Apollo Moonshot Armstrong famously said, "One small step for the individual, one big step for mankind." Not all "big steps" in history are so intuitive. Many times, the great changes in human society are often in the foreshadowing of those seemingly insignificant "small steps".
On January 18, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Activision Blizzard for $95 per share for $68.7 billion. After this transaction, Microsoft will become the third largest game company after Tencent and Sony.
As the saying goes, when you watch a play, you will watch the doorway, and if you don't watch, you will not watch the hilarity. Microsoft's large-scale acquisition of Activision Blizzard, most people feel that the rich Microsoft, in order to expand the scale of the enterprise or optimistic about the revenue of the game industry, hope to make more money. Such an intuitive impression is only the appearance of the acquisition behavior. The acquisitions of large technology companies that spend heavily on them are often the embodiment of their strategic decisions. In other words, the meaning of this Microsoft acquisition is not the game itself, but the next generation of the Internet.
The "drunken meaning" of Microsoft's acquisition behavior lies first and foremost in the metaverse related to the game. At the moment, "metaverse" has become the most fashionable word, and almost all the tech giants are talking about and favoring this concept. The so-called metaverse is nothing more than the expansion of virtual reality. For technology companies, where there is profit growth point, there is their presence. Since more and more young people are favoring virtual space, technology companies are trying to meet the needs of young people and compete to develop the "meta-universe" platform necessary for virtual reality life. Not only the technology companies of developed countries invest in the metacosm, but even the technology companies on the mainland are also impressed by the "metacosm" and strive to keep pace with the construction of the global "metacosm". In this sense, Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is indeed to join the competition of the "meta-universe".
The "drunken meaning" of Microsoft's acquisition behavior lies in the exploration of a new internet form that integrates virtual space and real space with the help of technology and capital games. Although the history of the Internet is only a few decades, the Internet has undergone at least two iterations: from the traditional Internet to the currently popular mobile Internet. Microsoft is the beneficiary of the development of the first generation of the Internet, which can be described as a first opportunity. In the process of Internet transformation, tech giants like Microsoft have invariably lost to companies like Facebook. When Facebook took the lead in changing the company to a "metacosm", it quickly woke up a group of technology companies that saw that with the rapid development of digital technology and the digital economy, in the process of deep integration of virtual and reality, the game industry has become a new form of the future Internet. Microsoft's acquisition can be seen as laying out the next generation of Internet exploration, which may be their real intention to acquire Activision Blizzard at any cost.
For China, our tech companies should not underestimate the strategic significance of Microsoft's acquisition. In the contemporary world, the soft power of a country lies in digital culture, and a country's global discourse power lies in the output ability of network culture, and it is also a concrete embodiment of measuring a country's comprehensive national strength and international competitiveness in the exploration of new Internet forms. Recognizing this, it is necessary to accurately read the "drunken meaning" of the technology giant from Microsoft's acquisition behavior, and then deploy its own development strategy to avoid creating a new technological gap in the global Internet technology revolution.
Spring River Plumbing Duck Prophet. Technology competition, our technology companies should not be a wall view, but should face up to the technical singularity, through the game industry to participate in the global new technology competition.
Source: Jingchu Network
Author: Liu Haiming (Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, School of Journalism, Chongqing University)
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