A “core replacement” transformation of traditional enterprises.
Text: First Sister Rong Da
Column planning: Liu Han
In 2009, the first “China Cloud Computing Conference” was held in Beijing. Although it is called “China”, the representatives of companies participating in the keynote speeches at the forum are almost all foreign companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel.
The cover article “Cloud Computing Third Generation” of the same period of “Internet Weekly” describes this as:
“When the giants on the podium talk about their cloud computing achievements, many domestic companies sitting in the audience are more like their fans.”
10 years later, China is the fastest growing market for cloud computing in the world. Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud ranks among the top ten global cloud computing rankings. Openstack, the largest open source platform for cloud computing, has three Chinese companies on the list.
In the past 10 years, apart from the noisy consumer Internet, this battle with cloud computing as the main weapon in the B-end market has experienced bloody price wars, crazy advertising wars, and turbulent wars of words. It has also gone through a magnificent history.
There are several unbelievable stories hidden behind this history:
Why Amazon AWS, which has divided nearly half of the global market share and is invincible in almost all regions, has encountered Waterloo in the Chinese market and even fell out of the first echelon?
How did Tencent, which is generally regarded as slow and does not have the TO B gene, quickly catch up to become the second largest cloud computing vendor in China?
There are many giants, high investment, high technology threshold, and at the same time fighting against the tragic cloud computing market. Why are there still some small and beautiful companies that can get rid of the nightmare of being eliminated or incorporated in the consumer Internet field? “project-link” data-id=”266463″ data-name=”立成” data-logo=”https://img.36krcdn.com/20201111/v2_a94309eecd394d7bb4ef2f5ab2857c2d_img_000″ data-refer-type=”2″ href=” https://36kr.com/projectDetails/266463″ target=”_blank”>Licheng to grow his own world?
What is the logic of all Internet giants all in the B-end market? What has changed in this world?
Looking back at history at this point in time, we can vaguely find answers to these stories. But looking at the future from today’s point of time, there is a more confusing and more fascinating question: who will be the last king in this B-side battle that is moving from cloud computing to the industrial Internet?
He’s Watching You
In 2012, one year before Amazon announced that AWS entered China, the US House of Representatives released a report. After that, President Obama signed a spending bill prohibiting federal government agencies from purchasing information technology products with a Chinese background.
A few months later, the prism door exploded by Snowden was fermented in China.
Together, a big discussion about information security is boiling in the tech circle.
The headline of the cover report of the then issue of China Economic Weekly under the People’s Daily was: “Prism Covering China, He’s Watching You”, and the subtitle was: “Seamless Penetration of the Eight U.S. King Kong in China”.
The article wrote:
In stark contrast to the situation where Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE are rejected by the United States, the “Eight King Kongs” (Cisco, IBM, Google, Qualcomm, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft) in China are It can be a long-term drive, and the products of these companies have been used in the construction of China’s national key information infrastructure.
At present, almost 100% of all units in China, including government departments, military, armed police, and military industrial enterprises, use Microsoft’s operating system and office software. Some database software for storing important information and industrial control systems are also developed by Western high-tech companies.
Before this security discussion, the infrastructure represented by IOE has shown that it cannot adapt to the rapid development of the domestic Internet, which has triggered a round of “go IOE “Today, Prism has pushed this wave to the height of national security.
On November 12, 2013, China established the National Security Committee. A few months later, the Central Cyber Security and Informatization Leading Group was established, officially taking “information security” as an important direction of national security supervision. Next, the new government procurement Tender Notification requires that all computer products of state agencies are not allowed to install windows 8 System”.
The regulatory principles of China’s cloud computing industry are finally condensed into two points:
1. All Chinese data must remain in China;
Second, all technical services are hoped to be provided by China.
On December 28, 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a notice of “Telecom Business Classification (2015 Edition)”, the adjustedIn the catalog, cloud computing services are included in telecommunications value-added services. To provide cloud services in China, you must apply for a telecommunications value-added service license in accordance with regulations.
Although there is a window, so far, Internet data center (IDC) and cloud computing business are still on the negative list of foreign investment, and no foreign company has independently obtained an IDC license to operate in China.
Among the changes in regulatory tightening, the more flexible Microsoft is the first to truly land. In early 2014, Microsoft announced that Azure, operated by 21Vianet, was commercially available in China.
The cooperation model of the two parties is: Microsoft provides technology authorization, 21Vianet is responsible for operation and sales.
This model is doomed to dissatisfaction with foreign cloud service providers in the later period.
The “The Paper” news once quoted an industry insider to explain the hidden pain of Microsoft Azure cooperative operation:
“The release process of Microsoft Azure in China is very complicated. You need to build a copy on a North American server, then copy it to a Chinese server through a springboard, and then start the release process. All servers, monitoring systems, and early warning systems are It is necessary to independently deploy one set in China, which seriously affects the speed and consistency of cloud services.”
When Microsoft just signed an agreement with Century Internet, it promised to provide cloud computing services in China with the same quality as global standards. Microsoft even copied all the indicators of the internal engineering team and used it to measure 21Vianet’s operational services in China.
But this promise can only achieve “exact efforts.”
There are at least six telecommunications operators in China, each province has its own characteristics, and there are still interoperability issues between operators.
At the same time, domestic enterprise-level IT consumption has almost remained at the level of the United States in the 1990s, and the B-end soft and hard market is far less mature than the United States. UCloud market operators once complained to the media. In China, even for orders of tens of thousands of dollars, Chinese companies also hope to have dedicated sales personnel to follow up.
In the cooperation between Microsoft and 21Vianet, the product is Microsoft’s, and the operation is 21Vianet’s. Based on regulatory security, Microsoft people must go through strict approval to enter the data center. At the same time, the applications of some cloud service providers, because the underlying development framework uses Google, cannot be used in China, and foreign cloud service providers have actually lost their competitiveness in providing rich product categories.
So, Amazon has never wanted to copy Microsoft’s model in China.
Since the announcement of AWS’s entry into China, Amazon has tried a variety of ways to avoid supervision. For example, the early “Front shop and back factory“, later “Limited Preview” was reported during the period. Due to its gray status, AWS has made slow progress in expanding customers in China.
Specially for Rong Yongkang, the head of Amazon AWS in China, because he bounced several times on the scheduled launch date with the headquarters, he was ready to be fired.
It wasn’t until the end of December 2017 that Amazon AWS passed the agreement with Shinnet cooperation is legal Identity. But at this time, the domestic domestic cloud computing market is already another scene.
In April 2018, Li Jin, the vice president of Alibaba Cloud, suddenly said something astonishing at the Nanjing Summit of the Yunqi Conference: “There are only two types of clouds in China. The first type of cloud is the cloud based on ethics, and the second type of cloud is An autonomous and controllable cloud like Alibaba Cloud.”
Less than two weeks ago, a discussion about “autonomy and control” swept across industries.
Compared with the exposure of the Prism project five years ago, the participation and response were more intense.
Li Jin’s words, the original intention was probably just to compare the doctrine with autonomy and controllability, but adding “Alibaba Cloud” in front of autonomy and controllability, it becomes like, except that Alibaba Cloud is autonomous and controllable Yes, all other clouds are ethical.
Evaluating a company’s “usage doctrine” is equivalent to giving the other party an “involuntary and uncontrollable” hat.
Who can stand this?
A person in charge of Huawei’s enterprises and products in China fought back tit-for-tat: There are only two kinds of clouds in China, one is “the cloud that only brags, and the other is the cloud that changes the world steadily”.
In the evening, QingCloud gave a more intense response. The company’s official WeChat account published “Discussing “Two Clouds””, the article wrote:
“With the giants all inCloud computing has become a serious PR battlefield, and we may have been unaware of all kinds of gorgeous packaging, excessive publicity and even false publicity. But Li Jin’s words make us no longer silent, because we cannot tolerate the most cherished things being trampled underfoot. The so-called “industry boss”, while arrogant and self-praising, denies the efforts and glory of a large number of domestic cloud computing R&D engineers, including QingCloud engineers, and deeply hurt our most cherished spirit and value I believe that Alibaba Cloud, which has thousands of engineers, can be so ignorant that it really believes that China has only the “Flying Cloud” as an autonomous and controllable cloud. “
Qingyun’s founder Huang Yunsong is a particularly cautious person, paranoid about technologyInside the circle Everyone knows that when he was responsible for smartcloud at IBM, he was a well-known bull of the company. Someone on Zhihu talked about gossip, saying that Huang Yunsong ran away from IBM and founded Qingyun, worrying that his old team might make trouble, so he simply re-learned a programming language to write Qingyun.
Huang Yunsong has always been confident of Qingyun’s technical capabilities since the public cloud was launched in 2013. In the face of competition, the attitude is basically “come, try and try”. Li Jin’s words were obviously poking on the lung tube of others.
But in fact, that sentence really refers to Tencent and Huawei. In 2018, China’s cloud computing has reached a new battlefield.
The shark swims across the Pacific Ocean
The history of cloud computing in China has a very clear time coordinate: December 18, 2013.
On this day, Amazon held a press conference at the Beijing International Hotel to announce that AWS will enter the Chinese market. The press conference that day was overcrowded, the aisle was too crowded to move forward. For safety reasons, the hotel once restricted “only exit but no entry”.
It was this highly anticipated press conference that sparked the first artillery fire in China’s cloud computing market.
In May earlier, Microsoft, with its soft body and strong public relations capabilities, announced its cooperation with the domestic enterprise 21Vianet. Immediately afterwards, two other well-known cloud service providers, IBM and SAP, also joined in a similar marriage. , On July and 11, 2013Announced its entry into the Chinese cloud computing market.
Among them, IBM and Capital Online signs a long-term strategic cooperation agreement for public cloud, the curve enters China, and SAP Through the establishment of a joint venture with China Telecom Group, the promotion of SAP cloud products in China is realized.
Several giants are all old players in the To B market, and now they have their own weapons and are prepared.
IBM’s domestic telecommunications, financial and other large enterprises have always been representatives of high-value customers. SAP is the world’s third largest independent software company and a leader in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) industry. 85% of Fortune 500 companies are its customers. And Microsoft has established an enviable government relationship since the 1990s. The laboratory established in China is the third laboratory besides the United States and the United Kingdom, which represents the company’s emphasis on the Chinese market. In addition, Microsoft, which has suffered from piracy, also has the broadest customer base.
However, these advantages were not worth mentioning in front of AWS back then.
Since 2006, when the flag was first inserted into the cloud computing continent, Amazon AWS has become the undisputed global leader in this market. It resembles a hurricane and reshapes the industrial structure of Silicon Valley.
A large part of Amazon’s initiative comes from the arrogance of other giants. At the 2008 Open World conference, Oracle founder Larry Ellison mocked that cloud computing has made the computer industry the only industry that pursues concepts and trend packaging than women’s fashion.
Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun, said with contempt: “Cloud computing, as a classic server advertisement, can make servers more sexy.”
The cool words are cool for a while. It was not until 2010 when the giants turned in a hurry to fight, only to find that Amazon had already taken the lead and firmly controlled the initiative in this market.
In March 2010, Ballmer, the then CEO of Microsoft, delivered a “We are all in” speech, announcing that Microsoft would fully develop cloud computing.
In fact, this is more like a self-empowering speech.
At this time, Microsoft’s internal incubation of cloud computing infrastructure products “The “Akainu” team is struggling. Its STB (Server and Tools) division is addicted to serving existing customers, and the “Akainu” team is severely marginalized.
At the end of the year, the team leader resigned, leaving a meaningful sentence in the resignation letter: For a large organization, the difficult transformation must be broken from within.
The current Microsoft CEO Nadella admitted when recalling the history of Microsoft in the book “Refresh”: “Amazon is leading a revolution, and we have not even assembled a team”, “Although Amazon did not disclose at that time Disclosure of AWS revenue, but it is obvious that he is the leader and its business scale is also difficult for Microsoft to match.”
Until the end of 2013, before Nadella took office, the technology media and Wall Street analysts were teasing about Microsoft, whose strategy was missed: Microsoft already had something very similar to Apple—unfortunately, Apple was 20 years ago.
The Synergy data in the third quarter of this year shows that AWS’s total revenue in the IaaS/PaaS market accounted for 55% of the global market share, surpassing the combined four of IBM, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce. .
Compared with Microsoft, IBM has suffered more ridicule.
In January 2013, in a bid with Amazon for a 10-year CIA cloud computing contract worth $600 million, IBM was unexpectedly out.
For a long time, IBM has been the most trusted partner of large enterprises and government customers, and it was almost synonymous with this type of transaction. Now, once close partners have thrown the olive branch to AWS. For the Blue Giant, who is often equated with American national strength, this result is not only the sharpest wake-up call, but also an unacceptable shame.
IBM quickly protested, questioning why Amazon’s bid was clearly higher than 54 million US dollars, why it still won the contract?
The Government Accountability Office conducted an eight-month review, and the investigation report issued afterwards explained: CIA believes that AWS’s elastic cloud technology is better than IBM. Although Amazon’s price is about 54 million US dollars higher, it can Was “offset by superior technical solutions.”
The huge price of the CIA order became a key endorsement when AWS knocked on the doors of large enterprises and government departments. Since then, Amazon has consolidated its position as the king of the cloud computing market in the United States.
One month later, on the day of the second Amazon AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, IBM dropped an overwhelming wave of advertisements. In the shopping malls of casinos, bus bodies, and even hotel corridors where AWS holds conferences, IBM’s advertisements can be seen everywhere: “The most popular websites supported by IBM cloud products are 30% more than all competitors.”
Old-fashioned delivery methods and “bluffing”The content of the advertisement made IBM a laughing stock again. Amazon AWS CEO Andy Jassy made a slide show of the IBM bus advertisement on the big screen of the podium that day, and added: old guard (old school).
IBM is not doing nothing. As early as 2007, this company and Google promoted the theoretical popularization of cloud computing in major universities in the United States, hoping to accumulate talents for future research. In the same year, it also launched the Blue Cloud plan, which is one of the earliest companies to test cloud services.
However, IBM’s main profit point at the time was minicomputers. Its monopoly success prevented the pace of active evolution. Cloud computing has been used as a tool rather than a disruptive technology for a long time.
It wasn’t until 2013 that IBM began to make efforts through a series of mergers and acquisitions. However, the hesitation and backwardness of the past have already paid.
Beginning in 2013, IBM’s stock price has entered a downward channel. As of now, its valuation is less than 100 billion, which is more than ten times behind the most valuable technology companies in the US stock market such as Apple, Google, and Amazon. Even those “small companies” whose revenues are only a fraction or even a dozen of IBM, such as Adobe and ServiceNow, have caught up with IBM.
The blue giant once had a dim light.
The cloud is everything
Of all the giants that missed the opportunity, the most annoying is probably Google. Almost all reports mentioning Amazon’s first entry into the cloud market will incidentally mention: Google engineers first proposed the concept of “Cloud Computing”.
Google has always been considered that its technical architecture is most suitable for cloud computing business, but among Silicon Valley giants, Google is the slowest wave. In the global cloud computing market share announced by Gartner in 2019, Google accounted for 5.3%, only one-tenth of the combined share of Microsoft and Amazon, which is no longer comparable to the latter two.
Last year, Google’s parent company Alphabet released an annual financial report with revenue in line with Wall Street expectations, and its stock price still fell 3%. Subsequently, Google’s newly appointed head of cloud platform responded to Wall Street’s doubts by announcing its cloud business plan.
Improve the stock price by increasing cloud computing. There is a perfect learning object in Silicon Valley-Microsoft.
Before 2014, Microsoft was a declining giant that “has reached the second half of its life cycle.” In 2014, Ballmer, who led Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia, retired early. Nadella, who was in charge of the cloud business, came to the front and became a new A CEO. Subsequently, Microsoft launched a new business strategy of “mobile first, cloud first”. In the years that followed, Microsoft’s stock price soared 5 times.Newly regained the glory of the technology leader.
It’s not just an Internet veteran like Microsoft, but also a rising star company in cloud computing like salesforce, which has also been touted by capital in recent years.
In August of this year, this company sold Yunsoft companies are benefited from exceeding expectations by their earnings reports. The stock price surpassed Oracle, which was once the world’s largest veteran software service provider, overnight.
Salesforce founder Mark·Benny Off is the representative of a new generation of rock star entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley . He has his own talent for how to appear high-profile under the spotlight. He is the kind of person who used “End Software” as his slogan when he first started his business, and his salesforce company phone number was also set to “No Software”. After becoming famous, he bought “Time” magazine, appeared at a charity party, publicly mocked Microsoft, and confronted SAP and Siebel in the media.
But all the legends are not as good as salesforce’s market value surpassing Oracle.
Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, is a famous representative of bad guys in Silicon Valley. He is completely opposite to the image of a humble technical man that Bill Gates is happy to show. He likes luxury cars in Chinese clothes. He never hides his pursuit of extravagant and exaggerated life. He borrows money to buy the next one when he is still in poverty and changing jobs. sailboat.
He is also a famous fighter in Silicon Valley. One of Oracle’s early advertisements was a jet plane marked “Oracle”, chasing an old biplane with “IBM”. His most famous statement is: “Not only do I want to succeed, but I also have to cut off my opponent’s oxygen tube and let them fail.
The intersection of him and Mark Benioff is Oracle. Mark Benioff was once Oracle’s youngest vice president and Larry Ellison’s favorite employee. The two have similar rebelliousness and unrestrained arrogance. Larry Ellison even invited Marc Benioff to spend a vacation together, and Benioff unbridled called Larry Ay Lisen is the “mentor”.
The media described the two people at that time as “good like wearing a pair of pants.”
So, when Benioff left Oracle to start salesforce, Larry Ellison generously invested a sum of money, about 5% of the shares, and even served as a director for a while.
salesforce has created a “rental” software sales model. Customers can use salesforce’s software for $50 a month and renew the fee as they use it. Compared with Oracle’s way of selling customers a set of customized software for hundreds of thousands of dollars, this “light” model was not taken seriously by big B-side bigwigs like Oracle at the beginning.
When the value of cloud computing was discovered, Larry Ellison suddenly discovered that the two companies became competitors. As a result, two people who were once good enough to wear a pair of trousers now diss with each other daily in Silicon Valley. Once, I even developed a cloth and sang on the stage at the same time across a road.
In recent years, when Wall Street considers the growth power of technology companies, it has taken “cloud” as an important indicator to the future world. When recommending salesforce stock, an analyst said: If you believe in the digital economy, that’s the biggest reason you buy salesforce.
The logic of capital’s enthusiasm for cloud computing is simple, because Moore’s Law is failing.
Moore himself, who proposed Moore’s Law, predicted in 2005 that Moore’s Law would reach its limit and fail from 2010 to 2020. “Nature” and “The Economist” magazines have also published articles in recent years announcing the failure of Moore’s Law.
According to the predictions of Moore’s Law, the number of transistors in microprocessors will double every two years, and the processing power of chips will also double. However, the current manufacturing process of transistors has reached 5 nanometers. It can be compared with the diameter of atoms ranging from 0.1 nanometers to 0.01 nanometers. If the process continues to shrink to the atomic level, it will enter a new field of physical research.
But for now, the biggest threat to the failure of Moore’s Law is not the technical bottleneck, but the economic limit.
A report published by the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies of the Walsh School of Diplomacy at Georgetown University shows that the cost of chips is increasing at a rate of 28 nanometers and beyond. Through the model, they calculated that the manufacturing cost of the 5nm chip that has been mass-produced is 238 US dollars. Adding the design cost, packaging and testing costs, the total cost of a 5nm chip will be as high as 426 US dollars.Nearly 3,000 yuan.
In other words, in order to increase computing power, consumers need to pay more and more. Unfortunately, the report also pointed out that the performance improvement curve brought about by the reduction of the size of each generation of transistors is slowing down-higher and higher costs correspond to the smaller and smaller increase in computing power felt by consumers.
The uneconomical input and output will make the pace of chip process upgrade slower and slower until it stops. This is the real threat to the failure of Moore’s Law.
The technology industry generally regards the cloud as a “step to the side” to solve the increase in computing power. Cloud can allocate corresponding computing power and storage space to various applications on demand through distributed computing. This is the first solution for computing power after hardware progress is blocked, and it is also the value of Amazon AWS.
As Bezos said, Amazon will be the infrastructure provider of the future information age.
For years, Silicon Valley chasers have been looking for weaknesses in AWS. But Amazon is heavily guarded. Until now, AWS still occupies the largest share of the global cloud computing market.
Data released by Internet research company Netcraft in July 2013 showed that the number of networked computers deployed by Amazon for cloud computing services has increased by more than 30 times in four years. Another report suggested that the computing space provided by AWS in the field of cloud services has reached 5 times the total computing space of the 2nd to 15th cloud service providers.
A technology industry analyst told the media: In a short period of time, no one company can shake Amazon’s dominance alone.
At that time, the American technology media talked about AWS, and it was also the tune of “when will Amazon’s market value exceed all IT vendors”.
In 2013, the year Amazon announced that AWS had landed in China, a domestic media wrote: Who can catch up with Amazon so powerful?
Crazy Bezos’ Law
Let us take a rough inventory of the basic situation of the major players in the domestic cloud computing market in 2013:
Alibaba Cloud completed the Feitian 5K cluster and achieved the technical accumulation of becoming the domestic cloud computing boss;
Tencent announced the opening of Tencent Cloud this year;
Baidu officially named the service provided to developers as “Baidu Open Cloud”;
Huawei became the first gold member of China’s cloud computing open source project OpenStack Foundation;
China Telecom Tianyi Cloud officially provides open services to users and developers;
Jinshan Cloud and Ucloud received US$20 million and US$10 million in Series A financing respectively;
Qingyun public cloud platform is officially launched;
China’s cloud computing market is different from the United States. Before the mobile Internet, the United States has cultivated a mature B-side software and hardware market, and has supported a large wave of enterprise service providers including Oracle, IBM, and SAP.
Almost all of the most successful domestic technology companies in the past 20 years have been Internet companies for C-end users.
Before and after 2008, Ali’s transaction volume exploded, technical personnel spent money like water, and IOE sales staff who bought IOE were promoted year after year, and the back-end servers were still lighted up. Some people inside have complained about it and have been busy all year working for American companies.
So Jack Ma said at the IT summit that “Ali will die if it doesn’t do cloud computing”, not based on the strategic vision of the technical staff, but the business decision forced by Ali at that time. Therefore, the Feitian system set a goal when it was developed: it must stand the test of Double Eleven.
A major background of Tencent Cloud’s opening is the needs of cooperative enterprises. In 2013, the subsidy war in the field of travel hit the dark, Didi’s transaction volume soared 50 times a week, the back-end storage, network, and server failures continued, and the technicians almost went crazy. Cheng Wei called Ma Huateng for support in the middle of the night, and the teams of both sides struggled for seven days and nights before passing a level.
The special background created the initial stage of China’s cloud market in 2013. The main customers are Internet startups.
At this time, Amazon in the United States has begun to sell AWS to large enterprises and government departments. The newcomers of domestic cloud computing have an ambivalent attitude towards AWS. They both hope that the giants will quickly increase their awareness of the domestic market after entering the game, but they are also worried.The other party’s huge advantages in technology, capital and operations will crush their own living space.
But in general, at that moment, no company has taken the initiative to recognize AWS as a rival. A domestic media used a particularly straightforward headline: Amazon AWS’s entry into China is to play Microsoft Cloud, and several domestic clouds are not in its eyes.
This is not to be underestimated. Just the previous year, the State Council’s “Government Work Report” just gave an official definition of “cloud computing”. “Cloud” can be regarded as getting rid of the “gimmick” hat and entering the application from a concept. But when Chen Jinpei, general manager of Alibaba Cloud’s cloud computing business, said at the developer conference that “2012 is the first year of China’s cloud computing practice”, many people still thought it was “too foolish”.
Although Alibaba Cloud finally ran through the Feitian 5K cluster at the time, commercialization had just tested the waters. Tencent and Baidu will not officially pay attention to cloud computing until three years later. As for Huawei, its cloud computing strategy at this time is still firmly holding the operator’s thigh.
The second echelon Tianyi Cloud has just established a cloud computing branch for professional operations the previous year, and Kingsoft Cloud has just been separated from Kingsoft Software. Qingyun and Ucloud are startups established the year before. When Qingyun’s public cloud platform was officially launched, the company’s account was only 60,000 yuan.
It is such a group of players who arrived in the battlefield in a hurry, now they are going to face the sharks swimming over in the Pacific.
The sound of the cannon sounded, and he couldn’t help but pause. On December 18, the same day Amazon AWS entered China’s press conference, China’s cloud market was already full of turmoil.
The battle method chosen by foreign companies is to show their muscles. In the morning, Microsoft and Lenovo held a signing ceremony and announced that Lenovo has become China’s first Microsoft Cloud OS strategic partner. At noon, the IBM development conference announced that it will join hands with 21Vianet to officially introduce IBM’s most advanced cloud computing infrastructure service SCE+ into China.
The domestic nascent cloud computing company entered the market with a simpler and rude price war.
Alibaba Cloud launched the 1218 big promotion that day, and the prices of cloud server ECS, relational database RDS, and open storage OSS were all reduced, with a maximum drop of 50%. Tencent followed closely, with a free cloud database gift package and a mobile acceleration trial to give it a proxyGoldCoupons, the object storage service COS is limited to six months free.
Jinshan Cloud has taken advantage of the hottest “mining” hotspots. The “Jinshan Cloud Mining Machine” function was officially launched that day. After registering with Jinshan Cloud, users can rent “Scorpio cloud platform” for mining, achieving zero hardware, zero electricity bills, and fully automatic mining.
This approach seems to be directly transplanted from the consumer Internet, but it turns out to be a conventional weapon in the cloud computing market.
In 2014, AppZero CEO Greg O’Connor made a point: In the era of cloud computing, Moore’s Law, which once dominated the information industry, will give way to Bezos’ Law. According to this law, the price of cloud computing unit computing power will drop by 50% every 3 years.
Amazon AWS is the most important creator of this law.
At the end of 2012, after Google entered the cloud market, it upgraded its cloud database service to increase user storage space ten times from the previous 10GB, and reduced the price of computing storage services by 20% in disguise, and the monthly price per GB To 9.5 cents.
Amazon responded to the price cut in less than 12 hours, announcing a 26% price reduction for VMs on demand, and sued a former AWS department executive who switched to Google to show the direction of the price cut.
Google then fought back, lowering the monthly price per GB to 8.5 cents. The two melee caused Microsoft to enter the game, reducing Azure’s service prices to levels comparable to those of the two competitors.
Salipsky, the head of AWS marketing, once said to the New York Times that if Google wants to launch a price war, Amazon is ready. “We have always been very good at developing business with the lowest possible cost, and we can continue to reduce costs.”
According to statistics from analysis agencies, Amazon AWS cut prices 42 times during the market pioneering period before 2014.
Who would have thought that the industry pioneer is also the most fearsome price butcher in this industry.
In the first quarter of 2014, Amazon AWS, Microsoft and Google once againStart a price war. What is different from the past is that this war has burned to the country.
Alibaba Cloud lowered the price of its cloud servers in the same month, with a maximum price cut of 30%. Among them, the 0-500G cloud storage (OSS) used by users was reduced by 42%, almost half cheaper than its domestic counterparts.
Tencent Cloud subsequently set off a wave of more violent price cuts. Cloud databases dropped by as much as 53%, and cloud servers dropped to the end, breaking the market with a 30% discount.
By the end of the year, cloud computing is unprecedented, breaking through the dimension wall and joining the Double Eleven Carnival that is a symbol of the consumer Internet.
Since price wars have become the norm in the domestic cloud market. Beginning in 2014, the keyword inventory of the cloud computing market every year has been “price war”.
How tragic is this price fight? Let’s take the CDN market as an example.
The leading player in this market once was Wangsu Technology and Lanxun, both In total, 90% of the market was taken away.
However, in a few years, Wangsu Technology has fallen from the number one high-priced stock in the two cities, which once surpassed Moutai, to its current position. The company’s revenue began to decline in 2014 when BAT entered the market, and its net profit fell by 95.71% in 2019. Founder Chen Baozhen started his business at the age of 57, reaching more than 5 billion at his highest worth. He was once nicknamed the Chinese old lady version of Buffett. Last year, this company set off a wave of shareholding reduction from founder to executive, which triggered a warning letter issued by the Shanghai Securities Regulatory Bureau.
Lanxun, which is listed in the United States, is even more miserable. This company, which claims to be the first domestic CDN service company, had a net income of 1.38 billion yuan in 2014, but then it took a sharp turn and became a loss of 910 million yuan after 3 years. Last year the founder and CEO Wang Song was accused of bribery and taken away under investigation, and soon the company was delisted from the Nasdaq. Then the company almost disappeared from the market.
From To B to Of B
At the end of 2017, when Alibaba and Tencent were fighting mobile payment to death or death, they found that the most suitable for small high-frequency and most suitable mobile payment scenarios were not available for both parties.
“2At the beginning of 017, our entire company’s mobile payment strategy was to force our payment code. We believe that the payment code can be used in any scenario, including supermarkets, hospitals, and, of course, it can also be copied in the field of public transportation. It turned out later that the transportation field is far from installing a POS. “
Song Lingyun, general manager of Tencent Public Transport, said that they had tried to directly copy the payment codes of supermarkets and convenience stores in Yueqing, Zhejiang, but found that it didn’t work. Public transport is an area where the network fluctuates. This station is still full of signals. It is very likely that it will be gone directly at another station. Traffic is another place where the effect is accumulated. Once the scan code gets stuck, it may affect the entire traffic.
Like many To C fields, expansion has entered a stage where the entire industry needs to be transformed upstream.
For Internet companies, this means a whole new field and a painful transformation.
Wang Wanxin, the general manager of Tencent Auto Union, is a technical background. He has worked for Tencent for more than 10 years. More than two months before the Tencent 930 reform, he took the initiative to apply for the service B-side team, and then he was greeted with cold water.
Some companies are polite on the surface. Since “Tencent” is a large company, they don’t directly shut the door out. However, most of the early communication was basically ineffective because the other party did not talk about real needs. This is a torture for fast-paced Internet companies.
When serving the C-end market, three or five people gathered together, drew a few strokes on the whiteboard, and started to work if they had a general idea. The product went online first. Everyone used it, scolded it, and changed it. Slowly improve, that is how WeChat came out back then.
In the B-end market, customers require no bugs to upgrade. The budget system of most traditional enterprises is a project system, and the cost of each link must be calculated in advance into the total cost. If you cannot predict and solve the problem in advance, you are faced with a particularly realistic problem: who will pay for the cost of subsequent upgrades?
Wang Wanxin was almost depressed when he got the test results from the client for the first time. In an EXCEL sheet, one row is a bug, and it can’t be finished after several pages. A veteran technical developer fell into deep self-doubt: “Is our ability to write code bad?”
Before and after 2016, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei fought an advertising war at airports in several first-tier cities. Several companies took over almost all print advertising spaces in several major airports. At that time, Alibaba Cloud’s advertising slogans radiated leisure. Indifferent: “for incalculable value”. This sentence once attracted a wave of enthusiastic praise in the advertising circle, and the philosophy and poetry behind various analyses.
In 2017, the slogan of Alibaba Cloud at major airports was changed to a simple and straightforward: Go to the cloud and go to Alibaba Cloud.
Behind the change in slogan is the change of “cloud” from the unique application of Internet companies to the traditional field.
Hu Xiaoming, the former president of Alibaba Cloud, took over in 2018When I was interviewed by the media, I sighed that I used to contact CTOs and CIOs, but now I have to talk to CEOs and CFOs.
Ji Xinhua, the founder of Ucloud, once said, “Cloud computing is a technology, but also a set of overall services. Customer service cannot be like e-commerce customer service and only shout “pro” online, but like a nanny. The manager is on standby, and after-sales engineers answer the phone at any time.”
When Microsoft’s Nadella was in charge of the Windows Azure business, he would fly to Silicon Valley regularly to ask customers what their needs are and how to improve the business.
None of this is wrong. But in the second half of cloud computing, these are not enough. The second half requires more than technology and services.
In 2014, after Nadella took over as Microsoft’s CEO, he changed the company’s cloud service name from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. This was the beginning of Microsoft’s abandonment of everything Windows-centric.
In the past 20 years, Windows has been the most successful product in the entire software industry. Based on this, Microsoft has been in the field of technology for more than ten years. Bill Gates once told the media that in the field of software, especially platforms, it is a winner-takes-all market.
In the era of cloud computing, there is no longer a shortcut to the world by software. As an infrastructure, the cloud needs a rich ecosystem.
In the Nadella era, Microsoft was a “Combined vertical and horizontal” Microsoft. His first move after taking office was to announce that the Office suite will be brought to the iOS platform. For many years before, Microsoft has refused to launch a mobile version of Office because of concerns about the decline in PC shipments.
Afterwards, Nadella said at an event in San Francisco that shocked the audience: “Microsoft loves Linux”. If you know the famous phrase “Linux is a cancer” by the former CEO of Microsoft, you can probably understand how explosive this phrase is at the scene.
In the past, the American technology circle criticized Microsoft for being “not fashionable enough.” This company created the world’s most The company that succeeds in software products has been low-key, eccentric and arrogant.
The current Microsoft is still not cool enough, but the changes are obvious.
Last year, the Financial Times named Nadella the Person of the Year. The article wrote: “A sign of Nadella’s success in 2019 is that his company rarely appears in news headlines. Now this company The focus of the business is to sell technology to companies rather than consumers.”
The scientific and technological revolution of decades has left a huge inertia of thinking. As long as you master the next generation of hardware terminals and software portals, you will be able to sit on the flow of users in an era. In this way, various services can be “reduced Attack” easily became the most dominant technology company.
Li Yanhong once said that the company is only 30 days away from bankruptcy. Ma Huateng personally confirmed that the WeChat got the ticket and Weibo war was lost. Lei Jun once bet that Tencent couldn’t react for half a year, and Mi Talk was the result.
But the times have changed. In the era of cloud computing, there is no longer a shortcut for a software to fight the world and a device to determine life and death. Tencent’s “dream” is not necessarily short video, and the “last battle” of Internet companies is even more unlikely for the traffic of small fresh meat.
In the new battlefield, past advantages may become obstacles, and previous shortcomings may become opportunities. The final result depends not only on the technology and service capabilities of Internet companies, but also on the ability of each company to handle the complex industrial chain structure of the B-end market, and even affect the reconstruction of social organizations.
This revolution of “changing cores” for B-end companies is not simply the Internet to B or the Internet for B, but a new revolution in the Internet of B..
One button
In 2012, when WeChat was launched for more than a year, Xie Pingsheng found Zhang Xiaolong after a lot of relationships. He wanted to ask Zhang Xiaolong if he could help them use WeChat to control the car, such as adding a control button to their BYD official account to allow the car owner to realize remote operation.
He thinks this idea is dazzling. At that time, he was the head of BYD’s automotive electronics division. As a typical practitioner in the traditional industry, he was particularly excited about being able to connect with Internet companies such as BAT and have interactive innovations in products.
For this, he and his boss worked tirelessly from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, the headquarters of WeChat. As a result, the conversation ended after only an hour of meeting with Zhang Xiaolong.
A few years later, Xie Ping was born to SAIC and Alibaba created the Internet project Zebra Network, he only Understand how crazy it is to add a car control button to WeChat.
This is not a simple car + internet, but a complex “surgery” that grafts industrial thinking and internet thinking together. It is an amazing leap to make the internet another engine of the car and at the same time turn the car into a part of the internet. , Is a disruptive reform involving the reshaping of the automotive industry chain and the need to “exchange the core” of the traditional manufacturing industry.
The initial process of connecting a product born from the previous industrial revolution to a new one is like two people who speak different languages together.
“These are two completely different species. The manufacturing industry has complete supply chain management, emphasis on process, and quality assurance. The Internet is an entry point of thinking, rapid iteration, and after the market share increases, the business model, starting point and business The logic is different.” Liu Xiaodong, who has worked in an automobile factory for 6 years, said that people who have just started contacting Internet companies feel that their ideas are too unrealistic, and that group of people actually want to let users buy members after selling their cars. .
“The people in our 4S store call people every day to make people recharge, and no one will come to charge one thousand to get five hundred. Who will pay for listening to QQ music in your car? I won’t get a USB flash drive. Okay? No, buy a cradle and put the phone there.”
Wait for him to quitAfter I went to Tencent Auto Union and looked at the car factory from another angle, I found that the idea of the car factory was equally impractical. Many car manufacturers felt that Internet companies were omnipotent. , It should be a very easy thing.
The cruel fact is that the vehicle environment is completely different from the mobile phone. It is necessary to consider complex posture scenarios and coordinate various vehicle signals. However, a few years ago, most of the car’s memory was only 4G, and even a WeChat could not run. Get up, let alone add buttons.
However, about two years ago, Liu Xiaodong was surprised to find that his younger brother and younger sister could not find a job.
The students of his alma mater, Jilin University, who majored in automobiles never thought that there would be a day of worrying about employment. In the past every graduation season, almost everyone in this major held several offers from FAW, BAIC, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW. Now the situation has changed. Instead of recruiting people for automotive engineering, materials engineering, and mechanical manufacturing, auto companies are recruiting for software and computer majors.
The number of software-related software engineers recruited by Geely on campus from 2017 to 2019 has tripled; 70% of FAW’s new employees were software engineers last year; SAIC has even independent its software center into a subsidiary.
Cars are no longer “4 wheels plus 2 sofas” as Li Shufu said, but “various software plus a car machine”.
In 2016, SAIC launched the Roewe RX5 based on Alibaba Cloud YunOS, and the monthly sales volume of Roewe RX5 exceeded 20,000 units for two consecutive years.
In 2019, GAC’s first Trumpchi GS4 equipped with WeChat in-vehicle version sold close to 100,000 units in less than a year, becoming the best-selling model of GAC passenger cars, accounting for 40% of the brand’s total sales.
In the history of Chinese automobiles, there are only four companies that can exceed the annual sales volume of 2 million, and all four are joint venture brands. For many self-owned brand car manufacturers, the annual sales volume exceeds 300,000 is a big problem. Among more than 60 independent brands, more than 50 have annual sales of less than 100,000 vehicles.
Cloud has produced real value in the automotive industry. This is the first time that an independent brand that has been struggling in the car industry for more than half a century has seen the dawn of catching up on the race track.
In 2016, the Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei warned the heads of auto companies at a closed-door summit: “Internet +”, smart driving and shared travel will bring huge impacts. Auto companies must actively adapt and not resist, “This is An irreversible directional trend”.
In April 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the “Three-Year Action Plan for Cloud Computing Development”, which clearly stated that it will promote manufacturing enterprises to accelerate business model and business model innovation based on cloud computing, and promote the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry and improve quality and efficiency.
Cloud computing, as a technological innovation for manufacturing upgrades, is becoming the key to a new round of global manufacturing dominance.
Last year, thank youPingcheng is the vice president of research and development for the travel company Xiandou Intelligent. One of his latest achievements is to work with Tencent Auto to add a physical WeChat button to the steering wheel of a Great Wall Motor.
At this time, eight years have passed since the first meeting between him and Zhang Xiaolong, and a new journey is underway in the cloud computing battlefield.
In 2017, Ma Huateng mentioned cloud 23 times in a letter to his partners. He traveled to multiple cities a day and met with different partners in the same frame. In a long article, he mentioned “connecting to the cloud” and “plugging in power” during the second industrial revolution, thinking that the two have the same meaning, and the deep integration of manufacturing and the Internet will be the home of the digital economy. war.
Liu Chiping, President of Tencent Group, said more bluntly: “We must treat the cloud business as a life-and-death business for us, and the whole company will cooperate together.”
Almost at the same time, Huawei also kept moving. The initial action was to announce the establishment of Cloud BU focusing on public clouds. After only 5 months, Cloud BU was moved to the Huawei Group and upgraded from the company’s secondary organization to the primary organization.
At this year’s Huawei Global Analyst Conference, Xu Wenwei, President of Huawei Enterprise BG, announced that “Huawei must be one of the five clouds in the world in the future.”
Since 2018, BAT has successively upgraded their cloud computing businesses. Alibaba released the Feilong Industrial Internet Platform, Baidu launched the AI 2B platform, and Tencent built a new cloud and smart industry business group and announced the full embrace of the “industrial Internet.”
Cloud is expanding from computing power to big data, AI, Internet of Things, and security, and is tied to future manufacturing upgrades and China’s economic transformation.
According to the report released by the research organization, as of the end of last year, Alibaba Cloud accounted for 46.4% of China’s public cloud service market, ranking first. Amazon AWS slipped out of the first echelon and was divided into Others. The second-ranked Tencent Cloud’s market share soared to 18% last year, the fastest growth rate among the world’s top 5 vendors, exceeding 110%.
Although Alibaba still has an advantage in the first half of cloud computing, looking at the broader battlefield, all participants have just arrived. This will be a “battle where everyone knows where the battlefield is, but there is no map, and where the ambush point will appear.”
No one can predict the final outcome of this battle. We can only imagine the future battlefield with that old saying:
“When the giant fell, his body temperature was still warm.”