Is Mini Program WeChat’s last chance? How big can it be?

WeChat mini-programs are all over the screen again.

Zhang Xiaolong, the most famous hidden figure in the field of technology and the Internet, personally came out to announce it, pinning all the public relations and communication effects accumulated in the past few years on the mini program.

It’s hard to say whether the very good communication effect yesterday was for the mini program or for Zhang Xiaolong.

Even Ma Huateng himself has talked about Mini Programs many times and made a product launch announcement that "Mini Programs will be released before the Spring Festival." This is a very rare treatment within Tencent. As the top management of Tencent, Pony rarely talks about specific products, let alone products that have not yet been released.

Therefore, from the treatment of the mini program, we can see that this is a product that is extremely important to WeChat and that Tencent’s top management attaches great importance to and protects. Therefore, there is no need to doubt WeChat’s sincerity and Tencent’s investment in the mini program.

WeChat is the product with the largest traffic today. For small companies that look up to WeChat, it will not be a wrong idea to place a bet on mini programs.

Mini Programs are not important to Tencent and will not have a significant impact on the Internet competition landscape

In fact, starting from the WeChat public platform, it is not the big companies or platforms, but entrepreneurs and individual developers, that have embraced the entire WeChat ecosystem the most and shouted that WeChat will subvert everything.

As the saying goes, those who are barefoot are not afraid of those who are wearing shoes. When the Internet enters the "second half", entrepreneurs hope to have a product that can smash the old world. From some perspectives, this is the root of Zhang Xiaolong and the WeChat team's super popularity. When new platforms such as Didi are completely dominated by capital, mini programs have become the "final fantasy" of programmers.

However, today’s Internet world is dominated by large companies. Just like Alibaba’s extreme rejection of WeChat, everyone wants to have their own platform. Even JD.com, which has attracted hundreds of millions of users from WeChat, is still not satisfied with the lack of WeChat’s first-level entrance, and has to gradually transfer users to its own App.

Therefore, when the mini program was released, all the big companies and platforms were silent, including many of Tencent's own business lines. Among Tencent's extremely long business lines, the one that attaches the most importance to the mini program is probably Tencent's stock selection, a new business that has few users and faces great competition.

The reason is that, driven by Tencent's strong overall strength, almost every product of Tencent with a little accumulation has hundreds of millions of users. You have your own platform dream and mini-program dream on WeChat, reading, security, animation, video, etc. Which one does not you have? What's more, mini-programs are far from meeting the functional requirements of these products.

So actually for Tencent, mini programs are not that important products.

In today's mobile Internet landscape, Tencent is the biggest winner. Tencent's various platform businesses are making rapid progress. Security has surpassed 360, OMG has surpassed traditional portals, and content channels such as animation, reading, and music have all become number one. In theory, Tencent should have the least motivation to change.

The same principle applies to small giants and small platforms that have made progress in niche areas. They will not embrace mini programs. Since large companies are bound to be absent, the success or failure of mini programs will not have much impact on today's Internet competition landscape.

Mini Programs are the key to WeChat avoiding becoming like QQ

However, mini programs are extremely important to WeChat’s business itself, and they are the key to preventing WeChat from becoming like QQ.

Tencent is too big, and to understand mini programs, you must understand Tencent's overall architecture and historical evolution. In Tencent's architecture, QQ and WeChat are defined as the underlying dual tracks, and all businesses revolve around QQ and WeChat, including payment, advertising, games, news, etc., all of which draw a lot of nutrients from WeChat and QQ.

In the history of Tencent, almost all its businesses have been developed from QQ, including the two most profitable ones today, advertising and games. Even WeChat was originally fed by the QQ account system and traffic. But now these profitable, fun and interesting businesses that look awesome on the outside have basically been separated from QQ.

Tencent's most recent divestiture was last year, when the Guangdiantong business, which was built by the SNG social network business group based on QQ, and the WeChat advertising business, which had a very good development prospect under the WXG WeChat business group, were divested at the same time, becoming independent departments under the CDG business group that continuously produced impressive performance in financial reports. Not long before this adjustment, the App Bao distribution platform and development platform system, which had been feeding the traffic of mobile QQ for a long time, were also divested from SNG. Today, App Bao has become known as the number one application distribution platform.

This is the fun of building the foundation. When I worked in the media industry, I was in the bottom-level portal website department. We had the largest traffic, the most people, and the most things to do, but we had the lowest salary and the lowest rating. Other businesses all got things from us. This is the bottom-level support department.

WeChat has been gradually becoming a bottom-level platform. Many businesses that have developed in the mobile Internet, such as mobile games and mobile advertising, no longer belong to WeChat. Only half of WeChat Pay is still in the hands of WXG. Even JD.com, Meituan-Dianping, etc. have to be "inserted" from the outside.

For the WeChat department, in order to avoid becoming a bottom-level support platform, it must open a WeChat-exclusive external channel for itself. This should include e-commerce, media, O2O, etc., and preferably also games that are not currently being developed. This is the significance of mini programs to the WeChat business itself.

Mini Programs are the last chance for WeChat ecosystem

Any product has its life cycle. Regardless of whether it is the Internet entering deep water or the second half of the Internet, or Baidu Robin shouting the end of mobile Internet, everyone has turned their attention to the next generation platform.

AR or VR? Windows or iOS? It’s just like before 2010, when everyone was saying that mobile Internet was the future, but no one knew how to do it.

The new platform has a new order and a new way of interaction. Whether it is Tencent or WeChat, they need to find the basic fulcrum of communication and social networking in the next era before talking about ecological construction. WeChat entered the mobile phone era as a basic communication version of QQ. If mini programs want to cross over to AR, they must also follow the Basic Law.

On the one hand, the entire mobile phone ecosystem is running out of time, and on the other hand, the dividends of the WeChat ecosystem are gradually being consumed.

"WeChat third party" is a term that has disappeared in today's Internet industry, but just two years ago and earlier during the pioneering period of WeChat public platform, every WeChat third party was very popular. Concepts such as WeChat e-commerce, WeChat marketing, WeChat O2O, and iBeacon supported many companies and platforms, many of which were valued at over 100 million US dollars.

But now, most WeChat third parties have gone silent or transformed. The grand occasion when each new feature of WeChat public platform would attract countless attention from the outside world no longer exists today.

With the rise of Toutiao, Bilibili, and live streaming platforms, App development has gradually returned this year, and even Weibo has begun to return. In the middle of this year, WeChat Card Coupons, which are extremely similar to the WeChat Membership Card that was once sold, were launched. Without the support of WeChat third parties, they failed to create a ripple in the O2O landscape dominated by food delivery.

But this does not mean that mini programs have no chance at all. WeChat O2O, WeChat e-commerce, etc. ultimately failed to win. The reasons are very complicated. Some of them are because Tencent failed to sort out the architecture internally, resulting in inconsistent ideas; some are because of Tencent’s external investment interests; and some are because the early technical rules of the public platform need to be improved.

The development of the mini program this time is different. With the support of Pony, the WeChat mini program is completely handed over to the WeChat team this time, and no one interferes with the rules, direction and gameplay. The mini program, which has been preparing for a year, is no longer so dependent on third-party technical support, and the concept of eliminating third-party is being put into practice.

All internal and external issues have been settled, and a year has been given. In the second half of the Internet, WeChat has a one-on-one chance, and whether it will go in or not depends on this one-shot deal.

How big can WeChat mini programs become?

At this point, we have to talk about what model WeChat Mini Programs are based on. I spent quite a while watching Zhang Xiaolong’s speech video. He repeatedly talked about the browser-centric Internet ecosystem on the PC side, and described Mini Programs as websites that provide services on the WEB.

There is a word here that Zhang Xiaolong never mentioned, that is, search engine. Who is the big winner on the Web side? Google abroad and Baidu in China. They carry the task of website distribution on the Web side and are the Internet bosses in the PC era.

However, Zhang Xiaolong and the WeChat team did not mention Baidu's name. Part of the reason is that Tencent's publicity strategy basically does not mention friendly competitors. The main reason is that the mini program model is very different from Baidu's.

The first difference is that search engines distribute information on PCs, while mini programs distribute services on mobile devices. Services are more valuable than information, so mini programs are not willing to compete with Baidu.

The second difference is that search engines are text searches, while mini programs have multiple entrances. Zhang Xiaolong focused on QR codes, but in fact, QR codes are still indirect and are a stopgap measure under the current Internet technology conditions. In the future, there should be more entrance forms, such as voice represented by Siri, which has always been considered a service entrance. Mini programs will almost inevitably evolve into multiple entrances in the future.

Once we have found the model of mini programs, we also know the business model of mini programs and the upper limit of the entire model. In the most ideal case, WeChat will have the opportunity to collect as much toll as the Internet world is big, but like Baidu, WeChat mini programs will be helpless against platform giants such as JD.com, Taobao, and Toutiao, but there is no problem in commanding many long-tail small players.

From WeChat to Apple, there is no platform above the platform

Finally, let’s talk about Apple. WeChat is a platform that is highly similar to Apple. This is not only reflected in the logic of mini-programs, but also in the concept.

The fundamental reason for the decline of WeChat as a third party is that WeChat’s concept is to “connect everything”. The subtext of connecting everything is to reject any intermediate platform. Any attempt to build a third platform between WeChat and merchants and services is unreliable.

The same is true for Apple. WeChat Mini Programs were originally called WeChat App Numbers, but they were renamed because of pressure from Apple. The ecosystem of Apple's iOS is built based on the rules of the AppStore. If you try to build another distribution center under the iOS system, Apple will consider it as subversion.

In fact, Apple's pressure on WeChat is everywhere, from requiring third-party logins for Tencent mobile games to suppressing WeChat H5 games. I even heard a long time ago that Zhang Xiaolong might miss the press conference on the 28th due to pressure from Apple.

Apple is so overbearing, can we not play with them? The answer is absolutely not. If you don’t understand, just listen to how Zhang Xiaolong complained about the people taking photos at the beginning of his speech today: I saw that all the mobile phones today are white.

What is the white thing? An apple.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.