Top of the big era

The trip to Germany went as smoothly as expected. Zhou Buqi tried to return to China before Christmas, so the rest of his itinerary was quite full.

First I went to Belgium, France, Spain, and finally to the UK to attend the completion ceremony of the second phase of the London Cloud Data Center project.

Unexpectedly, I received an invitation from Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, in London.

He is also in the UK at the moment and seems to be acquiring a project.

Ziweixing and Google have a competitive relationship, which has been quite intense in the past few months, but privately Zhou Buqi has a very good relationship with Larry Page. When Ziweixing first went to the United States to develop its business, Larry Page showed a very positive attitude to greet him and helped him a lot.

Zhou Buqi took an afternoon to visit Google's London headquarters, accompanied by Paul Koerner, Gary Ward, Ross Lee and others from Ziweixing International.

The scene is friendly.

There is no gunpowder smell at all.

Google, as always, has shown an open attitude towards its peers, visiting and looking at whatever they want. Except for some confidential projects, they basically answer all questions.

Zhou Buqi's main concern was a Google Chrome team, which attracted his attention.

Larry Page saw that he was very interested, so he smiled and said: "This product's market performance is not bad, and its reputation is good. It is estimated that... within two years, it will surpass Microsoft's IE and become the market share Top Browser."

Zhou Buqi praised: "I believe this is definitely the best browser in the world."

Larry Page said grandly: "This team is working on some new standard designs, and will focus on H5 next."

"H5?"

How could Zhou Buqi understand such professional terminology?

Larry Page smiled: "Html5, a way of expressing web content, may be a bet in the mobile era. This is the fundamental reason why Google is determined to spend huge sums of money to develop this browser product."

"bet?"

Zhou Buqi's English is actually very good, but due to cultural differences, he still cannot understand some American metaphors accurately.

Larry Page said: "Yes, the trend of mobile Internet is unstoppable. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in only 5 years, it should be able to arrive, at least to stand on par with the PC Internet. The mobile Internet In terms of expression, one is App and the other is H5. H5 is an application based on browser rendering."

No one in the world except Zhou Buqi knows what the future holds.

The world is chaotic, especially the Internet industry, which is unpredictable. Penguin started with a network paging system, Alibaba started with corporate yellow pages, Shanda started with communities, Sina started with forums, 360 started with search, and NetEase started with post office services. …

For a super giant like Google, we must find order in disorder.

what to do?

Bet it all!

There are several development paths that may exist in the future. Don’t make any choices, just go through them all!

There is always a way out.

Regarding the application methods of mobile Internet, there are mainly two judgments, one is App and the other is H5. App mode requires Android system; H5 mode requires Google Chrome.

At this moment, Zhou Buqi suddenly realized.

He once laughed at Google, saying that Google had made a huge strategic mistake and spent huge sums of money to develop Google Chrome, which had no profit prospects.

Looking at it this way, Google is still underestimated.

Wrong is wrong, people are betting on full coverage.

Buy big or small?

Answer: Buy them all!

Unless Zhou Buqi is a foresight, Google’s model is undoubtedly the most correct.

Baidu was not much worse than Google in the PC Internet era, but the gap has quickly widened in the mobile Internet era. This is a decision-making mistake, because Baidu did not buy big and small at the same time. Baidu made a unilateral bet, and the direction it chose was H5. This was a big mistake.

Zhou Buqi is very clear that H5 is not the choice for the future. All future mobile applications will appear in the form of Apps, and some are App applets. The existence of browsers on smartphones will become less and less meaningful, let alone based on The browser's H5 application is implemented.

However, he didn’t know much about H5. He glanced at the entourage beside him and said half-jokingly: “When we get back to the company, we will discuss whether we should follow the direction of H5.”

After a brief visit, Larry Page invited Zhou Buqi to his office. He did not dwell on some of the frictions that had occurred between the two parties in the past few months. He sighed, "Google's management is now encountering some troubles. "

Zhou Buqi asked: "What's wrong?"

Larry Page said: "In June this year, Google's total number of employees exceeded 20,000, and per capita revenue dropped significantly. Business management and organizational structure have encountered great challenges."

It turned out to be a management trouble. Zhou Buqi nodded, "For technology companies, 20,000 people is indeed a threshold."

Larry Page asked: "What can you do?"

Zhou Buqi said with a smile: "Ziweixing only has 6,000 employees in China. It is expected that when fresh graduates join next year, it can be expanded to 10,000 employees. I have not encountered such trouble yet, but... I am really here I have studied at this level and have made some preparations.”

"Really? What should I do?"

Larry Page humbly asked him for advice. With Boss Zhou's achievements and status today, he is qualified to be a teacher for anyone.

Zhou Buqi said: "Alibaba had more than 20,000 employees last year. At that time, they dismissed all eighteen founders collectively and then re-applied, so there was a kind of..."

“Always Day One?” (Amazon’s slogan, Always_Day_One.)

"Yes, that's what it means."

"Is it effective?"

Larry Page frowned slightly, feeling that this set was a bit formalistic.

Zhou Buqi said: "It works. Ali's method is simple and he learned it from Huawei. You know Huawei, right? It is also a great technology company in our country."

Larry Page nodded, "Yeah, I know."

Zhou Buqi said with a smile: "It took Huawei many years and many detours to solve this problem. If you are interested, you can study Huawei's method. However... what we do in China may not be good abroad. use."

Larry Page obviously has no interest in Huawei and Alibaba. "I think you are too modest. I have been paying attention to Ziweixing in the past few years. I think the organizational structure you have built for Ziweixing is the best."

"Yeah?"

"right."

"Haven't you been paying attention to Google's innovative projects?" Zhou Buqi was a little amused, "Why do you care about such a boring problem?"

Larry Page sighed and said helplessly: "Google is in a lot of trouble this time. It has been several months and there is still no solution. Schmidt is old, and I plan to let him take a back seat. , I will be the CEO to lead Google’s structural reform.”

Although he was the founder of Google, because of his lack of management experience, he hired an outsider, Schmidt, to be the chairman and CEO. He himself worked on some innovative projects and was constantly learning and growing.

Now, Google is in trouble and Schmidt can't solve it, so he has to take action himself.

When Zhou Buqi heard this, he immediately became interested.

This is great!

Google’s top leader is about to be replaced!

Schmidt is an eccentric old guy. He dated several times and did not leave a good impression. The friction between Ziweixing and Google in the past few months was actually led by Schmidt.

Once Schmidt steps down and Larry Page takes the front line, the relationship between Ziweixing and Google will have a great potential to ease.

Zhou Buqi did not care about his own mistakes and said frankly: "Many large companies have hundreds of thousands of employees, such as Wal-Mart, Toyota, Lufthansa, Foxconn, and General Motors. They are all well managed. This is because the employees of these companies are mainly front-line assembly line workers. , as long as you follow the standard actions, it is easy to manage. But Internet companies are different and have different models."

Larry Page nodded, "The Internet is an innovative industry."

Zhou Buqi said: “The Internet is an intelligence-intensive industry.”

"Um."

"The Internet industry encourages everyone to break through themselves, so what is needed is collaboration rather than management. This industry itself pursues equality and decentralization, and everything requires negotiation, gaming, and compromise."

"That's right."

Larry Page thinks so.

Google in particular is this kind of company.

In many traditional industries, the distinction between superiors and subordinates is very clear. Generally, the superiors make the decisions, while the lower-level people are just mindless zombies who just do what they ask of their superiors.

They are complete zombie employees.

Internet giants recruit the best people from the world's top universities. How can they let these people become zombies? This requires a decentralized form, giving them a lot of room for discussion and negotiation, and even refusing to obey orders and going their own way, even contradicting the boss.

This will inevitably cause great internal friction and resistance.

Therefore, the more people there are, the difficulty of internal management will increase exponentially. When the threshold of 20,000 people is reached, it will be a big trouble.

Although Ziweixing has less than 20,000 employees, Zhou Buqi relied on He Yang, who was born in Lenovo, and Xu Liangjie, who was born in eBay, and relied on their experience in managing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees to establish organizational structure. Adjustments have been made and preparations have been made.

You can't be like Google and only try to solve it when you encounter trouble. Then you will inevitably encounter heavy pressure from internal and external troubles.

Larry Page said: "One is internal friction and the other is resistance."

Zhou Buqi said: "To solve the problem of internal friction, Ziweixing adopts a mid-level approach; to solve the problem of resistance, Ziweixing adopts a BU approach."

BUization is the structure of business groups/divisions.

Ziweixing now has several major business sectors in China, including New Media Business Group, WeChat Business Group, Cloud Computing Business Group, Weidian Business Group and China-Taiwan Business Department, to solve the collaboration dilemma between different businesses.

This got to the point. Larry Page smiled and said: "Yes, China-Taiwanization. This is a genius idea. Can you tell me more about it? I can learn from you."