Interview with Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering
Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, is the first "private enterprise academician" in China. He pioneered the "data-centric" distributed cloud computing architecture and presided over the research and development of the Alibaba cloud computing platform with the large-scale distributed computing system "Feitian" as the core and independent intellectual property rights, so he is also known as the "father of Alibaba Cloud". However, when it comes to cloud computing, his road to research and development has not been smooth.
Wu Xiaoli: The most familiar thing is that you have made two systems, one is the Feitian system, which is an independent innovation ecosystem of cloud computing, and the other is the YunOs system.
Wang Jian: That's right. If YunOs had done this well, China's auto industry might not be what it is today.
Wu Xiaoli: What year was that?
Wang Jian: It was 2016, and some cars still use YunOs, but it doesn't play a soul role in the car. When I was writing the report on the selection of academicians, I wanted to write this point, and in the end, other academicians told me not to write it.
Wu Xiaoli: Because it didn't work?
Wang Jian: Because it didn't work.
In 2013, while Wang Jian was leading the development of the Alibaba Cloud Feitian system, he and his team were also working on building a front-end mobile operating system, which later became known as YunOs.
The hardware markets that YunOs is targeting are mobile phones and cars. After five years of research and development, YunOs did not achieve the expected market effect and finally withdrew from the market. After many years, Academician Wang Jian talked about this failure experience for the first time in an interview.
Wu Xiaoli: When you were working on the Feitian system, you were also doing YunOs, which was a process from scratch, was it difficult at that time?
Wang Jian: It's very difficult. First, it is very difficult for everyone to understand the operating system. What is the operating system? I often say that the soul must have a place to stay, and the operating system is that soul, but only the soul, and no place to live is a ghost, why is Feitian an operating system? It has a home, which is the familiar data center. Similarly, when it comes to making YunOs, it has to have a place for its soul, and one of the most important places to stay at that time is the mobile phone.
Wu Xiaoli: At that time, the Feitian system was still in the process of researching, and you already had to enter another operating system of a terminal system.
Wang Jian: Yes, from this point of view, it is also a very greedy approach, which dilutes my own energy a lot. Using Apple's IOS system as an example, we can't use everyone's understanding of Apple's operating system today to look at the situation at that time. What was emphasized when Apple's first phone was released may seem like a joke to us today, but what was good about Apple's phone at that time? You receive an email today, you don't have to take the initiative to check it yourself, it will automatically notify "you have a new email", just like that.
Wu Xiaoli: That's innovation.
Wang Jian: This is innovative, what is the joke? The companies that were released with it are all gone, one of them is Yahoo, and now this company is gone, so from this point of view, Apple's greatness is not that it did well today, it was when it was first released that year, it was not a complete thing...
Wu Xiaoli: Anyway, it was also released, and then it was constantly iterated.
Wang Jian: That's right.
Wu Xiaoli: YunOs didn't do it at that time, was it a bad breath?
Wang Jian: A big breath is to say that we often talk about ecology, and all players in this industry chain are "back-to-back" to do it, which is very difficult. For Android, the most rare thing is that manufacturers will feel that there is no worry about using Android, because they trust Google, and it is useless without this mechanism.
Wu Xiaoli: Isn't YunOs trusted?
Wang Jian: Because in the history of China, this kind of "back-to-back" thing has never been done, it is not a question of which company.
Wu Xiaoli: Isn't Feitian "back-to-back"?
Wang Jian: No, there is a difference between Feitian and YunOs. For Feitian, the hardware and software are our own, and others just use our product. Like Apple making mobile phones today, if YunOs comes from other mobile phone manufacturers, if it wants to use YunOs, it must trust YunOs unconditionally.
Wu Xiaoli: A company with a terminal equipment needs to cooperate unconditionally.
Wang Jian: And this company needs to agree that both of us can succeed at the same time, not a question of who kills whom, but this confidence can only be built in a strong environment.
Don't look at the problems of the past with the eyes of the present
Wu Xiaoli: Why do I have to talk about YunOs? It seems to be silent now, but I think it was a big opportunity and window at that time. Like you said, we now look at IOS and Android, and these two worlds are inevitable.
Wang Jian: That's right.
Wu Xiaoli: Turning around, if Sino-US relations are a little worse, what will happen to the device operating system of our mobile terminal after these two parts of the world?
Wang Jian: You can't use the current situation to look at the problems of that time, it was not the proposition at that time. At that time, we wanted to give birth to a new industrial structure, not to solve the problem of whether we had our own operating system, so the market at that time was a very pure, international market, with cruel market competition. Now Americans have turned a problem of market competition into a problem that is not market competition.
Wu Xiaoli: It became a security issue.
Wang Jian: Yes, so its difficulty is not comparable now.
Wu Xiaoli: What if you pick it up again?
Wang Jian: If it is picked up again and a new operating system is born, it will definitely be far beyond this possibility, but it has lost the biggest opportunity, which is to redefine the world's industrial structure. I often say that I can't look at this matter from the current perspective, because the challenge it encountered at that time was not a problem of an operating system in our country today, if it was this problem at that time, maybe our country's industrial layout in this area would really be done.
At that time, we released YunOs all the way to YunOs 6.0, which is a completely new operating system, and it is the first time to use it in a car, so its architecture and so on, is a completely independent architecture.
What is the biggest shame in the automotive industry?
Wang Jian: The car is the biggest intelligent hardware, but everyone uses their mobile phones to navigate
Wu Xiaoli: I originally thought that you were looking at a different way, not using the operating system to generally use mobile phones as mobile terminals, but directly entering the next mobile terminal scene - cars.
Wang Jian: That's right. Why did the car become our scene? At that time, the society has been talking about intelligent hardware, but everyone has overlooked one thing, the car is the biggest intelligent hardware. To this day, the automotive industry has not been successful. Once, they had a meeting in the automotive industry, and I said a sentence at the meeting, which was later relayed many times by their industry, and I said, "If I am a person in the automotive industry, what is the greatest shame for me?" Everyone sits in the car, but takes out their mobile phones to do navigation. ”
Wu Xiaoli: The car itself can't be online.
Wang Jian: The key is that the hardware inside the car is much better than the mobile phone hardware, the screen inside the car is also larger than the mobile phone, and the quality of all sensors is better than the mobile phone sensor. From this point of view, it is a very big change, but you have to make an operating system, without the accumulation on the phone, it cannot be done, which is complementary. The main battlefield of mobile phones must be won, and the situation in today's industry also proves that I was right to think this at that time.
Wu Xiaoli: Since you are a mobile terminal, you must be able to win on the first mobile terminal.
Wang Jian: This is the most basic. From the perspective of industrial changes, the battle of mobile phones must have passed, and may not have passed from the perspective of the country's security needs. I was doing this and made a good friend Tsai Mingjie (chairman of MediaTek Taiwan), who came to Hangzhou one year during the Spring Festival at the most difficult time for his company, and he said of me, "You are an incurable optimist."
As an individual, I am very proud, even if I don't do a good job, I still feel very proud. In that year, our global installed base exceeded the installed capacity of Microsoft systems, exceeding 100 million.
Wu Xiaoli: Selling cars with this system has exceeded 100 million.
Wang Jian: Cars, mobile phones, and tablets all add up, which is 100 million. As tragic as it sounds, I said about two years ago, "YunOs is the closest I've seen in China to have its own operating system."
How to view the relationship between technology and human beings?
Most of the "warm snakes" are helpful to humans
Wu Xiaoli: You said that the relationship between technology and people is "the farmer covers the snake".
Wang Jian: Think of science and technology as the animal world, there will definitely be technology in science and technology to bite you back, but you have to believe that most of the warm things are helpful to humans. You also have to believe that even if you get bitten, you can survive.
Today, Wang Jian is also actively promoting the establishment of the "Yunqi Conference" and participating in the preparation of "Yunqi Town" to build a complete cloud computing ecology and achieve a breakthrough from the Feitian technology platform to the cloud computing industry. For him, the future of cloud computing holds endless possibilities.
Reflection, where are the boundary boundaries of world development?
Stay on Earth and take out the plastic bag in the whale's belly
Wu Xiaoli: We often say that we have to look at the future, when cloud computing is just beginning to disrupt the world, what do you see as the next step?
Wang Jian: For example, dual carbon, when it comes to global green development. If this development continues, where are the constraints on the future development of the world? Two hundred years ago, the constraint of the world was to see the sea, but not know what was over there; Now you can run to any corner of the world. How did these technologies of the ship come out? It must have been forced out, not simply shut in the door, you can develop the technology of the ship, the technology of navigation, but slowly temper it in that place. Where is the ceiling of our cloud computing now? Double carbon gives us a good opportunity to reflect.
Looking back, we have a big problem today, like what Elon Musk did, he's going to Mars, which is remarkable, but I have reservations about his purpose and starting point for going to Mars. What are we going to Mars for? He himself said that he came to Mars to escape the earth, and the earth was made like this by us, and one day it will be destroyed. I don't think this idea is high, the earth does not need us to save, it must be that human beings disappeared first, and then the earth disappeared.
Now it is difficult to go to Mars, and in a hundred years, you will definitely feel that going to Mars is an easy thing, and in the end you will find that staying on Earth is the most difficult thing. We definitely can't leave plastic bags in a whale's belly and run to Mars ourselves.
Wu Xiaoli: We have become irresponsible on earth.
Wang Jian: Yes, we are simply not capable of being responsible. If I have to think about something, it is to live well on Earth, cloud computing can help; Second, going to Mars is just a trip, which is noble, but if we go to Mars to escape Earth, it is not noble. I firmly believe that cloud computing has the opportunity to get rid of plastic bags in the belly of whales.
Wu Xiaoli: How do you get the plastic bag out of the whale's belly?
Wang Jian: It may be a long and tortuous path in between, but there is an opportunity. Double carbon, is the best cloud computing innovation I can see today, one kilowatt-hour of electricity after cloud computing, will produce the social value of ten degrees of electricity before cloud computing, can reduce 90% of electricity consumption, in order to have the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions, this is my most basic idea.
Producer: Han Yan
Choreographer: Mei Yuan
Editor: Ma Jin