Ofo made headlines for the last time

Text | Vaish

When ofo was still praising the "new four inventions" in the capital markets, no one could have imagined that the last time the company made headlines would be when its SMS verification escrow expired, so that the app could not log in at all.

At this time, there are still tens of millions of users in the queue to return the deposit, although the hope of returning the money is quite slim, but as the first debt idea of young people, now even the opportunity to open this IOU has disappeared.

Looking back, ofo is like a symbol of the boom and bust of China's Internet entrepreneurship wave, symbolizing the twilight of the era of "holding traffic to make giants", extremely pampered and spirited, the power of growth seems omnipotent, and it also seduces groups of the brightest minds.

I always think of the old joke about a guy in the elevator who constantly does push-ups, and as the elevator arrives from the 1st floor to the 10th floor, a reporter stands at the door and asks him how he can climb so quickly, and he replies that it is all because the push-ups posture is standard enough.

This is not whipping the corpse or punching the face, we have all experienced such a short extremely smooth road, as Buffett said, with "a long slope, very wet snow", the fire on both sides of the road, the flowers are brocade, everyone who walks up, will think that they are the chosen son.

Maybe you can always pick out a lot of mistakes in the details, but silly optimism itself is not wrong.

I also remember that when ofo had overfinancing, going to sea was also one of its strategic directions, which was fine, and the fault was that one of the countries it chose to go to sea was the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is not Henan, not relying on spicy soup to attract fans, but famous for the kingdom of cycling, the country's population of 17 million, a total of 23 million bicycles, not only more cars than people, the government budget for green transportation subsidies are long-term high.

I wondered what kind of intellectual activity and fearlessness led Ofo to feel that his model could work unimpeded in the Netherlands, persuading citizens to pay for a $300 yellow car in a country with 1.4 bicycles per capita?

The idea that providing a fulcrum can pry the earth can be said to be an objective law of science, but in fact it is neither objective nor regular.

Compared with the rise of the little novelty - highly leveraged growth solutions - the fall of ofo is closer to the news bonanza, but in the past few years, all the famous technology media, such as 36Krypton, Deep Web, Late, have not missed this feature topic.

The beginning and end of the sudden stop have been told too many times, even if the versions are different, the directivity of all clues is not much different, the founder always believes that the script of the protagonist is in hand, but the industrial capital that is patiently exhausted is put into the stop loss list, and finally realizes a world where only he is injured.

Even the "king of mergers and acquisitions" Bao Fan, who has been full of topics these days, did not dare to wade into this muddy water, he chose to serve as a financial advisor to ofo's biggest competitor, and successfully completed the transaction sold to Meituan, at the celebration banquet, Bao was proud to say that Mobike's investors did not lose a single loss, and the worst had a 20% return.

It is said that whatever the lander does will appear to be a mockery of the person who fell into the sea.

So is bike sharing still a good business? Painted bicycles still fill residential areas and high streets, and their functional value as a low-cost means of short-distance transportation has never been denied.

The only thing that is overrated is to see these bikes and their QR codes as the entrance to everything, the entrance to transportation, the entrance to payment, the entrance to consumption, a reverie that has happened too many times in the Internet over the past decade or so, with participants wishful thinking constructing stories and then poking every bubble with their own hands.

Humans have invented many business concepts to describe such scenarios, a return to rationality, a revaluation of values, and technical adjustments, but in the final analysis, the basis for forcing the market to face reality is the departure of real behavior and planned vision.

For example, sharing bicycles is just sharing bicycles, and its mission is to transport users from one place to another, without so many exciting additions, and there is no room for ambition higher than the sky.

All of ofo's failures were due to the fact that its opponents recognized the facts, but it did not believe it, so the tall buildings collapsed, the guests scattered, and many people cherished the bad debts of the deposit, which was just one of the piles of funerary goods in the luxurious mausoleum.

Of course, young people with light in their eyes running around big cities with the ideal of changing the world are blameless in any era, in fact, the narrative of encouraging to leave the comfort zone and achieve cross-class wealth has long been outdated, and the new emotional value has become that it is good to be an ordinary person, and pursue a life without being pressured.

Only ByteDance's badge terrier is still occasionally awakening dead memories, and Ali employees were keen to indicate P8 on the hook-up software This confusing behavior is not quite the same, the badge is more like a symbol of creating a virtual image in the system in a market-oriented environment, and the big factory without financial crisis is within the system, but it is valid until the age of 35.

Ofo was on such a turn, and rushed straight without looking back.

In my circle of friends, there are reporters who write the topic ofo for help everywhere, trying to find a person who still has the ofo client installed on the mobile phone to take a screenshot of the report, and many people say that they can't help, because whether the deposit is returned or not, with the change of mobile phone in recent years, almost no one will keep ofo's App, and it has long been removed from the app store.

This is the rule of the online survival game, and you can't leave even a line of code after death.