Do you trust SaaS software made by China teams?

Question

Just stating a fact that I observed - teams that are based in China cannot easily get people's trust, especially when they are selling to large enterprises who care about data security and compliance. Is the country the team is based in part of how you make the decision? If so how can a company prove theirselves to gain your trust.

solardev · Accepted Answer

I wouldn't use a Chinese business service, mostly for geopolitical reasons. China may decide to block Western users at any time, or the US may decide to block Chinese servers at any time. It's volatile.
And there's concerns about the Great Firewall, CCP ownership of all your data and assets, cultural and ethical differences (in regards to privacy, piracy, IP, etc.), censorship and wiretapping, VPN blocking... it's a lot of overhead that's hard to justify. It's just matter of time before you piss off some official and get in trouble. And if they ever invade Taiwan, oof, it's gonna be a real mountain of headaches. Just not worth it. Even if China does nothing hostile, the US will keep using them as a scapegoat for all our domestic problems because it's easier to blame them than ourselves.
I don't think there's anything a Chinese team could do to earn trust, short of moving out of that country and reforming the business elsewhere (like how Jetbrains left Russia after Ukraine). It's really got nothing to do with the team, but two superpowers approaching a cold war.
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With games and movies though, I guess it's not as big a deal. I still don't like that China owns so much of our entertainment sector (between Tencent owning many Western studios and much of Hollywood being Chinese owned now), but whatever, that's just entertainment.

comprev · Answer

The laws within the country by which the product operates - and stores data - might not be compatible with regulations in which the customer must operate.
The legal headache for a US/EU company to use a SaaS product from China would not be worth the cost and risk.
It's not about the company or teams trying to prove trustworthy.

farouqaldori · Answer

I don't necessarily mistrust Chinese SaaS products, though I find Chinese products to follow a design paradigm that is outdated from a UI/UX perspective.Also, in general, Chinese products tend to be slow which is understandable if the servers are located in China.

leros · Answer

I wouldn't use a Chinese SaaS simply out of fear that it might cause one my customers to not use my service. There are many Chinese things I would use but not SaaS software.

farseer · Answer

There are SaaS companies from China and Russia that register and open their head office in US with token sales staff and retain the rest of their core engineering and management back home. You might not even notice it. Case in point: Bitrix24 is primarily a Russian company.