Why is Alibaba not good at social networking and Tencent not good at e-commerce?

We live in an era of chaotic values. There are many kinds of friends around us. Some people seek immediate wealth, others seek far-flung profits, some only seek fame, some only want family happiness, and some only want their own happiness.

  Who is right and who is wrong, clearly?

  You can only say who is likely to succeed, or who is more lovable - maybe your subtext is, who is more like me.

  Before joining the Alipay team,

  listen to me tell a story:

  my childhood before the age of 10 was spent in the countryside. At that time, I was very free. I ran around barefoot, went to the fields to touch loaches, and piled stones at the back of the house... There were no rules and no personal space at all. When my friends came to my house, they all jumped on the bed.

  Every time I go to my uncle's house in the city, I feel very restrained, there are many rules, take off your shoes when you enter the door, sit in a sitting position, don't jump around and make noises downstairs, and wear special shoes when you go to the toilet... My heart is refusal , There are so many rules in the city.

  Later, my family moved to the urban area, and I became a "city dweller".

  Later, in high school, because it was the best school in the city and the experimental class with the best grades, the class happened to be evenly distributed among districts and counties, that is, the number of urban students was basically equal to that of rural students.

  ——So we "urban people" live in the same class and sleep in the same room with many classmates from the countryside.

  It is natural to feel that there are differences in living habits and learning styles between urban students and rural students.

  The classmates in the urban area will chat about computer games, Beyond, guitar, and all kinds of delicious food and fun. At this time, the classmates from the countryside probably only study in silence. In addition, many of the classmates living in the countryside have darker skin, and their dress and living habits will always make the classmates in the city talk about "really rustic" in private. At this time, I will not go along, I thought to myself: Don't look down on the rural people.

  Until one time, a classmate from the countryside in the next dormitory saw a notebook on my desk and opened it directly - it was my diary - and I was extremely angry: the rural people are too disrespectful to people's privacy, It's really unruly!

  When I came up with this idea, I was stunned. Am I not a rural person? So I began to constantly reflect on what went wrong with me.

  Yes, after living in the city, I live in a building, have my own room, and have my own drawers, so I naturally have my own privacy space, and I don’t want others to touch my things casually. After studying in the urban area for a few years, I myself have the same interests, dress, habits and even catchphrase as other urban students... I don't look like a rural person at all.

  But it's not their fault that the rural students are "rusty" and "unruly", it's just that everyone's living habits are different. They are rustic, but because they don't have so many fancy entertainment, they are very focused on learning;

  they didn't have good learning conditions, good teachers, or even good teaching materials before, but now they can test with us With the same grades, their excellence is self-evident; they have no rules and don't know how to protect our personal space, which means that they have no defenses themselves and are open-minded; they don't pay too much attention, they are warm and hearty, and what is there to eat? I also enthusiastically shared it with us...

  After I understood this, I was relieved: I would put away the things I really don't want others to touch, and it would be good to prevent others from accidentally touching them. Others, wouldn’t it be better to let go a little bit?   After listening to this story, there is another story about the

  different company cultures of Alibaba and Tencent :   At the end of 2013, I joined the Alipay wallet team, which was known as the core team of Alibaba at the time.   Before that, my main work experience was working for Tencent mailbox and WeChat team. From 2011 to 2013, I experienced almost the entire startup period of WeChat. It can be said that my workplace genes are deeply branded by Tencent and WeChat. .







  Alibaba is a well-known wolf-like company. It has copied a few "Ali dialects" that Alibaba people regard as the Bible for everyone to see:

  "Embrace change"

  "Life is about tossing, not to collapse in the toss, just in the toss. Nirvana!"

  "If there is no pit, let yourself be a radish first"

  "Don't want things to find you, but to find things"

  "It's silly and naive, fierce and persistent"

  "It's better to fail once than to be afraid of failure"

  " Today is cruel, tomorrow is crueler, and the day after tomorrow is beautiful. But most people die tomorrow night, and only those true heroes can see the sun of the day after tomorrow."

  "It's not difficult, what do you want?"

  And Tencent culture is different.

  Since a large part of the employees are recruited through campus, these people who work in the company just after graduating from university have a very strong student spirit. In addition, the founders of the company are all engineers, so the whole company All very gentle.

  Moreover, the WeChat team (formerly the Guangzhou R&D Department) is very special in Tencent, perhaps because it is far away from the headquarters. Before WeChat became bigger, there were not many opportunities for promotion and transfer here, and there were very few personnel turnover. Hidden a lot of low-key but talented colleagues.

  Chatting in the department group, someone always composes a poem from time to time, or comes with a golden sentence that makes people applaud, but in real life, they are often taciturn, silently doing good things, and focusing on Carve products, codes, design drafts.

  There is a tradition within Tencent called "Rui Xue Spirit" - don't take the elevator backwards, but wait in a civilized queue. In Ali, I quickly discovered that it is impossible to survive by "Rui Xue".

  For example, I work on the 21st floor of the Alipay building. Every day at noon, if I don't take the elevator in the opposite direction, I can't go downstairs-because everyone is going in the wrong direction, the colleagues downstairs first take the upward elevator to go up and then go down;

  For example, when several colleagues pass through a door together, if I open the door first, I will hold the door to let the people behind me get better, but no one else has ever done so;

  another example is when I distribute snacks and fruits in the afternoon and supper in the evening. If you don't rush to grab it, you can only smell the fragrant smell when others eat and swallow silently.

  "Sven" is not a good word in Ali. In Ali I "learned" to scold foul language, and I found it out of place to not speak foul language here. Some superiors will even say, if you can't figure this out, you will kneel down and beg him - I can't imagine such a thing happening in Tencent.

  The most typical time, when I was going downstairs and going upstairs in the company, I met a female colleague who had never dealt with with a big box and a small box. I took the initiative to help her get a few - yes, a very small thing. Later, the colleague said that it was the first time in the company that someone took the initiative to help with things. This puzzled me for a long time.

  I looked like a weirdo in Ali.

  Someone once asked me the difference between Tencent and Ali, and I said: the difference between "scholar" and "bandit", but I don't think that Ali is bad.

  The reason why Tencent people are "bookish" is that most people need to write code, design products, and need to constantly learn, constantly innovate models, constantly speculate, and then execute after speculating, which of course requires a lot of highly educated " A good student", must have ideals, talents, love innovation, love creation and follow rules;

  and Ali is a typical sales and operation-oriented company, a force fighting at the forefront of e-commerce, and every day with small businesses from all walks of life. Dealing with and helping other traditional industry customers with peculiar needs to solve problems, more about execution, to be grounded, to focus on results, to bear hardships and stand hard work, and everyone needs to be able to fight independently. Can such a team do without "bandits"?

  In Ali, everyone is so rude and the jungle ecology, everyone is busy rushing forward, and no one has time to "lick the wound" for you.

  So you can understand why Tencent failed to do e-commerce well in the past, and Ali failed to do social networking.

  Enneagram divides a person's nine personalities into: "thinking center", "emotion center" and "action center". You can't always let action-oriented people do thought-oriented things.

  Business determines corporate genes and team temperament.

  Why does Baidu always say that it wants to be "wolf-like", but it is impossible to become "wolf-like"? You try to make the programmers in the company line up and gather every day, just like the little brothers and sisters in the hair salon, standing at the door of the company Shout out "Go! Go! Go! We're the best! Guaranteed to get the job done!"

  Let's take a look at the turnover rate in a month.

  Why Didi can acquire Uber China

  ? So Didi's biggest slogan is also Ali's phrase "Embrace change".

  Didi is a typical operation-oriented company, and it also likes to use heavy ground troops to develop its business;

  while UBER, a team that believes in technology, a foreign company from the United States, has recruited a large number of people in China. Elites from foreign companies, and the use of light models and small teams can ensure the smooth development of large-scale businesses.

  This seems to be another "Ali" vs. "Tencent" style opponent.

  So, can it be said that "operational orientation" beats "technological orientation"?

  No.

  Many people like to simply talk about the mergers and acquisitions of companies as who eats who, and deduce the rules from this. For example, in the several mergers and acquisitions mentioned in the article, everyone is saying that wolf-like companies eat sheep-like companies, and Beijing companies eat them. Shanghai/Southern enterprises.

  ——What about Ctrip's merger and acquisition? What about the merger of Mogujie and Meilishuo?

  Capital operation is a very complicated matter, and the competition between enterprises, products and businesses cannot be generalized. If it is only determined by genetics , then what's the point of us doing this business? If everything is determined from the beginning, why do we keep forging ahead in the sea of ​​commerce and the sea of ​​people?

  The joy of life, work, and entrepreneurship lies in the uncertainty of the future.

  But one thing we know, for an O2O business like "travel service", the company's initial operation needs "operation-oriented" (personal business) or "sales-oriented" (enterprise business) to ensure survival and correct the business model. ;

  While the company has developed into a medium-term and mature period, it is particularly dependent on technology and products. It needs to establish rules and models through large platforms, big data and intelligent algorithms to optimize experience and improve efficiency;

  at the same time, O2O business is not like the past e-commerce. The model is relatively relative. It is determined that only the operation strategy needs to be improved, it needs to continuously innovate products, update models, and constantly adjust product design according to the specific conditions of offline business.

  That is to say, O2O enterprises need two genes of "Ali" and "Tencent" to exist at the same time.

  From the car-hailing war for several years, we can see that Didi's technology and product team are also very good. The difference between Didi and UBER is that whose operating genes are stronger.

  There is a kind of war, whose success or failure is doomed from the very beginning. In

  Chinese history, there have been constant changes of dynasties, and there have been many wars, but these wars are very different.

  There is a war that is doomed from the start.

  Qin State used to be a weak state on the western frontier, lacking in resources and under the threat of Rong and Di for a long time, but in the end it dominated the world. The turning point was the "Shang Yang Reform". The "centralized power" after the reform defeated the "feudal vassals". After the reform, only the Qin state would play the role of the countries, and the countries basically did not dare to provoke the Qin state.

  In the Crow War, the British used strong ships and cannons to open the door of the Qing Empire. This was a "modern firearm" that defeated the backward "traditional weapons", and it was a "modern country" that defeated the backward "traditional empire". In the same way, when the Qing Dynasty saw the British troops, they did not dare to touch them again, and they would be defeated in every battle.

  Such a war is a "high-low war", a high-mode fight against a low-mode one, and an advanced "dimension reduction attack" in which the backward is defeated.

  Another kind of war, like the battle between Chu and Han, Liu Bang was a rogue, Xiang Yu was a nobleman, and finally the rogue defeated the nobleman.

  Such a war is just a "plane war". Everyone stands on the same plane, and who will win and who will lose cannot be determined in the early stage, and everything will only be known at the end.

  This kind of war is the difference between the way of organization and business strategy. They are a "hand-to-hand fight" between two teams on the same mode, and whoever is more flexible, more cohesive, or even "more shameless" in the end wins.

  Didi Kuaidi's defeat of the traditional taxi industry is a typical "high-low war". But UBER is playing Didi, but it is not. This is just a "plane war".

  In such a battlefield, shopping is required, so the battle between UBER and Didi is destined to be a bloody hand-to-hand battle. Fortunately they stopped.

  Maybe if UBER's AI is really ready, this war against Didi may turn into a "high-low war" - but it's far from it.

  Maybe you will think this is a counterattack of diaosi. But not being able to kill your opponent means that you have no distinction between high and low, and you have no qualifications to look down on your opponent.

  Most of you are urbanites, they are rural people, but are urbanites really qualified to look down on rural people?

  In ancient China, there was always a kind of diaosi: northern minorities, relying on their cavalry advantages, kept attacking southwards and attacking southerners The Central Plains Dynasty, the Central Plains Dynasty was repeatedly defeated. But two people went the opposite way, learned from the Hu people, and took the initiative to defeat them - King Wuling of Zhao and Emperor Wu of Han.

  King Wuling of Zhao, in order to resist the invasion of the Hu people in the north, he proposed the "Hu clothing riding and shooting". He took off the robes of the Central Plains people, put on the clothing of the Hu people, practiced horse riding and archery, and finally trained a very strong cavalry. They defeated the Hu people and opened up the northern territories.

  At the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the Han Dynasty had already suffered from the suffering of the Huns for decades, so he trained the cavalry in the way of the Huns, made several northern expeditions, and recaptured the Hetao land. In the Han Dynasty, there was no more suffering from the Huns.

  In this era of great technological change in the world, the "singularity" is approaching, and technology is changing rapidly, and China is also undergoing social and economic transformation and cultural transformation. We are faced with various ideological shocks, and our values ​​will inevitably be chaotic, and there will be countless right and wrong. There is not much difference between right and wrong.

  But a hundred schools of thought contend, it is a good thing to let a hundred flowers bloom, and it is our luck to be born in this era.

  Recalling the magnanimity of the prosperous Tang Dynasty, tolerant of the world, and not choosing a trickle. I wish I could see this in my lifetime.

  Therefore, you can have your ideals, your feelings, and you can express them, but this is not the end. You can still grow up, you can be tolerant, and you can learn from them, learn their strengths, and eventually become better people than them, and make better companies and products than them.