With the release of the iPhone in 2007, the era of smartphones really kicked off. In 2009, Google released the open source mobile phone operating system Android, and in September of the same year, the first Android phone G1 was released. Even though the Android phone experience was rough at the time, I thought Android would succeed because I was bullish on open source. So, we decided to make smartphones based on the Android operating system.
——Lei Jun, excerpted from Lei Jun's new book "Thoughts on Xiaomi's Entrepreneurship"
Lei Jun’s speech on crossing the trough of life was swiped, and I couldn’t help but do two things: 1) I went back to read the program life of the young Lei Jun, and found his old blog from 2008 to 2016 by the way. 2) Add "Xiaomi Entrepreneurship Thinking" to the bookshelf and read it quickly.
At the beginning, I saw the familiar story again, and the familiar word "open source". This is the Nth time that Lei Jun has mentioned open source. In 2018, I wrote " What did open source change Xiaomi?" "In the article, it was said at the beginning that "the origin of Xiaomi and open source should start from the open source of Android."
Lei Jun’s college classmate, Xiaomi’s open source promoter, Cui Baoqiu, vice president of Xiaomi Group, shared with him why Lei Jun founded Xiaomi. One of the reasons was seeing Android’s open source. As early as a few years ago, Lei Jun firmly believed in Android. The prevalence of such an open source operating system is a huge opportunity. "Mr. Lei told me, 'Baoqiu, any Internet company that leaves open source will lose at the starting line'. Open source is very important, and this is also the source of motivation for me to promote open source at Xiaomi." Cui Baoqiu said.
In addition to the above, in the book "Xiaomi Entrepreneurship Thinking", "open source" is mentioned 6 times. Of course, summed up, it may be a bit repetitive from the language point of view. After removing the repetition, the core has 4 point:
- The operating system is complicated, it doesn't matter, we do it on open source system.
- Open source is also very complicated, it doesn't matter, we found the most important functions of smartphones at that time and started working.
- Tim Berners-Lee (Tim Berners-Lee), who works at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), invented key Internet infrastructures such as the World Wide Web, web page languages, and browsers around 1990 and made them open source. The great thing about this series of inventions is that it unifies the display and communication of Internet applications on the web page, without having to ask what computing device, what operating system, and what programming language the provider uses to create these applications. These inventions also made it possible for ordinary people to use the Internet, and directly contributed to the take-off of modern Internet business companies based on web applications.
- At the 2020 Xiaomi Developer Conference, Xiaomi released the Xiaomi Vela IoT embedded software platform, a big step forward in open source and IoT operating systems.
Lei Jun pointed out the direction, and Cui Baoqiu carried it through. At the same time, Cui Baoqiu's speech at the TDengine Developer Conference brought him further insights into open source. The sentence "In the era of the Internet, big data and artificial intelligence, open source is the best platform and model for human technological progress" opened up the pattern.
Looking back on Lei Jun’s life of more than 50 years, it is really rich. He writes code, cares about open source, stands on the street to practice sales, and has made investments. He is an entrepreneur. I have always regretted not being able to write code for a lifetime, and I don't know if Lei Jun chooses again, what will Lei Jun choose?