First of all, what you need to know is that "internet plus" and "Internet thinking" are both very popular, but their internal tonality is completely different. Internet thinking is a concept pioneered by Xiaomi 361 and other companies, while internet plus is a government concept. Then, what some people need to know is-please indicate Zhihu and innovation works if you want to reprint it, otherwise the marketing department will come to you.

let me say a digression first. Everyone knows that there are two modes of supervision in various countries. One is our highly centralized system. The other is market freedom, such as the United States. In a country with a free market, you won't see any high-tech industrial policies. But in fact, the United States has not completely let go. Obama said three years ago that it is still being implemented and very successful, that is, creating a backflow. The manufacturing industry in the United States is now desperately returning. As for our national policy, the word "top-level design" means a top-down policy with overall relevance and practical operability and step by step. Top-level design is different from vision. Vision is a very vague word. For example, golden decade in Silicon Valley is very vague, but the top-level design adds the concept of timetable. We now completely skip the layer of electronic equipment manufacturing and vigorously embrace the "Internet". So what is the official definition of internet plus? It is to apply the internet to every level, to transportation, life, logistics, and automobiles. In the end, it is nothing more than moving towards smart life and smart cities.

but the government's promotion is one thing, and the actual effect is another. Just like Shenzhen was not initially positioned as a high-tech industry area, but later a large number of companies such as Tencent and Huawei came out, and now it is the base camp of hardware entrepreneurship, which is on par with Beijing in terms of innovation level, and even exceeds a lot in some fields.

From the microscopic point of view, internet plus's concept is more correct than Internet thinking, but the disadvantage is that there are only directions and slogans, which is completely opposite to the concept of Internet thinking with strategy but no direction.

let's start with internet thinking. Many people think that the internet thinking may be to rush traffic, make a platform or an ecosystem, and then establish a business model. Then, I thought of countless unprofitable Internet products, and then I said that JD.COM burned a lot of money, and Xiaomi didn't make much money at first. Didi distributed coupons wildly, and Alipay gave red envelopes ... A joke invented by a foreigner said this-two brothers drove a truck full of watermelons to sell, and the habit of $5 was quickly sold out. Sold out, counted the money and lost money. The elder brother said to his younger brother, "Look, I told you to drive a bigger truck!" "

the most absurd cognition of internet thinking is that you don't need to think about business model first, and think that it will emerge naturally one day. This attitude is not only passive and one-sided, but also ignores the premise of this possibility-the company has enough money and time. The success of Google and Facebook is entirely a survivor bias. They survived because they appeared in Silicon Valley and in the growth period of Internet explosion. The objective environment allows them to have sufficient resources and undeveloped market, which can be burned until they find a business model. As for JD.COM, I'm afraid I don't need to introduce the number of bodies that accompanied him.

In places with large market and large capital, such as Silicon Valley or Beijing, there is room for survival "regardless of business model". It's like playing Texas, players with more chips should take more risks and keep calling, because maybe the last card will reverse the victory. But if you are not a VC but an entrepreneur, or if you are in a city where venture capital is underdeveloped, then of course you must count the cards. When Uber and Airbnb were born, they didn't have such a vast undeveloped market as Google and Facebook, so they put forward an accurate business model from the first day.

Even if the business model is put forward at the beginning, it may not be able to go to the end, and many of them are proved to be false in the end. Take the well-known group purchase as an example. Simply speaking, its business model is to make use of the characteristics of easy group purchase impulse on the Internet to make some manufacturers willing to sell goods and services at reduced prices. Group buying websites are media, which play a two-handed strategy of "pricing by quantity" for manufacturers and "pricing by quantity" for consumers; If this strategy is to succeed, the biggest factor is that manufacturers and consumers must be able to get profits (manufacturers) and satisfaction (consumers) from it continuously.

let's talk about it from the manufacturer's point of view. Naturally, for them, it is most desirable to sell out all of them, so as not to generate inventory. For the practitioners of the first-line service industry such as catering beauty, group buying is a way to really reduce the idleness of personnel. A more extreme example is the plane. Anyway, the cost of a plane flight is fixed, so it is best not to have idle seats, and so is the movie (in fact, there are always group purchases of planes: travel agencies). For these operators, this extreme impulse approach must meet the following assumptions in order to maximize the benefits: 1. The cost will not increase (that is, the production capacity itself is abundant); 2. The quality of goods/services will not decrease; 3. Will not crowd out the original customers. These three conditions are relatively easy to achieve for those who sell goods, but it is not easy for the service industry to establish these three conditions at the same time.

suppose a restaurant breaks even, but the boss estimates that 25% of its production capacity is still not filled. The staff of the group buying company may convince the operators that if the remaining 25% can be used, even if the price is only half price, it will still make more money than it is now! Therefore, the owner may accept the conditions of group purchase and simply fill the production capacity with meager profits. Unfortunately, although the customer came, it also caused more trouble. First of all, the guests are not able to fill the daily production capacity on average as expected. Usually, I am still very free, and then I suddenly rushed to redeem the group purchase coupons before the expiration date, which didn't achieve the original purpose at all. Then, bad comments began to appear on the Internet, and the main reason was poor service quality. As for why the service quality is poor, the main reason may be that the owner overestimated the limit of the service he can provide from the beginning, and on the other hand, it is related to the uneven time when customers come to the store. Finally, the industry will find that after several times of cooperation with group buying, the business is getting more and more depressed, but it is even less profitable than before, and the profit is even lower.

Of course, group buying websites and customers must have thought about these things, so they will try their best to make reservations for everyone, and they will ask customers to change the time when the seats are full. However, customers tend to spend before the deadline, and if they can't digest the orders with a term of usually three or four months within one or two weeks, there will be a troublesome problem of whether the exchange coupons can delay the deadline. So what if the use date is limited when booking the group purchase coupon? This will greatly reduce consumers' willingness to buy, and it will also cause the problem of whether hot dates or weekends should be priced differently. In a word, it is almost impossible to guide or limit the time for consumers to spend at home, which is also the key to whether the industry is willing to continue to cooperate with group buying. Therefore, only a few manufacturers should benefit from it and be willing to cooperate with group buying.

but in theory, diversity is not the main reason why consumers are willing to spend in groups, so why will there be fewer customers in the long run? This should start from the consumer's idea. Needless to say, the problem of quality decline, the biggest problem is the change of consumer psychology. Pricing is one of the keys in marketing. Whether the price is appropriate or not basically determines whether consumers will pay the bill. Theoretically, prices are determined by supply and demand, but there are still many exceptions, such as boutique markets or special niche markets. Just as we all know that mineral water is not mineral water at all and the cost is extremely low, but a bottle of water costs more than a dozen yuan, and everyone still pays the bill. The important reason is that everyone is used to this price, and consumers don't compare the price of mineral water with tap water at home, but with other drinks such as cola or coffee. There are two key points here, the first is habit, and the second is comparison. The psychological mechanism behind the two is the anchoring effect of price. In other words, the low price of the original group purchase will make customers feel cost-effective, so they are very happy to buy; However, when customers are used to the price of group purchase, the value of these goods/services will drop to this price. Therefore, when there are more and more homogeneous goods on the group buying website, customers can get used to their amazing low prices by comparing these homogeneous goods; When the surprise is no longer a surprise, it is not easy for customers to spend impulsively after the price of goods/services is anchored again. Therefore, when consumers can't continue to get higher satisfaction from the low-priced goods/services purchased by consumers, this two-handed business model is doomed to decline due to the decline in consumer demand.

So the fundamental problem of group buying is that there is no feasible business model. Even if low prices are valuable to consumers, these low prices can't last forever, because not enough consumers buy them, and the partners who are willing to join the group buying are doomed to leave some manufacturers with poor competitiveness. The actual value of the goods/services that these manufacturers are willing to provide will gradually decrease to match the discounted price-whether or not the price is deliberately raised from the beginning. Irrationality will not last forever. After consumers lose their passion, the market will naturally return to the original mechanism. To put it simply, group buying is just a shot of stimulant for consumers and manufacturers, and then they earn profits from the irrational expectations of both sides. As a result, this untenable business model, despite the huge amount of funds to promote it, has not yet become a successful case of the so-called "Internet thinking".

In Baidu Encyclopedia, you can see the origin of "Internet thinking": When Li Yanhong gave a speech to a group of traditional business owners, he said, "We entrepreneurs should have Internet thinking in the future. Maybe what you are doing is not the Internet, but your way of thinking should gradually think about problems in the way of the Internet. " At this time, "Internet thinking" is only an idealistic and conceptual slogan declaration, which is still very vague. The real concrete definition of Internet thinking began with Zhou Hongyi's extensive publicity on various occasions, and these speeches were also compiled into a book called Zhou Hongyi's Internet Methodology. There are four points in Zhou Hongyi's Internet thinking:

First, users are supreme. In the internet economy, as long as you use your products or services, it is God! Many things are not only free of charge, but also of excellent quality, and people are even welcome to use them at a discount.

second, experience is king. Only by doing things to the extreme and exceeding expectations is called experience. For example, someone handed me a mineral water bottle, and when I drank Maotai, it turned out to be 51 degrees. This is beyond my experience.

third, free: hardware is also entering the era of free. Hardware is sold at cost, with zero profit, and then depends on value-added services to make money. Although TV, boxes, watches and other Internet hardware do not make money, they make money through advertising, e-commerce and value-added services.

fourth, subversive innovation: you should make things cheap or even free; If you make things very simple, you can impress people, and if you exceed the expected experience, you can win users, which will lay a solid foundation for your success. (This definition is not the same as "subversive innovation" put forward by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor.)

Look carefully, the second "experience is king" applies to any enterprise, which is not a feature of the Internet, but should be done by any enterprise, while the fourth overlaps with the second and third, so I am afraid it is the first and third that are truly unique thinking of the Internet. And the focus of these two points is free (or reverse money), and then rely on value-added services. The four strings together mean that when you find the user's needs (such as drinking), you should create an unexpected experience (Maotai), and then it is best for Maotai to be free and make money with different value-added services (high-end wine bottles). There is nothing wrong with this theory itself. The problem is that it has specific premises and does not apply to all situations.

from the above theory, firstly, a paradox will be deduced: suppose I provide a service for free and make money with value-added service B .. Then why doesn't the next competitor provide A+B service for free and make money with value-added service C? If this cycle continues, how big a truck do you need to drive to finally make money? The essence is coming-the premise of losing money to launch A service is that A market must be monopolized. For example, if there is a network effect (Facebook), a technological excellence (Google), a brand (Xiaomi) or economies of scale, competition can be stopped. When the market can be monopolized, seizing the market is the first priority. Monopolistic business has the rationality of impulse, popularity and "losing money to earn money", and it makes sense to sprint at this time. It is difficult for most physical goods to follow this model because of the high unit cost. A calf electric car is over 3,111 yuan, which is already very cheap, but it is a drop in the ocean in the whole locomotive market, and it is difficult to make up for the loss from other sources. Zhou Hongyi only dared to suggest that TV "doesn't make money", but didn't say that it should be free. Xiaomi mobile phone takes the prepaid group purchase mode, which can lower the supply price, but its biggest revenue still comes from selling mobile phones.

Although free is the demand of users and meeting the demand is something that any enterprise should do, it is not necessary to meet the demand only by free. But the most suitable for free is when free helps to improve the experience of products or services, including improving the functional experience or other incentives. For example, Google needs to be free to attract the most users, and the information searched by these users will further improve Google's search results, so free services can improve Google's services technically. Facebook is free to attract the most users to register, and the more people register, the higher the social value of Facebook, so free helps to produce the best experience. On the contrary, luxury goods obviously do not apply this premise, because high prices are a kind of value in themselves. Do you want a free LV? B2B services are not suitable for free, because enterprises will doubt free products instead. Slack, an enterprise collaboration service tool, is one of the top startups in the global business field, but it is not free. In fact, it is paid by enterprises. Slack doesn't let advertisers pay, because companies don't want information to fall into the hands of advertisers; Secondly, once Slack receives money from advertisers, its products will inevitably tilt towards service advertisers.

In our country where the industrial revolution has not yet been completed, any new concept looks bright. If you say to a pancake vendor, "You have to think in the Internet" or "It's time for internet plus", he will probably think that they are all very reasonable, and they seem to say the same thing because they are too abstract. The Internet thinking or internet plus in his mind may refer to the introduction of food delivery apps and the like. But if you say, "You have to have Internet thinking, pancakes are free, and there is always a way to make money." He would probably say, "You don't think my pancake stall is big enough?" This narrow Internet thinking is ridiculous.

Paradoxically, in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of the Internet, the concept of "Internet thinking" has never been heard. Because the truth of internet thinking is just market thinking, that is, the market first finds out the demand, and then considers the business model and production cost. In traditional manufacturing industry, customers are facing foreign countries, so foreign companies bear the responsibility of facing the market. When competing for orders, traditional industries are accustomed to thinking about cost before pricing, and at most, considering marketing after developing their own brands. place