Chapter 42 Gates seamless docking dream stranded confrontation

On May 26, 2005, Microsoft and Shanghai Lianhe Investment Co., Ltd., which is affiliated to the Shanghai Municipal Government, jointly established a joint venture company-Shanghai Messen Network Communication Technology Co., Ltd., with each party holding 50% of the shares. MSN officially entered the Chinese market and began to challenge Tencent. Luo Chuan's new title is the general manager of Shanghai MSN Network Communication Technology Co., Ltd. The cooperation method chosen by MSN is actually the operation qualification of ICP.In Luo Chuan's view, this method is not unique to MSN in China, and other countries and regions such as the United Kingdom and Japan have also had similar models.On this day, Luo Chuan, who had been the general manager of the Greater China region of Microsoft's MSN division for three years, became the focus of media and public attention overnight. "Three years is a long time, but it is also these three years that allow us to calm down, learn from the experience of other colleagues, and think about what we should do." Luo Chuan said.

Luo Chuan's MSN China New Deal, which has been brewing for three years, has also unveiled its mysterious veil. On June 2, 2005, 9 partners of MSN including Taobao.com, Dongfang Broadband Communication, CCID.com, SAIC Renlaiche.com, Englishtown, Lianzhong World, Zhiyun Times and Beiqing.com made their debut on the stage.They respectively provide content to different channels of MSN website, including finance, news, community, shopping, digital, automobile, game, wireless and English teaching, etc., which are the most profitable businesses on the Internet. MSN's challenge strategy is very obvious: multi-field, all-round penetration, comprehensively grab the market, and compete with Tencent QQ.In order to become MSN's partners, many content service providers in China even adopted the method of bidding. It is said that the franchise fee of each website reached more than 10 million yuan in the end.In terms of future profit sharing, it is said that Microsoft will share 50% with these partners.

This cooperation, which initially seemed to be a happy one, kicked off.Sun Tongyu, who was the executive general manager of Taobao at the time, introduced the benefit sharing method of cooperation with MSN in this way: the expenses incurred by customers on Taobao shopping and advertising on MSN belong to MSN, and what Taobao wants is the contribution from MSN website. flow.When cooperating with MSN, the traffic of Taobao has reached 70 million. Sun Tongyu hopes that after cooperating with MSN, the traffic of Taobao will reach 100 million by the end of the year.The cooperation between Taobao and MSN is exclusive, and Taobao has a special method to monitor the traffic coming from MSN.

Prior to this, MSN was positioned as an instant messaging tool for business people, and entertainment has always been the "sphere of influence" of Tencent.And now MSN is embarking on a road of market expansion combining business and entertainment.Luo Mike, vice president of global marketing and sales of Microsoft MSN, said at the press conference at the time that China is the most active country in the global Internet economy. MSN already has a wide range of high-end user groups in China, with about 7.1 million active users.With the innovative products and services launched together with partners, MSN will surely win the support and trust of a wider range of users. The official launch of MSN business in China is a milestone in MSN's long-term strategy.At the press conference, Luo Mike's self-confidence was clearly written on his face.

However, Luo Chuan was not careless, nor did he forget the lessons learned from the past. The FM365 website launched by AOL and Lenovo in a high-profile way was still a failure after the hustle and bustle.This case shocked Microsoft very much. Considering the series of dismal cases of global Internet giants after entering China, Microsoft has been hesitating at the door of China.In addition, the Chinese government strictly supervises the value-added services of media and telecommunications, and Microsoft has no idea whether MSN can make a big difference.The proportion of China Mobile's value-added services is far greater than that of online services, so MSN has many concerns.

The challenges MSN once faced may also be the reason why other foreign portals are not acclimatized in the Chinese market.Yahoo bought the ICP license from Founder back then and operated the content independently. However, Yahoo China seems to have not yet fully entered the state, and its development momentum is far less strong than that of Yahoo in the United States. The FM365 portal launched by AOL and Lenovo in a high-profile way now seems to be more of a wonderful idea. In an era where information is overloaded and content is king, AOL imagined the Chinese market too naively. From this point of view, MSN, which is playing the "cooperation" brand this time, seems to be more mellow and sophisticated in its way of entering China. For a long time, Microsoft has always pursued the principle of either not doing it or doing it to the extreme. MSN leveraged its strength this time to work closely with local content providers. According to media reports, before that, Luo Chuan spent a year convincing Microsoft's top management to accept this strategy of cooperating with local manufacturers.

One detail is that as early as two years ago, on March 25, 2003, Microsoft announced that it would give up its goal of catching up with AOL and becoming the largest online service provider, and formulated the latest strategy to make MSN an online portal.It was also from 2003 that Microsoft's MSN business became profitable, but this was far from Gates' goal.Analysts in the industry point out that just like Windows is the horizontal basic value layer of Microsoft, MSN will also become the vertical framework and chain running through Microsoft's future business.To some extent, this also reflects the significance of MSN to Microsoft.

Just when MSN changed its usual low-key and prudent attitude, "avoiding its edge" was the keynote set by Tencent CEO Ma Huateng to compete with MSN. He believed that Tencent should try its best to take a path of differentiation from MSN, rather than tit-for-tat with MSN to compete. "Recently, Microsoft has officially entered the domestic value-added service market. Microsoft is a respected and very powerful competitor, and we must face up to its competitiveness very, very seriously." This is an internal email of Ma Huateng in 2005 A reminder to colleagues. On March 11, 2005, Tencent officially announced the acquisition of Foxmail, bringing the entire team headed by Zhang Xiaolong under its command. Since Foxmail1.0 was released in 1997, it has spread rapidly at home and abroad.On the Internet, Foxmail is the only e-mail processing software that can be compared with Microsoft Outlook so far. "We are interested in Foxmail's technology and customers." Tencent CEO Ma Huateng told reporters the purpose of the acquisition.He said that compared with Microsoft, Yahoo, Sina, etc., there is a gap in QQ's mailbox technology. After the acquisition of Foxmail, Tencent QQ can be greatly improved.Mailbox technology is a major focus of competition among major portals. As the only software that can compete with Microsoft and Yahoo's E-mail systems, Foxmail does have its own unique features.

Liu Ren, founder of the DoNews community, believes that Tencent’s acquisition of Foxmail is comparable to Microsoft’s acquisition of Hotmail. Hotmail is one of the free email providers. The platform gradually transitioned to run entirely on the Windows platform, and then merged with other Microsoft services to form an integral part of MSN.And Microsoft's MSN is the rival of Tencent QQ.However, when talking about whether to use Foxmail to fight against Hotmail, Ma Huateng wrote lightly: "It is not possible to use this to fight against Microsoft." But he said that Tencent is very concerned about the 5 million users Foxmail currently has, because these are all More high-end business users.

In fact, as an industry leader, Tencent QQ must use self-challenge and a strong defense strategy to prevent the challenger MSN from occupying the leading position with its high-end user advantages.Tencent QQ enterprise-level IM and mailboxes are relatively weak. This acquisition is an attempt by Tencent to expand its product line and develop new markets. The second half of 2005 can be regarded as an eventful year for the IM market.Accompanied by the steady pace of the domestic IM (instant messaging) market soaring all the way, after Tencent took the lead and successfully listed in Hong Kong, many followers rushed to it regardless of their own safety.Although the development of MSN in China is unstoppable, it has overtaken Netease Bubbles in less than two years after landing in China, and became the runner-up in one fell swoop, but compared with the more powerful portal content websites owned by the former, MSN still appears It is much thinner, which is also the final reason why the industry believes that MSN is difficult to shake the dominance of Tencent QQ in a short period of time.

As far as the current actual situation is concerned, whether it is the IM market or the content website, Tencent has an absolute advantage. Although MSN has won the second place in the field of instant messaging, it is still far behind Tencent QQ Astronomical Number of registered users.In Ma Huateng's view, "Currently, the IM competition is not only a competition among instant messaging software, but also a contest of comprehensive strength." In response to MSN's extensive alliance strategy, Tencent's plan to block MSN has been fully launched.On the one hand, Tencent made comprehensive adjustments to the website layout, and on the other hand, it began to look for its own strategic allies in the professional field.First of all, Tencent threw the red hydrangea to the upstart IT professional website in China - IT World Network. On August 18, 2005, Tencent.com and IT World.com held a press conference on strategic cooperation in Beijing, announcing that the two would carry out in-depth cooperation, including news, evaluation, shopping guide, market and other aspects, and jointly create "2005 China The IT evaluation with the highest participation of netizens".This is the "prelude" to Tencent's response to MSN's undeclared war with nine alliances.A senior person in the Internet pointed out: ITWorld.com and Tencent.com have similar characteristics, both are representatives of cutting-edge forces in their respective fields, and have a large room for development. The cooperation between the two parties is relatively easy to produce a tacit understanding.At this time, Ma Huateng paid more attention to and repeatedly emphasized the "depth of cooperation".This is exactly the opposite of the breadth pursued by Microsoft's extensive alliance policy, which is quite similar to the warring states era. Under Ma Huateng's strategizing, a bigger counterattack is brewing.As the competition continues to escalate, Tencent's instant messaging tool has finally taken an important step in its openness.The Tencent Messenger 2006 Spring Edition launched by Tencent has already supported the opening and login of other E-mail accounts.In the previous version, you can only open and log in through QQ number, mobile phone number and QQ mailbox.As a result, Tencent TM will start a hand-to-hand combat with MSN. And Ma Huateng has also seen such a reality: MSN's service method without registration threshold has indeed attracted many users, and its nature that it is not easy to be harassed by strangers has been favored by business people.The E-mail account is more for the convenience of users. Only by providing thoughtful and satisfactory products and services is the best way to retain QQ registered users.