Chapter 15 Ma Huateng's Three-question Philosophy of Business Thinking

Ma Huateng rarely fails when extending his tentacles to new business lines, which has a lot to do with his business thinking.However, Ma Huateng's three-question philosophy played a very important role in judging the situation and determining whether he should place a bet. One question: Are you good at new fields? Competitors are often interested in profits and capital, but tend to ignore the real needs of customers. With a hazy but predictable understanding of the Internet market, Ma Huateng is extremely focused on Technology development and quality improvement. "He is a dedicated person." Almost all industry partners will use the word "focus" when they mention Ma Huateng.Ma Huateng explained Tencent's focus in this way: "In the beginning, several powerful companies were doing similar things to us, but we were the only company that focused on instant messaging services. Focus allowed us to accumulate technology. Many other companies Developing in the form of outsourcing, instead of doing it yourself, only using the contract to restrict the developer, the user is only in contact with a client software, the workload of this software is actually not large, and it will definitely not work after reaching a certain scale; At around 1,000 it doesn’t work; we’re not like them, we’re doing more work on the back end and it’s harder.”

He believes that Chinese users are very picky. "If you are unstable, you will not be selected. Use whichever is better." Concentration allows Ma Huateng to not be swayed by others, and he can see deeper and farther, which is indeed the case.Before Tencent, no company that did similar things was able to support itself, let alone develop and grow; even if you look at the world, there is no IM operator that hangs its destiny on instant messaging in the early stages of the company's development like Tencent. On one line, no company has reached the step of cooperating with mobile operators like Tencent.

Second question: If you don’t do it, will users lose anything? The experience of being a software engineer has made Ma Huateng understand that the significance of developing software lies in practicality, not the creator’s self-entertainment. To research products from the perspective of users, It is one of the secrets of Ma Huateng's success. Tencent used to do mailboxes in the early days.It didn't take much effort, just two or three people did it. As a result, many people registered to use it, but they came and went quickly, and almost no users stayed.In addition, Ma Huateng also realized that the competition for mailboxes was too fierce at that time, and a lot of money was spent, but there was no profit model, so Tencent's mailbox business was suspended.In 2005, it felt that the time was right. Tencent acquired mature mail technology through the acquisition of Foxmail, and once again stepped into this market.Many things look lively but are complicated to do.Taking online games as an example, Ma Huateng said that many people want to do it, but they can't do it just because they want to.In a virtual world, where tens of thousands of people interact at the same time, there are infinite possibilities.For example, server technology, how to ensure the speed? How to make it smooth? How to carry so many people? All these require a lot of research and accumulation.Therefore, when Ma Huateng was making games at that time, he invested the strongest R&D team into online games in order to lay a solid foundation.Another focus of Ma Huateng is to do things that are easy to see the effect first.Compared with large-scale online games, chess and card games have a history of stable operation for many years.So Tencent started playing chess and cards first, which has a better chance of winning.

Three questions: If you do it, how much competitive advantage can you maintain in this new project? This question played a huge role when Tencent shifted from a paging solution to an instant messaging product-based business model. In the second half of 1999, Tencent became bigger and bigger in the network paging system market. However, it also faced a major choice: on the one hand, the paging industry was declining; Rapid growth.In the early days, QQ existed only as a by-product of the company. Ma Huateng did not fully understand the huge market value contained in QQ. The strategy adopted at that time was "three-pronged approach": continue to consolidate the traditional network paging system brought A lot of profits; focus more on improving QQ functions and developing new versions; looking for venture capital support.Later facts proved that Ma Huateng's decision was correct.

Under the guidance of the three-question philosophy, Ma Huateng has his own business logic every time he launches a new business. In fact, more often it depends on the match between the market and Tencent's own capabilities. In 2001 and 2002, only the wireless value-added service was the largest in the market, and it was very single.Others are cost expenditures, QQ platform, etc. are all costs.At that time, Tencent had to consider what is the next growth point? At that time, Ma Huateng had started Internet value-added applications and membership fees, but the volume was very small.In 2002 and 2003, more people turned their attention to online games, spent more time on online games, and gradually began to give up instant messaging. The business model of online games was also proved to be feasible by the market. Ma Huateng felt threatened At that time, I also saw an opportunity.

In his view, if Tencent does not enter this field, it will be a disaster.As for building a portal, in Ma Huateng's view, the investment of the portal is very large, the hard cost is very clear, and the return is slow.But at that time, in addition to the SP business, it was advertising revenue, which was only two yuan.Moreover, advertising revenue is different from online games. As long as there is investment, there will definitely be income that can be returned. Unlike online games, it may be invested for a long time. After two or three years, a game will come out and go in the wrong direction. Or the planning went astray, and in the end they all disappeared.Therefore, the chance of the game will be relatively large, but as long as the portal does it, it will definitely pay off, just like farming. If you work hard, you will definitely gain something.