UC Yu: "Going Central" is a pseudo proposition

Today's "Going central" has become the hottest word in the internet age. It began a few years ago, when the Web2.0 concept arose, to define new content production patterns. Under the Web2.0, the content of the Internet is no longer produced by professional organizations or people, but by the participation and creation of all netizens, so it has the concept of "going central".

With the rise of mobile Internet, the effect of "going central" seems more obvious. So "going central" has become the key word for mobile Internet, especially when discussing the subversion of mobile Internet to traditional industry. But it seems to me that this is a biased understanding that "going central" is a pseudo proposition. Mobile internet to the traditional industry subversion, more accurate expression should be "personalized."

As democracy does not mean anarchy, "going central" is not an inevitable or ultimate goal. In general business law, scale and branding are irreversible trends. Only the scale can produce advantages, and with the development of scale, products and enterprises will gradually brand. Branding itself is necessarily a constantly centralized, large-scale process, how can "go to the center"? Take the clothing industry as an example, think about, people's demand for clothing more and more personalized, but the production of clothing enterprises are more or less? This rule is universally applicable, including the Internet.

Imagine that big data, cloud computing will cause the back end to become more concentrated, or more dispersed? Therefore, strictly speaking, with the development of mobile Internet, user demand is more and more personalized, to meet user needs of products will be more and more diversified, but from the overall product pattern point of view, there is no "to center", on the contrary, the development trend of technology is more centralized. Large data itself is a concentrated trend, there is no so-called "go to the center", more accurate is the front-end diversification, back-end centralization, the two complement each other.

specifically to the Internet ecology, over the past few years, the mobile Internet has brought user access to diversity. But after diversification, "niche" will tend to two extremes. On the one hand, the end of the application more and more decentralized, user identification, use of the path to shorten, such as in the PC era, the portal to be divided into a level, level two, three channels, and the corresponding mobile Internet, each channel has an independent app, directly meet the different vertical needs. On the other hand, diversification also makes the head application more and more centralized, that is, super app, you will find today's UC browser, micro-letter, Alipay, etc. are absorbing more and more complex user needs.

In this context, medium-sized companies are the most stressed, because their products can no longer return to the tail, can only seek to develop into a super app. But in today's mature market, the chances of getting into the Super app are slim. The situation is not only in China but also in the United States. Super Internet companies constitute an insurmountable peak. After Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, the United States has not been able to spawn a new level of scale in the past few years.

Two years ago, I made a summary of China's entrepreneurial environment, that is, big opportunities to become smaller, small opportunities become bigger. On the one hand, China's internet has said goodbye to the era of outlaws, entrepreneurs want to do the next Tencent, Baidu's chances are basically gone. On the other hand, the investment and mergers of big companies are normalized, and the opportunities for startups to sell to big companies are much greater than they were before.

Specific to the product pattern, several existing large platforms need to build their own ecosystems, they are considering the perfect development of the industrial chain. As a result, large platforms are wary of challengers and collaborators. In this sense, the level of openness of the Giants will become more and more high. And for small entrepreneurial teams, if you can provide enough personalized service, the big platform will even give you the strength to help you grow.

Therefore, entrepreneurs should be from the "personalized" rather than "go to the central" perspective of the development of the industry. Instead of thinking every day how to create a new model to subvert the traditional industry, subversion of the big platform, rather down-to-earth, seize the opportunity to personalized.

Lao Tze in the "moral Sutra" said "Tao One, life two, two born three, Sansheng all things". There are "pager is more" in English. The wisdom of the East and the west. This view also applies to today's Internet ecology.