"You say I'm wrong, then you better prove you're right"

Author: Xinghom
Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/29920558/answer/46062918
Source: Zhihu The
copyright belongs to the author, please contact the author for authorization.

15 years ago, Zhang Xiaolong was the top 10 programmer in China.
He wrote the code alone and completed the first three versions of Foxmail.
Foxmail was so popular that he had to put out language packs for various loyal fans to translate into more than a dozen languages.
Until today, Foxmail was acquired and QQmail was launched, and Foxmail still has millions of enterprise users.

After being acquired by Tencent, Foxmail began a difficult transition from a client to a Web product.
It was a very rough start, and the earliest version was like a Big Mac on the Web, and it was almost inoperable.
From programmer to manager, from client product manager to web product manager,
Zhang Xiaolong spent three years of extreme loneliness.
Three years later, he completed his first transformation.
QQmail is known as a "seven-star product" internally by Tencent.
People often use an example to illustrate the meticulousness of QQmail's product experience:
if you mention "attachments" in the body of the email, and you don't paste any attachments when sending,
the system will immediately remind you: Did you forget to add any attachments? Attachments.
This experience is now available in Gmail as well.

The success of QQmail made Zhang Xiaolong feel anxious.
Because mailboxes are still a product with a very high threshold for a large number of ordinary netizens.
Maybe it will take years to teach them to use the @ symbol.
What else is the product that the massive netizens need?
Zhang Xiaolong started his second transition,
from Web tools products to Web social products.

This process took less than two years, and
it was more difficult and complicated than the last time.
Zhang Xiaolong and his team first experimented with the reading space,
which is the first joint that jumped out of tool products.
Making a reading space seems like a tool, but there will be simple human interaction in it.
User behavior and interaction habits can be observed.

The reading space was successful,
so there was an attempt at QQ mailbox broadcasting.
This is an attempt to create a Twitter-like product in QQ mailbox.
163 Mailbox did something similar,
but the project failed, and users and content were merged into Tencent Weibo.
In the mailbox usage scenario,
the slow reading and deep reading of the reading space are compatible with the tone of the mailbox,
but not compatible with the fast-flowing Tweets stream.

So, there is another QQ mailbox drifting bottle.
This is an experiment, the
theme is: Assuming that on the basis of the large number of users, it is possible to make light SNS applications, especially strangers to make friends, can it be successful?
The result was unprecedented success.
Drift bottles per day are on the order of monstrous, and
user stickiness has grown considerably.
The by-product of this experiment is to face up to the loneliness of ordinary netizens.
So much so that they are willing to use up three times a day of writing a letter in a bottle,
Willing to salvage the fleeting electronic drift bottle in the blue page again and again.

The third change came suddenly, and
Zhang Xiaolong's eyes had already jumped from the Web to the mobile Internet.
Just a simple request,
the programmers in the team left their original positions and
started to learn the programming of the mobile client.
The original experience in QQmail mobile phone portable mail has
been widely used in the creation of WeChat.
The new mobile phone team is not a client,
but three clients of IOS, Android and Saipan at the same time.
After the IOS version is released, it will immediately switch to Android for the next version. After
Android is completed, it will switch to Saipan, and then switch back. Do IOS.
This is called the 24/7 mobile development team.
They like to develop all night in the dark.
At this time, Guangzhou is lonely and it
is suitable to concentrate on parallel development.
Programmers gather in groups of three or five, discussing in low voices in the aisles of the workspace, and
some start doing push-ups on the spot to boost their spirits.
Some call them "miners"
because they always work in the dark,
and they are proud of that title.

WeChat has swept the entire market in 8 months.
It is not as simple as it is dazzling,
it is not as fast as it is simple, and no one is faster
than it.
Even under GPRS, WeChat can easily push the progress bar to the end.
All laws return to the ancestors, only fast is not broken.
When each company fights for a single point function,
WeChat suddenly jumped off the main battlefield in the second half of 2011
and placed two chess pieces on LBS and video calls.
Immediately, the "Shake It" function was developed on LBS.
The city's "click" sounded, and the
endless lonely heart finally had a simple place to go.
From Web SNS products to mobile Internet SNS products,
Zhang Xiaolong's third jump only took 8 months.

In the past eight months,
WeChat has gone from unpopular to hot, and
Zhang Xiaolong feels more lonely due to the huge change.
In a month in the first half of 2011,
he has carefully read almost all the industry's evaluations of WeChat.
I have read the argument that WeChat is hopeless, and
I have read various accusations about WeChat copying KIK and Talkbox.
In the second half of 2011, they all reversed.
Zhang Xiaolong remained silent,
but a picture of Michael Jackson was posted on the startup page of WeChat 3.0, with
a sentence from MJ:
"If you say I'm wrong, then you better prove you're right."
" I would like to commemorate Michael Jackson with this version and thank his music for accompanying us on our product development journey."
In November of the same year, TalkBox released the TXT and picture input functions.
At this time, WeChat began to provide custom transparent background avatars and QR code business cards, and
began to test the impact of fashion on the popularity of products.

Apart from tennis once a week and music late at night every day,
Zhang Xiaolong has no other hobbies.
The smoking addiction in the era of programmers has been maintained,
He is the biggest Kent consumer in the middle of the night in Guangzhou,
a man who is so silent as a mystery, and
one of the few product managers with literary temperament in China.
He is the kind of person who, because he likes the lyrics of "Blue Lotus",
must ask Xu Wei to buy the copyright and
hang it at the entrance of his QQ mailbox.
He is also the kind of person who likes his colleague's young daughter to do graffiti, so he
hangs a graffiti painting at the entrance of his QQ mailbox like "Blue Lotus".

If there is a new APP in the world,
within 48 hours after its release,
if you download it and try it out,
you may meet a person named Allen.
If this person is silent, even his avatar is displayed. no.
Then you may have met Zhang Xiaolong.