The ecological view of mobile Internet

To mobile internet entrepreneurs:

Xu Xiwei on October 20, 2014

We are experiencing a third industrial revolution based on computers and the Internet: the Information technology revolution. The mobile internet is bringing the information revolution to a new climax. Today, more than half of the people in China have access to the Internet, and most of them have one or more smartphones. Anytime can touch the network, will inevitably change people food and clothing live, affect all aspects of life. As an entrepreneur, you don't have to imagine new needs. Demand comes from your understanding of life. All grievances and complaints are your opportunities. Changes in human needs are very slow. Change is usually the way to meet demand. The fundamental reason for technology to promote industrial change is that the old way of meeting demand is outdated. To solve the problems that your most familiar group encounters, this can be a starting point for a viable startup.

Today, all industries face the crossroads of change. The supply and demand relationship has changed subtly. In most cases, you will find that there are so many commodity categories that meet the same needs. The homogeneity of the product is very serious. Competition tends to be white-hot. This marks the end of the era of industrialized production. Service-oriented economy, personalized economy has come. Clients need to be served like God, and requirements are further subdivided to be better met. And the Internet is a tool that makes it possible for you to provide quality service (and perhaps even a very personalized service) to a huge customer.

Information technology is not the same as it is today that affects people's lives. It was naïve at first, like all changes. Like a house bulky mainframe, pure text version of the network game--mud, these things in the eyes of today it is difficult to understand that they exist. The infancy of the Internet is an independent industry (today we are also accustomed to say so), to meet people's entertainment and office needs as the main direction. The internet economy of this period we call "fictitious economy", it and real economy is a parallel line, both sides impinging. But the Internet ten years, formed today's BAT three giants, virtual economy ecological environment basically establishes. The opportunities for mobile internet entrepreneurship mainly come from "the Internet to transform the real economy, the real economy of various industries to produce subversive changes." 10 years later there will be no more traditional companies and internet companies. All businesses will be internet companies. The internet is no longer an independent industry, but an infrastructure of the whole society like electricity. Today all industries are facing new opportunities brought about by mobile Internet. Change is not necessarily born, but not change must die.

As the internet moves from a virtual economy to a real economy, today's competitive landscape becomes very complex. New kingdoms are on the way. Which three countries? A country for the "internet giant", the advantage is the use of Internet Tools adept, but because to enter new areas, understanding of the business needs to digest. A country for "traditional giants", the advantage is that there are both customers, skilled business, but as a representative of the subversive, its disadvantage is also proficient in business, there may be thinking inertia. The last country for "emerging entrepreneurs", it is the advantage of fast action, there are ideas, but the defect is also more obvious, the volume is too small, and the previous two contests, so that people do not consciously have "ants shake elephants" sense.

This is the best of times. An unprecedented opportunity for all industries to shuffle at the same time. There are so many opportunities for entrepreneurship. This is also the worst of times. Competition has never been more brutal. The homogeneity of the product is so serious. The user was so demanding that he left without a little satisfaction. Entrepreneurs do look very, very weak compared to Giants. It is no wonder that some investors are worried that the mobile internet is not a "big opportunity", it seems that the Giants have occupied all important positions. But contrary to people's intuition, statistics show that monopolies in the industry are becoming more and more frequent, and that the dominant cycle of big companies is getting shorter. It's not easy to build a century-old enterprise today.

The separation of the internet giants, traditional industry giants and new entrepreneurs has spawned an emerging industry--an entrepreneurial support industry, or an enterprise service industry. Why so many VC today, so many funds? Why are there so many incubators today? Why is the mobile internet era, but also the era of cloud computing? Without it, these are entrepreneurial support industries (Enterprise Services). From the social sense, the maturity of the enterprise support industry determines the social innovation ability, also determines whether the country is rich and powerful. In this perspective, the government should be the biggest driver of the entrepreneurial support industry. The competition pattern of the Three Kingdoms separation will make the pioneering support industry develop unprecedentedly. And the prosperity of entrepreneurial support industry, in turn, will enhance the competitiveness of emerging entrepreneurs, improve the success rate of entrepreneurship.

The new kingdoms are not only the competition of products and services, but also a talent war. In the past only an emerging industry called the internet industry needs IT technical personnel. But now all industries need the Internet, they need IT technicians. Today, the balance between the supply and demand of talent is extremely unbalanced. The status quo is that internet giants hoard talent, traditional giants dig horns from internet giants, and startups have unprecedented difficulties. Of course, difficulties are often accompanied by great opportunities. The talent war will change a lot of things.

One opportunity is the training and education industry of it technicians. In order to solve the balance imbalance, we need to generate more IT technical personnel. Basic IT skills training, targeted IT staff (specific jobs in specific industries) training has a potential market.

The second opportunity is the headhunting industry. In the past, headhunters provided high-end talent to the internet giants. But the bigger market today may be to provide a common talent (or even an intern) for many entrepreneurs. Of course, the premise is that headhunters need to change the traditional mode of work, can be very good to build a bridge between talent and enterprise, and enhance the enterprise to find the right talent efficiency (time efficiency and cost).

The third opportunity is remote collaboration. I believe that most of the team today is still very unfamiliar with remote office, even there will be a great conflict. But today, remote collaboration has the technology to implement, the need to break the team's existing habits, as well as the search for better remote collaboration tools. Once you accept telecommuting, companies open a door, not just local hiring, we can find the right people in any part of the world. The benefits to enterprises will be very significant. So telecommuting will be an unstoppable trend.

The four opportunities are outsourcing service. In the past, people's understanding of outsourcing is technology outsourcing, which is to outsource a child business module to an external team. Technology outsourcing has a lot of hidden costs (you have to take over the outsourced module and maintain it), and has a very high failure rate. Open source is the second stage of outsourcing development-crowdsourcing. Open source still belongs to technology outsourcing, but it is not outsourced to a team, but to the entire developer community. The form of open source determines that it is better suited for infrastructure outsourcing. The more pervasive the need for open source projects, the greater the likelihood of attention and the higher the likelihood of success. But open source still belongs to technology outsourcing, because of the problems and consequences of using open source projects, you need to bear them. Cloud computing, similar to open source, is an infrastructure outsourcing, but a revolutionary change from a outsourcing perspective: shifting from technology outsourcing to outsourcing. Service outsourcing is responsible for the results, which significantly improve the operational efficiency of the enterprise. But I think cloud computing is only the first phase of service outsourcing, the next step will be the service outsourcing business. Business service outsourcing refers to the separation of the technical operators of the business (including the development of business code and the technical operation of the service) and the business operators (that is, pull customers and customer relationship maintenance). A typical case is the website that sells tickets. Not all of the site to buy tickets to develop their own ticket website, they can share the same service provider to provide the business system, just adjust the appearance of the site, the configuration of the Enterprise bank account, the company can carry out business, the external sale of air tickets. The result of business service is that the two or three-line enterprise will share the technicians, it fundamentally solves the contradiction of the shortage of it technicians.

How long will the process of mobile Internet continue? There was a view that mobile Internet would repeat the process of PC Internet, but would accelerate the process of evolution. But today it is clear that the two are fundamentally different. Mobile Internet is not the root of the mobile phone Subversion pc, but the Internet subversion of traditional economies. I personally think that this is a protracted war of the two kingdoms, at least for more than 10 years. Never before have so many industries faced the challenge of an unprecedented and difficult opportunity. No subversion can be done in a short time, and the evolutionary process will be explored in the complex interests of all parties.