If I hadn’t read “Boiling New Decade”, I probably wouldn’t be able to think of those “star products” that disappeared in a blink of an eye. For example, the former intranet/renren, Kaixin, Fanfo, 91 Assistant, Wandoujia and so on.
As a “post-90s” generation, our generation has experienced the intelligent process of mobile phones. At an energetic age, we have witnessed that mobile phones have jumped out of the “2.8-inch” limit, moving towards 3.5-inch, 4.0-inch, and then approaching 7-inch “phablet phones”, and then the market will return to rationality, in the “6.X inch” ”, seeking a balance between performance and comfort.
In any case, the era when the 3.5-inch screen can be called a giant screen is gone forever.
And this evolution, the reason why we are “experience”, not “witness”, is because what we can see is only the front desk – the front desk where you sing and I appear. Therefore, when we see the sudden emergence of Xiaomi, the collapse of Nokia’s mobile phone giant, and the rapid advance of Huawei, we will feel sudden and surprising.
If you try to break into the backstage and get a glimpse of it, it is the world described in “Boiled New Decade”.
The most difficult history to write is contemporary history, which I am afraid no one can deny. Smartphones and mobile Internet are all too new, and it is still very early to conclude.
A vivid example is that, in the eyes of the general public, Nokia has long sacrificed gloriously in the fierce battle between Android and IOS. However, as everyone knows, today’s Nokia is still alive and well, because the communication technology and equipment assets it has accumulated over the years are sufficient. It is still active after losing the mass electronic consumer market.
Even further, in the future smart life that is brewing, Nokia’s place in the field of communications and its influence on the formulation of industry standards make it possible for it to return to the public eye.
Therefore, in the commercial society, success or failure is not enough to be a hero. This is like the rivers and lakes in martial arts novels, where experts are surrounded by experts, and blessings and misfortunes depend on each other. The head of a sect may have died at the hands of a seven-year-old child. And the orphan missed in a strangulation operation may be the male lead in the later story.
In this case, what is the use of writing contemporary history, or reading contemporary history?
The success or failure of right and wrong turns empty, and the waves wash away the heroes. A history of science and technology is no different from a history of humanities and social sciences. They are anchors set in the long river of time, and they are always compared to the present. There is no answer in history, and the answer needs to be obtained by comparison in the present.
The birth of the Internet was in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was mainly used for US defense and academic research. At this stage, we are just bystanders.
Marked by the birth of the World Wide Web, the Internet has only really entered the common people since the early 1990s. In the PC Internet, there are three network applications of e-commerce platform, search engine and social network. China is a follower at this stage. Benchmarking the frontier, China gave birth to Internet companies such as Sina, Baidu, Ali, and Tencent.
The symbol of the third process is the birth of iPhone and Android phone. This is the history that “Boiled New Decade” focuses on, and the time scale is from 2010 to 2020.
The wind rises at the end of the blue. When looking back at the turning point in history, it was always inconspicuous at first, and a major feature of modernity is that this node is likely to be about applied technology.
Therefore, technical developers are the first protagonists to appear. In 2009, Apple opened its App Store software, opening up a previously unseen mobile development market. Technology forums, developer communities, technology blogs, etc., have quickly become hot spots for entrepreneurship.
What “Tech House” is good at is the development and optimization of the bottom layer, making terminals such as mobile phones convenient and easy to use. In the early iPhone, whether downloading videos, music, changing ringtones, or even changing a mobile wallpaper, it could not be done on the native system. To this end, applications such as 91 Assistant were born, and became a major traffic player in the transitional stage of mobile phone intelligence.
Similar logic applies to the Android platform. The early Android couldn’t compare to the iPhone, and it suffered from hardware limitations and redundancy in the underlying code. At that time, “jailbreaking” became a common practice for Android players. The CM team was the largest ROM development and optimization team in the world at that time. They developed ROM packages suitable for new models, and made the initial binding of Android and flashing.
Today, “flashing ROM” may be a historical term, but from 2010 to 2013, countless teenagers indulged in the experience brought by different ROM packages, and I don’t know how many “bricked” mobile phones were left. Of course, now we know that the big winner of this gameplay is Xiaomi, which started with the development of MIUI and updates the ROM package once a week, capturing the hearts of technology enthusiasts.
Immediately after technology, commercial capital with a keen sense of smell comes on the scene.
It is worth noting that the alliance between IT and capital has a long history. In the PC Internet era, the story of the connection between technology and capital, represented by the Silicon Valley Internet, has gone through the complete process of “forming, staying, and being in the dark”. In 1995, Silicon Valley set off the beginning of the Internet bubble. Five or six years later, at the beginning of the new century, a large number of companies using the Internet as a gimmick went bankrupt, and the Silicon Valley Internet bubble burst.
The huge wealth and depression will make the mobile Internet industry still fresh in the memory ten years later, but it turns out that although history will not repeat, it will always rhyme. The alliance of technology and capital still shows inevitable barbarism.
In the early days of China’s mobile Internet, the iconic “Big Chaos” event was undoubtedly the “Thousand Regiments War”. At that time, the group-buying application had just debuted, with Meituan, Nuomi, Wowo.com, and Tuanmei (later renamed Jumeiyoupin) as the representative players, and a group of group-buying platforms merged together. It has really changed the operating model of the restaurant industry. Similar subversions include Didi’s subversion of travel, WeChat’s upgrade of social networks, and the reshaping of the information publishing industry by the media industry.
The alliance of business and technology, its light still shines, and its shadow will also be deep. The only certainty is that this alliance will still covet the transformation of traditional industries.
The new car-making force is a positive example. Go back to 2015, the year of the “entrepreneurial wave”, and the concept of “Internet +” is still popular, trying to “empower” all traditional industries. From 2015 to 2016, the “Three Assassins of New Energy Vehicles” (NIO, Ideal and Xiaopeng Motors) were successively established.
Speaking of which, it makes people smile. At the beginning, the new car-making forces implemented the “Internet +” thinking, trying to optimize the traditional “OEM + 4S shop” model and transform it into an Internet sales model. This set of thinking has long been successfully verified by Xiaomi in the mobile phone industry. Through the convenience of online direct sales, Xiaomi eliminated the profits of channel dealers in the past, and the “IQ tax” with different channels and different prices has become a thing of the past.
Unexpectedly, however, the test of auto e-commerce was not smooth. This is because the voice and influence of OEMs in the automotive industry far exceed those of mobile phone manufacturers. Building a car is a complex industrial process, and the technology is firmly grasped by the manufacturers. On the sales side, the 4S store is tightly bound to the channel, and the e-commerce platform can only be reduced to a tool for providing booths.
I can’t really sell someone else’s car, I have to sell my own car. The original e-commerce platform has naturally entered the car manufacturing industry. “Car Home” went out of Weilai, “Car and Home” went out of the ideal, Xiaopeng followed closely, and the three giants of new energy were born.
The belief in Internet thinking has inadvertently brought up the future of electric vehicles.
This is because the structure of fuel vehicles is too complex, requiring many offline stores to provide services such as delivery and maintenance. Electric vehicles are much simpler, and offline venues only need to show and deliver. Even now, Tesla is promoting the “automatic pickup service”. Once completed, the offline store of new energy vehicles will only display the functions.
If the previous subversion is based on the knowledge of Internet thinking to empower products, then the new energy vehicle is a reverse feat: transforming the product into the appearance required by the Internet model and stepping out of the world. In this regard, the Internet has obviously turned around, from “lightweight” to “heavyweight market”.
On September 15, 2020, Jack Ma once said, “There will be no industry called the Internet in the future.” The implication is that the Internet will be deeply integrated into industry. Taking new energy vehicles as an example, the future Internet is no longer just an application layer, like the past APP showed a state of blooming flowers. On the contrary, it must integrate and leverage industrial systems and supply chains to provide services or services to the market. Entity product. This is also known as the Industrial Internet.
The decade written in “Boiled New Decade” has become an old decade in a blink of an eye. The next stage, perhaps starting in 2022. Data shows that the number of smartphones and PCs shipped has continued to decline, showing exhaustion, while the demand for semiconductors represented by new energy vehicles and intelligent driving has risen sharply.
The tide strikes again, and history never stops.
