Chapter 44 Gates' seamless docking dream is stranded tomorrow

In September 2007, the media broke the news that Lianhe Investment had decided to withdraw from MSN China's joint venture company—Shanghai MSN Network Communication Technology Co., Ltd. The main reason was that the business model of the joint venture company with wireless applications as the core failed.And just in June, China Mobile's long-prepared instant messaging service - "Fetion" was officially commercialized. In addition to the short legs of the wireless business, MSN has also received other criticisms: the content of the MSN Chinese website is almost the online version of traditional media, which has not exerted actual influence, and is still far from the first portal of China's white-collar workers.Even so, MSN has gained a good reputation and has a high-quality user group.The high-end and business image it has established has clearly distinguished itself from other instant messaging brands. Many business people have MSN printed on their business cards for an obvious purpose: to facilitate work and communicate with friends.These constitute a strong foundation for challenging QQ in the field of instant messaging.

Correspondingly, how to obtain the recognition of high-end people has become the biggest confusion for Tencent QQ.In order to better expand and realize the online life strategy and change Tencent's brand image, Tencent has continuously upgraded its strategy. Since 2006, Tencent has divided the future IM user groups into office (QQ@Work) and school (QQ@School). ) and family (QQ@Home), among them, TM becomes a module of QQ@Work, mainly covering white-collar office workers, QQ@School covers primary school students aged 6-13, and QQ@Home covers elderly users.Tencent uses a unified QQ brand to "launch three major campaigns against these three user groups in the next few years", and the results are not yet known.As the earliest pioneer and leader of China's instant messaging, Tencent's core brand value of "entertainment" is slowly changing, replaced by the value appeal of "online life". However, its close contact with MSN is still inevitable. The competition between them and the resulting market movements will continue.At an important internal meeting in 2006, the joint CTO Xiong Minghua even played a clip of a documentary about the three major battles in the Liberation War to colleagues attending the meeting.

Nowhere is the situation more acute than in the campaign against office crowds.According to relevant data, there were more than 20 million IM office users in 2005.Tencent's IM share is 47%, with a total of 9.68 million people. MSN accounted for 53%, 10.75 million people.Among them, 95% of the new users of MSN come from the lost users of Tencent QQ. An insider from Tencent revealed that although Tencent QQ is still the most commonly used IM tool and has an absolute dominant market share, about half of the users use multiple IMs and are in a swinging period of low loyalty.Xiong Minghua, who was born in Microsoft, will be in charge of the battle with his old club.But this battle is very difficult for Xiong Minghua. In 2006, MSN and Yahoo realized the interoperability of the instant messaging software of the two service providers.Also in 2006, IBM also launched the latest enterprise instant messaging software. "With QQ occupying an absolute market share of the most commonly used IM, we should take the initiative to prevent MSN from forming a monopoly among high-end users. The core strategy of our market is to focus on new and existing QQ users, rather than trying to integrate existing Some MSN users moved over," Xiong Minghua said.

However, for Tencent, more competition comes from the field of mobile IM.In the mobile IM battlefield where Tencent has not invested its superior forces, companies including China Mobile, China Unicom and PICA have all begun to staking their claim in this market.Tencent QQ's market share remained stable under the first-mover advantage, and China Mobile's Fetion blocked the way. Under such circumstances, Gates' dream of a seamless connection to China's instant messaging market was temporarily stranded.