Tiantian Dongting, who died with hatred, linked a past of grievances and entanglements

Qianqian Jingting = Baidu + nanling

In the early days of the Chinese Internet, Baidu was synonymous with online music. Baidu MP3 search brought Baidu one-third of its traffic, and also confirmed the reputation of that generation of netizens that "the original fee was paid during the Eight-Nation Alliance, please feel free to use it." After downloading local music, netizens listened to it through desktop software such as Winamp and Foobar2000, and also competed with the sound quality of soft decompression. In 2002, Shanghai programmer Zheng Nanling (nanling) developed the "MP3 Walkman" software, which mainly realized efficient and low-resource MP3 playback, as well as the skin-changing function of irregular windows. Later, Nanling named the product "Qianqian Jingting" after his favorite "Qianqian Quege".

In the first 5-6 years, Nanling treated Qianqian Jingting as a side project. However, in the early stages of development, he established a complete feedback channel such as email, message board, and forum. Soon, Qianqian Jingting surpassed Winamp in popularity. Downloading songs from Baidu MP3 and listening to them on Qianqian Jingting became a part of the life of Chinese netizens at that time.

After that, as the software scale grew, Nanling began to maintain a small team and adapted to the form of online music, connecting to Baidu MP3's online song search and lyrics search functions. In July 2006, Baidu simply acquired Qianqian Jingting for more than 10 million RMB. Nanling worked at Baidu for 3 years, completed the handover of code and projects, and then retired.

In 2011, Baidu was forced to change its MP3 service to Ting due to accusations of piracy. In 2012, it integrated the brand into "Baidu Music". After Qianqian Jingting launched the "Baidu Music Edition", it was officially renamed "Baidu Music" in 2013. Since then, it has had little to do with Nanling's old works.

Tiantiandongting = (Qianqianjingting) + Alibaba

In 2007, when Qianqian Jingting made a splash of tens of millions and its developer successfully exited, a few young people named themselves "Nut Studio" and imitated Qianqian Jingting to create "Tiantian Dongting", which was applied to the largest smartphone systems at the time, Symbian and Windows Mobile. This is the introduction to our story today.

Just like Qianqian, which initially focused on playback effects and skinning, Tiantian Dongting also has its own unique skills, which is to support skinning, lyrics downloading and other complete functions on Symbian and WM, and historically realized "desktop lyrics" on iOS for the first time. Its user base has grown rapidly, exceeding 10 million in 2009, 50 million in 2011, 100 million in 2012, and 200 million in June 2013.

Alibaba acquired the app in full in October 2013 (for an unknown amount), and based on the 200 million existing users, it brazenly changed the product under the same package name to the so-called "Ali Planet" in iOS and Android stores, and introduced features that were completely unrelated to music playback, such as musicians and concert ticket grabbing. The angry reviews from fans of the product at the time have been cleared by Alibaba, and now they have even cut off the original local music function.

It has to be said that compared with Baidu, Alibaba's attitude towards acquired products is also cruel enough, which further reflects that it does not understand the significance of existing users. Users follow products because they agree with the tone and functions established by the products. Without knowing this, it is natural for Alipay to do something like social networking with all its efforts.

Wandoujia = Sinovation Ventures + (Baidu) + Alibaba

Given Alibaba's rough attitude towards its acquired products, when the news of Alibaba's $200 million acquisition of Wandoujia came out, people felt a mixture of regret and relief. This software may have a completely different future, and its founders can give themselves a not-too-bad ending when the overall application distribution is depressed - this may be their best ending.

Wandoujia was founded in 2009. In December 2009, it received millions of dollars in angel investment from Sinovation Ventures. In January 2011, it received tens of millions of dollars in Series A investment from DCM China. In January 2014, it received $120 million in Series B investment from Softbank China, DCM China, and Sinovation Ventures. In March, it received tens of millions of dollars in additional Series B investment from Goldman Sachs. At that time, Wandoujia's valuation had reached about $1 billion. In June 2014, it was rumored that Alibaba was going to acquire Wandoujia for $1.5 billion.

In fact, the sky-high price of 1.5 billion US dollars is almost certainly a "desperate" response to Baidu's acquisition of 91 Wireless for 1.9 billion US dollars. This transaction was once touted by the industry as Baidu's entry ticket to the mobile Internet, and Li Mingyuan, who led the transaction, was also established as Baidu's "crown prince" until he was later hidden and completely left Baidu's management team during a recent internal anti-corruption storm.

The golden age of mobile distribution has passed. After being acquired by Baidu, 91 was broken up into smaller pieces, with its business continuously split into other Baidu product lines. The $1.9 billion was basically wasted. Alibaba is probably glad that it hesitated, and I believe that if the members of Wandou Lab had really been able to negotiate the $1.5 billion acquisition, they would feel guilty looking back now.

At present, most of the old employees of Wandoujia have left, some have gone to other companies, and the rest have incubated a team called "Qingmang", which makes news push applications and operates a small software for cleaning the notification bar. When they started Wandoujia, they hoped to implement their own aesthetic idea of ​​small and beautiful, and now they continue their ideal in the new team.

Wandoujia, which has joined the Alibaba system, will hold a press conference on the 20th of this month to discuss its future. By then, perhaps we will know whether it will repeat the fate of "good cabbages are eaten by pigs".

Motu Wizard = Innovation Works + Baidu

In addition, Magic Photo Elf is just a small episode in the story chain. In addition to Wandoujia, Innovation Works incubated many products at the beginning, not to mention Zhihu; and another star product, Magic Photo Elf, was considered a strong rival to Meitu XiuXiu at the time. Not long after its release, it was immediately acquired by Baidu for tens of millions of dollars, becoming one of the typical success stories of Innovation Works in its early days.

Although Baidu Magic Photo has not reached the pinnacle of photo apps, it has done quite well. In 2013, Baidu Magic Photo launched a very famous social marketing campaign called "PK Big Coffee", which made it stay at the top of the iOS overall ranking for two weeks. In the following six months, it had more than 100 million users and entered the top five of the photography app rankings in 20 regions around the world.

Compared to Meitu, which is going to be listed in Hong Kong in the next two days, or compared to "Kuaitu" which will be discussed below, this software may not have reached its maximum potential - but who can be sure that it can do better?

Quick picture = nanling + cheetah

Many flowers have bloomed, and we can only express our own views. Back to Nanling, after achieving financial freedom at Baidu, he returned to Shanghai and lived a regular life as an ordinary programmer. But in his spare time, he became restless again and developed another legendary application that he maintained in his spare time.

Faced with the problems of slow Android system updates, slow opening speed of official photo applications, and poor experience, Nanling developed a lightweight photo browser "Quick Photo Browser" to provide fast and clear thumbnail previews and smooth 2D browsing experience. Thumbnails can be quickly refreshed according to SD card changes, and support slideshows, GIF image playback, etc., which seem commonplace now, but were "just needed" at the time.

In the first 20 months after its launch, KuaiTu was downloaded over 35 million times worldwide, and over 9.8 million times on the official Android app store. KuaiTu once took the top three spots in the image category in all domestic app stores, and also topped the charts for image apps in the Japanese and Korean markets, with 1.5 million and nearly 1 million active users, respectively. Compared to the days of Qianqian Jingting, the international mobile Internet market has allowed his efforts to reach the world.

Kuaitu and Qianqian Jingting only require Nanling's personal time to maintain most of their operations. Their rigorous code writing and low resource usage reflect their superb programming ability and technical level. People who have studied the code or done decompilation are amazed by it.

In September 2015, Cheetah Mobile acquired Kuaitu for an undisclosed amount. I’m not sure how the company that hired Nanling in the past two or three years felt after hearing the news. They can answer a question: “What is it like to meet someone who joins a company not to make money but to satisfy his own interests?”

Then, after finding out that Cheetah Mobile had become the new owner of QuickPicture, overseas users were outraged. As a product developed by an individual, QuickPicture’s selling points were purity, speed, simplicity and no ads. A few months after being acquired by Cheetah Mobile, it dropped from the top of the photo category in stores around the world, and was already becoming a nobody. However, Cheetah Mobile did not easily “rogue” QuickPicture. After the acquisition, it mainly added a reminder for newly added photos, and added a small floating ball, which can automatically back up photos to Cheetah Mobile’s cloud space.

After the Cheetah version of QuickMap was launched, it offered a 1,000GB cloud space bonus, so in Google Play, all the user reviews were filled with comments like "enter invitation code". It seems that Cheetah is very cautious in dealing with the issue of existing users. After all, they know that in foreign countries, this listed company that "fills users' phones with unnecessary software" may not have a particularly good reputation.

Yu Yongfu ≈ UC + Tiantian Dongting + Wandoujia + Alibaba

The fact that Tiantian Dongting was completely cut off will definitely become an indelible mark in the development history of Alibaba Mobile Business Group. Alibaba Music, which led all this, is directly under the Alibaba Entertainment System managed by Yu Yongfu. As for Wandoujia, it was eventually acquired to supplement the application distribution capabilities of UC Browser and PP Assistant acquired by Alibaba. And Alibaba Mobile, the leader of all this, is also managed by Yu Yongfu.

Yu Yongfu himself was once a well-known independent software author. The UC browser, which was popular in the Symbian and Java application era, effectively reduced people's traffic expenditure when browsing the mobile Internet. Saving traffic has become a necessary indicator for browsers. When UC was acquired by Alibaba, Alibaba was also confused and did not know the specific development path for the future. After joining Alibaba, Yu Yongfu became one of the most valuable assets acquired by Alibaba.

Yu Yongfu not only continued to maintain UC's strong market share in the third-party mobile browser market, but also successfully entered the difficult overseas markets such as India and the United States, and even brought up the market share of Alibaba's most important clients Taobao and Tmall, allowing Alibaba to hold the so-called "ticket" in the mobile Internet era. With such achievements, Yu Yongfu has more and more authority in his hands. He is in charge of all Alibaba's mobile client products, and at the same time transformed UC into a content distribution platform, and established an organization called Alibaba's big entertainment that includes resources such as Youku Tudou and Xiami Music. He has even been called one of the most likely successors to Jack Ma by some commentators.

As a former independent developer, Yu Yongfu must know the pain of a small team's hard work being wiped out. But his current vision, ability and responsibility are completely different from when he led a small team.

The world line is gradually closing, everything is interconnected, intertwined, and finally integrated. Market integration and mergers need to destroy some of the good memories of the past, and in exchange, most of the independent developers who once moved people can retire and get a relatively good return. Compared with a few years ago, small developers are not so afraid of the shadow of being killed by "copycats", and are more willing to face the eternal questioning of investors "life/death/Tencent (or other giants)".

As long as the developers get the rewards they deserve, I think the story should have a happy ending.