

People love a “missing billionaire” story, even when there isn’t one. That’s what many Western media outlets and some “Substack experts” have been hotly discussing lately: “Where is Jack Ma?” As Alibaba’s stock price gyrates, all this reminds me of was

Topics: Alibaba• Antitrust• Top Articles•

Alibaba and Antitrust with Chinese Characteristics

I had planned to take time off during this Christmas week and enjoy the rustic island of Moloka‘i. But the announcement of an antitrust probe on Alibaba, dropped on Christmas Eve (and consequently dropped Alibaba’s stock price by 13%), is too interesting

Topics: Developer• Global by Nature• Top Articles•

Global by Nature (Part I): Developers

I write Interconnected as a place to help me think and a space for anyone to think with me. One of the big themes I’ve been thinking about is what will the next phase of globalization look like and what kind of people,

Topics: Jack Ma• Alibaba• IPO•

Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit Speech

Below is my unofficial translation of Jack Ma’s speech on October 24 at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai based on a Chinese transcript, with minor edits for clarity and speechifying. To read some of my deep dive analysis on the speech and

Topics: Huawei• Open Source• China•

300 Years: Huawei's Open Source Strategy

Lost in the fog of TikTok was an important announcement: Huawei open sourced its homemade mobile operating system, HarmonyOS, now dubbed OpenHarmony. This announcement flew under the radar, but has far-reaching implications to not just the future of mobile technology, but also how that

Topics: Open Source• China• Gitee•

Can You "Nationalize" Open Source?

The impending ban or acquisition of TikTok and ByteDance’s lawsuit against the Trump administration have sucked up all the oxygen in the US-China tech zeitgeist. A gigantic IPO, possibly the largest in the world, by Ant Financials is also looming on the horizon.

Topics: Cloud Industry• Alibaba• Tencent•

Where Can the Chinese Internet Go?

With all the executive orders, CFIUS edicts, and additional sanctions placed on Chinese tech companies by the US, it’s hard to see where these companies - and by extension the Chinese Internet - can expand to. Certainly, China’s own economy will continue

Topics: ByteDance• Regulation• Open Source•

A Framework to (Dis)trust and Verify TikTok

Last week, the New York Times tech columnist, Kevin Roose, wrote a well-reasoned piece arguing that the U.S. government should not ban TikTok, but use it as an example and opportunity to build a stronger regulatory framework around tech products. (To my surprise,

Topics: Tesla• China• Semiconductor•

Tesla, China, the “Tech Cold-War”

Tesla may well be the biggest driver of China’s journey towards technological self-reliance, as the “Tech Cold War” between the U.S. and China deepens. This observation wasn’t obvious to me until I listened (three times) to Elon Musk’s Q&

Topics: RISC-V• China• Open Source•

RISC-V, China, Nightingales

Last weekend, I read a long, epic piece of techlore that chronicled the fierce and bitter rivalry between TSMC and Samsung in their fight to become the world’s number 1 chip foundry, which stretched back three decades and continues today. Among the many

Topics: ByteDance• Open Source• China•

Can ByteDance Build Trust?

As I noted in Interconnected Weekly, the most interesting news item from last week was the revelation that ByteDance is cutting its China-based engineers data access to TikTok and its other international products, reported by PingWest. While many Chinese tech companies have global ambitions,

Topics: Meta• Geopolitics• Zoom•

Why Write A Bilingual English-Chinese Newsletter

It’s been three months since I published my first post on Interconnected. Since then, I’ve been writing articles on a wide range of technology and business topics, twice a week in both English and Chinese. In this post, I want to take

Topics: Cloud Industry• COVID-19• Stock Market•

Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

Two weeks into the first Wall Street earnings season that includes COVID-19 data, most big tech companies that operate a large cloud unit have reported results. Judging from the growth rate and revenue numbers alone, the cloud seems to be weathering the coronavirus storm

Topics: Zoom• Oracle• Cloud Industry•

Why Zoom Chose Oracle

Zoom picked Oracle as a new cloud provider. This news caught some people by surprise. In hindsight, there are signs that this agreement was in the works, aggressively pushed forward by Oracle, and punctuated by its founder Larry Ellison’s uncharacteristic Youtube video 15

Topics: Cloud Industry• Azure• AWS•

Azure Cracks, AWS Strong: COVID-19 Stress Tests the Cloud

One of the most frequently discussed topics related to COVID-19’s multi-dimensional impact is the dramatic increase in “work from home” (WFH). A popular extension of that discussion is the various tools, applications, and technologies that are being used to make work from home.

Topics: Cloud Industry• Facebook• Open Source•

Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business?

I’ve written many posts on the global public cloud ecosystem lately, from in-depth comparisons of the big ones: AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, to a few of the less prominent but still very competitive ones: IBM, Oracle, Tencent. All of these

Topics: Cloud Industry• Alibaba• AWS•

Stress Test the Cloud: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP

I’ve been writing a lot about the public cloud industry lately. In my previous two posts, I touched on Alibaba Cloud’s earnings vis-a-vis Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s GCP to assess their relative size, and a fairly comprehensive overview of the

Topics: Cloud Industry• AWS• Azure•

Where Are The Data Centers: AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Azure, GCP

Earlier this week, I wrote about whether Alibaba Cloud should be ignored in the larger cloud computing industry conversation, when its growth and earnings are comparable to that of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A public cloud is an extraordinarily complex, deeply technical, and capital