Author: Yu Jing
Source: Business People (ID: biz-leaders)
"In the Internet era, I thought I was about to be forgotten, thank you Wang Xuan award did not forget me," in October 2015, the China Computer Society Wang Xuan Award was awarded to Liu Yingjian, chairman of Hanwang Group, at the award ceremony, Liu said. He looked agitated, and the news that followed described it as "it means a lot to him."
It was one of his few public appearances in recent years.
The Chinese Computer Society remembers him because he is the founder of the Laser Illumination System for Chinese Characters in China, and he has also won a national invention patent for inventing the "Online Handwriting Chinese Character Recognition Device".
Relying on these technologies, Liu Yingjian founded the King of Han. And rely on electric paper book products, quickly become a new star in business.
Technological achievements are large and small, some can lead an era, some can create a product, some may become a knot, and some may be wrapped in more powerful forces.
Time passed, and the King of Han was no more.
In the PC Internet era, Hanwang Technology used to be a star. The mobile internet has changed all that.
one
The first thing that caused trouble for Hanwang was not Amazon's kindle, but Apple's iPad. No wonder Liu Yingjian often regards Jobs as a benchmark, "In the future, not only can he stand shoulder to shoulder with Jobs, but it is also entirely possible to defeat the other side." ”
Liu Yingjian did not beat Jobs, but did beat Apple, or twice.
One occurred in 2009, when Apple's iPhone 4 encountered trademark registration obstacles when it entered China, and although Apple had registered the Chinese "iPhone" trademark in 2002, the scope of registration was limited to "hardware and software" and did not include mobile phones.
Hanwang had registered a similar i-Phone mobile phone trademark before Apple, constituting a legal obstacle to Apple's entry into China, so much so that Apple had to buy the trademark from Hanwang for $3.65 million.
The King of Han won. However, at that time, there was also media speculation about whether Hanwang was suspected of trademark squatting.
As for the reason for registering the trademark, Liu Yingjian said in an interview with a media outlet that in view of the success of Hanwang handwriting technology in mobile phones, electronic dictionaries, PDAs, and PCs, he hopes to expand this technology to telephone sets, at least to manage business cards and send short messages.
He said that at that time, the hardware manufacturers Philips, Siemens, Qiao Xin and BubuGao had shifted their attention to mobile phones, and they agreed that the telephone was no longer necessary for the situation, and Liu Yingjian decided to do it himself, "It was this project that almost made Han Wang lose his money." ”
In his account, the Apple trademark incident was a blessing in disguise.
Another one occurred in 2010, at the launch of two tablet computers of Hanwang, two executives smashed an apple-shaped ice sculpture with a hammer, heralding a declaration of war on Apple. Liu Yingjian joked that Apple's tablet iPad is like "a toy", and Hanwang's TouchPad is the real tablet.
Han Wang smashed the apple, which did not prove whether Han Wang's TouchPad was a real tablet, but Han Wang's electric paper book was gradually defeated by the iPad's attack. The challenge came not only from the iPad, until the time of Hanvon's listing in 2010, more than 80 companies from all over the world had entered the field, and 41 Chinese mainland alone, including Patriot, Newman, Shanda and so on.
Liu Yingjian, who came from a military background, often compared shopping malls to combat sites, and he believed that the field of electric paper books was a "battlefield" where bayonets were popular. To this end, he also summed up the eight-character operational policy: "mine-making," research and development and innovation; "mine-laying," actively declaring patents; "mine protection," encountering obstacles to bypass; and "demining," once stepping on mines, will fight lawsuits, be reasonable, and promote reconciliation.
However, these tactics do not work in the next thing.
The sales of electric paper books have shrunk and profits have declined, but what has pushed Han Wang to the forefront is another thing. In March 2011, 9 executives of Hanwang Technology reduced their holdings at the same time, some people thought that this was the accurate arbitrage of suspected internal transactions, and a shareholder left a message in the stock bar, "The great national entrepreneur Liu Yingjian, in the blink of an eye, became a liar Liu Adou." ”
Investors and shareholders have higher expectations of Hanwang than they have their own requirements, which is different from the original, Liu Yingjian said when reviewing the matter, "In the past, there were many awards and praises, and now, even if you do a good job, some people will give you a whip." ”
The time left for Liu Yingjian to fight was running out. Six years after the Kindle was listed in the United States, in June 2013, Amazon's Kindle Reader officially entered China. Although the entire e-paper book market was generally affected by smartphones at this time, kindle's overall sales increased steadily, thanks to the "terminal + content" profit model they adopted, in order to achieve digital content publishing, kindle has established cooperative relations with nearly 600 Chinese publishing institutions and importers.
This is an advantage that the han king with a technical background does not have. Hanwang mainly relies on selling equipment to make money, more often the product as a gift promotion, although Hanwang tried to build his own book city, but with little effect, the book content is mainly pre-installed political and business classics.
Even at such a moment, Liu Yingjian only admitted that the King of Han had fought a partial defeat. The outside world was once worried about whether Hanwang would give up this business, but the answer given by Liu Yingjian was, "Digital reading represents the future, as long as we persist, there will be good gains, and we will raise the war with war and persist for a long time." ”
So far, Hanwang still has not given up the electric paper book, but compared with the kindle, the Hanwang electric paper book not only has no content advantage, but also has almost no price advantage.
two
Don Quixote came to the countryside and saw thirty or forty windmills in the distance, and he said to his neighbor, "There are more than 30 strange giants over there." I'm going to fight them and beat them to death so that we can get the spoils of war and get rich." Neighbors repeatedly stated that it was a windmill, not a giant.
Some people compare Liu Yingjian to Don Quixote and the windmill as a giant. If we go back to the moment of the birth of technology, we may find that this is a story of success and failure. Being a scientist has made him, but it has also limited him.
Liu Yingjian sold his invention of Chinese character recognition technology to a Taiwanese company and received start-up funds from Han Wang. When he returned with a $100,000 check and a $10,000 cash transaction, several large $100 bills fell to the ground and did not pick them up.
The pride that technology brings to him is overflowing with words, and it also makes him determined to "take a path that no one else has taken at all." In May 1993, Liu Yingjian withdrew from the national "863 Program" and even gave up his upcoming doctorate, just to apply his handwriting skills to business. It's like his style of doing things, confident, and desperate.
In 1998, Hanwang Technology was established, and its name means "the king of Chinese character input".
After the establishment of the company, Hanvon developed from technical authorization to PDA (Pocket Computer). Due to the small PDA keyboard, input has become a bottleneck, handwriting input has quickly become the mainstream configuration, and the hype of concepts such as "Lian pen king" and "Line Grass King" has even become the weight of PDA replacement.
The development momentum of handwriting technology is strong, and mainstream PDAs such as Business Pass, QuickEase, Celebrity, Lenovo, and HaoyiTong have adopted Hanwang's technology. At that time, some companies wanted to buy or cooperate in the development of this technology, but Liu refused, and he hoped to make the technology bigger.
During this period, Han Wang also encountered fierce opponents, for example, the "Hui Pen" developed by Motorola's Lex, Liu Yingjian said that he and the other side fought for three years, and they ended up giving up this product. After several struggles, Hanvon became a provider of handwriting recognition technology for many mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Lenovo and so on.
Such a narrative can not only prove the superiority of Hanwang technology itself, but also show the joy of a warrior after victory, which in turn crowns the sanctity of technology, "a big company like Motorola, they do a wide range of things, and we only focus on handwriting to identify this field, and technically we can do better than them." According to one report, it was this competition that made Liu Yingjian realize the importance of specialization to technology companies.
Hanwang has made products such as stylus, text king, business card pass, etc., most of which are based on the application of handwriting technology. In order to expand it into a wider range of industries, Liu Yingjian launched 43 projects, but most of them failed, "Before 2001, we did a very good job, and then we started to get hot. ”
These projects include the smart phone projects mentioned above, at first, I was skeptical of Liu Yingjian's description in the above article, after all, many people make money by trademark squatting, but, considering his insistence on technology along the way, and adding a lot of truth to his narrative, if it is true that as he said, when the surrounding companies are going to do mobile phones, his behavior of making calls against the trend has added a sad footnote to his life.
three
How much weight does technology have in Liu Yingjian's heart? His upbringing seems to tell us the answer.
As a signal soldier, Liu Yingjian, in order to be admitted to college, "studied day and night", at the age of 25, he caught the last train of the age limit of the college entrance examination and was admitted to the Nanjing Institute of Communication Engineering, which was the second dream in his life, and his dream came true. It was also during his college years that he set a lifelong goal of doing handwritten Chinese character recognition technology.
In 1982, after graduating from university, Liu Yingjian became an assistant engineer in the Communication Department of the General Staff, at that time, he submitted a 20-page research and development report on the "online handwritten Chinese character recognition device" to the Science and Technology Department of the Communications Department of the General Staff, which should have been the work considered by professors and academicians, and unexpectedly obtained approval and support. In 1986, the "online handwritten Chinese character recognition device" came out, and won the national invention patent in one fell swoop, and the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences admitted him as a graduate student.
Thinking of his first dream as a child, winning the Nobel Prize, although this may be the unintentional talk of every ignorant teenager, it may have a different meaning for this person with technical pursuit and desire to win.
Liu Yingjian relied on handwriting technology to earn funds to set up a company, and also developed a series of products, but what really made Hanwang widely known was the electric paper book that did not use any of Hanwang's core technologies. Electronic ink screens rely on Taiwanese manufacturers, channels rely on telecom operators, content depends on publishers, and Hanwang has only completed the assembly work. However, Hanwang later introduced an electric paper book with handwriting function, but, subject to cost, the price was higher than Apple's iPad.
The success of Hanwang's electric paper book is more because Liu Yingjian grasped the time window. At the time, The Forerunner Reader did not succeed as expected, the Kindle was a huge hit, but it was not sold in China, and the Apple iPad was not yet in kind.
After the impact of the e-paper book business, Hanwang launched a foreign language translation product e-classic pen and a shorthand recorder for fragment knowledge scanning, as well as Hanwangyun, which provides four types of technologies: OCR cloud recognition, face cloud recognition, handwriting cloud recognition, and speech cloud recognition, but these businesses have not shown enough profitability, and the trauma caused by the Hanwang electronic paper book business has been difficult to make up.
Hanwang began a transformation, and unlike focusing only on technology, this transformation added new blood and new content. In 2015, Liu Yingjian's son, 23-year-old Liu Qiutong, became the new director and entered the company's board of directors, and almost at the same time, Hanwang Technology and Liu Qiutong jointly initiated the establishment of Hanwang Qichuang, mainly investing in Hanwang Technology's internal innovation projects and entrepreneurial teams.
And Liu Yingjian is still immersed in technology. At the end of last year, at the award ceremony of the China Computer Society's Wang Xuan Award, Liu Yingjian said, "The next outlet, I think, is intelligent hardware and the Internet of Things." Therefore, Han Wang is still immersed in the study of technology, precipitating his own technology, I hope that in the next outlet, you can still see me again."
A new future is taking shape, and as more companies focus on artificial intelligence and big data, whether this high-tech company known as "mastering many core patented technologies" can find the outlet still needs to be a question mark.
In a 2014 interview, the media asked Liu What his dream was, and he said there were many dreams: blue sky dreams, DNA testing, unmanned transport vehicles, colored ink, fiber for weight loss, and, "to achieve entertainment interaction, like shooting, playing games with a projector to entertain yourself at home." ”
shop
What is the position of technology in the development of enterprises? Many economists have raised the question of whether technology is important or the market is important.
This contradiction occurs not only on both sides of a person's entrepreneur and a scientist, but also between a scientist and a capitalist. The telephone was the most far-reaching invention of the 19th century, and the Bell Telephone Company founded by Bell was eventually acquired by the Morgan Group. Bell found himself in the usual dilemma of an inventor-founded business, inventing technology that could only take the company to the scale it could, and that realizing the full potential of the enterprise required a lot of capital.
When describing this event, "One Hundred Years of Mergers and Acquisitions" gives an analysis that inventors are the intellectual source behind business innovation, but in the development of enterprises, the technical school often has its own limitations. They tend to have little interest in efficiency and scale, and entrepreneurs need more integrated capabilities in strategy, investment, commercialization, etc.
Thomas Edison, who invented the electric light, did not escape this "dilemma", "the electric lamp I invented did not bring me profits, but let me fight for 40 years.".
Around the same time, this dilemma also occurred to McCormick, the inventor of the harvester, whose invention led to an agricultural revolution, but the International Harvesting Company he founded was eventually harvested by capital. This contradiction also occurs between scientists and entrepreneurs in a business.
Wozniak was Apple's first chief scientist, he designed the circuit board and related operating software in the Apple II, and it was through his research and development that Jobs founded a rising company. However, people know that without Jobs, this machine can only be displayed in amateur shops.
If the technology can not keep up with the trend, and the technical faction is stuck in the aura of technology and cannot recognize the reality, in the power struggle, they often become passers-by, becoming "once in the game".
For example, Ni Guangnan of Lenovo Group. He invented Lenovo Hanka, successfully solved the problem of Western Chinese, and was described as a landmark product in the history of Lenovo. Because of this invention, Ni Guangnan, like Liu Yingjian, has won the first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award.
Lenovo and Hanwang are both researchers of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to start a business in the sea, different from Liu Yingjian's "technical industry and trade" model, Liu Chuanzhi takes the road of "trade industry and technology", he is better at employing people, management, and "leading the team". Liu Chuanzhi admitted that Lenovo got its name thanks to Ni's scientific research ability, but in the 2004 Lenovo "trade industry technology" and "technology industry and trade" road debate, Liu Chuanzhi still threw down a harsh sentence, "When scientists think about problems, too engineers ... He didn't quite understand what role technology played in the enterprise. ”
Hanka slowly declined, Ni Guangnan, a technical god obsessed with hardware, has shown a narrow side of scientists in the process of "hard Chinese characters shooting soft Chinese characters", Chi Universe said in the book "Lenovo Bureau", "When the hard Chinese character system goes from its peak to decline and its research has no major results, the technical authority as the chief engineer can imagine the fear, confusion, frustration and anger in his heart." ”
Liu Yingjian, who is both a scientist and an entrepreneur, shows more of a technical side.
At the beginning of the establishment of Lenovo, there was neither funds nor a good mechanism, the only thing that could be played was the high-tech card, Liu Yingjian's brother Liu Chuanzhi said, "High-tech companies must have a technical image, so we insist on establishing Lao Ni as a propaganda image." ”