BAT what other areas can be eaten

The Internet is a very interesting industry, although the competition is sufficient, but in many segments but the unipolar pattern, and even the emergence of a winner-takes-all situation.

This seemingly paradoxical two characteristics, why can appear in an industry at the same time?

The earth demon after careful analysis, found that all can occupy a single pole in a field, are difficult to copy or catch up with competitors have an absolute advantage, such as Tencent's relationship chain of its social products, Baidu's technology in its search business, and now, the application distribution has also shown this trend.

In a word, the most important thing is to have the capital to eat through the industry.

We might as well explore how the Internet's unipolar world is made, and what the mystery is behind those companies that can "take all the winners.

Tencent: instant messaging + social networking, weaving a huge "net"

The first one to talk about is Tencent.

Remember about seven or eight years ago, MSN was in full swing, and became almost exclusive to white-collar workers. "We don't use QQ, we only use MSN" was a phrase that allowed QQers to naturally categorize themselves as under-aged, low-end, low-income, and even low-intelligence.

In just a few years, however, QQ has become the standard for every Chinese person, while Tencent has also extended WeChat, a more imaginative social networking tool, and MSN, at least in the Chinese market, has become synonymous with history.

Instead of saying that MSN lost in product and technology, it would be better to say that MSN lost in the relationship network that Tencent has woven for Chinese people. You can not like QQ, WeChat, but you can not escape this "net".

So in the beginning of Ma Yun to push "to and fro" when, no matter how lofty speech, how deep love and sadness, soil demon on the first time said "no way". In addition, Ali also do not hope to strangers or Tango, social especially instant messaging in the foreseeable quite a long period of time, is still the world of Ma Huateng, unless there is a real sense of revolutionary products.

Baidu: technology and model, pouring an insurmountable wall

Then there's Baidu.

Without realizing it, "Baidu" has become synonymous with search. Although Sogou and 360 also want to make a difference in search in the past few years, but unfortunately, has not been able to enter the core of the search. Whether it is the traditional PC, or the emerging mobile market, Baidu's search has not been surpassed.

In the mobile terminal, Baidu also has a field that has begun to have a "unipolar" temperament - mobile application distribution. In the mobile Internet, application distribution is called "the entrance to control the entrance" by the industry, so it has more strategic significance of the underlying infrastructure. Baidu's business is also inextricably linked to its core strength of "search".

For a long time, application distribution has been based on the "app store" as the most important mode, similar to the "display" of the 1.0 era of portals, when there were few apps, users could easily find the apps they needed in the app store. But today, the app store has become a sea of applications, on the one hand, the user to find looking for applications has become unusually inconvenient; on the other hand, the majority of small and medium-sized developers to develop a long tail of applications, but also be mercilessly drowned out.

The essence of application distribution is to provide users with the content and services they most urgently need in an accurate, immediate, and rapid manner. In this sense, "search" has naturally become the most important weapon in upgrading application distribution from the 1.0 era to the 2.0 era, and in meeting the needs of both supply and demand in the shortest path.

In fact, both 360 and pea pod, also realized this point. But compared to traditional search, mobile search because of the system, platform, network, terminal and other factors, the technical requirements are more stringent, and at the user level, the user's behavior is also more casual, fragmented, the search engine demand is also diversified, personalized, "WYSIWYG",

In the face of a tough market environment, 360 and PeaPod, which have insufficient reserves in the search field, are naturally more than capable of doing so. After all, the search technology is different from the content resources, can be introduced overnight, search technology is needed for years and years of deep plowing accumulation.

On the contrary, Baidu has not only accumulated an absolute technological advantage in the search field for more than a decade, but also broken through the cutting-edge technologies such as natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition, etc., and dug a deep and wide moat for the core business of search.

Based on the accumulation of technology in the big search era, Baidu has done a great job in the vertical field of mobile application search, such as the dual-core distribution model of "app store + mobile search", and the in-app search in the search box of the app store, which are typical of the combination of distribution and search. After the search technology is applied to the distribution, you can more thoroughly understand the user needs, more accurate recommendation, at any time and anywhere to meet the user fragmentation, scene, personalized needs; on the developers, is to make the application more accurate to reach the user, bring the distribution efficiency, to solve the dilemma of the distribution of the middle and long-tailed; Baidu brought, is the distribution of the business of the triumphant song.

August 2013, Baidu 91 application platform average daily distribution of 69 million; six months later, this figure was rewritten as "100 million". If Baidu's own data does not fully explain the problem, it may be worth looking at third-party data. The "2013 Q4 China Mobile Application Distribution Market Monitoring Report" from eWatch Intelligence Center shows that as of last year's Q4, Baidu's distribution platform's market share reached 41.2%.

"100 million + 41.2%" of these two figures, from the absolute value and relative value of the two aspects, has already shown that the field of mobile application distribution, has evolved from the previous "multi-country hegemony" to today's "unipolar pattern", while at the same time, Baidu system distribution platforms have become the most popular. The unipolar pattern, meanwhile, has begun to move towards the direction of "winner-takes-it-all".

From Tencent's instant messaging and social networking, and Baidu's search and application distribution, it seems difficult to summarize the reason why they are able to become a unipolar or even a winner-takes-all ****, if you have to summarize it, that is, in the core competitiveness of the niche area, you must maintain an absolute advantage over competitors. If this methodology is used to measure other areas of the mobile Internet, the next unipolar or winner-take-all area may appear in the vertical areas of intelligent hardware and "media + channel + service". In fact, in these areas, there are some companies are walking on the road to "unipolar".