Social networks are a big loser and the Internet has no winners | best real poker app, lagu rohani ampuni aku tuhan

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How popular is "Honor of Kings" in 2017? There are more than 50 million daily active players and more than 200 million registered users. In other words, 1 in every 7 people in China is playing this game. It is no exaggeration to describe it as "popular across the country".

However, compared with 2002's "Legend", "Glory of the King" is actually not that exaggerated. By the end of 2002, the total number of registered users of "Legend 2" exceeded 40 million, while the total number of Internet users in China that year was only 58 million. In other words, 2 out of every 3 Chinese people who have access to the Internet are playing Legend.

"Legend" is Chen Tianqiao's first big gamble. On July 14, 2001, he obtained the exclusive agency rights of Actoz "Legend II" in China with the remaining US$300,000. Since he ran out of funds, he could only take this agency contract to Inspur and Dell to apply for a trial machine for two months in the next two months. Unexpectedly, the other party saw that it was an international formal contract, so he agreed. Even China Telecom gave Shanda a free bandwidth trial for a two-month test period.

Two months later, "Legend" began open beta testing, and another two months later it began to be officially charged. The number of people online at the same time quickly exceeded 400,000. In that era, online games were legends, and legends were online games. If you walk into an Internet cafe at random, eight out of ten people will be playing Legends, and the remaining two may be chatting about QQ.

On May 13, 2004, Shanda Network was listed on Nasdaq, raising US$150 million, becoming the Chinese Internet company with the highest market value and the game company with the highest market value in the world at that time. The next year, Chen Qiaotian, who was only 31 years old, surpassed NetEase Ding Lei and became the richest man in China.

"Legend" adopts a time-based billing method, and players need to purchase point cards to continue the game. However, in 2006, Shi Yuzhu launched the "free game" "Zhengtu", which changed the era of time charging for online games in China. "Zhengtu" has also become the third game in the world to have more than one million people online at the same time. At this time, if you walk into an Internet cafe, eight out of ten people are playing Zhengtu, and the remaining two may still be chatting on QQ.

Chinajoy in 2016 has already been the world of mobile games, and Shanda Games announced that this is the last year it will participate in the exhibition. Chen Danian, one of the founders of Shanda Games, lamented in the circle of friends: "In the last year, everyone should go and see it."

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The year Shi Yuzhu launched free games was also a year of great ambition for Microsoft.

By the end of April 2006, there were 7.1 million users in China using Chinese MSN and Hotmail e-mails. But Microsoft's ambitions don't stop there. On May 11, Microsoft Internet Division-MSN announced the establishment of a joint venture with Shanghai Lianhe Investment Co., Ltd. to officially bring MSN to China.

Sitting in Guangzhou, Ma Huateng immediately felt the heat and pain behind his back. QQ had encountered its biggest opponent.

Although QQ’s registered users had already passed the 300 million mark, China’s Internet industry was pessimistic at that time. Fang Xingdong, then CEO of BlogChina.com, said, "Tencent underestimated its rival MSN, and sooner or later it will hhave to pay a heavy price." "Tencent's current user base and growth rate are notEnough to be proud of. Because after MSN comes in, it will be unstoppable and its market share will soon be rewritten. ”

MSN was once the most popular social software in the world. It had no restrictions and was unobstructed, but it eventually died.

On March 15, 2013, Microsoft closed its global MSN services except China. On October 31 of the following year, Microsoft announced that MSN had officially withdrawn from China. That day, in order to commemorate MSN, many netizens launched, or even downloaded and installed the long-forgotten MSN. However, after logging in, there was only a gray MSN icon.

“First of all, we didn’t kill him because he didn’t catch up with socialization. He died because of Facebook. Second, they did not localize it well in China. After the revision, the Chinese fonts were messy, accounts were stolen, and local operations such as security were not up to standard. "In 2016, Ma Huateng said in an interview with former FT Chinese editor-in-chief Li Fen.

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In 2009, when the fierce battle between MSN and QQ was in full swing, everyonee thought that Kaixin.com could become a super Internet company.

Over the course of three months, Li Min, who is nearly 40 years old in a fourth-tier city, her 16-year-old daughter who is in high school, and her 8-year-old niece who has just entered elementary school, all changed their usual routines. They set the alarm clock in the early morning every day, got up and turned on the computer to "steal food." Subsequently, Kaixin.com launched two more similar types of games, "Grab a Parking Space" and "Buy and Sell with Friends."

With these social games, Kaixin.com attracted nearly 60 million users a year and became the number one social networking site in China.

"Parking War" and "Friends For Sale" are not original creations of Kaixin.com, but are derived from the two most popular social applications on Facebook, "Parking War" and "Friends For Sale". It is precisely web applications based on Facebook's open platform like these two games that allow Facebook to surpass MySpace, which has been weighing on itself before.

This year, Kaixin.com has become extremely close to its foreign master, Facebook. At the beginning of 2009, Facebook had 150 million users.

The sudden rise of Kaixin.com made Chen Yizhou, the owner of Xiaonei.com (renamed Renren.com in 2009), China's largest SNS community at the time, unable to sit still.

Cheng Binghao’s Kaixin.com was established in March 2008. Chen Yizhou launched the SNS community "kaixin.com" in October 2008. The names of the two Kaixin.com were exactly the same, and the URLs were also very close (the URL of Cheng Binghao’s Kaixin.com was kaixin001.com), and the two parties began a protracted legal battle over this.

It was not until October 2010 that the legal battle between the "True and False Kaixin.com", which lasted for one and a half years, was officially announced. Thousand Oaks Interactive was ordered not to use the name "Kaixin.com" anymore, but it can still use the domain name kaixin.com. Although the lawsuit was lost, Renren actually gained dataTens of millions of users. However, Kaixin.com was in deep trouble in 2010, with a user churn rate as high as 65%.

Since 2012, Kaixin.com has entered the mobile game market and launched a mobile game called "Unify the World". It achieved revenue of 1 million in just one month after its launch, thus bidding farewell to the dream of a platform company. On July 21, 2016, Cheng Binghao announced his resignation from Kaixin.com.

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At one time, Chen Yizhou seemed to be the one having the last laugh. He first acquired Wang Xing's Xiaonei.com and then destroyed Kaixin.com. In 2011, Renren went public in the United States with a market value of more than US$7.9 billion, making it the fourth-highest-valued Internet company in China at the time.

He has rich experience in transition, from SP to Maopu, and from Maopu to on-campus. We have transformed many times in history, but in the end we fell into the spring breeze of the mobile Internet era.

The Spring Festival of 2013 is a time of comprehensive transformation for the mobile Internet. Chen Yizhou shouted, "I want to find shoes for walking in the swamp." He said: "In the past year, China's mobile Internet users exceeded PCs for the first time. Internet companies are transforming to mobile Internet. This is a major trend. Whether you plan to stay in it for a long time or leave after three years, you must transform. For the entire industry, it has reached a life-or-death moment. To die or not to die."

Five years later, Renren was sold for US$60 million.

In Wang Feng's Ten Questions conversation, Chen Yizhou quoted the book "The Second Brother Must Die" and believed that part of the reason for Renren's failure was that Tencent was too strong. "As long as there are Internet business types with network effects, in the end there will be only one big guy left, accounting for more than 90% of the value of the entire industry."

"One fact that can be proven is that Kaixin.com was successfully blocked by QQ Farm. QQ Farm bought the original code of Kaixin Farm on the Renren Open Platform, operated it by itself, and introduced most of the Qzone users. You can see the Alexa curve at that time. After the launch of QQ Farm, Qzone grew rapidly, and The growth curve of Renhe Kaixin has immediately flattened. Farm stealing is a pioneering work on the Internet in China, and it is also an important reason for the rise of social networks in various countries. But you see, the business competition of Shanghai Five Minutes Company, which invented stealing vegetables, is cruel. Of course, Cheng Binghao would hate me, and I would hate him too."

Chen Yizhou believes that without QQ Farm, Renren would live a better life and Kaixin.com would also be listed. However, if Tencent finally sacrifices WeChat, the second and third sons will still have to die.

But Cheng Binghao’s reflection is much deeper than Chen Yizhou’s. In 2016, when he quit Kaixin.com, Cheng Binghao wanted to understand: Did "Fake Kaixin.com" defeat True Kaixin.com? Did Weibo and WeChat defeat Kaixin.com? None.

Although it suffered great losses in the war, the competitor's user base is very similar and has a great influence. "But the decline in our user activity is caused by the characteristics and life cycle of the product itself." The emergence of new competitors has only accelerated this process.

If Chen Yizhou has read "A Brief History of Humankind" or "A Brief History of the World", he will know that evolution has no end, and the worldThere is no eternal boss in the world. New species always replace old ones.

Herbert Wells wrote in A Brief History of the World: "In a stable environment, newly emerging species are often suppressed and have difficulty developing, because the species that are best adapted to the environment are those existing species. However, in a new environment, it is the existing species that will suffer, and the new species can often seize the opportunity to survive." But in fact, "All extinct species have defects."

The competition in the Internet industry is so fierce and cruel that every entrant dares not to neglect and move forward with all their strength. The cruel thing about it is that every time the opponents take a step forward, or a new opponent does not appear, it means that the environment has changed. There is never a stable environment on the Internet. People on the Internet have to face one of the most painful things in life all the time, "learning a new way to make a living."

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Looking back at the SNS war between Renren and Kaixin.com, in addition to Kaixin.com, Renren also had QQ Farm, Myspace, Tianya, and Xici.

"I hope the photos on Xiaonei.com will always be there, because sometimes I want to look back at my youth." Today, an old user of Renren.com said this.

Right around the time Renren sold herself, Nanjing’s local BBS Xici Hutong issued an announcement announcing that it would close the discussion board that had “negative management and inactive postings in the past three months.”

As the earliest famous community website in China, Xici Hutong was established in 1998 and reached its peak in 2000, with more than 30 million registered users. On May Day of that year, Xici held its first large-scale netizen gathering. Many famous program hosts and Xici figures came, and even Xuanwu Gate was jammed with traffic. Jiangsu TV station also organized a New Year's Day party for Xici netizens.

In the past 25 years from 1994 to 2019, China’s Internet has experienced long or short trends such as portals being king, the rise of online games, search winning, the advent of online literature, video competition, e-commerce melee, thousands of group wars, social craze, O2O trend, live broadcast disputes, crowds of unmanned shelves, short videos becoming popular, etc.

In the meantime, thousands of entrepreneurs are caught up in the Internet trend.

Shao Yibo founded China's first C2C website, eBay, in August 1999. By 2002, the number of registered users exceeded 3 million, and the industry share exceeded 80%. However, in 2003, Shao Yibo decided to sell to eBay for US$225 million.

More than ten years later, Shao Yibo admitted that he did not expect the e-commerce market to be so big - Alibaba's market value today is more than 375 billion U.S. dollars, and it reached a peak of 500 billion U.S. dollars this year. Of course, today's Alibaba is not just about e-commerce, but has extended to more businesses such as payment, logistics, cloud computing, etc.

Almost at the same time as eBay, Hou Yantang used his spare time to develop the famous download software FlashGet (Internet Express). When FlashGet was at its most glorious, it once occupied more than 95% of the market share. Its pop-up window after a successful download, "Congratulations! You are installing the most popular download software in the world" is not an exaggeration at all.

Xunlei founder Zou Shenglong once jokedHe said that thanks to Hou Yantang's addiction to the online game "World of Warcraft", Internet Express stopped updating for a year. In this year, Xunlei updated 29 versions, surpassing it.

Very early on, Hou Yantang sold the Internet Express to ZCOM for 10 million yuan. 10 million yuan is not much in any Internet company that has ever been number one in the industry. However, Hou Yantang may have lived a more free and easy life than Zou Shenglong. After all, even though Xunlei has become the first in the industry, Xunlei is still deep in the swamp and chaos. Now, it seems to have lost its way in the blockchain.

Once, an entrepreneur lamented: Wang Xing said that entrepreneurship is a narrow escape from death, but in fact it should be to live towards death. In the Internet war, there are no winners.

[Source: TMTpost Media Author: Business and Life]