The biggest difference between Yang Yuanqing and Musk is the product, as well as the user. Yang Yuanqing feels that Musk has too few users, and Musk may feel that Lenovo has no users...
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"You know how many customers I have?" In 2014, The conversation between Yang Yuanqing and Musk at a forum was turned over.
From the excerpted video, most people may not know that Yang Yuanqing asked the host Chen Weihong, not Musk. Moreover, Yang Yuanqing actually highly praised the contribution of Musk and Tesla in the field of electric vehicles, and Yang Yuanqing also stressed in his speech that he believes that Tesla will bring changes to the automotive industry.
In a previous article, "Zhiwu" (WeChat public account: Zhiwu Technology Review) mentioned that the biggest challenge for Suning and Gome to try online is not scale, but users. Compared with Tmall, JD.com, especially the emerging format of Pinduoduo, Gome and Suning have not created value because they have not innovated to provide service models, and there are no users, only buyers.
Musk created users, Yang Yuanqing did not
From a similar perspective, we can understand the meaning behind a chicken-and-duck discussion between Musk and Yang Yuanqing. The users that Yang Yuanqing and Musk talk about are not the same content at all. Lenovo Group's dark sales of 100 million devices and Musk's 30,000 cars are not the same kind of users.
There is a huge difference between functional buyers, users, and true fans, advocates, and real users. Musk's users, Lenovo Group, Gome, suning, may not have at all.
The starting point of Chen Weihong's problem is the "fan economy". When Yang Yuanqing explained the understanding of the fan economy, Chen Weihong smoothly extended the topic to Musk, Tesla has many technology rich fans in Silicon Valley. Chen Weihong took it for granted that musk was praised.
"Elon took the fan economy you mentioned to the extreme, all these people willingly bought his car, and he was once again sure that he didn't fool them into buying, and paid for it and gave the celebrity endorsement for free."
The problem lies in Chen Weihong's deliberate display of humor and the "flickering" of creating an atmosphere. Yang Yuanqing mistakenly believes that Chen Weihong has opposed Musk's Model of not advertising and relying on fans to buy Tesla and Lenovo Group's large-scale advertising and marketing model.
Yang Yuanqing broke away from the topic and fought back with his dominant position. People familiar with Yang Yuanqing know that this is his consistent style. Yang Yuanqing asked Chen Weihong, how many customers he has now, how many customers do I have, do you know?
A discussion of patterns turned into a battle of wills.
Back in 2014, both were fairly successful CEOs with decent growth. For the full year of 2014, Tesla sold more than $700 million and sold only 35,000 cars for the full year, an increase of more than 145% compared to the previous year. Yang Yuanqing's Lenovo Group has sales of about 35 billion US dollars, an increase of nearly 30%, and PC sales of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The problem is that the users Yang Yuanqing and Musk called have never been on the same latitude. Comparing the performance of two companies and two CEOs with today's successes and failures is unfair and meaningless.
In this dialogue, Musk has been talking about the focus of the product itself, including emphasizing that the price of cars in the Chinese market should be the same as Ometchon, why insist on direct sales. Musk's perspective is more like a product manager. And Yang Yuanqing is more like a pure CEO, a company manager.
It's worth noting that Musk mentioned at the time that Tesla is doing something: We're developing software that allows this car to turn it into an extension of you, an extension of your driver, and it predicts what your needs are, and we'll see that when we buy a car this year.
Nowadays, it seems that it should be the use of AI algorithms to do some intelligent attempts. In the automotive sector in 2014, this should be considered quite ahead of its time.
Musk is based on a long-term trend, based on a philosophy of life product creation. Yang Yuanqing's introduction to the yoga series will stay more in flips, functions, appearances, etc. Yang Yuanqing is based on the scale of business users in the eyes of a successful entrepreneur and CEO.
In this sense, Musk may be closer to Jobs-esque, while Yang Yuanqing is more like Jack Welch. There is no distinction between high and low, just that it will be different, especially from a longer period of time.