Ranking China's Internet giants

At the recent World Internet Conference, there was a lot of verbal sparring between the bigwigs. I would like to take this opportunity to talk about my own impressions of each of you. It is not authoritative and is very subjective, but it can indeed be regarded as a kind of reputation from the perspective of ordinary people.

An era of heroes

If the Internet is the most critical feature of this era, then perhaps we can say that this is an era of heroes.

The Internet has brought about two fundamental changes: one is that the weight of intelligence is increasing, and the other is that the speed of change is accelerating. These two factors combined will inevitably lead to the rise of many heroes and constant fighting.

From a macro perspective, the development of science and technology and changes in people's living habits will constantly generate new blank areas. In fact, these blank areas are opportunities. Whoever can seize them can achieve success. At the same time, the speed at which these blank areas disappear and emerge is accelerating. The most important thing to capture these blank areas is people rather than capital, resources, and background. This will inevitably lead to an era of heroes. Heroes have better intellectual capital and thus have a better chance of capturing opportunities. This is completely different from traditional industries, which are more like a bureaucratic system, where factors such as qualifications have a greater impact. This difference can be seen from the age of the CEO.

Therefore, it is conceivable that the Internet world will always be in a state of many heroes. People can no longer compete on the battlefield like before, so they expand their territory in the business world. Sometimes when I read various competition stories, I feel that the fierceness of the fight is no less than that of the battle on the battlefield.

The meaning of "格"

When a person grows to a certain level, he needs an inner pattern. This pattern is not obvious when the business is small. At that time, details determine success or failure, and the handling of specific affairs is more important than the so-called pattern. But when the business expands to a certain level, the CEO's pattern will have a huge impact on the company. This is particularly evident in the founder of the company. In extreme terms, a person who always wants to work to make some money is actually unable to manage the career of the big bosses.

The most interesting description of the situation is the story of discussing heroes over plum wine in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I don’t know if this story happened in history, but it is really well written. It seems that there was such a trend in that era. First, there was the "capable ministers in a peaceful era and treacherous heroes in a chaotic era" evaluated by Yuedan, and later there were various stories in Shishuo Xinyu.

An interesting thing about the story of discussing heroes over green plum wine is that its evaluation criteria have nothing to do with family background or the size of one’s career. For example, Cao Cao’s evaluation of Yuan Shu was “a dry bone in a tomb; sooner or later I will capture him!”, and his evaluation of Liu Zhang was “although Liu Zhang is a royal family member, he is just a guard dog.” These people were all local tyrants, but in Cao Cao’s eyes they were not considered big names. His standard was “a hero is one who has great ambitions, good plans, and the ability to contain the universe and swallow the world.” To put it simply, you need both great ambitions and the means to actually do things.

Back to the Internet bosses, what I mean is that first of all, you must have the spirit of forging ahead, otherwise you will really be a dead body in the grave. After all, the bosses are not short of money, and it is still easy for them to live a carefree life. But once they do not make progress, they will fall behind, and it is not far from the destruction of the ship and the death of everyone. The second is the ability to gather people. Of course, if everyone adopts the strategy of explosive products, then you can also have the ability to create products like Steve Jobs. Gathering people is related to cultural creation. In this regard, the view in Built to Last is still correct:

"To make a business last forever, CEOs can behave in different ways, be flamboyant or quiet, but you have to create a culture. The so-called clock is not made to tell time, but to maintain the core and stimulate progress. Religious culture is related to this." This is a bit like the idea that in the torrent of time, all tangible things will be destroyed, and only the spirit can last forever. This can also be verified outside of the enterprise. Many religions have lasted for thousands of years, but they often only save the spirit and demand a lot from the material.

No matter what, gathering a crowd is actually a very critical dimension in evaluating whether you are good enough: Can you really create a culture, and the expression of this culture can be very realistic, that is, many outstanding people are really willing to work together under this culture to build a career.

Distribution of benefits is also a problem, but I believe it is not the main issue at a higher level.

Heroes' Seats

According to the above two dimensions, we can screen the bigwigs a little bit. Finally, from my perspective, the first echelon of domestic bigwigs is Lei Jun, Ma Huateng and Jack Ma. Others are inferior to these three. Some can even be ranked as withered bones in the grave. Although they still have momentum, they are probably not far from defeat. There is no need to talk about ambition and gathering people in the first echelon, otherwise they would not be ranked here at all. Let's talk about the specific differences in practice.

If the world votes for the most powerful CEO, I think it is very likely that Steve Jobs will be elected, definitely surpassing Bill Gates. Because Steve Jobs created a field. We have mentioned before that technology and changes in people's mentality will always bring some blank areas. Whoever occupies this blank area will grab the opportunity. According to the way of occupying the blank area, it can be divided into three categories. The most powerful one is to create a new area based on the existing form, one is to recognize this blank area as early as possible and grasp it, and the other is to fight out of the red ocean after everyone recognizes it. The reason why Steve Jobs impressed everyone is because he created more. I believe that if there was no Bill Gates, there would definitely be other operating systems like Windows, but without Steve Jobs, there would probably be no iPod or iPhone.

The reason why Lei Jun ranks first is similar to this.

I always suspect that if there is no Lei Jun, there would be no Xiaomi's way of playing. This is the first place that is very rare. Although Alibaba says that its model is very special, there are always traces to follow, but Xiaomi has created a model out of thin air, which is a very powerful innovation. Some people like to compare Xiaomi with Apple, but in fact this is a big misunderstanding. The Apple model is a pure single-point extreme. Simply put, it is to make very good products. To use the words in the biography of Steve Jobs, this is called the intersection of humanities and technology, but Xiaomi is not like that. Although it is also a hit product, the sense of participation in MIUI and the Xiaomi Redmi play are very different from Apple. Xiaomi has gathered many labels, such as 10 billion US dollars in three years, fans, Internet thinking, sense of participation, hunger marketing, etc. If you jump out of the right and wrong of specific cases, you can find that an enterprise that can keep coming up with these tricks must be a very dynamic enterprise. Only when a special field is formed in the enterprise can there be continuous innovation. And the person who can lead everyone to form this field must be a person who is very good in mind, ambition, and gathering people.

Ma Huateng's strengths can be seen in WeChat. I have mentioned in other articles that when we talk about WeChat, we tend to focus on Zhang Xiaolong's ability to create products, and often tend to overlook that Ma Huateng and Zhang Xiaolong are the combination that created WeChat. From public reports, there were many teams in Tencent at the time developing mobile IM at the same time, and this investment was probably based on the assumption that "mobile Internet is the real Internet, and Tencent must dominate the IM of mobile Internet." Under this assumption, Ma Huateng also has the so-called grayscale theory, so there are multiple teams moving forward at the same time. If there were no top-level designs like Ma Huateng, I think more companies would be more likely to make micro-innovations on the mobile version of QQ, and further fall into the dilemma of innovators. Everyone can say what the grayscale theory says, but it is difficult to dare to do it and make achievements. From the perspective of the understanding of mobile Internet, Lei Jun started the earliest, followed by Ma Huateng, but at least in IM, Ma Huateng came from behind and won, and WeChat defeated Mi Chat.

Judging from the attention level, Jack Ma may be the most popular among Internet tycoons. Judging from Jack Ma's various speeches, his thinking is quite profound. Jack Ma's most powerful points should be his ability to gather people and give speeches. Unlike Lei Jun and Ma Huateng, who are both programmers, he can dig deep into the industry from the inside out. Jack Ma does not understand technology, but he can make the company do a great job in technology. He is the leader in building platforms such as Alibaba Cloud, which is enough to reflect his ability to gather people. Of course, this is also Jack Ma's problem. Jack Ma himself is a little alienated from products and technology. Lai Wang is a more obvious example. Jack Ma must mention the Alipay incident and his grand retirement here. Such things can reflect some problems. It's not that others don't have problems. From the perspective of moralists, everyone should be tied to the pillar of shame. There are no heroes. So it's meaningless to make moral judgments alone, but it means that you can't exceed a certain bottom line. You can choose not to retire, and no one will say anything. It always makes people feel strange if you don't practice after making a big fuss. I suspect something has been misjudged.

The reason why others did not rank in the first echelon is mostly because they had obvious problems.

Some people are good at taking unconventional approaches. Although this approach can lead to success, it is limited in scope, just like a conspiracy is useful but cannot win the battle. Han Feizi once said: If you take an unconventional approach, you will die young; if you abandon reason, you will not succeed. This is also suitable for this type of enterprise.

Some people have obvious problems in gathering people, trying to build a bureaucratic organization in the Internet world. From the results, every product they release is very similar to every mobile phone Nokia released in the past: it can be used, but it is hard to say what is good about it.

Some people have lost their enterprising spirit and are passively carried away by the trend, much like the dry bones in the tomb that Cao Cao mentioned.

Some people are trapped in the red ocean, and have not yet achieved a surprising victory. They seem to have no idea what to do next and are acting blindly.

Conclusion

This kind of evaluation of people is definitely very subjective, and my list here is neither rigorous nor comprehensive. I believe everyone has their own list in their mind. An interesting thing is that Vzhongtou posted a question called: Internet giants, if you have to choose the top three NB, who do you think they are? I was surprised to find that there are still several people who feel the same as me. This kind of thing will definitely cause some controversy, but I believe that as long as there is an internal logic, even if there is controversy, it still has greater positive significance.

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.