As early as 2004, Jack Ma once said: "I can't find my opponent with a telescope."
When Ma Yun became the richest man in China in 2013 and Ali became the company with the highest market value in China, this sentence can be said to be appropriate.
But at this moment, with the popularization of smart phones and 3G networks, mankind has entered a new era of mobile Internet, and everything on the Internet is undergoing earth-shaking changes.
Ma Yun and Alibaba will soon panic and panic.
The biggest miracle of China's Internet development in those years was a brand new product called "WeChat".
WeChat is completely based on the mobile Internet. It has swept everyone's mobile phones at an unprecedented speed, and has rapidly grown into a huge social empire.
The difference between the mobile Internet and the PC Internet is typical of "social networking is king", "traffic is king", and "high frequency beats low frequency".
Take the payment field as an example:
Alipay was originally derived from the needs of Taobao, but within a few years it has grown into a towering tree that is almost as huge as Taobao.
In the first few years, Alipay occupied almost all of the domestic third-party online payments, and it was absolutely "you can't see your opponent with a telescope."
However, opponents will always pop up from places you don't expect.
Three days before the Spring Festival in 2014, WeChat quietly launched the "WeChat Red Packet". Within a few days, millions of users linked their bank cards to WeChat, more than 5 million red packets were sent out, and tens of millions of people got change in their WeChat.
Some media called it "WeChat red envelopes did overnight what Alipay took 10 years to do."
On the 29th day of the year, Ma Yun sent a message on Alibaba's social platform "Laiwang":
"Almost overnight, people from all walks of life believed that the Alipay system would be fully surpassed by WeChat red envelopes. How good the experience and products are... really amazing!
The attack on Pearl Harbor was perfectly planned and executed. Fortunately, the Spring Festival passed quickly, and the days to come are still long, but it did teach us a lesson. "
The opponent, who could not be seen with the telescope before, was suddenly attacked by the air. Alipay has encountered an unprecedented rival.
And the Spring Festival in 2014 was just a small test of WeChat. A year later, a bigger storm hit.
On New Year’s Eve in 2015, WeChat and CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala launched the “Shake” to grab red envelopes. During the four-hour show, 20 million users shook 11 billion times in total, sent out 1 billion red envelopes, and linked more than 100 million bank cards to WeChat.
Alipay's market share was quickly squeezed out, and it fell into gloom.
A few years later, in an interview with "China Entrepreneur Magazine", Jing Xiandong, CEO of Ant Financial, described a darkroom game to compare the feeling at that time: "I was at a loss and surrounded by great anxiety." Ni Xingjun, president of Ant Financial's Alipay business group, said: "It was a 'huge sense of shock and loss'."
Under the fierce attack of WeChat payment, Ali people gradually began to believe in two concepts: one is "pure payment is worthless", and the other is "high frequency beats low frequency".
In their view, Alipay cannot compete with WeChat because it has no social functions. In order to achieve greater value and increase user frequency, Alipay should also do social networking.
With an extreme desire for traffic, Alipay began to blindly pursue the length of user stay, transforming from a tool to a social platform. It gave up what it was best at, and competed with WeChat for what the other party was best at.
In 2016, Alipay released multiple versions, which looked no different from social apps, not a payment tool at all. However, its market share has been declining all the way, while WeChat payment is making great strides.
At this time, Alipay has completely fallen into a magic barrier: if the product does not perform well, it must be because there is no social interaction; if the social product still performs poorly, it must be because the social interaction is not enough. Therefore, all actions are trying to enhance social functions.
In November, Alipay finally reached the edge of the cliff.
This month, Alipay launched the "Circle" function, encouraging users to upload photos to make friends. As a result, in the two columns of "White Collar Diary" and "Girls' Diary", some users uploaded large-scale photos with ambiguous text.
These advertisements, which are considered by many netizens to imply solicitation for whoring, have caused an uproar in public opinion. Alipay was ridiculed as "pay bustard" for a while.
The frenzy of public opinion made Alibaba start to reflect. Peng Lei, then chairman of Ant Financial, apologized to the public in an internal letter. The title of the letter is "Wrong is Wrong".
Peng Lei said: "The past two days have been the saddest moments in the seven years since I joined Alipay. We have experienced many difficult moments, but nothing has hurt me so deeply as this time. .”
She asked: "What signal do we want to send to hundreds of millions of users? What exactly do we want? Where do we go after all? In the face of the so-called user activity, can we do whatever we can?"
In March 2017, Alipay finally announced that it would abandon social networking and return to the industry of payment. At this time, WeChat Pay has already occupied nearly 40% of the market share and has become a powerful opponent that Alipay cannot ignore.
In addition to Alipay, Ali is stuck in social myths, and there is another product that Ali is promoting with all its strength: "Lailian".
Lailian was launched in 2013. Jack Ma hoped that this new product would be able to fight against WeChat and find the basis for Ali’s survival in the mobile Internet era.
In order to quickly promote exchanges, Jack Ma even asked all employees of the company to develop at least 100 external users in addition to their own use. He himself did not hesitate to pull down his old face and invited entrepreneurs and friends in the entertainment circle to help him stand on the platform.
But social doesn't fit well with Alibaba.
Although Jack Ma vigorously promotes it, he often posts on it, but it is not a rival of WeChat at all. Later, it gradually fell silent, and no one cares about it anymore. It has become an epitaph of Ali's failure in social networking.
After the social war, "corporate gene theory" has become a popular argument. It is generally believed that Tencent has social genes and Ali has e-commerce genes. If Tencent wants to do e-commerce and Ali wants to do social networking, both are doomed to fail.
However, Ali's efforts to deal with the impact of the mobile Internet have not completely failed.
In 2014, Ali bought a small company called "Youmeng" for 80 million yuan. The company itself is nothing, but along with the company, the founder of the company, Jiang Fan, was born in 1985.
Just as Zhang Xiaolong is the biggest gain from Tencent's acquisition of Foxmail, Jiang Fan is the biggest gain from Ali's acquisition of Youmeng.
After arriving in Ali, Jiang Fan was appointed as the senior director of the wireless business department. Zhang Yong entrusted him with a daunting task: transforming mobile phone Taobao.
At that time, Taobao’s main transactions were still on the PC side, and the mobile Taobao experience was horrible.
Jiang Fan is a heavy mobile phone user. He doesn't even use a computer, doing almost all his work on his phone.
Armed with a deep understanding of the mobile Internet, Jiang Fan led the team to carry out a drastic transformation of mobile Taobao, and successfully completed Taobao's shocking leap from the PC era to the mobile phone era.
By March 2016, nearly 80% of Taobao's traffic came from wireless, and nearly 70% of the transactions on the entire network came from wireless. On Double Eleven in 2017, the wireless terminal transaction rate exceeded 90%.
And Jiang Fan also became the president of Taobao in 2017. This year, he was only 32 years old. Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan.com, believes that he has the opportunity to become the well-deserved successor of Alibaba CEO in the future.