This article has been published in Zhihu (2018-10-02). In addition, it was also written in the official account. Later, my official account was also cancelled. Publish it here.
You can see as far in the past as you can see in the future. It is difficult to predict the future, but looking at the past and the present, we may be able to realize some truths. In the history of industry, the replacement of an old technology by a new technology does not depend on human will. The luckiest thing in life is to discover and follow this trend.
It took more than 2 weeks of spare time to finally read Dr. Wu Jun’s "Top of the Wave". This is a book about internet memorabilia, but it's not just the internet. It involves industries, times, capital and other content, which helps us understand what the big internet companies have done. In this book, it explains ATT, IBM, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google, and maybe With the development of the times, the Facebook company and so on that came down have been fortunately pushed to the forefront.
It can be seen from the text that Dr. Wu Jun is full of "religious" beliefs in technology, innovation, and the Internet. Dr. Wu Jun is committed to speech recognition, natural language processing, and especially the study of statistical language models. The "Beauty of Mathematics" series of blogs were published on Google Blackboard, but the book "The Beauty of Mathematics" has not been read yet. At the same time, Dr. Wu Jun is very good at writing text, and the content of the text is particularly relevant, which is not easy for ordinary people to do. Ruan Yifeng in China is one of them. "The Survivor of the Future World" has been published as a book, and this book is also worth reading.
Unlike Wu Xiaobo’s book "Ten Years of Surging, Big Water and Big Fish", Wu Xiaobo uses time as the main line to describe what happened in each time; while Dr. Wu Jun takes the technological iteration as the main line, let us go Understanding American technology companies will allow more people and more people to see the law of development of the technology industry and seize opportunities. Wu Xiaobo is an economist, and Wu Jun is a scientist who understands economics. People's business knowledge and vision are not innate, and they need to be continuously and deliberately learned (the ten thousand-hour rule requires deliberate practice) . Dr. Wu Jun is a person who is always curious and continues to learn.
While reading this book, I found some differences between China and foreign countries: international companies use ecology to make money : Microsoft’s operating system; Microsoft’s home entertainment system; Google’s cloud computing system and Android system, Oracle’s SQL database Wait; China is making money using the demographic dividend : whether it is the original QQ, Taobao, Baidu search, or the current Miaopai, Douyin, bike sharing, etc. Although China's LeTV wanted to build a home entertainment system, it was not successful due to various reasons. Xiaomi wanted to build an ecosystem, but it deviated from the main line and became a "grocery company."
Of course, the book also mentions the relationship between technology and investment. The process of venture capital is actually the process of establishing a technology company. Technology is like the brain of our society, while finance is blood. The establishment of any company is inseparable from capital. It can be said that without those capital injections, there would be no Internet giants in the world today; and Internet giants continue to grow and bring huge profits to those capitals. Complement each other and grow with each other.
Why is Silicon Valley called Silicon Valley? And how did Silicon Valley become a paradise for Internet entrepreneurship? The San Francisco Bay Area got its name from Silicon Valley because in the early days, most of the companies here were semiconductor companies or computer hardware companies. However, the real semiconductor company that was first born in Silicon Valley was Fairchild Semiconductor. Later, Intel and Microsoft rose one after another, and Microsoft controlled the interface that people could not bypass when using computers-the operating system. When Microsoft, as an operating system developer, and Intel, as an irreplaceable processor manufacturer, reached a cooperation.
The names of electronic computers and IBM are inseparable, just as telephones and ATT are inseparable. On the one hand, IBM has been able to sustainably develop for half a century because of computers. On the other hand, because of the promotion of IBM, computers have gone from scientific computing to the business field and people's daily lives.
Apple was originally a cheap low-end brand, and now it has become a high-end fashion brand. These two seemingly contradictory aspects are well combined by Apple's founder Steve Jobs. The soul of the founder of a company often stays in the company forever, even if they have already left. Apple has continued Steve Jobs' innovative genes well.
The Internet is constantly iterating.
Internet 1.0-can be said to be technological innovation
Representatives: Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, etc.
In the Internet 1.0 era, super portals like Yahoo actually played the role of IBM back then. It provided almost all necessary services for Internet access, from dial-up Internet access (later DSL) to Internet directories and queries. To Email, then to instant message and voice service.
Oracle took a fancy to the largest database software in the market at the time, and developed a SQL database system that rivaled IBM. It quickly occupied the market by "selling software" and became the world's largest application software by relying on database systems alone. The second largest software company. After Oracle's success, many people in Silicon Valley have followed suit and set up various software companies, including Adobe, which is very successful in Photoshop, and Intuit, which is the financial software Turbo Tax (Google's neighbor).
Internet 2.0-can be said to be the innovation of business model
Representatives: Google, Tencent, Ali, Amazon, etc.
A common feature of Internet 2.0 companies is that they focus on building a universal platform, which is supplemented by social development forces and users into a complete service, from Wikipedia to Facebook.
Internet companies represented by Google and Yahoo have overturned the business model of software companies represented by Microsoft collecting money from every end user (End User).
Many countries have invested a lot of money to build their own technology parks similar to Silicon Valley to encourage innovation, but few have succeeded. **Mainly because it is difficult for other places to replicate the time (the development of IT industry after World War II), location (backed by Stanford and Berkeley) and people in Silicon Valley. Among them, human beings are the most important. It is a new type of production relationship developed in Silicon Valley. **This is the most special place in Silicon Valley in the world, and it fully guarantees innovation. In the production relationship, in industries dominated by technology, the means of production play a negligible role. Companies like Microsoft and Google have less than one-tenth of the market value after removing cash. Then the role of people is the key, specifically the way of profit distribution and the relationship between people. The option system of technology companies ensures that employees at all levels, in addition to wages, can get a share of the company's profits.
Silicon Valley can become the capital of science and technology, and it will be prosperous, and it must have its brilliance. One of the most critical is to ensure equal opportunities. No one, no country or system can guarantee that our society is absolutely fair, (in fact, there is no need to pursue absolute fairness.) However, a good system must ensure that everyone has equal opportunities. While looking for a job in Silicon Valley, a resume is important, but personal abilities (including the soft ability to deal with people) are what companies really value. (Shanghai and Shenzhen are particularly obvious in focusing on talents; compared to Beijing, Beijing places too much emphasis on academic qualifications. However, there is an old Chinese saying that the masters are among the people. This is why so many talents from Beijing flow to Shenzhen and Shanghai. , Hangzhou, Chengdu and other cities. In a word, Beijing’s Huilongguan was originally not a school district room, but Huilongguan has long been a school district room by the majority of programmers. This also reflects that Beijing does not pay much attention to talents.)
In the author's opinion, there are five semi-tech companies
in the world : Google-it controls the world's information sources;
Amazon-it is the Wal-Mart in e-commerce;
Facebook-it controls the Internet community;
Twitter- —It controls the mobile phone community, but after all, it is still too small to be considered half a home;
Alibaba — it has the world's most complete e-commerce ecological chain and the largest turnover;
Tencent — it has the world The largest registered user group, and controls the virtual communities of China's Internet and mobile phone networks.
Someone may ask why there is no Baidu in China, because it is only a regional Internet company. Google is more of a technology company, while Baidu is only an Internet company, just like Yahoo, which was a blessed one, was an Internet company with not very strong technical competitiveness. Technology companies can open up new growth points through continuous innovation, and growth of Internet companies that have grown through operations will become a big problem when their main business matures. In recent years, Baidu, relying on the hot air of artificial intelligence, has finally caught the fast train of technology.
When Dr. Wu Jun published this book in 2011, his worries about China are still not obvious. The real problem in China is that people don't seem to need to rely on technological progress and industry to obtain wealth. Looking at the composition of China's rich list, several people are inventors such as Bell and Ford, and several are industrialists such as Rockefeller and Carnegie. Almost all the wealth of the rich come from the stock market or the housing market. When people no longer regard the housing market and the stock market as the fastest means of making money, it is time for China to give birth to the next Google. Technological progress cannot be achieved through a real estate bubble or a stock market bubble.
The world and China are learning through the Internet. The prototypes of Sohu, Sina, and NetEase portal sites are foreign Yahoo; Weibo prototypes are foreign Twitter; Tencent is foreign ICQ; Baidu’s prototype is Google; Alibaba is the result of China's overall environmental impact. The cost of transporting a container from Guangdong to Beijing is much higher than that of transporting it to Los Angeles on the other side of the Pacific, because China’s road and rail tolls are too expensive, and there is no need to pay on the 500-kilometer highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the United States. Tolls that divide the money. In China, e-commerce appeared before the retail network was established. Therefore, China may skip the process of laying a national retail network (after all, opening 1,000 supermarkets across the country is a costly and long-term thing). Replaced by e-commerce. An e-commerce company as big as Wal-Mart has emerged in China. In my opinion, Ali is currently the company with the most innovative genes and innovative spirit.
Tencent was established in Shenzhen in 1998, Alibaba was established in Hangzhou in 1999; Baidu was established in Beijing in 2000. It is changing our social, shopping, search and other aspects. In addition to instant messaging, Tencent is also the largest wireless value-added service provider in Zhongtong and the largest online game company in China. At the same time, Tencent owns China’s largest Internet 2.0 community carrier Qzone, which is a bit like Facebook. In 2011, Foxmail founder Zhang Xiaolong led his team to create a new generation of social tool WeChat in Tencent, which is popular in the world; Alibaba is actually not A technology-driven company, which has similarities with Dell, is a business-driven company that operates very successfully in the field of technology based on a very good business model. Alibaba currently has three businesses, its traditional business-B2B e-commerce, B2C business-Taobao, and online payment business-Alipay. Among them, B2B e-commerce has no comparable companies in the United States and the world, while Taobao is almost the sum of Amazon and eBay. These two parts accounted for almost half of China's e-commerce, while Alipay is a complete copy of PayPal and controls two-thirds of online payments in China. In 2009, Dr. Wang Jian created Alibaba's cloud computing platform, Alibaba Cloud, and now has the Alibaba Cloud service that most enterprises now use; Baidu, in addition to being a must-use search engine for Chinese, launched in 2013 Unmanned vehicle project, and on February 15, 2018, Baidu Apollo unmanned vehicle appeared on CCTV Spring Festival Gala and started running on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge.
China has entered the Internet era that affects people's lives. It has been developing in full swing since 2008, and it has been ten years now. It can be said that the global economic crisis at that time awakened the sleeping lion in China. **What do you rely on to restore the economy? In the short term, it depends on infrastructure, because it has a quick effect on creating job opportunities. Relying on the technology industry (IT) for a long time, so every economic crisis has caused us to become more and more dependent on technology. **And all technology companies must experience the baptism of this financial crisis. At that time, the school network, Fanfou, Weibo, etc., provided the private economy with great information. After that, more and more Internet companies have sprung up like bamboo shoots after a rain, and, in contrast to the troika of China at that time—— Export, consumption, and investment go hand in hand. Changing people's consumption habits and lifestyles more and more deeply.
In 2018, Chinese Internet companies, with BATJ as the forward, entered the post-traffic war era. New technologies such as AI, big data, cloud computing and even blockchain are the future guidance and the new hope of technology companies. The ABC era is important because the intelligence based on cloud computing and big data technology will change the pattern of the entire business society. Winning the C-end market is still the first step, and the competition of platform resource capabilities is only one aspect of competition. The more intense competition has just begun.
A few days ago, an article "Ten Years of Mobile Internet" became popular, and I borrowed a passage from it to conclude:
Ten years, a flick of a finger. Even if I use my pen and ink, I can't tell all the stories. Ten years ago, some people seemed to be at the top of the mountain, but they were going downhill; ten years later, some people seemed to be at the bottom of the valley, but they were ready to go. People are like this, and things are also true. Many successes start from a small thing; many changes happen in a calm manner. This was the case ten years ago, and it will be the same ten years later.