Wen 丨20 Society, author 丨 Luo Lixuan Jia Yang, editor 丨 Wang Xiaoling
"Have you heard of any new horse racing programs?" A friend who works in a big Internet factory said that this year everyone does not want to toss.
One change this year is that internal competition is less important. An Ali operator told the 20th Society that just after the Spring Festival, a certain subdivision he was in no longer enjoyed independent preparation and budgeting, and was merged into the category.
Even for companies that are very committed to horse racing, many horse racing projects are in the process of merging and eliminating similar events. "Everyone has seen the environment this year." A large factory employee said.
For the domestic Internet industry, horse racing was once a well-affirmed strategic "elixir". But as with any useful strategy, horse racing has its time limits.
Now, the turning point has arrived.
Merge similar items
The last few that have been "eliminated" are those that have not found a clear direction. In large companies, there will be some projects that do not have a clear direction? There are, and there are many, and even some projects are not clearly thought out.
For example, a business does not have a clear business model, but the direction is important, which has the demand for card slots. In addition, when the market is relatively good, the environment for new projects within the company is relatively relaxed, especially for new projects in business departments.
On February 22, "Xinyan Finance" broke the news that Tencent's "Little Goose Fight" is about to be shut down, and at the same time, the corresponding solution has been proposed internally for employees after the business is laid off: "Little Goose Fight" employees will be transferred to other projects, and the solution will begin this week, and the project leader and employees will communicate.
A few days ago, ByteDance's independent site, Monstudio, announced that it would stop its website operations since February 11. This cross-border e-commerce platform that benchmarks Shein has only been online for three months.
The little goose spelling launched in early 2020 is considered to be a social e-commerce company that benchmarks pinduoduo. This project was not launched by the WeChat team, but under tencent PCG. In fact, looking at the previous WeChat attitude towards social e-commerce, I believe that all WeChat team projects are unlikely to appear in the name of the word "spelling".
Little Goose Fight Shutdown Announcement
The cross-border e-commerce platform Dimonstudio's downline was very sudden, and ByteDance also kept a low profile and did not give a specific reason. But from the perspective of cross-border e-commerce, the independent station of benchmarking Shei n is undoubtedly a difficult direction.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Shein requires contracted suppliers to be no more than 5 hours away from its Guangzhou sourcing center and have the ability to ship in 10 days. It is precisely because of the establishment of an industrial cluster with small single fast reaction capabilities that Shein has achieved faster than the traditional fast fashion ZARA.
Byte also has another cross-border e-commerce platform, Fanno, which is regarded as the international version of Pinduoduo. Its product categories are mainly clothes, accessories, gadgets and other daily necessities, and the price is mostly less than 5 pounds. Also relying on TikTok traffic, this platform model is more efficient and reasonable.
Every company, it is inevitable that some projects did not think clearly at the beginning of the project. For example, on a popular track, in order to run through the mode, it is not surprising that there are several events at the same time.
Horse racing is a money-burning style of play. For projects that were not clearly thought out at first, the trial-and-error window is shortening. Of course, the direction of difficulty in making profits is the focus of recent adjustments.
The pattern of domestic comprehensive e-commerce platforms has long been settled, and there are still opportunities in some vertical areas, mainly because the difficulty is too large.
The most difficult fresh food in the field of e-commerce is regarded as the "last traffic battle of the Internet". Ali does not dare to be sloppy in this direction, in addition to the original hema fresh, Tmall supermarket has also tested the water pre-warehouse business, and in 2021, it has set up a MMC business group to enter the community group to buy this red sea.
"A little bit can't understand Ali's fresh layout, a bit of horse racing meaning, several projects at the same time, running separately mode." An industry insider said.
But the pattern is still difficult to call running, and the long battle originally envisaged has been settled. Meituan Preferred huge loss of tens of billions, more to buy vegetables a large loss, Tongcheng Life and Orange Heart Preferred a collapse, a contraction, the third-line bet of Ali had to in the case of the Ten HuiTuan funds have not yet burned out, it decisively gave up, merge resources.
A person who buys more vegetables told the 20 community that the competition in the community group buying industry has become more and more fierce this year, from the scale competition to the competition of refined operation and supporting facilities construction, several major players "volume cost is inevitable, now is boiling."
Entertainment was also once the field of heavy military deployment of the Internet. Within Alibaba and Tencent, there are large and small overlapping projects.
On February 10, according to the interface report, the main part of Tencent Pictures will be adjusted from PCG (platform and content business group) to CDG (enterprise development business group), focusing on the development of era melodic works.
An industry insider believes that the adjustment of Tencent Pictures shows that the Tencent entertainment sector under Cheng Wu's rule has a tendency to stop horse racing. Tencent Pictures was transferred from PCG to CDG (Enterprise Development Business Group), although it is still responsible for Cheng Wu, but the main focus on the melody of the times is more to assume social responsibility, while commercial projects are handed over to Xinli Media, Yuwen Film and Television, and the original "troika" of Tencent's entertainment sector retains two main forces.
A practitioner of a head film and television company told 20 News Agency, "There is definitely a significant decline in the entire long video plate." Last year, the industry's most popular drama was "Son-in-law", the effective playback of the whole network is less than 5 billion, you should know that the hottest drama in previous years is often tens of billions of broadcasts. "From the demand side to the supply side, the overall shrinkage, at the beginning of the year, Tencent, Youku have middle and high-level people on social media lamented, the former project will be more than 70 only through 2, the latter 53 over 1.
iQiyi, which first pressed the industrialization leap button of the video platform, once played the studio horse racing to the extreme, "Every time a new important producer enters, it will open a separate studio, everyone will be rolled in, and there will be a blockbuster that will be pounced on." An iQIYI employee once told 20.
The first to step on the brakes was also iQiyi, which had nearly 9,000 people at its peak, three times as many as Tencent Video. Until the pressure on the capital side and the industry side overwhelmed iQiyi, and began to lay off employees at the end of last year.
From elixirs to managing inertia
Horse racing was once a well-recognized "elixir".
It is not a unique invention of the Internet. For example, Japan's Kyocera Company uses similar "amoeba" management, assigning employees to multiple independent units, independent operation, independent development.
For the domestic Internet, horse racing also did a good job in the early days to stimulate team creativity through decentralization and internal competition.
In China, the origin of everything is the QQ show that was launched in 2003. Xu Liang, a newcomer to the marketing department, accidentally learned that the Korean community website has developed a feature called "Avatar" to encourage users to create their own avatars in the community. Xu Liang believes that QQ users will also like such features, so he wrote a plan and recommended this product to the management.
At that time, the division of labor within Tencent was still relatively fixed, and the development of new products was the function of the R&D department. But the top management still assigned Xu Liang a few personnel to form a team to develop the product - one of Tencent's two major revenue pillars in the pre-game era, QQ Show.
Since then, Tencent has gradually formed a convention: "who proposes, who implements", once it becomes bigger, it will become an independent army. At the same time, Tencent also highly emphasizes the product manager culture, encourages employees to take the initiative to think and design products, and reserves sufficient leadership talents for multiple small teams after that.
For Tencent, it does not rely on top-level planning, and the wisdom from grass-roots business units to lead the business flow has really helped it launch epochal products in the era of PC and mobile Internet.
It can be said that this way of working has revolutionized the management method of Chinese enterprises from top to bottom and relying on strongmen, and it is also the only correct method when the market is rapidly expanding and as long as it seizes the opportunity, there is a high probability of success.
In an interview with the media, Ma Huateng himself also agreed with the effectiveness of the horse racing mechanism: "There is often a need for some redundancy within the company, tolerating failure, allowing moderate waste, and encouraging internal competition and trial and error. For large enterprises, moderate waste, trial and error, and stability in the strategic market are necessary. ”
For China's business community, Tencent, which has achieved great success in this way (or at least is believed to be), has made horse racing a management inertia, even a manifestation.
Take ByteDance, which also believes in horse racing, for example. In the early days, ByteDance's organizational structure was designed, and it could even be said that it was naturally prepared for horse racing: the hierarchy was extremely simple, the majority of the grass-roots employees could be split and reorganized at any time; a large number or even redundant recruitment of the best young people on the market, hungry enough, eager to fight.
There are multiple horse racing paths in ByteDance. In the early days, it was business-oriented, and in today's headline period, as long as a sub-channel performed well enough, it would immediately be split into independent apps, such as Understanding CheDi and Wukong Q&A. Later, there was a misplaced competition on the same track, such as the video track's Vibrato (short video), volcano small video (medium and long video) and watermelon video (long video). In addition, it is also possible to cast a net for different groups of people on a track, such as education is from K-12 to adults, from quality education to test-taking education, the whole line layout.
Today, short videos have won and won, and the winning margin is huge; while education is an unpredictable failure.
Pinduoduo also has a horse racing mechanism, but does not leave multiple horse racing events within the company.
An old employee of Pinduoduo commented on Huang Zheng's management style, saying, "I love horse racing, and there are three or four groups of people fighting in all projects." "An example is that, according to the late Latepost report, in the process of promoting the upgrading of pinduoduo's brand, 30 people in the brand investment team of the whole industry were divided into two completely independent groups and internal horse racing.
Pinduoduo's horse racing generally ends with the merger of the dominant team and the backward team. "Horse racing is suitable for the early stage, small steps trial and error rapid iteration, and after the direction is clear, concentrate on the market."
However, it is difficult to say whether this kind of project start-up method can still be sustained, because after the Spring Festival this year, Pinduoduo also reported the news of eliminating personnel with performance appraisal optimization.
What's more, even if this method works, in 2022, there are fewer and fewer wild places available for development on the map of the Internet business, and horse racing has been unable to expand the cake itself.
Times turn around
Horse racing is the most familiar application as a tool to stimulate internal competition, especially to develop new businesses. For companies, horse racing is more like sending out multiple expedition teams at the same time, and there are always one or two who can get treasure.
For example, after Tencent entered the game field, considering the fierce competition with game companies such as Shanda, Jiucheng and NetEase in the terminal game market, it was easier to let multiple teams compete in the same track, so it was easier to bet on the explosion, so it set up multiple studios such as Quantum, Lightspeed (later merged into Photonic Studios), Rubik's Cube, etc., backed by QQ, which is a rich mine of traffic and cash, to create more value.
This set of play has been invincible after the rise of the mobile terminal market: when there is gold everywhere, as long as there are enough people, the most gold can be mined.
With the growth of the strength of Internet companies, horse racing is more and more like the position of the group army, the romantic color has faded, and the whip of "winner takes all" makes practitioners dare not slacken off every second.
This makes horse racing sometimes a dead end in thinking. It can be said that the flaws of horse racing have been traced years ago.
For example, in some large companies, a popular role is "internal commerce.". They may not be the most capable, but they are familiar with the heads of departments and can coordinate more resources for their departments. When the development of new products becomes the exchange and possession of resources, the significance of innovation is gone.
The worse news is that fast-forward to 2022, which is far less expensive than the capital reserves, but are still racing horses, once the market stops expanding rapidly, waste will become unbearable.
From the perspective of the industry, the mobile Internet has developed for more than ten years, and the underlying logic of business is still traffic. The traditional core business of Internet companies has fallen into the Red Sea, and Internet giants are actively looking for a second growth curve, hoping to reconstruct the original business logic. For example, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, chip research and development, autonomous driving, or the general meaning of "metacosm"...
In the view of CICC, in the past year, the Internet sector has experienced a super decline, external factors are only the fuse, the deeper reason or lies in how the industry in the limited physical world, continue to do exponential growth?
According to the analysis of Zheshang Securities, the regulatory restrictions on monopoly will be mainly aimed at fair competition, and the future competition of the Internet will move more from the competition of scale to the dispute of efficiency; the commission model of the platform, involving the distribution of benefits and increasing transaction costs, will be challenged.
On the whole, "commodities and service platforms do not have negative externalities, or can be supported by supervision." However, content platforms have certain negative externalities, and the core business model may be challenged. ”
Source: CICC Research Report
From the perspective of policy trends, the direction of encouragement is "specialized and specialized", that is, enterprises with the characteristics of "specialization, refinement, specialization and novelty".
The Internet doesn't say goodbye to horse racing right away. For at least some, new exponential growth opportunities lie hidden in virtual reality. Although there is still a big gap between the current hardware and computing power levels, the larger technical maturity variables have led to uncertainty in the main application, which in turn has led to greater uncertainty in specific services.
According to the logic of the mobile Internet outbreak, this uncertainty is containing market potential and is an excellent practice scenario for horse racing logic. For example, how to present the experience, content, etc. to the user in the appropriate application form, whether it is a wearable device such as VR, AR, MR, or a chip that can be implanted, or other forms...
However, in the field of traditional Internet, under full competition, the map has long been planted with "occupied" flags. The restrictions on monopoly by supervision have made more and more marks of "risk" and "this road is not open".
In any case, 2022 will be a turning point in the gradual farewell to horse racing.