Are Mini Programs WeChat's Last Chance? How big can it be?

The WeChat applet refreshed the screen again.

Zhang Xiaolong, the most famous hidden character in the field of science and technology Internet, came out and released it personally, pinning all the public relations communication effects accumulated on himself in the past few years on the applet.

It's hard to say whether the fairly good communication effect yesterday was for the applet or Zhang Xiaolong.

Even Ma Huateng himself talked about Mini Programs many times, and even made a product release announcement that "Mini Programs will be released before the Spring Festival". This is a very rare treatment within Tencent. As the top management of Tencent, Pony rarely talks about specifics. products, let alone products that have yet to be released.

Therefore, it can be seen from the treatment of Mini Programs that this is a product that is extremely important to WeChat and that the top management of Tencent attaches great importance to and strives to protect. Therefore, there is no need to doubt WeChat's sincerity and Tencent's investment in the matter of small programs.

WeChat is the product with the most traffic today, and for those small companies that are obsessed with WeChat, there is nothing wrong with betting on mini programs.

Mini Programs are not important to Tencent, nor will they have a significant impact on the Internet competition.

In fact, starting from the WeChat public platform, it embraces the entire WeChat ecosystem the most, shouting that WeChat subverts everything, not big companies and platforms, but entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. individual developer.

The so-called bare feet are not afraid of wearing shoes. When the Internet comes to the "second half", entrepreneurs hope that a product can smash the old world. From some perspectives, this is the root of Zhang Xiaolong and the WeChat team’s high popularity. When Didi and other new platforms were completely dominated by capital, Mini Programs became the “final fantasy” of programmers.

However, today's Internet world is dominated by big companies. Just like Ali's extreme rejection of WeChat, everyone wants to have their own platform. Even JD.com, which may have hundreds of millions of users from WeChat, is still not satisfied with the first-level entrance of WeChat that does not even have mini programs, and has to gradually transfer users to its own App.

Therefore, when the Mini Program was released, all major companies and platforms were silent, including many of Tencent's own business lines. Among Tencent's long business lines, the one that attaches the most importance to mini programs is probably Tencent's self-selected stocks, a nascent business that does not yet have many users and faces great competition.

The reason is that, driven by Tencent's strong overall strength, almost every product that Tencent has accumulated is a "big user" with hundreds of millions of users. You WeChat has its own platform dream, small program dream, which one does not have reading, security, animation, video, etc.? What's more, Mini Programs are far from meeting the functional requirements of these products.

So in fact, for Tencent, Mini Programs are actually a less important product.

In today's mobile Internet landscape, Tencent is the biggest winner. Tencent's various platform businesses are making rapid progress, and content channels such as security over 360, OMG over traditional portals, and animation reading music are becoming the first. In theory, Tencent's motivation for change should be minimal.

This principle also applies to small giants and small platforms that have made progress in the segmented field, and they will not vigorously embrace Mini Programs. Due to the inevitable absence of large companies, the success or failure of small programs will not have much impact on today's Internet competition.

Mini Programs are the Key to WeChat Avoiding QQization

However , Mini Programs are extremely critical to WeChat business itself, which is the key to WeChat avoiding QQization.

Tencent is too big, and to understand Mini Programs, you must understand Tencent's overall structure and history. In Tencent's architecture, QQ and WeChat are defined as the bottom two tracks. All businesses revolve around QQ and WeChat, including payment, advertising, games, news and other businesses that have absorbed a lot of nutrients from WeChat and QQ.

From the history of Tencent's development, basically all businesses are developed from QQ, including the two most profitable advertisements and games today, and even WeChat was originally fed with the QQ account system and traffic. But nowadays, these businesses that make money, are fun and interesting, and look like NB explosions on the outside have basically been stripped from QQ.

Tencent's latest major divestiture was last year, when the SNG social network business group built with QQ as the main body started the Guangdiantong business, which was simultaneously divested from the super-promising WeChat advertising business under the WXG WeChat business group, becoming a CDG business group. An independent department that continues to produce good results in its financial reports. Not long before this adjustment, the app distribution platform and development platform system, which had been fed by mobile QQ for a long time, were also separated from SNG, and now App Store is known as the first app distribution platform.

This is the fun of doing the basics. When I was working in the media, I was in the bottom-level portal website department. The traffic is the largest, the people are the most, and the things are the most, but the salary is the lowest, the rating is the lowest, and other businesses have things from us. It is the bottom support department.

WeChat has gradually become a platform at the bottom layer. Many businesses developed on the mobile Internet, such as mobile games and mobile advertising, are no longer owned by WeChat. Only half of WeChat payment is still in the hands of WXG, even JD.com, Xinmei University, etc. It has to be "intubated" from the outside.


For the WeChat department, to avoid becoming a bottom-level support platform, it must open a WeChat-exclusive external channel for itself. There should be e-commerce, media, O2O, etc., and it is best to have a game that is not currently being done. This is the meaning of mini programs to the WeChat business itself.

Mini programs are the last opportunity for WeChat ecosystem.

Any product has its life cycle. Whether it is the Internet entering the deep water area or the second half of the Internet, or Baidu Robin calling the end of the mobile Internet, everyone has turned their attention to the next generation platform. .

AR or VR? Windows or iOS? Just like before 2010, everyone was saying that the mobile Internet is the future, but everyone didn't know how to do it.

The new platform has a new order and new interaction methods. Whether it is Tencent or WeChat, it is necessary to find the basic fulcrum of communication and social networking in the next era, and then come back to talk about ecological construction. WeChat entered the era of mobile phones as the basic communication version of QQ. If a small program wants to travel to AR, it must follow the Basic Law.

On the one hand, the time left for the entire mobile phone ecosystem is running out, and on the other hand, the dividends of the WeChat ecosystem are gradually being consumed.

"WeChat third party" is a word that has disappeared in today's Internet industry, but in the pioneering period of WeChat public platform two years ago and earlier, every WeChat third party is very popular, WeChat e-commerce, WeChat marketing, WeChat O2O Under the concepts of , iBeacon, many companies and platforms are supported, among which there are many companies with a valuation of over 100 million US dollars.

But today, most WeChat third parties are in silence or transformation. The grand occasion that every new function added to the WeChat public platform will attract countless attention from the outside world no longer exists today.

With the rise of Toutiao, Bilibili, and live broadcast platforms, App development has gradually returned since this year, and even Weibo has begun to return. In the middle of this year, WeChat card coupons, which are very similar to the WeChat membership cards that were sold, were launched. Without the third-party pursuit of WeChat, they failed to make waves in the O2O landscape dominated by takeaway.


However, this does not mean that there is no chance for Mini Programs. WeChat O2O, WeChat e-commerce, etc. did not succeed in the end. The reasons are very complicated. There are reasons for the inconsistency of thinking due to Tencent’s failure to understand the structure internally, and Tencent’s external investment interests. There are also reasons why the early technical rules of the public platform need to be improved.

This time, the development of the applet is different. With the support of Pony, the WeChat applet is completely handed over to the WeChat team this time, and the rules, directions, and gameplay are all undisturbed. The Mini Program, which has been gaining momentum for a year, no longer relies so much on third-party technical support, and the concept of de-third-partyization is in practice.

Both the inside and outside have been settled, and the time has been given a year. In the second half of the Internet, WeChat got the single-handedly ball, and whether to score or not depends on the hammer deal.

How big can a WeChat applet be?

At this time, we are going to talk about what model the WeChat applet is based on. I spent a long time watching Zhang Xiaolong’s speech video. He repeatedly talked about the browser-centric Internet ecology on the PC side, describing the applet as like It is the same as a website that implements services on the WEB.

There is a word here, which Zhang Xiaolong never mentioned, that is search engine. Who are the big winners on the web? It is Google in foreign countries and Baidu in China. They carry the task of website distribution on the Web side and are the Internet bosses in the PC era.

However, Zhang Xiaolong and the WeChat team did not mention Baidu's name. Part of the reason is that Tencent's publicity strategy basically does not talk about friends and businessmen. Most of the reason is that the Mini Program is very different from Baidu's model.



The first difference is that the search engine distributes information on the PC side, and the applet is a distribution service on the mobile terminal. The service is more valuable than the information, and the applet disdains to compare with Baidu; Multiple entrances. Zhang Xiaolong mainly talked about two-dimensional codes, but in fact, two-dimensional codes are still not direct, it is an expedient measure under the existing Internet technology conditions. Considered service entry. Mini Programs will almost certainly evolve towards multi-entry in the future.

Once you find the model of the applet, you also know the business model of the applet and the upper limit of the entire model. Ideally, no matter how big the Internet world is, WeChat will have the opportunity to collect toll fees. However, like Baidu, for platform giants such as JD.com, Taobao, and Toutiao, WeChat mini-programs will be very helpless, but they will order many long-tail small programs. Players are fine.

From WeChat to Apple, there is no platform above the platform

Finally , let’s talk about Apple. WeChat is a platform that is highly similar to Apple, which is not only reflected in the logic of the Mini Program, but also in the concept.

The fundamental reason for the decline of WeChat third parties is that the concept of WeChat is "connecting everything". The subtext of connecting everything is to reject any intermediate platform, and it is unreliable to try to build a third platform between WeChat, merchants and services.

The same is true for Apple. The WeChat applet was originally called the WeChat application number, but it was finally renamed because of Apple's pressure. Apple's iOS ecosystem is based on the rules of the AppStore. If you try to build another distribution center under the iOS system, in Apple's view, it is subversive.

In fact, Apple's pressure on WeChat is actually everywhere, from the requirement of third-party login for Tencent's mobile games, the suppression of WeChat H5 games, and even hearing that Zhang Xiaolong may be absent from this 28 due to Apple's pressure. Press release.

That Apple is so domineering, it's okay not to play with them. The answer is absolutely not. If you don't understand it, just listen to how Zhang Xiaolong complained about taking pictures of the crowd at the beginning of his speech today: I see that today's mobile phones are all white.

What is the white one, apple.

Original link: http://bbs.jointforce.com/topic/24642