The article is from WeChat public account: How does keso look (ID: kesoview) , author: keso, title figure from: vision China

10 years ago, standing on the threshold of the new decade, I copied the poem “The Belief in the Future” from my index finger on my blog:


When the cobweb blocked me heartily,


When the smoke of ashes sighs the sorrow of poverty,


I still stubbornly flatten out the ashes of disappointment,


write with beautiful snowflakes: believe in the future.

I thought it was a little dark at the time. Because reality is becoming frustrating, you can only believe that the future will at least be better than the present. For an optimist like me who eats strawberries from the beginning, Even when depressed, I still believe in the Internet, believe in globalization, and firmly believe that short-term countercurrents cannot change the rules, everything will only better.

You can decide to eat strawberries first or later, but the reality is not to eat strawberries. As soon as I entered the 2010s, my optimism was hit hard: Google was gone.

Back in 2010, I didn’t realize that it was a fable, which implies that we are moving towards a world where we don’t trust each other, increasingly opposing and decoupled from each other. It was not until the U.S. government blackened Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and banned American companies from doing business with them that we discovered that the ever-flatter world that attracted us, called us, and made us fascinated by them was already gulfless-the real divide . The Internet we believe in is likely to become disconnected.

At the end of 2018, everyone was passing the phrase: “2019 may be the worst year in the past ten years, but it will be the best year in the next ten years.” Among them, the pessimistic tone, It’s like someone picked the good strawberries first, so we can only accept a world that is getting worse.

But in the gloomy tone of the entire 2010s, you can still find the bright and bright colors when you take a closer look. It can even be said that the 2010s may be the best and most memorable decade in China’s IT / Internet industry.

Zhang Chaoyang once complained that Wall Street doesn’t understand China. But in the past ten years, almost nothing is more popular than the Chinese concept.

In 2013, the market value of Tencent exceeded US $ 100 billion for the first time, which is unprecedented for the Chinese Internet industry. In 2014, Alibaba went public in the United States, creating the largest IPO in history. In April and June 2017, Tencent and Alibaba successively entered the ranks of the world’s top ten listed companies. Although this result was expected by many people, no one expected it to be so fast. Also in 2017, Huawei surpassed Ericsson and became the world’s largest telecommunications equipment supplier.

Unlike the United States, the Internet is so stable, it is called the Internet giant FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) , Most ofThe companies are more than 20 years old, the youngest Facebook is 15 years old, and there have been no decent challengers in the past ten years. Fortune Magazine listed Snap, Lyft, and DoorDash as companies that have changed the lives of Americans in the past decade, with some helplessness.

In contrast, China, The BAT triangle structure has been firmly ruled for less than ten years and will be disintegrated. Although the AT two are more powerful, their light cannot hide the dazzling glory of the small giants. They are far more fearless, bolder and more international than their predecessors.

It is known as TMD’s headline, Meituan and Didi. Meituan, founded in 2010, is already the third largest Internet listed company in China. Didi Chuxing, founded in 2012, has a valuation of US $ 56 billion. It ranks among the top companies in the world for unlisted companies, and it was also founded in 2012.Biaotiao has been valued at $ 75 billion in 2018.

China’s top eight Internet listed companies (from selected stocks, data as of December 31, 2019)

Among the top eight Chinese Internet listed companies with a market value of more than US $ 30 billion, three were founded in the last 10 years, and the youngest Pinduoduo has only been established for 4 years.

In the past decade, the mobile Internet has rapidly turned most Chinese people into skilled netizens, and Internet companies have the opportunity to fully intervene and change people’s daily lives. Fortune Chinese Network has selected eight companies that have changed the lives of Chinese people in the past ten years. The top two are Meituan Review and Didi, and WeChat ranked third. Meituan and Didi have indeed greatly changed our food, accommodation and travel industry, and also profoundly changed the catering and travel industry. They can stand as the best representatives of the past decade. But by comparison, the changes brought by WeChat are much larger.

I think the most worthy of writing in the 2010s was the creation of WeChat. This product has revolutionized the daily lives of Chinese people, and it is not just a way of lifeTo a certain extent, it is still a way of working, learning, and business. It is a new operating system for the Chinese. At the same time, it has also adversely affected the trend of American products. Facebook is stealing WeChat in many ways, which was difficult to imagine in the past.

For the first time in the 2010s, the Chinese Mobile Phone Legion conquered the world with branded products instead of unbranded copycats. Of the top 10 mobile phone brands in the world, China occupied seven seats. In the 2010s, the turnover of China ’s Double Eleven was far more than that of the US Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday. The same-day and next-day e-commerce training has cultivated Chinese users’ abnormal requirements for e-commerce efficiency. In the 2010s, extremely convenient code scanning payment and takeaway meals anywhere and anytime made Chinese users feel “inconvenient” in any country …

In the 2010s, the market value of Internet companies surpassed real estate, surpassed China Mobile, and exceeded three barrels of oil, making the industry feel so important for the first time that it is so essential, and it has a deeper relationship with everyone. .

In the 2010s, Ma Yun and Liu Chuanzhi, the most respected godfathers in the IT industry, chose to retire in the last year of this era, and have since become the godfather who will never make mistakes.

Apart from all these remarkable achievements, it is the deepening of hostility between China and the United States. Decoupling is becoming a high probability event. Some people call it the New Cold War. Not only are Huawei, Hikvision, and HKUST Xunfei blacklisted by the United States, an entertainment application developed by a Chinese company that is loved by young Americans (TikTok ) , and just because it is a product of a Chinese company, it is subject to skepticism and repeated additional scrutiny.

In 2019, a Chinese-American who worked for a Chinese technology company told me that because of working for a Chinese company, he was questioned by the FBI for 5 hours when he returned to the United States. Not only that, but his American family was also implicated. This reminded him of the unfair treatment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and made him afraid. After careful consideration, he had to quit his job at a Chinese company.

I once asked a Chinese Internet company whether their U.S. investment and U.S. AI lab would be affected by Sino-US relations. The answer was that they might have to reconsider their business in the United States.

Peter Thiel, yes, the author of the book “From 0 to 1” called the Venture Capital Bible, the Silicon Valley politician who publicly supports Trump, writes in the New York Times in 2019 Article, accusing Google, Microsoft and other US companies in theChina set up an AI laboratory and recruited Chinese researchers to share military technology with American enemies.

In the new decade, we may have to accept the reality of distancing from inexplicable hostility. Just as Huawei firmly believes in globalization, insists on cooperating with American companies, and comprehensively builds “spare tires”. In this context, we have to say goodbye to the 2010s and to meet a more difficult 2020s.

This may become the new normal of the new decade, and we have to adapt to it as well as we adapt to globalization.

The article is from WeChat public account: How does keso look (ID: kesoview) , author: keso