Chapter 62 Two horses fight two horses duel

"Our original intention is absolutely good." Ma Yun, who had been thinking for a long time, told the media.At 1 a.m. on May 29, on the Taobao forum, Jack Ma published a post "Ma Yun: Talk about Embracing Change" with the ID "Feng Qingyang", explaining the "market strike incident" and sincerely apologized to netizens twice, claiming that Taobao There are problems in communication with sellers, such as deleting aggressive posts, not explaining well when launching products, etc.As an iconic figure in China's e-commerce field, Ma Yun was annoyed by the unfavorable start of "recruiting wealth and wealth".But at this time, a strange post appeared.

On May 30, 2006, on the www.donews.com website of Beijing Thousand Oaks Internet Technology Development Co., Ltd., an anonymous article "So the voices scolding Taobao were planned by Tencent" appeared. The article claimed that the public relations between Tencent and Deshengjia The company signed the "Tencent Network Forum Public Relations Agency Agreement". In this so-called "agreement", the parties who signed the contract have planned the details of the event quite "in place", and even the name, address and telephone number of the public relations company are quite detailed.It is written in the general rules: Party A authorizes Party B to act as the agency of Party A’s forum public relations communication, to write articles in Taobao, Donews, Tianya, Techweb and other online forums, mainly focusing on Taobao’s forced fees, strong opposition from users, and Taobao’s non-compliance Promises and more.As a result, the authenticity of the contract became the focus of online controversy, and Jack Ma also expressed deep doubts about the authenticity of the "agreement".He previously told the media, "Obviously, there are opponents behind this."

According to Ma Yun himself, since the launch of "Zhaocaijinbao", he has spent every day on the Taobao forum to secretly understand the opinions of sellers. Although there are more than 6,000 sellers who have signed online, the information Ma Yun has shows, Most of the signatures come from duplicate IP addresses, that is, the same person has registered several names to sign online, and most of them are from Shanghai and Shenzhen, where the headquarters of Taobao’s two competitors, eBay and Paipai, happen to be. Not long after, an anonymous article titled "Investigation: Do you believe that Ma Huateng hired "cyber thugs" to attack Taobao?" appeared again on www.donews.com.These two articles were directly linked in the "Writing Community" column on the homepage of the www.donews.com website, and they were pinned to the top, causing many netizens to post comments.After this article appeared, Tencent immediately sent a lawyer's letter to Thousand Oaks, requesting that the above two anonymous articles be deleted immediately. The administrator of the www.donews.com website then lifted the pinning of the two articles in the "rumor", but they have not been completely deleted.

In this incident, Tencent, Taobao and the public relations companies involved seem to have staged Infernal Affairs to the public.The attitudes of several parties are very clear, accusing each other of playing tricks. Tencent's statement mainly includes two points: First, the above-mentioned forum article that Tencent Paipai.com cooperated with a third-party company to plan to attack Taobao is pure rumor, and the business contract cited in the article is also full of loopholes and is pure forgery.The behavior of the anonymous attack also just proves the fact that the rumormongers are guilty and dare not confront the truth; secondly, the incident has already caused great damage to the image of Tencent and Paipai. Shocked and surprised! Tencent's legal department has completed the preservation of relevant evidence, and Paipai.com will use legal means to defend its rights and interests.

And Taobao also said that it is very regrettable to see that some companies use extremely bad means to deceive and mislead many online shopping users and disrupt the market order.Taobao said that although there was no first-hand evidence of the authenticity of the so-called contract, it implied that Tencent was indeed attacking Taobao.At the same time, the relevant personnel of Desheng Jiahui, a third-party public relations company involved in the post, also stated that they are just the daily public relations agents of Paipai.com, and it is impossible to attack competitors, and the contract is forged.The Internet farce triggered by "recruiting wealth and treasure" ended with Ma Yun's step-by-step compromise.

Due to fierce opposition from users, Taobao.com revised the relevant rules for recruiting wealth and treasures on the afternoon of May 26, 2006, announcing that the upper limit of recommendation fees would be lowered from 100 yuan to 50 yuan.However, Taobao’s compromise was not bought by many people, and the “strike crisis” intensified, forcing Ma Yun to tackle the problem himself, so the post published by Ma Yun as “Feng Qingyang” appeared on May 29. In the face of fierce protests from Taobao users and Paipai.com's "looting", on the evening of May 31, Taobao announced that from June 1st to June 10th, it would solicit opinions and suggestions from netizens and invite a notary office to conduct notarization , Taobao users vote to decide whether to continue this activity.After the start of the referendum on June 1, more than 90,000 people participated in the vote in just half a day.Judging from the results of the day, 38% chose "Continuously improve Zhaocaijinbao, keep Zhaocaijinbao", and 62% chose "Currently not fully suitable for Taobao, cancel Zhaocaijinbao".

At 12:00 on June 10th, under the supervision of Zhejiang Dongfang Notary Office, the 10-day Internet referendum officially ended. The result was 127,872 votes in favor of cancellation, accounting for 61% of the voters. On the afternoon of June 10, Taobao announced that it would officially stop the service of recruiting wealth and treasure at around 12:00 on June 12, 2006.In addition, all "Zhaocaijinbao" service fees incurred during this period will be fully refunded to the seller before 24:00 on June 21. So far, this farce of "recruiting wealth and wealth" has ended in a referendum. "Zhaocaijinbao", which was evaluated by industry insiders as the most innovative product of the year, died in the end, which made Jack Ma feel very sorry. He admitted that it was beyond his expectation that he had received opposition from most members.

Regarding the reasons for the premature death, Jack Ma admitted that firstly, there were problems with the product itself, and secondly, insufficient preparation and poor consideration, coupled with interference from competitors, the launch of Zhaocaijinbao was not timely.This statement is basically consistent with the evaluation of the outside world.In this regard, Jack Ma does not think that stopping the business of “encouraging wealth and wealth” is a failure. On the contrary, he thinks this is his greatest progress. He said that there has never been a compromise in Alibaba. If a project is not acceptable, it must be pushed hard. Today in Taobao, I understand the truth of taking a step back.

Ma Yun laughed at himself and said: "BMW and Mercedes-Benz can both recall their cars, so what is Taobao?" Some people don't pay, the basis for charging is that you really make money for others.Taobao's huge brand value and a large number of loyal users make him very optimistic about the future prospects of charging. But the war between the two horses reached its climax on June 21, 2006.Ma Yun, one of the parties involved, was filled with emotion. He felt that Taobao had endured countless pressures and open and dark arrows in the past year and a half.He told the media about his distress. When Tencent launched the C2C platform Paipai.com, it poached a lot of people from Taobao. He felt that poaching people was very tiring. Internet peer competition should abide by certain rules of the game. It is difficult to just poach people. Be innovative.Now the biggest problem with Tencent Paipai.com is that there is no innovation, and everything is copied.

Faced with a series of accusations by Ma Yun, the conservative Ma Huateng also has his reasons. This kind of talent flow in the Internet industry is normal. There are only two or three people from Tencent E-Commerce from Taobao. All e-commerce is done in this way, everyone's model is the same, and it is impossible to say who copied who.In the short 8-year history of China's e-commerce, similar stories have been repeated again and again: when eBay tried to charge fees, it encountered Taobao, which carried the banner of "free", so sellers rushed to Taobao, and free became the mainstream; now, Taobao Trying to use fees to standardize the market order, and popping up a Paipai.com, Taobao had to go back to the starting point.

"Competition is a game. Ma Huateng used it very well. This is the taste of competition. Competition keeps you on high alert forever." Jack Ma said.With his statement this time, the conflict between Taobao.com and Paipai.com has become completely public. Behind it is the collision between Alibaba and Tencent, the two major Internet forces. Paipai rose to fame as a spoiler.But the competition never seemed to die down. On November 21, 2006, Tencent sent a sternly worded lawyer's letter to Taobao, requiring the latter to take effective measures to delete all pages that sell QQ numbers and Q coins at low prices.Tencent believes that Taobao "sellers" have infringed their copyright and property rights by selling QQ numbers online, while Taobao, which provides a platform for "sellers" to publish information, is considered to constitute a joint infringement.However, Taobao does not think that it is infringing. In the absence of relevant industry regulations and no way to judge right from wrong, a new war of words has been staged.Since then, a large number of articles about the impact of Q coins on the RMB and Tencent's condoning the theft of QQ accounts have appeared in front of the public. On December 31, 2006, an ordinary employee of Tencent was browsing industry news on donews, when suddenly a line of text stretched his pupils—true and false investigation: Taobao’s public relations department cracked down on Q coin email exposure.The employee immediately sent the post to the company's public relations department. Tencent's public relations department found that there were many inaccuracies in the post, but since it was just a forum post, it didn't take it seriously. On January 1, 2007, a newspaper in Shanghai published an article exactly the same as this post. This article was titled "Q coin theft caused by the Q coin thief, Zhejiang Q coin thief: Q coin is the best thief". A large number of Q coins were stolen, and the lawyers stated that Tencent should be responsible for these incidents. "So, we felt that the matter was more serious, and we communicated with the Shanghai media about this matter, and the other party's answer was 'the report is presented as a special author', that is to say, it is actually an article A soft article (advertisement) released by a certain company.” Song Yang, director of public relations at Tencent, said in an interview. Some people in the industry said that this is obviously someone trying to stir up users’ psychology and lead the public to have a one-sided understanding. Combined with a series of unfavorable remarks against Tencent Q coins and the so-called "virtual currency storm" since November, I believe this post is nothing more than a series of attacks on Taobao. part of it.It is still unclear who is responsible for this matter, whether it is Taobao's plan to directly attack competitors, or Tencent's self-hype to seek sympathy from the industry. Some analysts pointed out that the cause of this incident is the fierce competition between the two parties in the C2C field-if Tencent wins the lawsuit, it will be a major blow to Taobao. Virtual goods transactions account for nearly 20% of Taobao’s share; Not only do we have to continue to suffer economic losses, but we also have to watch competitors use their own things to continue to grow bigger. Compared with other Internet services, the tactic of using war of words to gain a competitive advantage seems to be tried and tested in the C2C field. Zhang Dongwei, a well-known commentator in the IT industry, once wrote that in the war against eBay, Taobao did not hesitate to use a series of war of words, using rumors and speculation to make users distrust eBay and control the C2C market without fighting. A senior publicist who is well versed in this matter said that the war of words between Internet companies generally adopts two tactics: one is to publish the manuscript anonymously, and the public relations department organizes the manuscript first, and then publish it anonymously on some industry forums through gunmen; The other is to spend money to buy a version. You can directly contact the media advertising department or editor through a public relations company, and then publish the attacking article in the form of a soft article, or you can directly contact a familiar reporter. After stuffing the red envelope, explain your intention, and the reporter will Will take the initiative to deal with it. A common feature of these tactics is concealment, which is unknown to anyone except the operator.Because of this feature of the war of words, it has now become the first choice for some companies to irresponsibly attack their opponents, and to some extent has brought shock to the entire industry. According to the data in the "Quarterly Monitoring of China's C2C Market in the Fourth Quarter of 2006" released by Analysys International, the scale of China's C2C market in the fourth quarter of 2006 reached 8.27 billion, and the number of users reached 67.36 million, including Taobao, eBay and Paipai. The total turnover of C2C websites accounts for 99% of the total market turnover, which is in the state of one-third of the world.