Editor's Introduction: With the development and continuous promotion of the Internet, various types and functions of software emerge in an endless stream, enter our field of vision, and are widely used. In the process of the gradual development of the Internet, antivirus software was once indispensable software on every user's computer, and the prosperity of the once anti-soft market quietly declined after the advent of the mobile Internet era. Let's read the author's article together to understand the development of antivirus software and the possible future.
"No one has cared about the industry for a long time." An industry insider who has worked in the anti-virus industry for more than a decade described his inner shock: For Kingsoft Drug Bully and China's anti-soft industry, it should not be returned to the public eye in this way under any circumstances.
At the beginning of 1999, kingsoft antivirus software that was established two years ago was ready to be listed, and the general manager of Kingsoft, who had recently taken office, was changed by Lei Jun, who changed his life in the book "Fire of Silicon Valley", personally made a decision and named the software "Kingsoft Poison Bully". "To kill soft, you have to 'core black', because only the 'core' is 'black' enough to kill the virus."
1 year later, Lei Jun launched the third main product in the history of Kingsoft Company - Kingsoft Drug Bully.
At that time, a soft killing price was between 258 yuan and 358 yuan, Lei Jun proved himself to be a marketing master at that time, after attracting users with a price of 199 yuan, Kingsoft Poison Ba quickly became popular, and in the first year, he ranked among the top three chinese soft killers. In 2002, Kingsoft drug bully lowered the retail price to 50 yuan, surpassing Jiangmin to become the second in the market, second only to Rising.
Why Lei Jun later launched Xiaomi emphasized "cost performance", its success is here. Anti-virus has since become the label of Kingsoft. A few years later, he became the protagonist of a series of far-reaching jianghu melee stories.
20 years later, Lei Jun, who started a business again, led Xiaomi to become one of the world's top 500 companies. In the huge Jinshan system and Lei Jun system under his control, although the Jinshan poison bully exists tenaciously and silently, it has long been a most inconspicuous chess piece, and the vast majority of netizens will not notice this name.
Not only is it the surviving Jinshan poison bully, but other soft killers are also rarely asked. Since the transfer of user traffic from the PC to the mobile Internet, the once-glorious soft-killing industry has not attracted the public's attention for many years.
Until October 12, 2021, there was a thunderclap on the flat ground - Kingsoft Poison Bully mistakenly used heroic photos in the push content. This made countless netizens particularly angry, related topics on the hot search list, Kingsoft poison bully also had to apologize lightly after Wanfu pointed out.
As of now, the final outcome of this incident is still unknown, and some netizens have also begun to re-examine the forgotten killing soft jianghu. "No one has cared about this industry for a long time, let alone Kingsoft Poison Bully." Li Guan (pseudonym), an industry insider who has worked in the anti-virus industry for more than a decade, described his inner shock: For Kingsoft Drug Bully and China's anti-soft industry, it should not be returned to the public eye in this way under any circumstances.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >, a battle in which Lei Jun was completely defeated by Zhou Hongyi</h1>
What needs to be clarified is that today's Kingsoft Drug Bully does not directly belong to Kingsoft from the perspective of equity - it was included in Kingsoft Network in 2010, which is now a subsidiary of Beijing Cheetah Network Technology Co., Ltd.
The enterprise investigation shows that the major shareholder of Cheetah Mobile is Qiu Weiqin, holding 65% of the shares and Fu Sheng holding 35%. Qiu Weiqin joined Kingsoft in 1992 and has served as legal representative, senior executive and supervisor in many companies in Kingsoft. According to relevant reports, Qiu Weiqin is the sister of Qiu Bojun, the founder of Jinshan.
However, Lei Jun is still the first controller of the Jinshan system. As a veteran technology enterprise, the Composition of kingsoft is quite complex, and West Mountain Residence, Cheetah Mobile, Kingsoft Office and Kingsoft Cloud are the four most well-known subsidiaries.
For many years, Lei Jun has always placed high hopes on jinshan poison bully. In 2011, at a meeting of core executives after Lei Jun returned and planned to reorganize Kingsoft, he wrote down his transformation plan for Kingsoft on a blank piece of paper - among which, focusing on the three core businesses of "Kingsoft Drug Bully", WPS and online games was the first change of Lei Jun's Kingsoft transformation plan.
At that time, in a dispute that attracted attention inside and outside the circle and lasted for several years, Jinshan Poison Bully was one of the important protagonists.
In the early rise of PCs in the 21st century, anti-virus software based on Kingsoft, Rising and Jiangmin has become the pride of domestic software representatives in the competition with foreign Kaspersky, NOD32, Norton, etc., creating a golden age of soft killing.
Before 2003, Rising's annual sales reached 700 million. In 2007, when Kingsoft's parent company, Hong Kong Stocks, was listed on the stock market, its prospectus outlined that the vast majority of the company's software revenue came from Kingsoft Poison.
This situation was completely broken in 2008, and the industry has changed dramatically since then. In July of that year, an outsider appeared in the killing soft river and lake- Zhou Hongyi's Qihoo 360. Zhou Hongyi used free as a means to ignite the years-long war between free and fee.
By the beginning of 2010, 360 free antivirus and Rising, Kingsoft drug-based paid antivirus software competition results: 360 won, occupying 90% of the market share of the antivirus market in one fell swoop. The most direct impact on Kingsoft is that the company is on the verge of dying in crisis, and Has resigned Kingsoft CEO Lei Jun to return to Kingsoft to take charge of the two businesses of drug bullying and online games.
After Lei Jun returned, he brought an opponent who was very familiar with 360 and Zhou Hongyi- Lei Jun's old subordinate, Fu Sheng, who had previously left 360. In 360, Fu Sheng's security guard made Qihu and Zhou Hongyi.
At the end of 2010, Fu Sheng and his Keniu team were merged into Kingsoft Network (the predecessor of Cheetah Mobile), operated by Fu Sheng, and Wang Xin, former CEO of Kingsoft Security, was appointed as COO. Fu Sheng's first decision after coming to power was to cut down Jinshan's original seven or eight old product lines to only two poison bully and defender, and at the same time announced that Jinshan poison bully followed the permanent free strategy of 360, and the brave man broke his wrist and confronted 360 hard.
Lawsuits and war of words broke out, and Lei Jun and Zhou Hongyi were once "old and dead and did not interact with each other." At the same time, in order to fight against 360, Tencent Fireline invested $20 million in Kingsoft Network, and in that famous battle with 360, vigorously promoted Kingsoft's drug bully to make it a survival slowdown. After the 3B war, Baidu also quickly finalized a shareholding agreement with Fu Sheng, and a total of 360 resistances were made.
After kingsoft drug bullying, Rising, Kaspersky and other domestic and foreign killers have followed up free, but it is difficult to compete with the formation of a group effect of 360, as former Google CEO Schmidt said: "Free lunch is not available to everyone, it excludes all the price discrimination structure in the market, often resulting in a winner-take-all situation." ”
Kingsoft's previous revenue of hundreds of millions of yuan supports the lifeblood of Kingsoft Network Company. Although Lei Jun and Fu Sheng concentrated the strength of the whole company to be a drug bully, and even shouted the slogan of "smashing the pot and selling iron to make a drug bully", in the case of funds, technology and personnel are not as good as 360, at the most on the PC side, it is only one-third of the market share of 360.
After the battle of killing soft was completely won by Zhou Hongyi, Lei Jun focused his energy mainly on mobile phones. And the Kingsoft network, which bears the heavy responsibility of transformation, has since developed a completely different path from Lei Jun's expectations, and Kingsoft Poison Has ultimately failed to become the core business of Kingsoft after the reorganization of Kingsoft in Lei Jun's heart - Fu Sheng merged Kingsoft Poison Bully and Kingsoft Defender, added the "Internet-oriented" new project Kingsoft Navigation, Cheetah Browser, Game Intermodal, and chose to go to sea in another way, and finally in May 2014, Kingsoft Network was successfully listed after changing its name to Cheetah Mobile, and Lei Jun thus ushered in the "third ringing bell".
In the year of the listing of Kingsoft Network, COO Wang Xin resigned. As one of the "Five Tigers of Jinshan" who followed Lei Jun to fight in the world, many years ago she took over the Jinshan Poison Bully from Feng Xin, the founder of Storm Video, and led the Performance of the Jinshan Poison Bully to soar, but in the war of words with Zhou Hongyi, she seriously underestimated the opponent, let the other party kill out of the free road, and also let the Jinshan Poison Bully fall into a place of no return.
In 2018, on the eve of Xiaomi's listing, Lei Jun submitted his resignation to the board of directors of Cheetah Mobile and no longer serves as chairman and director.
For Lei Jun, at that time, the Jinshan poison bully had long been forgotten by most people, and it had become a most inconspicuous pawn in the huge Lei Jun system - in 2018, Baidu Antivirus and Baidu Defender, which had been out for less than 5 years, officially stopped updating. The killing soft market has almost become a confrontation between Qihoo 360 and Tencent Computer Butler, and Rising, Kingsoft Poison, Kaspersky, Norton and other domestic and foreign killing softs have either survived under the great changes of the times or completely abandoned.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > second, forgotten by the tide of the times</h1>
After the soft war between Lei Jun and Zhou Hongyi, there has been no greater news in the soft market for more than a decade. This industry, as early as the advent of the mobile Internet era, quietly declined.
Different from the traditional PC era, in the mobile era, iOS and Android are relatively closed systems, and at the system level, the built-in security mechanism has completed the soft work. For the soft killing industry, this is tantamount to a cruel "dimensionality reduction blow". In addition, all mobile phone manufacturers have also begun to do security, do channels, and build their own controllable traffic ecological closed loop.
On the PC side, Microsoft's Win10 system released in 2014 came with its own Windows Defender free antivirus software (renamed Microsoft Defender in 2019). In the comparative evaluation of foreign institutions, the software has obtained extremely high scores in all aspects.
"Compared with the traditional software killing experience, there are no ads and pop-ups, but there is better system compatibility." Li Guan said that his PC computer has not installed a third-party anti-software for many years, and from the user's point of view, the third-party antivirus software has long been not just needed.
This became the last straw that overwhelmed the camels. Forced to survive, each killing software will set its sights on software housekeepers, installed assistants, memory optimization and other more segmented areas, and continue the previous cruel competition - taking the Jinshan system as an example, after the launch of the Kingsoft cleaning master (cheetah cleaning master), in 2017, there were nearly 600 million installed users and 60 million daily active users, but soon fell into the siege and interception of similar products such as 360 and Tencent.
At the same time, Kingsoft, who took the free route, made a fatal mistake: the software became more and more "rogue" - always appearing in various installation packages in the form of bundled rogue software, plus a large number of pop-up windows and advertisements, resulting in a decline in product reputation and further loss of users.
In 2018, after downloading "Jinshan Drug Bully", a student of East China University of Political Science and Law was bundled with software such as "Software Butler" and "Cheetah Eye Care Master", and the student believed that these bundled software seriously affected his use of computers for study and work, so he decided to go to court with "Kingsoft Drug Bully". In July 2020, under the mediation presided over by the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court, Jinshan Drug Bully was sentenced to compensate the classmate for 700 yuan.
In this way, Kingsoft has lost most of its competitiveness in the domestic security software market. To this day, if it were not for the mandatory bundle of installation packages, I am afraid that almost no one would download them separately.
The business model of the free route is advertising, and it's the traffic that determines it all. With the fierce competition, almost all the anti-soft is difficult to escape this doubt - because of the advertising pop-up window and bloated software, 360 antivirus is also called "rogue software" by many users, although compared to Kingsoft drug bully, 360 killing effect is relatively good.
"The means are used to the extreme, and in the end, some antivirus software is more terrible than the virus." Li Guan admitted that in order to seek greater benefits, the antivirus software itself has also undergone qualitative changes, bundling and installing software, tampering with the user's home page, searching the page, and even retrieving the browser, etc., are some antivirus software companies in the traffic competition, hijacking users common means.
For the soft killing industry, these means are undoubtedly exhausting. For example, 360, which started with antivirus software, the stock price on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013 went all the way up to $94, which belongs to the same echelon as Ali and Tencent; after returning to A-shares in 2018, the highest market value was as high as 440 billion yuan, but after many years of continuous stock price decline, after a number of major shareholders reduced their holdings, the stock price has now fallen to less than 12 yuan, and the total market value is less than 85 billion yuan. From all aspects, Zhou Hongyi could not even see Lei Jun's back.
The reason is that whether it is on the PC or mobile end, users gradually no longer need antivirus software - compared with social, short video and other platforms, antivirus software has long ceased to be the largest traffic entrance, in addition to the strong sense of existence of 360, Tencent Butler, Kingsoft, Rising and other domestic and foreign players, by the tide of the times forgotten is expected.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > third, the bowl of government and enterprise security is not delicious</h1>
In fact, Fu Sheng also admitted that the biggest problem encountered by Cheetah is that tools and security, as an independent category, have slowly become narrower and narrower in the era of mobile Internet.
This means that from the C-end point of view, although the soft killing industry has not completely disappeared, but want to let users stay more, returning to the mainstream vision is almost impossible to achieve the task, the PC Internet era has triggered many war of words, innovation and subversion of the personal killing soft industry, will soon become a thing of the past.
After the C-end market is gradually forgotten, the security markets such as To B, To G enterprises, and governments are placed high hopes on security vendors - with the construction of 5G and the Internet of Things, the promotion of the industrial Internet, from the country to enterprises, more and more attention is paid to the significance of network security, and more attention is paid to the sustainability of network security services.
The change is obvious. In May 2021, the Colonial Pipeline in the United States suffered a cyber attack by the hacking group DarkSide, which encrypted the company's computer systems and stole confidential documents. To this end, Colonier paid a "ransom" of $5 million to unlock it.
Shortly thereafter, a subsidiary of Japanese tech giant Toshiba publicly admitted to being attacked by the "DarkSide" ransomware, which stole more than 740gb of data, including passport scans and other personal information. CNA Financial Corp., one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, was also forced to pay a ransom of $40 million to regain control of its network after a ransomware attack.
According to the "IDC Global Enterprise Endpoint Security Forecast, 2018-2022" report data shows that in 2017, the global enterprise terminal security market reached $6.146 billion, and will exceed $9.2 billion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.6%.
However, unlike the C-end personal antivirus market, the enterprise, government and enterprise security market mainly focuses on information and data protection in big data security, cloud security, Internet of Things security, industrial Internet security and other market segments, with low concentration and scattered competition pattern.
ACCORDING TOID CONSULTING RESEARCH REPORT, the total market share of the top five network security vendors in 2018 was about 21.9%, and the market share of single manufacturers such as 360, Qianxin, and Tencent Security did not exceed 10%. It can be seen that even the head player is difficult to reproduce the brilliance of market share concentration in the PC era.
In 2018, Zhou Hongyi reorganized the government and enterprise security group, and in August 2020, Zhou Hongyi announced that 360 has entered the era of "government and enterprise security". Relevant information shows that in the past few years, 360 has carried out network security cooperation with some large banks and small and medium-sized enterprises, and cooperated with more than a dozen cities to build city-level network security operation centers and infrastructure.
The interesting thing about fate is that after going around, Zhou Hongyi's main "hand-to-hand" opponent is still an old acquaintance - in the government and enterprise security market, its main opponent is Qianxin, who parted ways from 360.
Qi Xiangdong and Zhou Hongyi, the founders of Qianxin, were originally "good brothers" who had carried guns and fought together, and it was precisely under the joint efforts of the two that 360 was able to "be invincible" in the killing soft market, beating Rising, Jiangmin, Jinshan Poison, Kaspersky, Symantec and other domestic and foreign players to the ground to find teeth. But later, under the calculation of their respective interests, the "good brothers" pointed their needles at Mai Mang and repeatedly declared war publicly.
Perhaps the news that makes Zhou Hongyi feel backstabbed is that in January this year, Qianxin officially announced a strategic partnership with Tencent Security - as we all know, Tencent, which has turned into an industrial Internet, is also Zhou Hongyi's "most familiar enemy" and is also deeply optimizing the government and enterprise security market. In the Q3 quarter of 2020, the enterprise-level security business also became a new growth point for Tencent's quarterly earnings report.
In addition, in addition to the two major competitors of Qianxin and Tencent, there are also giants such as Hikvision, AsiaInfo, Huawei, and Ali. Zhou Hongyi wants to repeat the story of the invincibility of the original killing soft market, and it is almost impossible.
In fact, although the potential of the government and enterprise security market is large, this bowl of rice is not delicious. In the first half of 2021, the revenue of 360 government and enterprise security business was only 912 million yuan, and the revenue of Qianxin, which had suffered huge losses for many years, was slightly higher than 1.455 billion yuan in the first half of the year, which was difficult to bear the main responsibility of the company's revenue.
It is worth mentioning that Kingsoft, which claims to have released a free enterprise version of antivirus software in 2012, has disappeared in the list of major security vendors such as To B and To G, and from the search results, there has been no news or news in recent years.
It can be seen that the Kingsoft drug bully, who is surviving in the C-end market, has not entered the government and enterprise security market. However, this time, there will be no Lei Jun standing up on the cliff to restrain the horse - Lei Jun is striving to make Xiaomi mobile phone the world's first, as well as re-injecting the smart car market, and has no time to take care of the chess piece that Kingsoft Poison Bully can be abandoned long ago.
From the perspective of future layout, 360 has left Jinshan Poison Bully far behind. So, what happened to the Jinshan poison bully who returned to people's attention in the wrong way?
Author: Liu Shanshan, Editor: Yang Ming
This article was originally published by @Pole Business and everyone is a product manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash and is based on the CC0 protocol