Jia Yueting intends to apply for personal bankruptcy, the business empire falls apart, and although the dream of building a car has not yet been completely shattered, there is little hope.
However, if Jia Yueting is evaluated by the Confucian standards of "meritorious service, moral virtue, and three immortals", he has not left any positive legacy in terms of merit and morality; however, in terms of "making speeches", Jia Yueting has done quite well - the current Internet industry, the automobile industry, and the entrepreneurial community are still using his words and his logic.
Jia Yueting has two major "contributions" in terms of "making speeches".
One I summarized as "the theory of great glory and correctness in entrepreneurship." The greatness of entrepreneurial dreams, shining, glorious and correct, like religious beliefs, beyond reason, does not belong to the category of human rational knowledge, does not require strict argumentation, does not need serious thinking. Typical expressions are "blindfolded" and "suffocating dreams". This kind of propaganda with a little anti-intellectual color, people with a little rationality, know that this is self-deprecation, used to fight chicken blood, and it is not worth refuting. At present, many people are still imitating similar expressions, but they dare not be as radical as Jia Yueting.
The other, which has a wide range of poisons, is the "business ecology theory". Now whether it is doing cars or doing the Internet, even if it is a start-up, it often does not say products, services, or products and services are not enough, we must say ecology. Otherwise, the vision is not broad, and the pattern is not large. In fact, most of these "ecological" business models are deformed "Ponzi schemes", which have no confidence in their own products at all, eating grain and beating drums to spread flowers. As soon as the drums stopped, the song finally dispersed, leaving only the investors messy in the wind.
Why is Jia Yueting's "business ecology theory" wrong?
Modern human knowledge must be called Greece; and most of the contemporary Internet trends can be traced back to Silicon Valley.
The theory of commercial ecology is not Jia Yueting's original. In China, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun should have proposed and practiced earlier. But what was proposed earlier and fully demonstrated should be the god of Silicon Valley, the big bull of Internet thinking, and the founding editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly (known as KK).
In The Runaway, KK explains the implications of creating or rebuilding a natural ecology for humanity.
The process of human history is the process of learning from nature. In the early days, human learning was bionic learning: learning radar from bats and infrared from snakes. Human beings want to play God and also have the power of creation.
Later, human beings' attempt was to learn from nature the logic of ecosystem development, not limited to creation, but to create a system, that is, an ecology.
How do humans learn? The most direct way to learn is ecological restoration. For the ecosystems in a certain area of nature that have disappeared due to human activities and climate change, can humans go against the grain and restore the system?
KK gave many examples of human ecological transformation in "Out of Control".
A classic example of this is a man named David Wingate who tries to restore a suitable environment for the endangered Bermuda round-tailed stork (pronounced hù). Previously, due to the impact of improper development and alien species, the original ecology was destroyed.
Round-tailed grebes inhabit underground nests, but can only build their nests by the gaps between tree roots and the land that are uplifted by the sea breeze. Therefore, Wingate needs to restore the local cedar groves.
The area was originally covered with dense cedar forests, but it was completely destroyed by the introduction of pests. Wingate planted 8,000 cedars, but hurricanes killed them. As a result, Wingate planted an auxiliary species— the fast-growing, non-native evergreen plant casuarina — as a windbreak around the island. Casuarina grew rapidly, allowing the cedar to grow slowly, and after a few years, the more adapted cedar replaced the casuarina.
Another related ecological chain has also appeared: the cedar has brought back the night heron that has not appeared in Bermuda for hundreds of years. "Night herons will devour land crabs. Without night herons, these land crabs would have become harmful species on the island. The number of exploding land crabs has been enjoying the juicy and delicious buds of the wetland plants. Today's dwindling crab population has given the rare Bermuda sedge a chance to grow, and in recent years it has also had the opportunity to seed. ”
KK concludes, "Ecosystems and other functional systems are like empires, easy to destroy, but hard to build. Nature needs time to develop forests or wetlands, because even nature can't do everything at once. The kind of help that Wingate gave did not violate the laws of nature. Nature generally uses temporary scaffolding to accomplish many of its achievements. ”
Here, casuarina, which can withstand the sea breeze, is the "scaffolding", and its independent survival has won time for all subsequent organisms and ecology.
KK further demonstrates how humans create complex functional systems: "Complex machines must be perfected gradually, and often indirectly. Don't expect the entire functional system to be completed in one gorgeous assembly. You have to start by making a working system that serves as a working platform for the system you really want to accomplish. ”
The KK also argues that the results of building an ecosystem and the addition of different species can vary widely. In addition, it is not only necessary for the right species to appear in the right order, but also for the right species to disappear at the right time.
KK quotes Steve Parkard of the Illinois Nature Conservancy as saying, "That's why creating an ecosystem often takes millions of years." ”
To sum up, the establishment of an ecosystem first stems from a "scaffolding", a species that can survive independently, or a working system; secondly, more species or systems are developed based on this, but different species and system sequences may have different results; again, there are species or systems that need to be withdrawn in time; and most critically, this is a long process.
In this way, we correspond to entrepreneurial projects, especially new car projects, if it is to create an ecological model, it is impossible to succeed.
Can a new car project get a "scaffolding", or a system that works?
So far, the best-performing new car builders have sold only 20,000. No car company can rely on this sales to survive independently, let alone feed another species.
Many car companies hope that while selling cars, they will make money on services such as charging, software purchases on the car machine, and travel "big data", which is obviously unrealistic.
For example, the substation built by Weiwei, as a service, is definitely a cost item. It is unimaginable to expect to build replacement power stations for more than 20,000 car owners all over Major Parts of China to make money. One-key power-up is also, which may be the reason why Weilai now hopes to push one-key power-up to the entire industry.
Therefore, a person who truly believes in ecology, in the initial stage, should not talk about ecology, only about species (that is, products) - because it is impossible to start to create an ecology, because there must be reverence for ecology. Today's Apple should be considered a model of business ecology: it makes money on software and hardware, so many people build business models accordingly. But looking back at history, we know that only after the unprecedented success of Apple's iPod, everyone has a huge demand to download and buy music, and there is iTunes; after the success of the iPhone, the demand for smart applications has exploded, and there is an App Store.
FF is also exhibiting mass production engineering vehicles
However, KK's exploration of ecological construction and reconstruction also demonstrates that some organisms are difficult to survive from an ecology; others often die from the competition of other organisms. For example, the young birds of the Bermuda round-tailed stork are easily pecked to death by aggressive tropical birds.
In this way, the more important enlightenment for electric vehicles from the ecological point of view is to find an ecological environment suitable for electric vehicles, rather than creating an ecological environment suitable for electric vehicles.
Therefore, it may be more appropriate to think from the shortcomings of electric vehicles, then the following inferences should be safe:
(1) The place where charging is convenient is appropriate: for the city, it is often the villa area, high-end community, there is its own parking space, the community is relatively new, the capacitance is relatively high; for towns and villages, you can pull the line anywhere to charge, and there is no charging problem.
(2) Scenes that do not require long-distance travel are suitable: the second car used by a family in a big city; the commuter car in the city of individuals in a big city; and the small and medium-sized cities and urban and rural areas with a short travel distance.
(3) Suitable for customers who are not sensitive to car purchase price: men, Tesla, And Nio's prices do not matter; women, MINI and SMART are also suitable. For the micro-electric vehicle market in small and medium-sized cities, towns, and rural areas that I often advocate, although the first two conditions of (1) (2) are met, I would like to correct or emphasize that such a market is more price-sensitive, so the purchase price must be comparable to that of fuel-fired micro-electric vehicles.
These conclusions, without the help of any ecology, seem to be reached by common sense. However, the current mainstream products do not meet the above conditions. It may be that it is easier said than done, and there have been subsidies and capital temptations before, and short-term goals have overshadowed long-term goals. Then, when the short-term effects of subsidy decline have passed and non-policy factors have become more prominent, China's electric vehicle industry may find its own way. (End)