Forbes: Millet focus users recommend upgrading hardware every week

Lead: Forbes magazine online edition Tuesday titled "How Chinese Millet can achieve apple in a week: Upgrade equipment" (how China's Xiaomi does in a Week What Apple does in a year:update Devic ES) said that Millet is planning to use the development of software to develop hardware, that is, the weekly smartphone hardware upgrades. The move again shows Millet's focus on user advice. The following is the full text: China's hot smartphone maker Millet recently surpassed Apple in the Chinese market. The company wants to develop the software in the form of hardware: continuous upgrades. This is part of the unique operation of Millet, which analyzes users ' feedback on their smartphones, and accepts some advice when producing the next batch of 100,000 handsets. Millet will be in Beijing time every Tuesday noon sale a batch of mobile phones. Hugo Barra, the former product owner of Google, joined Millet this August and is likely to help millet develop the international market. "Every batch of handsets will be better," he says. "Barak participated in the Gmic Mobile industry conference in San Francisco in Tuesday, and Millet founder Lei also attended the conference. At Moscone Center, a street away, Apple unveiled its new ipad in Tuesday. This is the ipad's first upgrade since November 2012. Mr Barak said that Millet's focus on user feedback was "not much seen in this industry", and that millet's product managers typically spent half their time focusing on the company's active user Discussion edition. "A product manager can choose a proposal within a few hours," he says. For the next few hours, the proposal will be placed on the engineer's desk. "If engineers think this is a good idea, then the recommendations will become a reality in the next week's update." "Many of the unique features we develop come from user advice," says Barak. The product comes from the user's idea, not the product manager's idea. Millet calls its end users "rice noodles". Such a crowdsourcing product development strategy is diametrically opposed to Apple's top-down and secretive approach to development, but Millet is still often referred to as the "Chinese Apple." "The goal we want to achieve is very different from that of Apple," says Lei. "Another key difference is cost. "We are trying to develop better products while at the same time making the product price close to manufacturing costs," Lei said. "The Low-cost strategy helped millet gain more than 5% per cent of the Chinese smartphone market, more than 4.8% of Apple's," said the company. In China, the iphone is priced at about 900 dollars, while the cheapest mobile phone price for millet is about $300. Millet's 10 billion dollar valuation has also greatly enhanced Lei's personal wealth. In September this year, millet, which has been established for 3 years, said the company had made a profit, and that this year's handset sales were expected to reach 3 times times the size of last year. In Lei, Barak was the first international person to join millet. And Barak says the last two years at GooglePeriod, he has begun to pay attention to millet. Millet's "quirky" culture may make it harder to find and hire talent when it expands internationally, but the focus on users is the idea of Google's "Don't do Evil" motto. Lei says the millet 100% is compatible with Google's Android system, suggesting he has no plans to develop an independent software platform. Millet developed a customized user interface based on Android. Lei and Barak have not disclosed that millet to open up international business is where the first stop. However, Lei said the company has tried to water the Taiwan market. The market for Millet entry should have an active social media user base as well as a strong electricity quotient infrastructure. While the US is very much in line with such requirements, foreign smartphone makers have found it difficult to compete with Samsung and Apple in the US market, gaining market share and making profits, as long as Nokia and HTC can understand this. "We have not yet decided which market we are going to enter," says Barak. We will focus on end users from the first day. Lei said that in any market, millet and other equipment manufacturers have a very different strategy. Millet will be customized for different markets. If the analogy with big technology companies, Amazon's approach is similar. "We use hardware to develop software platforms and to sell all products through online channels," says Lei. "In the international market, it is no doubt more difficult to iterate over the product every week." However, Millet appears to have decided to go outside China and believes it will challenge Apple and Samsung. (Chu Yue)