BYD and Google

BYD and Google, Chinese battery company and US Internet giant, anything worth comparing? I would say, they are alike "from inside the bone". They both did something counter-my-intuition. If you are in the IT industry you probably know some of these names: GFS (Google File System), MapReduce, BigTable, or in broader term, the Google Platform. The old me used to have the idea of "trusting the professionals". Why didn't Google buy expensive, neat-looking "professional" servers and software from IBM, which indicate "professional and high quality"? Why did all those in-house, "shanzhai" products turn out to be huge successes?

Recently when I read the stories of BYD, it took my surprise that it has some very similar strategies as Google. Instead of buying professional battery and car manufacturing equipments from Japanese giants, it made ALOT of in-house, semi-auto equipments. This is seen as a fundamental factor for the success of BYD.

While I still couldn't fully understand this, one of my thoughts is that technologies are not seperated from each other by very solid walls. Once you know the ABC, the rest is common wisdom (read my recent paper on prefetching, haha). So we shouldn't be too afraid of experts in other areas, you can be one too...