Tencent Biography 1998-2016: Evolution of Chinese Internet Companies
Chapter 1 Preface: Who Can Freeze an Erupting Volcano
Chapter 1 Preface: Who Can Freeze an Erupting Volcano
There are cracks in everything, that's where the light gets in.
—Leonardo Cohen (Canadian singer and poet), The Book of Longing
The internet economy is built on a radical social assumption that modern society is inevitably moving towards transparency.
—David Kirkpatrick (American financial writer)
"Let's shake together, one, two, three, shake!" There was the sound of a rifle being loaded in the air in late autumn in the south, "click, click", crisp and sexy.
It was the evening of November 2011. Ma Huateng and I were standing at the entrance of the Venice Hotel in Shenzhen. Before we parted, he taught me to download WeChat and use the "shake" function to "follow each other".At this time, the famous war between Tencent and Qihoo 11 has just settled, and Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are fighting for users.Ma Huateng told me that WeChat is a new product launched by Tencent. It already has more than 360 million users, and 3000 new users are added every day. "Because of WeChat, the war on Weibo is over." These were the last words he said to me, in a low tone that could not be doubted.
Two months before the meeting with Ma Huateng, the other two founders of Tencent, Zhang Zhidong and Chen Yidan, went to Hangzhou. We drank tea under the royal tree in Longjing Village. They hoped that I would write a history of Tencent. "We guarantee the independence of non-interference in creation, and can arrange for any employee to be interviewed." I got such a promise.
In the next few years, I interviewed more than 60 people, including executives at the vice president level, general managers of some departments, and retired and resigned personnel. Industry practitioners, observers and competitors of Tencent.
I have never spent such a long time and so much energy researching a company-and I probably won't again, and what's worse, I haven't been able to fully find its "growth code", or even in some respects. , I was troubled by more intense doubts.The Tencent presented to me is like an evolving organism. We don't know much about its past experience, and we are attracted and coerced by its ongoing evolution.
For a long time, Tencent was a secret in the Chinese Internet world.
It keeps its doors tightly closed, neither accepting in-depth interviews from the media, nor politely refusing research from academic circles.Ma Huateng seldom accepts interviews and rarely attends public events. He is like an extremely low-key "king", avoiding the limelight.
Even more startlingly, even Tencent itself is casual about its own history.Its file management can be described as "terrible". Many original documents have not been preserved, and almost all important internal meetings have no written records.People from Tencent told me that Tencent is a company managed by e-mail, and many historical details are scattered in the memories and private mailboxes of the participants.When I started creating, I was very surprised by this scene, and the people from Tencent said to me very easily: "In the Internet industry, everyone's eyes are fixed on the future. Once yesterday is past, it is meaningless." It’s done.” Most of Tencent’s executives are from technical backgrounds, they are very sensitive to data, but they are at a loss for the details I need.Many important occasions left no images - whether photos or videos.
In the process of research and creation, I have been entangled by three questions:
——Why is it that Tencent, rather than other Internet companies, has become the company with the highest market value, the largest number of users, and the strongest profitability in China today?Is its success the result of a strategic plan, or an accidental product?
——Why did Tencent encounter unprecedented doubts, and how did it form the "accusation" that it faced imitation but not innovation, closed but not open?How did the mild-mannered Ma Huateng become a "public enemy" in the eyes of many people?
——What are the similarities and differences between the Internet in China and the Internet in the United States?Is the prosperity of the former a long-term follow-up journey, or does it have its own oriental way of survival?
These three questions come from the chaotic past and clearly point to the future.I must honestly admit that they are too much of a challenge for a writer.
In any field of cultural creation, all practitioners have always faced the double dilemma of "describing the facts" and "discovering the essence".Da Vinci once said when discussing the painter's mission: "A good painter should describe two main things, that is, the person and his thought intention. The first thing is easy to do, but the second thing is very difficult. The philosopher Wittgenstein expressed a similar view in a lecture in 1934, when he said: "It is easy to know what we say, but very difficult to know why we say it."
The creation of corporate history also faces the dilemma described by Da Vinci and Wittgenstein: we need to sort out the growth process of the company and state the "ideological intention" of its occurrence.In the era of the industrial revolution, researchers did a good job. Whether it is Peter Drucker's "Concept of the Corporation" or Alfred Chandler Jr.'s "History of the Evolution of American Corporations", they are very clear and comprehensive. Visionary description of the corporate landscape of their time.In China, our generation of financial writers is also very good at creating corporate histories of Vanke, Haier, Lenovo and other companies.
However, this scene has suddenly become difficult in the Internet age.In recent years, the creation of the history of Internet companies by American financial writers, such as Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs Biography", Brad Stone's "Sweeping Catch: Bezos and the Age of Amazon", David Kirk Bestsellers such as Patrick's "The Facebook Effect" are not considered masterpieces.This is not because of the lack of talent of this generation of writers, but because there are still huge uncertainties in the fission of the Internet economy, which has caused difficulties in observation and definition.It's like no photographer, painter or reporter can accurately describe or freeze an erupting volcano.
Therefore, in the past 5+ years, my creation has repeatedly stalled, and in some parts of this book, you can read my hesitation and puzzlement.In the later stage of creation, I gave up the "grand narrative" and "principle structure", and only focused more energy on the excavation and presentation of details.
A few days ago, a philosophy professor friend of mine came to Hangzhou.During the chat, I talked about the troubles in creating "Tencent Biography".He comforted me by quoting the Russian thinker Bakhtin, a master of deconstruction who is famous for his grotesques: "There has not been anything conclusive in the world, and no one has said the final conclusion for or about the world. The world is open and free, all that remains for the future, and always will be.”[1]
Hearing this, I couldn't help but smile knowingly.It seems that the world is originally like this, the Internet is like this, and so is Tencent.
In this case, allow me to slowly tell the story of Tencent in my own way, starting from a teenager who saw Halley’s Comet on a spring night in 1986.
Entrepreneurship: 1998—2004
"How could the shy and quiet Ma Huateng become an entrepreneur?" All of Ma Huateng's middle school and university classmates and teachers who were interviewed by me expressed such emotion without exception.Even Ma Huateng himself did not expect that he would create a "big enterprise".He and his entrepreneurial partner Zhang Zhidong had planned that by the third year, the number of employees would reach 18.When OICQ, that is, QQ in the future, went online, they set the user limit to 10.Ma Huateng tried to sell the company several times, but no one was willing to take over.
However, the luckiest thing for Ma Huateng is that he is in a "big industry" and "big era".Richard Tedlow, a professor at Harvard Business School, described the commercial significance of railroads and telegraphs: "Any new development that breaks down the constraints of space and time on people, products, and information will have a huge impact on the way commerce operates. In the history of mankind, the Internet economy that emerged in the 20s is obviously a commercial invention as important as the railway and the telegraph, which restructured the way information is disseminated.And China, after 90 years of reform and opening up, has boarded the first train of the Internet economy-if the United States is the front of this train, then China is the second car behind.We can say that China is the country that has benefited the most from the Internet movement.
Ma Huateng is the third generation of entrepreneurs after the reform and opening up. Unlike the previous peasants running enterprises, "people on the edge of the city" doing business, and officials going overseas, Ma Huateng founded Tencent. The greater driving force came from his interest. All the enthusiasm.Shenzhen is the third city in China to provide Internet access services, and Ma Huateng is one of the first hundreds of Internet users in the country, and has managed a well-known site.Ma Huateng and four other entrepreneurial companions were all born in urban middle-class families, four of them were middle school and college classmates, and they have a religious fanaticism for the Internet—not money itself.
Alfred Chandler, Jr. put forward the famous "four stages of growth" theory in his research on the history of the early American business enterprises, that is, accumulation of resources, rational use of resources, continuous growth and rationalization of expanding resources. use.Looking back at the early growth history of Tencent, we can clearly see the trajectory of this evolution: the accumulation of user resources has been realized through QQ, and the profit of user resources has been realized with an innovative profit model.However, this is not an inevitable process.
From the mid-20s to the bursting of the Internet bubble in 90, all Chinese Internet companies were imitations of the American style, including news portals, mailboxes, search, and instant messaging tools, without exception.Tencent has not been favored by the industry for a long time. The big reason is that its imitation object - ICQ developed by the Israelis and later acquired by America Online (AOL) has never achieved profitability, even until I wrote this At the time of the book, there was no other instant messaging product that had found a good way to make money.Therefore, Ma Huateng must do some things right, many of which Americans have not done.
One of the things that got it right: Tencent’s imitation of ICQ was based on micro-innovations.It transferred information retention from the client to the server, thereby adapting to the Internet environment in China at that time, and successively invented novel functions such as breakpoint transmission, group chat, and screenshots.From the case of Tencent, it can be seen that the ability and speed of applied innovation of Chinese Internet practitioners is not inferior to that of any international counterparts. This feature is completely different from the scene in the fields of electronic products, automobiles, medicine, and mechanical equipment.
The second thing to do right: In addition to micro-innovations in technology, the commercial application of the Internet is also affected by objective conditions such as a region's network environment, user habits, payment systems, and national policies.Therefore, local companies often have a greater advantage.Tencent put forward the concept of "user experience" very early, and it creatively launched service innovations such as "membership service", virtual item sales, Q coins, etc., which gradually transformed QQ from a warm instant messaging tool to an instant messaging tool. A "acquaintance-like" online social platform.In this sense, Tencent is one of the earliest social network testers in the world.
The third thing to do right: Ma Huateng began to seek the support of the capital market shortly after starting his business.Fortunately, when he was looking for money all over the world, venture capital had already entered China. IDG, Yingke, and MIH played an important role in the early development of Tencent.Tencent is also the second Chinese Internet company to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Another phenomenon that has never been taken seriously is that China's value-added services in the field of mobile communications started much earlier than that of the United States.As early as the end of 2000, the newly established China Mobile Company launched the "Monternet" service, which provided mobile phone users with various information value-added services through SMS push, which caused a unique phenomenon of SMS explosion. The value-added service providers (SPs) of this project have all obtained astonishing profits.Tencent was once the largest partner of "Monternet" and therefore the biggest beneficiary.In June 2001, Tencent became the first Internet company to achieve profitability in an unexpected way.
From its founding at the end of 1998 to its listing in June 2004, Tencent completed the whole process from product model imitation, application innovation to profit model exploration during this tortuous entrepreneurial period.This is also a microcosm of Chinese Internet companies.After the global Internet bubble burst in 6, Chinese Internet companies took a different path from their American counterparts in terms of profit model and user value mining. In 2000, there was a historic divergence of the Internet between China and the United States.Over the next two years, local companies "won" all international companies in almost all areas such as portals, search, e-commerce, email services, online games, and instant messaging. A completely different, Chinese-style Internet world is increasingly revealed his outline.
Ma Huateng did not show all his qualities as an entrepreneur during his entrepreneurial period.He seized the opportunity that was seen as an obstacle by others, but the ability he formed seems to be a "armor" with fatal flaws: the profit model of over-reliance on "Monternet" has been questioned, and at the same time, almost all Internet companies Both launched their own instant messaging tools.The challenge is like a dangerous and towering railing, standing in front of Little Ma.If we say that Tencent helped those young people find their "identity" in a virtual world, it is dramatic that for quite a long time, Tencent itself, like a rapidly growing child, curiously asked: who is it?
Attack: 2005—2009
Since its listing in 2004, Tencent has released quarterly financial reports, semi-annual reports, and annual reports on time. After reading these documents carefully, I finally came to a frustrating conclusion: you will never be able to read them from the financial statements. Understand an Internet company.
Thomas Watson, who founded IBM, said a well-known saying: "Machines should work, and humans should think." This should be the most advanced thought in the period of industrial civilization, but in the era of the information revolution, it is still behind.For Internet companies, there is no boundary between machines and humans. You need to redefine what is a machine and an asset, and you need to re-plan technology input and its output cycle, even for the meaning of strategy, identification of opponents, and even accounting. Laws and so on, carry out "value revaluation".
The capital market has always looked at Tencent after its listing with a very cold eye.From its listing in 2004 to around 2007, Tencent has entered a three-year "strategic adjustment period". This does not seem to be a process in which the strategy is determined, but a process in which the strategy is gradually presented through continuous adjustment.At the beginning, the starting point of the strategic adjustment was to avoid a disaster: At that time, nearly 3% of Tencent's operating income came from China Mobile's "Monternet" business, and the latter issued a "notice to clean up and rectify" the day before Tencent went public. ".
In the subsequent adjustments, Tencent's various risky behaviors were full of controversy and gunpowder.
In 2005, when he was left out, Ma Huateng put forward a new strategic proposition of "online life" and made major adjustments in the organization and talent structure. More than 30 chaotic departments have been reorganized to clearly present 5 business modules: wireless value-added business, Internet value-added business, interactive entertainment business, enterprise development business and network media business.Liu Chiping, Xiong Minghua and other senior executives who had served in multinational companies entered the decision-making level.They brought a standardized operating concept and reshaped Tencent's early talent structure full of grassroots entrepreneurship. This move caused huge waves within Tencent.
In the main battlefield of instant messaging, Tencent does not actively advocate "interconnection and interoperability", which is considered by some colleagues to be contrary to the Internet spirit of "making the world flat".Tencent repelled the encirclement and suppression of QQ by portal companies such as Netease, Sina, and Yahoo, especially the battle against Microsoft MSN. It not only resolved MSN's strong attack, but even introduced three core cadres from the MSN China R&D Center into the company, demonstrating the integrity of China. The combat capability of Internet companies in the local market is a landmark event.
Qzone, launched by Tencent in 2005, was first conceived as a Chinese version of My Space and later as a Facebook follower.In fact, Qzone has an operation and profit model completely different from the above two.It further magnifies the gold-absorbing ability of virtual props, and creatively stimulates the consumption enthusiasm of Chinese netizens with the monthly subscription model.In the next four years, Qzone implemented the "three major battles" against 4.com, Renren and Kaixin in stages, thus becoming the biggest winner in the big wave of socialization.
Still in 2005, Tencent was determined to become the number one overlord of online games.At the time, this seemed to be an almost impossible task: Beijing Lianzhong occupied more than 2009% of the market share in the casual chess and card category; and in the field of large-scale online games, Ding Lei of Guangzhou NetEase and Chen Tianqiao of Shanghai Shanda were like two goalkeepers. Controlling the door to enter, they have all ascended to the throne of "China's richest man" because of the success of online games.However, it took only one and a half years for Tencent to make its chess and card game players surpass Lianzhong.By [-], Tencent's online game revenue surpassed Shanda's.Before the rise of WeChat, online games became Tencent's biggest "cash cow", accounting for about half of all revenue, and Tencent was therefore "become" an online entertainment company.
Surprisingly, there is also Tencent's performance on the portal.In the face of the three traditional news portals - Sina, Sohu and NetEase, Tencent quietly overtook them with devious tactics.Liu Shengyi redefines the rules of online advertising, and has won the approval of advertisers, and the huge increase in traffic on the QQ mini homepage has made all opponents helpless.
Ma Huateng has also dabbled in e-commerce and search.He first launched Paipai and Tenpay, an online payment system, and then Soso.On these two battlefields, he encountered strong resistance from Jack Ma and Robin Li, which also laid the groundwork for the future pattern of the "New Big Three".
In the history of China's Internet, 2008 is a landmark year.In this year, China's Internet population surpassed that of the United States for the first time historically, and in the wave of Social Network Service (SNS), the three major news portals trying to complete the transformation in the blog mode could not find reliable information. Companies such as Qzone, Baidu Space, Renren and 51 have sprung up with new SNS models, and the portal era has come to an end.
Tencent's adjustments and attacks during this period are very risky, and it seems to go against the traditional concept of specialization—even inconsistent with Ma Huateng's early remarks.In just a few years, Tencent has become an increasingly unfamiliar "big monster". It has risen in many fields at the same time. No matter in China or in the United States, there is no comparable case.When it went public in 2004, Tencent was just a rapidly growing but marginalized instant messaging service provider. It advanced to the central theater very smoothly, and completed the territory expansion from the client to the web very smoothly.By 2008, Tencent had 4 entrances with a level of [-] million—QQ, Qzone, QQ Games and Tencent.com (QQ.com), which is unique among global Internet companies.The energetic Ma Huateng attacked everywhere, made enemies on all sides, and in almost all fields, he was not given any service, and every battle was fierce, and finally won a nickname of "public enemy".
Even Tencent itself doesn't know how to define itself.For quite some time, the southern company, with an average employee age of 26, has not been prepared for the victories it has achieved.Ma Huateng has avoided communicating with the media all the year round—before 2010, he had never had a meal with the editor-in-chief of any financial media.For financial reporters across China, the two most difficult entrepreneurs to interview are both in Shenzhen. One is Huawei's Ren Zhengfei, and the other is Ma Huateng.His low-key stance further added to the mystery, and he was also known as the "Shadow Leader".Ma Huateng later admitted that, on a certain factual level, he actually “didn’t know how to tell the Tencent story to others.”
It is not the first time that a creator is very strange to the history he created.
"Growth is always fragile", Peter Drucker's warning will soon be fulfilled in Tencent, which encountered unprecedented doubts and attacks after 2010, and all these seem to be the inevitable result of vague definitions.
Giants: 2010—2016
There have been three "enclosure movements" on the Chinese Internet.The first time was around 1999, with the news portal as the basic format, the "Big Three" of Sina, Sohu and Netease emerged. After 2007, there was a big reshuffle with the application platform as the basic format. The portals fell into a "model dilemma" and showed a trend of weak growth. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent respectively started from search, e-commerce and instant messaging tools. Starting in three directions, they completed the reverse surpassing around 2010 and became the "New Big Three", which are collectively called BAT.However, since 2012, with the sudden emergence of smartphones, the focus of Internet users has shifted rapidly from the computer terminal to the mobile terminal, and thus the third "enclosure movement" has occurred.
Tencent is the biggest beneficiary of the second "enclosure movement".In the mid-year report in 2010, Tencent's semi-annual profit was more than the sum of Baidu, Alibaba, Sina and Sohu, and it became "the enemy of the whole industry".Questions and attacks on it have been escalating before this.By the end of 4, all the "anger" broke out in the 2010Q war. Although it was in a favorable position at the factual level - which was proved by later judicial decisions, Tencent's embarrassment in the wave of public opinion was obvious to all.
The 3Q war changed Tencent's strategy, and even partially changed Ma Huateng's character. He announced that Tencent had entered the "half-year strategic transformation preparation period" and promised to increase the intensity of opening up.In the following period of time, Tencent held 10 consecutive diagnostic meetings, held the first developer conference, and successively opened up Qzone and QQ application platforms.
Interestingly, the 3Q war did not bring any substantive subversion to China's Internet industry. On the contrary, it heralded the end of the PC (Personal Computer, personal computer) era.Soon, all competitors will enter the new mobile Internet battlefield.A new era has begun.In the beginning, Sina Weibo took the lead and seemed to have the opportunity to "change everything". However, due to the unexpected appearance of Zhang Xiaolong's team, Ma Huateng was very lucky to achieve a reversal.
The three years from January 2011 to January 1 belonged to the "solo dancer era" of WeChat for the big stage of the Internet in China: it started from nothing, rose from the ground, with a staggering gesture Become the most influential social tool star.It not only builds another platform-level product besides QQ, but also grabs Tencent's first "platform ticket" for the mobile Internet, and allows Tencent to truly integrate into the life and work of China's mainstream consumer groups.
The WeChat official account is a true Chinese innovation. It uses a de-platform approach to allow media professionals and businesses to gain vertical penetration in the social environment.In the past 4 years, the number of official accounts opened has exceeded 2000 million. Millions of companies have opened their own subscription accounts or service accounts. Almost all media publish their content on the official account platform, and more of young entrepreneurs started strange and novel self-media experiments.Since then, everyone trying to succeed in the Chinese market has had to ask themselves one question: What do I have to do with WeChat?
Tencent's strategic layout in the capital market should be attributed to Liu Chiping, Tencent's president and former Goldman Sachs man.Beginning in 2011, Tencent changed its previous investment strategy and began to use capital means to achieve alliance-style opening up.The rise of WeChat gave Liu Chiping a bargaining chip to negotiate with all the Internet giants who are hungry for traffic. Tencent successively bought shares in companies such as Dianping, JD.com and 58.com, and launched the largest merger and acquisition competition in history with the aggressive Alibaba.In the duopoly-style combat readiness contest, Tencent and Alibaba built high walls and dug wide moats, in the words of Ma Huateng, "to contain or restrain the excessive approach of the opponent."
Although still gregarious and reluctant to appear in public, Ma Huateng is quietly changing. Over the past few years, he has given a number of speeches, unfolding visionary views on the future of China's Internet, they are called It was circulated in the circle of public opinion for the "Eight Points of Horse" and "Seven Points of Horse".His idea of "connecting everything" seems to have become an axiom, and the term "Internet+" was adopted in the central government's annual work report.
The character and talents of a founding entrepreneur will ultimately determine the entire personality of the business.Just as Apple has always belonged to Jobs, Tencent only belongs to Ma Huateng in terms of temperament and soul.
In the case of Tencent, we have seen the very individual core competencies formed by Ma Huateng’s team, which I summarize as “Ma Huateng’s seven weapons”, which include:
The first weapon: product minimalism.
Starting from a very small IM (Instant Messaging, instant messaging) tool, Tencent has naturally possessed the concept of "product" from the first day, and believes that "less is the most appropriate" and "Don't make me think! (Don't make me think!)" "Let functions exist in the invisible", Ma Huateng himself is a paranoid practitioner of "detail aesthetics" and "idiotism", which is precocious in China and even the global Internet industry .In the PC era, its advantages were not obvious, but in the mobile Internet era, it has become the most lethal corporate philosophy.Tencent is also a sample of the integration of engineer culture and product manager culture.
The second weapon: user-driven strategy.
As early as 2004, Ma Huateng proposed that Internet companies have three driving forces, namely technology-driven, application-driven, user- and service-driven, and Tencent will focus on the cultivation of the third capability.For quite a long time, the Tencent team has explored and discovered the grasp of the virtual consumption psychology of Chinese users. They have redefined "virtual props" as users' "emotional sustenance".In terms of technology, Tencent has formed a user feedback system based on big data, and has provided many Chinese-style understandings in terms of application tool innovation.
The third weapon: the internal horse racing mechanism.
Almost all innovations in the Internet world have subversive characteristics, and they often burst out at the edge and emerge from insignificant markets.Large, mainstream and successful companies often don't see it.In the 18-year development history of Tencent, several major product innovations that determined its fate, such as QQ Show, Qzone and WeChat, were not the result of top-level research and decision-making, but independent breakthroughs from the middle and grassroots. The horse racing mechanism formed by Ma Huateng internally.
The fourth weapon: trial and error iteration strategy.
Compared with the industrial economy characterized by standardization and precision, the most essential difference of the Internet economy is the rebellion against all perfectionism. "Small steps, iteration, trial and error, and fast running" are the eight-character secrets of success for all Internet companies.It requires the company to form a system completely different from that of the manufacturing industry in terms of R&D, feedback, and iteration.In this regard, Tencent's performance can be described as exemplary.
The fifth weapon: ecological cultivation mode.
As one of the Internet companies with the largest number of employees in the world, Tencent provides Chinese experience in managing very large enterprises.Ma Huateng is a fan of the theory of evolution and runaway theory.In the face of great uncertainty, he tried to make Tencent an ecological organization with blurred boundaries.In the QQ era, he proposed to make the Internet "integrate into life like water and electricity"; around 2013, he further proposed the concepts of "connecting everything" and "Internet +".In the dual expansion of internal and external, Tencent has formed a flexible organization and competition model.
The sixth weapon: the ability to integrate capital.
Tencent was one of the first Chinese Internet companies to obtain venture capital, but it was not until 2011 that it really formed its own investment style.Ma Huateng and Liu Chiping defined Tencent's open capabilities as traffic and capital, transforming and amplifying the former's advantages and strategic assumptions into the latter's driving force.Tencent is one of the largest and most aggressive strategic investors in Chinese Internet companies.
The seventh weapon: focus on the original intention of entrepreneurship.
Ma Huateng, who started his business in the late 20s, is a knowledge-based entrepreneur after the reform and opening up.At the beginning of his entrepreneurial mind, the need to improve the wealth situation gave way to personal interest and passion to transform society.In the past 90 years, Ma Huateng has almost abandoned all public performances, and has been immersed in the product itself, which constitutes his most distinctive professional feature.
Two Internet Worlds: America's, China's
This book records the experience of Tencent's rise, and attempts to reinterpret the twists and turns and uniqueness of China's integration into globalization from the perspective of the Internet.
If the Internet is regarded as a person with flesh and blood and soul, then where does his soul sprout?Regarding this question, there are different interpretations in different countries, and the different answers constitute different Internet worlds.
In the United States, an article published by Time magazine believed that the reason why today's personal computer revolution and the Internet have become like this is because they inherited the spirit of the hippies in the 20s. Around 60, a generation of American youths born after World War II occupied all the universities. They were tired of the rich and mediocre civil society and made them rebel. So starting from the West Coast, a new movement with the theme of sexual liberation and rock music broke out. hippie movement. "Don't tell me how the world is, tell me how to make it," Cornell University's rebellious slogan was all the rage.
This hippie movement soon came to an end with the arrival of the oil crisis.However, the spirit of the hippies is as lingering as a ghost. It has long lingered in the fields of music, film and installation art, and those engineers who have smoked marijuana have brought it into the world of the information revolution. , Freer technology breaks the machine kingdom cast by Henry Ford.As Jobs, who was deeply influenced by the spirit of the hippies, said, "The computer is the most extraordinary tool created by human beings. It is like a bicycle for our thoughts." A bicycle is a tool for wandering and rebellion. The destination of the track.The Internet, which grew up in the embryo of a computer, is a chaotic world where the banner of freedom is flying everywhere.
Since the birth of the Internet, the online culture and spirit of "freedom, equality, and doing whatever you want" has been advocated and popular in the online world, and its connotation is similar to hippie culture.From Jobs, Yang Zhiyuan, Bezos, to Brin, Zuckerberg, Musk, in these people - they are not all "Americans" in the traditional sense, some of them are from Eastern Europe, Russia Or the new immigrants from Taiwan, China - all of them have hippie blood in their blood, dropouts, rebellions, freedom and "don't be evil".
Completely different from the US, when the Internet was introduced into China as a new technology, the country was becoming a secular business society.As Hong Bo, a commentator who was very active in his early years, observed, the Chinese Internet did not go through the early non-commercial stage. It was a capital stage from the very beginning, so the Internet itself has never been democratic and decentralized in China. been widely concerned.
When the specter of the Internet entered China, the reform and opening up that began in 1978 was about to enter its 20th year, and middle-class culture was still a new trend in the ascendant.In the 20s, idealism once spread like wildfire, but it quickly extinguished. Young people no longer cared about politics, almost all elites devoted themselves to business, and money became the only criterion for measuring success and social value.In such a social context, the Internet, which has arrived like an elf, is purely regarded as a payment tool for wealth creation and a means of business development.In the hands of the first generation of Internet entrepreneurs, Alvin Toffler's "The Third Wave" and Nicholas Negroponte's "Digital Survival" are regarded as "bibles". Optimism and the prevailing Darwinian trend of thought in Chinese society complement each other, and have branded an indelible money temperament for the Chinese Internet.The Internet, which was born out of the hippie spirit, can be described as "out of spirit" in China.
What makes China's Internet more and more urgent on the road to commercialization is venture capital and the Nasdaq market.The first batch of Chinese companies recognized by the international capital market are Internet companies. From the first day of birth, companies such as Sina and Sohu have the shadow of venture capital behind them.They went public shortly after starting a business, and then, under the beating and supervision of the "capital whip", continued to make unremitting efforts to expand profits frantically.The Internet has fulfilled its promise of wealth to its Chinese practitioners. Two young people became "China's richest man" at the age of 31 and 32 respectively.In the past 10 years, the Internet and real estate are the two fields that have produced the most billionaires. Compared with the gray barbarism of the latter, the former is considered to be "wealth under the sun".
In terms of business model, China's Internet growth history is regarded by many as a long-distance follow-up to the Silicon Valley model.Just like the scene presented in the history of thought, intellectuals and entrepreneurs in Eastern countries have always been faced with the torture: how to obtain the fire of new civilization from the West, and how to break free from the shackles of "Western civilization-centrism" in the process .
Almost every Chinese Internet company is a clone of the United States, and its prototype can be found there. However, almost all successful companies have found a survival and profit model that is completely different from the original version in the future.From the cloning of ICQ by QQ to the follow-up of Kik by WeChat, all strategic products in Tencent's history can be imitated.What is intriguing is that those who were imitated quickly disappeared, and Tencent succeeded accordingly.
This book interprets this fact in great detail.We can see that Chinese Internet people have found their own way in terms of application iteration and understanding of the behavior of domestic consumers.In the case of Tencent, we can see various consumption differences between the East and the West. For example, Americans are willing to pay for a song to listen to themselves, while Chinese are willing to pay for a song to listen to their friends.According to a comparative report in 2011, Chinese netizens have completely surpassed American netizens in terms of using social media. They prefer to share and buy virtual props, and their enthusiasm for online shopping is obviously greater. By 2014, Chinese online shopping The proportion of business volume in the total retail sales of consumer goods in the whole society has exceeded 4 percentage points in the United States. [2] More importantly, the long-term closure and laziness of China's financial industry have allowed Internet companies to easily find a breakthrough in online payment and rebuilding financial credit relationships.
Therefore, China is a more exciting business market than the United States, no matter in terms of the absolute number of netizens, activity level or institutional innovation.By around 2015, Chinese Internet companies’ capabilities and achievements in applied innovation have surpassed their American counterparts; Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou are three cities that are more suitable for discussing Internet models than Silicon Valley.
If Americans are always thinking about how to change the world, then the Chinese think more about how to adapt to the changing world. They are more willing to change their lives. It is the difference in outlook on life, and it is also the starting point of many business stories between the United States and China.
If there is no Internet, the United States may still be the United States today, but China is certainly not the China it is today.
China is still an atypical modern country. The government controls almost unlimited resources, and huge state-owned capital groups occupy the upper reaches of industries and participate in policy formulation.The Internet is a rare sunshine industry. Due to the rapid change and the uncertainty of resources, state-owned capital has not yet found a way to effectively control it and obtain monopoly benefits.The internet, which has brought unexpected commercial advances and the opening of social space to the country, is creating new chaos and encountering more artful regulation.This is obviously an unfinished story, the game is going on, and no one can guess its ending.
As far as the protagonist of this book is concerned, the various controversies over Tencent are still going on, and the heat is still unabated.It's becoming more and more to look forward to, and more and more daunting.Just as Bill Gates and Jobs were entangled in the ultimate problems of "openness and closure" and "plagiarism and innovation" throughout their lives, Ma Huateng is still caught in such doubts.China's Internet is a strange market independent of the world. Google, which refused to be tamed, was expelled. Although Facebook's Zuckerberg has learned fluent Chinese, he still has no access to it.And within China, mutual blocking and shielding between platforms has become a fact of the day.Tencent and Ma Huateng, as well as Alibaba and Jack Ma, are growing into world-class companies and entrepreneurs, and at the same time, the public responsibility they are entrusted with is also a lesson that has not yet been broken.
It's already good, but it should be better.
(End of this chapter)
There are cracks in everything, that's where the light gets in.
—Leonardo Cohen (Canadian singer and poet), The Book of Longing
The internet economy is built on a radical social assumption that modern society is inevitably moving towards transparency.
—David Kirkpatrick (American financial writer)
"Let's shake together, one, two, three, shake!" There was the sound of a rifle being loaded in the air in late autumn in the south, "click, click", crisp and sexy.
It was the evening of November 2011. Ma Huateng and I were standing at the entrance of the Venice Hotel in Shenzhen. Before we parted, he taught me to download WeChat and use the "shake" function to "follow each other".At this time, the famous war between Tencent and Qihoo 11 has just settled, and Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are fighting for users.Ma Huateng told me that WeChat is a new product launched by Tencent. It already has more than 360 million users, and 3000 new users are added every day. "Because of WeChat, the war on Weibo is over." These were the last words he said to me, in a low tone that could not be doubted.
Two months before the meeting with Ma Huateng, the other two founders of Tencent, Zhang Zhidong and Chen Yidan, went to Hangzhou. We drank tea under the royal tree in Longjing Village. They hoped that I would write a history of Tencent. "We guarantee the independence of non-interference in creation, and can arrange for any employee to be interviewed." I got such a promise.
In the next few years, I interviewed more than 60 people, including executives at the vice president level, general managers of some departments, and retired and resigned personnel. Industry practitioners, observers and competitors of Tencent.
I have never spent such a long time and so much energy researching a company-and I probably won't again, and what's worse, I haven't been able to fully find its "growth code", or even in some respects. , I was troubled by more intense doubts.The Tencent presented to me is like an evolving organism. We don't know much about its past experience, and we are attracted and coerced by its ongoing evolution.
For a long time, Tencent was a secret in the Chinese Internet world.
It keeps its doors tightly closed, neither accepting in-depth interviews from the media, nor politely refusing research from academic circles.Ma Huateng seldom accepts interviews and rarely attends public events. He is like an extremely low-key "king", avoiding the limelight.
Even more startlingly, even Tencent itself is casual about its own history.Its file management can be described as "terrible". Many original documents have not been preserved, and almost all important internal meetings have no written records.People from Tencent told me that Tencent is a company managed by e-mail, and many historical details are scattered in the memories and private mailboxes of the participants.When I started creating, I was very surprised by this scene, and the people from Tencent said to me very easily: "In the Internet industry, everyone's eyes are fixed on the future. Once yesterday is past, it is meaningless." It’s done.” Most of Tencent’s executives are from technical backgrounds, they are very sensitive to data, but they are at a loss for the details I need.Many important occasions left no images - whether photos or videos.
In the process of research and creation, I have been entangled by three questions:
——Why is it that Tencent, rather than other Internet companies, has become the company with the highest market value, the largest number of users, and the strongest profitability in China today?Is its success the result of a strategic plan, or an accidental product?
——Why did Tencent encounter unprecedented doubts, and how did it form the "accusation" that it faced imitation but not innovation, closed but not open?How did the mild-mannered Ma Huateng become a "public enemy" in the eyes of many people?
——What are the similarities and differences between the Internet in China and the Internet in the United States?Is the prosperity of the former a long-term follow-up journey, or does it have its own oriental way of survival?
These three questions come from the chaotic past and clearly point to the future.I must honestly admit that they are too much of a challenge for a writer.
In any field of cultural creation, all practitioners have always faced the double dilemma of "describing the facts" and "discovering the essence".Da Vinci once said when discussing the painter's mission: "A good painter should describe two main things, that is, the person and his thought intention. The first thing is easy to do, but the second thing is very difficult. The philosopher Wittgenstein expressed a similar view in a lecture in 1934, when he said: "It is easy to know what we say, but very difficult to know why we say it."
The creation of corporate history also faces the dilemma described by Da Vinci and Wittgenstein: we need to sort out the growth process of the company and state the "ideological intention" of its occurrence.In the era of the industrial revolution, researchers did a good job. Whether it is Peter Drucker's "Concept of the Corporation" or Alfred Chandler Jr.'s "History of the Evolution of American Corporations", they are very clear and comprehensive. Visionary description of the corporate landscape of their time.In China, our generation of financial writers is also very good at creating corporate histories of Vanke, Haier, Lenovo and other companies.
However, this scene has suddenly become difficult in the Internet age.In recent years, the creation of the history of Internet companies by American financial writers, such as Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs Biography", Brad Stone's "Sweeping Catch: Bezos and the Age of Amazon", David Kirk Bestsellers such as Patrick's "The Facebook Effect" are not considered masterpieces.This is not because of the lack of talent of this generation of writers, but because there are still huge uncertainties in the fission of the Internet economy, which has caused difficulties in observation and definition.It's like no photographer, painter or reporter can accurately describe or freeze an erupting volcano.
Therefore, in the past 5+ years, my creation has repeatedly stalled, and in some parts of this book, you can read my hesitation and puzzlement.In the later stage of creation, I gave up the "grand narrative" and "principle structure", and only focused more energy on the excavation and presentation of details.
A few days ago, a philosophy professor friend of mine came to Hangzhou.During the chat, I talked about the troubles in creating "Tencent Biography".He comforted me by quoting the Russian thinker Bakhtin, a master of deconstruction who is famous for his grotesques: "There has not been anything conclusive in the world, and no one has said the final conclusion for or about the world. The world is open and free, all that remains for the future, and always will be.”[1]
Hearing this, I couldn't help but smile knowingly.It seems that the world is originally like this, the Internet is like this, and so is Tencent.
In this case, allow me to slowly tell the story of Tencent in my own way, starting from a teenager who saw Halley’s Comet on a spring night in 1986.
Entrepreneurship: 1998—2004
"How could the shy and quiet Ma Huateng become an entrepreneur?" All of Ma Huateng's middle school and university classmates and teachers who were interviewed by me expressed such emotion without exception.Even Ma Huateng himself did not expect that he would create a "big enterprise".He and his entrepreneurial partner Zhang Zhidong had planned that by the third year, the number of employees would reach 18.When OICQ, that is, QQ in the future, went online, they set the user limit to 10.Ma Huateng tried to sell the company several times, but no one was willing to take over.
However, the luckiest thing for Ma Huateng is that he is in a "big industry" and "big era".Richard Tedlow, a professor at Harvard Business School, described the commercial significance of railroads and telegraphs: "Any new development that breaks down the constraints of space and time on people, products, and information will have a huge impact on the way commerce operates. In the history of mankind, the Internet economy that emerged in the 20s is obviously a commercial invention as important as the railway and the telegraph, which restructured the way information is disseminated.And China, after 90 years of reform and opening up, has boarded the first train of the Internet economy-if the United States is the front of this train, then China is the second car behind.We can say that China is the country that has benefited the most from the Internet movement.
Ma Huateng is the third generation of entrepreneurs after the reform and opening up. Unlike the previous peasants running enterprises, "people on the edge of the city" doing business, and officials going overseas, Ma Huateng founded Tencent. The greater driving force came from his interest. All the enthusiasm.Shenzhen is the third city in China to provide Internet access services, and Ma Huateng is one of the first hundreds of Internet users in the country, and has managed a well-known site.Ma Huateng and four other entrepreneurial companions were all born in urban middle-class families, four of them were middle school and college classmates, and they have a religious fanaticism for the Internet—not money itself.
Alfred Chandler, Jr. put forward the famous "four stages of growth" theory in his research on the history of the early American business enterprises, that is, accumulation of resources, rational use of resources, continuous growth and rationalization of expanding resources. use.Looking back at the early growth history of Tencent, we can clearly see the trajectory of this evolution: the accumulation of user resources has been realized through QQ, and the profit of user resources has been realized with an innovative profit model.However, this is not an inevitable process.
From the mid-20s to the bursting of the Internet bubble in 90, all Chinese Internet companies were imitations of the American style, including news portals, mailboxes, search, and instant messaging tools, without exception.Tencent has not been favored by the industry for a long time. The big reason is that its imitation object - ICQ developed by the Israelis and later acquired by America Online (AOL) has never achieved profitability, even until I wrote this At the time of the book, there was no other instant messaging product that had found a good way to make money.Therefore, Ma Huateng must do some things right, many of which Americans have not done.
One of the things that got it right: Tencent’s imitation of ICQ was based on micro-innovations.It transferred information retention from the client to the server, thereby adapting to the Internet environment in China at that time, and successively invented novel functions such as breakpoint transmission, group chat, and screenshots.From the case of Tencent, it can be seen that the ability and speed of applied innovation of Chinese Internet practitioners is not inferior to that of any international counterparts. This feature is completely different from the scene in the fields of electronic products, automobiles, medicine, and mechanical equipment.
The second thing to do right: In addition to micro-innovations in technology, the commercial application of the Internet is also affected by objective conditions such as a region's network environment, user habits, payment systems, and national policies.Therefore, local companies often have a greater advantage.Tencent put forward the concept of "user experience" very early, and it creatively launched service innovations such as "membership service", virtual item sales, Q coins, etc., which gradually transformed QQ from a warm instant messaging tool to an instant messaging tool. A "acquaintance-like" online social platform.In this sense, Tencent is one of the earliest social network testers in the world.
The third thing to do right: Ma Huateng began to seek the support of the capital market shortly after starting his business.Fortunately, when he was looking for money all over the world, venture capital had already entered China. IDG, Yingke, and MIH played an important role in the early development of Tencent.Tencent is also the second Chinese Internet company to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Another phenomenon that has never been taken seriously is that China's value-added services in the field of mobile communications started much earlier than that of the United States.As early as the end of 2000, the newly established China Mobile Company launched the "Monternet" service, which provided mobile phone users with various information value-added services through SMS push, which caused a unique phenomenon of SMS explosion. The value-added service providers (SPs) of this project have all obtained astonishing profits.Tencent was once the largest partner of "Monternet" and therefore the biggest beneficiary.In June 2001, Tencent became the first Internet company to achieve profitability in an unexpected way.
From its founding at the end of 1998 to its listing in June 2004, Tencent completed the whole process from product model imitation, application innovation to profit model exploration during this tortuous entrepreneurial period.This is also a microcosm of Chinese Internet companies.After the global Internet bubble burst in 6, Chinese Internet companies took a different path from their American counterparts in terms of profit model and user value mining. In 2000, there was a historic divergence of the Internet between China and the United States.Over the next two years, local companies "won" all international companies in almost all areas such as portals, search, e-commerce, email services, online games, and instant messaging. A completely different, Chinese-style Internet world is increasingly revealed his outline.
Ma Huateng did not show all his qualities as an entrepreneur during his entrepreneurial period.He seized the opportunity that was seen as an obstacle by others, but the ability he formed seems to be a "armor" with fatal flaws: the profit model of over-reliance on "Monternet" has been questioned, and at the same time, almost all Internet companies Both launched their own instant messaging tools.The challenge is like a dangerous and towering railing, standing in front of Little Ma.If we say that Tencent helped those young people find their "identity" in a virtual world, it is dramatic that for quite a long time, Tencent itself, like a rapidly growing child, curiously asked: who is it?
Attack: 2005—2009
Since its listing in 2004, Tencent has released quarterly financial reports, semi-annual reports, and annual reports on time. After reading these documents carefully, I finally came to a frustrating conclusion: you will never be able to read them from the financial statements. Understand an Internet company.
Thomas Watson, who founded IBM, said a well-known saying: "Machines should work, and humans should think." This should be the most advanced thought in the period of industrial civilization, but in the era of the information revolution, it is still behind.For Internet companies, there is no boundary between machines and humans. You need to redefine what is a machine and an asset, and you need to re-plan technology input and its output cycle, even for the meaning of strategy, identification of opponents, and even accounting. Laws and so on, carry out "value revaluation".
The capital market has always looked at Tencent after its listing with a very cold eye.From its listing in 2004 to around 2007, Tencent has entered a three-year "strategic adjustment period". This does not seem to be a process in which the strategy is determined, but a process in which the strategy is gradually presented through continuous adjustment.At the beginning, the starting point of the strategic adjustment was to avoid a disaster: At that time, nearly 3% of Tencent's operating income came from China Mobile's "Monternet" business, and the latter issued a "notice to clean up and rectify" the day before Tencent went public. ".
In the subsequent adjustments, Tencent's various risky behaviors were full of controversy and gunpowder.
In 2005, when he was left out, Ma Huateng put forward a new strategic proposition of "online life" and made major adjustments in the organization and talent structure. More than 30 chaotic departments have been reorganized to clearly present 5 business modules: wireless value-added business, Internet value-added business, interactive entertainment business, enterprise development business and network media business.Liu Chiping, Xiong Minghua and other senior executives who had served in multinational companies entered the decision-making level.They brought a standardized operating concept and reshaped Tencent's early talent structure full of grassroots entrepreneurship. This move caused huge waves within Tencent.
In the main battlefield of instant messaging, Tencent does not actively advocate "interconnection and interoperability", which is considered by some colleagues to be contrary to the Internet spirit of "making the world flat".Tencent repelled the encirclement and suppression of QQ by portal companies such as Netease, Sina, and Yahoo, especially the battle against Microsoft MSN. It not only resolved MSN's strong attack, but even introduced three core cadres from the MSN China R&D Center into the company, demonstrating the integrity of China. The combat capability of Internet companies in the local market is a landmark event.
Qzone, launched by Tencent in 2005, was first conceived as a Chinese version of My Space and later as a Facebook follower.In fact, Qzone has an operation and profit model completely different from the above two.It further magnifies the gold-absorbing ability of virtual props, and creatively stimulates the consumption enthusiasm of Chinese netizens with the monthly subscription model.In the next four years, Qzone implemented the "three major battles" against 4.com, Renren and Kaixin in stages, thus becoming the biggest winner in the big wave of socialization.
Still in 2005, Tencent was determined to become the number one overlord of online games.At the time, this seemed to be an almost impossible task: Beijing Lianzhong occupied more than 2009% of the market share in the casual chess and card category; and in the field of large-scale online games, Ding Lei of Guangzhou NetEase and Chen Tianqiao of Shanghai Shanda were like two goalkeepers. Controlling the door to enter, they have all ascended to the throne of "China's richest man" because of the success of online games.However, it took only one and a half years for Tencent to make its chess and card game players surpass Lianzhong.By [-], Tencent's online game revenue surpassed Shanda's.Before the rise of WeChat, online games became Tencent's biggest "cash cow", accounting for about half of all revenue, and Tencent was therefore "become" an online entertainment company.
Surprisingly, there is also Tencent's performance on the portal.In the face of the three traditional news portals - Sina, Sohu and NetEase, Tencent quietly overtook them with devious tactics.Liu Shengyi redefines the rules of online advertising, and has won the approval of advertisers, and the huge increase in traffic on the QQ mini homepage has made all opponents helpless.
Ma Huateng has also dabbled in e-commerce and search.He first launched Paipai and Tenpay, an online payment system, and then Soso.On these two battlefields, he encountered strong resistance from Jack Ma and Robin Li, which also laid the groundwork for the future pattern of the "New Big Three".
In the history of China's Internet, 2008 is a landmark year.In this year, China's Internet population surpassed that of the United States for the first time historically, and in the wave of Social Network Service (SNS), the three major news portals trying to complete the transformation in the blog mode could not find reliable information. Companies such as Qzone, Baidu Space, Renren and 51 have sprung up with new SNS models, and the portal era has come to an end.
Tencent's adjustments and attacks during this period are very risky, and it seems to go against the traditional concept of specialization—even inconsistent with Ma Huateng's early remarks.In just a few years, Tencent has become an increasingly unfamiliar "big monster". It has risen in many fields at the same time. No matter in China or in the United States, there is no comparable case.When it went public in 2004, Tencent was just a rapidly growing but marginalized instant messaging service provider. It advanced to the central theater very smoothly, and completed the territory expansion from the client to the web very smoothly.By 2008, Tencent had 4 entrances with a level of [-] million—QQ, Qzone, QQ Games and Tencent.com (QQ.com), which is unique among global Internet companies.The energetic Ma Huateng attacked everywhere, made enemies on all sides, and in almost all fields, he was not given any service, and every battle was fierce, and finally won a nickname of "public enemy".
Even Tencent itself doesn't know how to define itself.For quite some time, the southern company, with an average employee age of 26, has not been prepared for the victories it has achieved.Ma Huateng has avoided communicating with the media all the year round—before 2010, he had never had a meal with the editor-in-chief of any financial media.For financial reporters across China, the two most difficult entrepreneurs to interview are both in Shenzhen. One is Huawei's Ren Zhengfei, and the other is Ma Huateng.His low-key stance further added to the mystery, and he was also known as the "Shadow Leader".Ma Huateng later admitted that, on a certain factual level, he actually “didn’t know how to tell the Tencent story to others.”
It is not the first time that a creator is very strange to the history he created.
"Growth is always fragile", Peter Drucker's warning will soon be fulfilled in Tencent, which encountered unprecedented doubts and attacks after 2010, and all these seem to be the inevitable result of vague definitions.
Giants: 2010—2016
There have been three "enclosure movements" on the Chinese Internet.The first time was around 1999, with the news portal as the basic format, the "Big Three" of Sina, Sohu and Netease emerged. After 2007, there was a big reshuffle with the application platform as the basic format. The portals fell into a "model dilemma" and showed a trend of weak growth. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent respectively started from search, e-commerce and instant messaging tools. Starting in three directions, they completed the reverse surpassing around 2010 and became the "New Big Three", which are collectively called BAT.However, since 2012, with the sudden emergence of smartphones, the focus of Internet users has shifted rapidly from the computer terminal to the mobile terminal, and thus the third "enclosure movement" has occurred.
Tencent is the biggest beneficiary of the second "enclosure movement".In the mid-year report in 2010, Tencent's semi-annual profit was more than the sum of Baidu, Alibaba, Sina and Sohu, and it became "the enemy of the whole industry".Questions and attacks on it have been escalating before this.By the end of 4, all the "anger" broke out in the 2010Q war. Although it was in a favorable position at the factual level - which was proved by later judicial decisions, Tencent's embarrassment in the wave of public opinion was obvious to all.
The 3Q war changed Tencent's strategy, and even partially changed Ma Huateng's character. He announced that Tencent had entered the "half-year strategic transformation preparation period" and promised to increase the intensity of opening up.In the following period of time, Tencent held 10 consecutive diagnostic meetings, held the first developer conference, and successively opened up Qzone and QQ application platforms.
Interestingly, the 3Q war did not bring any substantive subversion to China's Internet industry. On the contrary, it heralded the end of the PC (Personal Computer, personal computer) era.Soon, all competitors will enter the new mobile Internet battlefield.A new era has begun.In the beginning, Sina Weibo took the lead and seemed to have the opportunity to "change everything". However, due to the unexpected appearance of Zhang Xiaolong's team, Ma Huateng was very lucky to achieve a reversal.
The three years from January 2011 to January 1 belonged to the "solo dancer era" of WeChat for the big stage of the Internet in China: it started from nothing, rose from the ground, with a staggering gesture Become the most influential social tool star.It not only builds another platform-level product besides QQ, but also grabs Tencent's first "platform ticket" for the mobile Internet, and allows Tencent to truly integrate into the life and work of China's mainstream consumer groups.
The WeChat official account is a true Chinese innovation. It uses a de-platform approach to allow media professionals and businesses to gain vertical penetration in the social environment.In the past 4 years, the number of official accounts opened has exceeded 2000 million. Millions of companies have opened their own subscription accounts or service accounts. Almost all media publish their content on the official account platform, and more of young entrepreneurs started strange and novel self-media experiments.Since then, everyone trying to succeed in the Chinese market has had to ask themselves one question: What do I have to do with WeChat?
Tencent's strategic layout in the capital market should be attributed to Liu Chiping, Tencent's president and former Goldman Sachs man.Beginning in 2011, Tencent changed its previous investment strategy and began to use capital means to achieve alliance-style opening up.The rise of WeChat gave Liu Chiping a bargaining chip to negotiate with all the Internet giants who are hungry for traffic. Tencent successively bought shares in companies such as Dianping, JD.com and 58.com, and launched the largest merger and acquisition competition in history with the aggressive Alibaba.In the duopoly-style combat readiness contest, Tencent and Alibaba built high walls and dug wide moats, in the words of Ma Huateng, "to contain or restrain the excessive approach of the opponent."
Although still gregarious and reluctant to appear in public, Ma Huateng is quietly changing. Over the past few years, he has given a number of speeches, unfolding visionary views on the future of China's Internet, they are called It was circulated in the circle of public opinion for the "Eight Points of Horse" and "Seven Points of Horse".His idea of "connecting everything" seems to have become an axiom, and the term "Internet+" was adopted in the central government's annual work report.
The character and talents of a founding entrepreneur will ultimately determine the entire personality of the business.Just as Apple has always belonged to Jobs, Tencent only belongs to Ma Huateng in terms of temperament and soul.
In the case of Tencent, we have seen the very individual core competencies formed by Ma Huateng’s team, which I summarize as “Ma Huateng’s seven weapons”, which include:
The first weapon: product minimalism.
Starting from a very small IM (Instant Messaging, instant messaging) tool, Tencent has naturally possessed the concept of "product" from the first day, and believes that "less is the most appropriate" and "Don't make me think! (Don't make me think!)" "Let functions exist in the invisible", Ma Huateng himself is a paranoid practitioner of "detail aesthetics" and "idiotism", which is precocious in China and even the global Internet industry .In the PC era, its advantages were not obvious, but in the mobile Internet era, it has become the most lethal corporate philosophy.Tencent is also a sample of the integration of engineer culture and product manager culture.
The second weapon: user-driven strategy.
As early as 2004, Ma Huateng proposed that Internet companies have three driving forces, namely technology-driven, application-driven, user- and service-driven, and Tencent will focus on the cultivation of the third capability.For quite a long time, the Tencent team has explored and discovered the grasp of the virtual consumption psychology of Chinese users. They have redefined "virtual props" as users' "emotional sustenance".In terms of technology, Tencent has formed a user feedback system based on big data, and has provided many Chinese-style understandings in terms of application tool innovation.
The third weapon: the internal horse racing mechanism.
Almost all innovations in the Internet world have subversive characteristics, and they often burst out at the edge and emerge from insignificant markets.Large, mainstream and successful companies often don't see it.In the 18-year development history of Tencent, several major product innovations that determined its fate, such as QQ Show, Qzone and WeChat, were not the result of top-level research and decision-making, but independent breakthroughs from the middle and grassroots. The horse racing mechanism formed by Ma Huateng internally.
The fourth weapon: trial and error iteration strategy.
Compared with the industrial economy characterized by standardization and precision, the most essential difference of the Internet economy is the rebellion against all perfectionism. "Small steps, iteration, trial and error, and fast running" are the eight-character secrets of success for all Internet companies.It requires the company to form a system completely different from that of the manufacturing industry in terms of R&D, feedback, and iteration.In this regard, Tencent's performance can be described as exemplary.
The fifth weapon: ecological cultivation mode.
As one of the Internet companies with the largest number of employees in the world, Tencent provides Chinese experience in managing very large enterprises.Ma Huateng is a fan of the theory of evolution and runaway theory.In the face of great uncertainty, he tried to make Tencent an ecological organization with blurred boundaries.In the QQ era, he proposed to make the Internet "integrate into life like water and electricity"; around 2013, he further proposed the concepts of "connecting everything" and "Internet +".In the dual expansion of internal and external, Tencent has formed a flexible organization and competition model.
The sixth weapon: the ability to integrate capital.
Tencent was one of the first Chinese Internet companies to obtain venture capital, but it was not until 2011 that it really formed its own investment style.Ma Huateng and Liu Chiping defined Tencent's open capabilities as traffic and capital, transforming and amplifying the former's advantages and strategic assumptions into the latter's driving force.Tencent is one of the largest and most aggressive strategic investors in Chinese Internet companies.
The seventh weapon: focus on the original intention of entrepreneurship.
Ma Huateng, who started his business in the late 20s, is a knowledge-based entrepreneur after the reform and opening up.At the beginning of his entrepreneurial mind, the need to improve the wealth situation gave way to personal interest and passion to transform society.In the past 90 years, Ma Huateng has almost abandoned all public performances, and has been immersed in the product itself, which constitutes his most distinctive professional feature.
Two Internet Worlds: America's, China's
This book records the experience of Tencent's rise, and attempts to reinterpret the twists and turns and uniqueness of China's integration into globalization from the perspective of the Internet.
If the Internet is regarded as a person with flesh and blood and soul, then where does his soul sprout?Regarding this question, there are different interpretations in different countries, and the different answers constitute different Internet worlds.
In the United States, an article published by Time magazine believed that the reason why today's personal computer revolution and the Internet have become like this is because they inherited the spirit of the hippies in the 20s. Around 60, a generation of American youths born after World War II occupied all the universities. They were tired of the rich and mediocre civil society and made them rebel. So starting from the West Coast, a new movement with the theme of sexual liberation and rock music broke out. hippie movement. "Don't tell me how the world is, tell me how to make it," Cornell University's rebellious slogan was all the rage.
This hippie movement soon came to an end with the arrival of the oil crisis.However, the spirit of the hippies is as lingering as a ghost. It has long lingered in the fields of music, film and installation art, and those engineers who have smoked marijuana have brought it into the world of the information revolution. , Freer technology breaks the machine kingdom cast by Henry Ford.As Jobs, who was deeply influenced by the spirit of the hippies, said, "The computer is the most extraordinary tool created by human beings. It is like a bicycle for our thoughts." A bicycle is a tool for wandering and rebellion. The destination of the track.The Internet, which grew up in the embryo of a computer, is a chaotic world where the banner of freedom is flying everywhere.
Since the birth of the Internet, the online culture and spirit of "freedom, equality, and doing whatever you want" has been advocated and popular in the online world, and its connotation is similar to hippie culture.From Jobs, Yang Zhiyuan, Bezos, to Brin, Zuckerberg, Musk, in these people - they are not all "Americans" in the traditional sense, some of them are from Eastern Europe, Russia Or the new immigrants from Taiwan, China - all of them have hippie blood in their blood, dropouts, rebellions, freedom and "don't be evil".
Completely different from the US, when the Internet was introduced into China as a new technology, the country was becoming a secular business society.As Hong Bo, a commentator who was very active in his early years, observed, the Chinese Internet did not go through the early non-commercial stage. It was a capital stage from the very beginning, so the Internet itself has never been democratic and decentralized in China. been widely concerned.
When the specter of the Internet entered China, the reform and opening up that began in 1978 was about to enter its 20th year, and middle-class culture was still a new trend in the ascendant.In the 20s, idealism once spread like wildfire, but it quickly extinguished. Young people no longer cared about politics, almost all elites devoted themselves to business, and money became the only criterion for measuring success and social value.In such a social context, the Internet, which has arrived like an elf, is purely regarded as a payment tool for wealth creation and a means of business development.In the hands of the first generation of Internet entrepreneurs, Alvin Toffler's "The Third Wave" and Nicholas Negroponte's "Digital Survival" are regarded as "bibles". Optimism and the prevailing Darwinian trend of thought in Chinese society complement each other, and have branded an indelible money temperament for the Chinese Internet.The Internet, which was born out of the hippie spirit, can be described as "out of spirit" in China.
What makes China's Internet more and more urgent on the road to commercialization is venture capital and the Nasdaq market.The first batch of Chinese companies recognized by the international capital market are Internet companies. From the first day of birth, companies such as Sina and Sohu have the shadow of venture capital behind them.They went public shortly after starting a business, and then, under the beating and supervision of the "capital whip", continued to make unremitting efforts to expand profits frantically.The Internet has fulfilled its promise of wealth to its Chinese practitioners. Two young people became "China's richest man" at the age of 31 and 32 respectively.In the past 10 years, the Internet and real estate are the two fields that have produced the most billionaires. Compared with the gray barbarism of the latter, the former is considered to be "wealth under the sun".
In terms of business model, China's Internet growth history is regarded by many as a long-distance follow-up to the Silicon Valley model.Just like the scene presented in the history of thought, intellectuals and entrepreneurs in Eastern countries have always been faced with the torture: how to obtain the fire of new civilization from the West, and how to break free from the shackles of "Western civilization-centrism" in the process .
Almost every Chinese Internet company is a clone of the United States, and its prototype can be found there. However, almost all successful companies have found a survival and profit model that is completely different from the original version in the future.From the cloning of ICQ by QQ to the follow-up of Kik by WeChat, all strategic products in Tencent's history can be imitated.What is intriguing is that those who were imitated quickly disappeared, and Tencent succeeded accordingly.
This book interprets this fact in great detail.We can see that Chinese Internet people have found their own way in terms of application iteration and understanding of the behavior of domestic consumers.In the case of Tencent, we can see various consumption differences between the East and the West. For example, Americans are willing to pay for a song to listen to themselves, while Chinese are willing to pay for a song to listen to their friends.According to a comparative report in 2011, Chinese netizens have completely surpassed American netizens in terms of using social media. They prefer to share and buy virtual props, and their enthusiasm for online shopping is obviously greater. By 2014, Chinese online shopping The proportion of business volume in the total retail sales of consumer goods in the whole society has exceeded 4 percentage points in the United States. [2] More importantly, the long-term closure and laziness of China's financial industry have allowed Internet companies to easily find a breakthrough in online payment and rebuilding financial credit relationships.
Therefore, China is a more exciting business market than the United States, no matter in terms of the absolute number of netizens, activity level or institutional innovation.By around 2015, Chinese Internet companies’ capabilities and achievements in applied innovation have surpassed their American counterparts; Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou are three cities that are more suitable for discussing Internet models than Silicon Valley.
If Americans are always thinking about how to change the world, then the Chinese think more about how to adapt to the changing world. They are more willing to change their lives. It is the difference in outlook on life, and it is also the starting point of many business stories between the United States and China.
If there is no Internet, the United States may still be the United States today, but China is certainly not the China it is today.
China is still an atypical modern country. The government controls almost unlimited resources, and huge state-owned capital groups occupy the upper reaches of industries and participate in policy formulation.The Internet is a rare sunshine industry. Due to the rapid change and the uncertainty of resources, state-owned capital has not yet found a way to effectively control it and obtain monopoly benefits.The internet, which has brought unexpected commercial advances and the opening of social space to the country, is creating new chaos and encountering more artful regulation.This is obviously an unfinished story, the game is going on, and no one can guess its ending.
As far as the protagonist of this book is concerned, the various controversies over Tencent are still going on, and the heat is still unabated.It's becoming more and more to look forward to, and more and more daunting.Just as Bill Gates and Jobs were entangled in the ultimate problems of "openness and closure" and "plagiarism and innovation" throughout their lives, Ma Huateng is still caught in such doubts.China's Internet is a strange market independent of the world. Google, which refused to be tamed, was expelled. Although Facebook's Zuckerberg has learned fluent Chinese, he still has no access to it.And within China, mutual blocking and shielding between platforms has become a fact of the day.Tencent and Ma Huateng, as well as Alibaba and Jack Ma, are growing into world-class companies and entrepreneurs, and at the same time, the public responsibility they are entrusted with is also a lesson that has not yet been broken.
It's already good, but it should be better.
(End of this chapter)
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